Predator Eyes: Drones and Imperial Regenerations along the U.S.-Mexico Border

• In Event: Seeing through New Eyes: Science, Truth and Technologies of Visualization - I

Abstract

“Predator Eyes” tackles drone operations along the U.S.-Mexico border and the ways they contribute to the regeneration of U.S. imperial formations. Government officials have thought that drones offer them an advantage of “height of eye” against those they hunt. This advantage is understood as one of the strategic values of drone vision. The “height of eye” allowed CBP officials to act upon unauthorized border crossers hiding in remote areas. It also promised to solve the ongoing problem of making border crossings into a perceptible process—a signal instead of a noise. Yet such an advantage is what Donna Haraway calls the “unregulated gluttony” of technical vision. This is a vision historically marked by science’s linkages to empire, a vision committed to shielding the technological user from the messiness of their actions and from the material effects they have on the lives of others.

This paper examines archival materials from the federal government such as congressional and departmental reports as well as surveillance footage to answer how drone vision is constructed, understood, and mobilized on the U.S.-Mexico border. It does so as a way to complicate the existing drone literature which tends to place most operations outside of the U.S. Hence, the paper studies how U.S. imperial formations are felt closer to home, leading to the deaths of hundreds of border crossers and the perpetuation of so-called detention centers—a branch of the prison-industrial complex.

Author

• Iván Chaar-López, Cornell University, Department of S&TS