“Olhe, um terrorista!” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in Salvador, Brazil, where eighty percent of the population identifies as something other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I never, as a moreno (brown-skinned person), stood out to them as different. Yet to the man who pointed me out that day, I did. He apparently had been watching the news: another round of Arab men arrested on suspicion of plotting a terror attack. It was a small moment, an aberration amidst the abundance of hospitality I was enjoying in a country not my own. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in the United States, I chose to move to Brazil mainly for personal enrichment—to study and practice liberation theology in a land regarded as one of its homes. With so varied and privileged a background, I saw myself as something of a supra-cultural globetrotter, immune to other peoples' limitations of cultural and national identity. Whenever crossing what others referred to as borders, I rarely ceased to feel centered. Yet that day—the day I was labeled a terrorist—I suffered something of the migrant's anguish, the de-centering humiliation that typically accompanies the border crosser.
Militarized Capitalism? The Apparel Industry's Role in Scripting a Post-War National Identity in Sri Lanka
