Cimini, Amy, artist.

June 21, 2018 : Listening for Southwest Key in San Diego.

[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2018.

1 online resource.

Lateral Addition ; 44

"Southwest Key Programs' website was unavailable on the night of June 19th. "Under Renovations," a static page read.[1] The next day, Southwest Key offered a second static page in place of its full corporate site: a few FAQs and a statement that the Program "does not support separating families at the border." Southwest Key Programs does not support separating families at the border. For 30 years, our work in offering youth alternative justice, immigrant children's shelters and education has served to improve the lives of thousands of young people. We believe keeping families together is better for the children, parents and our communities and we remain committed to providing compassionate care and reunification. For every child who has come through our shelter doors, we start on day one to reunite them with their parents or a family sponsor and to provide them with the kind of service that will help them thrive. This has been our priority for decades.[2] Southwest Key was founded in 1987, one year after Reagan's Immigration Reform and Control Act. The Act introduced an amnesty program alongside new surveillance technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border and, for the first time, imposed penalties on employers who employ undocumented workers, knowingly or not. The non-profit operates 27 centers in California, Arizona and Texas. Some of Southwest Key's facilities are huge. The New York Times recently featured a Texas facility that houses 1,700 boys between ages 10-17. In San Diego, there are three Southwest Key facilities: Casa San Diego, Casa El Cajon and Casa Lemon Grove. All three are at least 20 miles from the border. The day before - June 18 - the San Diego Tribune ran a few articles about the San Diego facilities, one with the eye-grabbing headline: "When Children are Separated From Their Parents at the Border, Here is Where They Go Next."[3] The headline promises transparency but contradicts itself almost immediately. The article details a specific facility - Casa San Diego, in El Cajon - to which no recently separated children had actually been sent. Southwest Key's San Diego facilities are relatively small. Most house children who crossed unaccompanied to reach family already in the U.S. About 10% of the children in the San Diego facilities have been separated from their parents at the border. The largest facility has 65 available beds for boys and the other two hold a combined 25 beds for girls. They are all at capacity almost all the time. The Tribune piece underscores that Southwest Key workers say that the current number of arrivals is typical of the surges they see each summer. I live in San Diego. Amid these early moments in the ongoing family separation crisis, I spent the following Thursday - June 21 - driving around two nearby Southwest Key's facilities. I found them easily on Google Maps (no corporate website needed). I begin with the Tribune piece for a number of reasons. The article operates a stunning synecdoche in which Casa San Diego is made to stand in for Southwest Key's vast corporate apparatus. This displacement takes place in the article's written discourse but its accompanying video also gives this trope audio-visual form. Music studies and sound studies are, together, uniquely equipped to analyze the histories, places and subjects, objects that do and do not find expression in these sights and sounds. If the Tribune offered something of a panacea, I wanted to unpack the modes of listening that might have made it convincing. I wrote this essay quickly. Frustrated by the Tribune's fuzzy treatment of Casa San Diego, Southwest Key and the recently applied "no tolerance policy," I was eager to unsettle displacements that seemed to balance "no tolerance" against Southwest Key's longstanding presence in the region. I hoped that portraying the historical, political and sensorial specificity of Southwest Key's San Diego sites might upset that balance. And so, my writing experiment joined a number of recent essays that trace the Southwest Key's historically good standing among immigrant and civil rights activists since the mid-1980s[4] through the present. Many of these same groups now rightly decry its implication in the ongoing family separation crisis. To do essential research on the non-profit's corporate history, I add attention to the concepts of care that found expression in discourse on Southwest Key's San Diego sites from the mid-2010s to the present.[5] This apparent break from good standing, I'll suggest, is internal to care discourses themselves - and specifically, to how care discourses balance the well-being of migrant children against the well-being of the populations that "host" them. As Saiba Varma notes, arguments that exemplify humanitarian care can resist a politics of violence but can just as easily replicate them on various scales.