Reflection, stakes, future of program

Members of the UC Davis community over the past few months may have noticed the palpable presence of the UC Davis Comparative Border Studies Mellon Initiative on campus. The presence has expressed itself through the current art exhibition at the Manetti Shrem Museum entitled “Welcome?” curated by professor Susette Min and the recent panel “Border Protests and Transnational Solidarities,” a roundtable of scholars and activists negotiating the violence and resistance of borders as the initiative finds itself in its final year.

Since 2016, the Mellon project has been researching and organizing around the comparing of contested border zones internationally. Feeling that transnational border studies are of the essence at this historical moment, co-chairs and UC Davis Professors Sunaina Maira and Robert Irwin have led the charge. They are accompanied by two graduate fellows, two visiting scholars and many affiliated faculty and graduate students alike who pursue migrant and border experiences.

“We recognize that the US border regime is only one of many that shares technologies and strategies of containment, exclusion, counterterrorism, surveillance, policing, and racial violence around the world,” the mission statement said. “This larger network of migration control has had detrimental consequences for the freedom of movement and for migrant rights around the world. We condemn the imperial, racialized, and violent exclusion of migrants globally, as starkly visible in places such as Israel, Australia, the European Union, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, India, and elsewhere.”

Though this excerpt can’t say it all, it touches on some of the sociopolitical conditions essential to a study of borders and migration, which include racialization, gender, militarization, nativism, nationalism and imperialism. Zunaira Komal, a first-year student in the cultural studies Ph.D. program, takes a critical approach to the border zone of Kashmir, disputed between China, India and Pakistan since decolonization of the area following British imperialism.

“Everyone kind of has a starting point for how they get into things, and my mom is from Kashmir,” Komal said. “I kind of just grew up with a lot of stories of separation […] my grandma’s family, her sister got married and went to the other side of the border and then due to the wars and stuff they just never talked to each other again. We didn’t even know she had a sister until very, very recently when her [sister’s] grandkids […] moved back to the Pakistan side of the border. And that’s not a unique story. That was kind of my starting point. Coming to college and taking classes about colonialism and imperialism and secular empire, just sort of beginning to connect the dots of like okay there’s a repeating pattern for why this is happening in Palestine, why this is happening here, why this is happening in the U.S.”

The repeating pattern referenced by Komal is key to the pursuit of the comparative border studies. How do we make sense of the trends of settler colonialism around the world?

Robert Irwin, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, works from a U.S. and southwest border perspective. For him, issues of U.S., Latin and Central American migration are impossible to ignore in his courses as they directly affect some of his students.

“The threat of deportation which is all over the news, debated in very dehumanizing ways, in politics and in the media, I can see the effects day to day,” Irwin said. “I could visibly see how the election took a physical and mental toll on my students.”

Irwin, like his students and many others, has a personal stake in the developments of immigration policy. As covered recently, Irwin has worked on a video project called “Humanizing Deportation,” which shares the experiences of deportees.

“My grandparents were immigrants […] I have lived myself in Mexico as kind of an undocumented immigrant there for a while, I have married to an immigrant, I have relatives, my in-laws in Mexico,” Irwin said. “This is my world. To see that world so violently under assault in a country that I thought was more welcoming has been something that I’ve also felt very deeply.”

These experiences in many ways provide emotional information to the goals of the Mellon Initiative. The “mental toll” that the militarization and reinforcement of borders takes on students like those at UC Davis demands immediate attention.

“The Mellon project addresses questions of not just migration […] but migration and borders from the perspective of lived experience of people who are affected often in very devastating ways by borders and the politics of borders and the securitization of borders,” Irwin said. “What we want to do is not just address the very tense and violent border contexts around the world but also put them in dialogue with each other and see what we can learn from each other.”

The more that Irwin studies and follows border politics, the more he can see them encroach into his classroom curriculum, if not for the better than out of necessity and pertinence.

“I’ve been learning more about expulsions, mass deportations going on between Colombia and Venezuela, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic […] Argentina expelling Bolivian and other immigrants, kind of following the master deportation model of the United States,” Irwin said.

Migration policies do give credence to the approaches of the United States, making a comparative study of borders essential. Scholars and activists like Irwin, as well as professor Sunaina Maira, of the Asian American Studies Department, emphasize transnational approaches to migration and resistance. Maira applies the idea of transnational solidarity to her research.

“I got interested in the idea of transnational solidarity in response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the occupation in Palestine and an example of the way in which people were crossing borders in order to connect what was going on in their homelands,” Maira said. “Since 9/11 there has been this broader coalition […] which we see with the ME/SA program […] that’s bringing together communities from different regions with a kind of shared concern around U.S. military intervention and occupation but also with some overlapping histories of cross connection and exchange. These regions are also border zones.”

Maira’s research is informed by years of involvement in activism. She privileges a reconciliation between scholarship and activism, a tenuous relationship in spaces like the university. Thus, the recent and final major event hosted by the Mellon Initiative was extraordinary to Maira and Irwin alike.

