Living with the Narcos: The “Drug War” in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez Border Region

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-167
Author(s):  
Benita Heiskanen
Keyword(s):  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Drug War ◽  
Criminal Organizations ◽  
Drug Cartels ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

During the years 2008-2012, the El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua border region between the United States and Mexico saw a wave of violence that occurred as a result of the so-called “drug war” between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels. As the criminal organizations began recruiting local gangs for their enforcement strategies, the violence soon spiraled beyond the context of the drug trafficking industry, generating mayhem and social decay throughout Ciudad Juárez. In four years, the death toll in the city amounted to 10,882, with 3,622 bodies in 2010. This article discusses the impact of the violence in the region as experienced by border residents and in relation to policy responses by the U.S. and Mexican governments. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in January-May 2010 with members of the border community, it focuses on the interviewees’ experiences in 2010. The discussion of violence is contextualized as a global crisis, with ramifications upon urgent issues of citizenship and political and human rights across national boundaries.

The impact of a mega-event on city branding: The European Capital of Culture 2010 and the image of Istanbul

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evinç Doğan ◽  
Ibrahim Sirkeci
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Place Branding ◽  
World City ◽  
City Branding ◽  
City Image ◽  
European Capital Of Culture ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Symbolic Production ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This study examines the ways in which the city image of Istanbul is re-created through the mega-events within the context of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2010. Istanbul “took the stage” as one of the three ECoC cities (Essen for the Ruhr in Germany and Pécs in Hungary), where the urban spaces were projected as the theatre décor while residents and visitors became the spectators of the events. Organisers and agents of the ECoC 2010 seemed to rebrand Istanbul as a “world city” rather than a “European capital”. With a series of transnational connotations, this can be considered as part of an attempt to turn Istanbul to a global city. In this study we examine posters used during the ECoC 2010 to see whether this was evident in the promoted images of Istanbul. The research employs a hermeneutic approach in which representations, signs and language are the means of symbolic meaning, which is analysed through qualitative methods for the visual data (Visual Analysis Methods), namely Semiotics and Discourse Analysis. The analysed research material comes from a sample of posters released during the ECoC 2010 to promote 549 events throughout the year. Using stratified random sampling we have drawn 28 posters (5% of the total) reflecting the thematic groups of events in the ECoC 2010. Particular attention is also paid to the reflexivity of the researchers and researchers’ embeddedness to the object of research. The symbolic production and visual representation are therefore investigated firstly through the authoritative and historically constituted discourses in the making of Istanbul image and secondly through the orders of cultural consumption and mediatisation of culture through spectacular events. Hence enforcing a transnationalisation of the image of the city where the image appears to be almost stateless transcending the national boundaries. Findings and methodology used in this study can be useful in understanding similar cases and further research into the processes of city and place branding and image relationships. 

Strangers in the City: Transmigration from Eastern Europe and its Impact on Berlin and Hamburg 1880–1914

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Tobias Brinkmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Traffic ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Massive Growth ◽  
Transit Migration ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article examines the impact of transit migration from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires on Berlin and Hamburg between 1880 and 1914. Both cities experienced massive growth during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and both served as major points of passage for Eastern Europeans travelling to (and returning from) the United States. The rising migration from Eastern Europe through Central and Western European cities after 1880 coincided with the need to find adequate solutions to accommodate a rapidly growing number of commuters. The article demonstrates that the isolation of transmigrants in Berlin, Hamburg (and New York) during the 1890s was only partly related to containing contagious disease and ‘undesirable’ migrants. Isolating transmigrants was also a pragmatic response to the increasing pressure on the urban traffic infrastructure.

Quantifying changes in bicycle volumes using crowdsourced data

2022 ◽  
pp. 239980832110661
Author(s):  
Ali Al-Ramini ◽  
Mohammad A Takallou ◽  
Daniel P Piatkowski ◽  
Fadi Alsaleem
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crowdsourced Data ◽  
Machine Learning Approach ◽  
Bicycle Infrastructure ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Infrastructure Investments ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Most cities in the United States lack comprehensive or connected bicycle infrastructure; therefore, inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions for connecting existing bicycle infrastructure are increasingly being employed. Signage is one of the promising solutions. However, the necessary data for evaluating its effect on cycling ridership is lacking. To overcome this challenge, this study tests the potential of using readily-available crowdsourced data in concert with machine-learning methods to provide insight into signage intervention effectiveness. We do this by assessing a natural experiment to identify the potential effects of adding or replacing signage within existing bicycle infrastructure in 2019 in the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Specifically, we first visually compare cycling traffic changes in 2019 to those from the previous two years (2017–2018) using data extracted from the Strava fitness app. Then, we use a new three-step machine-learning approach to quantify the impact of signage while controlling for weather, demographics, and street characteristics. The steps are as follows: Step 1 (modeling and validation) build and train a model from the available 2017 crowdsourced data (i.e., Strava, Census, and weather) that accurately predicts the cycling traffic data for any street within the study area in 2018; Step 2 (prediction) use the model from Step 1 to predict bicycle traffic in 2019 while assuming new signage was not added; Step 3 (impact evaluation) use the difference in prediction from actual traffic in 2019 as evidence of the likely impact of signage. While our work does not demonstrate causality, it does demonstrate an inexpensive method, using readily-available data, to identify changing trends in bicycling over the same time that new infrastructure investments are being added.

