“Los Siempre Sospechosos de Todo”

Abstract

Chapter 4 reveals that criminality is not ascribed on migrants only upon reaching the US-Mexico border. From the US making of transnational gangs, to the increase of mass incarceration in the region, and a wave of mysterious prison fires that are burning inmates alive, Central American artists theorize illegality and delinquency within a broader colonial agenda of dehumanization. Beyond a critique of anti-immigrant sentiment, they reveal and expose a carceral logic rooted in coloniality that perpetuates criminalization of Central Americans across borders and that is inseparable from the colonial agenda of social cleansing of poor, racialized, and marginalized people in the region. Collectively their visual disobedience against policing, criminalization, and imprisonment of Central Americans—both within the region and across borders—pushes not for immigration reform, not for selective citizenship, but for an abolition of the carceral logic, the carceral state, and the carceral state's mechanisms of violence.