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

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel interrogates the imperial structures that uphold, define, and shape the US-Mexico border and borderlands. While the nation recently debated the 2024 US presidential election through the symbolic figure of the border, this panel grounds our scholarly understanding of the geopolitical line in the everyday, lived experience of crossing the US-Mexico border at a pedestrian or vehicular port of entry. In doing so, the panelists collectively map the densely fraught human landscape produced by the violent socio-political structures that maintain the border’s architecture of power and the resulting oppressive bureaucratic operations of ports of entry in daily life. Therefore, our panel examines the legacies–that is, the ongoing production and reproduction–of imperial violence right where the ocean waves crash against the sand: at the porous edges and in the socially muddled spaces that form the American empire’s gates.
By paying close attention to the epistemologies, ideologies, and affective atmospheres governing the border, this panel posits that the American empire’s pernicious violence manifests at ports of entry through a kind of erasure. This erasure obscures how its imperial violence—the often invisible yet palpable force of the state—manifests symbolically (through epistemic and social harm) and physically (through bodily, emotional, and psychological trauma).
As such, Miguel A. Avalos draws our attention to the “drawn out, elastic, and imperceptible but violent,” temporalities of imperial formation by examining the repetitive, banal, and everyday quality of immigration inspections. Asking, “How do we sense empire(s) in everyday life?”, Avalos develops the concept of temporal sequestration to render visible the time and “possible futures” that border regimes extract from students, workers, and the many others whose livelihoods depend on daily border crossings.
Turning our gaze towards border-crossing youth, Estefania Castañeda reinterprets “Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD)”– the dominant border policing strategy of the last thirty years, first developed by the Border Patrol in the 1990s. PTD was designed to push the main corridors of undocumented migration away from urban centers, and therefore the public eye, towards more remote and perilous areas–the deserts, mountains, and rivers. Understanding PTD as 'anticipatory threat and actual coercion', Castañeda argues, reveals the oppressive structures controlling youth mobility. In her analysis, she examines how PTD prevents her interlocutors from claiming rights or denouncing mistreatment by authorities on both sides of the border, while attending to the bodily experience that shape these interactions.
Lastly, Aleshia Barajas asks us to consider the epistemological impositions–that is, the conceptual frameworks–that sustain, uphold, and craft the empire’s violent border cartography. Instead of asking “Why do we have a border crisis?” or “How can we solve the border crisis?” Barajas examines the epistemological frameworks that produce such questions. She argues that our scholarly and popular understandings of the border are already, always, pre-filtered through the historical worldviews of state agencies tasked with administering it. These agencies have established foundations for understanding the border primarily through binary categories of documented and undocumented status and through the lens of enforcement and control.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Imperial Formations and US Land Ports of Entry - Miguel A. Avalos, Kenyon College

• Border Embodiment: Gender, Race, and Biopolitics - Estefania Castaneda Perez

• The Border We Cannot Think Beyond: Institutional Logic and the US-Mexico Border - Aleshia Barajas, Indiana University, Bloomington

Chair

• Olga Rodriguez-Ulloa, Indiana University

Comment

• Ana Celia Zentella

Biographical Information

Miguel A. Avalos (he/they) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Miguel’s dissertation unpacks border regimes’ temporal violence by examining Latinx transborder commuters’ experiences navigating US land ports of entry in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. Moreover, he explores their home-making practices and understandings of home in a region often maligned by US political discourse. His research interests include borders and borderlands, racialized affect and emotion, temporality, and minoritized racialization.
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California Los Angeles, where she was a National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation predoctoral fellow. Her research investigates how Latinx communities experience the law through policing and surveillance systems, and the consequences of these experiences on their racialization, well-being, and legal consciousness. In particular, she focuses on the perspectives of Latinx transborder commuters, who are U.S. citizens and non-citizens that reside in Mexican border cities but regularly cross the border to the U.S. for work, education, or commerce. As a Transfronteriza, her research and educational journey is deeply inspired by her lifelong border-crossing experiences. Her work has been published in International Migration Review, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and in numerous blogs including NACLA and the NYU Latinx Project Intervenxions Blog.
Dr. Barajas studies alternative ways of understanding the US-Mexico border through ethnographic research at ports of entry. She teaches American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.