sounds and silences in the migrant wait: soundscapes and the racialization of hearing in the haitian community in tapachula<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In its most primordial sense, listening is a form of social recognition. Drawing on this idea, this article reflects on sound, hearing, and the symbolic practices at the core of anti-immigration policies that reinforce silence toward and by immigrant communities. This article focuses on the Haitian community in Tapachula, Mexico, a city where refugees are forced to wait. It explores the categories of silence, noise, and racial beliefs about these immigrants -as well as the myriad feelings associated with them- on the part of institutional actors and humanitarian organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keywords: Haitian immigration, sound, silence, racialization, listening, Tapachula, Guatemala-Mexico border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n the silence The rumbling on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, caused by the 7.3 earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince, Haiti, showed that the origins of the catastrophe were the exclusion and poverty in which that part of the Caribbean island had been living for a long time. The future that would befall its inhabitants was still in doubt and the only certainty at that time was that a new era was beginning in its diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The complex history of this country has delineated great migratory waves in which the rejection that this population has encountered in the territories to which it has moved has been present. Perhaps we should briefly go back to the eighteenth century, a time when black slaves rose up against slaveholders and French colonial authorities. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) then confronted two great yokes: French colonization and slavery, and this extraordinary news spread to neighboring territories, for \"the self-liberation of black slaves in Haiti stimulated the imagination and triggered a revolution of consciences\" (Ferrer, 2003: 675), which could compromise European interests in the Caribbean. In Cuba, for example, the \"fear of Haiti\" was essentialized in the \"fear of the Negro\" (Ferrer, 2003: 676), ignoring the political force of what was the first independence struggle in America. Even then, to minimize that portentous social process symbolized a kind of silencing against those revolutionaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Years later, U.S. economic domination in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (1915-1934) through the cultivation of sugarcane in those lands, but with labor from Haiti, reconfigured the mobility of this population to neighboring lands (Coulange, 2018). At that time and as a tense consequence of this intervention, violent practices arose in the Dominican Republic against the Haitian population; for example, the so-called \"domination of the border\" during the dictatorial era of General Rafael Le\u00f3nidas Trujillo became an ethnic genocide sheltered under the classist and racial ideology that the migrant \"of purely African race\" did not represent \"any ethnic incentive\", thus differentiating him from those \"desirable\" Haitians: \"of selection, the one that forms the social, intellectual and economic elite of the neighboring people. That type does not worry us, because it does not create difficulties for us; that type does not emigrate\" (Pe\u00f1a Battle, 1942).<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most violent episodes that are part of the memory of the Haitian people during those times is the Parsley Massacre, so called because of the linguistic test ordered by Trujillo, in which, to distinguish Haitians from Dominicans trying to cross the border between one side and the other of the island of Hispaniola, they were required to pronounce the word \"parsley\". The Haitians' phonological apparatus made it impossible for them to pronounce the \/R\/, because in their language, Creole, this sound is softer, so they were easily detected and executed immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1957, the government of Fran\u00e7ois Duvalier began with the Cold War as a backdrop. Supported by the U.S. intention to contain the influence of communism in the Caribbean, together with the expansion of the paramilitary group the Tonton Macoute<\/em>The \"bogeymen\" created the ideal environment for the dictatorship of Duvalier and his successor, Jean-Claude Duvalier, to take hold, strengthening the political, economic and social instability of Haiti, thus promoting the second great period of migration of Haitians to Canada, the United States, France, other Caribbean islands or Mexico (Louidor, 2020: 53).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third major period of Haitian migration took place after the 2010 earthquake, this time to South America, especially to countries such as Brazil, Chile and Ecuador; the latter two, by not requesting visas or other entry requirements, became the main destinations of this mobilization until the migratory flow seeking to enter these States exceeded expectations, making regularization conditions more complex and noting the prevalence of social and cultural stigmas that have hindered the dignified settlement of this population (Louidor, 2020: 54). In this sense, it must also be said that, although in principle these countries welcomed Haitians in solidarity based on international humanitarian agreements, there were also practices far from protection and closer to the absence of human rights. An example of this is the stay at the border of Tibatinga, Brazil, where more than three thousand Haitians were stranded for two years, until the government decided to issue humanitarian visas (Louidor, 2020: 58).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The particularities of this mobility can be better understood under the auspices of the category known as \"Transnational Dispersion of Vulnerability\" (dtv<\/span>); this refers to the \"reiteration of circumstances of precariousness throughout the migration cycle as conditions similar to those faced by vulnerable populations in their societies of origin\" (Fresneda, 2023: 672); that is, the history of that country, with dictatorships, coups d'\u00e9tat, terrorism, military interventions and environmental crises, caused an imbalance in public policies that resulted in inequitable access to opportunity structures (such as educational precariousness), added to the large population growth of the time and the fragility of investment in the agricultural sector (Fresneda, 2023: 678), factors that facilitated the increase in outward displacements, finding similar circumstances in the destination cities and on their way to them, but now with one more disadvantage: the status of migrant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This history of mobility, vulnerability and rejection, first to neighboring lands in the Caribbean and later to the Southern Cone, has forced this community to renew its routes to the north of the American continent, crossing vast territories and surviving the most adverse situations hidden in the depths of Latin America until reaching Mexican territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until