The Mental Health Consequences of Continuous Crossings: Transborder Perspectives

• In Event: Immigrant Politics II

Abstract

How does violence at the Mexico-U.S. border impact transborder mental health and emotional well-being? Research on immigrant and Latinx mental health has extensively documented how experiencing racism, discrimination, and the fear of deportation lead to adverse mental health consequences, such as psychosocial stressors, for migrants and racialized communities in the U.S. (Gonzales et al. 2013; Vargas, Sanchez, and Juárez 2017). Relatively less research has documented the mental health and political implications of regularly navigating a highly militarized border. This article explores the relationship between mental health and crossing through land ports of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border. It seeks to unveil the emotional responses from transborder commuters toward border enforcement, including the most reported consequences, such as insomnia, stress, and anxiety. This article also investigates how transborder commuters respond to these mental health consequences, specifically their behavioral performances to navigate ports of entry without their emotions being noticed by CBP officers.

I draw from data collected through participant observations at the port of entry, original survey administered in Ciudad Juárez (n=637) and the Tijuana ports of entry (n=771), and (n=115) interviews I administered to transborder commuters from the Ciudad Juárez, Nogales, and Tijuana border regions. Transborder commuters are U.S. citizens and individuals with various forms of visas that reside in Mexico but regularly cross the Mexico-U.S. border for work, education, or commerce.

I map my findings using temporal themes to illustrate the commonly reported emotions triggered in each of these moments. Firstly, I find that emotions and health effects are triggered at different points of the transborder journey: 1) the night before crossing; 2) while waiting in line at the port of entry; 3) while interacting with CBP; and 4) after crossing the border. Secondly, I find that transborder commuters experience a complete loss of personal autonomy at the border due to unpredictable and aggressive border policing measures. Specifically, CBP officers target transborder commuters who exhibit behaviors of nervousness due to an erroneous perception that such emotions are indicative of suspicion and criminality. In response, transborder commuters engage in intentional performances of emotional suppression to counteract the effects of surveillance and border enforcement.

This article fills a gap in health, Latino, and migration politics literatures. It provides a novel approach to understand health implications experienced by Latino communities along the border from navigating militarized and policed space. Methodologically, this study also provides guidance for future work on the impacts of border enforcement using a multi-site, mixed-method approach. Finally, this article also presents theoretical contributions to studies on performativity, legal violence, and theories on normalization of violence.

The implications of the findings are that state repression becomes internalized through the numbing of emotions, which inhibits racialized communities along the border from recognizing their own suffering. In the case of emotional repression, the findings can elucidate the danger of border enforcement for human agency, particularly as emotions and reflexibility, which are essential to function as a human being (Burkitt 2012), are stigmatized through state violence and border control. These challenges have clear political implications because transborder commuters are coerced into consenting abusive policing practices, impacting their ability to express their dissent. Emotions are essential for building political consciousness and to contest acts of injustice. By silencing their own suffering, transborder commuters become vessels for the state to mold into complete submission to its authority. The findings can provide a lens to understand the mental health consequences experienced by racialized communities in parallel surveilled and criminalized context such as the surveillance of Middle Eastern communities at airports, Black and Brown neighborhoods, and the policing of immigrants in the interior of the U.S.

Author

• Estefania Castaneda Perez, UCLA