Mexico-US Borderlands Research Articles

Migrating Concepts

Abstract The Bracero Program (1942–64), a bilateral agreement to regulate labor migration between the United States and Mexico, oversaw more than four million contracts enabling Mexican men to work “temporarily” in the United States. Historians of the Mexico-US borderlands and of global migration have interpreted the program through hemispheric as well as broader imperial lenses. Yet this article shows that the program’s foundational ideas emerged from two decades of transatlantic exchange and circulation that cannot be contained within a single continent, nor a single framework such as imperialism. During the interwar period, Mexican politicians, intellectuals, and migrant labor activists eagerly participated in transatlantic and inter-American dialogues about migration policy, compared themselves to Italy, and admired the bilateral labor migration agreements that had recently emerged in Europe. Meanwhile, US officials heard but resisted pleas from migration scholars and the International Labor Organization to emulate European receiving countries. The two parties’ differing engagements with European migration policies meant that when World War II pushed US officials to suddenly propose the agreement, Mexican actors’ transatlantic knowledge inspired their participation and crucially shaped the program’s design. This article thus pushes historians of migration policy towards studies of not just comparison but also entanglement.

Bodies on the Border: Rematerializing and Decolonizing Ecologies of Mobility in the Mexico-US Borderlands

Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticism to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors—plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay’s primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.

Multimodal Cuentos as Fugitive Literacies on the Mexico-US Borderlands

In this article, we examine fugitivity and fugitive literacies as they are enacted by transfronterizx youth—young people who cross and experience life on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. Through a community-based literacy project located on the border between El Paso, Texas, USA, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, this article focuses on storytelling and multimodal creation, what we refer to as multimodal cuentos. Findings illustrate the ways in which Chicanx/Latinx transfronterizx youth exhibit, build, and sustain their ways of resisting white, Western, hegemonic definitions of literacy through communication and creativity. We theorize the notion of fugitivity on the border and share potential implications for language and literacy education for Chicanx/Latinx border crossers.

Export agriculture, transnational farmworkers, and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.

Social–ecological dynamics of change and restoration attempts in the Chihuahuan Desert grasslands of Janos Biosphere Reserve, Mexico

Shrub encroachment and declining grass production are widespread throughout the grasslands and savannas of the Mexico–US borderlands, with negative consequences for ecosystem services, livestock production, and native biodiversity. The problem suggests a complex interaction of social and ecological drivers that are not well understood. Using the Chihuahuan Desert grasslands of the Janos Biosphere Reserve of northern Mexico as a case study, we sought to understand the social–ecological context that shaped landscape change. Our approach included a synthesis of the historical literature and interviews with local residents, with the goal of facilitating long-term grassland restoration. Findings indicate that recent changes in Chihuahuan Desert grasslands are likely related to the co-occurrence of heavy grazing, fire suppression, and the elimination of key species, including prairie dogs and native ungulates. Local residents widely perceive both fire and prairie dogs to be destructive to grasslands and livelihoods. Over the last 50 years, evolving land tenure policies have fragmented the landscape into smaller parcels which typically produce an insufficient livelihood from cattle despite high stocking rates. Declining cattle profitability has motivated the sale and conversion of rangelands to more profitable croplands irrigated with groundwater. Since the founding of the Janos Biosphere Reserve in 2009, universities, local cattle operators, conservation organizations, and federal agencies have begun collaborating on restoration activities. While complete restoration of grasslands is unlikely, progress appears possible largely because of the willingness of local residents to try new management practices that may improve their ability to benefit from the land.

Anxious Architecture: Sleep, Identity, and Death in the US-Mexico Borderlands

The Mexico-US borderlands have been militarised by the technology, weaponry, and policies of both the American Border Patrol agency and Mexican cartels. Upon this contested ground, border-crossers interrupt their taxing journey to build small informal works of architecture. These structures – most commonly fashioned from whatever materials are at hand like thorny mesquite branches, rocks, and grasses – become a locus of crises. Like the migrants, drug mules, or guides who build it, border-crosser architecture has overlapping and competing agendas and motivations. Drawing on the analysis of architectural form, artifacts of material culture, and interviews gathered from fieldwork in the United States and Mexico, I identify three ways architecture acts ‘anxiously’ as a spatial relationship to conflict: 1) sleep (insomnia), 2) identity (anonymity), and 3) death (haunting). In these modes, an architecture born in the borderlands both embodies and emotes anxiety as an adaptive spatial tactic to respond to conflict and trauma.