a couple of years ago, the urban spaces south of the border in Mexico, traveled by migrants with the intention of reaching the north of the continent, were recognized as transit cities because their stay was brief and the gait and voices of their passersby were also fleeting. However, this has given way to a stagnation in this country that has transformed displacement into uncertainty and waiting due to causes such as the intensification of policies1<\/a> The main reasons for this are: the lack of legal status, the lack of clarity in the socialization of current policies and processes of action that would allow those interested to obtain some type of migratory regularization, either for the purpose of traveling with fewer risks during the journey, or to settle in a Mexican city, to be employed and to have access to social welfare structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historically, Tapachula, located on Mexico's southern border, has been a host city for communities coming from other latitudes: during the second half of the 20th century, Tapachula was one of the most important cities in Mexico. xix<\/span> and the beginning of the xx<\/span> saw the arrival of people from Germany, Lebanon, Japan and China, who, driven to travel to Mexico after the Porfirian promotion that \"exalted the benefits of migration in Mexico through its consulates in the United States and Europe\" (Avella, 2000: 447) settled in the city and its surroundings. Soon after, the mobilizations of the Central American population also began to gain visibility, becoming one of the most important migratory flows in this place so far. In more recent years, the city has witnessed the passage of Central American caravans, the Haitian and Venezuelan exodus and lately has witnessed the increase of people coming from Cuba and different African countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These presences have turned Tapachula into a space as complex as contradictory not only because, being the first point of entry, it receives large population flows of very different origins, but also because political interests converge there that place Mexico as a country that responds to the restrictive and containment demands of the United States, but that in the public discourse shows solidarity, empathy and attachment to the humanitarian ideal. In this space, several purposes and presences linked to migration interact: those of people in mobility, those directly related to the migration industry (such as coyotes or renters), as well as migration authorities, politicians and the local population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all mobile communities are received with the same enthusiasm in this Mexican city. A similar situation was identified by Alejandro Canales (2019) in the case of Haitian migrants in Santiago de Chile; the author argues that there is a perceptible distinction in the access to migratory regularization, health, education, labor market and even in the area of residence and \"that puts on the table the debate of the social construction of racism and ethnic discrimination2<\/a> based on the migratory status and national origin of the immigrants\" (Tijoux, 2016 in Canales, 2019: 57). In this way, this article explores the way in which ethnicity and class of Haitian people in Tapachula intervene in the exercise of their powers, in how they are perceived by civil society, regularization institutions and international humanitarian assistance organizations, and how these differences produce practices that replicate a cultural stigma about the perception of listening to the other as noisy, who is not worthy of listening and who is, therefore, silenced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the fact that human mobility is made possible above all through the body and the existence of the body in a space in which sonorities and their repercussions are essential in the interrelations of those who cohabit there and, although they are often ignored, especially in a population whose sensitivity has been pushed to the background, the significance of these sonorities evidences the existence of travelers in territories in which they are considered strangers. Since \"the sensory is political\" (Hamilakis, 2015: 41), to abound in this field, particularly from sound studies, is also to break down ideas that generalize \"abuses against migrants\", as it allows to answer what they consist of and what their procedures are, in addition to making notorious the tensions and solidarities between various collectives that often involuntarily coexist in a territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be interested in this is to recognize that, given our intrinsic sensoriality, we can use our senses systematically to reflect on how certain corporealities, and even more, certain sound and listening processes are perceived in specific contexts: waiting and uncertainty, as in the case presented here. It also allows us to learn about human mobility through the experience of its protagonists, narrated from their own sensory paradigms and\/or the transformation of these paradigms as they walk and, as we do so, we are introducing ourselves to studies of the perception of the identity of migrant communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, the main purpose of this article is to explore the processes of sound and listening, or aurality, of the Haitian community in Tapachula through notions of silence and noise, how it is crossed by the perception of ethnic and socio-cultural factors and the way it is perceptible through the so-called sound marks (soundmarks<\/em>The sounds characteristic of a community), evident in the public spaces of this city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We understand the term \"aurality\" as that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n set of values, concepts and paths of meaning that are performativized in listening, and at the same time, determine the ways in which the sound dimension, in each moment and place, becomes significant for a subject or intersubjective fabric (Savasta, 2020).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aurality then is a process that involves, simultaneously, sound emissions and listening, that is, reception, the ways in which these sound emissions are perceived and what they provoke in us (Dom\u00ednguez, 2011; Bieletto, 2018) beyond the biological process, also in its sociocultural dimension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than answering what the migrant waiting sounds like in this city, the questions that guide this reflection are the following: what are the elements of segregation in this border space in terms of sound and listening, is this migrant listening homogeneous for all the populations that converge there, what other factors intervene in this process? To accommodate the above questions, this work is situated in what has been called the \"sensory turn in the social sciences\" (Sabido, 2019), which warns about the relevance of the senses, perception and the body as fundamental axes to create knowledge and make sense of the world by understanding the affects that sustain it. Thus, this work is positioned between the convergence of sensory studies, especially sound studies, taking into consideration the notion of noise and racialization of listening (Dom\u00ednguez, 2011; Bieletto, 2018), contrasting them with the field of research on human mobility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We understand the notion of noise not only in its material dimension as a sound quality, but as a category of listening (Garc\u00eda, 2022), that is, as a construction of perception: \"it is factors such as taste, mood or the time and place of appearance of a sound that determine its degree of negativity\" (Dom\u00ednguez, 2014: 107), which, by involving more than one subject, sometimes becomes tensions or conflicts in which underlies the relationship between noise, power, space and territory (Dom\u00ednguez, 2011: 36).