“Hunting for Chinamen”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Immigration Law ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Railroad Workers ◽  
Chinese Exclusion

Through a close, on-the-ground reading of U.S. immigration records and newspaper accounts, this chapter shows how Chinese immigrants repeatedly improvised new cross-racial strategies to gain entry into the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion. Their actions not only forced local immigration officials to continually adjust their own practices in response, but to focus increasing attention on racial differentiation. In the process of distinguishing Chinese from Mexican, and rooting out smuggling rings that depended upon the cooperation of Chinese sponsors and immigrants, Mexican guides, and black railroad workers, these street-level bureaucrats not only enforced U.S. immigration law, but did so through practices that rendered multiracial relations and identities suspect and illegitimate. Moreover, as immigration officials and the immigrants they sought to police drew the attention of the federal government to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, they brought the American state into the borderlands. The chapter thus connects local enforcement practices at the border with the broader goals of federal immigration law and nation-building at the turn of the century.

Empires and Immigrants

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Demographic Shift ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
Diverse Groups

This chapter frames the nineteenth century borderlands as a theater of movement that had long been marked by imperial contestations and diverse migrations. Native American, colonial, Mexican, and American migrations shaped the region, keeping territorial boundaries porous, and racial and national identities blurred. Following the transformation of the indigenous borderlands to a capitalist borderlands, the chapter traces the seismic demographic shift that drove the region’s rapid industrialization; as the borderlands connected into national, transnational, and global circuits of migration, and oceanic lines fed back into railway connections, white, black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants descended on the border from all directions. Focusing on the multiple boundaries that intersected at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border – namely, the international boundary as well as the limits of Jim Crow that ended where Texas met New Mexico – this chapter shows how and why the late 19th century borderlands looked so promising for these diverse groups. It begins to develop a transborder framework for understanding immigration, emphasizing how the narrowing of economic opportunities, political rights, and social freedoms in both the United States and Mexico contributed to such diverse men and women coming together in the borderlands.

City-to-City and Temporal Assessment of Peer City Scooter Policy

2020 ◽  
Vol 2674 (7) ◽  
pp. 219-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Janssen ◽  
William Barbour ◽  
Erin Hafkenschiel ◽  
Mark Abkowitz ◽  
Craig Philip ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Device Removal ◽  
Directed Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Convergence Point ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Operating Company ◽  
Temporal Assessment

This paper presents a micromobility scooter policy comparison between 10 mid-sized peer cities with respect to 12 policy dimensions. Because of the evolutionary nature of the policy, a temporal analysis of policy dimensions is required, which we conduct and present in this work. The impact of these individual policies reaches across the city itself, the operating company, and the mobility user—all of which are assessed throughout this work. Many of these policy dimensions are acute pain points for cities, such as fleet caps, permitting fees, and equity requirements. In the temporal analysis, some dimensions show not just happenstance variability in attempts to manage forms of micromobility, but appreciable trends. Approximately 1 year after the deployment of dockless electric scooters in cities throughout the United States and the world, cities have made multiple attempts at regulations and legislation to handle the new mobility mode. Throughout this time, cities have agreed from the start in some aspects of policy such as device removal, safety, speed limit, and bonds. In other dimensions, such as fleet expansion plans, equity regulations, and parking requirements, cities see directed movement over time toward a convergence point.

scholarly journals Border Residents’ Perceptions of Crime and Security in El Paso, Texas

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Castañeda ◽  
Casey Chiappetta
Keyword(s):  
El Paso ◽  
Large City ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Sense Of Security ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Perceptions Of Crime ◽  
Official Crime ◽  
The U.S

Research has continued to show the overall safety of the U.S. border region contrary to the widespread belief about the insecurity of the U.S.-Mexico border and frequent claims for the need to secure the border in order to prevent the spread of violence into the rest of the country. Rarely do we ask how border residents feel about safety and crime, which could shed significant light on the claims that the border is an insecure warzone posing a threat to the entire country. While calls to secure national borders are common, outsiders’ perceptions of an unsafe border are not supported by official crime rates and statistics, Border Patrol apprehensions, or the everyday experiences of people in American cities along the U.S.-Mexico border. This paper investigates the perception of crime and security, as expressed by the residents of El Paso, Texas, a large city located along the U.S.-Mexico border and directly across from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Data come from a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded survey that asked 919 residents about their perceptions of crime, sense of security and safety in their neighborhood and the city in general. The results show that the overwhelming majority of border city residents feel safe and that those who are undocumented and raised in El Paso are the most likely to report feeling safe or very safe. We also find that the foreign-born population had a statistically significant lower felony conviction rate than those who were U.S.-born, an important qualifier in discussions over immigration and its connection with violence and crime. Contrary to sensationalized claims about border violence, residents of El Paso do not display any of the sense of insecurity experienced in neighboring Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. We present hypotheses about possible causes for these low levels of violence in the U.S.-side of the border and discuss the dissonance between the reality on the border and perception outside of the border region.

