Latinos in Israel

Alejandro I. Paz

Description

Latinos in Israel charts the unexpected ways that non-citizen immigrants become potential citizens. In the late 1980s Latin Americans of Christian background started arriving in Israel as labor migrants. Alejandro Paz examines the ways they perceived themselves and were perceived as potential citizens during an unexpected campaign for citizenship in the mid-2000s. This ethnographic account describes the problem of citizenship as it unfolds through language and language use among these Latinos both at home and in public life, and considers the different ways by which Latinos were recognized as having some of the qualities of citizens. Paz explains how unauthorized labor migrants quickly gained certain limited rights, such as the right to attend public schools or the right to work. Ultimately engaging Israelis across many such contexts, Latinos, especially youth, gained recognition as citizens to Israeli public opinion and governing politics. Paz illustrates how language use and mediatized interaction are under-appreciated aspects of the politics of immigration, citizenship, and national belonging.

PrefaceAcknowledgments

Note on Transcription

Introduction: Language and the Unexpected Citizen

Chapter 1: Becoming Non-Citizens: Modernizing Agency in Latino Arrivals to Israel

Chapter 2: Strangers in their own Home: Educación, Domesticity and (Trans-)National Intimacy

Chapter 3: Inculcating Citizenship: Language, Performance and Commensurating Cultural Difference

Chapter 4: Chisme as Latino Public Life: La Alcachofa and Marginal Public Voices

Chapter 5: El Sapo Speaks: Police Informers and the Voice of the State

Chapter 6: Becoming Israeli Citizens: Latino Youth, Uncanny Similarity and the Message of Citizenship

Epilogue: The Unexpected Citizen as Voice of Response

References

Index

Sujets

• Hebrew
• Jewish Studies
• Social Science
• modern
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Hispanic and Latino Americans
• Hebrew language
• Arab people
• Anthropology
• Arab
• Latino
• Social
• Migration
• Culture
• Hébreu

