Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground 1517914299, 9781517914295

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BORDER TUNNELS

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BORDER

A Media Theory of the

TUNNELS

U.S.–­Mexico Underground

JUAN LLAMAS-­RODRIGUEZ

University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A portion of chapter 4 was published as “First-­Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–­Mexico Border,” Lateral 10, no. 2 (Fall 2021); original article published under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ NonCommercial 4.0 International License; copyright Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez. Copyright 2023 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1428-­8 (hc) ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1429-­5 (pb) A Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2023

Para mi mamá y papá

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CONTENTS Introduction: A Media Theory of the Border Tunnel 1 1. TV News and Spectacle 27 2. Reality TV and Performativity 67 3. Digital Animation and Plasticity 99 4. First-­Person Shooters and Racialization 129 5. Speculative Design and Sustainability 157 Conclusion: Media Theory from the Border Tunnel 189

Acknowledgments 195 Notes 199 Index 227

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INTRODUCTION A MEDIA THEORY OF THE BORDER TUNNEL

The April 24, 1991, episode of the television series Unsolved Mysteries features what could be considered one of the first, if not the first, media depictions of an underground tunnel at the U.S.–­Mexico border. The footage appears in a segment about Roberto Camarena, the man responsible for the day-­to-­day operations of the first recorded, fully functional trafficking tunnel, located between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. The host of Unsolved Mysteries, Robert Stack, introduces the Camarena story within the context of the U.S.-­backed “War on Drugs,” which was in full effect during 1991, and the segment re-­creates the construction and discovery of the tunnel through interview clips with people who worked with Camarena and with Border Patrol agents on the case. The narrative arc of the segment sketches a timeline of the construction of the tunnel leading to the climactic night when it was discovered, which the show presents play-­by-­play in re-­created scenes with professional actors. The segment then ends with a run-­through of the trafficking tunnel itself. As the camera follows an unidentified man walking into and across the tunnel, the ominous music on the soundtrack suggests an uncertain trek down the damp, dark corridor. Through voice-­over, Stack underscores the significance of this footage when he indicates that the images of the inside of the tunnel seen by viewers at home correspond to the actual tunnel found between Douglas and Agua Prieta.1 Through such footage, viewers at home gained access to a 1

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Introduction

captivating and confounding structure that would come to dominate the media landscape of the U.S.–­Mexico borderlands over the following three decades. The Unsolved Mysteries segment remains indicative of its time by situating the threat of the tunnel structure within the context of the so-­called War on Drugs. Yet by placing its signature stoking of fears over the invasion of the white middle-­class home in the border setting, the show prefigures the twenty-­first-­century rise in ideologies about the “invasion of the homeland.” Mainstream media and state-­approved discourses about border tunnels have now shifted from an exclusive focus on drug trafficking to broadly include all matters of so-­called national security. Following the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and the increasing militarization of border enforcement, the closing off of the U.S.–­Mexico border has also meant the multiplication of clandestine tunnels across the border. Tunnel discoveries now add up to dozens per year, despite the enormous cost each tunnel represents to smuggling organizations. The number of tunnels found by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officially reported to the public totaled close to two hundred as of January 2020.2 It would be safe to assume that there are many more undiscovered and unreported. Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–­Mexico Underground offers a media studies approach to the topic of borders by turning to this understudied albeit illuminating feature of these spaces: underground illicit tunnels that allow movement across closed borders. The book argues that mediation enables the figural malleability of the tunnel, or the capacity of tunnels to assume various visual forms and conceptual meanings. This malleability, in turn, gives shape to a set of modern anxieties and struggles about living with borders. Different groups of people attach themselves to different anxieties and struggle to bring these to the fore. Border Patrol agents may be more concerned with labor stability while conservationists worry about the flora and fauna of the border region. Migrants and poor border residents stress over the life-­threatening conditions in the environment of the border while defense contractors focus on profiting off the latest surveillance technology. The power imbalances between these groups of people are significant, and the stakes are often life and death. Analyzing the mediation of tunnels reveals how

Introduction  3

various stakeholders struggle to control the narrative over which border issues matter the most and how to allocate time, resources, and political energy to addressing those issues. The main contribution put forth by this book is what I refer to as a “media theory of the border tunnel,” which has two basic premises. The first is that border tunnels are quintessential media figures. Because tunnels are hidden and inaccessible to most of the public, even those who live close to the border, tunnels come to matter in public discourse through their mediated representations. It is not that media offer one mode of access into this border feature; rather, media offer the main mode of access into this border feature. Thus, tunnels offer us a particularly generative figure with which to critically analyze and disentangle the process of mediation and its relation to constructing the reality of the border. The second premise is that every border-­tunnel mediation is also a border-­making project. Representing tunnels in any type of media requires choosing how to position these structures in relation to the border. Likewise, given the rise of digital technologies capable of subsuming other types of media, representation itself necessitates making decisions about the limits and affordances of an individual medium. Understanding mediations of border tunnels provides insights into the ideological struggles that constitute “border issues,” such as migration, militarization, and ecological sustainability. In turn, analyzing trafficking tunnels as media figures questions established frameworks about border enforcement, alerts us to emergent anxieties at the border, and suggests alternative configurations of borderscapes. Thinking of border issues through a media studies perspective matters because, in their most general sense, both borders and media are structuring frameworks of reference for how we come to understand ourselves and our place in the world. Political borders are never mere boundaries between two states, argues Étienne Balibar, because borders are always “overdetermined and, in that sense, sanctioned, reduplicated, and relativized by other geopolitical divisions.”3 Emerging from and reinforced by a series of sociocultural divisions and the institutions that support these, geopolitical borders manifest political struggles as a demarcation of physical space. The local function of borders to divide a particular space also implies their global significance: to give the world “a representable figure in the modality of the partition, distribution and

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Introduction

attribution of regions of space,” which in turn captures “the progresses and processes of its history.”4 In that sense, borders always signify more than themselves; they are global projections onto localized organizations of space. The “world-­configuring function” of borders finds its analogue in media’s contribution to “a domain of worldly sensibility.”5 Media transmit messages about our economic and ecological systems and, in doing so, become constitutive parts of those systems. The dual, reflexive process through which media represent and act upon our sense of the world is what we call mediation. Mediation refers to the complex intersection of economic, social, cultural, and technical domains. Contending with the mediatory function of media proves central to “understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technological world.”6 Fictional and nonfictional worlds both surround us and support us; they exceed our view of them yet act as structural invariances that define what kinds of actions may take place in them.7 If media make worlds and borders configure the world, then they both thrive in the productive impossibility of capturing what exists.8 By offering the very stuff with which to make sense of worldly existence, media and borders play an indispensable role in the social organization of human life. Through its analysis of the mediation of underground border tunnels, this book navigates the conceptual and political resonances between the world-­configuring functions of both media and borders. Focusing on tunnels enables us to refract the debates about border issues through an understudied albeit generative structure that inheres in the constitution of the border. Thinking through tunnels shifts the terms of those debates that play out most forcefully in border regions. Tunnels literally and figuratively open up new ways of thinking through the divisions and delineations that we make between nation-­states. The physical structure of tunnels reveals how easy it is to undermine the closed-­off border. The figurative structure of tunnels enables the subversion of rhetorical strongholds in the mainstream border discourse. Considering tunnels as both physical and figurative entities offers new ways of thinking about “border issues” by turning our attention to the infrastructures organizing such issues, from the technologically aided militarization sought by state institutions to the on-­the-­ground resistance to such militarization to popular representations shaped by media industries’ norms and conventions.

Introduction  5

Thinking of border issues through a media studies perspective displaces the prevalent approaches to analyzing international boundaries. Media studies takes seriously the role that representations play in people’s understanding of social issues, but it does not assume there is a straightforward relationship between images, sounds, and words and the ideas conveyed within them. Production contexts, labor relations, genre conventions, aesthetic experiments, technical affordances, circulation networks, and reception practices all constitute the complex process of mediation. Media objects are not mirrors or windows into a reality that lies separate from this process. Engaging with the various components that constitute mediation better equips us to understand how media articulates border issues. “Border issues” functions as an imperfect shorthand for an interrelated set of political and social struggles that, despite having broad origins and far-­reaching consequences, play out most intensely at the international boundary. Human migration responds to factors such as labor markets, resource allocation, and colonial exploitation, but mainstream discussions of migration reduce the centuries-­long phenomenon to localized instances of border crossing. Nativist discrimination and racist policing practices abound across the Global North, yet most nation-­states first introduce and perfect these violent forms of minority repression at their border sites. While environmental devastation affects human and nonhuman habitations worldwide, “tariff-­free” zones and other economic states of exception make borderlands particularly sensitive to derelict conditions. “National security,” the state’s imagined reason for being in the twenty-­first century, translates into the militarization of civilian border checkpoints. To refer to the transnational flow of goods and people, the violent imposition of whiteness and citizenship, the devastation of ecological lifeworlds, and the militarization of the border-­ enforcement apparatus as “border issues,” as I do in this book, is not to suggest that these issues only matter at the nation-­state border. Instead, it is to argue that such practices receive heightened attention at border sites and that this heightened attention results from the mediation of such issues. The resonances between media and borders are integral to the theoretical contributions of Border Tunnels. Yet, rather than propose a media theory of the border, this book puts forth a media theory of the border

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Introduction

tunnel because I am not merely concerned with how those far away from the border perceive it differently from those near it. It is not a matter of lacking proximity to the real-­world referent. The near inaccessibility of border tunnels to the general public (both near and far from the borderlands) without the intermediary facilitation of state agents or narcotraffickers presents a distinctly different field of action. It forces us to take seriously the generative functions of media, that is, media’s capacity to give new life to spaces and structures in excess of their real referent. The theoretical wager of this book is that border tunnels offer a parallax perspective on how mediation shapes issues concerning nation-­ state borders by offering a limit case: a border figure nearly impossible to comprehend without the assistance of media. This parallax perspective emerges from both the intrinsic mediated nature of border tunnels and their structural capacity to reorganize spaces and ideas about the border. Approaching border issues from this new perspective can potentially destabilize entrenched debates surrounding such issues. Tunnel mediations can serve to reaffirm the need for borders, to expand the conceptual space of borders, and to suggest the potential for undoing borders. These three types of tunnel–­border relations are not exclusive; elements of each can be found in the examples studied in all the chapters. The trajectory of the book moves from restrictive to open-­ ended forms of thinking about borders, from the realistic media in chapters 1 and 2 to the more explorative, imaginative media of chapters 3, 4, and 5, but this trajectory is not meant to be teleological. Undoing requires some measure of expanding, but it also needs further reaffirming for such change to take hold. Accounting for the complexity of mediatory processes allows us to parse through these different forms of thinking about borders. This book is a work of media studies insofar as it is informed by theories and methods central to the field: the indexicality of photographic media, the politics of production, the aesthetics of audiovisual forms, the materiality of representation. Implicitly, then, the book argues for the value of media studies approaches to engaging in charged public debates about border issues without merely falling into questions about accuracy, authenticity, or bias. These approaches encourage thinking critically and generously about the possibilities of media to reveal established patterns of thinking and to offer alternatives. The media examples chosen

Introduction  7

to pursue the book’s inquiries borrow and build from several established popular media forms, such as film, television, video games, and the internet. Bringing media studies to bear on border studies turns out to be not only about interrogating what media tells us about the border but also about what we can learn from questioning the borders of media themselves. Tunnels will guide us into this double journey.

A Border Tunnel Is More Like a Wall Than a Bridge It might be easy to imagine that a structure that undermines the effectiveness of the border wall would be liberatory in nature. Yet the existence of tunnels does not negate the existence of walls. In fact, tunnels often present yet another space for the enactment of state control. Political geography refers to the “politics of verticality,” those practices whereby nation-­states attempt to extend their power and control over areas above and below the horizontal space of the national territory. Understanding this spatialization of state power requires visualization methods beyond two-­dimensional maps, which often render geopolitics as a “flat discourse.”9 In his work about the West Bank, Eyal Weizman foregrounds the three-­dimensionality of political spaces of occupation, citing the importance of bridges, hilltops, airspace, and tunnels in making sense of the conflict and its multi-­sited instantiations.10 Mediations of tunnels are complex negotiations about the shape, function, and purpose of the border itself. These negotiations evidence power struggles between those who build tunnels, those who use tunnels, those who shut down tunnels, and those who represent tunnels in media. To say that a border tunnel is more like a wall than a bridge is to foreground how tunnels participate in the physical and conceptual (re)organization of the borderlands into geographies of control. The U.S.–­Mexico borderlands have been “infrastructuralized,” to borrow Andrea Ballestero’s term for singling out how a natural feature gets co-­ opted to serve specific purposes for human life.11 For decades, U.S. state agents have relied on the desert to act as a weapon against unwanted human migration into the country. At the same time, the infrastructures that make up “the border” (e.g., steel-­reinforced fences and walls, surveillance towers) themselves debilitate and destroy the once thriving ecosystem of the desert, including its animal and plant habitats. The

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Introduction

U.S. nation-­state’s project of infrastructuralizing the borderlands consists of mobilizing living environments into the tools and the grounds for the destruction of subaltern lifeworlds. To attend to this infrastructuralizing project and how media contributes to it, I mark a distinction between “borderlands,” which signal a regional setting with distinct environments and specific human and nonhuman lifeworlds, and “border,” which refers to the figurative and material construct supported by the nation-­state to demarcate geopolitical divisions. Borderlands, for Oscar Martínez, encompass the “transnational settlement” unified by common daily activities, shared natural resources and environmental features, and labor markets that overlap the political boundary.12 In her influential text Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa describes “to live in the Borderlands” as a rich, conflictual experience on social, political, and environmental registers that exceeds the physical demarcation of a dividing line between the United States and Mexico.13 Borderlands allude to both geological environments and the lifeworlds that exist within them. Borders exist within borderlands, but the former fail to capture the latter’s living complexity, despite the best attempts of policing apparatuses to reduce this complexity for the purpose of border enforcement. Because border-­tunnel mediations reorganize the borderlands into geographies of emergence and control, the tunnels analyzed in this book signify more than structures for smuggling drugs. Unsolved Mysteries introduces the Douglas tunnel in 1991 squarely within the context of the U.S. War on Drugs, but in the three decades since, the politics of tunnel mediation increasingly veer away from an exclusive focus on this form of trafficking. The reasons for this are twofold. First, in the post-­9/11 era the United States treats all perceived violations of its state sovereignty as potential national security threats, conflating otherwise disparate border issues like migration, smuggling, land rights, and environmental sustainability. Second, as many scholars have argued, the social and cultural impact of narcotrafficking, particularly through media, creates a popular discourse that addresses broader crises of neoliberalism, including institutional corruption, state failure, and the decomposition of the public.14 Despite their origins in the traffic of drugs across the U.S.–­Mexico border, tunnels have since become the site for the popular staging of a variety of border issues.

Introduction  9

Within these, migration is often inextricably linked as the issue of the border, and for good reasons. Although Border Tunnels does contend with the favored reactionary talking point that tunnels may be used by undocumented migrants, it is not centrally concerned with the mediation of migration. Several book-­length studies have already attended to the depiction of migrants in U.S. film and television,15 the politics of citizenship as tied to media industries,16 and the construction of Mexican, Mexican American, and other Latin American identities through popular media.17 The purpose of this book is to build on, but not replicate, these studies. Certainly, I engage with the politics of white supremacy embodied by Border Patrol agents (chapter 2); the “Latino threat narrative” as represented in non-­playable characters in border-­themed video games (chapter 4); and the racist metaphors of contagion and invasion that permeate architectural design practices (chapter 5). Yet the goals of this project as a whole do not lie in analyzing instances of identity representation. If critical race and ethnic studies have taught us the importance of media narratives and popular representations for articulating power and social hierarchies, this book engages these questions by demonstrating how racialization and white supremacy play out in the building and maintenance of infrastructures themselves. Analyzing tunnels necessitates not so much a focus on the representation of border identities as an interrogation of the mediation of border infrastructures. As Jesús Martín-­Barbero explains, mediation concerns those institutions, infrastructures, and subjects that generate the social temporalities and cultural contexts where technologies emerge as media. Mediation constitutes media; it is the process by which technologies become channels for representation and communication within specific sociocultural matrices.18 Understanding border-­tunnel mediations across televisual news, reality TV, special effects, video games, and speculative design requires attending to these technical and logistical features of production and reception. If we recognize that media technologies allow borders to scale out into transnational nodes beyond the space of the nation-­state,19 then we must also realize how media industries, formats, and genres shape the discourses around, and selective application of, borders. Because the representational and communicative forms that these institutional and technical networks facilitate ultimately have effects on

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Introduction

real people, the political stakes of Border Tunnels lie in illustrating how better understanding of the mediation of border issues can influence how these issues are articulated and addressed in a variety of activist, policy, and scholarly contexts.

A Short Genealogy of the Border Tunnel Hidden underground transnational networks have long figured in practices of state resistance and popular reimaginings of public space. Images of the underworld date back to antiquity and have often been associated with oppositional cultures, but the figurative use of “underground” to signify a movement that operates out of sight and from below is a relatively modern phenomenon.20 The idea of the “Underground Railroad,” a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the nineteenth century for slaves to escape into Canada and Mexico, gave wide circulation to the notion that hidden thruways allowed for the unfettered movement of people across state boundaries.21 The oppositional stance and potential for disruption of “the underground” only intensified in the twentieth century and, with the rise of new geopolitical border-­enforcement technologies, the tunnel joined the railroad as the infrastructure for such fugitive flows. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the tunnels underneath the Berlin Wall allowed for people to escape from the Soviet-­controlled part of the city.22 Around the same time, the Vietnam War became notorious for the guerrilla warfare undertaken in complex tunnel networks that traversed territories controlled by opposing groups.23 The erstwhile practice of framing underground illicit activities as potential avenues for liberation eventually gave way to the reactionary idea that stages underground tunnels as war zones: on the one hand, military technology experts decry their tools as useful for “tunnel warfare”;24 on the other hand, members of the United States’ Tunnel Task Forces call themselves “tunnel rats,” echoing the nickname used by soldiers in charge of finding and fighting in the Vietnam tunnels.25 Now, at the turn of the twenty-­first century, two sites of tunneling activity have the highest levels of activity and receive the most amount of public attention. The tunnels underneath the southern U.S. border resonate with those underneath Israeli-­occupied territories in Palestine. Key

Introduction  11

among these is the connection between the response to border tunneling carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the U.S. Department of Defense. U.S. investment flows into the IDF’s research and development initiatives, and in turn, Israel-­developed technologies come to be implemented in the southern U.S. border region.26 These different cases of border tunnels around the world represent contemporary forms of resistance to spatial domination through the enactment of barriers, but crucial distinctions between their contexts remain. The U.S.–­Mexico border tunnels are regularly used for smuggling, while those on the Israel–­ Palestine border enable movement of basic goods for populations under occupation. Further, interconnected tunnel networks under the U.S.–­ Mexico border often emerge parasitically from existing infrastructure. Although trafficking tunnels participate in a broader ecology of illicit cross-­border tunnel activities, the physical traits and symbolic significance of each border-­tunnel context remain noticeably different. The U.S.–­Mexico cross-­border tunnel discovered in Douglas, Arizona, in 1990 and the many others located over the following decade were creations of the Sinaloa cartel. The organization formerly led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán would incentivize or coerce architects and engineers from Durango, a mining industry state in northern Mexico, to design and supervise the construction of these million-­dollar structures. The most popular type of narco-­tunnel is what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls the “sophisticated tunnel”; it is many miles long and includes wooden paneling, electric lights, and ventilation systems. Over the last decade, other criminal organizations have also taken to constructing trafficking tunnels. In May 2016, Mexican federal authorities reported that the rising Jalisco New Generation cartel had begun incursions into tunneling operations around the western side of the U.S.–­Mexico border.27 Local leaders in Ciudad Juárez and Nogales regularly use what DHS calls “interconnecting tunnels”—­tactical repurposings of underground sewer and storm drain infrastructures—­to create makeshift tunnels.28 The most common use of these tunnels is smuggling drugs into the United States and smuggling guns and cash into Mexico. As Peter Andreas argues, “to varying degrees and in varying ways, all nations are smuggler nations.”29 In other words, the consolidation of the nation as a stronghold of unity and control in an increasingly interconnected world

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Introduction

depends largely on the state’s allowance of smuggling as a strategic advantage—­from the looting of native resources by colonial states to the imposition of Global North commodities through regulatory exclusion of Global South products. The basic purpose of illicit tunnels thus remains constitutive of the identity of the nation-­states they connect. What makes the United States a notorious example, according to Andreas, is that the country has had a close relationship with smuggling since before its founding, that now it is the leading importer of smuggled goods and labor, and that it is the world’s leading anti-­smuggling campaigner. The “golden age of secure borders” therefore is nothing but a myth: there has never been a time when the U.S. state had stable control over its borders. Now that smuggling issues have become redefined as security issues, a distinctive feature of the discourse around tunnels, it is important to remember that smuggling has never been an aberration of the current global geopolitical order. Rather, smuggling is its constitutive force. In the neoliberal heyday following the Cold War,30 regulating the flow of goods and people across state borders acquires symbolic importance beyond its pragmatic functions. For Diana Wong, the post-­1989 era of globalization features an increased obsession with “border control as the basis of a state’s sovereignty and as intrinsic to its logic of being.” In the case of human migration, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime marks a distinction between smuggling and trafficking by identifying the latter with forced migration and a slew of other exploitation practices. In practice, however, these distinctions are routinely ignored by transnational institutions in order to accentuate the rhetoric that human trafficking is a pressing issue in need of investment.31 Wong refers to this as “the rumor of trafficking” not to suggest that there is no exploitative human forced migration around the world but to reveal how language functions to implicitly add moralizing evaluations and influence data-­collecting practices. “In this discursive economy,” Wong concludes, “trafficking works as a master metaphor for the illicit as the criminal, assigning [various forms of unauthorized] migration in equal measure to the undesirable underside of globalization.”32 The trafficking moniker more adequately reflects the ideological goals of institutions in power rather than it indicates an objective distinction between types of flows.

Introduction  13

State institutions and official media reports often deploy this discursive slippage when addressing the tunnels at the U.S.–­Mexico border, equating the threat of drug traffickers building these structures to the potential of migrants crossing through them. For example, on January 14, 2019, a group of 376 migrants seeking asylum tunneled under the border wall near San Luis, Arizona. The group dug seven holes in the sandy ground, each hole only a few feet long, to crawl underneath the steel border fence. Under the DHS classification, these tunnels are “rudimentary” in that they are usually hand-­dug and sporadic attempts at quickly circumventing the border barrier. The purpose of these rudimentary tunnels thus differs significantly from those of drug cartels or even local smugglers. Indeed, the goal of these migrants was to turn themselves in to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents on the U.S. side of the border in order to start their asylum petition process, but the mainstream media response to this incident quickly fell under the guise of questioning whether there was in fact a “need” for a border wall.33 The fact that DHS and mainstream media classify all underground structures as similarly potential threats evidences the shift from “War on Drugs” mentality to the border militarization discourse of the twenty-­first century. Any cross-­border flow that is not sanctioned by the border-­policing apparatus is considered trafficking and a threat to the nation-­state.

Tunnelicity, or Thinking Infrastructurally through Tunnels The tunnel presents us with a notable example of a border infrastructure insofar as its physical characteristics (e.g., inaccessibility, constrained space) present unique visualization challenges while, at the same time, its conceptual affordances (e.g., figural malleability) are best explored in the speculative registers offered by various media forms. Elsewhere I identify the “infrastructures of the border” as those sociotechnical systems that constitute and maintain the geopolitical boundary (checkpoints, bridges, human patrolling, sentient surveillance technologies, sewage and drainage pipes) and as the conceptual frameworks that undergird our understanding of what borders are and what they are for.34 Analyzing the mediation of both physical and conceptual infrastructures reveals how much they are intertwined. How media enables and molds the

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Introduction

convergence between the physical traits and conceptual affordances of tunnels is what I call the border tunnel’s tunnelicity. The first notable aspect of tunnelicity refers to the shifting power valences contained within figurations of the underground. As explored in the previous section, different articulations of the underground (from a site of resistance, to one of conflict, to one of transgression) have been mapped onto border tunnels throughout the past two hundred years. Geographers and critical theorists emphasize the need to account for vertical spaces as sites of public struggle: Stephen Graham proposes the concept of “vertical geopolitics,” Paul Virilio argues for the “volume” of contemporary warfare, Stuart Elden writes about the “depths of power.”35 These theorists insist on the verticality of public space as well as this space’s potential for articulations of power distinct from, and in addition to, those present in the two-­dimensional area normally considered in the geopolitical division of the world. Such articulations of power rely on the process of mediation. For Lisa Parks, our contemporary era of global interconnectedness and unrelenting militarism means that “a vertical space cannot remain ‘public’ without a struggle to define and maintain it as such.”36 Visualizing this vertical space with the aid of media technologies remains vital to the process of claiming it as public and of defining which publics it serves. Tunnels present one instance where the struggle over control of a space occurs at a physical and representational level. The second aspect of the border tunnel’s tunnelicity concerns the structure’s capacity for connectivity and the crossing of boundaries. Tunnels operate as what Walter Benjamin once called “structures that convey and connect,” structures whose “mediating function has a literal and spatial as well as figurative and stylistic bearing.”37 Paradoxically, tunnels emphasize the existence of a dividing line even as they evidence strategies for contravening that line, participating in a modern imaginary of the underground as the site that opposes “a praxis of connections to a metaphysics of divisions,” as David Pike puts it.38 In this sense, the border tunnel is not unlike a corridor that connects two points by literally or metaphorically excluding those aspects that may infringe on a direct connection. In Western architecture and in common parlance, the corridor operates as an instrument of modernity that attends to speed, power,

Introduction  15

social differentiation, and industrialization and corporatization of life. For Mark Jarzombek, the development of military barracks in mid-­ nineteenth-­century France created corridors as “purpose-­driven spaces” whose main function was to bring “man, building, and nation into a single optic.”39 These modern corridors acted as spatial extensions of the nation-­state and its ideals. At the turn of the twentieth century, corridors represented architecturally the growth of bourgeois culture generally, and what Jarzombek calls “the corridic revolution” reached its apotheosis in the 1960s when the structure’s former connotations as a space of prestige and social differentiation gave way to “generic linear spaces that facilitated the easy distribution of people and mechanical systems.”40 With the move toward open-­space designs in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, architectural corridors may be less prevalent, but the cultural imaginary of the corridor has expanded more powerfully to the realm of the geopolitical: urban corridors, pipeline corridors, supply corridors. The militarization of borderlands around the world has precipitated a similar corridic revolution in the design and formation of borders. Even before the current border wall project, the U.S. government’s approach to border design signaled a concerted effort to distribute movement and mobilize space in favor of enforcement efforts. For instance, by strategically fencing off areas of the border region and increasing patrolling across existing roads, the state was able to push migrants into more dangerous parts of the desert. Subsequent efforts to prevent humanitarian aid in these inhospitable desert areas, including prosecuting those who would provide water to migrants, further established these areas of the borderlands as corridors of death.41 Establishing checkpoints on highways miles from the border likewise contributed to corralling movement into authorized corridors and unauthorized exclusion zones. In an NPR interview, a former Border Patrol agent named Ephraim Cruz admits that he never caught any undocumented migrants while working at these checkpoints, at least not at the checkpoint itself. He did, however, intercept migrants in the flanks, the area as far as three miles out around the checkpoint.42 Checkpoints have the effect of redirecting undocumented immigrant traffic out to the sides of highways and roads, to the brush and desert. Border Patrol agents then catch these immigrants during scheduled vehicle patrols. Designating illegitimate

16 

Introduction

paths and patrolling legitimate ones results in socially differentiated structures of movement across the borderlands. Not unlike the historical development of the corridor in Western architecture, border tunnels organize “the world into different, but parallel corridic universes.”43 These underground structures are also corridors in the supply chain sense, insofar as they enable illicit flows across the border. The border tunnel offers one of the most explicit figurations of the “illicit supply chain,” a think tank buzzword that denotes the activities of criminal organizations that secure the global movement of illicit goods.44 In practice, these activities are no different from the global supply chains that Deborah Cowen analyzes in The Deadly Life of Logistics. Cowen demonstrates that supply chain security specialists often conceptualize the security of supply chains as fundamental to, if not interchangeable with, national security.45 The illicitness of any supply chain lies in how it figures the role of the state as the arbiter for the logistics of circulation. Both tunnels and regular border checkpoints participate in the illicit supply chain for guns and drugs, but the former’s symbolic representation already alludes to the illicit flows occurring within it. Through mediation, the border tunnel gives audiovisual shape to ideological distinctions about licitness of transnational circulation as adjudicated by the state. Finally, the border tunnel’s tunnelicity has to do with the mediation of a secluded bounded space as the site to rearticulate spatial imaginaries. Border tunnels, I argue, operate as transnational media corridors. The physical structures of tunnels draw attention to the geophysics of the borderlands and the imperfect construction of the border. Border tunnels are inherently transnational because, in their crossing, they inhabit two nation-­state spaces at once. They become a constitutive feature of the borderlands and an affront to the idea of the border as a significant demarcation. In a report on the work of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, writer Jason Kersten suggests that the proliferation of border tunnels has “turned the U.S.–­Mexican border into Swiss cheese,” an image that provocatively evokes a hollowed physical state of the border underground.46 The media examples analyzed in the chapters to follow further feed into this image of a porous underground. The representation of tunnels continuously pushes against the idea of the border as a dividing line by offering images of the corridors that cross this line unencumbered.

Introduction  17

Border tunnels also operate as transnational media corridors because their symbolic representations draw attention to the mediated construction of the border and to how such mediation shapes the possibilities of imaging the border otherwise. In her examination of corridors in modernist literature, Kate Marshall demonstrates how narratives employ the corridor to reflect on their own formal character. As a literary form, the corridor encodes in its own material structure the communicative aspects it represents: connection, movement, and division.47 Because of its self-­reflexive formal character, the corridor reveals the aesthetic, technical, and political operations that go into its creation. The media examples of border tunnels in the following chapters likewise reflect their medium’s formal characteristics. The corridoricity of border tunnels emerges, for instance, in chapter 1 with the camera railway used by news organizations to depict the inside of tunnels; in chapter 4 with the algorithmic creation of video game spaces in first-­person shooters; and in chapter 5 with architectural 3D models for border wall alternatives. Whether through documentary, animation, or mixed media formats, mediations of border tunnels encode ideas about the role of borders in the world and about the means of presenting these borders to the world. As media figures, tunnels not only present images of underground, bounded corridic spaces but also turn these images into frameworks for thinking about purposive action within those spaces. Corridoricity, boundedness, and the imaginaries of the underground function as conceptual infrastructures for a media approach to border tunnels. Conceptual infrastructures are those things that undergird the making of knowledge and the generating of work.48 As corridors that traverse geopolitical boundaries, tunnels allow us to think infrastructurally about the spaces of the border—­to attend to the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all those other things that stand under our worlds. Thinking infrastructurally means addressing the physical traits of the space that lies beneath the geopolitical divide and the underlying images and symbols that structure our sociocultural ideas about borders. Tunnelicity points us to the border tunnel’s capacity to mobilize popular ideas about the underground as the site for conflict or resistance, about the corridor as a structuring device for connectivity, and about bounded secluded spaces as grounds for speculative reimaginings. In this manner, border

18 

Introduction

tunnels provide critical scaffolding for envisioning, analyzing, and undoing a world defined by borders. Thinking infrastructurally would also require us to attend to the resources and labor that go into the construction of tunnels. As noted earlier, the Sinaloa cartel was credited with building the first sophisticated tunnel in 1989 and remained as masters of the technique in the three decades since. U.S. authorities estimate that each one of these sophisticated tunnels took several months and over one million dollars to build. The cartel would either coerce or incentivize architects from Durango to design these tunnels, and it protected highly valued engineers to plan out the construction. The strenuous labor of construction would fall on the shoulders of working-­class Mexicans or Central American migrants entrapped by the cartel.49 A 2015 New Yorker profile on the Sinaloa cartel declared that the organization has “refined the art of underground construction” and has deployed tunnels “more effectively than any criminal group in history.”50 Hidden underneath that proclamation lie the lives and labor of thousands of unheard and unknown people. There are almost no media productions about border tunnels from the perspective of those who build them—­except for the countless epic melodramas recounting the career of El Chapo.51 As such, the case studies examined in this book focus on the people who discover, report on, and imagine border tunnels. Still, thinking infrastructurally through the figure of the tunnel means pointing to the traces, indexical or otherwise, left by those who made the underground structures. The laborers who built the tunnels of the U.S.–­Mexico border silently haunt the media examined in this book: in the furtive shadows captured by news crews or reality TV videographers; in the non-­playable characters introduced into first-­person shooter games; and in the construction messes captured by television news crews or staged by film set designers and speculative artists. Making those silences speak will inform how we understand the border-­making struggles at the heart of every border-­tunnel mediation.

The U.S.–­Mexico Border at the Turn of the Twenty-­First Century Because the multiplication of borders characterizes globalization in the twenty-­first century, social divisions and exclusions of all stripes become

Introduction  19

border issues. Still, these matters are situated. The examples explored in this book all relate to the geopolitical division between the nation-­states of Mexico and the United States, a border that figures as a symbolic boundary between the Global North and the Global South and stands as the physical location for the violent attempts to maintain such boundary. As Reece Jones notes, repeated invocations of a “crisis at the border” function as popular calls to deploy greater manpower and policing technologies and to build barriers that will prevent “uncivilized and violent practices from spilling over into the territory of the United States” without any acknowledgment of this country’s complicity in fomenting such violence.52 Mediations of this border, and of the border tunnels therein, often articulate continental struggles over the resource disparities and neocolonial territorial controls, even if the representations of these struggles remain localized. Borders are also situated insofar as they carry specific physical characteristics. Tunnels are a border figure in the U.S.–­Mexico context because a significant portion of that border is set in land, particularly desert zones and hilly terrain. These geophysical characteristics not only affect the importance that tunnels have for enabling trafficking flows across material space; they also have an impact on how tunnels are mediated across political divides. Whether it is by restricting visibility in the case of indexical media or offering cavernous spaces of speculation through non-­indexical forms, the physical traits of border zones amplify the figurative and affective power of tunnels. Other kinds of terrains in contested borders offer distinct opportunities for interrogating the fluidity of geopolitical boundaries.53 Situating the examination of border tunnels within the U.S.–­Mexico context illustrates the co-­constitutive relationship between tunnels and borders, particularly whether the construction of tunnels that connect points on either side of this imaginary divide helps to reaffirm the line of division. The delineation and enforcement of the U.S.–­Mexico border, as well as the resistances to that enforcement, have been a centuries-­old struggle.54 What has changed with increasing militarization and mediatization at the turn of the century is that the place of the border now stands not only as the site but also as the symbol where such struggles take place. Wendy Brown has written about this rise in the symbolic power of border walls, but she finds a paradox in the rise of walls as

20 

Introduction

borders themselves become more porous because of globalization.55 In contrast, I argue that the rise of border walls signals the importance of these symbols not as corollaries to the social, political, and economic policies that maintain borders but as fundamental struggles over the definition of national identity. Even if the physical structure itself will not achieve any of its purported aims, the fanfare over building a border-­ length wall provoked by constant media attention represents a victory for nativist groups advocating for it. The mediation of border-­enforcement structures and resistances to them constitutes an arena where popular ideas about the nation’s boundaries play out. For these reasons, a significant portion of the focus on border tunnels within this book comes from sources based in the United States: CBP-­produced videos, Hollywood action films, CNN news features, and multimedia designs from Berkeley-­and Miami-­based firms, to name a few. That is not to say that there is no media about border tunnels in Mexico, but rather that tunnels acquire different valences in media based on the south side of the border. In the case of fictional media, border tunnels end up subsumed as one element of narcocultura, or popular mediations of drug trafficking and the people involved in it. News features understandably dedicate far more airtime to the havoc that drug cartels wreak in cities and rural communities. Tunnels would most often become the focus of attention in relation to the ongoing saga of the Sinaloa cartel and its former leader. In short, Mexican-­based mediations of tunnels gesture at drug trafficking more than at borders. Because the goal of this book is to theorize the relationship between media and borders through the figure of the border tunnel, my focus remains on media from the U.S. side, even if it still attends to instances of Mexican agents appearing in U.S.-­based productions and to depictions of tunnels from the south side of the border. Border Tunnels takes the first two decades of the twenty-­first century as the rough time frame for exploring tunnels in the southern U.S. border. One reason for this time frame is that tunnels proliferated as a result of the militarization of the border following the founding of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Tallies of border tunnels in the region estimate that only about a dozen were found between 1990 and 2001, in contrast to over 150 between 2002 and 2016.56 Another reason is the growing inclusion of tunnels into fictional media narratives

Introduction  21

about the border. While back in 1984 the infamous border crossing in Gregory Nava’s El Norte takes place over a minutes-­long sequence inside a rat-­infested sewer, fictional media tunnels have multiplied in the twenty-­first century. Telenovelas in Telemundo’s “narco-­televisual universe,” including popular hits like El Señor de los Cielos (2013–­20) and Señora Acero (2014–­19), feature trafficking tunnels in their narratives.57 Television shows about drug trafficking on broadcast, cable, and streaming channels in Mexico and the United States often feature tunnels in their narratives. That includes season-­long narrative arcs, as in Weeds (Showtime, 2008); Queen of the South (USA Network, 2016–­present); El Chapo (Netflix, 2017–­18); and Mayans M.C. (FX, 2018–­present), and sporadic appearances, as in Narcos: Mexico (Netflix, 2018) and El Pantera (Televisa, 2008). Despite their popularity, these examples of tunnels in popular media are not the focus of this book. The media examples analyzed in the subsequent chapters are representative of this larger corpus yet exemplary in what they reveal about the significance of tunnels as media figures. The militarization of the U.S.–­Mexico border at the turn of the twenty-­first century represents an increased mediatization of the border as well. The final reason for limiting this book’s analysis to this time frame concerns the interconnections between militarization, technological innovation, and mediation. On the one hand, these two decades witnessed the increasing coordination of DHS generally, and CBP specifically, with media producers to create reality TV content and feature the agency’s activities more centrally in television news coverage. These coordination efforts reveal how much “homeland security” discourse permeates contemporary popular culture. On the other hand, the inordinate investment in technological solutions to border-­enforcement issues has fueled speculation about the promise of digital media for reimagining border spaces. Technology entrepreneurs, once largely concerned with consumer-­facing technologies, increasingly see a profitable opportunity in recasting border militarization in techno-­solutionist terms. The U.S.–­Mexico border stands as a microcosm of what Jones calls “the global border regime,” the worldwide phenomenon through which borders have been transformed into “militarized security spaces” with increased dedicated budgets, a growing number of heavily armed border guards, and the construction of walls, fences, and surveillance

22 

Introduction

networks.58 Analyzing this border illustrates the specificities of U.S. border-­enforcement policies and, at the same time, the political and economic connections between these policies and the global border regime. As Camilla Fojas points out, border studies has a long tradition of examining the U.S.–­Mexico border as “both extraordinary—­as a site of surveillance, low-­intensity war, and clashing cultures and economies—­and as a case study and model for all borders.”59 Border Tunnels similarly attends to this border’s status as extraordinary and generalizable.

