Sensing Infrastructure: Perception, Politics, and Media of the US-Mexico Border

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

In a period of late-stage American Empire, infrastructures intended for public use or the public good are decaying or falling apart. Yet, those systems that dispossess, surveil, or control continue to grow. In this panel, we turn to the infrastructures used to create and maintain the United States-Mexico border as both a geopolitical boundary and a media system. Since the formal development of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, we have witnessed heightened militarization and increased funding. From the concertina wire, bollard-style fencing, surveillance towers, and expanded car lanes at ports of entry to the makeshift bordering practices like border buoys in the Rio Grande or the use of shipping containers in the Sonoran desert, borders have become increasingly “spectacular,” as Wendy Brown has argued.

This panel demonstrates how the US-Mexico border is a site where the effects of the American empire are both enacted and felt. Our papers consider what it means to sense the imperial infrastructures at work through various media forms. These media allow us to sense the border’s infrastructures and attune us to what can sometimes sit below perception. How do we see, smell, touch, or interface with the border’s infrastructures? But also, how do security infrastructures sense? How do they see? Touch? Smell? Infrastructures are both technical and conceptual objects. They become a part of people’s daily lives, whether they are acknowledged or understood. As scholars, artists, and activists who work at the intersections of critical border studies, new media studies, performance studies, and environmental studies, we argue that the US-Mexico border is a site of invasive infrastructures that dictate the bounds of a nation, who gains entry, and who is positioned as external.

Together, we examine how the border’s infrastructures cut across different senses and scales. Corporeally, they thwart the movements of people through dangerous and violent policies that criminalize and endanger the lives of border crossers. Nationally, they attempt to cohere imaginaries around belonging. Globally, they enable the flow of capital and fortify imperialist agendas. We look to ephemeral forms, visual media, and activist movements: trading cards used by the Border Patrol to glorify the work of agents and teams of canines, aerial photographs of detention centers, and sky-typed messages meant to enact abolitionist protest. Ultimately, we trace the means through which border infrastructures are materially constituted and how they imbue and are imbued with social meaning. Considering the border and its mediation, infrastructurally, we offer a way to reframe what it means to sense empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Detention and the Limits of Vision in David Taylor’s COMPLEX - Ila Nicole Sheren, Washington University In St Louis

• Border Dogs: Trading Cards and the War on Drugs - Alyssa Quintanilla, College of William and Mary

• Inscriptive Intimacies: Atmospheric Media and the Scales of Incarceration - Benjamin Williams, Marshall University

Chair

• Alyssa Quintanilla, College of William and Mary

Comment

• Camilla Fojas, Arizona State University-Tempe

Biographical Information

Ila N. Sheren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology in Washington University in St. Louis. She also serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in American Culture Studies. She is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (2015) and Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins (2023). Ila is a co-founder of the Moving Stories project that collects narratives of migration in the St. Louis community and can be found at http://movingstories.art

Alyssa Quintanilla (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. Her book project, Markers, Monuments, Memorials in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, centers on the performances and practices of mourning and the objects created to remember, acknowledge, and visualize the dead. She is also the creator of Vistas de la Frontera, a digital memorial for migrants who have died while crossing the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. Her work has been published in Lateral Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, and The Digital Review. She is the 2024-2025 David J. Weber Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies.

Benjamin Williams is completing his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His interdisciplinary and publicly engaged research and teaching bring together critical border, race and ethnic studies, and carceral studies to examine how writers and media makers throughout the Americas reshape discourse around migration and the prison system. This research has been published or is forthcoming with Cultural Critique, ASAP/Journal, Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Clues: A Journal of Detection, and JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Before beginning his PhD, he worked in the border city of El Paso as an English teacher and department chair, developing curriculum and training instructors. In addition, he is a public humanist who believes in coalitional projects and making scholarship accessible. He regularly collaborates with artists and scholars in the activist organization Migrantes Valientes and contributes to re:verb, a podcast about politics, culture, and language.

Camilla Fojas is Foundation Professor and Director of the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research explores mediated cultures of the Americas and the Pacific through the axes of empire, security, and race with a focus on the U.S.-Mexico border within the context of the expanding borders of the United States. Her recent books include Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier (NYU Press, 2021), Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (Illinois, 2017), and Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (UT Press, 2014).