[6] This essay begins and ends by listening for such resistance and replication. The Tribune's video opens with a roomful of empty well-made beds with colorful patterned sheets. A series of medium shots show kids lining up for food, kicking a soccer ball around and clapping to music. Their faces are not in the frame. Standing outside Casa San Diego, an immigration reporter tells the Tribune "it looks like a school where children sleep." They do not interview any Southwest Key staff and there are no clear markers of place, like street signs or nearby businesses. We don't hear what any of this sounds like because the video is instead set to music. A syncopated pattern in triple meter with an innocuous but thoughtful, optimistic Steve Reich-y feel loops for almost the video's entire duration. Of musical processes, the ostinato is perhaps least amenable to being represented as a bounded "unit" or complete musical "object." A listener can join an ostinato as an already-ongoing process that might perhaps continue, open-endedly and unsegmented, beyond her period of engagement. This suggests a few different listening positions. As Naomi Cumming shows in her expert analysis of Reich's Different Trains, such engagements might be experienced as comforting and horrifying by turns.[7] Cumming locates this sense of comfort in rhythmic repetition that can be embodied, via listening, as kineasthetic motion.[8] This mode of engagement is crucial to Tribune's video panacea. Overall, the piece is meant to reassure us that Southwest Key has been doing their best and will continue to do so amid the application of "no tolerance." The ostinato neither segments the image track nor illustrates the actions we see onscreen. It belies no geographic and temporal specificity until its gentle rocking loop is at last interrupted by a single sound that originates in Casa San Diego: a bell that children ring when they are re-united with a parent or sponsor. The video's play with nondiegetic music and diegetic sound presumably recorded on-site composite deflects attention from what happens inside these facilities. We hear only the bell that indicates that Southwest Key has done its work successfully. We only hear, in other words, the sounds meant to childrens' faith in the Programs' effectiveness.[9] Understanding and responding to this crisis requires a radical rethinking of its spatial distribution. The Mobilized Humanities working group's project Torn Apart / Separados, for example, used a 2017 ICE Facilities List to create an interactive map that locates the centers that could be holding recently separated children. Orange dots cover the map; you can zoom in for Google street view.[10] "A lot of America thinks this phenomenon is happening in this limited geographical space along the border," writes digital scholarship librarian Andrew Gil, of Mobilized Humanities. This map is telling a different story: The border is everywhere. ICE is everywhere."[11] If ICE is everywhere, ICE has long been sensible in ways that are not obvious or spectacular; if ICE is everywhere, then there is somewhere nearby to which you might listen and look differently. Or that someone has been looking at listening to differently for some time. Powerful in its scope and density, this visualization also suggests that locally-specific ways of seeing and looking might provide cues for further intervention, forms of study and coalition-building work.
De Sá Pereira who hand-cranked the code for everything here." [12] Hortense J.
Following Gil, I wondered after ways of reading the city that could connect what Hortense Spillers calls "mistaken glances of the eye," visualizing tricks and auditory illusions to the vast geographical sweep of immigrant detention that Mobilized Humanities has so carefully mapped.[12] How to hear and see a border that is everywhere? This essay's next three sections experiment within the ambitus of this question.** El Cajon, CA: June 21, 2018 ** In a then-recent clip, an NBC reporter stationed outside Casa San Diego tells us that the facility is located "on a residential street in San Diego."[13] Both details are false. El Cajon is a city in San Diego County about seventeen miles east of downtown San Diego. Broadway is a not a residential street - it is a four-lane commercial thoroughfare. Cars and trucks zoom past Casa San Diego. A little further south and west, frequent lights allow cars to turn in and out strip malls thickets lining both sides of the street. The businesses in the middle of Casa San Diego's block, however, require a little more space: a recreational vehicle rental facility, a Middle Eastern grocery story with a large parking lot, a car parts wholesaler. Apart from the soft whoosh of vehicles traveling about 40 to 50 miles per hour, the block is quiet. This is not because it's remote; it's because June is hot and these are all obviously driving destinations. Casa San Diego sits between a street-corner strip mall and parking lot. The facility is surrounded by a fence with opaque green privacy tape woven into its chain links. The green tape creates a strange continuity with leafy trees inside the fence but visible from the street. One tree has grown over the fence, creating the sidewalk's only shady spot. Amid Broadway's grays and browns, Casa San Diego's combination of organic and inorganic greens looks cool and lush. Vehicles come and go through a white security gate that is easily visible from the street and sidewalk. The recreational vehicle rental's gated driveway creates a weird symmetry with Casa San Diego's, as though reassuring passersby that gated facilities are the norm, here. A sign about 20 feet above street level and inside the fence features Southwest Key's logo, but not the non-profit's name. The design is non-descript but vaguely optimistic: a soft orange sun with cutely asymmetrical rays peeks over an abstract horizon. The sign's height stands out among the one-story building and seems to rise much like the sun it depicts. Single-family homes with large lots line the streets that run parallel to Broadway. Separated by a long block, some share a back fence with Casa San Diego. As I walked by, an ABC film crew in town from