Tunneling Through: An Outline of the Book Border Tunnels seeks to engage a diverse set of publics interested in the intersections between media, borders, and infrastructures. For those interested in the study of the border, the book asks us to think about the border as always mediated and not merely a thing that “the media” presents accurately or inaccurately. There is no border without mediation, that is, without the technologies that enforce border divisions and without the images that help people make sense of this socio-­techno-­political apparatus. For those interested in transforming the border, whether by supporting the lifeworlds of the borderlands or advocating for marginalized folks harmed by the geopolitical division, this book presents a plea to think infrastructurally. Like borders and media, race is a social construct. To properly act upon the racializing logics of borders and media, we must attend to their mediating infra-­structures: to the underlying technologies, industrial networks, norms and standards. Thinking infrastructurally better equips us to chart courses for social transformation. Ultimately, for those interested in media studies, the goal of the book is to illustrate the value of our field for engaging with, and responding to, the questions offered by other interdisciplinary areas. Although methodologically Border Tunnels focuses primarily on close readings of media texts and on analysis of industrial and technological practices, the questions guiding these analyses are those of broader political and social import. Chapter 1 explores depictions of border tunnels in local, broadcast, and cable news shows in the United States. What are the politics of visualizing the border? How do formal decisions about how to visualize the border foreground or forgo engagement with its politics? To address

Introduction  23

these questions, tunnels present us with a unique case within border representations: namely, the structure’s physical restrictions that must be creatively engaged. The chapter analyzes televisual news at the intersection of televisual programming choices and documentary formal practices. Both contribute specific ways of spectacularizing border tunnels, as news producers draw on a variety of televisual and documentary strategies to present the tunnels as spectacular despite the restrictions imposed by the physical structures. Televisual news as a genre with specific industrial mandates and aesthetic considerations privileges certain types of stories and visual elements over others. Understanding these aspects beyond the question of journalistic bias illustrates the importance of formal decisions in making sense of the border and its politics. Chapter 2 turns to reality television to examine how members of Tunnel Task Forces mobilize the physical restrictions of tunnels to present themselves as extraordinary agents within the border-­security apparatus. If border security relies largely on performance, critical media analysis exposes the elements of this performance at a structural and individual level. Tunnels present a paradoxical stance in the performance of border security: the need to reveal a vulnerability (the existence of a tunnel) to reinforce security (the closing of the tunnel). The reality TV shows analyzed in this chapter demonstrate the limits of popular state-­approved propaganda to justify border security as a whole. At the same time, these shows prove more effective at exalting the individual trials and troubles of those tasked with enforcing and policing borders. The unique work required to discover and shut down tunnels allows Task Force members to argue for the exceptionality of their labor while the dramatic trappings of reality TV allows border agents to cast themselves as the victims of the dangers of border-­enforcement practices. In doing so, they downplay and efface the harms inflicted on the targets of border security: migrants, Indigenous peoples, and other border residents. Chapters 3 and 4 attend to the animated qualities of computer-­ generated border tunnels. Chapter 3 considers tunnels created through special effects as shaped by the technical affordances of digital animation and the narrative strategies of the action film. Here the tunnel offers a dual form of illicit pleasure. Digital animation presents the thrill of illicit spaces underground and the endless possibilities therein. Action aesthetics provide the experience of liberation as a sensory crossing through

24 

Introduction

boundless spaces. Special effects tunnels present a plastic version of the border underground and deliver dynamic spectacles that briefly undermine the ideology of total control intended by the visualization technologies employed by CBP. Though pleasurable, these animated structures are not inherently resistant: their liberatory sensations are transitory and leave intact the material divisions perpetuated by the border. Chapter 4 then considers how virtual interactive media can instead reaffirm ideologies of control by turning to first-­person shooter games. Much like defense contractor proposals for VR-­enabled border security, the interactive tunnels in these games present expansive realms where colonialist and racist fantasies are encouraged and rewarded. Namely, border tunnels in a first-­person shooter game borrow the colonialist perspectives of the frontier found in open world video games and encode these ideas into corridors for the systematic shooting of Mexicans. Mobilizing what defense contractors call “tunnel warfare,” the play logics of the first-­person shooter game demonstrate the racist underpinnings of many virtual border infrastructures. Finally, chapter 5 examines speculative design, artistic and architectural practices that consist of multiple mixed media forms, including photography, video, physical materials, 3D renderings, and 2D sketches. Conceptualizing speculative design in chapter 5 as a multimedia practice that includes video and computer imaging as well as fabric, metal, and plastic modeling foregrounds the connections between material construction and the thinking of future border alternatives. What do sustainable border practices look like? How can media forms shape sustainable forms of thinking? The projects found in this chapter seek to provide creative reimaginings of the border, but a critical analysis of them reveals how often speculative media ends up reproducing the conditions of the present. Some tunnel models illustrate how reactionary forms of sustainability, that is, reproducing present conditions indefinitely, can be repackaged as a futuristic good. In turn, incomplete models can offer open-­ended avenues for trying out and rethinking the state of the borderlands, prompting us to attend to the deterioration of already existing vital underground infrastructures. The examples presented in each chapter trace an increasing shift in scale. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on individual tunnels and the bodies of agents or reporters entering tunnels. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 consider the

Introduction  25

tunnel within larger networks, whether the institutional structure of the Department of Homeland Security, the technological nets of surveillance that line the border, or the entire subsoil of the border region. Chapter 5 turns to a continental perspective on the borderlands. From the micro to the macro, such changes in the scale of figuration also correspond to changes in scale for the proposed reconfiguration of borders. The individualism analyzed in chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate how calls for border security, and closed borders broadly, emerge from forms of mediating solipsism at the expense of intersubjective and structural thinking. The plasticity found in chapters 3 and 4 explores structural thinking in the sense of the figural expansion of rigid structures. Such plasticity points to how new forms of figuring the structures that undergird our thinking can potentiate political alternatives. Chapter 5 zooms back to the regional scale and the possibilities in reframing border issues from the needs of the nation-­state to the livelihoods of local communities. Throughout the chapters, I note how analyzing different media forms and genres illuminates changes in scalar perspective and how rethinking scales of analysis facilitates the uncovering of new perspectives on border issues. Scalar thinking addresses both the spatial and temporal dimension of border issues. Spatially, the nation-­based practices of border enforcement and securitization remain incompatible with the region-­ wide approaches needed to tackle issues such as environmental devastation or poverty in border communities. The vitality of the geopolitical state relies on an apparatus whose enactment undermines the vitality of the region where this apparatus is most forcibly enacted. Likewise, because of the different temporal registers between “security” concerns and social or environmental justice issues, the former always draws more attention. National security issues carry a sense of urgency, while struggles for ecological sustainability and social justice require decades-­long cooperation. Without a justice-­oriented approach to borders, any proposal to make borders “safe,” “secure,” or “sustainable” is bound to be insufficient and, most likely, counterproductive.60 In most of the underground tunnel formations of the twentieth century detailed earlier, the border being crossed marks a division between a negative, undesirable side where flows escape from and the positive, desirable one across the border where flows escape to. For contemporary

26 

Introduction

tunnels, this division is less strict: global capital’s hold over social life around the world means that increasingly there is no alternative economic system or natural environment to escape to. Likewise, the intensification of nativist sentiments that have led to the rise of border walls in the Global North also signal the emergence of a society that, despite some economic advantages, offers no hospitality. Again, this reminds us that tunnels should not be thought of as freeing structures in and of themselves. As malleable figures, border tunnels can function both as the medium for transnational flows and as the infrastructure for alternative border formations. The political wager of Border Tunnels is that critically understanding the mediation of tunnels allows us to make these distinctions and to mobilize such insights toward imagining more just border formations. We must evaluate whom the borderlands are for and deemphasize ideas about securitization and the entrenched “state-­ thinking” that impedes local forms of collaboration. Only then can we undo the assumption that the geopolitical division should take precedence over the sustainability of regional lifeworlds. An alternative conception of the borderlands is necessary. Critically analyzing the border underground represents the first step toward formulating this alternative conception.

1 TV NEWS AND SPECTACLE

The establishing shot is a long shot at the beginning of a sequence that presents from a distance the things (actors, places, objects) central to that sequence. Its purpose is to literally “set the scene”: to introduce viewers to the setting where the scene takes place. Television reports about the U.S.–­Mexico border usually feature one of two types of establishing shots. The first is the aerial shot, taken by drone or by a camera operator on a helicopter, which displays a miles-­long stretch of the border. The border wall or fence lies in the center of the frame as the camera moves alongside or across the dividing line (Figure 1). The second type of establishing shot is the street-­level shot, taken by a handheld or tripod-­based camera on a street corner or along a road, which depicts the daily bustle of a border town. The camera turns on its axis, in a sideways pan or an upward tilt, to reveal the border wall in relative proximity (Figure 2). Both types of shots feature the border wall prominently. Establishing shots establish more than location. They set the tone and stakes of the report, often with the aid of background music, a reporter’s voice-­over, and other elements that suggest how audiences should perceive the location. Through their establishing shots, English-­ language long-­form television reports about the U.S.–­Mexico border elicit all sorts of emotions, including suspicion, disdain, and wonder. Given the global prominence of the U.S.–Mexico border, it is likely that most people tuning into television reports about it are already familiar 27

Figure 1. Three aerial long shots center the wall in the opening of a report from the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs TV program. (Source: Newsnight, Tunnels, Traffickers, and Cartels, 2017; screenshots by author.)

TV News and Spectacle  29

with other media depictions of the place. As such, the establishing shots in these reports adhere to a realist aesthetic characteristic of most television reporting: they aim to present the place as audiences expect it to be. As Peter Wollen writes, the realist aesthetic “rests on a monstrous delusion: the idea that truth resides in the real world and can be picked out by a camera.”1 Perceiving the world through a camera already implies a complex process of mediation. When sounds and images appear to be “realistic,” it is because they adhere to the audience’s assumptions about what sounds and images about that topic should sound and look like. The effect of realism depends on formal strategies of representation mapping onto preconceived notions about the world. Realistic representations can generally be understood as conservative, in the sense that they conserve audience expectations about how the world is and operates while effacing the fact that the representations themselves work to cement such expectations. “Grounding ideology in reality is a way of making it appear unchallengeable and unchangeable,” John Fiske argues, “and thus is a reactionary political strategy.”2 As representational tropes, the establishing shots of the U.S.–­Mexico border in these television reports both signal the setting of reports and reinforce audiences’ preconceived ideas of what that border setting looks like. There are no establishing shots of border tunnels. Capturing a wide shot of a tunnel is physically impossible, as there is no underground vantage point that would allow for this. Camera panning and tilting is extremely restricted inside tunnels, so most shots in nonfiction media are static or only moving forward. The audiovisual introduction to a tunnel in television reports is, in some ways, always already in media res. By the time audiences get to see the tunnel, they are already in it. When the reporter’s voice-­over signals that the segment will move to a discussion of tunnels, some reports will include a few scenes inside a tunnel; others may feature extended scenes of reporters crawling down a tunnel. Still others will merely include an interview snippet with a CBP agent. The particular technique used to broach the topic of tunnels in television reporting depends on a number of factors, including the range of tunnel sizes, production resources, and time constraints. Still, tunnels featured in television reports adhere to a realist aesthetic in their formal choices, which include shaky handheld camera footage, hastily

Figure 2. Three street-­level establishing shots introduce the border wall as a quotidian part of Nogales in a report from the flagship nightly newscast of CBC News. (Source: The National, Patrolling the Border Wall with a U.S. Border Agent, 2019; screenshots by author.)

TV News and Spectacle  31

edited images from a variety of sources, and images that center the body of the reporter as an indexical marker of the size of the tunnel. In this chapter I argue that realistic representations of border tunnels are inextricable from the spectacle of their representation. Television reports that aim to present border tunnels “as they are” nonetheless rely on the medium’s formal strategies, such as the use of portable recording devices, editing strategies to bring together disparate pieces of footage, and the reporter’s acknowledgment and interaction with the camera. Yet these strategies alone are seldom sufficient to make border tunnels visually compelling. News reports must contend with the underground structure’s limitations as the subject of programming, whether those are physical restrictions circumscribing how the tunnel can be captured on camera or narrative issues stemming from the lack of access to the builders of these tunnels and their stories. Television news producers are also unable to capture tunnel discoveries live, a common televisual trope to create narrative intrigue. As the examples analyzed in this chapter will reveal, television coverage of tunnels relies on a series of standard tropes as well as on visual and aural experimentation to convey the same set of facts about border tunnels in a novel manner. Paradoxically, the realist aesthetic in televisual mediations of tunnels relies heavily on both television’s and documentary’s affordances for creating audiovisual spectacles. The chapter addresses local, national, and international English-­ language television news reports about specific tunnel discoveries. Because televisual news draws on the technical affordances and generic tropes of both television and documentary to present realism, understanding how the realistic mediation of border tunnels foregrounds and obfuscates specific political projects inherent in corporate news making is essential. As Deborah Jaramillo argues, analyzing television news without attending to its medium affordances ignores the fact that television is “a complex, historically determined intermixture of technology, industry, culture, stylistic influences, and viewer behaviors.” Television news, particularly cable news, is foremost a type of television program scheduled next to and opposite other types of programs “being influenced by them and competing against them in a landscape shaped by decades-­old broadcasting companies, advertisers, and regulations.”3 Television news producers make decisions about the length, look, and narratives of specific

32 

TV News and Spectacle

reports with regards to how these will play on television. Such decisions have implications for how audiences learn about the issues discussed therein, implications that we ignore when treating news delivery as merely a question of communication. These segments about border tunnels are concerned not only with helping audiences make sense of unfolding events but also with making a set of basic facts about tunnels into compelling and exciting content. Television news reports mediate tunnels ambiguously, offering visual representation to the structures that purportedly violate state sovereignty while at the same time making these structures thrilling and fascinating. The five sections that follow explore this productive ambiguity by analyzing several news reports about tunnel discoveries. The first section explores how television news producers navigate the physical and narrative restrictions imposed by the U.S.–­Mexico border tunnels. Unable to rely on television’s distinctive feature of live news reporting, producers turn to other televisual aesthetics and formal strategies to make tunnels into compelling subjects. The second section presents how these news reports engage the “spectacle of reality,” Elizabeth Cowie’s term for how documentary media balance the need to present images from actuality and the desire to make these images spectacular or intriguing. Border tunnels lend themselves well to the spectacle of reality by offering indexical footage of secret worlds that can be produced into spectacular narratives. The case of news reports about the Berlin tunnels in the 1960s offer a useful historical point of comparison to examine continuities and disparities in the televisual mediation of border tunnels. The next two sections analyze the televisual strategies that facilitate this spectacle of reality: the use of emerging media technologies to present the tunnel from a point of view inaccessible to humans, and the focus on the body of the reporter as audience surrogate, de facto narrator, and indexical reference point. The concluding section explains how turning tunnels into televisual spectacle reinforces a white masculine perspective on the border underground. Through these strategies, televisual news fetishizes the tunnel itself, often at the expense of engaging with the structure’s conditions of production and its geopolitical importance. By deemphasizing the human elements undergirding the creation of border tunnels, these reports align the tunnel’s spectacle of reality into what Nicholas De Genova calls

TV News and Spectacle  33

“border spectacle,” the persistent use of border enforcement practices as visually engaging demonstrations that promote an ideological agenda of nationalistic inclusion and exclusion. Like other elements of the border spectacle, televisual news reports uphold the discourse of border security by emphasizing distinctly white, male, and Anglocentric perspectives on how to visualize and make sense of the existence of border tunnels. The analyses in this chapter will unearth such latent dominant perspectives in mediations that purport to be sober factual investigations of a cross-­border phenomenon.

The Televisuality of the Border Tunnel To classify news special reports about border tunnels as televisual is more than claiming that these media texts appear on television. The televisual must be understood as a particular form of audiovisual perception emergent from specific industrial, stylistic, and technological operations. For Samuel Weber, “what one looks at in watching television is not first and foremost images [but] one looks at a certain kind of vision.”4 Television is foremost an audiovisual medium concerned with transmission, or the movement of information that overcomes spatial separation, and with the strategies to convey this sense of transmission. To think about borders and tunnels through the televisual, then, is to pay attention to the strategies that depict these as faraway yet immediate to audiences that do not have physical access to them. Technological changes, geographical issues, and industrial shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries were important components in the formation of the contemporary televisual mode of production. How specific topics are covered on televisual documentaries depends not only on the affordances of documentary but also on the strategies of televisual coverage, including the self-­reflexive use of videographic technologies and its specific mode of addressing the audience. Watching border tunnels on television reveals how these strategies allow for certain ways of offering the spectacle of reality. Tunnels prove particularly illustrative because, given the physical restrictions in depicting these structures, their televisual representations end up showcasing the media apparatus that renders them visual in the first place. Understanding the “certain kind of vision” presented by televisual tunnels

34 

TV News and Spectacle

requires that we understand how the focus on the spectacularization of basic facts about the structure obfuscates broader social and political elements tied to these structures, thereby reinforcing an unquestioning, nationalistic ideal of border security as neutral or benign. Consider the August 22, 2018, broadcast for 12 News on KPNX, the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, Arizona, which featured a segment about the Nogales Tunnel Task Force’s training facility. While introducing the segment, the news anchors sit at their reflective glass table in a medium shot. The five vertical panel screens behind them fill the entirety of the frame. Playing on these screens is video footage from a descent into a border tunnel. This footage clearly has been sped up to match the length of the introduction to the segment, depicting the entire descent in merely twenty seconds, and appears cropped given the tight framing. The medium shot and the reflective table surface draw attention to the middle of the frame, focusing the viewer’s attention away from the anchors and toward the speedy move through the tunnel (Figure 3). Although the video lasts only twenty seconds, the vertigo effect is palpable: it simulates a dive into the tunnel even before the report has been introduced. Notably, the footage displayed in the background screens does not form part of the segment being introduced. It is credited to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so presumably it was captured by one of the videography crews hired by the agency and licensed to news organizations. The tunnel depicted behind the anchors’ desk, we later find out, is far more enthralling than the one that reporter Antonia Mejia visits in her investigation. KPNX 12 News’ use of random footage as background to introduce a border-­tunnel segment offers a succinct example of the televisual strategies that television news rely on to make tunnel coverage spectacular. Even though the reporter goes into one of the training tunnels, the footage from the actual reporting segment does not provide any compelling visuals. By using stock footage from CBP and tightening the frame, the 12 News production team constructed a visually engaging (and perhaps hypnotizing) introduction to the topic of tunnels, ramping up audience interest and excitement before introducing an otherwise rote practice in border security. These aesthetic decisions are an example of what John Caldwell has theorized as “televisuality,” the emergence of a shift in the conceptual and ideological paradigms that governed the look and presentational

TV News and Spectacle  35

Figure 3. This stock footage background video of a descent into a tunnel offers a thrilling introduction to a segment about a routine description of Tunnel Task Force training facilities. (Source: KPNX 12 News, August 22, 2018; screenshots by author.)

demeanor of U.S. television. Televisuality emerged when television moved away “from a framework that approached broadcasting primarily as a form of word-­based rhetoric and transmission” and developed instead “a visually based mythology, framework, and aesthetic based on an extreme self-­consciousness of style.” The rise of new, portable video-­recording technologies and digital editing software in the 1990s allowed television

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TV News and Spectacle

stations to move toward new forms of visualization. In the case of television news, complex graphics, fast-­paced editing, and other visual effects replaced the traditional practice of an anchor reading the day’s news at the camera. The “look” of the news became as important as its content. Attending to televisuality means recognizing that the style of television programming is not a mere “vessel for content, issues, and ideas” but rather “one of television’s most privileged and showcased signifieds.”5 The most common appearance of border tunnels on television is in local news reports. These short reports appear every few months to discuss a new tunnel discovery or to cover a new development in CBP’s efforts to find and shut down tunnels. Sometimes the content of these clips does not constitute new news. A new tunnel may have been found, but there is rarely much to report beyond the basic facts about it, such as location, size, and structural features. As in the KPNX example, local news shows still find ways of covering border tunnels and presenting these reports in visually engaging ways. They do this out of necessity: local stations must fill the airtime with news that will attract viewers in order to sell advertising spots. Showy graphics and sensational content have historically proven to be dependable tactics to achieve these goals.6 A touchstone of televisual coverage is the medium-­specific appeal of presenting content live. Television producers have long exploited the idea of liveness as a way to argue for the medium’s immediacy and authenticity.7 Media scholars, in turn, have critiqued liveness as a fraught technologically determinist ideology that ultimately serves to negotiate with television production’s fragmentation to create the appearance of flow.8 This is certainly the case when television news aims to cover an ongoing crisis. Crisis, as Mary Ann Doane argues, becomes a defining characteristic of television when the medium transforms information into a commodity by insisting on its own forgetability.9 Television’s continued emphasis on “nowness” rather than memory depends in part on its capacity to appeal to liveness. Even when it relies on recorded materials, televisual imagery becomes most potent when it insists on immediacy. In the case of border security, there rarely are immediate events that demonstrate that state borders are under siege. Everyday events, such as migrants asking for asylum at a border checkpoint, must accrue meaning through moralizing narratives and specific formal strategies in order to constitute a “border crisis.” The news media coverage of the Central American

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“migrant caravans” during 2019 offers a clear example of this. The White House’s false claims that these caravans represented a threat to state borders were supported by the news’ insistence on reframing otherwise unremarkable movements of people northward as exceptional recurring events.10 More so than stories about migration, border tunnels actively refuse liveness. News programs cannot cover a tunnel discovery live, because they only learn about them after Tunnel Task Force agents have inspected the tunnel and deemed it secure. When news broke in January 2020 about the Tijuana Airport tunnel, the longest tunnel discovered up to that time, television reports rarely emphasized that the tunnel was first found in August 2019. News about this tunnel was “breaking” in January 2020 in the sense that only then had CBP officials released any information about it. By the time television news organizations reported on this tunnel, agents had already mapped out its 4,309-­foot length and drilled an access point separate from the tunnel’s original exit point—­ which was never disclosed—­in order to allow journalists entry into the structure. Other than the tunnel’s size, nothing about the information shared by CBP offered a compelling narrative about why this discovery and shutdown was significant. Officials did not find any drugs inside the tunnel, nor could they guess how much had been trafficked through it before. There were also no arrests tied to the tunnel and no information on how long it had been operational.11 The case of the 2020 Tijuana Airport tunnel illustrates how television reporting cannot rely on liveness to develop a sense of crisis in coverage about these underground structures. In the absence of liveness, constant repetition of images and the habitual reminder that border tunnels exist build the sense of importance needed for border-­security spectacle. Over time, one realizes that the narrative structure of local news segments functions according to a repetitive formula. The reporter acts as an audience stand-­in, asking a few questions but, for the most part, letting the CBP agent convey the relevant information. For example, in “Criminal Underground,” a November 16, 2015, segment on Tucson’s CBS affiliate KOLD, reporter Cynthia Washington covers the Nogales Tunnel Task Force’s efforts to install locked grates atop border sewers to prevent traffickers from using them.12 Washington stands off-­screen to the side as agent Kevin Hecht enters the sewers to demonstrate their ease of access for traffickers. A

Figure 4. In local news segments, reporters often act as stand-­ins for the audience while CBP agents enter the tunnels and share most of the information. (Source: KOLD News 13, November 16, 2015; screenshots by author.)

TV News and Spectacle  39

cutaway reveals the inside of the sewers from Hecht’s point of view before cutting back to a two-­shot interview between Washington and Hecht (Figure 4). Throughout this segment, the reporter remains at a distance from the tunnel structure, acting merely as audience surrogate and interlocutor with the CBP agent. Letting the state agent guide the action and shape the informational content of a segment is not uncommon for a local news broadcast, particularly since a station’s limited human and economic resources may not warrant investing in such short segments. In contrast, investigative reporting from national broadcast and cable news networks can draw on more resources to produce their border-­tunnel segments. The production value significantly increases in these segments. By foregrounding visualization technologies and developing more elaborate narratives, national broadcast and cable news networks find inventive means of spectacularizing these underground border structures.

Televisual Documentaries as Spectacles of Reality The strategies for documenting underground border tunnels and creating compelling television narratives around them date back to U.S. broadcasters’ attempts to portray the tunneling efforts under the Berlin Wall in the 1960s. At the height of the Cold War, Berlin was divided into West Berlin, run by the United States, Britain, and France, and East Berlin, run by the USSR. Because the division of the city happened suddenly, families and friends living on opposite sides of the city found themselves divided by geopolitical lines overnight. As the conflict escalated, further restrictions on travel meant increasing separation for these social groups. Additionally, declining standards of living in East Berlin incentivized many to attempt to escape to West Berlin. The Berlin Wall was a layered barrier that included concrete barriers, wire fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, and armed guards. Because crossing the wall without authorization was extremely difficult aboveground, tunneling underneath it became an attractive alternative. Students, activists, and other interested parties began forming clandestine groups to build underground tunnels connecting the basements of houses near the wall. The stories of these tunneling crews captured the attention of television news producers in the United States. As Mary Ann Watson explains,

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U.S. television found itself undergoing a crisis of legitimacy in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the aftermath of the quiz show scandals. The appointment of Newton Minow as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and his infamous 1961 “Vast Wasteland” speech, which derided the quality of all television programming at the time, signaled the advent of self-­inflicted reform for the three main broadcasters’ original content.13 As the Kennedy administration exerted continuous pressure on broadcasters to invest in programming that would educate the public, particularly in matters of international affairs, broadcasters turned to the television documentary in the early 1960s. During the peak season of 1962, the three major networks produced almost four hundred documentaries and featured six weekly prime-­time documentary series.14 Television producers also began to turn to documentary film forms, including advocacy films and war propaganda, as inspirations for the formal and narrative strategies of their nonfiction content, seeking to distance this content from the legacy of newsreels and radio commentary.15 NBC, CBS, and ABC found themselves looking for programming ideas that would be considered serious content in order to revitalize this tarnished image and preempt heavy-­handed regulation from the FCC. News of scrappy tunnelers in Berlin reached U.S. television producers at a time when such stories were exactly what was needed. Two of the major networks simultaneously developed their tunnel documentaries. The Kennedy State Department successfully prevented the airing of the CBS project, arguing that glorifying a mass escape from East Berlin on U.S. television might enrage the Soviets and spark a confrontation. However, the administration failed to do the same for NBC’s The Tunnel (1962), a ninety-­minute prime-­time special that followed a group of tunnel builders from construction to successful escape. Describing the elation of NBC producers after watching their crew’s footage from the Berlin tunnel escapes, journalist Greg Mitchell characterizes it as “history in the making, cinema verité, danger at every turn, day after day, happening right in front of the camera’s eye—­one might call it something new for TV, a reality show filmed at the frontline of the Cold War.”16 Such hyperbole is not unfounded. The Tunnel became a landmark success as the first television documentary to win the Emmy for “Program of the Year.”

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The historical precedent of U.S. television news reporting on the Berlin tunnels is significant to understanding the mediation of contemporary border tunnels for two reasons. First, it illustrates how industry practices and broader institutional changes influence the priorities of television news reporting beyond the actual content of the news. The need to legitimatize original television programming, particularly in regard to news reporting, offers important context for why CBS and NBC invested such time and resources to their respective projects. Current efforts at documenting U.S.–­Mexico border tunnels are less time-­and resource-­ intensive. Still, industry demands for spectacular and continuously novel content undoubtedly influences producers’ decisions to keep coming back to create extensive reports on new tunnel discoveries that are sometimes disproportionate to the newsworthiness of such discoveries. In contrast to the geopolitical state of affairs during the Cold War, agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection now incentivize the development of features about border tunnels as part of their own promotional efforts—­an aspect explored at length in the next chapter. Second, as the production decisions in The Tunnel demonstrate, and current news reports on border tunnels continue to attest, the figure of the tunnel offers a certain representational malleability for televisual documentaries. As a physical structure, the underground tunnel restricts representation: cameras cannot capture the space in its entirety; insufficient lighting means that footage can be grainy or dark; staging and spatial clarity are rare within the tunnel’s cramped quarters; liability measures and legal restrictions limit how and where reporters can approach the underground space. At the same time, these limitations can be mobilized in the creation of compelling narratives from the fragments of its visual depictions. There is already an appealing aspect in the fact that these indexical representations grant access to structures that audiences would never get to see otherwise. Producers can further use the tunnels’ recesses and limited visibility to build excitement and viewer interest. Narratively, by focusing on specific illicit structures, these reports can also concretize and localize the abstractions of various state-­led ideological wars: the Cold War, War on Drugs, or War on Terror. The border tunnel emerges in documentary media through the negotiation between limited visual capture and expanded narrative possibilities.

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Documentaries engage audiences at once in two forms of the pleasure of looking: the empirical and the experiential. We watch documentaries to know and to feel. The recorded elements of reality presented by documentary media are not merely sobering facts about the world but building blocks to construct a sensorial account of that world. The “spectacle of reality” involves entertaining the eye through form and light and entertaining the mind by showing something known in a new way or something not yet known that thereby becomes known.17 Documentaries about tunnels certainly draw their appeal from showing something not yet known that thereby becomes known. Since border tunnels remain inaccessible to most of the public, documentary footage becomes the main source to make these structures known. News reports about border tunnels satisfy “knowing spectators” (those who receive factual information and analyze it rationally) by showcasing structures that audiences may not be familiar with. At the same time, these reports engage “desiring spectators” (those who engage information through multisensorial experiences) when they represent tunnel structures in ways that prove entertaining or spectacular.18 Border tunnels prove to be an appropriate subject matter for the documentary’s “spectacle of reality” because tunnels themselves are spectacular structures. Not unlike how Wendy Brown characterizes border walls, underground border tunnels inspire a nearly “theological awe largely unrelated to their quotidian functions or failures.”19 The symbolic power of both these border structures, the impact they command on publics interested in border politics, precedes and exceeds the structures’ functionality. That symbolic power helps explain why state agents and traffickers may continue to build walls and tunnels, respectively. Through constant media exposure, border walls and border tunnels “generat[e] significant effects in excess of or even counter to their stated purposes.”20 Documentary media representations of border tunnels feed into the spectacle of reality by offering entertainment for the senses even when the entertainment for the mind—­that is, the basic facts of tunnel building and shutdown—­has been exhausted. Border studies scholars have long argued that maintaining borders requires not only physical structures and acts of violent policing but also the continuous symbolic reassurance that those structures and acts are implicated in the larger ideological investments of state sovereignty

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and national strength. De Genova refers to these connections as the “border spectacle,” the persistent and repetitive implication of the “materiality of border enforcement practices in the symbolic and ideological production of a brightly lit scene of ‘exclusion.’”21 Bordering practices include a negotiation between inclusion and exclusion; the border spectacle foregrounds the exclusionary tactics in a visually striking manner while maintaining the inclusionary ones within its shadow. The symbolic construction of this scene of exclusion demonstrates, validates, and legitimizes “the purported naturalness and putative necessity of [such] exclusion.”22 In the case of drug trafficking, for example, border spectacle consists of visualizing the violent aspects of combating cartels and individual smugglers while effacing the fact that most of the drugs flowing into the United States pass unacknowledged through regular ports of entry because of bureaucratic inefficiency or systematic corruption. Extending De Genova’s framework, this analysis of televisual reports on tunnels demonstrates how border spectacle is a media spectacle. The enactment of this spectacle through media productions allows it to scale up its reach, stakes, and effects. The border spectacle emerges from the images that shape, form, and contour it, yet “the spectacle is not merely a matter of images,” as Guy Debord argues. “It is whatever escapes people’s activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction.”23 Mediation mobilizes the spectacle of the border most strongly for publics who are geographically removed from the border region. These publics have no access to the material geopolitical border except through its mediated representations, and they may not know of, or may not care about, the practicalities of border enforcement in everyday life. In the case of border tunnels, however, publics both near to and far from the borderlands lack proximity to the real-­world referent. Media’s centrality to the creation of spectacle appears most starkly because it brings to life these underground spaces in excess of their real referent. The spectacle of the border tunnel lies in television’s capacity to use realistic tropes to make the structure more exciting than it really is. Comparing the 1960s documentaries about the Berlin tunnels with today’s U.S.–­Mexico border news reports illustrates how documentary media relies on human-­centered narratives to make these underground structures compelling. Historically and presently, the verité appeal of tunnel footage is an effect of both the immediacy of the representations and

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the world-­historical import attached to them by the aesthetic decisions from the production team. The Tunnel’s producer Reuven Frank famously explained that “the highest power of television journalism is not in the transmission of information but in the transmission of experience.”24 Likewise, media scholar John Ellis argues that “television can be seen as a vast mechanism for processing the material of the witnessed world into more narrativized, explained forms.”25 News can offer a “pleasurable” experience because the narrative form is recognizable and understandable, thereby ensuring that news programming will be pleasing for viewers.26 Media scholars have demonstrated how narrative thinking helped establish conventions of news broadcasts, how narrativization responds to and builds up the entertainment value of television news, and how drawing on narrative forms serves as the connective tissue between broadcast news and the rest of a network’s fictional programming.27 In short, while the authenticity of the tunnel footage offers some appeal, transforming these indexical images into a compelling narrative remains crucial to constructing the televisual appeal of tunnels. The Tunnel had two main human-­centered narratives attached to the underground structure: the construction of the tunnel and the moment of the escape. Because of the access producers negotiated with the tunnelers, the NBC crew was able to depict both instances. The footage of these events were not always recorded live: the scenes depicting the early months of the project, such as finding a house to build the tunnel from, were in fact reenactments shot during a break in the tunnel digging timeline.28 The NBC crew also filmed the builders during their leisure moments, adding valuable context and empathy for the protagonists to raise the stakes of their tunnel escapes. The high level of access and amount of time dedicated to recording and editing this television documentary offered the creators ample space to try out different story lines and to engage in various formal experimentations, as in presenting the footage of the dirty work at an excruciatingly slow pace. The televisual representations of tunnels across the U.S.–­Mexico border are starkly different in this regard. In an age of constant content production and unending circulation, these reports must be short, quick to catch the audience’s attention, and easily available. Even the most in-­depth looks at a trafficking tunnel (e.g., the Anderson Cooper 360° example analyzed later in this chapter) are produced within a week, less

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than fifteen minutes in length, and relegated to segments within longer news program episodes. Then there are the human restrictions specific to the tunnels themselves. Unlike the Berlin tunnels, news reports have no access to the builders of the U.S.–­Mexico tunnels. All the information comes from the agents shutting them down, so television networks tend to adhere to versions of the official state-­approved messaging.29 Despite what anti-­immigration proponents espouse, today’s tunnels are rarely used for moving people, so there are few human stories attached to the flows within the structure. The main story of the U.S.–­Mexico border tunnels is that of illicit capitalism gone underground. These two key differences—­the source of information and the lack of redemptive stories—­restrict the kind of narratives that televisual documentaries can attach to their depictions of border tunnels. Even when the documentary footage offers glimpses of the people who may regularly interact in these tunnels, the framing of television segments deemphasizes these human narrative elements. In the “Tunnels, Traffickers and Cartels” report from the BBC’s Newsnight, reporter Juan Paullier follows police officers and firefighters from the Mexican side of Nogales into a cross-­border underground storm drain. The group moves into the underground structure, and shortly thereafter Paullier narrates that “after [the policeman] turned on their flashlight, they saw someone and this person ran away.” Paullier looks straight at the camera while framed in darkly lit close-­up as he explains this. The shot following this revelation features the silhouette of a man in the far right corner of the tunnel’s darkness. The man is presumably one of the police officers leading the group, as he walks leisurely and carries a flashlight. Paullier explains on voice-­over that the man they found is ahead of the officers and that the crew has been asked to stay behind. Following the mention of this implied threat, the report cuts to the firefighter narrating a previous experience of coming into the tunnel and finding a group of people who asked him to ignore them and move along. The report provides no further context for either encounter with people inside the tunnels and no speculation on whether those people may be cartel operatives, potential migrants, or transients looking for a place away from the sun. These instances reveal the narrative limitations for televisual reports of border tunnels in the U.S.–­Mexico border. The people in charge of building the tunnels and those who use them are unlikely to appear on

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television, and even when they are mentioned, their stories are mediated through, and deemphasized by, the perspective of official state agents. Instead, the BBC report ends this sequence with three seemingly unlinked long shots. The first of these depicts the tunnel structure fairly well-­lit with the sun coming in through the water-­drain slits. As the camera moves forward, the tunnel curves and continues seemingly endlessly. An officer standing next to a water-­drain slit offers a reference for the

Figure 5. Using the rings of light created by the water-­drain slits, these shots present the length of the tunnel as nearly endless, spectacularizing the size of the structure. (Source: Newsnight, Tunnels, Traffickers, and Cartels, 2017; screenshots by author.)

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relative size of the tunnel. The next shot features an officer’s gear in the foreground and the darkness of the tunnel ahead. The final shot is a head-­on long shot of a straight stretch of the storm drain. Sunlight coming in through the slits creates a series of ever smaller rings that suggest the length of the tunnel until they disappear altogether (Figure 5). In this sequence, the report manages to represent the tunnel in a way that signals its size and depth despite the absence of more traditional establishing shots. Turning the tunnel’s physical characteristics into visual support cues, the filmmaking emphasizes the tunnel’s size without ever having to depict the structure’s enormity in toto. The report thus ends by returning to the spectacularization of the underground structure. Contemporary televisual mediations of border tunnels participate in the construction of border spectacle by foregrounding the physical and technical features of the underground structures and ignoring the few human-­centered narratives attached to these structures. Absent these narratives, television producers must turn to other strategies to make tunnel content compelling. In particular, English-­language televisual news reports about tunnels in the U.S.–­Mexico border lean on the televisual aspects of mediating spectacle by showcasing emerging video technologies. Likewise, without tunnel escapees as protagonists, these televisual documentaries rely on the reporter as the embodied reference and guide for audiences within the underground structures. In fetishizing emerging technologies and the reporters’ own bodies, these televisual reports implicitly replicate state-­approved narratives about the border spectacle, offering an entry into tunnels that reinforces a white, male, and Anglocentric perspective. Two reports explored in the sections that follow, from ABC’s Nightline and CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360°, exemplify these concerns.

Emerging Technologies and the Structure’s Point of View In November 2015, ABC News’ late-­night long-­form reporting show Nightline featured a segment hosted by Matt Gutman on the trafficking tunnels. In it, Gutman takes audiences inside and around the immediate vicinity of a tunnel running from Naco, Sonora, to Naco, Arizona. Like Cynthia Washington’s KOLD segment, this episode of Nightline

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relies on CBP agent Kevin Hecht to provide background and context on tunnel discovery and shutdown efforts. However, Gutman provides voice-­over narration throughout the segment as a way to stitch together various kinds of footage. He sets the pace of the story through his narration, and the editing follows this story by intercutting between shots inside the tunnel and context outside. Gutman’s journey into and through the tunnel is not linear but rather relies on the reporter’s commentary to make sense of the disparate pieces of information. The Nightline feature stitches together different sources of video: the camera operated by a videographer, the smartphone carried by Gutman himself, and a drone-­operated camera. Through these three types of video footage, the feature mediates the tunnel across distinct scales, oscillating between the extreme close-­up of the smartphone footage and the extreme long shot of the drone view. Each of these perspectives differently centers Gutman’s body and, in doing so, offers the audience a perspective on the relative scale of the structure. At the same time, foregrounding each of these technologies as the segment does often draws attention away from the issues under discussion and instead turns into a fetishization of the technologies themselves.30 The smartphone footage connotes intimacy and Gutman’s own point of view. The camera operated by a videographer captures Gutman’s entire body as he crouches and hunches inside the tunnel, revealing the structure’s cramped spaces and recording Gutman’s reactions to the atmospheric conditions. “Air smells sticky,” the reporter admits in one of these cutaway shots. The shots from a smartphone are grainy, poorly lit, and at odds with the more calculated shots of the videographer or the drone, but its inclusion contributes to the specifically televisual construction of the border tunnel. As Ellis points out, television news can bear to show images that are “badly framed, wrongly lit, unstable, [and] totally contingent” because television’s role is that of a “process of stabilization of that image material, carried out through documentary [tropes].”31 The smartphone footage feeds into the sensation of witnessing the tunnel from the reporter’s point of view despite the poor quality of these images (Figure 6). The rest of the report offers enough context into the source and importance of the images that their bad framing and lighting connote immediacy rather than detract from the authenticity of their representation.