Editors’ Note: Rethinking Transnational Feminisms

Editors’ NoteRethinking Transnational Feminisms Guisela Latorre, Mytheli Sreenivas, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu This issue marks an important transition for the Frontiers editorial team. We are beginning our fourth year of stewardship by welcoming two new members. Mytheli Sreenivas, a scholar who specializes in South Asian Women’s History, particularly in relation to kinship and reproduction, joins as a new co-editor of Frontiers. Leticia Wiggins, a doctoral student in the Ohio State University History Department, begins her term as our editorial assistant. We also say good-bye to Denise Delgado and Peggy Solic, who have worked diligently for Frontiers for the past two years. They were instrumental not only in producing our issues but also in organizing the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute, a week-long feminist summer camp held at osu in 2014 that attracted approximately one hundred scholars from around the world. Denise returns to her dissertation writing, while Peggy graduated with her PhD. Also, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu will be relocating to the University of California, Irvine, but will continue to serve as a co-editor of Frontiers from afar. We acknowledge these important changes but also dedicate this issue to pursuing conversations that were the subject of our 2015 special issue on transnational feminisms. The scholarship, personal narratives, and artwork in this Spring 2016 issue engage with the global and the local by foregrounding how power shapes the gendered flows of ideas, people, and goods. The authors and artists in this issue also ask us to rethink how we understand transnational feminism as a field and as a methodology. Sharon Heijin Lee and Annelise Heinz begin our issue by examining how the transnational serves to shape beauty and leisure practices in the global South and the global North. Lee explores the colonial and neo-colonial legacies in South Korea, particularly in relation to the United States, through the lens of plastic surgery. She also analyzes the complex feminist politics that condemn these practices in the United States and in South Korea. Heinz studies the craze for mahjong, a Chinese game that was particularly popular [End Page vii] among white US women in the 1920s. She analyzes this consumerist practice of Orientalism and how it relies on the bodies and cultural knowledge of Asian people in the United States. Richelle D. Schrock and Susan H. Swetnam remind us to rethink the political and the personal as well as the local and the global by deconstructing controversies related to women and organizations that cross national boundaries. Schrock analyzes the debates surrounding Hirsi Ali, a well-known Somali author who has been acclaimed as a women’s rights champion and criticized as an Islamophobe. Schrock grounds her analysis through fieldwork with Somali Muslim refugee women who live in the US Midwest. Swetnam chronicles her personal experiences with the Girl Scouts of the United States to offer an alternative history of the organization. She points out that this seemingly wholesome organization has been accused of fostering non-normative sexuality in the twenty-first century and un-American values during the Cold War. Swetnam examines how the Girl Scouts sparked her own interest in exploration and internationalism. Jenifer K Wofford and Stephanie Lewthwaite focus our attention on how art helps us explore gendered and racialized forms of colonialism, hybridity, and violence. Wofford, whose work is featured on our cover and in this issue, is a Filipina American artist and educator who has also lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. Her work examines the anticipation and anxiety of reunions and departures, the discomfort of cross-cultural encounters in public spaces of transportation, and the embodiment of cultural hybridity. Lewthwaite analyzes the art and politics Delilah Montoya. Montoya, an artist based in New Mexico, explores the complex colonial heritage of that region by making visible the history of indigenous enslavement and the continuing importance of Mestiza or mixed Indo-Hispanic identity. Jessie D. Turner, Kristen Kolenz, and Marie Lerma explore gendered and racial forms of border crossing. Turner uses creative nonfiction to analyze power and privilege based on her volunteer experience at a Catholic women’s and children’s shelter on the Mexico-US borderlands. Kolenz and Lerma...

Return Migration and the Profiling of Non‐Citizens: Highly Skilled BRIC Migrants in the Mexico–US Borderlands and Arizona's SB 1070

AbstractBased on interviews conducted between 2011 and 2012, this paper examines how highly skilled migrants from Brazil, Russia, India, and China in Arizona have experienced acculturation to US racial norms and heightened anti‐immigration sentiment since 9/11, which in this state culminated in the passage of Senate Bill 1070. We found that negative experiences with incorporation into US racial hierarchies, immigration enforcement at the Mexico–US border, and profiling as ‘foreigners’ had little impact on their deliberations to return to countries that have become new engines for global growth at a time of US economic decline. Interviewees tended to interpret their experiences as having been mistaken for members of other targeted groups, expected exemption from SB 1070 because of their highly skilled and/or documented status, and lacked knowledge of a now defunct provision in the bill that would have affected immigrants by criminalising failure to carry proper documentation. Instead of immigration experiences or the economic downturn in the US, participants were deterred from return because of perceived deficiencies in their countries of origin, which mitigated the attractiveness of the new economic opportunities there. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Governance of Visibility

This article explores the relationship between information and mobility as it is manifest at the Mexico-US border and understands that border to be one, although very important, site of information processing and production. Within the electronic as well as the physical spaces of the Mexico-US borderlands, it is argued that practices of evasion and exposure produce specific forms of politics. These forms bear on the militarization of the border, particular bourgeois anxieties, various instances of violence, the pursuit of survival strategies and recognition, and the emergence of resistance and countertactics. Also considered are possibilities for alternatives to the ways mobility is governed and challenged in the borderlands especially as it bears on the lives of migrants.

