From “killing deserts” to “killing cities”: weaponizing urban landscapes in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the most visible forms of violence migrants face on their journeys to and toward the United States are the ways in which they must navigate difficult and hazardous spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border. From the infernal and mountainous Sonoran Desert to the erratic Rio Grande, hundreds of migrants perish confronting these dangerous and hostile conditions every year. But while much work has focused on states’ use of environmental landscapes in enforcing borders and immigration from afar, such as deserts and open waters, few have considered the importance of urban landscapes. Through this manuscript, I explore the role of “killing cities” in contemporary border and immigration enforcement. As I demonstrate, United States border and immigration enforcement has increasingly relied upon urban landscapes to impede and incapacitate migrants at the fringes of its territory. Drawing from recent policy, I show how migrants were pushed into cities scattered across northern Mexico, where they became vulnerable to disappearances, kidnappings, and death. I argue that the lived effects of this policy worked to control and regulate migrants’ mobility as a managed form of violence that was characteristically urban, thereby marking a key shift in the United States’ weaponization of landscape.