Figure 6. The Nightline report sporadically includes images from Gutman’s smartphone. Despite the contrast in quality with the other footage, these images offer a sense of immediacy and authenticity to the report. (ABC News, Nightline, 2015; screenshots by author.)

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The final source material in the Nightline news report are shots from a drone’s view that offer a regional perspective on the site, first from the U.S. side at the beginning of the report, and then from the Mexico side toward the end. These takes begin with a full-­body shot of Gutman speaking to the camera to convey pieces of information. As the drone pulls back and up, it reveals the border wall behind Gutman and provides a view that stretches several yards away from both sides of the wall (Figure 7). During the report, Gutman explains that the length of the border tunnel is no more than a football field, presumably the relative size of the area captured by the drone’s perspective. Featured against the earlier close-­ups of the tunnel’s cramped insides, these drone view shots figuratively visualize the entire length of tunnels. The reporter’s body stands in the middle of both kinds of shots to remind viewers of the scale of the trafficking structure. The rise of portable, motion-­controlled devices in television news reporting radically changes the visual and epistemological perspective on the subject being reported on. As Caldwell argues: Motion-­control devices all do one thing for the television image: they automate an inherently omniscient point of view and subjectivize it around a technological rather than human center. . . . The ideological effect of this basic televisual apparatus is one of airless and high-­tech artifice. The televisual image no longer seems to be anchored by the comforting, human eye-­level view of the pedestal-­ mounted camera, but floats like the eye of a cyborg.32

To make this argument, Caldwell considers the rise of dolly-­mounted cameras that glide subtly and smoothly around the anchor’s desk within the television news studio, yet such observations apply equally to the use of drone cameras in the Nightline feature. As opposed to the standard, shoulder-­height perspective of the videographer’s camera that permeates most of the local news reports, Nightline’s use of drone footage and smartphone images throughout subjectivize the point of view from a technological rather than a human center. Gutman becomes the point of reference not for the news story itself but for the variety of visual perspectives offered about the border tunnel and its immediate environment. This shift in point of view is emblematic of the spectacularization of the border tunnel in televisual documentaries: it represents a shift away

Figure 7. Using a drone to film and the border fence as point of relative reference, this shot illustrates the presumed length of the tunnel from aboveground. (ABC News, Nightline, 2015; screenshots by author.)

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from the human-­centeredness of tunnel representations to a structure-­ centered point of view. Nowhere is this technologically assisted, structure-­centered point of view better illustrated than in the end of the feature with the introduction of tunnel robots. Gutman narrates that “Customs and Border Protection has robots that they insert in the tunnels.” The segment cuts to a shot of three CBP agents lowering a robot into a grate, followed by a shot of the robot inside a drainpipe. The shadow of the top of the robot occupies the center foreground of the shot while the robot’s light illuminates the center background, revealing the endless pipe ahead. The camera is positioned atop the robot, simulating an over-­the-­shoulder shot perspective into the tunnel (Figure 8). Of course, this “shoulder” is the robot’s—­as it rolls over dirt, the small machine’s shadow serves as a reminder that the point of view into this particular tunnel is entirely technological.33 The spectacle lies in the audience’s ability to perceive the underground structure in a manner that defies human perception. The drainpipe is small enough that someone who crawled inside it would have considerable difficulty maneuvering a camera. Instead, the robot facilitates the recording of the tunnel from an on-­the-­ground perspective that reconfigures the structure and makes it perceptible. Behind the

Figure 8. Positioned atop the tunnel robot, the camera provides an “over the shoulder” perspective that is entirely technologically centered. (ABC News, Nightline, 2015; screenshot by author.)

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fascination with tunnel robots lies not only a sense of technophilia but also a desire for the mediated spectacle of the tunnel as presented through this different kind of vision. For years, technophiles have subscribed to the narrative that robots are key to improving border-­security practices. In Makeshift magazine’s April 2015 issue, a short article titled “Tunnel Vision” opens with the line, “The US Border Patrol has gained some unlikely allies in its efforts to stifle drug smuggling activity: tiny remote-­controlled robots.” The write-­up details the features of these robots and characterizes them as “the latest tactic” to combat drug smuggling into the U.S. via tunnels.34 A similarly bombastic lead appears in a 2009 Wired magazine article titled “Bots vs. Smugglers: Drug Tunnel Smackdown”: “Semi-­autonomous robots that can navigate and map drug-­smuggling tunnels could be the greatest weapon to emerge from the government’s attempt to stamp out the trade in illicit substances across its borders.”35 In the six-­year span between these two articles, however, the efficiency of robots in anti-­drug-­smuggling efforts changed very little. As agent Tom Pittman explains to Gutman in the Nightline report, robots are useful in shutting down tunnels, but only insofar as they scout a suspected smuggling tunnel after it is detected. Robots inspect the tunnel and ascertain whether it is clear for agents to enter and whether it is structurally sound. Despite this technological assistance, the work that CBP agents perform remains the same. At least one agent must go into the tunnel and certify that it reaches beyond the geopolitical border for the agency to take action in shutting it down. Tunnel discovery itself still relies on old-­fashioned methods of intelligence gathering such as informants or citizen reports. Throughout this process, human agents perform the work of tunnel closure while technological means remain merely tools. Footage of a robot moving into the tunnel has appeared in a number of other television reports over the years. In the same year as the Nightline feature, it was also included in the segment “Criminal Underground” for KOLD, the CBS affiliate in Tucson. Two years earlier, the robot was the main focus of a 2013 segment titled “Border Robots” from local station KGUN, the ABC affiliate in Tucson.36 When Craig Smith, the reporter of the KGUN segment, ends by noting that “new robots are on their way,” the claim stands as much for the promise of actual robots joining the Tunnel Task Forces as for the multiple media representations

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of robots to come for years thereafter. Similar to how the episodic quality of televisual representations of tunnels mediates the structures’ implied threat, the repeated appearances of the tunnel robot promise a technological solution to border security that never arrives. Those watching these different reports may not have been able to tell that similar footage recurs across the years. Each of the reports integrates the footage into their story, papering over different sources with explanations provided by the reporter’s voice-­over. Television news achieves coherence largely due to its continuous “self-­referential subjectivity,” as Margaret Morse refers to the formal strategies that draw attention to the construction of the news story. Among the “constant relays of words and looks between narrators, of graphics and verbal segues over images, frames and wipes,” the reporter acts as the self-­referential storyteller whose narration holds the “flow of miscellaneous images together.”37 This is certainly the case in Gutman’s report: Nightline’s depiction of the underground tunnel largely relies on a montage of images from various sources. The images themselves do not suffice to fully depict the geography of the tunnel or to orient viewers as to their location within the structure. Instead, these various images function in support of Gutman’s narration. The reporter functions as the locus for audiences to make sense of the images and sounds they perceive in a short amount of time. Beyond the reporter’s role as narrator, the reporter’s body itself can operate as an embodied medium for understanding the physical structure of the border tunnel, as evidenced in the feature from Anderson Cooper 360° discussed in the next section.

Televisual Personalities and the Reporter inside the Tunnel Anderson Cooper was among the first U.S.-­based reporters to embed themselves in border-­tunnel reporting, featuring on-­location segments about tunnels for his CNN show Anderson Cooper 360° starting as early as 2006. At the time, his and other CNN shows had associated blogs written in the first-­person voice of the host. The blog entry for Monday, January 30, 2006, titled “Tunneling into America,” opens with a brief mention of the grave injuries suffered by the two ABC reporters embedded in Iraq, Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt, of which Cooper writes,

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“It’s one of those things all of us who’ve been to Iraq know can happen, but when it does, it’s still like a punch to the stomach.”38 He then transitions into explaining that he is in San Diego to explore a recently discovered 2,400-­foot-­long tunnel. Intentionally or not, this rhetorical transition from thinking about being embedded in Iraq to reporting on a border tunnel draws a connection between the two situations, a connection tethered to the reporter himself and the sorts of assignments he undertakes. Indeed, Cooper’s public persona as a daredevil reporter has served to mythologize his family trauma as the fuel propelling him to take risky and adventurous investigative assignments.39 The mediation of border tunnels in his reports is inseparable from this daredevil persona. Televisual news reports feature the embodied presence of reporters in at least three ways. In each of these, the bodies of reporters mediate between the content of the news report and the spectacularization of such content. Most reports feature the first manner for representing the reporter’s body, but fewer reports feature the second and third ways. In the first, the reporter acts as someone to listen and react to the information about tunnels conveyed by authorities, usually a CBP agent. The local news segments analyzed in the earlier sections are good examples of this function. Reporters will stand next to the agent and interview the agent. At other times, the reporter will stand above or behind as the agent moves into the tunnel entry. In these instances, being outside the tunnel structure mimics the removed perspective of the audience getting access to the tunnels through televisual documentaries. The reporter acts as audience surrogate both in the sense of a dedicated audience for the agent’s commentary and as an observer at a distance. The second function for the reporter’s body in these reports is as a material marker of relative scale. Television reports draw on the human body to visualize a space’s height and depth. As in the Nightline report, the reporter can first occupy the entire space inside the cramped tunnel and then walk among the vast expanse of the border region. Capturing the body in these two different spaces, and with different technologies, visually informs the viewer about the change in size. In its third way, reporters take on an exploratory capacity, putting themselves inside the tunnel for a prolonged period of time to capture the sense of “being there.” Here the reporter does not merely relay

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information to the audience but conveys the sensations and physical exertions demanded by being in such cramped spaces. The feature relies on the reporter’s body not only as a physical marker but as a living entity that can reproduce the sensorial environment of the underground space. Because television facilitates the direct address to the camera, correspondents can call attention to their embodied experiences, especially to what they feel and smell while going through the tunnel. This practice offers viewers insight into conditions within the structure that may not be readily noticeable through image and sound. Providing these further details adds to the realistic representation of border tunnels in televisual documentaries. At the same time, the modes of address serve as a reminder of the process of mediation. The focus on the reporter’s embodiment as a source of information also has its connections to the U.S. Iraq War coverage in the early 2000s, particularly in cable news. As Jaramillo argues, the embedded reporters of CNN and Fox News became media stars whose exciting and telegenic coverage of the atrocities of the Iraq War laundered military propaganda into entertaining segments. The reporters’ unkempt appearance as they reported from locations “in the middle of the action” added a sense of realism to their reports. The fact that they were traveling with the armed divisions gave reporters the ultimate sense of authority on the events depicted, even though, by their own admission, often they “were shown [by the military] what [they] came to see.”40 As Lindsay Palmer notes, there has never been an era when journalists could cover war or other state-­related topics without some degree of censorship or limited access. The industrial, technological, and political changes of the early twenty-­first century, including labor casualization and the rise of new media’s citizen journalism, have left freelance journalists in a more precarious position and perhaps more willing to adapt to the official story.41 Like the fetishization of emerging technologies, the body of the reporter spectacularizes the televisual representation of military-­related stories and obfuscates the mediation of state-­approved ideologies under the guise of realism. One of Anderson Cooper’s most in-­depth explorations of a border tunnel is the 2010 segment “Inside a Mexican Border Drug Tunnel.” The investigation reports on the tunnel discovered in Otay Mesa, California, in November of that year. Following a brief introduction, Cooper takes

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the audience through the various components of the tunnel operation. He begins standing in an unnamed residential street in Tijuana; then walks through the empty house that traffickers used to enter the tunnel; proceeds down to, through, and up from the tunnel itself; and ends by exploring the tunnel’s exit at a warehouse in San Diego. Throughout this excursion, he is filmed by a handheld camera and appears on-­screen by himself, with only the occasional shadow reminding viewers of the presence of the cameraperson. Despite traversing the tunnel without an accompanying CBP agent, Cooper relays the information provided by the agency and occasionally editorializes on what he sees as he moves through the multiple spaces. Dressed in a white long-­sleeve shirt, jeans, and sneakers, Cooper stands out as the wrong kind of body expected to be inside a border tunnel.42 Instead, Cooper embodies a spectacular whiteness tethered to his celebrity persona as a maverick male reporter and articulated in contrast to the popular image of poor migrants or smugglers wading through the dirt. Such spectacular whiteness enables two key representational strategies in this segment. First, it encourages viewer identification with someone who presents as “less other” than the imagined users of border tunnels by foregrounding Cooper as the primary and sole human connection to the mediated exploration of the tunnel. Second, Cooper’s richly embodied description of and interaction with the tunnel mystifies the structure into a thrilling space not unlike the dangerous sites the reporter was usually affiliated with. The feature follows a consistent camera setup as Cooper moves through these spaces: the camera will first follow Cooper from behind as he points toward and introduces the next room in his trajectory; following an editing cut, the camera then captures Cooper from inside the next room, looking back as Cooper enters it (Figure 9). The effect of this setup is twofold. First, it avoids the representational challenges of filming a tunnel. We never witness the cameraperson struggle into and out of the cramped spaces. The camera remains relatively stable, and the shots are consistently wide, well lit, and clearly visible. Choosing to focus the investigative feature on the 2010 Otay Mesa tunnel, a notoriously sophisticated and fully finished tunnel, proves to be particularly apt for this representational strategy. The unrestricted access to the structure that Cooper manages to secure also helps, since there are no other people walking, talking, or obstructing the carefully blocked shots.

Figure 9. In order to stage Anderson Cooper as the guide through the tunnel, the CNN feature cuts between shots from behind as the reporter exits a room (first and third images) and shots from the front as he enters the next room (second and fourth images). (CNN, Anderson Cooper 360°, 2010; screenshots by author.)

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These formal strategies also contribute to a second effect. By editing between the moments Cooper enters into the different spaces, the segment reinforces his presence as the primary guide of the tunnel experience. He is the sole source of factual information and the sense of embodiment. There are relatively few shots that visually portray the inside of the tunnel without centering Cooper. His narration and his physicality within the tunnel become the nexus for audiences to make sense of the structure logically and affectively. The segment’s trek through the main shaft of the tunnel consists of two long takes. The first captures Cooper straight-­on as he walks crouching across the tunnel. The second focuses on Cooper’s point of view on the tunnel as he moves forward. Notably, this pronounced 180-­degree shot/reverse shot structure relies on the tunnel’s infrastructure itself (Figure 10). Using the rails of the tunnel, Cooper pushes a cart on which the camera is placed, first facing toward him and then facing away from him and toward the rest of the tunnel. This setup allows for seamless camera movement that remains focused on the reporter and his point of view as he moves through the tunnel’s main corridor. Relying on a railway to steady the camera’s movements recalls the traditional filmmaking strategy of dolly shots. Also called tracking shots, these filmmaking strategies use a mobile platform set atop rails to create smooth, even movement in a scene. The camera can then follow the action across vast spaces or move toward or away from characters to convey something about the reality of their circumstances. Dolly shots are notorious not only for their complicated production but also for how they make spaces experiential in the process of recording them. In these shots, the controlled visualization of a scene conveys the experience of gliding through that scene. In the Anderson Cooper 360° report, it is further notable that the infrastructure for recording belongs to the very structure being documented. The 2010 Otay Mesa tunnel presents an opportunity to illustrate the border tunnel’s tunnelicity—­that is, its capacity to function as a corridor space in a literal and figurative sense and to depict the underground as a space of marvel and possibility. The main shaft of this tunnel is a straight hallway that allows for the rail to extend throughout the structure’s length, yet it also becomes a corridor space in how it enables particular forms of movement and visualization. By relying on the railway

Figure 10. In these two setups, the CNN feature uses the infrastructure of the tunnel itself to mediate the corridic structure. By relying on the tunnel’s railway, the camera can center Cooper in the reverse shots and offer a gliding perspective on the tunnel’s hallway. (CNN, Anderson Cooper 360°, 2010; screenshots by author.)

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to set the camera and track the reporter moving through the tunnel, the report’s representation of the tunnel reflects visually the structure’s materiality. The tunnel’s physical characteristics shape the strategies for its media figuration. It literally participates in its own mediation. The railway-­assisted takes inside the tunnel’s main shaft also represent the starkest moment where the feature erases the cameraperson in favor of foregrounding the body of the reporter. In the shot facing Cooper, it becomes clear that he himself is pushing the cart on the rails, a motion that is then matched in the reverse shot from his perspective. Whether or not the cameraperson assists in the movement of the camera in these takes remains obscured by the frame’s blocking, which centers Cooper as the literal driver of the visual exploration of the tunnel. Undoubtedly, there must have been breaks between these takes where the crew set up the different camera takes. There must have also been some rearranging to make sure the cameraperson was not visible in either of the shots. By actively working to erase the cameraperson’s work, the report purposely foregrounds Cooper’s physical labor in his reporting on the border tunnel. Furthermore, the body of the reporter functions as an indexical marker of the physical conditions of the tunnel spaces. In particular, Cooper relies on his own physiological responses to traversing the various cramped spaces to signal to audiences the conditions within which he is reporting. The latter half of the feature includes several moments when he is noticeably tired. As he approaches the U.S. side of the tunnel, Cooper seems out of breath as he explains the differences in the shoring­up technique on this end of the tunnel. He pants audibly as he moves up the large dirt steps to exit the tunnel. By the time he comes out of the tunnel in the warehouse in San Diego, Cooper is covered in dust and sweat, which he swipes off with his sleeve. Cooper’s report of the Otay Mesa tunnel offers a first-­person, embodied exploration of the structure. His body provides a material trace of the tunnel as an inhabited space: the effort of crouching and walking through cramped quarters, the dusty conditions of the tunnel, and the physical dexterity to manage climbing into and out of the space several feet underground. Cooper is emphatically tactile, pointing to and touching the aspects of the construction he wants to emphasize, such as the cinder blocks and wooden panels used to shore up the tunnel or the

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rails used to push carts through the tunnel. He also grabs things like construction tools left lying around and oranges in the crates housed in the warehouse in San Diego. These items stand as indexical reminders of the people who constructed the tunnel and the labor that went into that construction. By absent-­mindedly picking them up and putting them down, Cooper recenters the focus on himself and the tunnel structure itself. His direct address to the camera brings in viewers into his journey through the underground and across the border. In contrast to the standard local news reports, the features produced for Anderson Cooper 360° and Nightline do not merely relay information about border tunnels. These features also draw on the vulnerability of the reporters’ bodies to mediate the thrill of the underground. In Cooper’s case, this vulnerability becomes evident in the traces of physical exhaustion that the reporter conveys as he is navigating the tunnel. The structure’s cramped spaces, limited air supply, and significant length take a toll on his body as he moves through it. In the Nightline feature, Gutman makes vulnerability more explicit. He pointedly reiterates the safety measures that CBP agents enforce on the reporter and his crew. At one point, the feature cuts to a metal rod that Gutman explains almost hurt his head. Another short cutaway includes agent Kevin Hecht asking the video crew if they have undergone safety training. Finally, Gutman’s own narration tells us that Hecht’s one rule for the crew is “don’t touch anything” lest they compromise the mold on the shoring frames and cause the tunnel to collapse while they are inside of it. Drawing attention to these moments of bodily vulnerability within reports of trafficking tunnels allows for a sense of thrill and fascination with the underground structures that makes such feature reports more televisually appealing than straightforward informational reporting.

Border Spectacle as White Male Spectacle Both the Anderson Cooper 360° and Nightline reports trade on the daredevil charisma of the white male reporters to showcase the intricate dangers of and physical struggles within the tunnels they explore. Indeed, across the television features on border tunnels I have analyzed there have been several women reporters, but only a few whose feature included her performing an embodied exploration of an entire tunnel structure

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in the way that Anderson Cooper and Matt Gutman do. One of them revealed in my conversation with her that her feature only covered the U.S. side of the tunnel because, given that she worked for a local affiliate rather than a national news organization, insurance restrictions prevented her from doing the reporting on the Mexican side of the border. (She asked to remain anonymous.) The reasons for this gender disparity in border-­tunnel reporting could certainly stem from broader gender disparities within hiring practices for the television journalism industry. It could also result from gendered expectations about the different aesthetics attached to male and female reporters. Despite the ways that women investigative reporters often mobilize femininity and masculinity to gain privileged access to stories and to navigate dangerous situations,43 they may be less likely to be assigned to features that require them to present themselves sweaty and dusty on national television. For example, in a November 13, 2019, segment in News 4, the nightly news broadcast for Tucson’s NBC affiliate KVOA-­TV, reporter Lupita Murillo goes inside a practice tunnel within the Nogales Tunnel Task Force’s training facility. The segment includes one shot of Murillo inside a drainpipe demonstrating how agents will crawl on their hands and knees to move through the more cramped spaces of tunnels, but Murillo offers no commentary on the conditions of the tunnel and shows no sign of being uncomfortable (Figure 11). Televisual news reports construct the spectacle of reality through such emphasis on the reporter’s bodily risk during eyewitness reporting. Yet, since actual physical harm to famous reporters such as Cooper represents a significant financial loss to television networks, this kind of reportage results from “powerful legal, economic, and geopolitical apparatuses that also ensure [their] privileged social position,” including physical safety. As Pooja Rangan argues, the vulnerability of the reporter’s body in these features is minimal, but the theatrical dimensions of televisual reporting are “inevitably obscured by its documentary aura of high seriousness.”44 The mobilization of bodily vulnerability constructs a thrilling depiction of the tunnels as potentially dangerous places given the physical exertions experienced by the reporter. Building on the purported seriousness of news reporting and the documentary aesthetics that accompany this reporting, such mobilization also becomes a formal strategy to construct a spectacular representation of tunnels.

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In the long-­form televisual reports about tunnels I encountered, one exception to this gendered division also, incidentally, revealed a language difference. In a November 2013 segment on Telemundo’s long-­ form reporting show Enfoque, the feature opens with reporter Maria Paula Ochoa stating that she and her crew are following the “adequate [safety] protections,” but once inside the tunnel she interacts with the structure’s features in a more playful sense. In one take, she sits with her legs crossed on top of a cart used for transporting drugs, and wheels herself forward as she speaks to the camera. Despite her embodied interactions with the tunnel, Ochoa’s reporting downplays the extraordinariness of the structure and her own level of risk in inhabiting it (Figure 12). Likewise, Enfoque’s introduction of this segment fell more in line with Univision’s and with Mexican broadcast media’s framing of border-­tunnel coverage as related to the narcotrafficking wars rather than border security or national sovereignty. As a pointed counterexample, the Enfoque segment reveals how the performance of physical vulnerability performed by the male reporters in English-­language reporting is partly a fantasy that contributes to the mediated spectacle of tunnels. Ultimately, the spectacle of reality fabricated by televisual news reports about border tunnels is not merely an entertaining feature.

Figure 11. In her report, Lupita Murillo merely poses inside the tunnel but does not perform any physical discomfort or risk. (Source: KVOA, News 4, November 13, 2019; screenshot by author.)

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Figure 12. In her report, Maria Paula Ochoa does not overly perform bodily vulnerability but interacts more playfully with the features of the tunnel structure. (Source: Telemundo, Enfoque, 2013; screenshot by author.)

Understanding news reports as a televisual genre makes clear how the technical and formal decisions of production teams shape and influence the presentation of the basic facts of a news story to audiences. These decisions are far from neutral since they work to emphasize specific aspects at the expense of others. In the case of border tunnels, the fascination with the structure, and with the creative ways that news reports can present it on television, ends up privileging the spectacle of the border underground while sidelining the human elements involved in the construction and use of these structures. Such fascination also results in coverage of this one illicit structure far in excess of its material importance to issues of cross-­border traffic. Televisual news reports contribute to the politics of border spectacle not only by unquestioningly adhering to the state-­approved message on the threat of border tunnels but also by turning that message into entertaining content.

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2 REALITY TV AND PERFORMATIVITY

Border Wars was a popular reality television series that aired on the cable channel National Geographic for five seasons between 2010 and 2013. Drawing on the tropes of previous reality TV shows that followed police officers as they patrolled urban neighborhoods like Cops (1989–­2020), Border Wars cemented the look and tone of serialized media depictions of border agents. The show’s popularity also made it emblematic of the popular discourse around the state security apparatus in the years to come. Later shows like Border Security: America’s Front Line (Netflix, 2016–­) and Law on the Border (Animal Planet, 2012) recall many tropes established in the National Geographic series. Border Wars has been rightly critiqued for presenting a highly dramatized, propagandistic portrait of the border-­policing agents.1 The series, and others that came after it, turned the day-­to-­day activities of border-­policing personnel into dramatic scenarios, building sympathy for the executors of border-­enforcement practices at the expense of those on the receiving end of such practices. In this chapter, I return to Border Wars and examine it in comparison to the short-­lived 2018 Discovery Channel series Border Live and the 2014 video series created by Customs and Border Protection, What Lies Beneath. The aim here is to analyze the instances when all three of these series turned their focus to Tunnel Task Forces, inter-­ organizational groups dedicated exclusively to finding and shutting down 67

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border tunnels. Tunnel Task Force teams include agents from CBP, the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), assorted other DHS personnel, as well as some members of state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies. As explained in the Border Tunnel Task Force Act, Tunnel Task Forces are deployed in “jurisdictions that are significantly impacted by cross-­ border threats.” Their inter-­organizational composition is intended to foster a “comprehensive law enforcement effort to detect, investigate, and destroy the illicit international highways used for trafficking drugs, humans, and weapons in and out of the U.S.”2 Border Wars and the shows that followed it promoted their access to and insights into the work lives of the personnel in charge of U.S. border security. Implicit in such representations is an endorsement of border enforcement and a curiosity for the labor that goes into the deployment of that enforcement. Through close examinations of scenes about Tunnel Task Force agents in Border Wars and Border Live, in this chapter I analyze how the tropes of reality TV facilitate the introduction of the labor of border security to a popular audience. Reality TV’s promotion of rugged individualism and its creation of heightened dramatic stakes from mundane events prove to be valuable to the performance of border security. These representations of agents at work zero in on specific aspects of workers’ tasks to construct dramatic narratives about how such aspects matter to the larger mission of the organization. Portraying the aspirations and experiences of border-­policing agents as workers creates a space where ideological negotiations over the relative value of their specific job roles can play out. By offering a partial and curated perspective into the goals and ideals driving those who perform border policing, these shows shift focus away from the targets and the effects of such policing. Reality TV and border enforcement share the characteristic that both are primarily concerned with performance. Scholars have persuasively argued that border security consists not only of legal and bureaucratic procedures but also of carefully orchestrated performances for public consumption: constructing walls, raiding immigrant communities, promoting nativist sentiments. The impact of such performances increases exponentially when they are recorded and circulated widely through various forms of media. For Peter Andreas, the “ceremonial” practice of border enforcement, where seizing contraband and arresting

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smugglers “take the form of a ritualistic performance,” suggests that even if individual acts of seizure and arrest do not contribute significantly to minimizing drug trafficking, these policing practices are “politically popular expressions of the state’s moral resolve.”3 As Nancy Wonders argues, “state policies have little meaning until they are ‘performed’ by state agents [and] by border crossers.” Border agents “play a critical role in determining where, how, and on whose body a border will be performed.”4 Most often these bodies are those of populations already subjected to other forms of policing: people of color, citizens of the Global South, Indigenous people. Border agents act as representatives of the state and enact its policies in their interactions with minoritized subjects. The contingent and context-­dependent qualities of border inspections map borders onto racialized and gendered bodies.5 Explicitly or implicitly, these scholars suggest understanding border enforcement through the notion of performativity, where speech acts and gestures have the force to bring about that which they name. Media directly produced or indirectly supported by the state creates a space for that performativity. Reality TV shows about the work of border enforcement add another dimension to the performance of border security. The popularization of this television genre has given rise to “modes of observation in which high degrees of self-­consciousness and openly performative display to camera (both in speech and action) are routine.”6 That is, people are more likely to “perform” on-­screen even if they are not trained actors, while viewers are more attuned to the ways “regular people” offer variations of their persona when they know they are being filmed. Understanding the work of reality TV shows as evidence of the need for border security in general, and Tunnel Task Forces in particular, is inseparable from the agents’ continuous self-­conscious performance of the value of their labor in these series. I argue that state-­approved depictions of Tunnel Task Force agents mobilize the tropes of “reality” afforded by reality TV to narratively shift the focus toward these agents, to promote their importance within the border-­security apparatus, and to displace the risks associated with border policing from the victims to the perpetrators. Focusing on the agents who find and shut down tunnels shifts attention away from those who build these tunnels, including their technological and labor expertise. Having dedicated airtime to their border-­enforcement activities also

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benefits Task Force agents, because it distinguishes them from workers in other sectors of the broader border-­security apparatus of the DHS. These reality TV appearances allow border-­enforcement agents to grab the spotlight and shift popular attention away from those most affected by their practices, such as migrants, border residents, and people of color generally. Although this ideological displacement occurs across the media portrayals of other border-­security agencies,7 tunnels prove particularly valuable in staging these representational struggles. Given the special training needed to enter and navigate underground tunnels, Task Force agents emphasize their uniqueness within the DHS organization by signaling how the hazards of tunnel shutdown would prevent regular border agents from participating in these activities. Mobilizing the popular misconception that tunnels are used by both traffickers and migrants, the agents in charge of shutting down these illicit structures can also cast everyone they encounter as already criminal and dangerous. Then, by foregrounding the hazards of tunnel shutdown and casting all those found within them as potentially dangerous criminals, Tunnel Task Forces essentially reposition border-­enforcement agents as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of harm. The trope of rugged individualism, the performance of work, and the high-­stakes drama emblematic of reality TV abet this ideological displacement. How media ideologies become insidious and normalized depends on a complex set of relations that cannot be fully explained by the notions of media effects or propaganda. The examples of Border Wars and Border Live certainly illustrate how dominant ideologies about the securitization of state borders reinforce white masculinist nationalist sentiments, but they also reveal the fraught relationship between media figurations of tunnels and the discourse of border security as well as the instability of dominant frameworks that promote border enforcement. The shows repeatedly undermine their own attempts at raising the stakes of the Border Patrol’s routines and vacillate, often contradictorily, between their purported aim, the footage recorded, and the formal strategies that the producers can use in postproduction. The first section of this chapter attends to this ambivalence within official state propaganda by looking at What Lies Beneath, a short video campaign about Tunnel Task Forces created by CBP. The next two sections turn to the affordances of reality TV for the promotion of these Task Forces. In the first I analyze the

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ideological resonances between this genre and border-­security performance, and in the second I argue that the trope of rugged workplace individualism serves as a powerful rhetorical tool to shift the victim role away from the targets of border policing to the perpetrators. The chapter’s final section uses the case of Border Live as a limit case for the mediation of border enforcement. In its adherence to liveness, Border Live relied on the “telling” rather than the “showing” function of documentary media, and thus it failed to dramatize the performance of border security as successfully as its predecessors.

Mediating Ambivalence in Official Border Propaganda Frontline is a digital publication published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection that features stories about the agency in multimedia formats. It began as a quarterly print publication between 2008 and 2013, then returned with a redesigned look between 2015 and 2018. The digital version of the publication began in 2014 with the video series What Lies Beneath, a look at the Nogales Tunnel Task Force. The digital version continues to feature short, almost monthly stories about different CBP operations. Written in the style of human-­interest stories, these posts most often reframe the policing work of CBP agents as socially conscious missions. For instance, during the widely publicized human rights abuses of Central American migrants in 2018 and 2019, Frontline published a story about CBP agents “fighting child exploitation.” Photos of agents carrying children in their arms accompanied quotes from agents stating, “We’re all fathers. We’re not mistreating children. . . . We try to comfort them as a father would.”8 Quotes such as these are not only counterfactual but also reveal the paternalistic terms that frame border policing. These obvious lies in the face of widespread accounts to the contrary demonstrate the rote purpose of the digital publication as explained in its “About” page: “The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined that publication of this periodical is necessary in the transaction of public business by CBP.” In its multimedia coverage, Frontline acts primarily as a public-­relations publication for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The main purpose of What Lies Beneath, or any media about Tunnel Task Forces, is to promote the idea that the tunnel-­shutdown initiatives depicted therein are directly responsible for decreases in trafficking

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efforts. Despite mentioning that “traffickers are nothing if not inventive,” nowhere in these media do agents raise the possibility that the reduced number of tunnel discoveries could be due to traffickers bettering their infiltration practices. The performance of security captured in these videos purports to be reassuring in and of itself. The expressive role pursued by labor documentaries about Tunnel Task Forces is therefore performative in the sense that the work of the videos is “to enact or produce that which it names,” to bring about border securitization through its mediation.9 The performativity of mediated border security stands in for securitization itself. The performative aspect of tunnel shutdown proves especially crucial because, quantitatively, tunnels are not the most significant form of drug smuggling into the United States. The former head of the Border Patrol’s Nogales Station in Arizona, Gary Widner, readily admits that tunnel trafficking is but a fraction of the smuggling activities across the border. Although he reinforces the importance of tunnel interdiction efforts in his multiple press interviews, he also notes that smuggling organizations adapt quickly and creatively to these efforts.10 Speaking to the media production arm of the conservative think tank Reason TV, Deputy Special Agent Joe Garcia of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force explains the purpose of their group as “mak[ing] it so unattractive to do the type of work that they do [i.e., trafficking through tunnels] that they’ll go somewhere else and do something else.”11 In interviews such as these, the agents in charge of tunnel interdiction themselves admit to the limited impact of their activities within the broader phenomenon of drug trafficking. Reports from the U.S. government itself mention that the majority of drugs actually cross through ports of entry.12 Indeed, the 2017 Executive Orders to increase Border Patrol hires at the same time that Anti–­Border Corruption Act protections were dismantled set the stage for more bribes to CBP officials and smoother trafficking through regular ports of entry.13 Anthropologist Howard Campbell suggests that the Border Patrol’s interest in finding and shutting down tunnels has less to do with the amount of drugs that pass through them than with their symbolic value. “With the Department of Homeland Security spending billions of dollars annually on agents and technology,” he argues, “smugglers outwitting their efforts with shovels and pickaxes doesn’t look good.”14 If the ceremonial aspect of border security lies in

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reinforcing the nation-­state’s values like the notion of the U.S. superiority in technology, then the performance of this security must obfuscate the myriad instances that undermine such superiority. As I have argued elsewhere, tunnels prove a privileged structure for the mediation of border-­security risk for several reasons. Because of the tunnels’ sophistication, the visual awe they inspire is partially grounded in their physical characteristics. This material-­representational convergence provides a solid problem-­and-­solution approach to the implementation of border security: finding a tunnel, hiring a construction company to fill it with concrete, and shutting the tunnel down. Tunnels also allow the performance of border security to act as a preventive move. Municipal governments and CBP agents emphasize the “closing” of tunnels that are still inoperable, long from being finished.15 By focusing on the Tunnel Task Force as an entry into exploring underground border tunnels, What Lies Beneath deflects the “technological awe” of trafficking tunnels from those who build them to those who shut them down. Sophisticated tunnels are complex structures designed and built by expert engineers trained in mining industries; they take years to build and require substantial resources and labor. However, there is no indication of this aspect in the series. One of the videos refers to the DHS categorization of tunnels into rudimentary, sophisticated, and interconnected, but the campaign overall ignores any details of how these tunnels differ in terms of composition and technical expertise. Tunnels become structures that arise all on their own but must be shut down lest they actualize their potential threat. The mediation of tunnels within these documentary media perpetuates myths about the asymmetry of technological innovation. By ignoring the complexity of the structures they seek to shut down, border-­policing agents present themselves as cutting-­ edge technology users while traffickers remain unsophisticated criminals with elementary tools. Still, foregrounding tunnel-­shutdown efforts begets a paradoxical stance: since these structures are underground and hidden, they must be made visible, but only briefly and only so that their shutdown becomes a significant event. In her content analysis of press releases from national security agencies between 2003 and 2012, geographer Cynthia Sorrensen concludes that “since the subterranean space is less visible than the surface, security agencies [must] demonstrate knowledge and therefore

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security through descriptions of the physical characteristics of tunnels.”16 Mediating border security likewise consists of this two-­part process. First, media makes the state of insecurity visible by shedding light on the fact that sophisticated tunnels exist. At the same time, the mediation of insecurity includes within itself the performance of security, such as the act of shutting down the tunnels that have just been made visible. This two-­step dynamic presents the drop in the number of tunnels found as an effect of the demonstration of security. The videos in What Lies Beneath attempt to serve as visual demonstrations of the sophistication and “technological awe” of the efforts to shut down tunnels.

Better Border Security through Reality TV While What Lies Beneath demonstrates a rather straightforward approach to state propaganda, Border Wars demonstrates how the formal strategies and narrative tropes of reality TV further abet such efforts. The show’s successful production of thrilling segments about a variety of sectors within the DHS umbrella signals how documentary media about labor operate not only as promotion for an industry but also as documents of the structural organization of said industry. Before production began on a season of Border Wars, representatives from various DHS agencies, such as CBP, ICE, and the Coast Guard, would gather to pitch stories that could be featured on the series. Once the stories were approved to not interfere with ongoing investigations and deemed compelling enough for television, station chiefs offered names of agents who could be shadowed by the television crew. These agents had to be telegenic, preferably bilingual, and willing to submit to a more in-­depth background check than the standard for their agency. Stricter background checks were required for those agents featured in Border Wars so that the agency would not be embarrassed if, given public scrutiny, one of those agents turned out to be caught in a corruption scandal, undermining the otherwise positive representation of the series.17 From the hours of footage shot over ten weeks with up to twelve different teams, producers created around a dozen one-­hour episodes. The creation of purportedly candid “on-­ the-­ground” moments in fact involved the negotiation of organizational priorities and relied on cooperation at the inter-­and intra-­organizational level.

