The other U.S. Border? Techno-cultural-rationalities and fortification in Southern Mexico

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border Program ( Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.