Cover image: Display by Hervé di Rosa, at Mucem Museum of Marseilles. A theoretical companion piece to to this essay by Edward Avila is found in this issue’s Out of Bounds section.
“The Rules of Engagement: The Necropolitical (B)order of Power”
Luis Alberto Urrea’s journalistic narrative, The Devil’s Highway, recounts the perilous
journey migrants from Mexico and Central America endure while travelling northward to the
U.S. and Canada. In this section, we focus on the first chapter from Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway,
“The Rules of the Game,” in which Urrea recounts the arduous and often deadly journey
awaiting migrant as they traverse the hostile desert and mountain environments in northern
Mexico and the U.S. Southwest.[1] While travelling across the treacherous desert landscape,
border crossers often suffer from dehydration, hunger, hypothermia, and sunstroke, in addition to
exposure to cacti, brush, poisonous insects, and predatory wildlife. By sealing off major crossing
points along the U.S./Mexico border through increased border surveillance and seizure, border
crossers are forced to take alternate routes in which they encounter extremely hostile landscapes
that many scholars, journalists, and cultural producers label the “killing fields.” And while
strategies of deterrence—promoted as pragmatic solutions based on rational calculations of
presumed border crossers—close off major crossing points, these same strategies also constitute
death sentences for many already facing precarious living conditions in their countries of
origin.[2] Within this context of heightened border enforcement and rechanneling of routes we
begin our discussion of Urrea’s “The Rules of the Game.”
“The Rules of the Game” opens by recounting the horrifying material conditions produced by
the dehumanizing rationalities undergirding U.S. militarized border enforcement. Urrea writes,
* Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their
names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how long they
been lost. One of them wandered back up a peak. One of them was barefoot [. . .]
They were drunk from having their brains baked in a pan, they were seeing God
and devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine, the poisons
clogging their systems. They were beyond rational thought [. . .] Nothing soft
here. This world of spikes and crags was as alien to them as if they suddenly
awakened on Mars.[3]
This unfamiliar and inhospitable landscape, indifferent and merciless to those sojourners of
which necessity beckons, is not the fourth planet from the sun but rather that all-too-earthly and
all-too-vicious necropolitical spatiality of punishment and retribution, which, like Mars, carries
the name of war. And while Urrea’s opening salvo offers readers a graphic and poignant account
of treacherous border crossings across the Mexican and southern Arizona desert, this “silent war”
marks the degree to which U.S. border enforcement statecraft reflects the logic of fostering
politically valued life while exposing to death the racialized, “alien Other.” Urrea captures in
vivid detail the dehumanizing logic of the biopolitical state wherein human life is distilled and
reduced beyond name. Rendered into a state of existence “beyond rational thought,” space and
time evaporate under an unrelenting sun, the “star weapon” deployed in the silent war against the
migrant border crosser. If nature is said to kill indiscriminately, then we must consider the ways
in which nature is also put into the service of state surveillance and security, that is, the way in
which it constitutes a defense system and therefore a politically discriminate killing machine.
Urrea’s use of indirect personification and vivid setting reanimates an ostensibly detached, a-
political, and de-historicized terrain into a selectively and discriminately political apparatus:
“The plants are noxious and spiked. Saguaros, nopales, the fiendish chollas. Each long cholla
spike has a small barb, and they hook into the skin, and they catch in elbow creases and hook
forearm and biceps together. Even the green mesquite trees have long thorns set just at eye
level.”[4] The passage begins descriptively in which flora and fauna transmogrify into
threatening desert sentinels, that is to say, Urrea reanimates the saguaros, nopales, and chollas
into fiendish and malevolent sentries strategically stationed along a wide and imposing desert
moat. Moreover, the chollas’ small, but menacing “barb” invokes images of barbed wire fences
scattered across the desert floor in which nature, appropriated and thus reconfigured into border
enforcement technology, works in the service of an expanding and elastic militarized border
zone. Like the conditions of seizure and injury that characterize militarized border enforcement
and im/migrant policing, nature here disciplines and inflicts its cruel and (un)usual punishment in
the service of the US nation-state.