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Showcasing a specific department’s work has value within the organization if it means arguing for resources and reinforcing that department’s essential role to the organization as a whole. In the film industry, for instance, struggles over recognition play out when one department’s success in making its work seemingly invisible on-­screen ends up undermining its ability to argue for the value of that work as labor.18 In border security, the incorporation of various agencies previously reporting to separate bodies under the banner of DHS places an onus on each individual agency to prove its indispensability for the project of border security. Getting airtime within a television series like Border Wars becomes one strategy to prove indispensability in the minds of mainstream audiences. As small inter-­organizational units within the expanding border-­ security workforce, Tunnel Task Forces benefit immensely from having their work showcased and therefore valued in compelling media narratives. Reality TV appearances by Tunnel Task Force agents serve to illuminate the purported exceptionality of these white male agents and to cast their work as essential to the functioning of the border-­security apparatus. The airtime also opens up opportunities for further promotion: these state-­sanctioned media offer a curated glimpse into the work of highly specialized groups that would later become resources or scripts for news organizations looking for a story. During the show’s five-­season run, the producers of Border Wars made no secret of the fact that they closely coordinated with these agencies to create stories from the perspective of those working in border enforcement.19 While the show’s first season took place exclusively in Nogales, the success of that early run allowed producers to move to other major centers across the U.S. side of the border. The different locations offered new opportunities and challenges from a production perspective. Filming in more robust security operations offered new areas to focus on, but also limited the exposure to the more sensational aspects of the earlier episodes. As producer Nicholas Stein explains: We headed off to San Diego and it was really interesting to see the differences between Nogales, which is this landlocked, desert, mountainous, you know, porous border area . . . in terms of putting up the new technologies, the triple-­fencing, the sensors, the cameras, the lights, and all of this sort of thing. Southern California got

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Reality TV and Performativity all that before any other part of the country did. And, you know, I kind of joke with the officers a little bit that, you know, what’s good for America can sometimes be tough on a TV producer because, you know, they got this place much more locked down than Nogales and yet the action is still happening. The numbers are different. In Nogales, we’d get 20, 30, 40 immigrants in a group who’ve been coming across the desert over the mountains. In San Diego, you’d get 2, 3, 4 in a group.20

Stein bemoans the lack of action in San Diego, a more heavily militarized border city, because an understaffed and more porous border-­crossing center like Nogales makes for more-­exciting television. From the perspective of DHS, featuring these other locations meant getting to showcase new surveillance technologies and promoting a more robust image of security. From the television producer’s perspective, more surveillance technologies meant less-­compelling drama. The coordination between these two aims—­reality TV drama and border-­security promotion—­ structures most of the production decisions on the show. Behind the appearance of merely following CBP crews as they respond to crises at the border, Border Wars was in fact the result of methodical planning, single-­perspective storytelling, and precise content curation. It cannot be expected to depict the border “as it is really like.” In fact, it cannot even be assumed to show border-­enforcement activities as they really are. Stein’s claim that “it was important to get on the ground and really see [what is] happening” comes with the caveat that “really, this [show] is a look from the point of view of the federal law enforcement folks.”21 The show and its progeny should be approached as carefully constructed versions of the official state narrative of border enforcement, but they must also be understood as exemplars of the reality TV genre. For one, these shows demonstrate the resonances between border security’s performance of “the homeland” under threat and reality TV’s neoliberal impetus to condition viewers into a constant state of vigilance. As Laurie Ouellette and James Hay note, “the increase of technologies for managing risk and security (including reality TV) has dovetailed with the privatization of welfare and the promotion of personal responsibility, as well as with heightened attention to terrorism and national security issues.”22 These connections are not mere coincidences. How the idea of “homeland security” gained traction in the United States during the first decade of the twenty-­first century depended as much on the

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investment in new policing forces like ICE as it did on the repurposing of an array of programs “through which nonmilitary citizens have been expected to look after their own welfare and security—­to be the new first line of defense.” DHS contributed to this individualized sense of self-­defense not only by consulting on programs but also by actively promoting public campaigns that “chastis[ed] citizens who were not responsible in recognizing risk and in learning about how to manage their own individual survival.”23 In addition to spreading this individualized sense of risk, border-­ security reality TV shows, like policing shows writ large, also shape social ideas about crime and justice into stark dichotomies between righteous cops and guilty felons. In his analysis of Cops, Aaron Doyle argues that the show’s transformation of “raw reality” into made-­for-­TV stories reinforced preexisting ideological inclinations among audience members toward “law and order.” Yet the show’s formal techniques also affected how audiences made sense of crime narratives in other media, including news and advertising, and even influenced how the show’s events and practices were later taken up in the criminal justice system.24 The “devious genius” of Cops, as Alyssa Rosenberg calls it, lay in how it managed to get the targets of policing to “acquiesce in the show’s depiction of their own worst moments.” According to creator John Langley, the show’s popularity helped producers get as many as 90 percent of those arrested on camera to sign releases so that their unblurred faces could appear on-­screen. In turn, the police were able to present themselves as dedicated and sympathetic, agreeing only to depictions that portrayed them conducting patient questioning and offering help.25 In the case of Border Wars and Border Live, the shows promote the righteousness of the officers in two main ways: by presenting the work of border security in meticulous step-­by-­step processes and by reframing the potential risks of this work as markers of the officers’ rugged individualism. The on-­the-­ground aesthetic of these shows falls under the “reflexive” mode of documentary, which foregrounds the process of encountering the documentary subject and relies on the subjects themselves to carry the drama of the narrative.26 While the “telling” function of these reality TV series consists of granting audiences (some) access to the hidden mechanisms of the border-­policing institutions, their “showing” function consists of depicting the time and effort that goes into creating the work, often with painstaking attention to minute details in the

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process. Specific formal strategies, including editing, sound, and camera choices, can help not only to aggrandize small details but also to exalt the agents who perform such routine tasks. As examples of reality TV’s adherence to neoliberal tenets, Border Wars and Border Live foreground the individualistic focus on the work of working-­class white men and extend the meaning of individual creative actions by connecting them to extended networks of production and meaning making, thereby suggesting that these individual actions carry broader implications. Rarely do these media explain the relative importance of finding tunnels to trafficking interdiction efforts. Depictions of Tunnel Task Force agents investigating and shutting down tunnels become marked as significant wins for the U.S. strategy against illicit drug trade, when facts often downplay the relative impact of one tunnel against other forms of trafficking narcotics.27 These media purposefully take individual acts of tunnel detection and shutdown as metonymic of the larger border-­ security apparatus. In doing so, these mediations simultaneously elevate the act of a single tunnel closing into a grave matter for the security of the state and promote the ongoing efforts to fund, expand, and sustain networks of border policing. The discursive work of Border Wars and Border Live pivots on these three aspects: depicting labor expertise, connecting work to broader implications, and reinforcing the exceptionality of those who perform such work. Consider the segment from the Border Wars season 4 episode titled “Tunnel Smoke Out.”28 The segment begins with Task Force agents Kevin Hecht and Tom Pittman getting out of their CBP pickup truck and walking toward the driveway of a house in Douglas, Arizona, where HSI agents are already congregated. It then cuts to a talking-­head shot of Hecht and Pittman describing what they do and why they are in that location: Pittman: We’re in from Nogales. We’re Nogales agents. The Douglas [HSI] agents called us over here. Kevin and I have a lot of experience in dealing with tunnels. Hecht: The tunnels are always dangerous. You never know what to expect.

Following a quick montage of the HSI agents inspecting the inside of the house, we cut to a medium close-­up of Pittman standing inside a hole in the floor as he explains that they suspect this hand-­dug portion of the tunnel is the exit. Footage from a “snake camera,” a small flexible

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tube, shows the inside of the tunnel, revealing a possible collapse. The next series of shots capture the hands and legs of a number of agents as they bring in some equipment, including a floor fan. Throughout, we only get to see the face of one other agent, and only Hecht and Pittman address the camera. The segment clearly intends to showcase the work of Pittman and Hecht exclusively: other agents come in and out of the shots, but they do not address the camera and their roles are never explained. Sitting somewhere inside the house, Hecht notes in a talking-­ head shot that they will be putting smoke into the hole and pushing it with the fan to see if it moves through the tunnel and comes out on the Mexican side of the border. If the smoke does come out, they will have found the entrance; if it does not, they can assume the tunnel has collapsed and is not a threat. “We’ve never done something like this before, so we’ll see how it works out,” admits Pittman. The admission that they are trying out a new technique contrasts with their earlier interview when they introduce themselves as experts in dealing with border tunnels. Pittman’s delivery suggests he wants to present this information as a marker of dexterity and quick thinking, but the conclusion of the segment proves the failed tactic to be the result of poor planning. The plan, it seems, is for Pittman to tape a smoke grenade to the end of a wooden pole and push that pole into the tunnel. The sequence devotes almost an entire minute and three different shot compositions to the agent as he tapes the grenade to the pole. The payoff to this strategy, however, devolves rather quickly. Once Pittman pulls the grenade cord and pushes the grenade-­attached end of the pole into the tunnel, the smoke appears rapidly. As the camera zooms out, smoke engulfs the hole, fully occluding Pittman. A quick camera move and jump cut suggest a break while the videographers rearranged themselves. The next shot is a medium shot in front of the entrance to the hole. Smoke still occupies most of the frame, but a boom mic is visible near the top. Three arms appear from outside the frame as Hecht repeatedly asks, “Get him out. Tom, can you breathe?” The camera moves a few steps backward and then Pittman appears from behind the cloud of smoke. The final shot depicts the waists of Pittman and two other officers shrouded by what now seems like yellow smoke. Pittman explains that the smoke came back out of the tunnel faster than expected and calls for everyone to move out (Figure 13). The sequence ends abruptly and without any debrief from the agents involved.

Figure 13. After spending most of the sequence detailing the agents’ approach to the tunnel, the most exciting moment in “Tunnel Smoke Out” comes from the failure of their experimental strategy for inspecting the tunnel. (Source: National Geographic, Border Wars, 2012; screenshots by author.)

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“Smoke Out” reveals the formal strategies that Border Wars relied on to create drama out of routine inspection work by Tunnel Task Force agents. It begins by explaining their presence on the scene as tied to their being experts on the matter of tunnels. The main action consists of a single goal: assessing if the tunnel is operable or if it is collapsed. The bulk of the segment consists of the agents as they go through a series of minute tasks in pursuit of this goal. Notably, the denouement offers the most intense moment of drama, yet this dramatic climax is the result of a work hazard. Their strategy for verifying the state of the structure carried unforeseen dangers, but these dangers were unrelated to the threat of the tunnel itself. The narrative stakes turn out to be tied to the agents at work. The segment thus succinctly illustrates the appeal of these reality TV shows for the border-­enforcement agents participating in them: depicting the work that goes into the performance of border security, tying small details of the everyday operations of these workers into larger narratives about the border, and reinforcing the idea that they are uniquely qualified to perform this work. As the segment shows, however, these depictions were sometimes ambiguous. Though the sequence’s formal choices suggest that the production team intended to portray the agents as always competent, they were restricted by the footage captured. Postproduction decisions could only do so much to erase simple tactical mistakes like introducing the smoke grenade without accounting for blowback. These moments of breakage from the dominant ideologies within state-­approved media illustrate the fact that what is on-­screen is itself a performance, one fraught with ruptures and instabilities ripe for critical analysis.

Whiteness, “Blue-­Collar” Work, and the Performance of Individual Risk In her history of the rise of the Border Patrol, Kelly Lytle Hernández argues that “control in the borderlands evolved as the story of race in the United States.” Border Patrol practices imagined their targets as a specific intersection of gender, class, and complexion: what Hernández calls the “Mexican Brown.” If the role of police forces within the United States has been to perpetuate racial stratification across the Black/white divide, then the role of police forces from the United States toward the

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outside is to perpetuate racial stratification across the legal/illegal divide.29 The surge in the number of Latinx border-­policing agents over the past few decades has prompted questions about the extent to which institutionalized and internalized racial hierarchies supersede ethnic affiliation.30 Research shows that these Latinx citizens align themselves with the institution historically tasked with persecuting the “Mexican Brown” because of the promise of job stability, revealing how individual self-­interest drives the support of institutions that uphold whiteness.31 Examining media representations of CBP agents helps reveal the structural dimensions of racial hierarchies and the ways institutions work to reinforce these hierarchies. Even when individual agents may be people of color, their representational roles within the organization are to stand in for whiteness and to uphold the U.S. legal racial stratification. Reality TV appearances prove particularly adept for promoting these dual roles. To see the border from the perspective of a CBP agent in these shows is to adopt what Rosa Linda Fregoso calls the “point of view of whiteness,” a set of “institutionally and historically determined codes, conventions, modes of address, [and] mechanisms of vision” that overdetermine the viewer’s understanding of the border into dominant white and masculine frames.32 The ideological effacement that positions whiteness as neutral is not unlike the ideological articulation of reality TV as “reality.” As Catherine Squires notes, “the ‘invisibility’ of whiteness provides white reality television participants with an easier time giving the impression that they are presenting an authentic self.”33 In short, analyzing the media about CBP agents reveals how these representations most successfully perform authenticity when they adhere to the point of view of whiteness despite the diversity of the agents themselves. For that reason, I propose we understand Border Wars in the context of the rise of reality TV series premised on exalting the working-­ class white man. Shows such as Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Duck Dynasty, and Ax Men promoted a conception of the U.S. working class as consisting of white men who embody concepts of rugged individualism and life on the “frontier.”34 Gareth Palmer distinguishes this trend from an earlier moment in reality TV when the working-­class man was the subject of police targeting. In the era of Cops, the “ancient line between ‘us and them’ is still being drawn and we are thus invited to take our place as citizens.” The work of the police positioned viewers against the

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criminals; police officers’ sacrifice was on “our” behalf for the greater good. In more recent shows, we encounter working-­class men themselves combating the circumstances that must be overcome for the survival of that community. Reality TV programs such as American Trucker, Coal, Deadliest Catch, and Swamp Loggers “all remind us that some men are still engaged in primitive struggles to sustain both the economy and the definition of heroic hegemonic masculinity.”35 These shows present working communities by using dramatic techniques to foster our emotional engagement with the subjects. Key among the generic narrative tropes that Border Wars shares with this newer strand of reality TV series focused on “blue-­collar” workers is the mobilization of individual risk as a sign of authentic masculinity. As Laurie Ouellette argues, “reality television’s fascination with working-­class subjects, particularly male laborers, is traced to the origins of documentary and situated within the contemporary crisis of masculinity.”36 Reality TV functions to address this crisis of masculinity by not only foregrounding the values but also emphasizing the skills of these working-­class men. The narrative drama and excitement of “blue-­collar work” shows like Deadliest Catch, American Trucker, and Duck Dynasty centers on how dangerous these men’s jobs truly are, yet the dangers these men faced were never framed as workers’ rights issues, but as tests of individual courage and manhood.37 These shows’ “idealization of working-­class masculinity” relied on reality TV’s ideology of unmediated access to transform its mediated representations into standards of “authentic masculinity.”38 The reality TV appearances of Tunnel Task Force agents analyzed here represent the most explicit case of this idealization, since Border Wars, Border Live, and What Lies Beneath always rely on the same two white men to speak for the group as a whole, and other agents—­including the few people of color—­merely appear in the background. The depictions of tunnel discovery as particularly dangerous and of Tunnel Task Force agents as uniquely suited for these dangers follow in the “blue-­collar work” tradition of praising white male work as emblematic of rugged individualism. Consider the following scene from the third season of Border Wars. The sequence begins with narrator Bill Graves’s characteristic serious and ominous vocal tones introducing Pittman and Hecht:

Reality TV and Performativity  85 “Agent Hecht and his partner agent Tom Pittman arrive at the site, a parking lot 140 feet from the border fence. Their mission: measure and map the tunnel so it can be destroyed. But first, Pittman and Hecht need to find out if smugglers are inside.”39

Agent Pittman then speaks to the camera to explain, again, that they are going into the tunnel to see if there are any smugglers still inside. He is carrying a Glock and a flashlight as he enters the tunnel, with Hecht and the Border Wars video crew following behind. For the next four minutes of the segment, the two agents crawl through a tight hand-­dug tunnel, occasionally remarking on aspects of the construction. “Twenty feet in, evidence of drug smuggling,” narrates Graves while we see video of abandoned rope, plastic containers, and burlap sacks. Hecht pats the discarded objects and explains to the camera how smugglers pull contraband through the tunnel using sleds. At eighty feet inside the tunnel, the agents acknowledge the presence of the camera crew. Looking back, Hecht states he will check in on the videographers regularly because “if something happens to you, you’re blocking our exit.” One hundred and twenty feet into the tunnel, tubing protecting phone and data cables “cut the tunnel in half,” forcing Pittman to crawl under them. The scene cuts between a medium shot depicting Pittman from the front and medium and close-­up shots depicting him from the back. Given that the earlier shots suggested there was only one videographer and that they were crawling behind Pittman and Hecht in this tight tunnel, the different angles on Pittman crawling indicate that this moment was likely re-­created for the cameras at least once (Figure 14). Shortly thereafter, we see a close-­up of a hole in the wall and what seems like a bigger space on the other side. Pittman’s voice claims “that’s Mexico, that’s where it all begins” as we cut to a medium shot with the hole in the background several feet away and Pittman lying on the left foreground pointing his flashlight at it. The hole presumably leads to a drainage pipe on the Mexican side of the border. Once again, the camera’s position suggests that the crew members have had to rearrange and move past Hecht’s position in order to shoot next to Pittman. Graves’s narration comes back in: “Suddenly, Pittman stops dead in his tracks.” In the span of twenty seconds, the tense ambient music intensifies over a montage of six different shots of Pittman as he explains that he smells

Figure 14. Three shots depict CBP agent Tom Pittman crawling under plastic tubing from the front and back, suggesting that there were multiple camera setups and that the scene was re-­created for the camera. (Source: National Geographic, Border Wars, 2011; screenshots by author.)

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someone smoking, then abruptly declares, “I hear voices. Let’s get the [bleep] out of here” (Figure 15). The sequence’s ending illustrates most starkly how postproduction techniques like editing and voice-­ over attempt to raise the stakes of this routine tunnel discovery. Earlier shots indicate that the crew has had the opportunity to rearrange into different camera setups. Because the tunnel’s cramped spaces impede a rapid retreat, it is unlikely that the videographer could have been at the front if there was any possibility of danger. While the narration implies a quick exit from the tunnel because of impending danger, a close analysis of this sequence reveals the highly orchestrated production decisions behind it. Pittman’s claim that he hears voices is enough to end the scene on a purported note of excitement. Yet apart from the officer’s claim, the scene does not provide much evidence of a real threat within the tunnel. We briefly see a flutter of a shadow, but there is no indication of who that shadow might be, or even if it is another human. A moment like this most likely demonstrates the discursive slippage between tunnels as threatening structures themselves and tunnels as threatening because of how they are used. The shadow that Pittman fears could be a narcotrafficker engaged in smuggling through the tunnel or a person trying to cross the border through the underground structure. By virtue of their location, both of these figures come to embody the same level of threat for the border agent. Regardless of who it is or their reasons for being inside the tunnel, the shadow just signals a “foreign threat” that needs to be feared. These media appearances allow Tunnel Task Force agents to reframe their policing duties as labor. Agent testimonials and voice-­over descriptions emphasize the effort and risk in the agents’ work while eliding this work’s complicity in the perpetuation of border-­enforcement practices. Reframing border-­enforcement practices as work duties operates as a powerful ideological tool by shifting the direction of risk from the victims of border-­policing tactics to the perpetrators of border policing. In the two Border Wars sequences analyzed so far, constructing the activities of Tunnel Task Force agents as dangerous overplays the actual risks these agents face on a day-­to-­day basis and elicits sympathy for the agents while ignoring how those activities are implicated in the broader border-­security apparatus.

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Figure 15. While the voice-­over narration implies impending danger, the different camera setups in these shots betray the fact that they were likely taken when there was no real danger for the agents and video crew. (Source: National Geographic, Border Wars, 2011; screenshots by author.)

Several media scholars have connected the rise of “blue-­collar work” reality TV in the early 2010s as foreshadowing the popular fascination with the feelings of the white male working-­class voter at the expense of structural critiques of racism, a trend many see as culminating with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016.40 Yet even before this, the emphasis on white male agents in Border Wars

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demonstrates an impetus to redirect popular attention to those enforcing border restrictions and away from those fighting against these restrictions. Indeed, the resurgent wave of migrants’ rights activism during the Bush and Obama years was characterized by its savvy media engagement.41 The rise of social media platforms enabled activists to engage their movement’s social base in participatory media-­making practices in a form of “transmedia organizing.”42 Networking platforms allowed migration activists to increase recruiting, facilitate organizing, and reach broader audiences. Participatory media became central not only to the development and establishment of the DREAM Act movement but also to the creation of coalitional initiatives between undocumented youth and queer advocates.43 At the same time, movement leaders extended social media engagement to address a variety of other publics through legacy television networks, ethnic media outlets, and cross-­language initiatives.44 The DHS interest in collaborating with TV producers between 2008 and 2016 to create content from the perspective of border enforcement must be understood, at least in part, as a response to the proliferating media attention to migrants’ rights and voices. Media focused on Tunnel Task Forces are particularly situated to stage this shift in attention, because they can turn to the physical characteristics of the tunnel itself as a source of danger. While CBP agents repeatedly bemoan that “the general population doesn’t know the risks that these guys take,” by focusing on tunnels, media like Border Wars or What Lies Beneath can further propagate the myth about “how hard it is to get into” this line of work.45 In the What Lies Beneath video centered on the job experience of Tunnel Task Force agents, Hecht’s voice-­ over explains that crawling into tunnels to inspect them is mired with claustrophobia, darkness, and various unknowns that “play mind games with you.” To reinforce his remarks, the video features two scenes of the cramped spaces and dark recesses of the tunnels. The first is a waist-­ level shaky walking shot rounding a corner to find an agent crouching in front of building materials. The second is a long shot positioned at the bottom of a shaft looking up at the ladder and pulley leading to the entrance of a tunnel. As agents peer into the shaft from above, the camera rotates on its axis 180 degrees (Figure 16). The deep focus makes the shaft seem longer than it is, while the rotation produces a sense of vertigo. Notably, these shots represent one of the few instances when

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the videographers depart from the standard framing used throughout the rest of the series: static medium shots that depict visually the information conveyed on the voice-­over. The exceptionality of these shots implies a concerted effort to foreground the Tunnel Task Force agents’ embodied sense of performing their labor by attempting to replicate the claustrophobia and vertigo that accompanies their work duties.

Figure 16. A 180-­degree camera rotation conveys the sense of claustrophobia and vertigo that Tunnel Task Force agents experience in carrying out their tunnel inspections. (Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, What Lies Beneath, 2014; screenshots by author.)

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Later, Hecht admits that being a Tunnel Task Force agent is not a job for everyone, since some people naturally freeze in these cramped spaces. Those agents who do participate in these task forces, Hecht muses, must have “a desire to do it.” A series of close-­ups show agents inside the tunnels, doing routine activities such as walking down a ladder or crawling through a low, hand-­dug portion of a tunnel. With only the voice-­over to contextualize the various moments and the different agents, these shots primarily stand to signify moments of labor. Resonating with Hecht’s words about the job’s “adrenaline rush,” we see a point-­of-­view shot (presumably from a camera atop the agent’s helmet) of a Tunnel Task Force agent climbing down the ladder and then turning to look down at the shaft. The shallow focus of the camera shows only the walls of the shaft nearest to the agent in the foreground while the center of the frame remains pitch black, appearing like a limitless drop below (Figure 17). At once, this video foregrounds the mystery of border tunnels, evoking the agents’ pleasure in exploring “what lies beneath,” and perpetuates the myth of the extraordinary individual, depicting these agents as uniquely prepared to carry out these explorations. In some ways, the myth of exceptionality promoted by this series is unique to the work of finding and closing off underground tunnels. Agents can turn to the physical demands of tunnel discovery and the lack of technological support to distinguish themselves from the vast, and growing, cohort of border-­security personnel. But propagating this notion about the exceptionality of the work of Tunnel Task Forces both upholds and undermines the performance of border security. On one hand, this series upholds border security because it reinforces tunnels as a significant threat and the mediation of their closure as an effective means of securitization. On the other hand, propagating the myth of unique individuals undermines such performance by implying that the border-­security apparatus, as metonymically represented by its individual agents, may not always be prepared to deal with an overhyped threat. By casting their expertise as tacit knowledge that cannot be found in all agents, the Tunnel Task Force further reveals the contingent aspect of tunnel security, dependent on finding unique individuals within the dwindling numbers of the Border Patrol. Amid declining hiring trends for CBP despite the outsized budgets for the agency, the myth of the exceptional individual brings into relief the very obvious limitations of the organization as a whole.46

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Figure 17. The first-­person perspective on a seemingly endless drop attempts to convey a sense of danger for the agents in charge of inspecting tunnels. (Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, What Lies Beneath, 2014; screenshots by author.)

The Limits of Performativity in Border Live Because of how Border Wars largely succeeds in making evident the performance of border security, it is instructive to end by contrasting this series’ success with the failure of Border Live five years later. Border Live was a reality TV series produced by Lucky 8 that aired on the Discovery Channel in December 2018. Its objective was to “document the work

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of law enforcement on the U.S.–­Mexico border as well as the real lives, real moments and real stories of those that live and work along its remote stretches.”47 By embedding videographers with CBP agents as they carry out patrolling missions around the border, the show promised to be the spiritual successor to Border Wars, but with two notable differences: the footage would be shown live to audiences, and host Bill Weir would moderate a panel of “border security experts,” such as former CBP agents and border-­town sheriffs, to comment on the live feed. This ambitious reformatting of the border-­policing reality series was short lived, since the series was canceled after three episodes due to unsatisfactory ratings.48 Border Live’s unceremonious failure points to the ideological limits of the reality TV genre for border security. The Discovery Channel show incorporates all the same formal and production elements as its predecessor but sought to distinguish itself by including the element of liveness. In the end, this distinctive element most likely contributed to the show’s lack of notoriety and early cancellation.49 While it lasted, the show nakedly revealed the operations behind producing the performance of border security. In the studio, these three border-­security experts (men, always men) provide running commentary on the footage as it was delivered from the field (Figure 18). The panel of experts nonetheless fail to provide any significant insight into the operations of the agents on the field. Having the footage and the in-­studio commentary run live prevented the production team from editing around the experts’ comments to compose a more dramatic narrative. Despite Weir’s best attempts at moderating and extracting more in-­depth reflections on the live footage, the panelists often resorted to simply paraphrasing what was on-­screen, speculating on the agents’ state of mind, or concluding that the steps taken by the agents was “standard procedure.” Across these comments, the “expertise” expected from the panelists amounted to little more than descriptive voice-­over to the action on-­screen. By foregrounding liveness, the formal structure built by the show to distinguish itself from previous reality TV about border security relied too much on its individual participants. It also betrayed the artificiality of the behind-­the-­scenes discourse that Border Wars had championed years earlier. The latter constructed tension by re-­creating moments of action, thereby allowing its agents to comment on them with the benefit

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Figure 18. In the Border Live studio, a panel of three experts and host Bill Weir look at different streams of live footage from videographers shadowing CBP agents. (Source: Discovery Channel, Border Live, 2018; screenshots by author.)

of hindsight and granting the production team the ability to edit these moments into compelling narratives. In contrast, the live footage of Border Live presented these moments as perfunctory cogs in the border-­ security machine. The rote mundanity of such moments illustrated the performative nature of border policing precisely by showing the moments when this performativity falls short.

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The tunnel content in Border Live is minimal, restricted to its third and final episode, and likewise reveals the general failure of the show to revive the performative ethos of its predecessor. In contrast to the show’s live segments, which showcased CBP agents with unobtrusive video crews, the footage about tunnel discovery and shutdown features Lilia Luciano, a reporter for ABC 10 in Sacramento credited as Border Live’s chief investigating reporter. Luciano’s reporting contributions to the show stand out as first-­person accounts of border issues. Often the topics addressed by the reporting segments did not relate to those being discussed in the live scenes. While the show does not present them as such, Luciano’s reporting segments come off as the production team’s attempt to fill in the time with content when the live feeds were not providing any action. The segments about border tunnels in Border Live are a clear example of this discrepant inclusion of reporting bits into the live narratives. In these three segments, Luciano first interviews (once again) Kevin Hecht, who shares most of the same information about tunnels that has already appeared in previous documentary media about the subject. The second segment features Luciano going into a drainpipe used as a trafficking tunnel. Shot and lit from the front, Luciano points out the anti-­smuggling measures installed by CBP, describes the stench of the tunnel, and converses with Hecht as she crawls into the pipe. In the final segment, Luciano accompanies a team of Tunnel Task Force agents into a storm drain to learn about the efforts to repair diggings made by traffickers who create interconnecting tunnels. During this final segment, Luciano also meets with Mexican federal agents and interviews them about measures they are taking to stave off trafficking through storm drains. The Mexican agents express themselves similarly to their U.S. counterparts. Agents from both the U.S. and Mexican state agencies reinforce their essential role in finding traffickers using storm drains and pipes as interconnecting tunnels. One of the agents from the Mexican Policía Federal explains that they have been collaborating with U.S. agents for at least eight years and argues that such collaboration has reduced trafficking through those interconnecting tunnels. Another agent emphasizes that Mexico also suffers from the trafficking flows through such tunnels, namely, U.S. guns sold to drug cartels. Aware of the narrative constructed in U.S. media about border

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enforcement and tunnel shutdown, the Mexican agents use the opportunity to advocate for the value of their roles. In the few moments of the sequence when their voices can be heard, the men mention that they have been collaborating with their counterparts north of the border for almost eight years and argue that such collaboration has benefited both nation-­states. At the same time, these agents point out the precariousness of their own working conditions as it relates to the trafficking operations they seek to shut down. It is not only that their work will go unnoticed by audiences on both sides of the border. The Mexican agents also present themselves at a heightened risk of pursuing traffickers because the latter are well armed with weapons they receive from the United States. Agents on both sides of the border understand how media portrayals contribute to the public support for the project of border enforcement and utilize their participation in this media to secure their position within the project. During the segment, the Mexican agents are depicted with blurred faces, presumably for legal reasons or as a safety measure so they cannot be identified by traffickers. There are also no subtitles for their dialogue. The agents must speak to Luciano, and she translates on-­site to

Figure 19. Framed as mediator between Mexican federal agents and the U.S. audience of Border Live, Lilia Luciano literally translates the agents’ words and frames their policing activities as labor concerns. (Source: Discovery Channel, Border Live, 2018; screenshots by author.)

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the audience. In a medium shot, when Luciano turns toward the camera to translate what the Mexican agent has just mentioned, her profile remains in focus and brightly lit in the foreground while the agent stands in the background out of focus (Figure 19). Visually and aurally, the reporter acts as the translator of the agent’s anxieties to the audience. The result is a strict “telling” rather than “showing” dynamic: the scene’s setting, camera setup, and editing illustrate nothing beyond the dialogue spoken. Like the scenes in the Border Live studio with experts describing live footage, merely talking about the goals of border security exposes the mundanity of its execution and deprives its performance of the heightened dramatic stakes afforded by a heavily edited narrative. In this tunnel scene, the show offers little insight into the officers’ particular line of work, despite having everyone involved standing inside an actual underground storm drain used for trafficking. When compared to the highly constructed drama of Border Wars, the scene reveals the unmistakable effect that specific formal choices have in conveying the performance of border security. Herein lies the irreducibility of the propagandistic ethos of reality TV shows about border security: the main goal of these kinds of media is to promote the work that goes into the construction of the border-­ security apparatus. It is an ideological aim, not an aesthetic one. The formal choices in these series could end up supporting or undermining its propagandistic aims. Border Wars succeeds at mobilizing the production strategies and formal elements of reality TV filmmaking on the field to portray what seems like a true “behind-­the-­scenes look” at the operations of CBP, even if that look remains a highly curated, edited, and tendentious presentation. Border Live attempts to lean further into the behind-­the-­scenes ideology by including expert panelists and commenting on footage live, yet ultimately fails because of these formal choices. Critically analyzing these reality TV shows illustrates the affordances and limitations of formal choices for the promotion of border enforcement. The fact that these media rely heavily on the performative aspect of border enforcement for the construction of these propagandistic narratives can also ultimately lead to fragmentary, and contradictory, ideologies. The mediated construction of border-­security spectacle derives its effectiveness—­its effects and its ability to deliver those effects—­from

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the fact that it is performative. Media becomes a useful tool in the performance of border security by reproducing the practices of enforcement and policing continuously and across dispersed publics. Border-­security practices acquire their “naturalized effect” by virtue of this reiteration. At the same time, it is also because of such repetition that gaps and fissures “are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions.”50 Because border security is performative, it is bound to be fraught with inconsistencies and fissures. Its own constitutive performativity gives the lie of its undoing. Border Wars, Border Live, and What Lies Beneath illustrate how border security is a media production that results from a series of calculated, albeit sometimes failed, creative decisions. Postproduction elements like editing, voice-­over, and nondiegetic music can serve to accentuate the drama and artificially raise the stakes of specific border-­enforcement activities such as tunnel discovery. By engaging a reflexive mode in the representation of Tunnel Task Forces, these media enact two important ideological maneuvers. First, they foreground the performative aspects of border security and mobilize this performativity for dramatic effect. Second, by purporting to give voice to the Tunnel Task Force agents, these media shift the focus entirely from the builders of the tunnels to the agents shutting them down. In turn, this focus allows agents to place the risk of border enforcement on themselves and away from the people most affected by border policing. Parsing out the creative decisions that sustain these ideological maneuvers reveals far more about the construction of state-­approved media propaganda than only attending to these media’s rhetorical strategies. Moments of ambiguity, contradictory connotations, and creative failures permeate the mediation of border security and potentially undermine its effectiveness. Ultimately, the symbolic borders produced in media about state agencies turn out to be as porous as the borders these agencies purport to uphold.

3 DIGITAL ANIMATION AND PLASTICITY

Despite the pervasiveness of televisual news and reality TV, the public imaginary of border tunnels is not limited to these realistic representations. The ubiquity, accessibility, and popularity of digital media means we have far more instances of “unrealistic” tunnels, that is, those entirely brought to life, or animated, with computer-­generated imagery. Freed from the constraints of its physical referent, the digitally rendered border tunnel can grow and contract, appear and disappear, expand and extend on the screen far beyond what the laws of physics allow. How, then, might the animated tunnel offer a different formulation of the border? An early proponent for critically analyzing animation, filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein identified the appeal of animation in its characteristic plasmaticness. In Eisenstein’s terms, the quality of plasmaticness speaks to “a rejection of once-­and-­forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form.”1 He concluded that the distinguishing formal feature of animation was the medium’s ability to assume any form, to change this form at any time, and to make this lack of figural fixity a medium-­specific appeal. His analysis links animation’s “trait of all-­possible diversity of form” to the sight of “omnipotence” that the fluidity of the moving image implies. The sight of omnipotence fuels an aspiration to become “whatever you wish,” a counter to what the Soviet film theorist diagnoses as the “petrified canons of 99

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world-­outlook” in the United States as well as the “rigid spine and stiff corset of high society.”2 Plasmaticness is an appealing quality because it gestures toward infinite (personal and social) possibility. Animation, in short, opens up a host of possibilities for imaging and imagining otherwise rigid structures. In the case of border tunnels, the fluidity of animation not only grants the structure the potential to dynamically assume a variety of shapes and sizes but also renders it a malleable space that pushes and subverts the rules of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. For this reason, I refer to the animated border tunnels explored in this chapter as plastic infrastructures. I argue that the plastic quality of digitally animated tunnels facilitates modes of representation in excess of their physical counterparts, which, in turn, expands the conceptual possibilities of what tunnels can signify for our understanding of the border. Animated tunnels extend far and wide, expand and contract, and situate audiences in dynamic points of view. Unlike representations of actually existing tunnels, these virtual renderings are not limited by physical constraints, but they are shaped by formal and technical affordances of the medium of digital animation. These tunnels prove to be capacious illustrations of more expansive ways of thinking about borders. The “plastic” in plastic infrastructures refers to the capacity for digitally animated tunnels both to assume a variety of visual forms and to give shape to numerous cognitive mappings. Formulating plastic in this figurative sense offers some fruitful conceptual confusion. On one hand, it could refer to the qualities of plastic as a petrochemical-­based synthetic material, while on the other hand it points to plasticity as the generative capacity of neurons to repair and regrow neural pathways.3 The former definition gestures toward ossification and durability (in other words, to control), while the latter one supposes malleability and regeneration (in other words, emergence). The conceptual confusion oscillating between both connotations of “plastic” is fruitful, because the term gestures at the affordances and limitations of thinking through digitally animated tunnels: these mediations may open up emerging pathways for thinking about the role of borders, or they may reinforce existing divisions and forms of control. If the indexical and realistic tunnel representations of chapters 1 and 2 turned out to rely on the fabrication of spectacle,

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then the fantastical tunnel representations in this chapter will reveal how real-­world hierarchies and stereotypes continue to encode artificially constructed worlds. The “infrastructures” in plastic infrastructures refer not only to the underground structures themselves but also to the connections between physical substrates and cognitive frameworks. Tunnels function within media’s fictional worlds as logistical lines of connection for the illicit adventures of the characters that infiltrate them. Yet physical structures and their representations are not mere stuff. As anthropologist Brian Larkin argues, the impact of infrastructures goes beyond their technical capabilities, because they “encode the dreams of individuals and societies” in such a way that social ideals and fantasies can be “transmitted and made emotionally real.”4 The interrelated material and representational features of infrastructures means we should approach them as “generative structures,” or frameworks for building systems and environments that embody social values.5 The primary media example analyzed in this chapter is the action film Fast and Furious (Justin Lin, 2009), the fourth film in “The Fast Saga,” a Universal Pictures media franchise centered on illegal racing, heists, and global espionage. The film’s protagonists, an FBI agent and an outlaw, must infiltrate a smuggling operation that conducts its drug trafficking by hiring runners to drive cars through cross-­border tunnels at high speeds while avoiding detection from border-­enforcement agents. As Mary Beltrán’s incisive analysis demonstrates, the film mobilizes Latino-­inspired iconography—­casting reggaeton stars, integrating reggaeton music in the film’s soundtrack, and borrowing iconography from B-­movie narco películas for the drug boss figure—­into a global “cool” aesthetic to much international acclaim.6 Fast and Furious functioned as an unofficial reboot of the series and became the highest-­grossing film in the franchise at the time of its release, grossing over 363 million USD around the world. The film’s narrative, special effects, and action sequences illustrate the competing effects of popular culture: the perpetuation of dominant ideologies, as in the reinforcement of border security, as well as the introduction of resistant pleasures, such as the borderless movement of brown bodies. A sustained interrogation of the animated special effects in this film will offer insight into the value of analyzing border tunnels as plastic infrastructures.

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Although Fast and Furious is a live-­action film, most of the scenes set at the border, and particularly the tunnel sequences, are the result of digital animation. Digital animation refers to graphics created fully or in part with the aid of computer software and adhering to various forms of computational aesthetics, such as modeling, rigging, and data visualization. The becoming digital of animation extends and transforms the plasmatic qualities of the medium that Eisenstein identified at an earlier time. Kristen Whissel argues that “the plasmaticness of the digital” emblematizes a violent conflict between “the desire for radical freedom and forces that work in the service of control over space, time, and fate.”7 Digital animation visually exercises the plastic qualities of analog animation, yet the digital’s distinct conditions of production and technological affordances also fluctuate between freedom (figural malleability) and control (algorithmic coding). Vivian Sobchack further argues for the connections between digital animation and ideologies of the early twenty-­first century when she claims that the digital morph is “liberating in its democratic lack of hierarchical attachment to any privileged form of being while bent on some ultimate totalitarian mastery of all forms,” concluding that by “exuding its own freedom while globally incorporating and homogenizing that of all in its path, the morph seems to double the dramatic actions of both our nation and our technoculture.”8 While Whissel and Sobchack focus primarily on morphs, or shape-­shifting character creatures, I suggest that digitally animated tunnels embody a similar figural flexibility that embodies a play between the experience of freedom amid underlying algorithmic control. In the first section of this chapter I detail the specific affordances of animation for the mediation of border tunnels, focusing on the fluid change in perspective and the ease of access facilitated by digital renderings. The second section introduces the cultural politics of Fast and Furious and its representation of the U.S.–­Mexico border. In the third section I turn to the tunnel sequences in Fast and Furious to illustrate not only how digital animation renders plastic infrastructures but also how different modes of traversing these animated spaces connote subversive experiences of the border underground. The aesthetics of the action sequence flaunt border-­policing agencies’ desire for scopic mastery by animating a dynamic space of kinetic possibility. Such experiential simulations reveal the animated tunnel’s capacity for imagining

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the border underground in novel ways. Still, the following analysis of this popular film will stress that these representational alternatives are not inherently utopic. In the final section I address the need to critically examine how the plasticity of animated tunnels enables the emergence of both progressive and reactionary possibilities to reimagine the border underground.