scholarly journals Assessing Groundwater Withdrawal Sustainability in the Mexican Portion of the Transboundary Santa Cruz River Aquifer

Water ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 233
Author(s):  
Elia M. Tapia-Villaseñor ◽  
Eylon Shamir ◽  
Mary-Belle Cruz-Ayala ◽  
Sharon B. Megdal
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Groundwater Withdrawal ◽  
Water Withdrawal ◽  
Balance Model ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Precipitation Record ◽  
Santa Cruz River ◽  
The Impact

The impact of climate uncertainties is already evident in the border communities of the United States and Mexico. This semi-arid to arid border region has faced increased vulnerability to water scarcity, propelled by droughts, warming atmosphere, population growth, ecosystem sensitivity, and institutional asymmetries between the two countries. In this study, we assessed the annual water withdrawal, which is essential for maintaining long-term sustainable conditions in the Santa Cruz River Aquifer in Mexico, which is part of the U.S.–Mexico Transboundary Santa Cruz Aquifer. For this assessment, we developed a water balance model that accounts for the water fluxes into and out of the aquifer’s basin. A central component of this model is a hydrologic model that uses precipitation and evapotranspiration demand as input to simulate the streamflow into and out of the basin, natural recharge, soil moisture, and actual evapotranspiration. Based on the precipitation record for the period 1954–2020, we found that the amount of groundwater withdrawal that maintains sustainable conditions is 23.3 MCM/year. However, the record is clearly divided into two periods: a wet period, 1965–1993, in which the cumulative surplus in the basin reached ~380 MCM by 1993, and a dry period, 1994–2020, in which the cumulative surplus had been completely depleted. Looking at a balanced annual groundwater withdrawal for a moving average of 20-year intervals, we found the sustainable groundwater withdrawal to decline from a maximum of 36.4 MCM/year in 1993 to less than 8 MCM/year in 2020. This study underscores the urgency for adjusted water resources management that considers the large inter-annual climate variability in the region.

Digital Resources: The Wheelan Collection of Photographs of the Mexican Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton DuPlessis
Keyword(s):  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Military Commander ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Ardent Supporter

The John D. Wheelan Collection primarily contains photographs taken along the Texas-Mexico border in the areas of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, México. The processed collection, housed at Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, comprises nearly 700 photographs documenting the Mexican Revolution and the war’s spillover into the United States, during a span of 1912 to 1919. Other portions of the image collection document American soldiers stationed in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. The images have been digitized as JP2 files and can be viewed at the library’s institutional repository as well as downloaded. While most of the photographs derive from the film stock shot for The Life of General Villa, there are also portraits, scenes of daily life, and landscapes produced by El Paso studio photographers, photo postcards, and postcards. With the exception of some postcards, nearly all the images are black and white. The photos themselves vary in their measurements, though 3.5" x 5" and 5" x 7" predominate; each image’s dimensions is included in the accompanying metadata found in the repository. John Wheelan, already active in the fledging Texan motion picture industry, was one of numerous reporters and photographers who covered the Mexican Revolution. He probably arrived in northern Mexico early in the winter of 1913–1914, when General Francisco “Pancho” Villa held Ciudad Juárez. Villa was considered the most able military commander among the Constitutionalists, a loose coalition of revolutionaries against General Victoriano Huerta’s provisional government. In February 1913, Huerta had conspired in the overthrow of the constitutionally elected government of President Francisco Madero. Villa, an ardent supporter of Madero, was one of several leaders in northern Mexico who were fighting for both the restoration of constitutional government and revolutionary agrarian land reforms.

The effect of lodging tax increases on US destinations

2019 ◽  
pp. 135481661989075 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Hudson ◽  
Fang Meng ◽  
Kevin Kam Fung So ◽  
Scott Smith ◽  
Jing Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Economic Loss ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tax Rates ◽  
Daily Rate ◽  
States Data ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Room Time

This study examined the impact of lodging tax increases on eight different destinations of the United States. Data were collected via in-depth stakeholder interviews and monthly statistics provided by Smith Travel Research including average daily rate, occupancy, and revenue per available room. Time series analysis was employed to estimate the impact of tax increases in each destination by analyzing that time series before and after the imposition of the tax. Overall, our results did not fully support the hypothesis that when a city’s hotel tax greatly increases above that of an easily accessible competitor, it will result in an economic loss to the city with the disproportionate tax rates. Hotels appear to have absorbed any tax increases with little impact to their businesses, but there was concern among stakeholders as to how the lodging tax was spent.

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