In re-counting the harrowing trek across the hostile desert and mountain landscape, Urrea
links the rise of militarized border enforcement to that of the history of conquest in the border
region. Specifically, Urrea’s use of vivid setting recasts this hostile desert landscape as the very
space of U.S. imperialism and expansionism as U.S. militarized border enforcement represents
an ongoing imperial conquest characterized by an impulse to expand south even as it establishes
a vast defensive moat to repel migrant “Others,” thus assuring an expanding influence in the
South while securitizing the sacred “motherland” from unwanted northbound migrants. Urrea’s
use of vivid setting, particularly the way in which he portrays the “ruins” of U.S. militarism,
echoes previous conquest and expansionist practices, including the U.S. war against Mexico
(1846-1848), the Pershing Expedition into Mexico (1916-1917), U.S. political and “quiet”
military interventionism in Central American under the Reagan Administration, to more
contemporary manifestations of U.S. American hegemony exercised through a broad and
complex system of political economic influence and interventionism throughout Latin America.
Note Urrea’s representation of nature as a governing technology against the migrant “Other,”
particularly the way in which he situates that technology within the history of U.S. military
expansionism: “They came down out of the screaming sun and broke onto the rough plains of the
Cabeza Prieta wilderness, at the south end of the United States Air Force’s Barry Goldwater
bombing range, where the sun commenced its burning.”[5] Urrea symbolically links the Air
Force bombing range to contemporary solar bombardments of border crossers and, thus, to the
systematic targeting of racialized bodies who offer witness to a history of US military
expansionism and conquest. On the ghostly presence of militarized hardware positioned along
the Devil’s Highway, Urrea writes, “A volcanic cone called Raven’s Butte that was dark, as if a
rain cloud were hovering over it. It looked as if you could find relief on its perpetually shadowy
flanks, but that too was an illusion. Abandoned army tanks, preserved forever in the dry heat,
stood in their path, a ghostly arrangement that must have seemed like another bad dream.”[6]
Images of abandoned military vehicles, bombing ranges, and inhospitable terrain, depicts a
disquieting, even haunting, picture of a hostile and terrorizing killing field garrisoned by the
specters of war. Notably, militarized border enforcement emerges out of the context of
expansionism, conquest, and racial terror, thereby offering readers a genealogy of contemporary
US border enforcement statecraft. Urrea continues,
Think of the border struggle as an extension of the Indian Wars, the cavalry now
chasing new Apaches and Comanches. Much of the human hunting that goes on
along the border happens on Cocopah, Papago, Pima, Apache, and Yaqui lands
[…] Tohono O’Odham people, for example, regularly submit complaints of
harassment by Tuscon sector. A truckload of Indians looks like a truckload of
Mexican to the cavalry.[7]
Though Urrea depicts border enforcement practice to what historian Timothy Dunn identifies as
“low-intensity conflict,” “The Rules of the Game” draws attention to a history of unremitting
state surveillance and discipline of racialized peoples at the margins of the nation state.[8] The
biopolitical program of fostering life finds its ghastly corollary played out at the margins of the
state where cavalry charges and sorties against indigenous and racialized peoples not only
registers the legacies of imperial conquest but an ongoing necropolitical (b)order of power
sanctioned in the name of national defense and racial purity.
“Necro-elasticity: Racial Governance Comes Stays Home”
As the negative referent to Foucault’s biopolitics, that is, the fostering of life in the context of
the optimization of population control, necropolitics becomes a useful lens through which to
understand the operations of immigration policy and anti-immigrant ideology. As a discrete
neoliberal technology of governing that directs and therefore dictates who must live and who
may die, the bio-necropolitical order of power figures prominently in the calculus of border
enforcement and immigrant policing to such a degree that race and nation come to operate, as
Mbembe puts it, “on the basis of a split between the living and the dead [insofar as] such a power
defines itself in relation to a biological field”[9], that is to say, within the nation-state operations
of fostering and protecting life.