The Affordances of Digital Animation Digital animation renders before it represents. Animation builds a reality by taking fragments such as individual shots or virtual objects and transforming them through machinic processes such as algorithms. To paraphrase Thomas Elsaesser, digital animation does not “capture” reality so much as it “harvests” reality.9 While a common feature across most fictional audiovisual media is their capacity to take partly constructed worlds and project them into immersive narratives, digital animation is a medium defined by the computational translation of information into representational forms.10 This computational capacity allows animated worlds to become repetitive and responsive. In Fast and Furious, footage from a thousand-­yard-­long film set becomes a multiple-­miles-­long underground highway. The corridoricity of digitally animated tunnels therefore is not a physical trait to be overcome through mediation, as in the documentary media analyzed previously, but rather a generative feature of these structures’ pleasures and possibilities. To illustrate animation’s distinct affordances to engage with the mediation of space, consider the animated videos produced by News Direct, a Taiwan-­based service that creates 3D animations of international news items distributed worldwide through agreements with Reuters.11 In the absence of indexical footage, these animated graphics fill in the gaps and provide visual support to the television anchor delivering the basic facts of a news story. These graphics operate in what Craig Hight calls “symbolic expositional mode,” the use of computer-­generated images as tools for creating a version of a sociohistorical object (like a border tunnel) as “something that is aesthetically appealing yet still authentic in terms of its referent.”12 News Direct has produced multiple videos about tunnel discoveries in the U.S.–­Mexico border. Here I will consider the videos reporting on the 2015 San Ysidro and 2020 Tijuana

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tunnels produced by News Direct.13 Both open with an image alluding to the border wall or fence and then move the “virtual camera” underground to introduce the tunnel. The first video presents the tunnel in a wide shot that bisects the underground as if showing the tunnel from the side. The second video offers a perspective from inside the tunnel. At some point during each of the videos, these tunnel shots feature floating red lines that signal the height and width of the tunnels. Next come images to signal the entry point for the tunnel: the first video depicts an entire animated house, while the second merely includes the graphic of a shed floating in an empty 3D space. Following this image of the entry point comes the positioning of the tunnel in its geographic location. The videos zoom into a motion graphic map of the California border area and connect the entry and exit points of the tunnel with a dotted line. A central aspect of these videos is how they introduce the infrastructural characteristics of the tunnel. As the voice-­over announces the railways, lights, and ventilation systems, each of these elements appears in videos in distinct ways. The first video maintains the wide shot and introduces these elements as if they were rendered into existence. Highlighted wireframes run through the length of the tunnel and then consolidate into a full-­color depiction of the structural feature (Figure 20). In the second video, the railways appear as the virtual camera moves forward through the tunnel. Later, starting from a close-­up on the ground, the virtual camera moves up to a close-­up of the ventilation and drainage pipes on the roof of the tunnel and then zooms out to a diagonal perspective on the length of the tunnel (Figure 21). Despite their differences, both perspectives defy the visualization possibilities of capturing tunnels with documentary media. The first video essentially offers an animated “establishing shot” of the tunnel, while the second video’s virtual camera moves and refocuses in ways that would be impossible for a physical camera to do. As Mike Jones points out, the development of 3D computer-­generated environments alter the work of the camera as a vantage point into a scene. Because these environments are “composed” rather than framed, the camera enters into the scene after the process of composition has already taken place, resulting in “a staging of the camera rather than a staging for the camera.”14 Rather than a physical object recording a scene, the “virtual camera” can be better

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Figure 20. In this News Direct video, an “establishing shot” of the tunnel allows for the animated introduction of each of its infrastructural elements as blueprints: shoring, lights, railways. (Source: News Direct, “Drug Tunnel Discovered beneath US–­Mexico Border,” 2015; screenshots by author.)

understood as the position of perspective within a digitally rendered space. Both animated videos illustrate this new perspective into border tunnels, one that exists outside of the structure and operates unfettered by the structure’s limitations. In these ways, the News Direct videos succinctly encapsulate the affordances of the digitally animated border tunnel. Viewers are able to

Figure 21. In this News Direct video, animation allows for the staging of the “virtual camera” in positions that would be impossible given the physical restrictions of a physical tunnel: moving from a close­up of the railway up to a close-­up of the drainage pipes and back to a long shot that depicts the length of the tunnel. (Source: News Direct, “Longest Ever Smuggling Tunnel Found at U.S.–­Mexico Border,” 2020; screenshots by author.)

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travel through the structure without blockages or restrictions to access. Likewise, the physical limits of the tunnel do not prevent animated media from depicting a macro perspective of the space. Indeed, even when the rendering of the tunnel itself is not very detailed, the presence of high-­ definition colors and the ease of navigation give the impression of a thorough depiction of the underground structure. These animated videos present a fully realized representation of tunnels despite never introducing footage taken from within the tunnels themselves. The “virtual camera” operating in these animated border tunnels, “by its very nature of physical intangibility,” as Jones puts it, fosters a sense “of fantasy and the impossible.”15 Digital animation pervades fields as varied as medicine, journalism, engineering, and entertainment to such an extent that it has become increasingly fundamental to processes of knowledge production.16 Given its cross-­disciplinary pervasiveness, there are clear stakes in engaging with the world through a medium that simultaneously renders a reality through artifice and draws attention to that artifice. An early account of these stakes comes from film theorist Christian Metz, who in the 1970s famously argued that all image-­making includes some degree of “process effects,” manipulations occurring either at the moment of recording or during postproduction.17 Understanding all sorts of manipulations to the recorded image as a form of process effect allows Metz to signal the film spectator’s contradictory attitudes of belief and disavowal. By immersing themselves in audiovisual representations, spectators engage with images they know to be unreal but choose to provisionally accept nonetheless. Contemporary work on film’s “special effects” suggests that Metz’s insights remain appropriate in today’s digitally animated mediascapes. Dan North describes the conflict and uncertainty emerging from the co-­presence of artifice and “recorded truth” within special effects as “a kind of doublethink on the part of the viewer.”18 The digitally animated tunnels in Fast and Furious present an artifice from fragments of recorded reality, but their visual appeal relies on how viewers perceive them as operating within real-­world laws of physics, which includes speed, torque, and catastrophic collisions. Understanding the epistemological maneuvers at play in the creation and reception of special effects proves key to making sense of “the larger cultural practices through which we engage what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ in our media and, by extension, our conception of the world around us.”19

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In filmic special effects, the viewer must engage in a complex interpretative sorting to accept something provisionally as real despite witnessing its artificiality. The appeal to artificiality only solidifies the spectatorial immersion, but the connections of this artifice to real-­world ways of thinking or acting grant that immersion material effects. The virtual realities rendered by digital animation in action films are certainly not the thing that they represent. An animated tunnel has none of the physical restrictions of a real-­world tunnel. Still, our interactions with virtual objects have the capacity to position us within seemingly disparate material realities at once.20 Undeniably, virtual objects have relationships with and significance within real-­world contexts. The potential of animated border tunnels to function as plastic infrastructures lies in the value of plasticity not only as an aesthetic quality but also as a political orientation. Philosopher Catherine Malabou’s critical translation of developments in neuroscience considers the phenomenon of brain plasticity, the process of neuronal genesis and re-­genesis, as figurative illustration of how subjectivity can be reconceptualized in the twenty-­first century. The plastic nature of the brain, that is, its capacity to give form and receive form, means that neural connections can be established, reformulated, and re-­created in the event of loss. By modulating the synaptic efficacy of neurons, the nervous system is able to create wholly new connections and neuronal pathways, changing the ways messages flow. Through this modulation, Malabou argues, “plasticity imposes itself with the greatest clarity and force in ‘opening’ its meaning.”21 Pathway reorganization opens up, literally and figuratively, new forms of transmitting messages and making meaning within an otherwise consistent network. Malabou uses this framework to inquire how to trace paths of resistance to late-­capitalist imperatives to constantly adapt and endure increasingly more exploitative practices. This politically informed notion of plasticity prompts us to interrogate how animated tunnels, by undoing ossified physical imperatives of form and function, can also instigate a rethinking of the ossified political standards about borders and tunnels. If we contend that viewers’ experiences of special visual effects amount to a kind of doublethink that momentarily holds two contradictory ideas in one’s mind, then within this doublethink may also lie the potential to reimagine the current and alternative renderings of the border. The point is not to evaluate whether or not audiences believe

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that border tunnels are in fact as wide and high as depicted in digitally animated sequences. Rather, the value of this analysis lies in how it will reveal the parallels and tensions between media-­enabled forms of perception and ideological alignments with border enforcement. The infrastructures of the border include those physical structures and cognitive frameworks that entrench our current understanding of how divisions between nation-­states ought to be established and enforced. As plastic infrastructures, animated tunnels thwart realistic expectations about the reliability and stability of such structures and frameworks. Digitally animated tunnels, in short, hold the potential to unbound our cognitive mappings about the border.

The Representational Borders of Fast and Furious The Fast and Furious series is a multimedia franchise run by Universal Studios focused on a diverse cast of heroes with an affinity for, and dexterity at, operating automobiles and other transportation vehicles at high speeds in extraordinary circumstances. In addition to ten films in the main series, the franchise also includes several spin-­off films, animated series, a cross-­platform video game, online shorts, and theme park rides. Fast and Furious (2009) is the fourth entry in the main film series and in a sense reignites the franchise. The film reunites the first film’s protagonists, outlaw Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) and FBI agent Brian O’Conner (played by Paul Walker), and reinvents the story of that earlier feature by placing its heroes in the world of drug smuggling across the U.S.–­Mexico border. Both protagonists seek access to a powerful drug trafficker—­to enact revenge for a murdered lover in Dominic’s case and to make a career-­defining arrest in Brian’s case. In order to infiltrate the cartel, the two men must first prove their street racing skills, since the trafficker’s smuggling operation relies on hired runners that drive race cars through cross-­border tunnels at high speeds while avoiding detection from CBP.22 Given this plot setup, the action thriller revolves around high-­speed chases in the streets of Los Angeles and in the desert of the U.S.–­Mexico border, including two pivotal sequences within the trafficking tunnel system. In terms of production, digital animation allows the film’s production team to construct a miles-­long tunnel system for the racing sequences from only a few fragments shot in a set. The filmmakers

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reportedly first tried to record the tunnel racing scenes within tunnels found in Guanajuato, Mexico, but the physical dimensions of an actual tunnel proved to be too constraining for on-­location shooting. The material characteristics of tunnels forbid their indexical capture, prompting the emergence of animated structures. The film’s production team instead created what they called a “smuggler’s tunnel set” at a warehouse in the Port of Los Angeles. This set was a thousand-­yard-­long driving range held inside empty shipping containers lined with beige fabric. Within the set, cars were filmed driving at twenty miles per hour; that footage would later be sped up for the film. Likewise, the multi-­car collision from the final tunnel sequence was practiced and orchestrated there.23 The production of this film’s tunnels also relied on the transnational division of labor enabled by digital animation. Superimposed over the “smuggler’s tunnel set” footage were computer-­generated virtual environments created by the London-­based visual effects studio Double Negative (DNeg). The visual design artists created three distinct tunnel environments: single-­wide and double-­wide “miner tunnels,” which featured wooden paneling and columns, and a “smuggler tunnel,” which looked like hand-­turned rock and was to be used when one of the drivers veers into a hidden segment of the tunnel.24 To transform the footage of cars driving at twenty miles per hour over a few yards into race cars driving at seventy miles per hour over thousands of feet, the visual effects team created three thousand feet of “digital tunnel.”25 In addition to procedurally rendered layouts, the DNeg artists traced the material surface of the rocky grounds and walls of the tunnels by basing it on photographs from mines around the suburban district of Chislehurst, southeast of London. Built from component parts from Los Angeles and London, the digitally animated tunnels of Fast and Furious resulted from the complex relations of the contemporary mode of global media production. Within its narrative, Fast and Furious intervenes in a long tradition of action films mobilizing foreign locales to heighten the political stakes of their narratives. The global action thriller, as Christian Long argues, ties the narrative threat motivating a chase sequence to the political valences of the locations where these sequences take place. Hollywood film franchises such as the James Bond films or the Jason Bourne saga mobilize the “complex, multimodal urban transportation

Figure 22. The “smuggler’s tunnel set” built inside a warehouse allows the production team of Fast and Furious to film car crashes that will later be incorporated into the animated tunnel environments. (Source: Fast and Furious DVD, “Races and Chases,” 2009, screenshots by author.)

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infrastructure” of their Global South locales to stage elaborate and thrilling chase sequences. By dynamically engaging these settings within the narrative, such action films end up placing “the abstraction of imperial interest in a location in concrete terms.”26 The “imperial interest” manifests as the Western hero carelessly destroys vital structures by moving across the foreign space, portraying these spaces as disposable and its people as secondary to the project of Western economic and political expansion. Paradoxically, while the precarious infrastructures of these Global South locales provide the throughways, hiding places, and other settings that make the chase sequence thrilling, these infrastructures’ state of disrepair also supports the imperialist impulse to sustain Global North interventions in the area. The streets of the impoverished areas of Los Angeles and border desert areas featured in Fast and Furious certainly mirror the far-­flung locales of other action thrillers, illustrating the concept of the Global South as a distributed geography connected by shared histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation.27 Like several U.S. imperial outposts around the world, the lands and peoples of the southern border region have long been subject to dispossession by the U.S. state. The film’s depictions of the desert landscape during the tunnel chase sequences, in particular, most effectively expose the imperial interests of the U.S. border infrastructure and undermine its purported superiority. During the first tunnel sequence, the computer interfaces in the Border Patrol station present a drone-­like view from above and the “footage” from a surveillance camera perpendicular to the ground (Figure 23). Although the image of the terrain only presents the topography of mountains and valleys, a drawn-­on yellow line signifies the border division, and yellow labels point to the “U.S. Border Territory” and “Mexico.” The artificiality of this literal “drawing” of the border line is a common trope in cinematic representations of the U.S.–­Mexico border, as Rebecca Sheehan explains. In examples as disparate as the documentary Maquilapolis (Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006) and the TV series The Bridge (FX, 2013–­14), the animated line over an aerial photograph picturing the borderlands as a swath of desert suggests a mechanism for interrupting and interfering in the omniscience and power of the state (implied by the aerial perspective). The

Digital Animation and Plasticity  113 drawn-­in or drawn-­over line communicates to the audience how artificial means reify a view of the border that is totalizing in its “truth-­telling” abilities; aerial images connote the power of surveillance via the state-­owned satellite or drone. . . . Thus the trope ironically uses the authority of the aerial image to reveal the artificiality of the border. As an artificial visual construction of the border (traced over the photographic image), these animations also locate and recall a history of photography’s and cinema’s authoritative participation on the construction of this border, often taken to be natural, always already there.28

The drawn-­over line trope functions as what Bob Rehak calls a “microgenre,” a type of animated special effect that operates as “a package of photographic and digital techniques” shaped by “a complex interplay of technology, narrative, and style.”29 Recognizable across media texts, these images convey a similar sense of ironic representation in how they foreground the artificiality of border-­making practices, yet the meaning of this artificiality changes depending on the narrative where the microgenre appears. In the case of Fast and Furious, the scene prompts us to read the drawn-­over line trope as a metonym for the border agents’ feeble attempts to contain the fast crossing of the racers through the artificial boundary. By staging the border tunnels as the point of crossing, the film further makes light of the inadequacy of the graphics from the surveillance imaging technologies, which can only render the borderlands as a flat space with a drawn-­on division. In addition to its ironic undermining of the border line, the film also narrativizes the practical failure of these imaging technologies. The first tunnel racing sequence begins when the surveillance camera triggers an alert of movement in the border area at the Border Patrol control center. The center commander orders an agent to reroute a camera manually, since its automated rotation will leave a forty-­five-­second blind spot on the south side of the border. The drivers use the few seconds between the detection and the manual override of the camera to race into the tunnel before the camera faces the southern side of the border again. The border agents call in patrol helicopters flying nearby to offer an unmediated look at the scene. Here the sequence contrasts the speed of the cars racing through the tunnel with the speed of the nearest helicopter flying parallel to the border from its original location to the site

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Figure 23. Interface graphics of the border-­security apparatus in Fast and Furious: the line drawing the border over the mountainous terrain and the surveillance camera shots depicting the vast desert terrain. (Source: Justin Lin, dir., Fast and Furious, 2009, screenshots by author.)

of the disturbance. Cutting between the underground racing and the aboveground flying, the film renders the border agents’ failure as one of response speed and perceptual acuity. By the time the helicopter arrives at the border-­crossing location to compensate for the surveillance camera’s failure, the drivers have exited the tunnel on the north side and joined the freeway. When the helicopter patrol reports “no visual contact,” the CBP’s entire technological infrastructure has failed to respond expediently to a handful of smugglers driving across the border. The sequence introduces the surveillance technologies and their failures to dictate the sense of urgency for its action sequences. The infrastructures on display and disrepair in the film are not those of the

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Global South in need of imperialist intervention but rather those of the Global North intent on controlling movement to maintain their imperial interests. Besides revealing the empty promise of scopic mastery over the border, the border scenes exaggerate the porousness of the border infrastructure by suggesting that the trafficking tunnels are big enough to allow cars to move through them. As a speculative animation, this exaggeration operates in the inverse fashion of what military and border-­security speculators promote. These speculators attempt to sell the promise of a complete visualization of the border accessible through digital animation media. In contrast, the animated tunnels of Fast and Furious serve as a reminder of the equally inventive responses to, and subversions of, border securitization. Narratively, Fast and Furious positions its audience between the two warring factions over scopic mastery of the border (border agents and narcotraffickers) by having the protagonists not be loyal to either faction. On the one hand, this in-­betweenness allows us to examine the thrills of racing through tunnels as kinetic experiences separate from narratively overdetermined connotations. On the other hand, the film’s mobilization of what Beltrán calls “racelessness” ought to circumscribe the resistant pleasures created by unfettered transnational movement. The two characters guiding the audience through the tunnel racing are the white FBI agent played by Paul Walker and the outlaw played by Vin Diesel, whose ethnic indeterminacy, as Beltrán convincingly argues, both grants him a “cultural competency” to communicate effectively with people of a range of ethnicities and confers upon him a “symbolic whiteness.”30 Subsequent films in the franchise do capitalize on its multicultural cast as a marketing hook and source of cultural impact, but the rebellious sense of crossing the geopolitical border in the fourth film is not firmly tied to an upending of racial hierarchies. In fact, the outsized caricature of the Mexican narcotrafficker played by John Ortiz speaks to Krin Gabbard’s observation that action cinema’s continued interest in “nourish[ing] racial hierarchies without calling attention to itself ” operates by moving one ethnic group into the position of action hero while relegating other ethnic groups in problematic ways.31 The plasticity of animated tunnels may push at the boundaries of the spatial geographies of the border, but it does not inherently undo established racial hierarchies.

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Action Aesthetics and Infrastructural Spectacles Critics derided Fast and Furious at the time of its release, bemoaning its flimsy plot and the high artificiality of the action sequences. “Boiled down to its essentials,” argued Richard Corliss in Time magazine, “F&F is four pretty swell auto-­race video games—­on a highway, across city streets, through a mountain tunnel, then in an all-­terrain chase with a tunnel reprise—­encased in the bloated carcass of a script.”32 In the Boston Globe, Wesley Morris also compares the film to a video game, namely Grand Theft Auto, because “in too many of the action sequences, it’s hard to tell where the true physical stunt work ends and the digital fakery begins.”33 In one of the few somewhat positive reviews, Kimberley Jones in the Austin Chronicle concludes, “Does the heart rate respond in Pavlovian fashion to every shot of a speedometer rising, every pedal pushed to the metal? Sure thing.”34 Positive or not, these reviews all admit that the pleasures of the film lie in its digitally animated action sequences. Against the more derisive takes that discard the action sequences for seeming fake, I argue that the affective qualities of this cinematic kineticism attached to the spectacular rendering of animated tunnels in fact open up a vertical space of possibility, and a new way of relating to the space of the borderlands. The spectacle of the action film often lies in “the frame itself ”; action is “directly expressed through cinematic motion, camera movement, and (digitally uber-­flexible) editing” that denies viewers a strong sense of the body’s existence and of movements in space.35 As a result, popular action cinema destabilizes traditional models of one-­to-­one identification. These action films position viewers within the action but not as agents capable of intervening in such action. Spectators identify “not so much with the hero as with the film’s visual style,” thereby aligning themselves with the vicarious thrill of the film itself and its depicted acts.36 The filmic action sequence does not pretend to grant the viewer any opportunities to intervene in the navigation of the mediated space, yet its formal elements allow for a different set of identificatory structures geared toward experiencing the animated border tunnel. “Special effects sequences move,” argues Scott Bukatman, where moving refers both to motion and emotion in tandem. Through special effects, viewers experience motion on the screen at the same time that they engage

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in “kinesthetic sensation, haptic engagement, and an empathic sense of wonder.”37 The appeal of the action sequence lies not in the possibility to direct that action but in the possibility to be transported—­to move and to be moved—­through the mediation of action. Special effects in action sequences enable on-­screen movement to become “a tool of bodily knowledge” insofar as the spectator’s entire body gets to feel the thrills of the action sequence. Sobchack refers to this kind of bodily knowledge as “tactile foresight,” where the viewer’s body itself experiences a thrill as an embodied response independent of or in anticipation of making sense of the images visually.38 Experiencing the tunnel chase sequences of Fast and Furious produces sensations that carry significant effects for how to understand these plastic structures. The animated rendering of border tunnels in Fast and Furious and the inclusion of these renderings within a trafficking narrative illustrates how infrastructural projects serve as visible spectacles. As Larkin argues, investment in infrastructure often aspires to be transformative, a techno-­ optimist gesture toward a new society or a new life-­form. Infrastructures, then, are not only technical objects but also objects that operate on the level of fantasy and desire. They encode the dreams of a society and operate as the “vehicles whereby those fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real.”39 Insofar as they reflect and project the historical forces that gave life to them, infrastructures capture public senses of pride or frustration, constituting people into political subjects by mobilizing desires as much as collective actions. This is certainly the case for border-­enforcement infrastructures like walls and fences. For instance, to accompany the process of building the U.S. southern border wall, in May 2020, CBP launched a dedicated page on their website that features fast-­forwarded videos of the wall construction along with animated infographics.40 The regular update on the wall’s progress was both a reminder of the construction project and a training on how to affectively respond to it. The mediated reminder of its eventual construction suffices to harness the social and political attachments that the structure itself will one day command. The affective force of infrastructures theorized by Larkin emerges from the public’s ability to see that infrastructure itself and to perceive its effects, often through media. In the case of structures that remain readily inaccessible, or whose effects cannot be easily perceived, speculative

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media like digital animation offers the possibility to render images that can elicit such public feelings. Digital animation itself tends toward the spectacular depiction of things and forms that defy rational explanation. The “special” quality of special effects lies not only in the unimaginable image finally visualized but in the experience of self-­reflexively perceiving images that are unimaginable in real life, an aspect that big-­budget action thrillers bank on.41 The affective impact of perceiving invisible infrastructures in these plastic forms might then supersede the impact of indexical media representations. Despite the lack of realism in these depictions, spectacular depictions can elicit a sense of wonder and possibility. These animated representations also become vehicles whereby fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real. Aesthetic plasticity thus has clear political implications. In the case of Fast and Furious, the progressive mediation of the tunnel structure is tied to the action of the drivers racing through it. On the one hand, this strategy grants the filmmakers the ability to give the impression of a complete underground space from fragmentary shots. The geography of the underground arena expands through editing cuts between close-­ups of the drivers’ faces to mark relational distance, and long shots of computer-­generated graphics that establish the tunnels’ interior environment. On the other hand, drawing out the encounter with the tunnel as coterminous with the driving endows the structure with the vitality of the race sequence. As the racers speed through the tunnel system, these structures seem more malleable, more alive. The visual effects allow the tunnels to seem as if they wrap around the cars, fluidly expanding and contracting as the racing vehicles move through and collide within these spaces. The tunnels in Fast and Furious are plastic both in the malleability of their depiction and in the fluidity of their cognitive construction. Narratively, the first tunnel racing sequence establishes the value of the tunnels to the smuggling operation and how the drivers can escape the border-­surveillance apparatus. Visually, this sequence introduces the tunnel space as a dynamic arena. Stretches of the pathway become visible only as drivers approach them and the cars’ headlights illuminate the immediate foreground. In this manner, this sequence follows what is often posited as the primary goal of action cinema: to balance the competing demands of spatial clarity on the one hand and an aesthetic of

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immersion and onslaught on the other.42 The sequence that introduces the tunnel space simultaneously ties a sense of urgency to the practice of crossing it. This sequence illustrates two key aspects about mediating a plastic tunnel. First is the centrality of editing. Whereas action sequences in video games are usually uninterrupted stretches of animation, films rely on editing strategies to suture the different visual elements into a coherent whole. The “action maelstrom” that Matthias Stork identifies in the twenty-­first-­century Hollywood action film produces a sense of space that is “fragmented, imprecise, and precarious.”43 Editing works to position the audience within the action, situating the spectator’s point of view in dynamic positions so that they sense objects propelling toward and around them. This “impact aesthetic” represents a formal strategy “to recreate cinematically the very ‘explosiveness’ of the on-­screen experience.”44 In Fast and Furious, eyeline matches, or editing cuts that follow a character’s line of sight, create a geography inside the tunnel where it did not exist before. The inside of the tunnels is predominantly depicted through close-­ ups, alternating between shots of the drivers’ faces and point-­of-­view shots from their perspectives, with back-­screen computer-­generated details of the tunnel walls (Figure 24). Apart from these close-­ups, four long-­shot compositions display the cars in their entirety within the tunnel: one facing the front of the cars as they turn a corner; one facing the rear of the cars as they turn another corner; one facing the cars as they stumble over a bump on the ground; and one facing the rear of the cars as they speed through the left side of a two-­lane stretch of the tunnel. The corner shots are most likely entirely computer-­generated; they are also darker and show the cars in less detail. The bump and the two-­lane stretch shots result from footage of cars driving inside the “smuggler tunnel” set with special effects added to expand the space vertically (in the case of the bump) and horizontally (in the case of the two lanes). None of these shots lasts more than three seconds. In fact, there is no sense of the speed of the vehicles in the shots themselves. Speed is represented by editing these shots in between the driver-­point-­of-­view animated graphics, creating the impression of long distances traveled in short periods of time. The quick editing also contributes to an expanded visual geography. The shots of cars turning corners and the brief glimpse of a

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two-­lane stretch suggest an underground space much wider and more serpentine than a straight corridor. The formal convention in chase sequences of “alternating shots taken from inside vehicles with those taken from cameras mounted on them,” argues Jennifer Barker, “force[s] us into movements that aren’t meant for humans, only for machines,” throwing spectators around and giving them “nothing to hang onto.”45 Yet this is not necessarily a downside to such high-­intensity mediation. Lisa Purse holds that in the speed sequences within Fast and Furious, “being in danger is experienced in the context of the anticipation of mastery; the thrill of risk is followed by the thrill of mastery.”46 The fact that these films follow a traditional narrative where heroes prevail against adversity means that audiences perceive the momentary risk as anticipatory to the protagonists’ mastery of speed and space. The “thrill of mastery” lies not only in the action hero’s extraordinary physicality but also in the wonder of the fictional spaces created by the film, such as these underground tunnels. While visually we may not have anything to hang onto as the protagonists race through the tunnels, the narrative expectation of closure offers viewers the opportunity to enjoy the lack of control rather than despair from it. This self-­assured “letting go” represents one of the dynamic pleasures of the plastic tunnel. The second key aspect fueling the sequence’s sense of speed and mastery is its use of sound. The soundtrack of the scene includes the pulsating score, the car-­engine-­revving sound effects, and a running commentary from an off-­screen character. The first two sounds function in the traditional sense, conveying speed through a fast tempo and effects simulating a revving engine. The character’s off-­screen commentary, in turn, grounds the confusion of navigating the tunnel networks and sets up the temporal urgency for both the characters and the audience. The racers link up to a satellite feed from which a female voice gives a “bird’s-­ eye” perspective on where and when to move into and out of the tunnels. This voice, which belongs to a woman accomplice named Gisele (played by Gal Gadot),47 first guides and then hurries the runners as they drive through the course. She informs the drivers of what occurs outside as the editing intercuts scenes from inside the Border Patrol surveillance headquarters. Without Gisele’s urgings, the sequence would lose its primary motivator for the characters to speed through the tunnel.

Figure 24. The tunnel racing scenes in Fast and Furious consist of close-­ups of the drivers’ faces quickly intercut with short segments of the animated environment. (Source: Justin Lin, dir., Fast and Furious, 2009, screenshots by author.)

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Another female voice in the machine appears earlier in the film during a street racing sequence. In that sequence, the drivers auditioning to join the smuggling gang must participate in a race through downtown Los Angeles and arrive first at a predetermined location. Their automobiles’ GPS systems feature three-­dimensional renditions of the downtown streets and colorful path lines to the end location. These computer graphics allow the audience to cognitively map the downtown space as drivers move in and out of the designated route. In addition to dictating the scene’s sense of urgency, the female voice of the GPS also contributes to the spatial relation by repeatedly mentioning the remaining distance to the final line. Gisele’s voice in the tunnel scenes does not offer spatial guidance, suggesting that the drivers are alone in navigating the space. The downtown and tunnel racing scenes in the film all perpetuate what Nick Jones diagnoses as the “perpetual motion aesthetic of action cinema,” where motion must not be stopped but it must be controlled. Controlling this movement demands facilitating the navigation of spaces we can see and might recognize as well as the discovery and mapping of spaces we rarely encounter.48 The change in the use of digital animation from computer-­interface graphics in the earlier downtown scene to the computer-­generated photorealist environments of the tunnel scenes creates a different form of cognitive mapping. The first relies on the “bird’s-­eye view” provided by the GPS similarly to the omniscient ideology of border-­surveillance technologies. The latter, however, mobilizes computer-­generated images to render an affectively different depiction of the border tunnel. These animated tunnels emerge throughout the action sequences as the characters drive through them, tying the character’s dynamic perspective to that of the viewer. In this way, the film’s tunnel sequences undermine the sense of omniscient perspective and instead perpetuate a sense of discovery through embodied motion in the plastic tunnel. Consider the film’s final tunnel racing sequence. By this point, the protagonists have turned against the rest of the smuggling crew; the sequence represents a struggle over survival more than a trafficking run. When the drivers first enter the tunnel, low-­angle shots depict the tunnel ceiling as just above the cars’ roofs. The drivers keep bumping into each other, hoping to get their enemies to crash into one another or into

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the walls of the tunnel. While the protagonists manage to avoid getting crashed into, a member of the gang of smugglers ends up rear-­ending another. Because the cars are driving in a single line, this crash quickly becomes a multi-­car collision. A long shot captures one of the cars in the back as it flips over and crashes atop the car in front. In this shot, the tunnel’s height expands to the flipping car’s length; by the next shot, the tunnel has contracted back to its earlier height. In a matter of seconds, the tunnel has expanded and contracted in concert with the kinetic movements of the scene. The vertical plasticity of these tunnels speaks to what Whissel calls “cinema’s vertical imagination,” the medium’s “tendency to map the violent collision of opposed forces onto a vertical axis marked by extreme highs and lows.”49 Whissel argues that special effects’ capacity for rendering impressive vertical spaces invokes a particular structure of feeling that dynamically and visually stages a conflict between opposed forces. Ideologically, the use of these effects in popular action films maps the operation and effects of social, economic, or military power onto the laws of space and time. The crucial aspect of cinema’s vertical imagination lies in the medium’s capacity to translate social and political struggles into an audiovisual spectacle. As Whissel writes, “verticality allows these films simultaneously to acknowledge extremism, economic polarization, and thwarted upward mobility as significant aspects of their global audience’s conditions of existence and to charge these crises with new visual pleasures and imaginary resolutions.”50 The border tunnels created through special effects in Fast and Furious are plastic infrastructures in the sense that they expand vertically the space of the border underground into a malleable zone. In doing so, they also shape and circumscribe ways of thinking about the possibilities lying underneath, or beyond, the border-­enforcement infrastructure. The verticality of these animated tunnels must be understood not only in their symbolic functions but also through the experiential aspects due to the medium’s perceptual affordances. The special effects in Fast and Furious allow the film to create an expansive illicit underground that sheds light on and narratively undermines the efforts at border policing. For the audience, traversing this illicit space affords new visual pleasures that counteract the imaginative restrictions of border security as scopic mastery.51 The border underground becomes not another space that digital media can

Figure 25. Because digital animation allows the Fast and Furious tunnels to expand vertically based on the sequence’s action, in one moment the tunnels may appear high enough that a car can flip over and, in the next, the ceiling is back to the height of a car. (Source: Justin Lin, dir., Fast and Furious, 2009, screenshots by author.)

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omnisciently capture but a dynamic realm where new openings and thruways can be found. Although the film’s final racing sequence begins with all the cars following each other in a one-­lane tunnel, which precipitates the multi-­ car collision that eliminates most of the secondary characters, the underground space quickly converts into a two-­lane stretch where their enemies attempt to throw protagonists Dominic and Brian off course. Unfolding over four minutes, the sequence depicts the narrative twists as literal driving turns. Absent a female voice to mark the temporal urgency, speed is created through quick editing while the sequence maintains its spatial coherence via eyeline matches that guide the various lane changes. While Dominic manages to stay on the main tunnel lane toward the exit, the smuggling crew manages to push Brian off this main runway. He diverts toward what seems like a dead end, only to find a hidden entrance into a rudimentary part of the tunnel. He navigates through this secret passageway at full speed and joins the main tunnel lane again mere moments before escaping the collapsing structure. The last-­minute appearance of a hidden tunnel section defies logical explanation within the film’s narrative, since there was never an indication of its existence in previous racing sequences. Indeed, the film presents this revelation as mere happenstance, not as the result of Brian’s cunning. Yet as an experiential action sequence, the turn toward the hidden tunnel encapsulates not only the embodied sensations of cinematic action but also the thrill inherent in finding new visual pathways. Racing through unknown passageways represents movement that, as Bukatman puts it, “performs an idea of utopia.” That is not to say that the hidden tunnel is utopic in its representational value, and mere kinesis does not constitute a revolutionary element. However, the unexpected turn and drive through this hidden tunnel undermines the instrumentalism of other tunnel mediations by its very unfathomability. The sequence breaks with the traditional narrative structure of causality and logic, favoring instead “a spatiotemporal unfolding that feels different than more familiar, more transparent, cinematic styles, that means differently.”52 As a kind of bodily knowledge, the special effects that create this unknown tunnel and enable its high-­speed traversal articulate a discourse of possibility.53 They do not present the realization of utopia; they show us what utopia might feel like.

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In this tunnel racing sequence, the discovery of and racing through the secret tunnel contrasts with the rigid corridoricity of physical border tunnels. By breaking that rigidity in the act of movement, the tunnelicity of the Fast and Furious tunnels figures the potential for opening up new avenues within the underground environment created by digital special effects as a central feature of the plasticity of animated tunnels. The boundaries set up in the mediated depiction of the border tunnel yield before an act of movement that denies their very premises. With regard to representations of the border through digital animation, the identificatory structure of the action sequence offers a generative way of thinking about the tunnel and the border underground broadly as spaces of possibility, albeit not spaces of mastery. Their utopian potential lies in the experience of traversing what is unknown, in the possibility that there may lie other alternatives where paths seem closed off.

Plasticity, Implosion, and the Paths Ahead News Direct, the service that created the tunnel animations analyzed earlier in this chapter, debuted in 2009 as a branch of Next Media Animation (NMA), owned by Hong Kong media entrepreneur and tabloid veteran Jimmy Lai. Notably, NMA also produces videos under the banner of TOMONews, which claims to “cover the funniest, craziest and most talked-­about stories on the internet.” The tools used for both types of content rely on the affordances of animation as a medium to render what cannot otherwise be captured, and to instigate specific emotional responses via such renderings. Indeed, Jimmy Lai has been quoted as promoting that “There’s no better sensation than image. It’s so in-­your-­ face!”54 The fact that similar images are used in both purportedly journalistic and unabashedly entertainment spheres should signal the need to attend to how contexts of production and reception shape the effects of such animated renderings. As explained in chapter 1, understanding news as a media genre reminds us of the importance of attending to mediation as a complex, sometimes contradictory process for making sense of phenomena such as borders. Still, I want to avoid a simplistic distinction between “serious” news and “unserious” entertainment. Popular entertainment provides powerful, innovative ways of framing social issues that stick with audiences for

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longer than sober, rational discussions would. In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers admits that “[he] can see why Fast and Furious might be a smash as audiences look for escape from a broken economy. All those wheelies and power slides are designed to obliterate thought, not provoke it.”55 While I agree that the goal of digital animations such as those of TOMONews and the action sequences in Fast and Furious may not be to provoke thought, that does not mean they cannot help illustrate novel, maybe even outlandish, forms of thinking. In a world increasingly merging politics and entertainment, popular animated sequences create wholly new connections and neuronal pathways—­“opening meaning” as Malabou would say—­and changing the ways we think about overdetermined topics like borders. The fact that the final racing sequence ends with the implosion of the trafficking tunnels not only creates a sense of urgency during the sequence and offers narrative closure but also reminds us of the temporal nature of the freeing sensations of cinematic kineticism. For Pansy Duncan, cinematic implosions became far more common in Hollywood blockbusters after 2008 because these special effects offer “telling metaphors for a global economic crisis that has given the plaintive imagery of ‘meltdown’ and ‘collapse’ the imaginative imagery.”56 Like the post-­ 2008 images of global collapse, digitally animated implosions suggest that new world orders are needed. Within the dialectical relationship between border and tunnel, the tunnel implosion signals that the search for border alternatives in fact lies in the destruction of contemporary forms of thinking about border enforcement. As this chapter details, the digital animation of tunnels offers a different rendering of the border space than what documentary media allow. The collapse of these structures in order to provide narrative closure also signals the limits of such renderings. The rendering of implosions is “the experience of not seeing—­of watching something known become unknown, something substantial lose shape, something present fall into the past.”57 If racing through these tunnel networks shows us what utopia might feel like, their destruction also reminds us that such experiences represent mere glimpses at potential reorganizations. Ultimately, this chapter contends that digital animations of tunnels offer a new way of sensing and thinking about border space. The underground appears not as a space to be contained but as a realm to be

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explored. The animated tunnels of News Direct and Fast and Furious present a different affective relationship to the—­imagined, underground —­space of the borderlands. Yet such orientation must not be uncritically considered as utopic in a progressive way. The media technological affordances to render and shape different spatial configurations of the borderlands can likewise lend themselves to reinscribing long-­standing ideologies of control—­and even encourage emergent forms of colonial, racist, and extractive practices. Indeed, in the case of Fast and Furious, the flaunting of borders never amounts to a critique of the racial divisions enforced by borders themselves. This unfulfilled connection results from the very affordances of digital animation and action aesthetics: identifying with the visual style (and not the characters) opens up new visual and cognitive organizations, but it does not guarantee that such new organizations will lead to undermining erstwhile forms of control. Plastic infrastructures such as animated tunnels are malleable insofar as they inaugurate spaces for thinking beyond the physical restrictions of actually existing tunnels. Where this “thinking beyond” takes us must still be parsed out, interrogated, and critically thought through. Implosion in a reparative sense, then, requires taking such short-­term affects and orienting them toward the long-­term process of dismantling the systems that make up the current violent organization of the border.