Los Angeles was packing up. I asked them about what they were doing. Like the Tribune, they just wanted to show viewers what the facility looked like; they hadn't interviewed any Southwest Key staff or the few protesters that had been there earlier that morning. Like the Tribune, he was both right and wrong when he told me that "this is where the children are being detained." This easy sleight of hand furthered the need for analysis, strategy and action that could connect the longer-standing Casas with the immediate and catastrophic implementation of "no tolerance." ** Lemon Grove, CA: June 21, 2018 ** Two houses away from Casa Lemon Grove, I could hear chickens clucking in a front yard coop. The street was that quiet. An occasional "crack!" signaled a construction project on a nearby house that I couldn't see. Casa Lemon Grove's address is easily visible from the street. There is one segment of unlined fencing in front of the house and you can see the structure easily atop a steep driveway with lush overhanging foliage like many of the other homes on the block. The street is easy to miss. Left and right turns off of the artery scales the mesa and intersects with Lemon Grove Boulevard which is not clearly marked. The street's pavement tapers onto sandy dirt, suggesting little foot or vehicle traffic. Houses are set back from a street that cuts a steep incline into one side of the hill with long, flat yards on the other. There is no Southwest Key signage and no opaque fence, but a surfeit of "No Parking" and "Video Surveillance" signage induced in me a pre-emptive guilt: walking, driving, driving slowly to read the signs, driving slowly to find parking would signal, to those who know, that I did not belong there. Like the recreational vehicle's security gate in El Cajon, "No Parking" signs on nearby houses naturalized the signs outside Casa Lemon Grove. If you don't know the neighborhood, you might be forgiven for thinking ok, maybe it's just how things are here, I'll move right along. Both facilities conceal themselves, in part, via their proximity to familiar signage that sanctifies private and commercial property. Southwest Key's house fits into the block to avail itself of the surveillance technologies that have long been part of its built environment. Southwest Key's presence in San Diego convenes many important local histories. As North County residents were protesting a proposed Southwest Key facility in the city of Escondido in 2012, Lemon Grove residents underscored their co-habitation with Casa Lemon Grove as a relatively easy one. Lemon Grove and El Cajon have been home to historically organized immigrant communities. Just after the turn of the century, Mexican immigrants began settling in Lemon Grove. Isolated on the mesa, this rural region was extolled for its "blissful" setting and lucrative agricultural fields.[14] By 1924, Congress created Border Patrol to combat Mexican immigration, reflecting local, regional and national sentiment that favored the deportation of the Mexican population in the United States. School segregation was a test case: Mexican segregation was institutionalized in Texas during the 1920s and, by 1928, at least 68 California schools were 80-100% Mexican-American.[15] Lemon Grove was the site of the first successful school desegregation court decision in U.S. history. Known as the "Lemon Grove Incident," the 1932 case Roberto Alvarez vs. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District barred the DA's Office from creating separate schools for Mexican children. Though the case did not set precedent, Robert Alvarez Jr. (the plaintiff's son) writes, "it is important in San Diego and U.S. history, [...] because the community took court action and won the case they established the rights of their children to equal education."[16] Southwest Key took over the house's conditional use permit in 2008. The site had been a group home since 1987 and neighbors were well aware of the changeover. By 2014, the number of kids coming through San Diego had increased but, compared to kids arriving in Texas, their numbers were relatively small. Because the Southwest Key system is national, however, the San Diego facilities might house kids from all of over the country. (Again, the Torn Apart / Separados map makes this clear). In a 2014 article published, in part, in response to the Escondido case, Casa San Diego neighbor Marilyn Gutierrez clarified that "we have no complaints at all" about Southwest Key's presence on her residential street.[17] Fellow neighbor Nathan Johnson also underscores that he had no problems with the shelter: "I'm just glad that there's a place like that for them," he says.[18] ** Escondido, CA: March 23, 2017 **[19] In the North County city of Escondido, however, public resistance to Southwest Key turned humanitarian rhetoric to anti-immigrant ends. By the time Southwest Key's proposed to open a facility there in 2012, Escondido had long been well-known for its anti-immigrant measures. Amid increased drivers' license checkpoints and a proposed 2006 ordinance that would have punished landlords for renting to undocumented persons, at least one-quarter of Escondido's non-citizens left the city between 2008 and 2009.[20] Close attention to residents' 2012 arguments is telling. As Mayor Sam Abed put it "there is no plan whatsoever except that we are going to provide them with services in a prison-like environment."[21] The strategic "we" operates a number of slippages in Abed's hypothetical. Abed produces Escondido residents as a "we" that would be implicated in Southwest Key's standards of care.