In the context of border enforcement and immigrant policing, racism “is a far more subtle
permutation of the state of exception that occurs in the mundane, daily evaluation of racialized,
normative citizenship, as well as being subject to militarized forms of governance.”[10] The
concept of “exceptionality” registers the diffused forms of racial governance in which
im/migrant bodies are susceptible to intense surveillance exhibited not only through militarized
border enforcement but also through anti-immigrant paramilitary vigilantism.[11] Im/migrant
policing, particularly within spaces seemingly far removed from the international border,
emerges as a flexible form of necropolitical governing through which the exposure to harm, even
death, always already inscribes upon the racialized “other” a condition of exceptionality.
Moreover, this form of racial governance would appear to normalize the surveillance, discipline,
and punishment of im/migrant bodies across space, thereby reproducing a form of socio-political
innocence (if not a sense of patriotic heroism) for agents, participants, and supporters of such
governance, thus establishing a sense of impunity. Given that the border, and therefore the injury
and terror associated with border crossing, cannot be so easily reduced to a fixed location or
geography, the inscription of exceptionality upon the im/migrant body allows us to see how
undocumented migrants and racialized citizens continue to face border enforcement violence
deep within the territorial U.S.
In one of the most extraordinary fictional representations of precarity, Helena Maria
Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Cafe” imaginatively illustrates what Rosas identifies as the plasticity
of exceptionality. Specifically, “The Cariboo Cafe” portrays through the eyes of an immigrant
child, Sonya, the seemingly always present danger of enforcement, seizure, and detention of
racialized bodies within U.S. urban spaces. It is in this specific context that Viramontes
figuratively represents the necropolitical expansion (and contraction) of im/migrant targeting
within the urban “killing fields” of the U.S. interior.
Near the beginning of the story, our young female protagonist, Sonya, misplaces her
apartment key, which she considers to be her “guardian saint” amid the commotion and chaos of
the big city. While charged with caring for Macky, presumably her younger brother or close
relative, Sonya decides to pay Mrs. Avila, a trusted family friend, a visit until she and Macky are
able to return home. However, during their walk to Mrs. Avila’s house the narrative tone abruptly
changes from childhood innocence and playfulness to that of anxiety, terror, and, eventually,
escape and survival. While walking the streets of the city at twilight, uncertain as to how to reach
Mrs. Avila’s house, Sonya notices Raoul’s father at a nearby tienda and contemplates asking him
for directions. Yet, before resolving to ask Raoul’s father, police sirens and flashing lights
unsettle Sonya and Macky. Startled by the clamor of “sirens flash[ing] in their faces,” Sonya
recalls her father’s warning how the “Polie are men in black who get kids and send them back to
Tijuana.”[12] More than simply the “alien” Others of an “illegal” trespass, Sonya is instructed to
run away from the Polie because, as her father puts it, “they hate you.”[13]
Through the initial shock of the sound of flashing sirens, Viramontes figuratively transforms
this urban space into a precarious border enforcement zone. At this particular juncture of the
story, Viramontes’ rendering of racial governance offers a figurative (yet seemingly literal)
representation of a perilous border crossing scene. Note how Sonya and Macky’s world
transforms into a treacherous and terrifying border crossing: “They finally crossed the street at a
cautious pace, the colors of the street lights brighter as darkness descended . . . Maybe she could
ask Raoul’s Popi where Mrs. Avila lived, but before she could think it all out, sirens flashed in
their faces and she shielded her eyes to see the polie.”[14] The narrative description of these two
young children’s “escape” from “La Migra” disturbingly re-enacts the anxiety and perils of
unauthorized border crossing. This skillfully crafted narrative reconfigures the terror and
anxieties of living under what we have been referring to as necro elasticity, what we might also
refer to as the plasticity of exceptionality. It is noteworthy to mention that the children’s legal
status is never established. The implication of this omission is extremely important as it gestures
to the inextricable relation between border enforcement and anti-immigrant ideology. Moreover,
it suggests that the rationalities supporting the apprehension, detention, and targeting of migrant
bodies are underwritten by a semiotics of illegality.
