Edward Avila’s essay on the representation of practices of surveillance and repression at the border in Latine/a Literature and film is found the Non fiction section of this issue. Cover image: Photo of painting by Hervé di Rosa, at Mucem, Marseilles exhibit.
Since at least the onset of the Cold War, cultural producers in Latin America and the United
States have generated a number of poignant and thought-provoking narratives related to both
internal and outward migrations across the Americas, especially regarding forced emigration and
the complexities and limits of resettlement in the United States. Additionally, contemporary
cultural texts focusing on neoliberal enclosures and dispossession directly related to capitalist
conquest, including militarized border enforcement, offer key insights into migrant surveillance
and punishment. Moreover, an impressive body of critical essays and monographs analyzing the
political, economic, and social dimensions of border enforcement, immigrant policing, and
forced migration also suggest 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 or political imaginary.
To counter this elision and forgetfulness, we would do well to consider Gilberto Rosas’
concept of “policeability,” which provides a useful lens through which to make sense of the
ghastly relationship between militarized border enforcement and racialized surveillance and
punishment occurring along the U.S. and Mexico border(lands). As Rosas reminds us, border
enforcement statecraft and immigrant policing constitute what Michel Foucault refers to as
“silent wars,” which are embedded in contemporary social institutions that “continuously
reinstate relations of conquest.”[1] Drawing from Foucault, Rosas underscores the often-
concealed dimensions of ongoing coloniality within the territorial U.S., a history of colonialism
that is often erased or elided under the auspices of American Exceptionalism. Furthermore, the
logics of NAFTA-era militarized border enforcement implemented through state-sanctioned
policies like Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line play a key role in racial
governance in which racialized bodies are exposed to injury, harm, and death. For example, by
focusing surveillance and detainment resources toward closing off key crossing points along the
US-Mexico border region, migrants are forced to traverse remote and inhospitable terrain. This
particular border enforcement policy, colloquially known as “prevention through deterrence,”
channels or funnels migrants through the perilous and hazardous Sonoran Desert, the so-called
“natural environments” of Northern Mexico and the US Southwest. Contemporary US
militarized border enforcement at both the margins and the interior of the state illustrates the
extent to which the biopolitical state relies upon a necropolitical rationale toward achieving a
tenuous, yet certainly racist, objective of biological and cultural “purity” under the aegis of US
national or homeland security.
Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropower also offers a valuable framework toward
understanding the dehumanizing rationalities of im/migrant policing and border enforcement
executed across the U.S.-Mexico border. Conceptualized as the negative, though certainly
dialectical, referent to Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, necropolitics in this specific
context points to the ways in which anti-immigrant ideology articulates who may live and who
must die. Such logic illustrates how the production of precarity, especially in the form of
“exposure to death,” constitutes a key aspect of political abandonment, as the power of the
“sword” (i.e., sovereignty) summons a politics of death toward achieving the optimizing of the
life of the population. Moreover, that race and racism underwrite this death producing power,
witnessed in the approximately 8,000 undocumented migrant deaths identified within the “killing
fields” of the U.S.-Mexico border region,[2] not only speaks of the violent mechanisms of
necropolitical governing but also to the calculus of biopower, where the power of the sword
accompanies the fostering of life. In other words, the division, yet contrapuntal relationship,
between politically valued life and precarious life registers a form of necropolitical
governmentality that “defines itself in relation to a biological field”[3], that is, power over life
itself. Thus, the fostering of politically valued life emerges from the depths of a sovereign power
that demarcates not only the expendable and the disposable of modernity but also produces the
expendable and disposable as constitutive exclusions from which the securitization of politically
relevant life is made possible.
While numerous fictional and scholarly texts offer imaginative depictions and theoretical
insights into the socio-historical specificities of the contemporary Mexico-U.S. borderlands,
Foucault’s and Mbembe’s theorizations of biopower nonetheless offer critical insights into the
dialectical operations of “fostering life” and concomitant injury of racialized, migrant bodies.