4 FIRST-­PERSON SHOOTERS AND RACIALIZATION

In June 2017, the designer of the virtual-­reality (VR) technology Oculus, Palmer Luckey, cofounded a defense technology company called Anduril. The company’s first project was Lattice, an artificial intelligence system consisting of high-­tech, low-­cost sensors networked together to detect human presence at the U.S.–­Mexico border and send push alerts to notify CBP agents in real time. Lattice’s promotional mock interfaces feature satellite images of the border terrain with an animated, orange-­ colored line placed above what looks like closed-­circuit video footage of people running in the desert. Upon receiving a push alert, CBP agents strap on a pair of VR goggles to get a bird’s-­eye view of the border by toggling between each sensor’s individual streams. Describing Luckey’s pitch to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, journalist Steven Levy characterizes Lattice as a “sci-­fi fantasia” that “us[es] off-­the-­shelf sensors and cameras, connect[s] them in a network, and make[s] something in the spirit of Google Maps and Pokémon Go.”1 The allusion to popular digital media in this description reveals much about how Silicon Valley speculators and the state agencies they court conceptualize the space of the borderlands. Media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering the reference points for the new technology being developed (Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable.2 Interactive media in particular, as modes for imagining and 129

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creating, are well suited to facilitate that transition between the virtual and the actual: the “spirit of Google Maps and Pokémon Go” quickly becomes the actionable militaristic apparatus that targets brown bodies at the border. Throughout this book, what I call the “infrastructures of the border” refers to the sociotechnical systems that maintain the geopolitical boundary (checkpoints, bridges, sentient surveillance technologies, weapons) and to the conceptual frameworks that shape popular ideas about what borders are and what they are for. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ references to popular virtual media in the pitching and development of actual technologies for CBP agents reveals how much the physical and conceptual infrastructures of the border are intertwined. These references also implicitly suggest the racial mechanics that have always undergirded the construction and maintenance of border infrastructures. In the colonial context, Daniel Nemser argues that race became thinkable through spatial disciplines (e.g., cartography or urban planning) and that racialization took place through physical interventions in the landscape. Colonial infrastructure projects enabled the consolidation of racial categories by allowing “groupness” to emerge and by naturalizing segregation.3 In contemporary times, infrastructure projects continue to naturalize segregation through physical means: the U.S. border wall stands as one of the most vulgar examples of this. Race continues to be a question of space as much as it is a question of populations, and as the Lattice example illustrates, the infrastructures of race in the border context increasingly include virtual spaces in addition to physical ones. If interactive virtual media actively participate in the nation-­state’s and corporate efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands, then these media can also help us make sense of, and devise alternatives to, the visual, conceptual, and ideological infrastructures sustaining such efforts. This chapter pursues this proposition by analyzing the underground tunnels within the first-­person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). The Cartel is the third installment in the video-­game series Call of Juarez, a riff on the popular Call of Duty series but set at the U.S.–­Mexico border. The game follows three rogue law enforcement agents tracking down leaders of a trafficking cartel. A sustained interrogation of The Cartel will offer insight into how its virtual interactive border tunnels encode the infrastructures of race that Nemser

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argues stretch back to colonial times. Border-­themed video games often borrow colonial tropes and ideologies to create playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through digital modes of representation and interaction, these games encode the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. I propose that an analysis of the narrative and procedural work of tunnels within an ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures form and shape specific kinds of racial and colonial violence. My argument follows Tara Fickle’s claim that “the infrastructure of gaming [is] itself a raced project.”4 Tracing a symmetry between the racial logic found in spatialized systems of oppression and the ludic logic that presents games as games, Fickle compellingly argues that we must understand racialization as a “location-­based technology that has been seamlessly automated into the interface of everyday life.”5 If we understand racialization as a ludic logic, as a series of rules that encode hierarchies by limiting what some subjects can do and what others cannot, then FPS video games pointedly illuminate the racial infrastructures of the border.6 Telescopic modes of visualizing the border like those proposed by Lattice inherently position border agents in the role of active watcher and shooter, whereas all bodies present in the borderlands (e.g., migrants, Indigenous folks) are always already targets of scrutiny and violence. Further, Christopher B. Patterson urges us to understand “race as play” in order to attend to how playing styles speak to racial constructs. Against the postracial “magic circle” that posits games as separate from lived world experiences, Patterson’s “race as play” suggests that dominant, minoritized, and queer play styles contribute to the emergence of virtual racial formations.7 Analyzing the narrative, procedural, and play elements of The Cartel succinctly demonstrates how digitally animated renderings and their algorithmically determined forms of interaction shape the racial infrastructures of the border. As explained in the last chapter, by “infrastructures” I refer not only to the structures themselves but also to the connections between physical substrates and conceptual frameworks. The impact of infrastructures goes beyond their technical capabilities, because they “encode the dreams of individuals and societies” in such a way that social ideals and fantasies can be “transmitted and made emotionally real.”8 The interrelated material

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and semiotic features of infrastructures means we should approach them as “generative structures,” or frameworks for building systems and environments that embody social values.9 Theorizing the border tunnels of The Cartel in this capacious understanding of infrastructures allows us to uncover the fantasies and social values embedded in virtual representations of the borderlands. The first two sections of the chapter trace a genealogy of the spatial ideologies embedded in a border-­themed game like The Cartel, both as a virtual interactive medium and as representation of the border as untamed frontier. The next three sections analyze how the game’s genre and its level design mobilize the tunnel figure to reimagine the space of the border while simultaneously reinforcing the dominant racial infrastructures of the border. The Cartel  ’s digital animation renders underground tunnels in imaginative ways, yet the game’s specific form of interactivity, that is, how players are able and unable to traverse these animated structures, circumscribes the experience of the border underground. While digital aesthetics may animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the FPS reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare. As an ideological orientation to the border underground, tunnel warfare explains how the game’s rendering of the underground environment through algorithmic corridors channels the player’s purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. The last section concludes by addressing how the dialectics of emergence and control afforded by interactive play and digital animation illuminate the animated tunnel’s capacity for rendering competing imaginaries of the border underground.

The Politics of Virtual Interactive Media Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founder of a virtual-­reality company would become interested in designing and developing media technologies for border policing. Borders are “virtual realities in the most literal sense,” argue Eszter Zimanyi and Emma Ben Ayoun, because they “project national and political imaginaries onto physical bodies.”10 The virtual reality of the border refers both to the current forms of media-­ enabled visualizations of control and to the emergent explorations of

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possible border alternatives. Video games act as virtual media not only because of the technical affordances of computer-­generated spaces but also because of the medium’s capacity to represent what has yet to be actualized.11 If the virtual remains in a state of potential until given form, often through mediation, virtual media engage in speculation, or practices that form conjectures, make estimations and projections, and look into the future so as to hypothesize. Virtual media project alternative futures by actualizing them in interactive forms. As Rita Raley argues, tactical productions can turn virtual effects into modes of resistance simply by undermining the dominant “representations of networked war.”12 Digital media technologies are thus not mere conduits for representing the border space. Rather, they actively participate in the creation of space and in the encoding of dominant or resistant ideologies onto that space. As argued in chapter 3, digital animation renders before it represents. It builds a reality by taking virtual objects and transforming them through machinic processes such as algorithms. Digital animation is a medium defined by the computational translation of information into representational forms.13 This computational capacity allows virtual worlds to become responsive, replicable, and malleable. The digital medium’s conditions of production and its technological affordances embody a distinct play between freedom (figural malleability) and control (algorithmic coding). In the case of The Cartel, the tunnels are repetitive, algorithmically created forking pathways that expand the space of the border underground yet constrict the player’s capacities for navigating this space. The corridoricity of digitally animated tunnels, therefore, is a generative feature of these structures’ pleasures, possibilities, and limitations. The same could be said for the cultural work that video games perform. While Jesper Juul famously argued that games are “half-­real” in the sense that players immerse themselves in a fictional world through the use of real-­world rules,14 critical reappraisals of this maxim propose that such a division is untenable, especially when sociopolitical processes like racialization traverse fictional and nonfictional realms.15 Appeals to artificiality may work to foster immersion through interactivity in video games, but the connections of this artifice to real-­world ways of thinking or acting grant that interactivity considerable material purchase. The

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virtual realities rendered by digital animation in video games are certainly not the thing they represent: an animated tunnel has none of the physical restrictions of a real-­world tunnel. Still, virtual objects “have the capacity to position us within seemingly disparate social and material realities.”16 When we interact with virtual objects, we are already entangled in real-­world contexts. Interactive representations of the border hold significant sway in envisioning its features and its politics. The controversy over Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (Ubisoft, 2007), for example, centered on the game’s depictions of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, as a lawless space in need of military intervention. At the time of its release, both the mayor of Juárez and the governor of Chihuahua condemned the game for promoting xenophobic ideas about Mexicans living in the border state and for dissuading people from visiting the border city.17 Even without referencing specific locations, games about the U.S.–­Mexico border can reinforce racist stereotypes in their playable dynamics, as in the case of Smuggle Truck (Owlchemy Labs, 2011).18 Scholars have therefore argued that critical analysis of video games should be central to discussions of border and Latinx politics in the United States.19 Because “virtual experiences are contributing ever more to the way we live and understand our real lives,” Phillip Penix-­Tadsen calls for a Latin American ludology that takes seriously how players interact with the region in the virtual sphere.20 In the case of the borderlands, the frontier ideology that promises an untamed expanse in need of intervention by white settlers finds its analogue in the ideology of interactivity promised by video games. For Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, these interactive virtual spaces are rife with colonial paradigms in that they “open new spaces for exploration, colonization, and exploitation, returning to a mythic time when there were worlds without limits and resources beyond imagining.”21 If by now the borderlands have been fully occupied and exhausted by the two nation-­states that lay claim to them, virtual depictions of these spaces recycle the colonial fantasy of finding the lands untouched and ripe for settler occupation. This representation of open virtual spaces dovetails with the interactive narratives afforded by video games. The connection between game space and narratives of exploration lies in “the transformation and mastery of geography—­the colonization of space,” since

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progressing through the levels of a game is quite often contiguous with progressing through its world.22 Yet, as Soraya Murray argues, representations of a landscape within games reveal “ways of seeing the landscape, but as a representation of something that is already a representation in its own right.”23 While virtual representations in video games shape ideologies about the space depicted, their interactive form of representation already draws attention to its own constructedness. The value of critically examining how a reactionary video game constructs the borderlands is not only about identifying these representations as inaccurate but also about learning how these representations are built in the first place. Then there is the question of play, or the strategies that players undertake within the constraints of the game design. How players interact with the space of video games has real implications for how this space comes to matter in the world. Games create “worlds with values at play,” argues Miguel Sicart.24 Players engage with the spaces depicted through the rules of the game. These rules have implied values within them, particularly about which forms of action are preferred or discouraged. There are ethics involved in rule making and in playing, as users choose to follow, push at, or cheat these rules. When games take up already culturally loaded spaces in their playable narratives, we must attend to how the values inherent in the rules of the game resonate with the ideologies of that space in the real world. “There is no magic circle,” Mia Consalvo reminds us,25 because in-­game behaviors often reflect players’ extra-­game lives, revealing the porousness of the boundaries between territories of play and the lived world. How video games position us within disparate social realities is a matter not only of the ludic aspects of the medium or the narratives represented therein but also of the medium’s contexts of reception. FPS games interpellate players as the sole causal force within the fictional world. Their brand of interactivity makes the player individually responsible for the decisions that affect gameplay at the same time that the game’s design already circumscribes the possibilities for action, a contradiction that may result in frustration or acquiescence. In analyzing The Cartel, I consider reviews of the game and its Let’s Plays—­videos that fans create of themselves playing video games—­to illustrate these interactions and the implications for understanding how to navigate a fictionalized version of the border.

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Critically analyzing the doublethink inherent in digitally animated play sequences of tunnels offers one way to parse out how digital media’s affordances enable particular ways of thinking about the current formation of the border and its potential alternative formations. The point is not to evaluate whether or not audiences believe that border tunnels are in fact as wide and high as depicted in these interactive narratives. Rather, the value of this analysis lies in how it will reveal the parallels between media-­enabled forms of perception and the ideological alignments with border enforcement. If the infrastructures of the border include those physical structures and cognitive frameworks that entrench our current understanding of how divisions between nation-­states ought to be established and enforced, then animated tunnels thwart realistic expectations about the reliability and stability of such structures and frameworks. Virtual media’s aesthetics and interactive possibilities illustrate how tunnels constrict or unbound cognitive mappings about the border, and its potential dissolution.

Frontier Narratives and the Mexican “Other” The Cartel is the only game in the Call of Juarez series set in contemporary times. The installment proves generative for analyzing media tropes about the border because, by virtue of its failures in design and story, it makes explicit not only the racist and colonialist tropes underpinning frontier narratives but also how these tropes take shape in the mediated depiction of space. Frontier narratives have long been a foundational fiction of the United States as a settler state and erstwhile colonial outpost of the European metropolis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The “myth of the frontier” first served to explain and justify the establishment of the American colonies: raging a “savage war” with the Indigenous peoples of the continent established the colonists’ self-­identity and racial supremacy.26 As these colonies expanded, that foundational myth also functioned as a way to account for rapid economic growth and the establishment of the United States as a powerful nation-­state. The frontier as the expansive space to articulate conflicts between civilizations has long been a trope in popular culture and media, particularly through the genre of the Western. The Western allowed for the strict delimitation of good guys (“White Hats”) and bad guys (“Black

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Hats”) in moralistic narratives set within purportedly uncharted and unruly lands. Media historian Thomas Schatz argues that the significance and impact of the Western as the United States’ “foundation ritual” has been most clearly and effectively articulated in cinema. Filmic depictions of limitless vistas projected “a formalized vision of the nation’s infinite possibilities” which served to “‘naturalize’ the policies of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.”27 The genre mutates to articulate various different anxieties about the nation, masculinity, and spatial control. Adding the affordance of interactivity, video games have likewise mobilized the tropes of the lawless frontier by creating virtual spaces that allow players to “play at colonization.”28 Beginning around 2005, film and television neo-­Westerns drew on these tropes to tell stories about these renewed anxieties at the turn of the twenty-­first century. Though some were self-­reflexive critiques of the Western’s more reactionary elements, others mobilized the genre to articulate white male anxieties at the turn of the new millennium, particularly around the 2008 Recession.29 Neo-­Westerns have also come to represent the U.S.-­centric anxieties about the integration of the American hemisphere as a result of economic globalization and the increased transnational migration of people and goods.30 The Call of Juarez video-­game series draws on this new wave of interest in the Western, connects it to the first-­person shooter, and, in the process, finds resonances between the racist and colonialist tropes of both genres. The Cartel evidences the most pronounced examples of these resonances. The racist elements of The Cartel have been well documented by popular critics. Early in the game there is a level called “Gang Bang” where the law enforcement characters have to “incite gang violence” in a district of the game’s version of Los Angeles. In this level—­and only in this level—­players unlock an achievement called “Bad Guy” for killing at least forty characters. Importantly, all the non-­playable characters (NPCs) that players would need to kill to unlock said achievement are Black men. Another level alludes to the issue of sex trafficking in the border region by presenting it as if Mexican drug lords kidnap white women from the United States to sell as sex slaves in Mexico. This framing falsely portrays the flow of sex trafficking as it currently occurs in the U.S.–­Mexico context, erasing the fact that most often Mexican women are kidnapped to service clients in the United States. The level also builds

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on decades-­old racist myths perpetuated by media about people of color conducting white slavery.31 In their review of the game, the educational collective Extra Credits explains that The Cartel “might be the most racist game [they’ve] ever played by a major publisher.”32 Racist portrayals of Mexicans in U.S. popular media have a long history, as detailed by the work of Charles Ramirez Berg. Stereotypes such as el bandido, the drug runner, and the inner-­city gang member are ahistorical and decontextualized representations that, through repetition, become “part of the narrative form itself—­anticipated, typical, and well nigh ‘invisible.’”33 Despite repeated calls from advocacy groups for more varied portrayals, these stereotypical depictions continue today. As Jason Ruiz demonstrates, critically acclaimed neo-­Westerns in cable television dramas like Breaking Bad present stories about white male (anti)heroes defeating Mexican villains, thereby perpetuating the “Latino threat narrative” that positions these brown subjects as inherently threatening to the body politic of the United States.34 When such rhetoric then infiltrates the realm of policy, it shapes how Latinx bodies come to matter in popular discourse.35 As part of popular media, video games likewise frequently activate these stereotypes. Indeed, The Cartel falls within what Penix-­Tadsen calls “contras games,” which “situate Latin American culture within the realm of paramilitary warfare” and whose narrative presents the Latin American characters “only as the anonymous enemy contra the American hero.”36 Analyzing the tunnel-­crossing moments in the game exposes yet another iteration of these long-­standing racist and colonialist tropes. Moreover, The Cartel mobilizes the FPS genre to set up an interactive conflict between the game’s playable antiheroes and a series of unnamed, indistinguishable Mexican NPCs. By encoding and making playable racist and colonialist tropes, this FPS recasts the borderlands as a paramilitary warzone against the infiltration of brown bodies into the United States.

Tunnel Warfare and the First-­Person Shooter The narrative and procedural work of tunnels within this reactionary video game illustrates how border infrastructures perpetuate specific forms of racial and colonial violence. In particular, The Cartel mediates what has been called “tunnel warfare.” As a concept popular in defense

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and military research, the idea of tunnel warfare recasts the potential emergence of underground border tunnels not only as elements of drug and gun trafficking but also as active sites for the undertaking of invasion and extermination efforts akin to those of a foreign-­set war. Fighting within tunnels has long been an important albeit unremarked feature of modern wars.37 Military historians argue that while it does not “share the glamor” of air or sea warfare, armed conflicts in tunnels have often had decisive effects in the history of modern human conflict.38 The prolonged engagement in underground fronts during the Vietnam War represents a notable example in the history of the U.S. military.39 More recently, the concept of tunnel warfare recurs within defense contractor sectors interested in developing new technologies to carry out such warfare underground. Think tanks based in the United States look particularly to the Israel Defense Forces’ attacks on Palestinian tunnels in the occupied territories and hypothesize how such actions could benefit policing efforts in U.S.-­occupied areas and across the border.40 According to such research, the subterranean must become “an operational environment” and armed forces should actively prepare for future conflicts underground.41 In the twenty-­first-­century version of tunnel warfare, war must be waged on the Global South subjects trying to use the tunnels to purportedly access Global North’s territory and resources. To understand how tunnel warfare comes to figure the border as a lawless arena, consider another famous media text that also features a tunnel shootout, Denis Villeneuve’s thriller Sicario (2015). In one of the film’s iconic sequences, agents of the interagency task force enter an underground border tunnel in the middle of the night. The agents disperse across what appears to be a long corridor with smaller hallways branching off. In the course of the ensuing shootout, the film’s protagonist Kate (played by Emily Blunt) is almost shot from the corner of one of these hallways. Asked to stay close behind by her colleague, she instead separates from the group of agents and heads down her own path. She comes out the Mexican side of the tunnel and discovers the rogue agent Alejandro Gillick, alias “Medellín” (played by Benicio del Toro), who has just shot a trafficker in the head and is taking a Mexican police officer hostage. When confronted, Medellín shoots Kate twice in her bulletproof vest and leaves her convalescing while he escapes to carry out his secret mission in the south side of the border.

Figure 26. The tunnel shootout in Sicario allows the protagonist Kate to separate from the group, only to be punished for diverging from the warfare mentality of the rest of the agents. (Source: Denis Villeneuve, dir., Sicario, 2015; screenshots by author.)

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That Kate’s confrontation with Medellín and the revelation of his nefarious plan play out in and through a border tunnel is significant in a number of ways. First, it takes the dominant representation of tunnels in media as avenues for the traffic of drugs northward to the United States and reverses it. Second, the sequence frames the character’s moment of revelation in terms of her traversing the tunnel, as she comes out the other side to discover what has been planned throughout the film unbeknownst to her. Finally, this climactic action sequence and its resolution are also the apex for the film’s reactionary politics. Throughout the film, Sicario’s narrative centers on wearing down its idealistic female protagonist from the eager, proactive agent she embodies at the beginning to the disillusioned, failed operative she has become at the end. The film consists of a series of rogue missions, each increasingly violent, that put Kate and her partner Reggie in constant danger while sidelining them from the decision-­making processes of the task force. The tunnel shootout briefly allows Kate to separate from the norms of the group, only to be punished for diverging from the warfare mentality of the rest of the agents. Her personal defeat functions to reinforce the worldview of her male counterparts in the task force: that the border is a dangerous place where rules of law do not apply and where the only course of action is masculinist vigilante justice. The tunnel level in The Cartel likewise promotes these ideologies yet situates them within the genre of the FPS game, which is defined by two main characteristics: its perspective (“first-­person”) and its activity (“shooter”). In addition to the noticeable weapon in the foreground, the perspective of the FPS is the subjective camera, a type of point-­of-­view shot that “positions itself inside the skull of [the] character” and attempts to reproduce the physiology of embodied vision.42 As Alexander Galloway argues, the first-­person subjective perspective is “so omnipresent and so central to the grammar of the entire game that it essentially becomes coterminous with it.”43 As the game’s central functions, the FPS’s subjective perspective and shooting activity work together to personalize gameplay (Figure 27). The player moves the character through a series of environments, ranging from simple room-­based mazes to more complex environments. Despite varying degrees of narrative and spatial complexity, “the ultimate goal in the first-­person shooter is to traverse from point A to point B, ridding the environment of the enemies which inhabit it.”44 The FPS shooting activity is thus not only a playable action but

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Figure 27. The tunnel shootout scene as rendered in the first-­person shooter: the subjective point of view and the weapon in the foreground signal that moving through this environment requires shooting your way through it. Once the player has traversed half of the level, the game signals that achievement as “The Border Crossed Us!,” evoking a famous Chicana/o phrase. (Ubisoft, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, 2011; screenshot by author.)

also a mode of perception. To kill in a first-­person shooter is to inhabit its environment. This ideological mapping onto its mode of perception in the FPS illustrates why it is a preferred genre for military training. The identification structure of the FPS sets the player as the hero and casts the NPCs encountered throughout as villains to be eliminated. In the Wired article on Anduril, Palmer Luckey claims that the “DOD has been asking for what some people describe as Call of Duty goggles. Like, you put on the glasses, and the headset display tells you where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, where your air support is, where you’re going, where you were.”45 Luckey’s contention that the Department of Defense wants a media technology to perform the work of casting “good guys” and “bad guys” succinctly illustrates the common appeal of both this video-­game genre and digital technologies for border security: the illusion that the technology itself will mediate the world around the subject and map social ideologies into interactive interfaces in a straightforward way. In the FPS, to inhabit an environment is to shoot your way through it. From the outset, the game’s procedural structure casts its environments

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as spaces filled with dangers and enemies that must be eliminated. As Matthew Payne puts it, the FPS acts as a “textual apparatus [that] locates the player as an agent of change in a universe where his or her choices are decisive plot points for a personalized war story” as well as a “cultural apparatus [that] targets political anxieties as opportunities for play and pleasure.”46 The game allows players to “play out” political anxieties in a manner that positions them as the main agents of change for addressing these anxieties. Addressing, however, becomes reduced to shooting their way out of a situation. Success is measured in hits. Amanda Phillips argues that, because games strip away the physical and psychological challenges of shooting, the gamer’s experience of shooting consists of visual acuity and well-­timed reflexes multiplied by quantity of hits: “shooting to kill becomes a riskless, fast-­paced, twitchy enterprise.”47 The first-­person shooter’s direct, violence-­forward approach further reinforces the colonialist tropes of the frontier narrative. In The Cartel, this approach renders the border as an untamed space and posits shooting as the way to deal with that space. The game then centers (unnamed) Mexicans as the stumbling blocks within the series of corridors to traverse the border through the underground. As with its “Gang Bang” level, the men of color in The Cartel are reduced to NPCs whose sole purpose is being the targets for the players’ shooting. Yet this racist figuration operates not only at the level of representation. Because of the subjective camera position of the first-­person shooter, this procedural genre fulfills the ideological imperative to tell the player “where the good guys are, where the bad guys are . . . where you’re going, where you were,” as Luckey puts it. The game’s procedural elements position unnamed Mexicans as criminals and limit players’ responses to shooting them. The subjective positioning of the player within the game and the design of the playable space themselves already establish specific roles that reinforce racial and gendered hierarchies.

Navigating the Border as Algorithmic Corridors Plenty of scholars have addressed the formation of subjectivity within FPS games,48 but fewer have written about the role of the setting where these subjective structures take place. FPS games are notorious for their use of corridors in level design. Because the principal gameplay action requires a player to advance through a level shooting and avoiding being

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shot at, an FPS map usually consists of a series of rooms and corridors in any number of configurations. These configurations perform wayfinding functions for players and offer tactical spaces to retreat in between rounds of shooting. FPS games may feature elaborate architectures with several different floors, sometimes with openings to see above or below. They may also include strategically placed design choices such as stairs, ramps, and poles for moving vertically between floors. The tunnel space in The Cartel consists of only a single floor, and while the ceiling does not always appear when players run through the level, it is implied that the lack of high galleries prevents a player from getting shot at from above. Instead, the game level relies heavily on the corridor formations, particularly a

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Figure 28. The tunnel environment in The Cartel consists of seemingly endless corridors, sharp corners, forks in the road, and inlets that allow for hiding from the shooting. The game prompt states simply that the objective is “Get to the other side of the border through the tunnels.” (Ubisoft, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, 2011; screenshot by author.)

recursive series of forking corridors, to offer wayfinding and to provide players with barriers to hide behind. Rocks, wooden panels, and corridor corners allow players spaces to retreat when being shot at (Figure 28). Because of this design simplification, The Cartel neatly illustrates the centrality of corridors to the FPS as both an enabling mechanism and a restrictive feature. Corridors function as what Ian Bogost calls a

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“procedural figure,” a unit operation that allows for a range of expressive practices.49 These basic unit operations provide options for procedural forms, like a game engine or a user interface, to be applied toward a variety of goals. The assemblage of these forms creates procedural genres like the FPS. The corridor therefore acts as a figure that can be taken up in any number of ways with distinct meanings and applications across genres. How these basic figures get taken up within the genre speaks to the forms of thought that the genre potentiates and restricts. In particular, because computational media have a native ability to “represent process with process,” a procedural genre like the FPS mobilizes the figure of the corridor in significantly different manners from other textual or visual media. Corridors may allow for different expressive functions in other types of games, but in the FPS they are a fundamental engine to thinking about space and purposive action. Corridoricity becomes a central spatial design feature that reinforces this genre’s specific identificatory perspective and enables its central activity. The corridors set the spatial limits of how players move through the game: following linear paths and making decisions about trajectories at forks along the way. Michael Nitsche identifies five shared elements that allow individuals to create cognitive maps of fictional spaces: paths (or corridors), landmarks, edges or limits, crossroads, and districts.50 Individuals could produce different cognitive maps of the same space by privileging one element over another and structuring their mental image around their privileged element. In the case of FPS, corridors become the privileged elements for making sense of the game space. They enable the forward movement and, depending on architectural variations on their structure, facilitate or complicate strategies for attacking enemies. Corridoricity is therefore essential to the making sense of FPS game space in terms of both spatial recognition (the ability to navigate the game) and cognitive mapping (the understanding of the world proposed by the game). Corridors as procedural figures in the FPS also establish value judgments about how to interpret these spatial arrangements. Under the FPS logic, open spaces signify moments of vulnerability, because the player could be at risk of attack from unseen foes. Game levels with multiple floors and openings between these floors dichotomize player action between hiding and advancing through the level through shooting. These open spaces present a world that requires choosing between offensive and defensive options. Players must evaluate and decide between

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distinct courses of action. Closed corridor spaces, in contrast, limit the opportunities for hiding, offering merely contingent and momentary instances of retreat. In turn, these closed corridor spaces not only facilitate but demand direct confrontation. Absent the possibility of a defensive position, closed corridor spaces propose attack as the only viable course of action; confrontation becomes tantamount to advancing through the level. To shoot is to move, and to move is to succeed. What is at stake in focusing on the corridoricity of the tunnel level as a procedural figure within The Cartel? As Tom Senior in PC Gamer notes, The Cartel’s “[game] engine is capable of throwing out environments of notable scale, but they’re always painfully linear wide corridors full of pop-­up drug fiends and pop-­in textures.”51 Other reviews of the game likewise noted the sophistication of the environment as a whole but bemoaned the repetitiveness of the forking corridor structure for how little variety it allowed in terms of strategy. Undoubtedly this is a failure in terms of the potential pleasures of playing the game. Little variation results in monotonous gameplay. Still, the repetitive “painfully linear wide corridors” instructively illustrate the mode of perception unique to playing through shootouts in tunnels as well as this mode’s attendant ideological implications. If, as Payne argues, the cultural apparatus of the FPS transforms political anxieties into opportunities for pleasure and play, then tunnels as the site for a shootout enable specific modes of perceptual engagement with border spaces and with the characters encountered therein. These modes of engagement feed into a frontierist rationale for interpreting underground spaces. Early in the tunnel level, the player’s allies explain the history behind the tunnels: Eddie: I’ve seen smuggling tunnels all up and down the border, but nothing like this one . . . Kim: Some of those old Spanish forts had escape tunnels. This could be one of those . . . Ben: Smugglers have been moving shit across the border ever since there was a border. Kim: I wouldn’t be surprised if the mob used this tunnel during prohibition . . .

Through the characters’ dialogue, the game flattens a varied history of smuggling and tunnel building (fictional and nonfictional) into the same

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structure. The implication is that the tunnels the characters move through could stand in for all those trafficking structures that have existed throughout the history of the U.S.–­Mexico border. To be sure, the game’s narrative fails to make any self-­conscious connection between these illicit acts and the playable characters’ own circumventing of the border through tunnels. There is even an achievement notification titled “The Border Crossed Us!” for when the players have gotten through half of the level, perverting a Chicana/o rallying cry into a throwaway game prize (see Figure 27). Overall, The Cartel adopts the symbols of collective border resistance only to place them within a game genre that foregrounds individualist action and violent confrontation. In that sense, setting the game’s border-­crossing moment within the tunnels reveals the usefulness of these infrastructures to the conceptual reorganization of the border as a lawless frontier. The tunnels’ corridor structure transforms the border’s linear division into an expanded space of confrontation appropriate for the first-­person shooter. As previously mentioned, the game presents only unnamed Mexicans qua drug dealers as the stumbling blocks within the series of corridors to traverse the border through the underground (Figure 29). The tunnels in the game stand not only as the site for illicit activities but also as the ground

Figure 29. The use of tunnels as corridors in this level sets up the unidentified Mexican NPCs as mere stumbling blocks within the player’s path. (Ubisoft, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, 2011; screenshot by author.)

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where the confrontation with, and extermination of, the Mexican “Other” becomes playable and pleasurable. Emphasizing the affordances of digital animation and the computational processes that enable it within The Cartel is important for a number of reasons. First, digital animation allows the game to create an underground space big enough to sustain multiple shootouts. Second, the algorithmic reproduction of these animated tunnels extends the time it takes players to traverse these spaces (particularly in contrast to the time it takes to watch the shootout in Sicario), which has a more impactful effect on the forms of thinking and acting enabled by the corridoricity. Third is the issue of procedurality: repeating animated renderings of the tunnel as the players move through the space for a prolonged period of time create an undifferentiated space of tunnels. Ultimately, these affordances mobilize almost exclusively reactionary means. The expansion of the border underground, the temporal elongation, and the procedural recasting of movement within the FPS logic serve to reinforce the lawlessness of the border region and to uphold violent self-­assertion as a means to traverse the region.

The Efficiency of Playing White Supremacy The reliance on digital animation to create the border tunnels in The Cartel allows for the volumetric extension of the space of the border underground. Players navigate the tunnels as if their avatars are standing up. There is no need to crouch, and sometimes players even move up or down ramps, suggesting the tunnel system consists of multiple stories. Near the end of the level, the players arrive at a cave-­like structure several feet high and wide. The plasticity of the animated space allows for extensive tunnel warfare scenarios to be carried out in a way that would be impossible in a physical tunnel. But the spatial extension enabled by digital animation is circumscribed by the FPS’s corridoricity. These animated tunnels rigidly enforce the playable and cognitive connections that users can make within this space. Extending the border underground into a series of corridors opens up visually these previously invisible spaces yet closes down conceptually the possibilities inherent in the new spatial formation. In The Cartel, the corridor structure attached to the FPS contours and delimits the possible ways of thinking about the act of

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traversing these tunnels. It evacuates the possibilities of a new border space by prestructuring the space into one of confrontation, where navigating is tantamount to eliminating enemies in the protagonist’s way. Unlike other digitally animated representations of tunnels, video games offer the opportunity for interaction, where players can select how to engage with the structures within the confines set by the game’s design. As Adrienne Shaw productively explains, “analyzing texts tells us how the audience was constructed” and the meanings embedded in these texts, while studying the audience “helps us make sense of where these meanings go after they are constructed.”52 In this last section, I turn to whether and how players’ decisions in The Cartel replicate the racist infrastructures created by the tunnel level. For Christopher Patterson, games expose race not only as history or culture but also “as tactics and strategies for either winning or disrupting the order of things.”53 Analyzing the practice of game playing itself foregrounds how “winning” strategies also fuel the tensions, fears, and anxieties that shape popular notions about race. By uncritically engaging with the game’s corridic structure, players of The Cartel repeatedly fall into a circumscribed approach to traversing the level that replicates racial hierarchies of white agents eliminating Mexican NPCs. To analyze the experience of playing through this video game, we can turn to paratexts such as walkthroughs, step-­by-­step guides on how to navigate the game levels, or Let’s Plays, fan-­created videos of gameplay that provide live commentary. Analyzing these paratexts illustrates not only the gameplay possibilities within the game but also the connections between digitally animated renderings and users’ responses to these. In my research, I was able to find a dozen walkthroughs or Let’s Plays of The Cartel on YouTube and ten more on Twitch. The relatively small number of videos speak to the game’s lack of popularity (for comparison, the walkthroughs of any Call of Duty game number in the hundreds). Still, looking at these paratexts illustrates how those who did play the game engaged with the tunnel level and its corridor structure. For instance, the walkthrough for The Cartel on GameFAQs, a popular game-­discussion site run by GameSpot, suggests traversing the tunnel level as such: Follow the waypoint markers through the tunnel and you will eventually happen upon some enemies. The first group will just be a

First-­Person Shooters and Racialization  151 few in the hallway, which are easy enough to dispatch. The next will be a small group that has the high ground and have [sic] shored up behind some crates and rocks. . . . After dealing with those enemies, head through the door and head through the tunnels, following your waypoint and killing the odd enemy along the way. . . . Head toward your waypoint and suddenly a random guy will yell out that he’s blowing up the tunnel. Run like hell straight forward and you’ll eventually be caught [by] a rock slide and be separated from your partners. Follow your waypoint marker through a long, long corridor of debris before finding yourself with your teammates once more.54

This description encapsulates the corridor structure of the tunnel level and how this structure systematizes the FPS logic of shooting as moving. The repeated recourse to the waypoint marker is telling in this regard: whenever the level presents a fork in the tunnel corridors, the marker can help the player decide which hallway to choose. The mention of “the odd enemy along the way” and the instructions to head straight ahead repeatedly suggest that the main point of the level is running through the corridors and that the NPCs are merely obstacles in the player’s move through these corridors. Similarly, the Let’s Plays of The Cartel on YouTube and Twitch illustrate how embracing the corridic structure enables players to pass the level quickly and efficiently. The players who proactively embrace the FPS ethos of shooting as moving traverse the tunnels faster and without dying in the process. Players struggle the most during the cavernous sections of the tunnels, where they are often blindsided by NPCs shooting at them from multiple directions. Players who complete the level quickly and without dying once are those who embrace the individualistic sense of the FPS, following the waypoint marker to choose which tunnel to run down and shooting indiscriminately as Mexican NPCs appear in their way. Although the game prompts players to “Wait for your partner’s covering fire before you advance to a next cover,” the players who shot their way through the commotion were more likely to succeed than those who waited to advance in the staggered, cooperative way. Let’s Plays demonstrate not only playing techniques but also how video games themselves act as meaningful texts to make sense of the world. As Josef Nguyen notes, these types of videos highlight “how

Figure 30. Two examples of users demonstrating their gameplay of The Cartel: (a) Let’s Play from user Wolverous on Twitch and (b) walkthrough from Howcast Gaming on YouTube. In both cases, the focus remains on efficiently navigating the series of tunnels without engaging with the implied politics of the level. (Sources: Wolverous, Call of Juarez: The Cartel Livestream, September 28, 2018; Howcast, Call of Juarez: The Cartel Walkthrough, 2011; screenshots by author.)

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players locally and individually negotiate, revise, and make meaning about playing video games.”55 From the select number of users who were willing to play through The Cartel and share their experience online, we can glean how the design simplification of the tunnel level incentivizes players to align with its racist infrastructures. None of the users in these Let’s Plays commented on the game’s politics and instead seemed more concerned with finding the most efficient way to maximize their kills and get through the level. Whether their engagement came off as disaffected or jokey, these players appeared more interested in the logics of the FPS, while the racial dynamics presented in this border setting remained unremarked upon or secondary to the appeal of the game. In video games, the design of the game level reveals the meanings implicit in the game while the players’ engagement with these levels shows how such meanings are taken up. Thus, it is significant that the responses from the different Let’s Plays of The Cartel end up looking remarkably similar. The initial differences in strategies for moving through the tunnel space signal individual players’ preferences for gameplay. Players who systematize the forking corridor structure and tackle it without waiting for backup clear the level as fast as possible. Players who try a more exploratory approach ultimately end up falling short: their repeated deaths and retries help them learn how to tackle the game level within its corridic structure. In the end, all players conform their gameplay to the repetitive forking corridors in order to get through the game level. The procedural design of the level itself promotes this strategy, and the simplicity of the level design, its painful repetitiveness, effectively dissuades any other approach. Certainly, players could choose not to follow the most efficient play strategy presented by the game. Players could perform what Espen Aarseth calls “transgressive play,” a tactic that serves as “a symbolic gesture against the tyranny of the game, a (perhaps illusory) way for the played subject to regain their sense of identity and uniqueness through the mechanisms of the game itself.”56 But such transgressive play would likely be more troublesome, tiring, and time-­consuming than following the straightforward strategy of embracing the game’s use of corridors as avenues for racial violence. Quite literally, perpetuating the racist status quo is the path of least resistance. As Patterson argues, racial frames emerge from the selection of play strategies as much as from the game’s

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symbolic representation. The efficient way of traversing the tunnel level in The Cartel requires subscribing to a tunnel warfare mentality of shooting unnamed Mexican NPCs in order to cross the border. Implicit in this “efficient” play strategy also lie the twin reactionary ideologies of perceiving the borderlands as zones of conflict and of approaching border crossing as an individualistic, violent endeavor.