The semiotics of illegality constitutes a necropolitical discursive technology that makes
possible the internalization of criminality depicted in the psychological state of the children.
Viramontes writes,
[Sonya] grabs Macky by the sleeve and they crawl under a table of bargain
cassettes […] “Ssssh. Mi’jo, when I say run, you run, okay?” She waited for the
tires to turn out, and as the black and white drove off she whispered “Now,” and
they scurried out from under the table and ran across the street, oblivious to the
horns […] Macky stumbled and she continued to drag him until his crying, his
untied sneakers, and this raspy breathing finally forced her to stop […] Her mouth
was parched as she swallowed to rid herself of the metallic taste of fear. The
shadows stalked them, hovering like nightmares.[15]
While neither a “raid” nor a “border crossing” scene per se, Viramontes’ graphic depiction of
flight and escape represents the physical and psychological terror and trauma of treacherous
border crossings and INS/ICE raids. Moreover, Viramontes offers an emotionally provocative
account of migrant escape from the “hunt” of what Peter Andreas refers to as the perilous
“border games” of U.S border enforcement statecraft.[16]
Through the effective use of visual imagery and diction, Viramontes’ portrayal of flight and
escape momentarily disrupts the spatial specificity of militarized border enforcement, a form of
governance often associated with international border policing. These two young children do not
simply hide or move inconspicuously away from police detection, but rather stealthily crawl
under a table of unwanted, discarded tapes that offers, ironically, temporary refuge from capture
and detention. While taking refuge under a table of bargain cassettes, that is, figuratively in the
foliage of urban growth, Sonya awaits patiently for a chance to scurry out from under the table
and make a run “from the border,” risking both their lives by having to navigate across a busy
city street. Paradoxically, their “escape from the border,” under Viramontes’ skillful hand, leads
our young protagonists towards a seemingly vanishing horizon with no refuge or sanctuary in
sight. Ultimately, their escape from the Polie eventually returns them “back to the border,” and
thus within the gaze of an incessant surveying and disciplinary state apparatus. This zone of
indistinction, represents the extent to which urbanized low intensity conflict operates as a mobile
and flexible diffused form of racial governance at both the margins of and within the U.S. nation-
state.
And while not specific to Sonya and Macky, I think we must also consider how and why
immigrant labor, especially unauthorized labor, remains politically and economically important
for labor market demands, especially for the exigencies of capitalist production and surplus.
Simply put, this death producing power appears to impede access to flexible labor essential to
capital accumulation. If indeed immigrant labor, especially undocumented labor, satisfies labor
market demand, then it stands to reason that such labor must not be exterminated, but rather
preserved, however exposed to harm. Again, Rosas is instructive when he writes,
Foucault’s conceptualization of racism is one of extermination or elimination that aims to
purify the social body. This contrasts with a racism of oppression or exploitation that
hierarchically partitions society . . . Racism is a far more subtle permutation of the state
of exception that occurs in the mundane, daily evaluation of racialized, normative
citizenship, as well as being subject to militarized forms of governance, where thousands
of people are channeled into the “killing deserts”.[17]
Oppression and exploitation, coupled with illegality, then, functions to produce and maintain
flexible, docile labor while subjecting such labor to deplorable and inhumane living conditions.
This process exhibits what I call an asymptotic effect, whereby the dialectics of the production of
precarious life and the preservation of exploitable labor reproduce a necropolitical field of power
across the territorial U.S. Permutations of immigrant exceptionality, then, capture both the most
conspicuous and less obvious, informal forms of racial governance and necropower. It is in this
context that we now look at Alejandro González Iñárritu’s critically acclaimed film, Babel
(2006).
