South Asian and Indigenous Experiences at the US–Mexico Border

Abstract

This essay addresses the cultural politics of US Empire as it appears at the site of the US–Mexico border. I offer a reading of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that situates the case within the ongoing violence of US settler colonialism and border imperialism. To do this, I juxtapose two texts—a fictional short film and an interview—located at the borderlands. These texts highlight not only the violence South Asians confront as a result of the global War on Terror, but also how the expansion of the US security state in the post-9/11 era has further dispossessed Indigenous communities located at the US–Mexico border. The short film Thank You, Come Again (2020) was written by, directed by, and stars South Asian American Nirav Bhakta in a story about an undocumented South Asian convenience store clerk. In this short, the clerk contends with the memories of the loss of his father at the hands of border police in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The second text, an interview with Tohono O’odham activist Ofelia Rivas, emerged from a 2006 project entitled “O’odham Against the Wall.” In this interview, Rivas situated the construction of a border wall on the Tohono O’odham land within the context of post-9/11 racial anxieties. Together, these two texts offer us a meditation not only on the state of South Asian America 100 years after US v. Thind, where race-making continues to shape the lives of the diaspora, but also the settler logics that are entangled with this historic case and the ways in which South Asians have also become complicit in settler colonial processes. However, I suggest these two texts offer the diaspora the possibility to radically rupture their complicities by forming a relational politics against the white settler nationalism that continues to target both South Asians and Indigenous communities for domination at the border and beyond.