The Department of Gender Studies and Chicano Studies Research Center Present

CINTHYA MARTINEZ

 ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies

 Tuesday, January 31st

3:30-5pm

YRL Presentation Room, 11348

Talk Description:  How are ghosts subjects that continue to speak after death? What do they say about the violence that has occurred? “ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies” investigates how women and queer migrants inside ICE immigrant detention use “haunted-ness” and testimony to unsettle detention. The locus of analysis for this dissertation is the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. Located in San Bernardino County, two hours away from Los Angeles, Adelanto is the largest immigrant detention center in the nation and has the third-highest number of reported cases of sexual assault. Martinez contextualizes queer migrants and women’s refusals within the state’s active destruction of the recent, living historical archive of gendered carceral state violence in forgotten prison towns like Adelanto. This research offers a critical contribution to scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico border and contemporary immigration by conceptualizing detention centers as prison-borders imbued in gendered violence. It further pushes the boundaries of border and immigration studies by centering migrant women as authors of abolitionist theory.

Bio: Dr. Cinthya Martinez is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She organizes with Adelanto Visitation Network to support people in ICE detention and to end migrant detention. She earned her doctorate from the University of California, Riverside in Ethnic Studies. Her research investigates how women and queer migrants who are incarcerated in ICE detention centers use place-making to unsettle their conditions of captivity. In her book project, ICE on Fire: Incinerating Prison/Border Violence through Feminist Abolition Geographies, she reads correspondence and hunger strike demands from incarcerated women as a form of embodied feminist abolitionist praxis that counters state sexual violence and carceral violence.