Leniqueca Welcome

LENIQUECA A. WELCOME, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Life as Threat: The Transnational Securitization of Place and Subjectivity in Trinidad and Tobago,’ supervised by Dr. Deborah Thomas. Funding supported six months’ research investigating the criminalization and governance of local geographies by transnational securitization networks, and the ways residents of these geographies make life despite vulnerability. The work explores the following questions: what does it mean to be produced as a threat and how does it feel to live as one? Conducting ethnographic research in East Port of Spain, Trinidad with members of the police service, NGO workers, security consultants to the state, the US Embassy, and residents, the research utilizes participant observation, interviews, photography and archival research. Preliminary research findings reveal the ways East Port of Spain is reduced to a dangerous imaginary and crime to a choice, as the grief, trauma, suspicion, desperation, and normalcy of loss that simultaneously circulate in this region and act on residents, are ignored. This leads to a dependence on women to perform unacknowledged ‘crime-fighting’ labor and care for their communities even as they are vulnerable to economic hardship, masculinist gang violence, and masculinist state control.