Mexican water studies in the Mexico-US borderlands

This article is an introduction to a special section of the Journal of Political Ecology that presents a Mexican perspective on the transnational dimensions of water use and management in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Three articles by leading Mexican scholars discuss the anthropology and history of water in the borderlands. The articles are interdisciplinary, and are linked in different ways to pioneering research on water in Mexico established by Angel Palerm.

Border water culture in theory and practice: political behavior on the Mexico-U.S. border

This articles examines water politics and the creation of a "transborder water culture" along the western end of the Mexico-U.S. border. In global debates over water, some observers see the need to construct water "cultures" that reinforce conservation strategies, as well as transnational political cooperation. This article discusses events related to the distribution of water in the bi-national Colorado River watershed from 20032010. The article argues that a fundamental change has occurred in the concept of water culture along that border, from an idea of political culture defined as community norms that promote transborder cooperation in the strategies of water distribution, to an idea of culture as rationality that serves as a filter through which pass the political interests of individuals. This change has elevated the role played by local leaders in the process of decision-making about water distribution. An analysis of water culture in the Mexico-US borderlands must differentiate between general "binational political cultures", and specific "institutional cultures."Key Words: Mexico-U.S. border, transborder water culture, political culture, Colorado River watershed

Out of Chatham: Abolitionism on the Canadian frontier

In the 1850s, one region in Canada became the site of intense abolitionist activity: Canada West (south-western Ontario) and, prominently, the town of Chatham. Chatham can be described as a kind of border town as it is located close to the US–Canada border; it was one of the terminal points of the Underground Railroad and one of the first Canadian destinations of abolitionists looking for ways to network. Noted abolitionists lived, worked, and passed through Chatham in the mid-nineteenth century. Therefore, in the 1850s, the town turned into what would later be called Canada's “black Mecca.” This article investigates the complicated story of Chatham as a mid nineteenth-century Canadian border town, a story that reverberates with the tension of real-world white racism and African American abolitionist intellectual life. For the fugitives and black residents, Chatham seems to have been a safe place of transit and reflection to ponder available future possibilities, as well as a place of belonging. In Chatham, African American educator and writer Mary Ann Shadd published the abolitionist newspaper the Provincial Freeman; Martin Delany, the “father of black nationalism,” who had a medical practice in Chatham, wrote his novel Blake (1859-62)and planned settlements in Africa; the Presbyterian minister William King founded the Elgin settlement for former slaves south of Chatham; and John Brown plotted his rebellion at the so-called “Chatham convention”, also hoping to recruit blacks living in Canada for his attempt to found a black state on US soil. In the wake of the transnational turn in American studies, the author draws on “border studies” and “border theory,” fields developed with a focus on the Mexico–US borderlands. In the context of this article, it serves the analysis of the border situation to the north of the United States and allows attention to be drawn to the overall desideratum of studying anti-slavery thought in a transnational context – beyond borders as well as at the borders – while also paying close attention to local practices and particularities, such as those discernible in the case of Chatham. In an exemplary fashion, this Canadian town is an abolitionist place, where in the mid-nineteenth century a black diasporic culture develops and interacts with various local and transnational forces.