“Babel: Communication Breakdown, Defiled Subjectivity”
In an early scene from the film, the camera focuses on two adolescent Moroccan boys herding
livestock along a mountain range. While watching the livestock and enduring what seems like
hours of boredom and tedium, the boys decide to test the accuracy and range of their newly
purchased rifle. As they take shots at the surrounding area from a mountaintop, they accidently
hit a tour bus loaded with U.S. tourists. The bullet manages to find its way into the shoulder of a
white, upper-middle class American woman (Susan Jones played by Kate Blanchete). Panic
immediately ensues as the woman’s husband (Richard Jones played by Brad Pitt) tends to her
injury while the rest of the passengers scuffle away from the windows and scream at the bus
driver to move the bus out of this perceived terrorist space. As the two children learn of this
unfortunate mishap, they quickly flee the “scene of the crime” and race down the mountaintop
away from any watchful eye in the area. Just as the children scurry down the mountaintop, the
scene skillfully transitions into the very home of the two aforementioned adults on board the bus.
In this scene, we encounter a white, upper-middle class suburban household in San Diego,
California, where the children of the couple on board the bus in Morocco are in the care of
Amelia, an affectionate and devoted undocumented housekeeper who, we may assume from
latter scenes from the film, resides in Tijuana, Mexico.
The construction of spaces of criminality and terrorism constitutes one of the more important
compositional elements of this film. The skillful segue from the Moroccan boys running down
from the mountaintop to the Anglo-American children running around in their suburban living
room in San Diego complicates normative conceptions of such spaces and as well as those of its
occupants. The accidental shooting of an American tourist in Morocco and Amelia’s
unauthorized presence in the U.S. both complicate normative conceptions of criminality and
illegality. Later in the film, we learn that U.S. and Western governmental and media discourse
frame the accident as a deliberate terrorist act, which initiates a region- wide “manhunt” for the
“terrorists” responsible for the shooting. Sadly, the search for the “terrorists” results in the tragic
death of a Moroccan boy by local police enforcement agents acting under the false pretense of
terrorism constructed by the U.S. State Department and U.S. and European mainstream media.
However, what we must also consider is how the two boys’ accidental shooting gets framed
into criminality much like Amelia’s undocumented status eventually leads her to deportation to
Tijuana (especially given that she has established permanent residency and work in the U.S. for
over fifteen years). Moreover, both related scenes point to how criminality gets constructed in
what we may take to be spaces of everyday life. The San Diego suburban home and the
Moroccan mountaintop signify spaces of criminality not because criminal activity occupy such
spaces, but rather because the way in which these “actors” and their activity have been framed
through fear, anxiety, and suspicion (of the “Other”) that construct and legitimize their
criminality. In both cases, spaces of death and displacement mark the scenes of the crime, that is
to say, a child is shot to death for his supposed terrorist activity, and an unauthorized caretaker is
deported and left on the streets of Tijuana on account of her unflinching care and love for “her
children.” Throughout much of the film, the ways in which categories, labels, and signifiers
create trauma, violence, and misunderstanding symbolically demonstrate the potentially
dangerous relationship between discourse (and its discursive liminalities) and death.
Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo’s examination of the intersections of security and economy at the
US-Mexico border reveals the more unsettling aspects of neoliberalism’s defense of the
politically and economically powerful.[18] This constant state of insecurity and uncertainty
generates and maintains an exceptional state of human existence. As Jane Juffers points out,
“When the US-Mexico border becomes a normalized state of exception, the U.S. government
finds it easier to expand the very contours of the border, again in the name of security.”[19] This
state of exception or exceptionality of the borderland represents what Manzanas Calvo describes
as a paradoxical double desire on part of the U.S.: “The desire for a sealed border that instills
confidence in national definition and national identify is simultaneous to the desire for a cheap
and submissive workforce.”[20] On the transfiguration of indocumentados into criminals, or,
more generally, racialized labor into criminality, border crossing and the struggle for survival in
the U.S. represent what Arturo Arias calls the “defilement of subjectivity.” This subjective
transfiguration re-casts many labor-seeking migrants into dangerous and delinquent bodies
whereby their subjectivity confronts hostile processes of otherization resulting in the reification
of the im/migrant within the popular political imaginary. As Manzanas Calvo illustrates, “As the
migrants cross the border they go through what Mary Pat Brady calls an ‘abjection machine’ that
metamorphoses them into something else, into ‘aliens,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘wetbacks,’ […] and renders
them ‘unintelligible’ (and unintelligent), ontologically impossible, outside the real and the
human.”[21]
If in fact the elasticity of the border migrates with the “undocumented body,” then it would
appear that the migrant material and discursive status remains perpetually liminal. We should
note, however, that a large number of authorized or legal (im)migrants from Mexico, Central and
South America living in the U.S. do not experience the same kinds of exceptionality and
liminality that most undocumentados experience. Clearly, class status, (dual) citizenship, race,
and gender often determine to a large degree one’s ability to traverse the selectively porous
borders across the Americas. At any rate, attention to the production of such liminalities may
prove useful when analyzing cultural texts by considering the micro- and macro-political
dimensions of subject formation, i.e., how subjects get formed, positioned, and represented.
Analysis at the level of the body and personhood may allow us to better understand how the
materialist practices of oppression and discursive practices of criminality constitute the
defilement or erasure of im/migrant subjectivity.
“Excess of Presence: Concluding Remarks”
In “The Society of Enmity,” Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, Achille
Mbembe, examines contemporary social and political movements against what he refers to as the
so-called “bad objects” of necropolitical modernity, that is, from the standpoint of Western
colonial and imperial power, ““the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the refugee,
the intruder, to mention only a few.”[22] According to Mbembe, this “fixation point” (i.e., the
violation and eventual purge of the “bad object”) constitutes an ongoing colonial and imperial
desire, or more precisely, “the desire for an enemy.”[23] However, what exactly is this “desire
for an object” through which to reproduce colonial and imperial dominion and dominance across
great swaths of land? It is the desire for separation, enclosure, and condensation. It is a fantasy
and a mythology of repossession—largely through capitalist enclosure and dispossession—also
made possible through various fantasies and policies of extermination.
And yet, these fantasies and policies of extermination stand in relation to that seemingly
overwhelming presence of the “bad object,” an object that functions simultaneously as the
necessary threat to the nation-state while establishing the nation-state’s necropolitical raison
d’être. We are of course speaking about “excess of presence,” that is, the ostensibly excessive
presence of the “bad object” out which the construction of walls, towers, and other enforcement
structures spring from the ground. As Mbembe reminds us, “A separation wall is supposed to
resolve a problem of excess of presence, the very presence that some see as the origin of
situations of unbearable suffering.”[24] These situations, however, demand relief, deliverance,
perhaps some final resolution to rid the colonial/imperial regime (and attendant body politic) of
this unsufferable burden. And to rid itself of this unbearable burden and suffering “henceforth
depends on breaking with that excess presence, whose absence (or indeed disappearance pure
and simple) will by no means be felt as a loss.”[25]
As the above texts illustrate to varying degrees, the existence and function of the wall, though
a key symbolic figure of that desire, is also accompanied by the existence of the “patrol,” the
“sentinel,” and the “agent” who represent the mobility, elasticity, and fungibility of that wall,
which is to say, of that will and desire. “In a number of cases,” writes Mbembe, “a wall is
enough to express such desire. Several sorts of wall exist, and not all fulfill the same
functions.”[26] Though they do not fulfill the same functions, they would seem to relate to the
same overarching or master desire to seize and detain the “bad object” of the necropolitical
imaginary. “Alongside the walls,” Mbembe informs us, “other security structures are emerging:
checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, all manner of demarcations that in many cases
have no other function than to intensify the enclaving of entire communities.”[27] At the risk of
repeating, the texts discussed above also shed light on the genealogy of these emerging
enforcement and security structures, which to many may appear only in the present, that is,
without a history. If anything, these texts reel against the degree to which the historical
conditions of possibility underwriting migration and its securitization are lost or elided within the
greater U.S. public consciousness and (necro)political imaginary.
