Carceral Intimacies: Family Organizing, Social Reproduction of Life, and the Limits of El Salvador’s Carceral State

Drawing inspiration from Susana Draper’s move to articulate two feminist traditions for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. and against the crisis of social reproduction in Latin America, this talk considers a social movement of families of incarcerated people in the city of Santa Ana, El Salvador at the intersection of these two traditions. El Salvador’s carceral politics have intensified over the past three years; mass arrests have detained over 81,000 people without access to due process under a crackdown on gangs and authoritarian politics. Through a framework of “carceral intimacies,” Grazzia Grimaldi considers how families of incarcerated people have become unevenly instrumentalized by El Salvador’s carceral state in sustaining the lives of inmates through their social reproductive labor. At the same time, she shows how this labor is central to questioning and setting limits to the state’s racializing project of dehumanizing incarcerated people in El Salvador.