The spatiotemporal forming of a state of exception: repurposing hot-spot analysis to map bare-life in Southern Arizona’s borderlands

Abstract

Through the use of Hot-Spot analysis, typically reserved for local analysis of crime and law enforcement, I document the dispersal and clustering of migrant mortalities on a temporal scale in the Ajo valley of Southern Arizona in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. The study maps the influence of border enforcement by time and documents the forming of a state of exception, by finding whether and where migrants had taken other more-remote routes in relation to the constructing of and policing by a Border Patrol checkpoint, The spatiotemporal nature of ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold-Spots’ plus an analysis of migrant mortality locations before and after the establishment of a checkpoint serves as a novel approach to spatial analysis in border studies. It creates a type of remote forensics for verifying the ‘funnel effect’ and the condition of Bare Life it produces where law has taken migrant’s political power and left them with their biological existence (Agamben in Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998). I show a widening of the state and a receding of the migrant into a rugged and remote isolation. Until now, the defining of the borderlands as a State of Exception (Doty in Int Political Sociol 1(2):113–137, 2007) has been theoretical and qualitative. This paper doesn’t retract from that but rather adds quantitative data and interpretation to theory, making it a needed clarification of biopolitics in a time of growing use of militarization at the U.S.–Mexico border and worldwide.