I want to linger with his orchestra metaphor. For Sarah Kofman, metaphor is an analytic of power, comparison and hierarchy.[33] The orchestra is a frequent player in metaphoric evaluations of many kinds, especially figures of complexity, cooperation and coordination. The office clearly ironizes these gestures. Yet, via that irony, the figure of the orchestra disciplines subjects of care and introduces shifting notions of perpetration central to migration discourse qua biopolitical care. The remark drags familiar, long-standing histories of listening along with it. The comparison is obvious: beautiful symphonic music versus the detained childrens' voices. To work, the orchestra of this metaphor would almost certainly have to be that of Beethoven or the Viennese composers that followed after 1860, like Brahms, Bruckner or Mahler. I say this because of their sonic force and cultural status as unquestionably beautiful, edifying or other-worldly. By the 1860s, hearing the orchestra was supposed to be a quasi-religious experience. Within a white middle class culture of bildung, the concert was an educational occasion for self-refinement.[34] Though this project of self-cultivation was individualistic in character, it took place in massive new concert halls whose unprecedentedly thick walls gave material, architectural and acoustical form to an emerging Romantic notion of art.[35] As Walter Frisch writes, "the symphony was a work in which everything must be cast more grandly, as if from the stage downward toward listeners."[36] Listening is a structured relation of grandness to gratitude via the work of bildung. "19th century symphonies were meant to be distinctive and recognizable," Frisch continues, "aimed at a broad public." In the museum-like architectural enclosure, the self-possessed liberal subject ritualizes the process of agreeing to have one kind of listening experience and not another. If the modern listener can claim to choose the symphony, she can also claim to be victimized by sounds that, for various reasons, she doesn't choose. Or, to respond with impunity to the sounds she chooses not to choose. As Bill Dietz puts it, "this history is redolent with the left fantasies about the rational public sphere. Yet, the very idea of a broad public has never existed. Rather, it was always premised on violent exclusions."[37] The officer's quip recapitulates this history. Against the orchestra, the childrens' voices can only be ugly, they can only be nearly nothing. The children are presumed not to hear or interpret one another. This noisy scene features only one legitimate listener: the CBP agent. His remark weighs the childrens' suffering against the liberal right to very specific organization of the Western sensorium as children become the perpetrators of noisy violence against the ears of adult authorities. The modern listener loans the agent its logics of victimization. This is not the first time that the orchestra has been deployed to contain the sounds that it also produces as racialized noise. When I teach the 9th, I take a page out of the Žižek playbook to point my students to this line in Schiller's poem: "but he who cannot rejoice, let him steal weeping away."[38] The (silent) sounds of "weeping" accompany an "Ode to Joy" that foregrounds its constitutive exclusions. After this line, we hear a cliché of 18th century Orientalism: the so-called "Turkish march."[39] As Wendy Heller summarizes, conflict with the Ottoman Empire fueled European anxiety about threats from the "East" for most of the 17th century. However, after the Turkish army's unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683, musical appropriation began in earnest. No longer tied to political threats, this music became "safe" to imitate in orchestral discourse.