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the southern border region of Mexico, the presence of certain communities in mobility can become tensions within a territory, not precisely because they are within the same sound situation, sharing the same acoustic vibrations in a given space, but in these tensions also come into play the very interpretation of territory, certain migratory policies and even the racialization of bodies, which, being alien to the subject with \"colonized subjectivities\" (Bieletto, 2018: 163), are transformed into a social disregard traversed, in the case presented here, by race and by national and international migratory policies, as an underlying factor in the willingness to listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This work attempts to contribute to the conjugation of sound studies in specific contexts that involve restrictive mobility policies, cultural stigmas, but also bodies and affects, incorporating new elements in the social analysis of listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the elaboration of the following, a qualitative methodology was used with the following information gathering strategies, of course, all in Tapachula: from May 2021 to February 2022, and due to an employment within international humanitarian aid organizations, participant observation and listening were conducted in these closed spaces, but also in public places, such as food establishments, in the municipal market and in open plazas, namely Miguel Hidalgo, Benito Ju\u00e1rez and Bicentenario parks, located in the center of the city, with the purpose of knowing the context of interaction in these places. I take up the notion of \"participant listening\" by Victoria Polti (2011) understood as \"the theoretical-methodological tool that allows addressing sound routines, sound events and discourses through the act of hearing and producing sounds as a practice shared by the subjects and the researcher\" (Polti, 2011: 10). The audio samples and photographs that accompany this article were taken, in principle, during those tours and, later on, the small audiovisual archive shared here was nourished in many subsequent visits to the city in the first half of 2023.3<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Likewise, at the beginning of 2022, a sound mapping focus group was held. Some of the fragments of conversations cited here are taken from these meetings. This ethnographic collection technique consists of gathering a small number of members (six people in this issue) who share certain characteristics with the rest of the group, in this case migrants who live in Tapachula and whose experience favored the discussion about their perception of sound, both in their journey and in this border city through cartographic representations. These maps serve as a methodological and also epistemological tool, since they allow access to the authors' own narratives of these creations, facilitating emotional and subjective knowledge, since in them feelings, thoughts and experiences can be expressed, that is, \"they reproduce life in a territory\" (Su\u00e1rez-Cabrera, 2015: 635-639).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The waiting, frustration and uncertainty that the migratory context brings with it are perceptible in the migrant population of Tapachula through attention to the sound and symbolic environment created there and the experiential cartographic record of the participants in these focus groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The order of this exhibition is as follows: first, the modes of silencing during the journey of the Haitian community to Mexico are explored. Later, some sound environments of Tapachula are explored when this diaspora converged with other migrant communities and with the local population that received them, in order to show how the perception of Haitians was interpreted as noisy by migration regularization institutions and the media. The racial element is brought to the table as a fundamental factor for the aural and, therefore, socioeconomic and cultural segregation of this Caribbean population, as well as the power of silence as a strategic form of resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For foreigners traveling from distant lands and whose passports are not welcome in all airports, the routes and transports are diversified and can become a risk to their integrity, barely counteracting it by being silent witnesses of the most atrocious acts of dehumanization. This has been the case with Haitian people who, after the 2010 earthquake in their country, were welcomed by Chile and Brazil, although by 2018 large mobilizations began again due to the difficulty of renewing work visas, which limited the obtaining of legal documents that would guarantee social security and access to development. This suggests that silencing is also reproduced in the political order by the condition of \"undocumented\", experienced in many societies where they have tried to settle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all Haitians were born in Haiti, many of them were born in the Caribbean or South America, they learned two, three or more languages from a very young age and maintain the Creole language, which resists from the intimate and the personal during the long displacements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spanish is a familiar language for many of the Haitians who have arrived on Mexico's southern border. Some acknowledge an original lack of interest in learning it during their schooling. So said B., who at the time found it boring and even a bit impractical, as his parents, and the parents of his classmates, urged them to seek to learn English or French, which, they felt, were more beneficial languages in the event of going to the United States or Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
more heartbreaking than a simun of azagayas
more roaring than a cyclone of wild beasts
and howling
rises
requests
revenge and punishment
tidal wave of pus and lava
on the felony of the world
and the eardrum of the sky burst under my fist
of justice
Ebony wood, Jaques Roumain<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nIntroduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![](\"https:\/\/encartes.mx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Fotografia-01-scaled.jpg\")
\n <\/i>\n <\/a>\n <\/figure> <\/div> \n <\/div>\n Methodological considerations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Preamble on the journey: the habit of keeping silent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n