Notes:
[1] Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway. New York: Little, Brown, and Company,
2004.
[2] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998. Drawing from Agamben’s concept of homo
sacer (human life that cannot be sacrificed but killed with impunity, i.e., human life divested of
political value and legal protection), the camp or “the structure in which the state of exception . .
. is realized normally” emerges as the site of the neoliberal camp, which I refer to elsewhere as
necroliberalism, a structure or form of social organization rendered commonsensical or normal,
if not operational in absentia (170).
[3] “The Rules of the Game,” The Devil’s Highway, pp. 3-4.
[4] ibid, p. 6
[5] ibid, p. 5
[6] ibid, p. 5 (emphases added)
[7] ibid, p. 38
[8] Dunn, Timothy J. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity
Conflict Doctrine Comes Home. University of Texas Press, 1996.
[9] Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003), p. 17.
[10] Rosas, Gilberto. “Diffused Exceptionality and ‘Immigrant’ Social Struggles during the
‘War on Terror.’” Cultural Dynamics 18.3 (2006), p. 339.
[11] On the extra-territorial jurisdiction of U.S. border enforcement and im/migrant policing, see
Matthew Coleman, “Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico-U.S. Border.” Antipode 39.1
(2007): 54-76; “A Geopolitics of Engagement: Neoliberalism, the War on Terrorism, and the
Reconfiguration of US Immigration Enforcement.” Geopolitics 12 (2007): 607-634.
[12] Viramontes, Helena María. “The Cariboo Cafe.” The Moths and Other Stories.
Houston: Arte Público Press,1995, p. 67.
[13] ibid, p. 67.
[14] ibid, p. 67.
[15] ibid, pp. 67-68.
[16] Andreas, Peter. Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. Cornell University Press,
2000.
[17] “Diffused Exceptionality and ‘Immigrant’ Social Struggles during the ‘War on Terror.’”
Cultural Dynamics 18.3 (2006), p. 339.
[18] Manzanas Calvo, Ana Maria. “Contested Passages: Migrants Crossing the Rio Grande
and Mediterranean Sea.” The Last Frontier: The Contemporary Configuration of
the U.S.-Mexico Border. The South Atlantic Quarterly 105.4 (Fall 2006): 759-775.
[19] Juffer, Jane. “Introduction.” The Last Frontier: The Contemporary Configuration of the
U.S.-Mexico Border. The South Atlantic Quarterly 105.4 (Fall 2006), p. 677.
[20] “Contested Passages: Migrants Crossing the Rio Grande and Mediterranean Sea,” p. 761.
[21] ibid, p. 765.
[22] Mbembe, Achille. “The Society of Enmity.” Necropolitics, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Duke University Press, 2019, p. 43.
[23] ibid, p. 43.
[24] ibid, p. 43.
[25] ibid, p. 43.
[26] ibid, p. 43.
[27] ibid, p. 43.
Edward Avila received his doctorate in Literatures in English and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego. As Associate Professor of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato, Avila specializes in Chicana/x/o and Latina/x/o Literature and Film and Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. His research takes an interdisciplinary approach that bridges literary studies with recent theoretical works on neoliberal governmentality, bio- and necro-politics, Marxist theory, and transnational Latina feminism. Avila has published articles through the Forum for Inter-American Research, The Southwest Council of Latin American Studies (SCOLAS), Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, and The Dreaming Machine: Writings and Visual Arts from the World. He is currently working on a book project titled In Absentia: Necro-Ecologies, Multi-temporalities, and Resistance in Latina/o/x Literature and Film.