[40] The result was a classicized version of the music of Turkish brass bands living and working in Vienna replete with expanded percussion ensembles and novel percussive effects. Mozart's rondo alla turca, for example, uses the jangling low strings of the piano to this effect. These sounds cohered a public taste for "exotic" subject matter that poked fun at a once-feared enemy. The suggestion that this scene "lacks" a conductor is fatuous. This crack occludes the myriad forms of authority to which the children he no longer wishes to hear have long been subject. His crack absents perpetrators. Among them, we could imagine Sanders, Nielsen, Sessions, ICE, CBP, DHS, Southwest Key and the speaker himself. And like that suspension, his quip depoliticizes the children's sounds, voices and cries. They are, he might have it, the cause of disorder, not the effect of "no tolerance's" disastrous disorder. Children are cast, here, as perpetrators of their own suffering. They would suffer less if only they would just be quiet. This quip doesn't even allow us to hear the "weeping" that silently accompanies the 9th. On the Brownsville recording, weeping is not silent. Over weeping, the agent would perhaps have us hear laughter. He acts as a "conductor" precisely by declaring that there is not one. His surfeit of conductors - the sick chorus of Sanders, Neilsen, Sessions, ICE, CBP, DHS, Southwest Key - stands aside, laughing at the sounds of enemies that the orchestra "ritualistically dehumanizes."[41] In this sense, the CBP's remark is not a metaphor at all. Rather, it correctly names a history of listening that stands in the way of hearing these children's voices as historic interventions.[42] - AC - [1] At the time of this publication, Southwest Key's website still features only a "temporary page" (though a better designed page that the one I encountered in mid-June). According to that temporary page, complete corporate website remains unavailable because of higher than usual traffic, accessed 19 June 2018.http://www.swkey.org/ [2] Ibid, last Accessed 26 June 2018. [3] Kate Morissey, "When Children are Separated From Their Parents at the Border, Here is Where They Go Next," San Diego Tribune, 18 June 2018. [4] Manny Ferndandez and Kate Benner, "The Billion-Dollar Business of Operating Shelters for Migrant Children," New York Times, 21 Jun. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/us/migrant-shelters-border-crossing.html. In their words,"Southwest Key was warmly received by left-leaning immigration activists and civil rights organizations. Post-Trump, some of the group's former allies are now leading the outcry." [5] Henry Grabar, "Shelter in the Storm: Southwest Key was a model shelter for migrant kids. Once Trump's family separation policy began, it became a villain," Slate Magazine, 6 July 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/southwest-key-and-family-separations-was-the-shelter-complicit.html. [6] Saiba Varma "Care's Abandonments: Nationalism, Militarism, and Humanitarianism in Kashmir" (lecture, UCLA Center for South Asia, Los Angeles, CA, 11 December 2017). [7] Naomi Cumming, "The Horrors of Identification: Reich's Different Trains," Perspectives of New Music. Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter 1997): pp. 129-152. [8] Ibid. [9] Cumming, 135. [10] Torn Apart / Separados,last accessed 30 July 2018, http://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/visualizations.html#clinks. [11] Emily Dreyfus, "ICE is Everywhere:" Using Library Science to Map the Child Separation Crisis," Wired Magazine, 25 June 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/ice-is-everywhere-using-library-science-to-map-child-separation/amp?__twitter_impression=true. Here is the Torn Apart team's description of the project. See their website for more and to learn from their interactive map. "MH brings together digital tools to equip broad social awareness and help in global critical situations. We mobilize humanities faculties, libraries, and students with relevant language, archival, technical, and social expertise to nimbly produce curated and applied knowledge. MH sits away from state and non-governmental organizations and is scholarly activism in a global context. Torn Apart is a result of intense 6-day collaboration between xpMethod (Manan Ahmed, Alex Gil, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, Roopika Risam), Borderlands Archives Cartography (Maira E. Álvarez, Sylvia A. Fernández), Linda Rodriguez, and Merisa Martinez. A special acknowledgment for Moacir P.