The Mexico-US borderlands through two decades

Firsthand knowledge about place is achieved by being there. Travel writers come to understand place through fresh eyes and often from quick exposure--a visit here, a short stay there. Others, including geographers, cultivate an appreciation from repeated visits to places in an area developing what some call regional expertise. Regional understanding requires diligence and persistence beyond repeated visits. It is not convenience food geography quickly heated and served. Rather it is like a slow simmering stew that permits ingredients to mix thereby enhancing an overall flavor. Cooking can take years, sometimes decades, to perfect. My association with the Mexico-United States borderlands is an academic path some two decades long. It is an ongoing enterprise that derives from repeated field and archival research and from a commitment to share the field with students both undergraduate and graduate. (1) The Mexico-US borderland is a tricultural zone--Native, Hispanic, Anglo--cut by a boundary line. For much of its one hundred sixty-two year political history this zone was without significant formal bounding, and only recently has the line become material through construction of a fence along much of the divide. The 200-kilometer-wide (124 miles) zone--100 (62.5 miles) on either side of the international boundary--was declared an official borderland by Article 4 of the 1983 La Paz Agreement. That bounding was based on trans-border watersheds and local administrative units (counties and municipios) (Figure 1). While the region has been called A Third Country, it has also been described as entre siempre (forever in between) (Arreola and Curtis 1993, p. 219-220; Miller 2003, p. xix). The border has been characterized as a Poso del Mundo (hole of the world), Troublesome, Where North Meets South, and a Land of Necessity. Recently, researchers have created a Border Human Development Index to rank quality of life in twenty-five US counties and thirty-eight Mexican municipios that cling to the boundary. To others, especially English-language speakers, the zone is simply the border or the borderlands, relative terms of geographic distance from an administrative center suggesting the opposite of heartland and thus implying a kind of cultural uneasiness, even deviance. To Spanish speakers, including many Mexican nationals, on the other hand, the border is la frontera, literally the frontier, a term imbued with optimism and opportunity and a very different vision of the region. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In this essay I transect the borderlands of my experience over some twenty-plus years from the late 1980s through to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a personal recounting and not meant to be the same for any other scholar or borderland habitue. Nevertheless, reflection permits a freedom to explore what I have seen as persistent and or changing themes about the human geography of the region. My journey starts with a brief discussion about the changing knowledge of the borderlands for scholarly and popular cultures. Next, I examine two general themes that continue to shape places in the region in significant ways. The first theme concerns the consumer economies of towns along the international boundary including the medical and pharmaceutical businesses that now permeate so many Mexican border towns attracting chiefly non-Mexican (Anglo) shoppers to the border. This is followed by complementary observation on the other side of the line, especially the explosion of Mexican shopping districts in American border communities that service the growing numbers of Mexican transnationals and others, including Mexican Americans, in US towns. The second theme reviews the changing landscape impacts resulting from the construction of security installations such as fences and vehicle barriers that have militarized the boundary line from the US side. I then explore the consequent transformations of spaces in Mexican border towns to service the growth of crossers who stage by gathering on the Mexican side of the line. …

The Managed Violences of the Borderlands: Treacherous Geographies, Policeability, and the Politics of Race

Shifts in border and migration governance since the 1990s evident in the intensification of militarized policing in the Mexico–US borderlands and crystallized in the funneling of a large percentage of migrants into the treacherous geography of the “killing deserts” constitute managed forms of violence that are inextricably linked to the racialization processes of American empire. Such managed violences generated another treacherous geography, the critical and “contaminating” socio-spatial formation of Barrio Libre, a transnational 'hood incarnated by a severely marginalized population of young people and instantiated in a sewer system that ran under the border. I advance the concept of policeability to capture the daily instantiations of the managed violences of the borderlands, evident in dramatic displays of state power and in the informal managements of everyday life.

The Thickening Borderlands

I draw from ethnographic research in the Mexico-US borderlands,the immigrant social struggle in the United States, and interviews with organizations invested in the immigrant social struggle in Arizona, to explore the historically specific expansion of what I am calling the ‘borderlands condition’,or the coupling of ‘exceptionality’ with politicalimaginaries.The former term represents an iteration of the diffused governance of race.The article charts the plasticity of the exceptionality of the borderlands,its shift from militarized policing in the southwestern borderlands to the naturalization of a vigilantism in concert with the transnationally inflected immigrant social struggle, as representative of the borderlands condition.

Learning to Clap: Reflections on Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Development

This paper draws on the experience of the World Bank in rural and urban development during the 1970s and 1980s to explain why neither predominantly top-down nor bottom-up approaches have succeeded--nor indeed deserved to--or can be expected to succeed in the future. It then proceeds through a selection of related innovations initiated in the latter 1980s and through the 1990s; notes their failure to promote significant breakthroughs to date; and suggests improved initiatives that blend top-down and bottom-up approaches and beyond their general efficacy would seem to be particularly suitable for confronting many of the principal problems in the Mexico-US borderlands. (authors)

Differential Criminalization under Operation Streamline: Challenges to Freedom of Movement and Humanitarian Aid Provision in the Mexico-US Borderlands

On January 14, 2008, under the wider program of the Arizona Denial Prosecution Initiative, Operation Streamline was put into effect in the Tucson Sector of the Mexico-US borderlands. Initially implemented in Del Rio, Texas, this program—aimed at mass incarceration of undocumented persons to reduce repeated migration attempts—has been most rigorously applied in the Tucson Sector, known as both the busiest and deadliest corridor for migration. Every day approximately seventy migrants are apprehended by the US Border Patrol and then sentenced for up to 180 days imprisonment. I consider Operation Streamline and its impacts on undocumented migrants through the lens of local organizing, particularly by the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths, asserting that such policies—which further militarize the border and justify criminalization of migrants in the public eye—put bodies at greater risk, even before they are prosecuted, through practices of spatial containment that add to the rigours of crossing the Sonoran Desert. In this work I explore the methods in which grassroots humanitarian aid groups apply practices of direct action to challenge such policies and promote freedom of movement.