“What I think was really kind of powerful was that we had five women of color speaking and we didn’t actually intentionally plan it that way,” Maira said. “I think what was really wonderful was that it was really a mix of academics and activists and scholars. It’s sometimes very difficult to bring people who don’t have academic jobs into the university and allow them to sit at the table with those who are scholars.”

Inclusion of activists from outside of the university ameliorates another challenge faced by border studies, which is the separation of disciplines and departments that often eliminate the possibility of truly transnational and comparative study.

“I think that while on the one hand the university is a place where people get to do critical research […] what often happens is these conversations happen in silos,” Maira said. “For the most part people are focusing on particular regions but are not necessarily looking at them transnationally and when they’re looking at them transnationally they’re not always looking at the questions we’re interested in, which are the very notion of a border, like where does it come from and why are people challenging it, or crossing it, or fortifying it or resisting it.”

The university is at once a challenging and optimal space in which comparative border studies can be conducted. It is the location of the AB 540 and Undocumented Student Center, of a campus radical sanctuary collective that hosted Resist Trump Tuesdays, of the Migration Research Cluster and a recent Migration Research Portal site, but it is also a place that reproduces or invests in systems of oppression.

“There’s a way in which universities get portrayed as like super liberal, diverse institutions through which we can do justice work and it increasingly doesn’t seem like the right avenue for me to do that work,” Zunaira said.

Maira herself has written a book called “The Imperial University,” using UC Davis as a case study, which challenges both the problematic nature of the university and the tendency to be complicit.

“Those of us who are scholars at U.S. universities can use that as a space for activism and challenging the complicity of the university,” Maira said.

Her aspirations and commitment to reforming the University perhaps can be paired ideologically with projects like the Comparative Border Studies Mellon Initiative. Reflecting on a successful roundtable on transnational solidarity, Maira was pleased.

“This theme of kind of solidarity and crossing borders was very powerful,” Maira said.

Written by: Stella Sappington — features@theaggie.org

Nepalese athlete uses talents to advocate for people in his home country

On the third day of competition, despite having pulled a muscle only a few days prior, Aayush Kunwar was feeling good about his upcoming race. It was the middle of winter and the dirt track was soft and wet, but he was determined to not let anything stop him from doing his best. He proceeded to sprint spectacularly in the 100-meter relay and his team won first at the 2017 Nepalese National Games.

“[My team is called] the Armed Police Force, and [the opposing is] Army,” said Kunwar, a fourth-year economics major. “We defeated Army for the first time in the history of Nepal in the relay, and I was the new team member. Since then everyone started talking to me, all the coaches from the different regions started talking to me, all the national athletes. And they knew that I study in California. It’s a good thing, it’s a new thing to them, they see me as a beacon of hope.”

Kunwar has been on this particular mission to become a “beacon of hope” far before last winter. It’s something that has developed in the past few years of his life as he’s learned more about himself and the world he comes from. In fact, his story begins on the opposite side of the planet: Nepal.

Kunwar was born in Nepalganj but tends to say he’s from Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. He comes from an upper middle class family, and therefore Kunwar was fortunate to have the best education and childhood he could ask for, where all of his needs and those beyond were met.

“The public school education system in Nepal is poor, so if you are from a good family you are sent to private schools,” Kunwar said. “So I went to a private school and we were made to study English from nursery school.”

In the middle of the 1990s, the Nepalese Civil War broke out in Nepal between the monarchic government and the communist party. Kunwar’s parents sent him and his brother to boarding school in India so that they could continue their education without worrying about the war.

“During that time it was a set routine for us,” Kunwar said. “We woke up at 6 a.m., went out for some physical exercises — as a group, like the whole school would be out doing some physical exercises. It’s compulsory, you have to wake up at 6, do some exercises and then go back, take a shower, and go to school.”

At his school, the different houses, or groups of students, would compete against each other in sports like basketball and soccer. Kunwar liked playing both these sports, and he even represented his house in basketball senior year. It was his activity in these sports that he attributes to the development of his speed on the track.

“Since I was so good in basketball and soccer, they sent me for track and field as well and I finished second I think in the 200 meters, my first race basically,” Kunwar said. “I think studying in India exposed me to different, other activities other than academics. I was more into sports, that’s how I started doing track and field.”

After returning to Nepal in 2008 to complete high school, Kunwar continued to play soccer and basketball. This is when he started to truly shine in track and field, and in 2011 he was considered Nepal’s best national athlete under the age of 18.

“That was a turning point, I’d say, because I got a gold medal in 200 meters and 400 meter relay in high school level,” Kunwar said. “Then our school started taking participation in all these national events, national competitions that were happening. In one of these national competitions I became the best national athlete because I won my 200 meter race, 400 meter race and long jump.”

Despite his success, Kunwar’s father was not completely happy with his decision to focus on sports. Kunwar mentioned that in Nepal, athletics are not considered a prestigious activity, let alone a career. It’s around this time that he started to take serious note of this situation around athletics in his home country.