Moreover, this violent imbrication registers the degree to which the fostering of the good life is
intimately fused with the targeting (and attendant harassment) of im/migrant bodies, a governing
strategy that we know all too well today in the name of “the people” and national security. State
agencies and authorities such as the U.S. Mexican Border Patrol, Immigration Customs and
Enforcement (ICE), the National Guard, and local law enforcement agencies, in concert with
extra-state actors like the Minutemen, the American Border Patrol, Civilian Homeland Defense,
and the Arizona Highlands chapter of The Proud Boys constitute the more explicit forms of the
bio/necropolitical order. In adopting this analytic approach, we come to appreciate and
understand the ways in which Latin American and Latinx/a/o literature and film represent the
transmogrification of the im/migrant into the somatic and symbolic manifestation of biological
and cultural threat. [5] Moreover, such an approach focuses on the daily instantiations of
bio/necropolitical power that operate in the most seemingly mundane public and private spaces,
including home improvement store parking lots, shopping malls, city streets, manicured lawns
and gardens of both the middle-class and the wealthy, not to mention the most intimate of
affluent domestic spaces—the “home.”
In this context, state-sponsored and public forms of racial surveillance and discipline operate
in spaces typically outside the operations of international border enforcement. Under this elastic
form of border enforcement, so-called expedient and commonsensical policy both literally and
figuratively render those ostensibly non-political, non-militaristic spaces into the very spaces of
death (or exposure to death) in the service of national security and the fostering of politically
relevant life. Nature, for example, typically thought to kill in the most indiscriminate manner
takes on new political life, operating in the most politically discriminating manner.
In light of the theoretical points rehearsed above, “Excess of Presence” focuses on
Latinx/a/o and Latin American cultural representations that extend or reconfigure humanistic
thinking about the border, particularly in terms of the dialectical operations of the bio-
necropolitical order of power in the context of migration, border enforcement, and migrant
policing. In looking at Helena María Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985), Luis Alberto
Urrea’s journalist narrative, “The Rules of the Game” from The Devil’s Highway (2004), and
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s critically acclaimed film, Babel (2006), “Excess of Presence”
examines the discursive production and transmogrification of racialized subjects and
communities into the somatic and symbolic manifestation of biological and cultural threat to
hegemonic conceptions of national and cultural identity. If, as D. Robert DeChaine argues, “The
figure of the border animates the language of social relations [and] functions as a powerful site of
rhetorical invention,”[4] then the texts examined in “Excess of Presence” represent sites of
rhetorical contestation in which the intensification of militarized border enforcement and migrant
policing figures prominently in the ways in which the fostering of life is bound to and predicated
upon the exposure to death and the production of politically disinvested life. Moreover, the
aforementioned texts also challenge de-historicized perspectives and accounts of migration in
which the historical conditions of possibility underwriting migration and resettlement are often
elided or erased.
Notes:
[1] Rosas, Gilberto. “The Managed Violences of the Borderlands: Treacherous Geographies,
Policeability, and the Politics of Race.” Latino Studies 4.4 (2006): 401-418.
[2] “How many people die crossing the US-Mexico border?” USAFacts. Updated August 1, 2024.
According to the not-for-profit organization and website USA Facts, “The US-Mexico border
spans 1,951 miles. It cuts across the Sonoran Desert, which covers parts of Mexico, Arizona, and
California, the Chihuahuan Desert, which covers Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas, and the Rio
Grande River, which divides Texas and Mexico […] Since 1998, at least 8,000 undocumented
migrants have died attempting to cross the border from Mexico to the US. Their journey often
involves traveling through desert areas where there’s few sources of water, steep rocky terrain,
and temperatures reaching 118°F during the summer” (2024).
[3] Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003), p. 17.
[4] DeChaine, D. Robert. “Introduction: for Rhetorical Border Studies.” Border Rhetorics:
Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexican Frontier, edited by D. Robert DeChaine, University
of Alabama Press, 2012, p. 1.
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.