Spillers, "Who Cuts the Border?: Some Readings on America" in Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 319-336. [13] Gadi Schwartz. "Inside a San Diego Detention Center Where Children Live in Limbo." NBC News,15 June 2018, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/video/inside-a-san-diego-detention-center-where-children-live-in-limbo/vp-AAyHYKn. [14] Roberto R. Alvarez. "The Lemon Grove Incident." The Journal of San Diego History. Volume 32, Number 2. (Spring 1986), accessed, 23 June 2018, http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/1986/april/lemongrove/. [15] Ibid. [16] Ibid. [17] Edward Sifuentes, "Two Shelters for Migrant Children Operating in the County," San Diego Union Tribune, 24 June 2014, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sdut-lemon-grove-el-cajon-immigrant-youth-shelters-2014jun24-story.html. [18] Ibid. [19] On this date, that City of Escondido won their court and barred Southwest Key from opening a facility there. Please see Southwest Key Programs, Inc. v. City of Escondido (S.D. Cal.), https://www.justice.gov/crt/case/southwest-key-programs-inc-v-city-escondido-sd-cal. [20] Zach Fox, "Escondido Faces Another Fiscal Obstacle: Fewer People," North County Times, 23 September 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090815083400/http://www.nctimes.com/business/article_057ab19c-65c4-5d81-a452-11a8b4ffe8c5.html. [21] J. Harry Jones. "Lawsuit Heats up over Escondido shelter" San Diego Union Tribune.2 December 2016, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/sd-no-aclu-lawsuit-20161201-story.html. (my italics) [22] Sandra Phillips, "Shelter for Immigrant Kids Rejected in Escondido, Fox5 San Diego, 24 June 2014, https://fox5sandiego.com/2014/06/24/potential-housing-facility-for-immigrant-children-questioned/. [23] Alexia Rodriguez. "Southwest Key: A Message to the Escondido City Council." (letter, Austin, TX, undated) https://www.escondido.org/Data/Sites/1/media/agendas/Council/10-15-14_PHG14-0017/2014-10-13_Southwest_Key_Programs_Letter.pdf. [24] Luca Mavelli, "Governing Populations Through the Humanitarian Government of Refugees: Biopolitical Care and Racism in the European Refugee Crisis," Review of International Studies, accessed 21 June 2018, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/governing-populations-through-the-humanitarian-government-of-refugees-biopolitical-care-and-racism-in-the-european-refugee-crisis/934B0BB45D8971BE62F62DBBFC210C81. [25] Ibid.,815. [26] The literature on the political management of life and death is vast.My formation draws on Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben's re-workings of Michel Foucault's 1970s work on biopolitics. Both attend to different articulation of life's bifurcation - i.e., its reduction to biology and its expansion as horizon of politics. Demands for protection qua biological life often enables more ferocious forms of defense qua politic. What begins as what Foucault calls the power to "make live" instigates what Esposito calls a "thanatopolitical drift" toward the sovereign prerogative to kill or abandon in the name of defense. Please see Roberto Esposito, "Community, Immunity, Biopolitics," E-Misférica, Volume 10, Issue 1 (Winter 2013), http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-101/espositohttp://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-101/esposito. [27] Mavelli, 814. [28] Mavelli, 817. [29] Saiba Varma: "Care's Abandonments: Nationalism, Militarism, and Humanitarianism in Kashmir" Lecture delivered at the UCLA Center for South Asia. 11 December 2017[30] Jessica Winter, "The Language of the Trump Administration is the Language of Domesric Violence," The New Yorker,11 June 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-language-of-the-trump-administration-is-the-language-of-domestic-violence. [31] Mavelli, 818. [32] Consider a contrasting hypothetical. A paranoid voiceover that assertsthat"neighbors don't even know what goes on in Southwest Key's buildings." Regardless of whether or not this is true - reportage from Lemon Grove suggests that it is not - this soundbyte implies Southwest Key has abdicated its biopolitical obligation to care for "host" populations. In other words, both cases - the actual ostinato and the hypothetical more-critical voice over both appeal to the proper care of the host population. [33] Sarah Kofman, trans Duncan Large. Nietzsche and Metaphor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) [34] Walter Frisch. Music in the 19th Century. (New York: Norton, 2012) [35] Peter Ablinger, "Cézanne and Music: Perception and Perceptual Deficiencies / Music and Painting of the Last Thirty Years" Ear Wave Event, Issue One (Fall 2014)ed. Bill Dietz and Woody Sullender,accessed 26 June 2018, http://earwaveevent.org/article/cezanne-and-music/ [36] Frisch, pp. 53. [37] Bill Dietz.,"Preface: A Note for 'Positionen'" in L'école