Search Results

This chapter considers how the dominant performance of borders and bordering is being reworked through Brexit and the Trump presidency. The impact of Brexit has brought renewed attention and anxiety to the 310-mile land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while also unsettling the norms around the EU's external borders. In the United States, President Trump campaigned on the promise to ‘build a wall’ between Mexico and the United States and, not incidentally, to ‘make Mexico pay for it’. Since his election, the US–Mexico border has been intensely politicised and racialised. In contrast, there is a relative lack of anxiety regarding the US–Canada border. The chapter considers the ways in which borders are discursively invoked and materially reconfigured such that particular types of migrants are constructed as a threat and specific borders in need of securitisation.

This chapter examines how grandmotherhood is performed at the US–Mexico border in service of the new nativist movement in contemporary United States and in the broader ethno-nationalist project to which it contributes. It is the work of women, especially older women, that sustains this project to police the geopolitical, legal, and cultural boundaries of the nation. Through a case study of one active Minuteman chapter and its articulation with national efforts to reach out to women, the chapter elucidates how this collective impulse to protect the border incorporates women in seemingly contradictory ways that nonetheless work together to reproduce hierarchies of power grounded in both race and gender. Indeed, women's work to keep new immigrants of color outside the boundaries of this imagined community we call nation appears inextricably tied to those women's own gendered subordination within.

This chapter examines the challenges of identification of migrant remains at the US-Mexico border, highlighting the logistical and ethical considerations for cross-border identifications. Each year hundreds of human remains are found along the southern US border. Migrants fleeing violence and poverty are increasingly forced by US immigration policy to cross the border through treacherous terrain, risking death from exposure or violence. The infrastructure for DNA identification developed for missing persons is inadequate for migrant families, who might be residing in another country or living in the United States undocumented. Fear of US immigration and law enforcement authorities complicates the normal processes for reporting missing migrant cases and thereby limits family reference DNA collection. Many remains are buried without identification, some are buried without collection of DNA, some are buried without a marker to enable future identification, and some are cremated. Both governmental and nongovernmental efforts to collect DNA from relatives of missing migrants are further complicated by questions of sovereignty, privacy, and national security. International missing persons databases are underdeveloped and disconnected, and the informed consent process for relatives of the missing is inadequate for migrant families. The challenges of identification at the US-Mexico border underscore the systemic biases that exclude migrant populations from access to law enforcement processes that would enable identification of their family members and repatriation of their remains for respect and burial. Addressing these challenges at the US-Mexico border can inform cross-border policies for other migrant populations around the world.

The hypervisibility of contemporary migration flows has generated significant interest in human smugglers, and reports of their activities are ubiquitous. Smugglers as facilitators of irregular migration are most often characterized as young and violent men from the Global South organized in criminal networks who are responsible for the tragic journeys of migrants around the world. Yet despite their frequent appearance in dramatic migration accounts, smugglers have hardly been the subject of empirical inquiry, which has led to the prevalence of male-centred, racialized, and classist characterizations of their activities. This chapter, drawing from structured interviews and participant observation conducted among twelve women charged with human smuggling offences and twenty-five women who travelled with smuggling facilitators in the US states of Arizona and Utah, situates the narratives of smuggling and its intersections with race, class, and gender in the facilitation of border crossings along the US–Mexico border.

This chapter offers an extended look at two Tucson-based organizations, Wingspan and Coalición de Derechos Humanos (CDH), both of which have an avowed coalition to jointly fight oppression. The groups have constructed a coalition that refuses the master's tool of divide and conquer by actively taking up the many forms of difference in the service of coalition. Sometimes venturing into both normative and utopian realms with their tactical strategies, the activism of Wingspan and CDH starkly reveals the fraught nature of coalition. This coalition provides insight into the specific kind of strategies that local groups can utilize to foster unlikely political coalitions and educate communities in order to shift local, state, and national ways of thinking, even as these strategies are imperfect and sometimes fail.

This chapter centers on the activities of Gatas y Vatas, an annual experimental music festival in New Mexico that features solo performances by local practitioners. Initiated by young female Hispanic musicians as an attempt to counteract the white male dominance of local music scenes, Gatas y Vatas has become a catalyst of female empowerment where participants experience liberation while defying gender norms in an all-inclusive environment. Alonso-Minutti examines how the practices fostered in the festival are tied to a locally perceived freedom granted by Albuquerque’s complex cultural makeup. To the “Gatas,” the city is a place where “everything is possible.” She argues that this sentiment of endless potential drives performers to experiment with sound, noise, technology, and the environment and to engage in activities that foster a feminist ideal rooted in a Hispanic connection. The result is a community-oriented experimental atmosphere that has reached levels of inclusion and female equality rarely seen in experimental music scenes.