Virtual Games and the Future of Border Warfare The specific imagination of underground tunnels presented in The Cartel results from the game’s generic conventions, its racist narrative tropes, and the specific game mechanics of the FPS. Importantly, the game reveals how “tunnel warfare” can emerge as an ideological perspective even when there is no physical or material support for it. As explained in chapter 2, Border Patrol agents continuously reveal their hesitation to venture into a tunnel without precautionary measures for fear of finding a trafficker inside. Were they to come face-­to-­face with someone inside the tunnel, both parties would immediately be exposed, as there would be nowhere to hide or retreat to. In contrast, the animated tunnels of The Cartel expand the space of the tunnel to allow for spaces to hide and shoot at enemies from, refiguring the underground space as one conducive to armed confrontation. By mobilizing the procedural elements of the FPS, the game sets this confrontation as necessary for exploring the space and moving through it. Its corridoricity then limits the scope of possible strategies for traversing them, effectively circumscribing players’ possible actions to shooting specifically and to warfare generally. These animated tunnels reaffirm the ideology of tunnel warfare by opening up the possibility of such underground confrontation to occur; by implementing a strict corridor structure on the expanded underground space; and by limiting the course of action to shooting as moving. The preceding analysis of The Cartel illustrates how video games act as virtual media not only because of the technical affordances of computer-­generated spaces but also because of the medium’s capacity to represent what has yet to be actualized. Virtual media engage in speculation—­practices that form conjectures, make estimations, and project potential futures—­by actualizing them in interactive forms. This

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form of speculation becomes tantamount to replicating the present, foreclosing the potential for other forms of being. National-­security proponents employ speculative strategies of “preemptive thinking” that manifest as full-­blown “scenario-­based exercises,” or virtual reenactments with Hollywood-­scale budgets.57 In these reenactments, media technologies materialize imaginaries of insecurity and, in doing so, enable the development of management plans that ultimately produce the very crisis they seek to contain. The case of Anduril reveals why these speculative practices are desirable for security and defense contractors. New digital technologies for surveillance and policing replicate contemporary forms of policing in faster, more efficient, and more cost-­effective ways. Border-­enforcement agencies can guarantee that they will require more resources and manpower by continuing to perpetuate current strategies of enforcement, despite the fact that—­and even because—­these strategies have already proven to be ineffective in solving the issues they purportedly tackle. In turn, the guarantee that U.S. border, defense, and policing agencies will require newer and more elaborate technologies to enact their manufactured enforcement scenarios proves attractive to Silicon Valley speculators. Investing in ventures that promise to cheaply develop weapons that the U.S. government will buy for millions of dollars is a surefire way of securing a return on those investments. “As military technology today makes clear,” writes Eugene Thacker, “the VR videogame interface is the ‘real world’ of navigation, combat, and warfare.”58 The Lattice example described at the beginning of this chapter offers a clear example of this assertion. Virtual-­reality creators can seamlessly transition into developing militaristic technologies for border enforcement, because so many of their fictional creations already present the forms of seeing and acting that render the borderlands as spaces of conflict and racial violence. That parallel is by design. Even purportedly innocuous games borrow racial frames for seeing and organizing the world, frames which then become actionable when racialized subjects experience violence for transgressing those norms in real, physical spaces. Video games function as inextricable infrastructures of the border insofar as these media enable particular audiovisual representations of the borderlands and encode dominant ways of interacting with that space.

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In the “virtual reality” of the U.S.–­Mexico border, to follow Zimanyi and Ben Ayoun, virtual media test out alternatives which can then become physical realities. Although they do not always purport to represent the world “as it is,” virtual media nonetheless have real power in influencing how the world comes to be perceived. The virtual ways of seeing and interacting supported by these media have real, physical consequences when translated into continued violence to the bodies and ecologies present in the border space. Media technologies and the forms of interaction they facilitate allow us (state agents, stakeholders, citizens, and others not immediately living in the border region) to create an idea of how the borderlands are and how they operate. At stake, then, is finding ways to repurpose such technologies to create different forms of seeing and interacting with the space of the borderlands.

5 SPECULATIVE DESIGN AND SUSTAINABILITY

By the end of 2020, news of underground tunnels across the U.S.–­ Mexico border had become commonplace. New tunnel discoveries are seldom notable unless there is something distinct about the tunnel itself. For example, a 627-­foot-­long tunnel that was discovered in the Jacumba area southeast of San Diego, California, on October 9, 2018, included ventilation lines, running lights, and railways, the features of most “sophisticated tunnels.” Two characteristics of this tunnel, however, captured public attention in a way that those before it had not: first, that it relied on solar panels, rather than electric generators, as its main power source; and second, that it featured built-­in mechanisms to pump out water in case of a tunnel flood. These two novel developments signaled a next stage in border-­tunnel construction, giving new significance to the “sophistication” of sophisticated tunnels. The peculiar finding that a trafficking organization had constructed an infrastructure with energy-­efficient features struck a chord with cultural commentators such as Trevor Noah, then host of the political satire television series The Daily Show. During the show’s October 10, 2018, episode, Noah reports the news of the tunnel discovery by mocking then President Donald Trump’s wishes for a border wall, joking that the president will now advocate for “an upside-­down wall.” The TV host also jokes that, with its elaborate railway and anti-­flood mechanisms, the Jacumba tunnel had a better subway system than New York City, 157

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whose infrastructural disrepair had been laid bare in late 2018.1 Noah quips that traffickers must have added the solar panels as a response to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released just a day before the public announcement of the tunnel discovery. “Man, we gotta do our part, man,” Noah states in a fake Mexican accent. “I don’t want my kids growing up in a white marble mansion with a pet tiger and no ozone layer, man.”2 Noah’s comedic take on the 2018 Jacumba tunnel succinctly illustrates the political and ecological stakes in the study of border tunnels. His jokes contrast the sophistication of an infrastructure produced by criminal enterprises with the U.S. government’s own infrastructural failures, whether these are the building of a futile border wall or the lack of investment in urban repair projects.3 Border tunnels reveal how, in an era of border militarization, the state’s funding priorities tend toward the spectacular and the polarizing rather than the vital albeit mundane infrastructures on which regional communities depend. Media about border tunnels offer insights into how these priorities take shape and mobilize public sentiment. The Daily Show host’s comments also unearth the speculative potential of the Jacumba tunnel in particular and of border tunnels in general; the relative inaccessibility of these sophisticated structures makes them particularly fecund sites for reimagining the spaces of the border. It is ironic, though perhaps not surprising, that illicit structures for cross-­border flows would end up being more sustainable than licit structures for border enforcement. The U.S. government’s inefficient overinvestment in border militarization not only disrupts the environments of the border in the present but also guarantees the unsustainability of these lands into the future. This chapter focuses on speculative border undergrounds and other tunnel formations to analyze how media help envision the sustainability of borders and their infrastructures. Specifically, I analyze speculative design, a medium that incorporates multiple modes of material representation, including video, photography, and 3D fabrications, as a way to “create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being.”4 It is a medium concerned with materiality as a form of world-­building. Its examples manifest perspectives on alternative worlds and the physical means to achieve them. Design “has doubtlessly been a central political technology of modernity” as it shapes the material circumstances of

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daily life.5 Among industry circles there has always been an interest in “designing” solutions to current social problems, but as designers Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou argue, the mantra that design practice is a “problem-­solving activity” ignores the “so many ways the designed has been problem-­creating.”6 Critical makers and theorists have thus begun to expose the limits of design’s most techno-­solutionist strands.7 Building on scholarly work in media archaeology and critical design studies, I discuss design projects that seek to imagine future border-­tunnel formations, both those that propose an extension of present arrangements and those that suggest alternative orientations. I argue that speculative design projects about borders and border tunnels fundamentally make claims about how the borderlands can abet or undermine the reinforcement of the border-­security apparatus. Recall that the concept of “borderlands” signals a regional setting with distinct environments and specific human and nonhuman lifeworlds, while the idea of the “border” still refers to the figurative and material construct supported by the nation-­state to demarcate geopolitical divisions.8 Thinking about borderlands requires thinking about tunnels not as avenues that cross a line of division but as networks that traverse a land. The referent for the tunnel mediations discussed in this chapter are not only the structures used to smuggle contraband but also the underground structures created to extend the reach of the state border (as in belowground border checkpoints) and the infrastructures for the maintenance of border regional lifeworlds (as in sewage-­disposal networks). These tunnel formations likewise offer insights into how media shape ideologies about the function of borders and offer alternative approaches to these ideologies. The U.S.–­Mexico borderlands have been “infrastructuralized”—­ Andrea Ballestero’s term for singling out legally and technically the function that an entity plays in human life.9 For decades, U.S. state agents have relied on the desert to act as a weapon against unwanted human migration into the country. By building walls, fences, checkpoints, and human patrols, the Border Patrol pushes migrants into desolate and dangerous areas to die off while attempting to cross.10 At the same time, “the racial infrastructures of the border”—­including walls, checkpoints, camera towers, and drone weapons—­debilitate and destroy the once thriving animal and plant habitats.11 From the perspective of landscape ecology, the U.S.–­Mexico border slices through three north–­south mountain

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ranges with heterogeneous levels of precipitation and thus encompasses at least seven distinct transboundary ecosystems.12 The nation-­state’s project of infrastructuralizing the borderlands consists of mobilizing these diverse living environments into the tools and the grounds for the destruction of subaltern lifeworlds. To argue for more just border futures, we must reclaim an environmental vision of the borderlands from this state-­mandated project. Analyzing design projects about border undergrounds reveals the potentials and limits of enacting such an environmental vision. At stake is neither a reductionist sense of sustainability nor a return to an idyllic existence before human intervention. Indeed, some infrastructures across the borderlands, such as waste-­disposal networks, could help maintain the environment of the region but have fallen into disrepair because of the single focus on securitization as border enforcement. Finding affirmative forms of future thinking among the current environmental deterioration of the borderlands is what I call ruinous speculation. We must turn our attention away from constructing more infrastructures that deplete the environments of the borderlands (e.g., steel-­reinforced fences and walls, surveillance towers) and toward maintaining those infrastructures that support and enable such environments to thrive (e.g., sewage systems, mutual aid networks). The aim of ruinous speculation is twofold: first, to resist the infrastructuralizing imperative that turns living environments into tools for reinforcing state divisions, and second, to foment the care for and repair of infrastructures that actually support human and nonhuman lifeworlds across the borderlands. The following sections elaborate on such matters. First, I explore how the notion of sustainability, like that of speculation, carries conflictual connotations that support different kinds of futures. Through this comparison, I analyze the limits of contemporary speculative design projects about border sustainability, particularly the lauded Borderwall as Architecture initiative and the Beautifying the Border project, insofar as they do not resist the infrastructuralizing imperative to transform the borderlands into tools for securitization. Then I offer a multifaceted close reading of the less-­well-­known speculative design project A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, which focuses on border tunnels and reclaims an environmental vision from the ruins of border infrastructures. This close reading illustrates ruinous speculation as a form of

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“broken-­world thinking”13 that suggests that the openings for sustainable futures can be found in the failures of the present. Finally, I suggest how the alternative vision of thinking through tunnels can be implemented in the present by focusing on border sewer networks.

Sustainability and Speculation in Border-­Design Projects Speculation has become a dominant force in late capitalism as a form of surplus creation. The rise of global finance and the monetization of risk across all sectors of society often imply extrapolation and prediction, relying on mathematical models to transform quantitative data into a narrative arc. Despite its overtures to facts and data, financial speculation produces a fiction that contributes to and is affected by the broader cultural milieu.14 This fiction, or ideology, infects other aspects of social life: stock prices and profit speculations come to stand in for “the economy,” while government and business leaders value these speculative instruments over individual people’s lives. In the realm of national security, the fear of “unknown unknowns” creates an unspecified threat “affectively held in the present in a perpetual state of potential emergence.”15 Such speculation translates into a permanent state of emergency and the development of risk-­management initiatives. Securitization, in finance and national security, prioritizes the permanence of present conditions over the possibilities that the future may bring. Speculating on the future then becomes tantamount to replicating the present, foreclosing the potential for other forms of being. The collective Uncertain Commons refers to those forms of speculation as “firmative.” Firmative speculation refers to the containment of risk, “firming” or solidifying the possibilities of the future.16 Firmative speculation seeks to monetize the mitigation of risk by setting up the conditions to replicate the present into the future indefinitely. In contrast, Uncertain Commons proposes another form of speculation, affirmative speculation, which, they argue, does not foreclose potentialities but affords modes of living that creatively engage the uncertainty that the future holds. The future must not represent an opportunity for calculating and capturing uncertainty as monetizable risk. Instead, speculating affirmatively means embracing uncertainty as a generative space

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for imagining and essaying. As a consistently modifying practice acting on shifting, multiscalar worlds, the preferred practices of this form of speculation are intuition, creativity, and play. Affirmative speculation embraces ways of living in common insofar as it is open to thinking of social formations different from those currently at hand. Like the conflict between firmative and affirmative speculation, competing notions of sustainability reveal contrasting political projects. In the area of global development, sustainability has long served the interests of the privileged. Conservative versions of “sustainable development” naturalize practices of capitalist expansion around the globe and focus on imagining how the planet can adapt to such practices. Under the guise of aid relief, the expansionist sustainable development pursued by agents from the Global North privilege forms of life that accommodate resource extraction and profit maximization. If these are the lifeworlds that must be maintained, sustainable development becomes merely a justification for exploitative practices and capital expansion in ever-­expanding trajectories. Sustainability also finds wide adoption in defense industry circles. For the Department of Homeland Security, “sustainable national security” refers to the “military-­tactical” dimension of finding renewable energy sources to cut down on emissions in order to make the military forces and the weapons of security “more lethal.”17 Sustainability thus cannot be understood as unproblematically benign. Theorists of sustainability must consider not only present and past harms to natural and built environments but also assess the implications and unfoldings of carrying such practices into the future. An affirmative version of sustainability should reimagine environmental betterment as a social and political project. In other words, we must understand social conflict and the uneven distribution of resources as the root causes for ecological crises. Policy-­making initiatives will remain insufficient, and perhaps even prejudicial, if these root causes are not adequately addressed.18 Building on feminist critiques of science and indigenous knowledges about human-­environment relations, what is “at stake in the construction of knowledge for sustainability,” argues Enrique Leff, “is not a neutral articulation of sciences [or technology or media] but a reconstruction of knowledge from the critical exteriority of the environment.”19 The fundamental questions that need to be addressed revolve around epistemes, or ways of thinking and knowing.

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If modern societies are “already thoroughly theoretically driven,” as Arturo Escobar argues, then reality “is textually mediated and produced by all kinds of expert categories, including their unfailing deployment by the media.”20 In their attempts to contend with mass media’s problematic relation to environmental sustainability, scholars have turned to the material and representational forms of specific media as a way to articulate progressive models of environmental thinking. In her analysis of climate representations in Hollywood studio sets, Jennifer Fay sketches how the aesthetics of anthropogenic weather in these controlled spaces allows us to envision the planetary effects of human-­driven climate change.21 Likewise, Jacob Smith’s experimental scholarship reveals how audio-­based media can foster an ability to listen and respond to our world with greater ecological awareness.22 The stakes of formal analysis in these projects are theoretical and practical. In the case of speculative design, formal critique attentive to the material qualities of the medium will also reveal possibilities for more ecologically minded ways of watching, listening, and sensing. As Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski argue, media studies should pursue a critical version of sustainability that complicates and destabilizes mainstream media’s narrow focus on the spectacularization of environmental catastrophe.23 In this way, Walker and Starosielski foreground media’s capacity for articulating time differently, thereby allowing a critical engagement with what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence,” or the environmental impact that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”24 Attending to how media forms rearticulate time and enable different kinds of environmental thinking offers us one avenue toward developing a critical sustainability emergent from the decolonization of science and technology studies. The concept of a U.S.–­Mexico border represents a clear example of firmative speculation. For communities native to the borderlands, the border represents an arbitrary division of otherwise highly interconnected societies and lifeworlds. A division born out of Indigenous dispossession and racial violence, the border as it stands today is neither natural nor necessary, yet firmative forms of thinking cannot fathom another organization of the space of the borderlands outside of the arbitrary division less than two hundred years old. Critical border studies

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scholars have long argued that borders take shape through negotiations between individuals and institutions performed out of habit and subject to instability and change.25 Such negotiations include performative acts of securitization designed for mass-­media consumption as well as relentless acts of violence at the hands of state agents and their increasingly sophisticated technologies of control.26 Building on the insights of critical border studies, I attend to speculative design as one way to illuminate how specific infrastructures mediate the habits, performances, and violent acts that maintain the border and to consider how these might be reconstructed differently. Affirmative forms of speculating border futures must focus on sustaining those infrastructures that enable the borderlands to thrive while reimagining the infrastructures that abet the violent enactment of divisions and the exploitation of human and nonhuman lives. At stake in achieving a critical sustainability approach lies unearthing the former type of infrastructures amid the ruins of the latter—­what I call ruinous speculation. One of the most famous speculative design projects about the U.S.–­Mexico border is the Borderwall as Architecture initiative, which consists of a series of “counterproposals” emerging from research at the Rael San Fratello studio that are “presented as a manifesto against the borderwall [sic] that divides the U.S. from Mexico.”27 Collectively, these counterproposals present “a conceptional journey” that documents scenarios, both real and imagined, relating to the U.S.–­Mexico border. These scenarios (also called recuerdos, the Spanish word for “souvenirs”) include transforming the border wall into a wastewater treatment plant, rethinking border checkpoints as thruway libraries, and fashioning ports of entry as solar farms, among others. Alternatively feasible and outlandish, these recuerdos seek to “re-­imagine, hyperbolize, or question the wall and its construction, cost, performance and its meaning.” In the introduction to the monograph condensing the results of years-­long collaborations, Ronald Rael explains that the project is a “protest against the wall” that promotes a reconsideration of said wall through design proposals and “hyperboles of actual scenarios.” These proposals, Rael suggests, indicate that “within this enormously expensive and extremely low-­tech piece of security infrastructure lie opportunities for the residents of this landscape to intellectually, physically, and culturally transcend the wall through their creativity and resilience.”28

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The most generous reading of this project would assume that it parodies the need for a structure demarcating the border by suggesting wildly implausible solutions.29 A closer look at the details of specific “counterproposals,” however, reveals that the purported aims of the project do not bear out in the implicit politics of its designs. Consider the idea for a wastewater treatment plant powered by solar panels. On its face, it presents a “more benevolent” alternative to the straight cement wall or steel slats that would compose a border wall. Indeed, the borderlands would benefit from more advanced wastewater treatment facilities. Yet the positioning of these solar panels in a line formation, retaining the barrier aspect of the wall, perpetuates the structure’s negative externalities. Human migrants would have to find other, more dangerous areas of the border to cross. Likewise, this wastewater treatment plant/border would disrupt the hunting and migration patterns of desert animals, which is the main reason that biologists vehemently oppose the wall. Despite its stated intent to generate solar power, a construction of this scale across the desert would impede humans’ travel and adversely affect animal survival practices. In short, there is little reason for building solar panels in a linear formation in the middle of the desert other than an assumption that there must be something physical to signify the socially demarcated division. The wastewater treatment plant counterproposal draws inspiration from the fact that “the New River is considered the most polluted river in the United States.” Flowing north from Mexicali, Mexico, and crossing the border at Calexico, California, “New River toxicity is comprised of chemical runoff from farm industry, sewage, contaminants—­ such as volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, pesticides, which at the border checkpoint far exceed U.S.–­Mexico treaty limits.” Pollution in the New River is especially harmful because it flows through the Imperial Valley, which is a major source of winter fruits and vegetables, cotton, and grain for domestic and export markets. Water contamination from industry runoff has long been a serious problem in the border context. In the late 1990s, as Tijuana’s sewage treatment plants reached maximum capacity, the Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana (Tijuana’s Water Authority) proposed treating the city’s wastewater to secondary standards (a level that cleans out roughly 85 percent of contaminants) and dump it back into the Tijuana River for discharge into

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the Pacific Ocean. Officials from the California Water Quality Control Board and the U.S. EPA opposed this vehemently. So the International Boundary and Water Commission struck a deal between the two nations’ agencies for a new sewage plant on U.S. soil, which would receive the sewage coming from Tijuana and treat it to EPA standards. The plant took over ten years to meet Clean Water Act standards on a regular basis.30 While the counterproposal attempts to tackle this very real border ecological nightmare, the language deployed to promote the wall alternative internalizes the siege mentality that permeates current debates on border security. “While the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was enacted, according to President Bush, to ‘help protect the American people’ from illegal immigration, drug smuggling and terrorism,” the proposal reads, “the New River represents a far more dangerous flow north from Mexico in need of containment.” The slippage between security discourse and environmental solutionism betrays the reactionary forms of sustainability implicit in this kind of design thinking. The proposal ends by claiming that “[a] wastewater treatment wall located in the two-­mile-­long wasteland that buffers the dense border city of Mexicali from the agricultural Eden of the Imperial Valley would offer a solution to the ‘illegal entry’ of toxins to the U.S.”31 Without pushing against the rhetoric of invasion, using such language to justify the speculative counterproposal obscures the broader historical and political reasons for the wastewater problems. Following the trade liberalization imposed by NAFTA, the southern border region saw the proliferation of maquiladoras, manufacturing operations that took advantage of the lessened import tariffs in the United States and cheaper labor costs in Mexico. This straightforward story of Global North economic development outsourcing production to the Global South is complicated by the fact that most of the Mexican side of the border is at a higher altitude than the U.S. side: heavy rains on the south side of the geopolitical border bring millions of gallons of sewage and industrial waste from Mexican factories into U.S. beaches. These runoffs are better understood as a “dark ecology” resulting from the enforcement of geopolitical boundaries and the disproportionate dispersal of harm across this divide. The proposal for a wastewater treatment plant as the wall reinforces the idea of “southern invaders” while excusing the northerners for creating the conditions of possibility for such unwanted flows.

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Other proposals similarly adopt current exploitation practices without questioning them. A proposal for a beacon signal with built-­in water supply, for instance, not only overlooks the Border Patrol’s active efforts to destroy all vital aid for desert crossers but also installs a permanent structure that makes it easier for these agencies to surveil the border region. Human rights activists purposely set up water stations in the desolate desert areas to counteract the state’s tactical use of desert conditions to dispose of migrants and to prevent CBP agents from finding and destroying these life-­saving resources.32 The counterproposal in fact ends up exacerbating current problematic conditions. “It is not sufficient to rethink, repurpose, or redeem [the] space,” argues Camila Fojas about speculative projects about the U.S.–­Mexico border. Instead, for any such project to be successful, the borderlands must “be completely reconfigured to reflect the nonhierarchical spatialization of binationalism.”33 Despite its distinct architectural take, Borderwall as Architecture embodies many of the issues that critics have identified in other forms of speculative design. Critics of speculative design often point out how it subscribes to the “modernist spirit of technological objects as design leadership,” which centers on stylish pieces, encourages consumerism, and privileges a user’s cognitive and affective responses.34 Critical practitioners, in turn, question the drive toward solutionism in most design methodologies. The “teleological view” of solutionist design principles focuses on incremental problem solving and displaces value-­based discourse grounded in social concerns. For Daniela Rosner, a corrective to the techno-­solutionism prevalent in much design thinking is “staying with the trouble,” Donna Haraway’s formulation for methods that live with and between contradictions and breakdowns.35 The normative politics of speculative design have implications for what is considered worthy as an object of speculation. Jussi Parikka rightly notes that when speculative design claims “to address an existing lack of imaginaries [it] implies that only specific kinds of situated practices were in the first place accredited as interesting enough to be ‘speculative.’”36 The kinds of situated practices excluded from the realm of the speculative often turn out to be, for instance, those emerging from Indigenous and Global South lifeworlds and those that do not subscribe to futuristic technological solutions to social problems.

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Putting forth a speculative proposal that specifically targets border tunnels, the Miami firm DOMO Architecture + Design envisions an underground wall made of recycled shipping containers “topped with flowers as an alternative to ugly grey concrete” in its project Beautifying the Border.37 Unwittingly, this proposal zeroes in on the central conceit that speculative design proposals about the border fail to acknowledge and thus remain unable to contend with: it rejects the crude aesthetics of the border wall but not its ideological and practical purposes. As explained by the firm’s principal designer, “by removing the idea of a wall or a fence, we remove the negative social, cultural and physical connotations associated with visual and physical barriers.”38 The target problem of these speculative designs becomes the aesthetics and significance of a border wall, yet the broader social and ecological issues with the presence of a physical barrier remain unaddressed. Animal lifeworlds would suffer from disruption to their hunting and breeding grounds or impediments to yearly migration patterns. Likewise, despite the lack of aboveground barriers, an underground physical construction across the length of the border would have a significant impact on existing plant and water ecosystems that make up the borderlands. Beautifying the Border concerns itself with the aboveground aesthetics but fails to account for the impact of any construction, whether above-­or underground, that decisively and permanently divides what are otherwise highly interconnected lands. The design’s animations portray the borderlands as expansive green fields akin to parks, but the proposed underground division makes it so these parks would be the opposite of gathering places. People are depicted as waving across a vast expanse, a direct contrast to the way parks across the border currently operate. Even a highly surveilled and securitized social space like Friendship Park in San Diego–­Tijuana allows for people divided by the geopolitical border to come into close physical contact. The “beautifying” in the project’s title betrays the modernist underpinnings of this project and its attendant effects. In Fry and Kalantidou’s words, the “progressive luminescence” of design often obfuscates its starkest “regressive otherness”: focusing only on the worlds illuminated by stylish design ignores the worlds it simultaneously destroys.39 By proposing a presumably more aesthetically pleasing barrier to divide the two nation-­states, the DOMO

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speculative design invents new forms of separating the communities that inhabit the borderlands. The proposed separation of the two nation-­states in this speculative design consists of a “ha-­ha wall,” a turfed slope that declines to meet a vertical retaining barrier. Ha-­ha walls merge the aims of landscape design and security design insofar as they prevent access (whether by humans, animals, or unauthorized vehicles) to an area while minimizing visual obstruction. In the DOMO proposal, “the slope is inspired by the [construction] of a ha-­ha wall, which will maintain visual connectivity and stop any potential tunnel connectivity.” That this speculative design acknowledges and targets trafficking tunnels is significant, because it reveals the rise of border tunnels as central features in the border imaginary. More troubling, however, it also signals the flattening of all border underground formations into the trafficking structures. Sewers and storm drains are also tunnel connectivities across the U.S.–­Mexico border that would be disrupted by the proposed ha-­ha walls. In order to prevent the development of all cross-­border tunnels, the aggregate of ha-­ha walls in this design proposal would end up creating a border-­length perpendicular underground tunnel that replicates the physical, political, and environmental consequences of the aboveground wall.40 This proposal demonstrates that tunnels are themselves not emancipatory structures, but rather structures that can be mobilized to enact differing conceptions of the borderlands, for better or for worse. This border-­length series of ha-­ha walls illustrates another aspect of the tunnelicity of border tunnels. In previous chapters, the corridor space of tunnels remained within the structure itself, whether it was the railway that enabled the tracking shot of documentary tunnels or the repetitive corridors of the first-­person shooter. As a structure of containment, the tunnel constrains movement within itself. As a structure of transit, the tunnel-­as-­corridor affects the spaces it runs through differently than the places it runs to. Running to is a process of connection, while running through becomes a practice of division. The border-­length perpendicular underground tunnel proposed by Beautifying the Border runs through the borderlands in order to reinforce the division of the geopolitical border. While it may seem at first glance to be an alternative to the demarcations of space facilitated by walls, in the end this proposal

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merely translates the tunnel’s corridoricity into a tool for replicating the function of border walls in an underground space. Speculative projects such as Beautifying the Border and Borderwall as Architecture can never fully shed their underlying premise that something human-­made should demarcate the border. Because they do not disavow such a notion, these projects can only imagine solutions that replicate the existing structures of resource exploitation and ecological disruption. It is reactionary sustainability and firmative speculation. Mark Jarzombek has taken architectural theory to task for being unable to deal with the most pressing social and environmental issues of the current moment, claiming that the discipline can “only barely deal with the problem of global warming.” For Jarzombek, this has to do with the fact that architecture’s notion of sustainability has been aligned since the 1980s with management theory.41 Social justice concerns become relegated to policy-­making decisions. Under this assumption, the discipline will continue to privilege building and development over maintenance and repair. Speculative architectural proposals such as these remain moored to the “modernist spirit of technological objects” rather than committing to staying with the trouble. Locating the problem in a disciplinary context seems reductive, however. Critical work like that of the Forensic Architecture activist research group relies on “architectural evidence” to expose and intervene in “state and corporate violence, human rights violations and environmental destruction all over the world.”42 Besides leading the group, researcher Eyal Weizman has mobilized the methods and insights of architecture and urban design to reveal how the construction of infrastructure such as highways and parks supports settlement and border enforcement just as much as fences, walls, and watchtowers.43 These efforts turn architecture and design studies into tools for transformative politics. Despite their stated critical bent, the proposals in Borderwall as Architecture fall short of offering the potential for these transformative politics, because they emphasize a nation-­state division over a regional terrain that precedes and could outlive that division.44 As Fry and Kalantidou argue, design can be “a determinate force of global change” only if “design itself is remade” by breaking from the “impositional worldly enframing” that unifies everything under modernist ideologies.45 In the case of the border, speculating on future alternatives means undoing the

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modernist assumption that the geopolitical division should take precedence over the sustainability of regional lifeworlds. It means disentangling and evaluating ideals about what the borderlands are and for whom they exist. Consider a vital yet often overlooked set of border tunnels: sewers. Crumbling sewer infrastructure across the borderlands has been a well-­ documented problem since the early 1990s, and it resurfaces whenever a spectacular pipe break results in sewage spillage aboveground.46 Border residents, including local politicians, attest to the hazardous effects of depending on polluted water yet few people outside of the border region are aware of this issue, let alone consider it at the level of a crisis.47 But sewage maintenance proves to be a particularly generative issue to contend with the need to rethink paths of action across the borderlands.48 In the case of the U.S.–­Mexico border region, downhill runoff subverts the established power differential operating in the north-­south distinction, subverting geopolitical hierarchies by reinforcing geophysical ones. Sewage runoff also distributes pathogens in a way that refuses to respect social boundaries: both Southern California surfers and low-­income colonias (unincorporated borderland communities) have stakes in finding solutions to this issue. Fixing the existing sewage infrastructure requires bulky, high-­cost materials and labor-­intensive repairs. The need for extensive physical repairs and changes to existing infrastructure is not a mystery. Experts have long detailed the range of actionable solutions, including fixing weak points in the International Outfall Interceptor, which carries at least ten million gallons of sewage per day from Mexico to the Nogales International Wastewater Treatment Plant in Rio Rico; reforming the role of the International Boundary and Water Commission; and reinstating funding to the North American Development Bank.49 The main issue, then, is the entrenched “state-­thinking” that privileges security over sustainability and leaves bureaucratic inefficiencies unchecked. In the U.S.–­Mexico context, state-­ thinking also leads to an international impasse where each side blames the other for causing the infrastructural problems, and neither works toward collaborative solutions that could benefit both. Therefore, solutions to this issue require not only significant forms of investment but also a regional commitment to infrastructure maintenance and repair.

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“The State Is the Sewer,” as Dominique Laporte succinctly puts it.50 Historians and other scholars have long argued that the development of urban sewer networks parallels, and is informed by, modern forms of state power. Sewers are key elements in the study of state power, because they infrastructurally link the citizenry to the state without any sense of direct intervention. “The construction of sewers,” notes Gay Hawkins, was “the creation of an infrastructure for the subterranean management of threats to life.”51 Practices of waste management in the border region are likewise caught up in larger political assemblages, but the qualification of what that “threat to life” is in the case of the U.S.–­Mexico sewers remains under contention. The emphasis on securitization and entrenched “state-­thinking” impedes the collaboration needed to properly mend and maintain sewers across the borderlands. An alternative conception of these tunnel networks is necessary.

Ruinous Speculation in A Practice in Excavating The pragmatism championed by Borderwall as Architecture and Beautifying the Border—­that a wall should exist at all—­remains its most glaring default to normativity. In contrast, Edwin Agudelo’s project A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales opens up a space for affirmative modes of speculation on border futurities and, in doing so, offers more creative and intuitive forms of rethinking the organization of the borderlands. I would invoke “failure” here in the sense that Jack Halberstam theorizes, as a kind of critical work that “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant.”52 Eschewing the focus on the wall reveals that alternatives are already present in the caves, sewers, and drug tunnels that Agudelo’s project invokes. For José Esteban Muñoz, the queer potential of failure lies in a “rejection of pragmatism” and a refusal of social norms.53 The failure of A Practice in Excavating to adhere to the firmative speculation maxims of other border-­design projects becomes the generative grounds for the critical reading pursued here. “What sort of worlds might we find if we could have a totalizing view of the underground?” This is the starting premise for Agudelo’s project A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales.54 The project takes the existence and relative obscurity of border tunnels as an invitation for speculating border alternatives. A series of mixed-­media

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models constructed from photographs, sketches, and a cast of Agudelo’s making, A Practice in Excavating rethinks the role of border tunnels as public spaces, not only for the present but also for the future. If tunnels already provide alternative transnational routes for the movement of goods, people, and ideas, this project suggests that they may also act as what John Durham Peters terms “world-­enabling infrastructures.” That is, in fostering transnational connections beyond current geopolitical formations, tunnels become “not passive vessels for content, but ontological shifters,” transforming the very terms of the debate around the issue of public space.55 A Practice in Excavating illustrates why and how the struggle over the definition and control of an underground public space includes attending to immediate and long-­lasting concerns as well as managing the conflicts that emerge from competing temporalities. The starting point for envisioning alternative underground worlds is the patchwork qualities of both border fences and border tunnels. Border Patrol must continually mend and patch up broken fences and torn-­down chain links across the border. Likewise, the discovery of any border tunnel is swiftly followed by a concrete plug on both sides of the tunnel, yet authorities rarely close off a tunnel fully. A few feet of high-­ bonding concrete seal off the exits but leave the main shaft untouched. Agudelo zeroes in on this peculiarity of border-­tunnel afterlives and proposes that their hollowed-­out remains hold potential for a new public space. At stake is shifting “the U.S.–­Mexico border from the typically thought of aboveground condition to one of a subterranean and limitless clandestine nature.” He suggests thinking through three underground border systems—­sewers, natural caves, and drug tunnels—­as a “system of aggregation,” or assemblage, that is “capable of being programmed for public access.” In A Practice in Excavating, this public underground assemblage features no functional distinction between the various underground formations, whether human-­or nonhuman-­made, licit or illicit. What this model suggests is a future public space emergent yet unmoored from contemporary geopolitical distinctions. A Practice in Excavating represents the border underground as a multimedia model. The aboveground world is made up of collages of Agudelo’s own photographs of the border and from sketches of silhouettes: a border officer holding a gun, a truck, people walking, a border fence with graffiti. The underground world consists of photographs of

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a physical model created by Agudelo himself (Figure 31). The designer built casts for different sections of the border he sought to represent by connecting wooden sticks and metal rods in disparate organizations, covering them in plaster, then wrapping them in cloth. He then cut the casts in half, revealing a tangle of cloth, metal, and wood. These sections of the cast are placed atop a concrete block and photographed. The photographs of these tangles are placed in the same image as the collages, creating a contrast between the two-­dimensional aboveground world and the disarrayed, three-­dimensional underground. The distinguishable figures for the aboveground world also stand in opposition to the entangled mesh of the underground. In A Practice in Excavating we find a project of ruinous speculation. Ruination, according to Ann Laura Stoler, refers to “an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss.”56 Rather than focusing on the object of ruins, ruination highlights the processual force of imperial destruction brought forth by capitalist forces. Ruination encapsulates the feeling of dwelling amid various forms of environmental decay, depletion, and exhaustion. Rahul Mukherjee further expands this term to include the “lived worlds of people who are inhabiting ruins-­ in-­the-­making.” Focusing on the mediation of ruins means considering in tandem both the media infrastructures that index obsolescence (e.g., old cell towers, broken phones, incompatible software) and the images, ideas, and values these objects transmit. The materiality of the media object stands not only as a vessel with which to render the state of worldly ruin but also a ruin-­in-­the-­making itself. Studying ruins from the perspective of mediation moors infrastructural precarity to an interrogation of power relations. “Ruination is finally, and quite literally, a political project” of distributing waste, segregating livelihoods, and demarcating productive spaces from forgotten sites.57 Ruinous speculation attends not only to the distribution of livelihoods across productive and unproductive sites, but also to the sustainability, as in the multiply open-­ended futurity, of such sites. The ruination rendered in A Practice in Excavating concerns not only the state of the border underground as we may find it today but also the possibilities inherent in rethinking what the border underground could be like. Mukherjee finds in media archaeology a method for excavating the lifeworlds of ruins-­in-­the-­making. Parikka proposes that media archaeology

Figure 31. The representation of the borderlands in A Practice in Excavating emphasizes the underground as a material, three-­dimensional space that contrasts with the two-­dimensional sketches of the aboveground. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

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already thinks of alternative pasts, possible futures, and the politics of such for the present. The “search for lost ideas and forgotten themes” that structures much of media archaeology also undergirds a potential reframing of media futures. Parikka emphasizes the value of media archaeology to address the issues of speculative design insofar as the former reminds the latter that design prototypes are material media objects with physical characteristics and representational histories.58 Taking such critiques into consideration, this analysis of A Practice in Excavating as speculative design refers to design not as a methodology but as an artifact whose material characteristics and creation processes enable novel ways of imagining border alternatives. Influenced by both media archaeological and critical design approaches, the following analysis of A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales illustrates the value of ruinous speculation as a critical practice of media analysis.59 The multimedia artifacts of the project construct worlds with varying material and representational affordances: two-­dimensional and three-­dimensional perspectives, tactile and complex textures, and fragmentary and collage-­like aesthetics. Agudelo’s documentation of the construction process likewise offers an opportunity to critically reflect on how the potential for transformative thinking inheres in practices of media making (Figure 32). The project’s dual nature of mediation is evident in its title: excavating in the sense of archaeological uncovering of material relations, and envisioning in the sense of giving shape to the insights uncovered from such archaeology. These contrasts in materiality gesture at distinct ontologies between the (purportedly) clearly demarcated divisions of the present geopolitical order and the nebulous future order of the tunnel world. The mixed-­ media nature of these models adds a material texture that speaks to the representational impossibility of this space and time. It also alludes to the multiplicity of tunnels. The mesh in A Practice in Excavating is tunnel-­ like in how it depicts the underground as a cavernous space. At the same time, the mixture of textures and shapes in this depiction speaks to the web of rudimentary, interconnected, and sophisticated tunnels that shape the border’s porous underground. As a hybrid liminal space that conflates natural and human-­made, licit and illicit systems, the project is akin to a frontera in that it dissipates geopolitical markers in favor of rendering the borderlands as a distinct region.