de la claque (Köthen: ONCURATING.org., 201), p. 10. [38] Slavoj Žižek, "Ode to Joy Followed by Chaos and Despair" in The New York Times, 24 December 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html. [39] Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (New York: Norton, 2012), pp. 10, 53 & 218. [40] Ibid., 218. [41] This formulation is inspired by Josh Jones, "Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven's Ode to Joy," Open Culture, 26 November 2013, http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/slavoj-zizek-examines-the-perverse-ideology-of-beethovens-ode-to-joy.html. Instead of laughter, Jones hears in this moment a "perverse scene of universal fraternity in which the world's dictators, arch-terrorists, and war criminals all embrace each other." [42] I am very grateful to Eric Laska for being open to publishing this essay, raw and in-progress as it is. I wrote quickly with a sense of urgency, though I have a sense that these thoughts arrivealready too late but also too early, incomplete and unresolved. Many, many thanks to Erin Rose Glass, Clara Latham, Julie Napolin and Katherine Young for thoughtful, encouraging feedback on earlier drafts. I would welcome any reader feedback on this work-in-progress."-- provided by distributor.
This historically inhospitable city can then be seen to take the moral high ground by demanding better care and at the same time recusing themselves from having to produce it. Though on their face, his remarks pertain to the care of migrant children, his statement is really about caring for Escondido's "host" population. Abed promoted, for residents, a positive self-understanding and self-appreciation as defenders of care that, at the same time, preserved the city's anti-immigrant status quo. Consider also, a complementary remark. "Let's find something that's appropriate space-wise for these kids," one resident comments. The argument begins as a humanitarian question about the suitability of built space. Her "let's" extends Abed's suggestion that there is a "we" in Escondido that would take an interest in where "these kids" might end up. But she continues, ""...and not put them in Escondido." An apparent concern for space belies exclusions that preserve the integrity of place, not-so-tacitly cast in racial terms.[22] This "host" population is presumed to be white. In a letter to the City, Southwest Key plays both ends against the middle. The letter validates residents' concerns by underscoring that the number of visitors to the site would have been minimal.[23] The tone is reassuring: bringing migrant children to a Southwest Key facility would not also bring families awaiting reunification to Escondido. Federal regulations require that visitors must undergo a background check that takes at least 21 days to complete. Southwest Key underscored that this exceeds the average stay at their facilities. They also highlight that 95% of their reunifications occur outside of San Diego County, which means that Escondido residents would not even have to tolerate the experiences of family member's coming into two to pick up separated children. Southwest Key's letter to the City of Escondido informs us that, in 2014 and between all three facilities, they hosted only a single visitor. (The implicit and explicit forms of surveillance I saw at the Lemon Grove and El Cajon sites underscore as much.) Their letter also specifies that outdoor time is tightly organized: one hour every weekday and three hours each weekend of "structured large muscle outdoor activity." This statement plays both ends against the middle. In addition to school, music, movies and computer time, these details are meant to evidence Southwest Key's well-rounded forms of care and activity. But it also reassures residents that they will only hear children outdoors for short and predictably specific times. Neither my visit to Casa Lemon Grove nor my visit to Casa San Diego coincided with those prescribed hours. Southwest Key addresses the city of Escondido with compassionate language that correlates residents' apparent grievances with their own standards of humanitarian care. This argument takes advantage of what political theorist Luca Mavelli calls rhetorics of "compassionate borderwork:"[24] Southwest Key's programs are not straightforwardly positive but they are also not thanatopolitical governance through violence and death.[25] However, the Escondido residents' comments suggest that this could never have been the case. Southwest Key's children may be "good migrants" deserving of care but are at the same time " bad migrants" whose presence in Escondido would attenuate their own flourishing. The qualifier "...not in Escondido" shows how demands for care also exposes those on whose behalf that demand is made to lethality and abandonment. The very lives that Southwest Key wants Escondido residents to agree to protect are - via precisely that demand - made all the more easily targetable by lethal apparatuses of security.