“Living conditions of athletes in Nepal are not so good either, so even if you’re a professional athlete, you’re not respected,” Kunwar said. “And apart from that, track and field is not a nationally accepted super game. It’s a big deal here [in the U.S.]. I was reading, it was like some billion dollars go to sports here in the United States, but it’s a different story in Nepal.”

After Kunwar graduated high school, he came to the United States to join his parents living in the town of Santa Rosa, just north of the Bay Area. His father already worked in the country, which made it easier for Kunwar and his family to move and gain permanent residency.

Kunwar then enrolled in Santa Rosa Junior College before transferring to UC Davis. After deciding soccer wasn’t for him, he started training in track and field at the JC.

“I just kind of fell in love with the sports,” Kunwar said. “I started getting better and better. Then all the sudden one day when I was breaking my personal best after best, my coach was just like ‘why don’t you try out for Nepal?’ We just started looking for the best athlete in Nepal and how his times were. My personal best beat his personal best, that’s how I was like ‘yeah I think I should try for Nepal.’”

And so began Kunwar’s journey to achieve even greater success at the sport, something he wanted to achieve so he could eventually be a voice for Nepalese athletes. The stark reality of it all, he realized, was that the basic facilities and equipment he received the the JC were far better than anything the athletes receive in Nepal. He claimed it’s not that Nepalese runners aren’t good at their sport, but that they lack the infrastructure to achieve their fullest potential.

“While in JC, we were training on a synthetic track, and every time I got injured I would get facilities, like I would go to the training center and get ice bath and things, for free,” Kunwar said. “But back in Nepal we just run through the injuries. Whenever I go there and train it’s just a dirt track and running there hurts my shins so bad. [When] I asked my teammates, ‘do these [pains] happen to you?’ they’re like ‘all the time but we just run through it’ — there’s no other option.”

Nepal is made up of a caste system of distinct social stratification amongst different castes, or classes, of people. Athletes in Nepal tend to come from the lowest caste and face a number of challenges because of this. Unlike in the United States, where athletes get sponsorships and make good money, athletes in Nepal do not, and therefore cannot afford all the athletic gear they need.

“The government [doesn’t] pour in money and I think there’s [government] corruption going on,” Kunwar said. “All these people are from ethnically poor backgrounds and they can’t raise their voices [because…] first off, they’re from military backgrounds, so they have to be disciplined and they can’t raise voices against their leaders or authority. Secondly they’re from lower caste, they’re not [well] educated people, their salary was not high.”

Essentially, Nepalese athletes are not able to speak for their betterment due to these social and economic restrictions. So in the summer of 2016, when Kunwar was training in Nepal with his fellow track and field athletes, he decided he wanted to work as hard as he could so he could become a voice for these people he feels so deeply for.

“You have to be good at what you’re advocating for,” Kunwar said. “So my goal, I’m [getting] better so I can have a voice, like I have a reason to talk.”

Even though Kunwar wasn’t able to join the UC Davis track and field team when he came to school here in the fall of 2016, he’s been working hard to build the strength and motivation to focus his goal.

“I still talked to my coach at the JC, about all the improvements I could do like that, and also my coaches from high school,” Kunwar said. “It was just giving me more hope. I was talking to the athletes from Nepal too and how they want me to come back and change things. They were saying this indirectly but I could feel the vibe.”

This motivation is what led up to the winter of 2017, when Kunwar heard the National Games were happening and felt a deep urge to go. Without his father’s knowing but his mother’s help, he snuck away to Nepal to compete. This is when his team won gold in the relay race against Nepal’s seemingly undefeatable team, an event that further reinforced Kunwar’s dedication to his goal to become an advocate and uplift the living standards of Nepalese athletes.  

The biggest problem Kunwar has noticed is not only the lack of facilities and funds, but the lack of exposure for young people who have great potential.

“I’m going to go talk to my coach and see if he can get scholarships, because back in Nepal we didn’t know you can get sports scholarships,” Kunwar said. “It was all about ‘you have to be good in academics, that’s it’ and I had so many friends who were super good athletes but they just had to give up basically, there’s no future.”

Kunwar is graduating from UC Davis this spring and already has plans for the next few years of his life. The South Asian Games are coming soon, and they’re happening in Nepal. It’s Kunwar’s goal to get selected for these games, but regardless of the outcome, he wants to continue training in athletics roughly two more years and then become an advocate.

“There was this article that I read, it was this Nepalese guy who is super good, an academia-related person, and people asked him why [he] doesn’t stay here in the United States, and he said, ‘there are plenty of people like me in the United States, but they need people like me in Nepal’ because it’s an underdeveloped country and there needs to be a strong leader that can change the rhetoric around Nepal,” Kunwar said. “And that applies to me too. I would be a need in Nepal, that’s where I want to be, that’s where I want to go.”

Written by: Marlys Jeane — features@theaggie.org