The Introduction introduces the concept of being socially, as opposed to (merely) legally undocumented. It briefly explores the relationship of being socially undocumented to Latina/o/x identity and anti-Latina/o/x racism. It establishes the relational egalitarian conception of justice that is employed throughout this book. The Introduction also lays out the framework for the remaining chapters. Chapter 1 articulates a new framework for immigration justice using a more expansive conception of what it means to “be undocumented.” Chapter 2 explores the meaning of having a socially undocumented identity. Chapter 3 argues that “being socially undocumented” is embodied along racial and class lines, an argument continued in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapters 6 and 7 examine what states must do to undermine anti-socially undocumented oppression. The Conclusion draws upon the arguments explored in all the previous chapters.

The postcrisis flattening of the social order spurred a flurry of anxiety-ridden stories of extralegal endeavors to maintain a middle-class lifestyle against further ruin. Ruin and personal devastation put the white protagonists of Arrested Development, Weeds, and Breaking Bad at the limits of the United States in proximity to the U.S.-Mexican border where crossing over is the final stop on their personal freefall. The border is the end of the line. The southern frontier offers ready symbols for the end of capitalism, signified as a geographical limit. Capitalism reaches its limit when it no longer serves white supremacy, when whiteness loses its value as capital and needs new forms for survival.

This chapter explores how genetic information supersedes other technologies as a biometric for migrants lacking proof of identity. It also examines the inherent privacy and societal issues of using genetic evidence as a substitute for human identity. As concerns about border security increase around the world, policymakers are turning to genetic information as a biometric for tracing individuals entering the country, processing refugee claims, and screening for human trafficking. Since many migrants travel without proof of identity, genetic information is useful for establishing identity, particularly for verifying family relationships. The United States has had the authority to collect DNA of immigrant detainees for the criminal database since 2009, in large part to detect repeat border crossers and immigrants who commit crimes in the United States. In addition, recent efforts to thwart immigration fraud and human trafficking include use of DNA relationship testing to verify claims. In the future, immigration courts might consider DNA testing for ancestral origin to verify refugees’ ethnicity claims—an approach that might help a stateless person seeking refuge to provide evidence of country of origin. Each of these expanded uses of genetic information beyond traditional criminal investigations could result in stigmatization of individuals or entire populations if applied broadly. Moreover, the geneticization of families and individuals undermines the social constructs that underlie human relations and self-identity and could lead to discrimination against nontraditional families or revelation of unintentional family secrets that could endanger individuals.

This chapter explores the evolving role of forensic genetics in human rights investigations and as a technology of postmortem identification for missing persons in ongoing conflict and post-conflict societies. How has DNA’s increasingly privileged place as a line of evidence impacted the field in terms of both medico-legal standards and heightened expectations among surviving kin and their communities? Drawing on interviews with leading figures in the field of forensic science and human rights/transitional justice (e.g., the International Commission on Missing Persons, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, and the Colibrí Center for Human Rights), buttressed by ethnographic analysis of exhumation and identification efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Uganda, the chapter provides an overview and commentary about the technology’s complicated place in unearthing truths and effecting repair.

The epilogue compares Donald Trump’s attempt to build a border wall with Mexico and an earlier attempt by Montana Congressman Joseph M. Dixon in 1903 to build a barbed wire fence along much of Canada’s border with the United States. Stepping back, the epilogue provides an overview of the impacts of 9/11, the development of new technologies, and the ways contemporary problems in art, politics, and business often have historic roots. The epilogue returns to the ways Indigenous people conceptualize land, territory, and belonging and how this has shifted over time. It argues that if the border today is a more prominent impediment to movement than it was even twenty years earlier, it has not succeeded in shaking its past. It remains one border among many: a border built on Indigenous lands with all the ambiguity and complexity that such a venture creates.

Through two ethnographic vignettes at the Mexico’s southern and norther borders, the concluding chapter summarizes the central contributions of the book. It also places the migrant journey across Mexico within a larger global context to understand the far reaching and violent impacts of state securitization and border enforcement across the globe. It ends with a reflection on the power of ethnography to tell important and otherwise untold stories.

Explores how, in the context of drought, the parties were able to move From Litigation to Cooperation. After a serious diplomatic confrontation and ensuing lawsuit in which both countries ended up worse off than before, leaders on both sides of the border set out to frame a new mandate. With this new approach, the two sides sought to redefine their relations on the Colorado River and begin negotiations from a constructive, mutual gains mindset. Turning Crisis into Opportunity examines the ways in which the two sides seized a critical window of opportunity to move the negotiations forward following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Mexico’s Mexicali Valley, which weakened the alternatives of several domestic constituencies in Mexico who were opposed to a cooperative process with the U.S. No Negotiation without Representation explains how the U.S. was able to break the traditional diplomatic protocol to allow the seven U.S. states that own the rights to the Colorado River water to be appropriately represented and have a seat at the negotiating table. Involved for the first time as co-sovereigns with the U.S. and Mexican federal authorities, the contributions of the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states were critical to shaping an implementable agreement.