Against Disappearance: A Clandestine Stratagem of Community Defense in Community-Engaged Research

At the height of the second Trump presidency, the elaboration of violence in Latiné/x immigrant communities has taken a familiar discursive shape: as disappearance. The enforced disappearance, a name for the arrest, detention, and abduction of persons, followed by denial of the act(s), has been leveled against numerous Black and brown communities. From legal concessions granting immunity to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to racially profile individuals, to a widespread surge in deportations, detentions, and deaths, there is a need for culturally congruent and flexible forms of solidarity that honor waywardness. For if disappearance is an attack on and through visibility, clandestine communication plots and echolocates resistance at the periphery of visibility’s enforcement. In this essay, I forward clandestine communication as a theory and tactical stratagem that maps the transmission of vernacular discourse according to fugitive strategy. Stratagems articulate tactics of trickery often found in gossip/chisme/kikis, redaction strategies, sonic upheaval, and whisper networks. But as a theory, clandestine communication charges community-engaged research with being actively political by considering the theoretical, methodological, analytical, and material tactics of fugitivity as significant to the ways we identify power and resistance in our communities. In drawing from queer, trans*, and feminist of color (QTFOC) genealogies, clandestine communication denotes flexible forms of solidarity that scaffold these fugitive vernacular practices. This theoretical paper thinks with Latiné/x immigrant communities by arguing that community defense initiatives, such as neighborhood defense workshops and rapid response networks, outline participatory and ephemeral (or less visible) ways that vernacular communities can co-create clandestine networks of care. Ultimately, this essay calls for greater consideration to be given to the everyday, defiant ways that community-engaged research is premised on the pragmatism of trust and hiddenness.