[26] This rhetoric also depoliticizes migration by concealing its historical basis in domination and violence. Suspending migration's causes produces diffuse concepts of "perpetrator" and "perpetration."[27] As Luca Mavelli notes, children are often cast victims without perpetrators, while other migrants can be cast as perpetrators of their own suffering (i.e. for arriving a Port of Entry when it is "too busy" - or worse - as Sarah Huckabee Sanders specified at an early June press conference). Different notions of perpetration create scarily flexible distinctions between "good" and "bad" based on variably assessments of their current suffering as legitimate or not.[28] Care is often structured to complement these distinctions. As a "structured relation of magnanimity to obeisance," Varma points out, care disciplines its subjects while at the same time sorting them as more or less deserving.[29] Migrants become visible and audible not as subjects whose actions intervene on histories of structural violence but as objects of a crisis lodged stubbornly in the present. To be the object of the question central to Southwest Key's operation (in Escondido but also elsewhere) - how can waiting to be admitted or not be made more or less humane? - is also to be relegated to what Mavelli calls the "humanitarian present." Care's containments, separations and classifications also unfold via forms of social time.Diffuse notions of perpetrations also suggest perverse enhancements for a "host" population that, as the Escondido case suggests, is often assumed to be white. If migrants can be made to seem to perpetrate their own suffering, then the U.S. population can be exempted from the conditions of migration itself and from the violent security apparatus migrant face before, during and after crossing. Trumps's paradigmatic victim-blaming "look what you made me do" rhetoric admits to death-dealing while at the same time delivering biopolitical care:[30] the phrasing enhances the life of some populations by suggesting that they are "blameless." Care does not oppose biopolitical racism but rather provides an alibi for its "ways of measuring, assessing, ranking, intervening on and distributing individuals according to their endowment of absence of those biological qualities that can contribute to the well-being and flourishing of a population."[31] We need to continue pressing hard to see and hear what goes on inside these facilities. But noting their ubiquity - as I have tried to do, in this essay - means also asking how the delivery of care to migrant children has also been used to govern, classify, enhance and attenuate life across the socio-political field. And after all, Southwest Key's longer-standing salutary standards of care suggest that family separation can in some circumstances be made viable. Care discourses point toward the violent exposures that result when those circumstances change. Naomi Cumming's analysis of rhythmic ostinati resonates surprisingly with this ambivalence. In one sense, the Tribune's ostinato takes care of the viewer. The ostinato highlights the normalcy of everyday life in Casa San Diego to retrofit a kind of normalcy for the presence of Southwest Key in everyday life. The unsegmented repeating pattern reassures us that, though this has been going on for longer than we've perhaps known, everyday life in a Southwest Key facility is stable and unobjectionable. This audio-visual logic doubles the viewer's emotional well-being in the well-being of the children it documents.[32] But as Cumming might perhaps point out, it is also horrifying to have accepted this comfort. These sights and sounds invite us to become subjects of biopolitical care who can be variously enhanced and managed via migration discourses. But their invitation asks us to query seriously whether we are not not already subjects of that care. The horror lies in having not registered the ostinato's invitation but to have perhaps already accepted it. ** Brownsville, TX: June 18, 2018 ** & ...before So far, I've tried to think through some audio-visual logics on which Southwest Key explicitly and implicitly relies to promote its work as an enhancement of life for both the children it serves as well as a larger "host" population while obscuring the implication of both in a politics of death and abandonment. The impetus for the essay came from the widely-circulated audio from Brownsville, Texas on June 18.
We hear a CPB officer describe childrens' voices and cries: "well, we have an orchestra, what's missing is a conductor." He delivered the remark in Spanish. He presumably addresses the children, although his statement is documented on a visiting reporters' audio recording.

Art and music.
Art et musique.

Music.

Laska, Eric, editor.
Library Stack, distributor.
Library Stack.