“Where you from?”: Deportación, identidad y trabajo reciclado en el call center salvadoreño

Abstract

Much of the academic literature conceives of deportation as a process of waste removal, characterizing deportees as the discards of empire. However, the existence of a significant class of people deported from the United States working as call center agents in countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador suggests instead the metaphor of recycling, evidence of the cynical and cruel efficiencies of global neoliberal capitalism. This article is based on interviews conducted with thirteen individuals who migrated to the United States as minors, were deported to El Salvador following lengthy residencies in the United States, and found work in the growing Salvadoran call center industry, where they provide virtual services in English for North American customers. I argue that this recycling of deportee labor is made possible through the extension of the condition of deportability, which continues to produce a population of workers vulnerable to exploitation by North American capital in El Salvador long after deportation, and that this recycling serves as a disciplinary process that reproduces a neoliberal discourse of personal responsibility, in which call center work emerges as the instrument to reform transgressive deportees and convert them into productive neoliberal subjects.