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253036537
• Langue: English

Extrait

LATINOS IN ISRAEL
PUBLIC CULTURES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA
Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors
LATINOS IN ISRAEL
Language and Unexpected Citizenship
Alejandro I. Paz
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Alejandro I. Paz
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03649-0 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03650-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03651-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
To the light of my heavens, Tamouz Andrea and Nour Peter
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transcription
Introduction: Language and the Unexpected Citizen
1 Becoming Noncitizens: Modernizing Agency in Latino Arrivals in Israel
2 Strangers in Their Own Home: Educaci n , Domesticity, and Transnational Intimacy
3 Inculcating Citizenship: Language, Performance, and the Commensuration of Cultural Difference
4 Chisme as Latino Public Life: La Alcachofa and Marginal Public Voices
5 El Sapo Speaks: Police Informers and the Voice of the State
6 Becoming Israeli Citizens: Latino Youth, Uncanny Similarity, and the Message of Citizenship
Epilogue: The Unexpected Citizen as Voice of Response
References
Index
Preface
T HIS BOOK CAME to me unexpectedly. I set out to study ethnolinguistic issues among Latinos in Israel, and to especially focus on how Latinos understood themselves as different from Israelis. When I arrived, however, Latinos wanted to talk about their similarities to Israelis. Since I did the majority of my fieldwork (2004-2006) after a period of intensified deportation sweeps, as well as the beginning of a campaign for citizenship, Latinos felt their differences but also realized that similarity could get them closer to the economic stability they needed. The dissertation that I wrote from my fieldwork tended to maintain the resulting tension. It was only in the process of transforming my dissertation into a book that I realized that the Latinos interest in citizenship was also to be found in the way they understood their differences.
Looking back at my fieldwork, I realize that as an ethnographer I ended up playing a role in the complex circuits by which Latinos came to engage in the cultural politics of Israel, and also in forming their claims to citizenship. As for so many before me, the fieldwork sent me in unexpected directions. I initially became interested in Latino unauthorized immigrants as a research assistant for a sociological study in the late 1990s. I worked first with two Latino Evangelical churches, who made-to my eyes-extraordinarily Zionist claims to explain their presence in Israel, which included prayer and ritual that incorporated Hebrew-language formulations. For the most part, these Evangelicals took me-a Hebrew-speaking Jew-for an Israeli native. My fieldwork thus somewhat reversed the classic ethnographic fieldwork encounter. On other occasions, many Latinos assumed that-as a native Spanish speaker with a Spanish name and a Latin American background-I was not very different from them.
All this piqued my curiosity, and I sought to study the linguistic and discursive aspects of how Latinos were being transformed in Israel. But it was some time before I returned to begin ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, in September 2004, two years after the establishment of the Immigration Authority and the onset of mass deportations. Many Latinos either had been deported or had left out of fear of deportation. Others had dispersed to the suburban areas of Tel Aviv, which made their lives more difficult, but helped them avoid detection. Many of the people whom I had known prior to starting my doctoral studies were no longer there, or they lived with a sense of siege, in much smaller networks of kin and friends.
These changes shaped all my fieldwork, and my position in the field. I began to assume the kinds of intermediary roles that I describe in this book. I helped frame the voice of Latinos to Israeli audiences, and then helped relay information to Latinos. For example, I had planned to work with a Latino organization, La Escuelita , which instructs children in standard Spanish and Latin American public culture. I had hoped to volunteer as an assistant, to see how children were instructed in Spanish and culture, and how Israeli language and culture came to be compared. When I arrived in September 2004, however, two of the teachers had just been arrested and awaited deportation, and a third had decided to stop working with La Escuelita in order to save up money before the police caught him. La Escuelita suddenly needed many teachers, and its charismatic director immediately pressed me into service. While previously many undocumented Latinos had been teachers at La Escuelita, suddenly most were Jewish Spanish-speakers and long-term residents. As a group, we represented the citizens who were helping to provide services to marginalized youth and Latino families.
At the same time I became a teacher, a series of contingencies also led to my becoming an NGO advocate. One of La Escuelita s teachers who had been arrested received a judgment that gave her thirty days to organize her affairs before leaving the country. She only needed someone to help her post bail, which involved a bit of bureaucratic running around. At the first meeting I attended for La Escuelita s teachers, the question of help was discussed, and everyone explained why they could not do it. Even though it was my first meeting, I realized that I was being called upon to help. In some ways, the crisis of deportations seemed to change the time it takes to create trust and reciprocity. To get instructions on how to post bail for the arrested teacher, I was sent to an NGO, at the time known as the Hotline for Migrant Workers. The Hotline was very active on labor migration issues, and as I wondered how I would carry out my fieldwork, I began to volunteer there too. It was there that I became involved in the campaign for citizenship for the children of labor migrants.
This campaign, as I describe throughout the book, was hugely important and formative for the Latinos during the majority of my fieldwork. In fact, the campaign enabled me to see the deep web of relations between language, cultural politics, and citizenship. If I had come to do a study about bilingualism and transnationalism, one that emphasized how Latinos maintained boundaries of difference, I had arrived at exactly the right time to see how Latinos were more interested in emphasizing their similarity to Israelis. Further, La Escuelita and the Hotline, and other organizations with which I worked, were all involved in the campaign. These organizations worked on forging a public message to the Israeli public, and I began to see how important that process was to Latinos.
Eventually, I did manage to do the kind of research I had set out to do. I started to record conversations of Latino families in order to get a sense of how they used Hebrew and Spanish, and more importantly how they managed to inhabit different voices in their discursive interactions. I also interviewed Latinos about their reasons for migration and their routes to Israel. Here, the issue of educaci n , and the voices of the strict Latin American parent ( chap. 2 ), came to the fore, which I quickly realized engulfed the perceived difference between Hebrew and Spanish.
Ultimately, this fieldwork helped me see the deep relations between, on the one hand, the campaign and the various forms of publicness in Latino lives, and on the other hand, Latinos attunement to the politics of language and culture. The study that I had set out to do, and the unexpected one that was forced upon me when the Immigration Authority began its mass deportations, connected. That is the final meaning of the unexpected in this book: that my own fieldwork was shaped by and helped to shape how some Latinos became unexpected citizens in Israel.
Throughout, I use pseudonyms to protect those who shared with me important aspects of their lives and work. Further, in an effort to keep the discussion as accessible as possible, some of the more technical points are fleshed out in footnotes.
Acknowledgments
A BOOK IS A kind of discursive transformation, rotating on an axis of debt. I must start by acknowledging the excellent education I received as a graduate student. Susan Gal and Michael Silverstein are both inspirational and dedicated mentors, and I cannot find a way to thank them enough. I received a great deal also from Amy Dahlstrom, Victor Friedman, Claudio Lomnitz, Beth Povinelli, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (who is sorely missed). And of course from Anne Chi en. Thank you all, both for your example and your patience. I am grateful also to my classmates, who always pushed me both by example and critique, especially Chris Ball, Sue Chlebove, Courtney Handman, Shunsuke Nozawa, Ben Smith, and James Slotta.
I am lucky to have added fantastic interlocutors after grad school, whose sage advice I wish I were better