The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S. México Line. Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire

Abstract

Scholarship focusing on human suffering in the North American Southwest will always find a ready audience, especially given the U.S. public’s never-ending obsession with border security and immigration controls. The Border and its Bodies is a collection of essays that focuses on the “corporality of risk on the border,” or, the negative impacts of border-crossing on the bodies of migrants, themselves (p. 4). No short review could adequately address the intellectual and moral importance of the nine essays contained in this volume. Randall H. McGuire and Ruth M. Van Dyke examine the material infrastructure of the border in Ambos Nogales, demonstrating the inescapable performances of sovereignty and citizenship for all crossers between Arizona and Sonora, most significantly for undocumented persons moving north. In “Como me duele,” anthropologist Jason de León utilizes fieldwork from southern Mexico to analyze the violent traumas experienced by Central American migrants moving north through Mexico in order to paint a more holistic picture of how migrants experience border enforcement and the clandestine nature of crossing. Another standout chapter is Shaylih Muehlmann’s “Singing Along ‘Like a Mexican,’” wherein the author examines the seemingly contradictory popularity of violent narcocorridos among working-class norteños, revealing the ways in which “local people experience corridos as markers of a joyful, subaltern nationalism amid conditions of social suffering,” implying an important connection between contemporary and historical folkways in the borderlands (p. 140). Other essays examine the biological manifestations of endemic poverty and oppression on the bodies of migrants found dead in southern Arizona, the physiological manifestations of emotional trauma on Mexican migrants, how migrant children are all too often interpreted as a security threat through anti-immigrant narratives in the United States, and the significance of migrants’ found objects in the desert borderlands of the North American Southwest.