Imperial Formations and US Land Ports of Entry

• In Event: The American Empire’s Favorite Line: Ports of Entry and Everyday Violence at the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

While the US-Mexico borderlands are at the margin of the geopolitical US empire, socio-political and economic processes in this region have been at the center of the United States’ broader imperial transformations, ambitions, and anxieties. For example, at ports of entry along the Southern divide with Mexico, increased militarization, surveillance technologies, and the broad discretionary powers of CBP officers have signaled or alluded to the waning imperial dominance of the United States decades before the present conjuncture. In this paper, I grapple with the question: “How do we sense empire(s) in everyday life?” to foreground the pernicious forms of violence that may proliferate at the limitrophes of empire. Drawing on Stoler’s (2008) theorization of “imperial formations,” I argue that American studies and borderlands scholars must pay keen attention to imperial violences that may not meet the threshold of a catastrophic or “eruptive” and which may emanate from places, institutions, and relations not necessarily perceived as imperial in everyday life. I use the case of Latinx transborder commuters —San Diego-Tijuana residents who commute across the United States-Mexico border frequently—to elucidate the imbrication of borderlands, ports of entry, and imperial formations and the obfuscation of this relationship in everyday life. To do so, I propose the concept of “temporal sequestration” to capture how sudden delays and indeterminate waiting periods at a US port of entry (USPOE) often prevent or hinder Latinx transborder commuters’ futurities, an imperial form of violence not always legible as such. Indeed, my interlocutors view unpredictable delays and waiting as an irremediable issue but do not necessarily see this social ruination of their futures, desires, and daily schedules as an ongoing effect of an imperial formation. Instead, temporal sequestration becomes an inevitable and ordinary aspect of their everyday lives, which they recognize but cannot fully mitigate or control. Building on Berlant (2011), I juxtapose my interlocutors’ eventful and episodic encounters with CBP officers during immigration inspection. I argue that the banality of immigration inspection simultaneously upholds and obfuscates the root cause of temporal sequestration: US empire. Though this encounter may become physically violent due to CBP officers’ abusive or harassing behaviors, I further argue that the recursiveness of immigration inspection becomes a pernicious form of imperial violence, contributing to my interlocutors’ experience of temporal sequestration. I call on scholars to consider the differential temporalities of imperial formations and transformations, including those that are “eruptive” or slow, drawn out, elastic, and imperceptible but violent.

Author

• Miguel A. Avalos, Kenyon College