Freedom for Beginners

The Freedom Project is an inquiry into the dialectics of “freedom,” as understood by first-generation immigrants to South Florida. Through on the one hand, analyzing the considerations of freedom in relation to understandings of urban space as public or private, and on the other, following immigrants’ embrace of U.S. gun culture, we seek to foster a reflection on contemporary society as well as facilitate participative forms of citizenship. 

The pursuit of liberty fuels the immigrant passage. For the immigrant, freedom is not “Freedom to” as “Freedom from.” Freedom from interference requires self-defense, and so in the land of the free, idea becomes thing. Freedom is a weapon in all the senses of the word.

In the immigrant city - Hialeah, FL, for instance, two-thirds foreign-born - the gun range is both a non-place and a private space of freedom. Facing a target, the immigrant hunches forward in deep concentration, legs firmly planted, both arms extended without hesitation, clutching the gun and, when ready, releasing the trigger. Piercing the X will be the ultimate triumph of mind over body.

There, every individual stands alone, shielded from each other by a wall. Training for the ideal society requires the illusion of solitude. Not only the trainee stands with his/her back to the surveillance cameras, seemingly oblivious to them, but s/he is isolated from its surroundings by the ultimate isolating devise: ear protectors. Thus the shooter is alienated from the only tangible expression of a deadly power: the blasting sound. Negative freedom (“freedom from”) requires the retreat to the inner citadel, to paraphrase Isaiah Berlin. It is not relational and therefore not social.