scholarly journals The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall

2013 ◽  
pp. 110-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Us Mexico Border

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coexistence and intertwinement of at least three distinct types of power at work there: the sovereign exclusion of illegal life, the disciplinary detention of surveilled life, and the biopolitical circulation of migratory life. By doing so this paper offers an original contribution to two major areas of study: in Foucault studies this paper expands the existing literature on Foucault by analyzing the crossroads of power particular to the US/Mexico border wall, which has not yet been done, and in border studies this Foucauldian approach offers a unique political analysis that goes beyond the critique of sovereignty and toward an analysis of coexisting strategies of power.

scholarly journals Politics of the US-Mexico Border

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Staudt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Border States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
Us Mexico Border

It is perhaps not surprising that a pioneering review essay on border politics should focus on the US-Mexico border and, by extension, the borderlands of this near-2,000 mile territorial line seemingly fixed in 1848 (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) but then adjusted several times thereafter. With a population of approximately 14 million people in US counties and Mexican municipios (80 million in the ten border states: six in Mexico and four in the United States), and an annual half-trillion-dollar trade across the border between both countries, the significance of the US-Mexico borderlands can hardly be overstated. In the United States, people of Mexican heritage comprise the largest of the fast-growing census-counted Hispanic population of 18.3 percent, and significant numbers either migrated across the border or the border crossed their ancestors when Mexico lost half its territory to the United States in the mid-19th century under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the mid-1970s, the interdisciplinary border studies discipline was born with a focus on the politics of the US-Mexico borderlands and the creation of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS). Many of the pioneering scholars of border studies lived, taught, and researched in the US-Mexico borderlands, illuminated in sections below. Because both the research and the scholars initially concentrated on the US-Mexico border, many border concepts emerged from richly contextualized studies in the multiple border regions and later in North America but struggled to expand toward a comparative and global approach while still exercising attentiveness to the politics of power in borderlands spaces. This essay provides an overview of key US-Mexico border political studies, with the term “political” used broadly to include both Political Processes and Institutions within borderlands, power disparities in everyday life, and public policies that impinge upon borderlands from afar, generally from the capital cities of Washington, DC, and Mexico City.

California

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Alvarez
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Social Cartography ◽  
Family Network ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Police Surveillance ◽  
Us Mexico Border

I utilize my situated position as anthropologist, academician, and citizen to argue not only that we should “think” California, but also that we should “rethink” our state—both its condition and its social cartography. To be clear, I see all my research and endeavors—my research on the US/Mexico border; my time among the markets and entrepreneurs I have worked and lived with; my focus on those places in which I was raised: Lemon Grove, Logan Heights; the family network and my community ethnographic work—as personal. I am in this academic game and the telling of our story because it is personal. When Lemon Grove was segregated, it was about my family; when Logan Heights was split by the construction of Interstate 5 and threatened by police surveillance, it was about our community; when the border was sanctioned and militarized it again was about the communities of which I am a part. A rethinking California is rooted in the experience of living California, of knowing and feeling the condition and the struggles we are experiencing and the crises we have gone through. We need to rethink California, especially the current failure of the state. This too is ultimately personal, because it affects each and every one of us, especially those historically unrepresented folks who have endured over the decades.

scholarly journals Reinforcing and contesting neoliberal citizenship: Legal advocates and the asylum interview at the US–Mexico border

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Riva ◽  
Erin Routon
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Abstract This article explores the mechanisms in which, through the US family detention asylum process, neoliberal ideas of citizenship are reinforced and contested. Through ethnographic research, and using a Foucauldian lens, we take a closer look at the neoliberal processes involved within so-called family detention. Specifically, we focus on legal advocates who are helping detained women prepare for their legal interviews. This paper argues that humanitarian aid work becomes knowable through attention to microlevel details and forms of practice—on the ground and at the margins. This affords a recognition of not only areas of functional solidarity or symbiosis with the state, but also those less visible forms of contestation. We claim that while legal advocates play a role within the neoliberal regimes at work inside these centres, they also contest this system in various critical ways, ensuring both access to legal representation for all detainees and their eventual release.

scholarly journals Substance Use and Cumulative Exposure to American Society: Findings From Both Sides of the US–Mexico Border Region

2016 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Borges ◽  
Cheryl J. Cherpitel ◽  
Ricardo Orozco ◽  
Sarah E. Zemore ◽  
Lynn Wallisch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Cumulative Exposure ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
American Society ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Intergenerational Spanish transmission in El Paso, Texas

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Velázquez
Keyword(s):  
El Paso ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Linguistic Development ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
The Us ◽  
Interethnic Contact ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Benefits And Costs ◽  
Us Mexico Border ◽  
At Home

This study examines the beliefs held by a group of adult Spanish-English bilinguals from El Paso, Texas regarding the vitality of Spanish in their community and the ways in which their own experience of being bilingual on the US-Mexico border has influenced their perceptions of the benefits and costs of fostering Spanish development in their children. Results show that parents’ positive attitudes toward Spanish did not translate into the investment of time and resources to foster Spanish development in their children nor, ultimately, into the use of Spanish by their children. Households where the mother perceived herself as having an active role in her children’s linguistic development and where she perceived both Spanish and a bilingual/biethnic identity as desirable for her children’s future were also households where children were expected to speak Spanish at home and where more opportunities for linguistic development were present. The author argues that these beliefs must be understood as a consequence of the underlying tensions present in the community, where intense linguistic and interethnic contact takes place every day.

Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive's Reenactment Play

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Patricia Stuelke
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Central American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Road Novel ◽  
Colonial Frontier ◽  
Us Mexico Border

This essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive's attempt to imagine anti-imperialist solidarity aesthetics in a moment of the increasing imbrication of the US literary sphere and settler colonial capitalist surveillance of the US-Mexico border, as well as the nonprofit care regime that has arisen to oppose and ameliorate its effects. Because these structures converge around overt and subterranean investments in settler colonial frontier fantasy, the essay focuses particularly on Lost Children Archive's engagement with the tradition of the white male road novel Western in the Americas—Luiselli's attempts to write both through and against this form—as part of the novel's larger attempt to grapple with the formal problems that adhere in representing the temporality and scale of ongoing Central American Indigenous dispossession and refugee displacement in settler colonial capitalism. In exploring the degree to which the Western genre's tradition of, per Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” might oppose the brutal bureaucratic violence of the xenophobic carceral settler US state, the novel builds a critique of the frontier road novel fantasy that it cannot quite sustain.

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