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Figure 32. Agudelo reimagines sections of the border space as pieces from a cast. The documentation of the process of making his speculative project also offers an opportunity to think about the construction of border alternatives. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

The materiality of design invites us to explore issues of scale and temporality in tandem. The scalar difference between the photo collage of the aboveground and the cast of the underground visually renders the shift in emphasis that Agudelo proposes. The border fences and other security forces are still there, but they are minimized and relegated to a fraction of the frame. Visually and conceptually, the photo collage of fences and agents recedes in order to foreground the tunnels as the area for speculation—­but it is significant that these figures are still present. A Practice in Excavating does not pretend to ignore the present conditions of border lifeworlds. Rather, it sidelines them and offers new worlds at the same time. The barely legible traces of the border agents, fences, and vehicles gesture at the potentially disappearing

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traces of current bordering conditions. Even if the speculative futurities embodied by the tunnel worlds come to fruition, these would not undo the destruction that current bordering practices have perpetuated on the region’s ecologies. The aspiration that these practices will soon become a memory is also a reminder of the endurance of the material effects wrought by their violence. Time itself is stratified in material traces. The use of different components for each of the layers in A Practice in Excavating allows for an examination of temporality beyond the straightforward demarcation of present and future. While the top layer of the sketch figures and photo collages gestures at ephemerality, the bottom layer of concrete upon which the tunnel cast is set signals more permanent sediments. Spatially, such sediments could mean the geological strata that human bioturbation is unlikely to reach. Temporally, this concrete block represents the limits to future thinking. It is a reminder that even open-­ended speculation should focus on short-­and middle-­term futures, since these serve as the conditions of possibility for the long term. The cast created to represent the tunnel underground deserves special attention (Figure 33). In its shape, process of creation, and material composition, the tunnel cast provides further avenues for ruinous speculation. There is the use of a cast to create portions of the underground, a feature that Agudelo does not elaborate on. Before it is cut up into sections, the shape of the cast resembles the body of a small person without a head. In a way, it is a maimed body. Maiming, as Jasbir Puar argues, extracts value from populations that would otherwise be disposable. What she terms “the right to maim” articulates a sovereign form of power that will not allow disenfranchised populations to die as long as their debilitated existence still carries value for the oppressors. By physically marking populations as disposable but not disposed, maiming becomes a “sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule, justified in protectionist terms.”60 Borders are one kind of spatiotemporal figuration that enacts the biopolitical strategies of maiming. Although Puar’s analysis focuses on the violent tactics of the Israel Defense Forces to debilitate the Palestinian population, this practice of maiming also occurs at the U.S.–­Mexico border and across border zones around the world. Examples include the 2012 killing of a sixteen-­year-­old Mexican boy by U.S. Border Patrol

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Figure 33. The cast created to represent pieces of the border underground recalls the shape and look of a maimed human body, reminding us that borders act as spatiotemporal figurations of maiming. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

agent Lonnie Swartz by shooting at him through the border fence and the repeated instances of Border Patrol firing tear gas at Central American refugees attempting to approach the border.61 These resonances are far from coincidental. The U.S. government repeatedly relies on Israeli military contractors to develop and implement the architecture of securitization across the U.S.–­Mexico border.62 Violent borders share similar infrastructures and maiming practices. Maiming is the most explicit articulation of what Puar calls the biopolitics of debilitation. Debilitation here implies a “tactical practice deployed in order to create and precaritize populations and maintain them as such.”63 It is a process whereby certain subjects are marked as risky and become slowly and systematically targeted for harm. Concurrent with these processes of debilitation are those of capacitation, which enable certain harmed bodies opportunities through social and political rights. Puar uses these distinctions to nuance the understanding of disability. Certain disabled bodies may be capacitated by virtue of

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their access to rights accorded through race, sex, and nationality. In contrast, precarious bodies marked because of their race, sex, or nationality may be debilitated further by preventing their access to disability rights discourse. Transposing this biopolitical framework onto the “body” of the underground world of A Practice in Excavating reveals the potentials of ruinous speculation. The insistence on marking national borders at the expense of regional lifeworlds perpetuates the process of debilitation for the flora, fauna, and select human populations that inhabit the border region. Such insistence is tied to attempts at capacitating the national nativist sentiments elsewhere in the nation-­state. Throughout the disputes in early 2019 over funding for a border wall, it came as no surprise that support of such a measure did not come from people living in the border region.64 Ecological wearing down occurs here at a regional level, but it is also clear that within the region, already disenfranchised populations feel the burden of such debilitation processes the most. By using the cast as the material from which to build an alternative future, this speculative project suggests that capacitating the ruined worlds of

Figure 34. Part of the cast cut in half and set up to be photographed from the side to give shape to the underground mesh. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

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the border is tantamount to envisioning the viability and livability of the underground. What forms of livable life can emerge to counter the processes of debilitation that border reinforcement facilitates? The mesh derived from the pieces of the cast provides material to speculate with because of its composition (Figures 34 and 35). The mesh gestures at inchoate forms contained within such entanglements. It suggests the impossibility of knowing in advance what tunnel futures would look and feel like. Mesh-­like formations stand in contrast to the calculations that firmative speculation would demand. Instead, the future is a literal mess: it remains unknowable yet emergent from material traces that we can apprehend in the present. In their analysis of the etymological roots of speculation, Uncertain Commons ascertains that from the Sanskrit root verb spas are derived not only words that invoke observing and contemplating but also those that suggest undertaking, stringing together, and touching. In the process of advocating for an affirmative mode of speculation, these etymological links “turn us toward not only speculation as thought

Figure 35. Close-­up of the mesh from inside the cast, meant to give tactile representation to the border underground world of tunnels. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

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but also speculation as a pressing toward an apprehension of the unknown.”65 The mesh of the underground world suggests that the future unknowns cannot be merely forecast, as in made visible. They must also be made tangible. The rethinking of public space proposed by A Practice in Excavating proves suggestive because it links a ruinous landscape to a field of potential. Certainly, the public space envisioned in this project is, at present, unlivable. Even sophisticated trafficking tunnels that feature ventilation systems and electric lighting depend on aboveground sources of energy to function. In the diptych presentation of the project, Agudelo sets two prints of the border underground at a ninety-­degree angle and connects them with a wire tunnel (Figure 36). The wire tunnel reminds us that sealing off border tunnels with concrete severs their viability, leaving an empty shell in lieu of a functional shaft. Materializing an alternative public space in these underground recesses would require finding a means of providing energy from within the tunnel world. Still, the potential for alternative publicness remains in infrastructural form. The “sophisticatedness” of sophisticated tunnels lies partly in their resilience to natural and artificial contingencies, in their ability to endure for long periods of time. Geologists Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, and Mark Williams have argued that “this form of anthropogenic modification arguably has the highest long-­term preservation potential of anything made by humans.”66 In geological time, tunneling may become the longest-­lasting human invention. The potential of these resilient infrastructures becomes a powerful rejoinder to the reactionary, and inherently futile, impulse of building border fences, surveillance towers, and walls. A Practice in Excavating thus fosters links between technological sophistication, underground space, and speculative futurities. These links speak to the current historical conjuncture, wherein technological systems remain intertwined with natural ecologies on a global scale. In her analysis of nineteenth-­century science fiction narratives, Rosalind Williams notes a shift from stories about the underground as a place to visit to stories about the underground as a place to live. She explains this change by referring to advancements in the realms of scientific knowledge and technological production.67 Developments in science made the idea of discovering a subterranean world seem more far-­fetched, while

Figure 36. Diptych model of two prints of border undergrounds connected with a cylindrical wire representing a cross-­section tunnel. (Source: Edwin Agudelo, A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, 2008; courtesy of the artist.)

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technological innovations made the idea of building a world underground seem more plausible. The imaginative proposal put forth by A Practice in Excavating similarly speaks to the scientific and technological knowledge of our current historical conjuncture. At the same time that new technologies make the disruption of existing geopolitical formations more likely, the threat from the consequences of climate change prompts the need for thinking about new organizations for social life. The meshwork of tunnels intersects these two concerns, proposing that they may be addressed in tandem. In this project, border tunnels represent a site akin to what Anna Tsing calls the “latent commons,” emerging formations that are both barely noticeable and underdeveloped. The key contribution of Tsing’s formulation lies in the fact that the commons are not (necessarily) good for everyone, because every collaboration includes some and leaves out others. Latent commons are not utopic; they exist in the “here and now, amidst the trouble.” The purpose of tracing these commons is to “aim for ‘good enough’ worlds, where ‘good enough’ is always imperfect and under revision.”68 These commons thus transform the ruinous state of contemporary organizations into the grounds for thinking other configurations in the future, but such future configurations remain contingent and continuously permutable. Like Tsing’s latent commons, A Practice in Excavating eschews teleology while alerting us to the ethical dimensions left in its wake. Sustainability emerges not as the perpetuation of current practices in less maligned forms but as the encounter of conflicting processes animated by natural and social forces. Ruinous speculation suggests that to build a future in common means to negotiate diverse interests driving their own economic, ecological, and technological processes with their own timings. The latent commons found in A Practice in Excavating gestures at a future world below, rather than beyond, the current geopolitical formations and architectural structures. The speculative reimaginings presented in this project also mobilize the figure of the tunnel to make claims about the relativity of borders and their potential imminent dissolution. In this regard, the project further suggests that tunnels may provide apertures not only to the epistemological, geopolitical, and technological struggles within the present but also to those struggles to come. Tunneling futures hold the capacity

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to engender and give shape to alternatives for contemporary geopolitical orderings. If capitalism has securitized, quantified, and parceled out the future—­in other words, foreclosed it—­then underground border tunnels provide a literal and figurative opening to reevaluate the terms of our engagement with the uncertainty of what is to come. These vertical structures undermine spatiotemporal horizontal orientations and, in doing so, unearth radical potentialities within the ruinous infrastructure of the present. Tunnels animate new lifeworlds in the here and now, amidst the trouble.

Remediating Vital Tunnels What sort of worlds might we find if we began by considering the underground? By now, my analysis of A Practice in Excavating as ruinous speculation suggests a starting point to think through the question posed by Agudelo. By way of conclusion, let us return to the case of border sewers as an example of how such an aspiration can begin to take shape already. Sewers illustrate how the insights derived from the preceding speculative analysis—­sustainability as open-­ended creative engagement and the importance of “good enough” worlds—­inform the development of short-­term solutions. Sewage networks offer a concrete infrastructure that requires maintenance and repair in the present to ensure the sustainability of the borderlands in the future. The tunnel sewage systems explored here extend modern forms of state control to the transnational arena, but they are complicated by an unavoidable, distinctly regional dimension. The state-­based practices of border enforcement and securitization remain incompatible with the regionwide approaches needed to tackle environmental issues such as sewage disposal. The widespread use of sewers by narcotraffickers and the framing of trafficking as a national-­security issue will likely only complicate the integration of these cross-­scale differentials. In this regard, lack of intervention in border sewer infrastructure is not unlike other clashes between the interests of state militarization and environmental sustainability, such as the passing of laws that allow the suspension of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts whenever the DHS deems it a national-­ security imperative.69 At the heart of all these examples is the struggle between “immunizing the nation” on the one hand and “preserving

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border ecologies” on the other—­a struggle between two distinct conceptions of life. In the nineteenth century, urban planning relied on an “organic” understanding of sewer lines, pipes, and tunnels. Pipes were supposed to be neutral and anonymous, supplying the private space of the home with public intervention in an unintrusive way. They were organic because they were “natural,” blended into the background. Additionally, these sewer lines were organic because they were ideologically and materially coupled to the “vital economy” of the body politic, to maintaining the health of citizens and the cleanliness of the city. This underground tunnel environment was intrinsic to the “life” of the state, and therefore needed to be regulated like the population itself.70 The regulation of a particular form of life remains a central feature in the securitization of sewer networks across the U.S.–­Mexico border. DHS refers to the practice of shutting down any kind of trafficking tunnel as “remediating tunnels.” Implied in this usage is the assumption that ameliorating the condition of the tunnels means filling them with concrete and sealing off entrances and exits, without considering whether such sealing off prevents using the tunnels for other, more vital purposes. As Alenda Chang explains, “environmental remediation aims to remove without return. The desired goal is an absence, rather than a presence.”71 Remediating tunnels in the DHS manner suggests that the problem being solved, the absence sought, is trafficking. The security paradigm emphasizes protecting the vulnerabilities of these vital systems so as to avoid contraventions to state sovereignty, but not necessarily to foment a better functioning of the vital systems themselves. The remediation of tunnels as currently exercised by DHS focuses on the livelihood of state control without regard to the lives of those who depend on the waste-­ disposal system. The issues fueling this lopsided focus concern different temporal and spatial scales. Spatially, the nation-­based practices of border enforcement and securitization remain incompatible with the regionwide approaches needed to tackle environmental issues such as sewage disposal. The development of a security apparatus to maintain the vitality of the geopolitical state increasingly contrasts with the vitality of the region where this apparatus is most forcibly enacted. Likewise, the different temporal registers between “security” issues and environmental ones means

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that the former always draws more attention. While issues of national security carry a sense of urgency, and therefore immediacy, plans for the betterment of ecological problems require decades-­long cooperation.72 The imbalance of powers between the interested parties is also a factor. The underfunded agencies on the Mexican side of the border may be more concerned with treating the ecological crises before the geopolitical ones, but the military industries on the U.S. side favor the opposite approach. Mapping, mending, and caring for these infrastructures, I argue, are better alternatives to think through the sustainability of the border. Herein lies the value of “open-­ended” speculation: it is not about a lack of concrete action but about allowing plans of action to emerge through avenues that existing paradigms cannot account for. The ruinous tunnels of the sewer systems evidence the limited use of state-­based paradigms for border futures. Their figurative mesh signals both the nebulous present, where incomplete information prevents better care for these vital infrastructures, and the speculative future, where attending to regional problems requires the dissolution of present divisions. As Jenna M. Loyd argues, political movements for the abolition of borders must contend with the “troubled categories” inherited from nation-­state thinking and must seek alternative “scales or sites of organizing.”73 I have proposed ruinous speculation as a practice that opens up the space to sketch out solutions toward this scalar reorganization. The first step is to resist the infrastructuralizing imperative of most speculative border-­design projects, which continue to assume that the living environments of the borderlands can be turned into tools for the benefit of the nation-­state. The second step is to foment the care for and repair of already existing infrastructures, such as sewers, that can viably support human and nonhuman lifeworlds across the borderlands. In the long term, this turn toward care also implies attending to the material composition of community through collective practices that make everyday life possible.74 As Tsing reminds us, not all “good enough” worlds are the same. Choices need to be made about which border futurities we want to aspire to and how to make them happen, starting today.

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CONCLUSION MEDIA THEORY FROM THE BORDER TUNNEL

The January 29, 2019, episode of the popular design podcast 99% Invisible returns us to the trafficking tunnel discovered in 1990 between Douglas and Agua Prieta. Delaney Hall, the podcast’s senior editor, carries out the bulk of the reporting for the episode and provides the voice that guides the listener through the story of the building and discovery of this tunnel. Hall interviews locals familiar with the story and discusses the popular media fascination with the tunnel, including its appearance in Unsolved Mysteries. Toward the end of the episode, Hall mentions that during her investigation she tried to visit the Douglas tunnel, since it has been kept open for decades to facilitate training sessions for Border Patrol agents. Through the connections made while reporting, she was able to get into the warehouse where the tunnel ended, but “the tunnel is dank, and unmaintained, and I was seven months pregnant at the time of the visit,” Hall explains. “A city worker took one look at me, probably imagined me trying to clamber down the rusty ladder in the dark, and wouldn’t let us in after all.”1 The podcast episode ends without providing listeners an inside perspective into the tunnel itself. Mediating a tunnel through a podcast is distinctly different from the audiovisual examples explored in most of this book. Still, I end with this non-­appearance of the Douglas tunnel because it makes explicit the work of mediation required for (listening or viewing) audiences to engage with border tunnels. Because Hall herself could not enter the 189

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tunnel, the episode ends up not featuring a detailed description of the tunnel’s inside architecture. This absence illustrates the direct relationship between the physical presence of the reporter and the ability to envision the tunnel. When she remarks on her inability to gain entry to the tunnel and thus provide listeners access to the structure, Hall draws attention to the body of the reporter as the literal medium to translate information to the audience. Hall’s eyes would have seen the tunnel and translated what she saw into words that painted a picture for the audience. We have seen similar examples of how the bodies of protagonists, whether these are television reporters or Tunnel Task Force agents, mediate our access to and understanding of the space of physical tunnels. Because mediation is not a transparent transference but a complex process of articulation, these mediating subjects imbue their representations with different connotations. Telegenic reporters like Anderson Cooper might turn to their own physicality to reinforce the thrill and fascination with tunnels. CBP agents like Tom Pittman and Kevin Hecht might emphasize the riskiness of the structures as a way to foreground their own labor. These subjects’ embodied relationship to reality shapes the capacity for audiences to access that reality. Inversely, the examples discussed in later chapters demonstrate how media form itself positions the audience member as the protagonist in charge of mediating access to virtual tunnels. Through computationally generated animations, media can construct tunnels that are bigger and more malleable than their physical counterparts. In action films, editing, sound, and special effects place viewers in the figurative driving seat to explore such plastic structures. In first-­person shooter games, the perspective and action of the genre can both expand and limit the player’s courses of action within the virtual border undergrounds. Because of its formal and conceptual malleability, the tunnel as a media figure will always remind us of how textual forms, technological affordances, and production contexts matter to the perspective mediating the border. Another reason why I end with the example of the aural non-­ appearance of the Douglas tunnel is to address a concern raised by many careful readers and listeners of Border Tunnels throughout the years: Must we somehow step outside the frame of moving-­image media to find viable alternatives to imagining borders and/or tunnels otherwise? The short answer is no. The wager of this book is to remain immersed within the

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bordered world created by moving image media precisely because these works have material impacts beyond their representations. How televisual news producers choose to frame topics regarding the border shapes how audiences understand and act (or not) on these topics. How DHS agents reframe the violence of border security by shifting its risk away from marginalized populations affects how activist groups can advocate for such populations. How technofuturist military speculators render the space of the borderlands influences the kinds of tools that will come to organize and surveil this space. The importance of critical media studies for our understanding of the border lies in the field’s tools to examine and scrutinize media objects as complex processes involving institutional norms, technological changes, creative practices, and individual subjects. These critical analyses identify breakages and opportunities for self-­critique within media artifacts that might otherwise seem rote, racist, or politically regressive. Such analytical orientation is familiar within visual culture studies, media studies, and ethnic studies alike—­all of which draw from the work of Stuart Hall, including his argument that we cannot “think of cultural forms as whole and coherent: either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic” because these forms “are deeply contradictory . . . especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular.’”2 By being familiar, recursive, and laden with meaning, popular figures are potent symbols ripe for the cultural work of unifying heterogeneous social elements in easily consumed, readily understood forms.3 The resistant potential of border tunnels as media figures may not always lie in the mediations themselves, but in the critical analysis of these figures as dense with insights into popular forms of conceptualizing borders. A critically informed approach to popular media shall remain a political and social need so long as pervasive and compelling mediated versions of the border continue to inform and sway public sentiment. Whether through watching Breaking Bad, listening to Fox News, or playing Call of Duty, audiences close to and far away from the U.S.–­Mexico borderlands form ideas about border walls, border tunnels, the people living there, and the general purpose of the place. For those of us teaching and writing about this kind of media, the central challenge lies precisely in breaking apart mediations that are so taken for granted that they seem natural and unremarkable. Confronting that challenge is not an

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end in itself but, rather, the beginning of tracing and putting into action alternatives to our current conceptions of borders and media. Fostering and cultivating a critical-­thinking approach to media and borders—­in ourselves and others around us—­remains a constant struggle, albeit a worthwhile and transformative one. In the introduction I promised that bringing media studies to bear on border studies would interrogate not only “what media tells us about the border but also about what we can learn from questioning the borders of media themselves.” The analyses included in each of the chapters demonstrate the capacity of critical media studies to help us make sense of social phenomena like borders. These analyses also demonstrate the increasing hybridity, complexity, and transience of contemporary media forms and, therefore, the importance of approaching media across disciplinary and formal boundaries. Understanding televisual news’ formal and generic characteristics requires drawing on theories of both televisuality and documentary. Contending with the effectiveness of special effects necessitates accounting for the affordances of both digital animation and action film aesthetics. Analyzing the advantages and pitfalls of speculative design relies on attending to form, aesthetics, and materiality across a number of different media. As Amanda Phillips and T. L. Taylor make evident in their respective projects, we must take media seriously because these objects represent microcosms of cultural and political struggles permeating across society, but we cannot assume these objects are only legible through a single lens—­and, in fact, flaunting the boundaries of media analysis reveals the multifaceted ways in which these objects matter.4 Certainly, I remain committed to the value of critical media making, and several projects I have undertaken put into practice the insights derived from research included in this book. The creation of The Sewer Transnationalists owes much to the critical analysis in chapter 5 regarding the role of media form to engaging critical sustainability.5 The premise of Ambos Nogales Repair responds to the concerns raised in chapter 4 regarding the limitations of first-­person perspectives in games for addressing cross-­border issues.6 Projects such as these likewise emerge from the premise that we come to know and engage with the border in ways that are always already mediated. Their contributions lie in proposing creative and critically informed alternative forms of engagement.

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Ultimately, however, these projects would not be possible without first carrying out critical analysis of the irreducible mediation of the border in contemporary culture. The media theory of the border tunnel demonstrates how every border mediation is a border-­making project. We must remain invested in media objects about the border, such as figurations of tunnels, both as powerful representations with widespread influence and impact and as representative illustrations of broader political struggles over who controls the forms and narratives by which we shape the world and our relation to it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book originated from one and a half chapters of my PhD dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am greatly indebted to my dissertation committee for guiding me through the researching and writing of that project and, ultimately, discovering my own voice in the process. Lisa Parks encouraged me to find the ways those chapters on tunnels could form the basis for an emergent theory about borders and infrastructures. Michael Curtin always urged me to think through research questions across a variety of frameworks in order to make sense of why they mattered. Cristina Venegas reminded me to make central and clear the social and political stakes of any theoretical work—­a piece of advice I come back to repeatedly. More than anyone else, I owe my ability to develop and refine the insights in this book to Bhaskar Sarkar, a rigorous, thoughtful, and generous mentor. My time at UC Santa Barbara was formative not only for this work but also for how I imagined myself as a scholar and educator. I am forever thankful for the support and guidance offered by all the faculty in and affiliated with the Department of Film and Media Studies, particularly Bishnupriya Ghosh, Dolores Inés Casillas, Alenda Chang, Ross Melnick, Rita Raley, Janet Walker, and Charles Wolfe. Early discussions about my interest in the mediation of borders and tunnels benefited from the thoughtful contributions of graduate peers in seminars and social events. My deepest thanks to Daniel Grinberg, Lisa Han, Jennifer 195

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Hessler, Wesley Jacks, Carlos Jiménez, and especially to the incredible members of the Brown Cohort: Bianka Ballina, Corrigan Edmoundson, and Bhargavi Narayanan. I had the good fortune of beginning my academic career surrounded by exemplary and supportive colleagues at the University of Texas at Dallas. There, I presented early versions of several chapters and received invaluable feedback to make the project’s arguments stronger and the stakes clearer. Josef Nguyen, Wendy Sung, and Hong-­An Wu have been wonderful teammates and friends, and I am forever thankful for their support in these early years. I am indebted to the incomparable mentorship and leadership of Kim Brillante Knight, a thoughtful collaborator and an inspiration on how to create networks of care amid the precarity of academia. At UTD, I also wish to thank Anne Balsamo, Olivia Banner, Lisa Bell, Heidi Cooley, and Laura Imaoka. This book was finished, reviewed, and revised in the early years of the Covid-­19 pandemic. I must thank everyone who contributed to making this happen despite the untenable conditions we found ourselves in. Laura Portwood-­Stacer offered invaluable insights into how to reorganize early versions of the manuscript and how to pitch the project to editors. Leah Pennywark has been a supportive editor and a careful reader throughout the manuscript revisions. Thank you as well to Cathy Hannabach for creating the index, and to Mohammed Mizanur Rashid for his support in formatting and finalizing the manuscript. Several knotty aspects of the arguments of the book were worked out in colloquium talks at New Mexico State University, Université du Québec à Montréal, Northwestern University, and University of California, Irvine, as well as invited presentations at the Latino/a/x Colloquium organized by the CUNY Graduate Center and the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar. I appreciate all the thoughtful comments from those in attendance at these events. For their careful feedback on one or more of the features of the project, thank you to Camilla Fojas, Deborah Jaramillo, Jason Ruiz, Adriana Johnson, Daniel Nemser, and Eszter Zimanyi. For their support throughout this and other scholarly endeavors, thank you to Rahul Mukherjee, Aswin Punathambekar, Masha Salazkina, and Laura Isabel Serna. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who have been enthusiastic and tireless cheerleaders through the good, the bad, and everything

Acknowledgments  197

in between. My husband, Gabe, has been my foremost champion and an inspiration on how to pursue social justice across personal and professional projects. Words cannot capture the love and gratitude I have for my parents. I managed to get through some of the toughest moments in the creation of this book only because they taught me how to find and nurture the necessary strength, confidence, and optimism. For that, I can never say thank you enough.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. The reboot of Unsolved Mysteries on Spike TV between 2008 and 2010 with host Dennis Farina often included new reenactments of the segments from the Stack years. Despite introducing new actors, the redone version of the Camarena segment that aired on October 22, 2008, uses the same tunnel footage. 2. Kim Bellware, “‘Longest Ever’ Drug-­Smuggling Tunnel Discovered at U.S.–­Mexico Border, CBP Says,” Washington Post, January 30, 2020, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/30/border-smuggling-tunnel-mex ico-cbp/. In contrast to this number, there has been only one reported illicit tunnel across the U.S.–­Canada border, in 2005. In the Maclean’s article about this 110-­meter-­long tunnel, the Canadian inspector in charge of the investigation admits his bafflement at the tunnel’s existence: “I didn’t believe it. There’d never been a known illegal tunnel between the U.S. and Canada. Why would there be, with all that open border?” See Ken MacQueen, “B.C.’s Tunnel Busters,” Maclean’s, November 7, 2005, 40–­42. 3. Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (New York: Verso, 2002), 79. 4. Balibar, 93. 5. Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-­Forward: On the Future of Twenty-­First-­ Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 6. 6. Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), xv. 199

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7. Here I am indebted to Ryan Pierson’s excellent summary of film and media theorists’ conception of worlds and perspective. See Ryan Pierson, “Whole-­Screen Metamorphosis and the Imagined Camera (Notes on Perspectival Movement in Animation),” Animation 10, no. 1 (2015): 6–­21. 8. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 11. 9. Eyal Weizman, “Introduction to the Politics of Verticality,” openDemocracy, April 24, 2002, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverti cality/article_801.jsp. 10. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). 11. Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/ Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Kregg Hetherington (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17. 12. Oscar J. Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.–­Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 40–­41. 13. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194–­95. 14. See Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018); Hector Amaya, Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); and Jorge Volpi, “La Nueva Narrativa Hispánica de América,” Nexos, September 1, 2011, http:// www.nexos.com.mx/?p=14471. 15. In addition to Camilla Fojas, Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), see Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the Mexico–­U.S. Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Sasha Costanza-­ Chock, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). 16. Hector Amaya, Citizenship Excess: Latino/as, Media, and the Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Dolores Ines Casillas, Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-­Language Radio and Public Advocacy (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Jillian M. Baez, In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 17. Arthur G. Pettit, Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1980); Angharad Valdivia, A Latina in the

Notes to Introduction  201 Land of Hollywood and Other Essays on Media Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000); Isabel Molina-­Guzmán, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Mary Beltrán, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 18. Jesús Martín-­Barbero, “Communication from Culture: The Crisis of the National and the Emergence of the Popular,” Media, Culture and Society 10, no. 4 (1988): 454. 19. Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou, The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (New York: New York University Press, 2022). 20. Lara Langer Cohen, “The Depths of Astonishment: City Mysteries and the Antebellum Underground,” American Literary History 29, no.1 (2017): 1–­25. 21. As recent historical work on race and the border reveals, the idea and practice of an “Underground Railroad” was not only about moving north toward Canada but also about moving south to Mexico. See Reynaldo Leanos Jr., “This Underground Railroad Took Slaves to Freedom in Mexico,” The World, March 29, 2017, https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-03-29/underground-rail road-took-slaves-freedom-mexico. 22. See Burkhart Veigel, Wege durch die Mauer: Fluchthilfe und Stasi zwischen Ost und West (Berlin: Berliner Unterwelten, 2013). 23. Tom Mangold and John Penycate, The Tunnels of Cu Chi (New York: Random House, 1985). 24. Rania Khalek, “Gaza Is Laboratory for US–­Mexico Border Tunnel Warfare,” Electronic Intifada, February 17, 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/ blogs/rania-khalek/gaza-laboratory-us-mexico-border-tunnel-warfare. 25. Steve Patterson, “Meet the Border ‘Tunnel Rats’ Patrolling Deep Under� neath the U.S. Mexico Border,” NBC Nightly News, August 27, 2016. 26. Oren Liebermann, “Israel Battles Hamas in Tunnel ‘Hide-­and-­Seek,’” CNN, July 22, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/22/middleeast/israel -gaza-tunnels/. 27. Tatiana Sanchez, “Tight Squeeze: Economics Make Border Tunnels Narrower,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/ lanow/la-me-ln-border-drug-tunnels-20160503-snap-htmlstory.html. 28. See, for instance, Gilberto Rosas, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 29. Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9. 30. Jeremy Gilbert, “What Kind of Thing Is ‘Neoliberalism’?,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 80 (2013): 7–­22.

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31. Diana Wong, “The Rumor of Trafficking: Border Controls, Illegal Migration, and the Sovereignty of the Nation-­State,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, ed. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 78–­80. 32. Wong, 71. 33. Matt Gutman, “Largest Single Group of Migrants Ever Tunnels under Border Wall in Arizona, Says Border Protection,” ABC News, January 18, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/US/largest-single-group-migrants-tunnels-border -wall-arizona/story?id=60462672. 34. Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “First-­Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–­Mexico Border,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 10, no. 2 (Fall 2021), https://csalateral.org/issue/ 10-2/first-person-shooters-tunnel-warfare-racial-infrastructures-us-mexico -border-llamas-rodriguez/. 35. Stephen Graham, “Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and After,” Antipode 36, no.1 (2004): 12–­23; Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989); Stuart Elden, “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power,” Political Geography 34 (2013): 35–­51. 36. Lisa Parks, “Mapping Orbit: Toward a Vertical Public Space,” in Media Space, Public Space, ed. Chris Berry, Janet Hardon, and Rachel Moore (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 63. 37. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 125; my emphasis. 38. David Pike, “Wall and Tunnel: The Spatial Metaphorics of Cold War Berlin,” New German Critique 37, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 75. 39. Mark Jarzombek, “Corridor Spaces,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Summer 2010): 751. 40. Jarzombek, 764. 41. See Jonathan Krohn, “Geographer. Humanitarian. Felon?,” Huffington Post, May 30, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scott-warren-arizona -undocumented-migrants_n_5ceee754e4b00cfa19658ebd. 42. Debbie Nathan, “The Border between America and America,” This American Life 540 (November 21, 2014), http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ radio-archives/episode/540/a-front. 43. Jarzombek, “Corridor Spaces,” 753. 44. Duncan Deville, “The Illicit Supply Chain,” in Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, ed. Michael Miklaucic and Jacqueline Brewer (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 2013), 63–­74.

Notes to Introduction  203 45. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 78. 46. Jason Kersten, “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Mari� juana Railroad,” GQ, January 2014, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/news makers/201401/marijuana-railroad-mexican-drug-cartel-tunnels. 47. Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 48. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 49. Tamara Audi, “Drug Tunnels Have Feds Digging for Answers,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142412 7887323854904578264382749570570. 50. Monte Reel, “Underworld: How the Sinaloa Cartel Builds Its Tun�nels,” New Yorker, August 3, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20 15/08/03/underworld-monte-reel. 51. For a longer analysis of the circulation of El Chapo’s tunnels as infra� structural spectacle around the world, see Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “Animating Infrastructures, or How an Illicit Tunnel Becomes a Global Media Sensation,” in Media in the Americas, ed. Cristina Venegas (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). 52. Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 8. 53. For instance, Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, “Risk, Mediation, Migration,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, ed. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (New York: Routledge, 2020), 130–­47. 54. See, for instance, María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Nicole M. Guidotti-­Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Arturo J. Aldama, Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-­Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015). 55. See Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 56. San Diego Union-­Tribune, “Border Tunnels: Complete List of Those Found,” April 19, 2016, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border -baja-california/sdut-border-tunnels-2013oct31-htmlstory.html. 57. For more on the “narco-­ televisual universe,” see Juan Llamas-­ Rodriguez, “Telemundo: Telenovelas for the Twenty-­First Century,” in From

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Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels, ed. Derek Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2022), 59–­68; and Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “Mapping the Narco-­Televisual Universe,” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, February 26, 2018, http://www.flowjournal.org/2018/02/mapping-the-narco-tele visual-universe/. 58. For a lucid, short overview of the history and rising militarization of the U.S.–­Mexico border, see Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (New York: Verso Books, 2016), 32–­37. 59. Fojas, Migrant Labor, 44. 60. Many authors from a variety of disciplines have mounted solid argu�ments against closed borders. For a perspective from political geography, see Reece Jones, ed., Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). For a philosophical argument, see Alex Sager, Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). For a decolonial poetics approach, see Nabil Echchaibi, “(B)Orders of Immobility,” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 5, no. 2 (January 2020): 283–­311.

1. TV News and Spectacle 1. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 166. 2. John Fiske, Television Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 2011), 36; my emphasis. 3. Deborah L. Jaramillo, “Finding the ‘TV’ in TV News,” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture 26. no. 3 (November 28, 2019), https://www .flowjournal.org/2019/11/finding-tv-in-tv-news/. 4. Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 118. 5. John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 4–­5. 6. Caldwell, 6–­7. 7. Robert Vianello, “The Power Politics of ‘Live’ Television,” Journal of Film and Video 37, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 34. 8. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—­An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1983), 14–­16. 9. Mary Ann Doane, “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 253–­55.

Notes to Chapter 1  205 10. See, for instance, Daniel Thrilling, “How the Media Contributed to the Migrant Crisis,” The Guardian, August 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian .com/news/2019/aug/01/media-framed-migrant-crisis-disaster-reporting. 11. Wendy Fry, “Authorities in San Diego Unearth Longest Cross-­Border Drug Tunnel in History,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2020, https://www .latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-29/longest-smuggling-tunnel-in-south west-discovered-in-san-diego-county. 12. Cynthia Washington, “Criminal Underground: A Look into Nogales Drug Tunnels,” KOLD 13 News, November 16, 2015, https://www.kold.com/ story/30531552/criminal-underground-a-look-into-nogales-drug-tunnels/. 13. Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 36–­40. 14. Michael Curtin, Redeeming the Wasteland: Television Documentary and Cold War Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 18–­19. 15. Curtin, 180. 16. Greg Mitchell, The Tunnels: Escapes under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 208. 17. Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2. 18. Cowie, 3. 19. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 26. 20. Brown, 27. 21. Nicholas De Genova, “The ‘Crisis’ of the European Border Regime: Towards a Marxist Theory of Borders,” International Socialism 150 (2016), http://isj.org.uk/the-crisis-of-the-european-border-regime-towards-a-marxist -theory-of-borders/. 22. Nicholas De Genova, “Spectacles of Migrant Illegality,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 7 (2013): 1181. 23. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), 9. 24. Quoted in Mitchell, The Tunnels, 243. 25. John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris & Co, 2000), 78. 26. Robert Stam, “Television News and Its Spectator,” in Regarding Television—­Critical Approaches: An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1983), 31. 27. See Karen S. Johnson-­Cartee, News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005);

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Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); James H. Wittebols, The Soap Opera Paradigm: Television Programming and Corporate Priorities (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Sharon Lynn Sperry, “Television News as Narrative,” in Understanding Television: Essays on Television as a Social and Cultural Force, ed. Richard P. Adler (New York: Praeger, 1981), 295–­312. 28. Mitchell, The Tunnels, 93. 29. Jaramillo’s analysis of the televisual strategies that shaped the narrative of the Iraq War illustrates many of the decisions still prevalent a decade later. For the Iraq War, twenty-­four-­hour coverage of the U.S. invasion had two structural constraints that shaped the transmission of information to audiences: limited resources, such as few journalists in Baghdad, and Department of Defense censorship through the reporter-­embedding system and general wartime reporting protocol. See Deborah Jaramillo, Ugly War, Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 44. 30. As Jaramillo points out, there can be dire political implications to fetishizing technologies in television news coverage. During the Iraq War, cable news’ fascination with “weapons graphics, computer-­animated sequences, and satellite imagery” both promoted the official state narrative and “failed to point out the consequences these weapons would have for human beings” (Ugly War, 169). 31. Ellis, Seeing Things, 98. 32. Caldwell, Televisuality, 80–­81. 33. Although the Nightline feature does not mention it, this specific piece of footage of the robot moving into the tunnel was recorded by videographer Daniel Barrios and belongs to the behind-­the-­scenes video What Lies Beneath commissioned by the CBP (analyzed in chapter 2). It can appear in this segment because the footage is licensed through Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, a service affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense that provides stock footage for media organizations reporting on its activities. See https://www.dvidshub.net/. 34. “Tunnel Vision,” Makeshift 12 (April 2015): 7. 35. Alexis Madrigal, “Bots vs. Smugglers: Drug Tunnel Smackdown,” Wired, May 16, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/05/tunnelbots/. 36. KGUN 9 News, “Robots Root through Tunnels for Border Patrol,” September 20, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to2F6rWKG8U. 37. Margaret Morse, “Talk, Talk, Talk,” Screen 26, no. 2 (March 1985): 5. 38. Anderson Cooper, “Tunneling into America,” Anderson Cooper 360° blog, January 30, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.coo per.360/blog/2006/01/tunneling-into-america.html.

Notes to Chapter 2  207 39. Marisa Guthrie, “3 Days on the Job (and at Home) with Anderson Cooper,” Hollywood Reporter, September 13, 2018, https://www.hollywoodre porter.com/features/anderson-cooper-3-days-life-busiest-man-tv-news-1141663. 40. Greg Kelly, Fox News reporter, quoted in Jaramillo, Ugly War, 113. 41. Lindsay Palmer, Becoming the Story: War Correspondents since 9/11 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 15–­17. 42. In a pointed, perverse example of “never read the online comments,” the viewer responses on the AC360 blog post about Cooper’s reporting on the 2006 tunnel offer a succinct rundown of the varied popular responses to tunnels, from worrying about terrorist infiltration, to bemoaning the influx of drugs into the country, to speculating on the tunnel use by migrants and arguing the illegality of such tunnel migration. See Cooper, “Tunneling into America.” 43. Lindsay Palmer and Jad Melki, “Shape Shifting in the Conflict Zone,” Journalism Studies 19, no. 1 (2018): 126–­42. 44. Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 79.

2. Reality TV and Performativity 1. Reece Jones, “Border Wars: Narratives and Images of the US–­Mexico Border on TV,” ACME: An International E-­Journal for Critical Geographies 13, no. 3 (2014): 548. 2. U.S. Congress, House, Border Tunnel Task Force Act, H.R. 6740, 115th Cong., introduced in House September 26, 2018, https://www.congress.gov/ 115/bills/hr6740/BILLS-115hr6740rfs.pdf. 3. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.–­Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 11. 4. Nancy Wonders, “Global Flows, Semi-­permeable Borders and New Channels of Inequality,” in Borders, Mobility, and Technologies of Control, ed. Sharon Pickering and Leanne Weber (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 66. 5. For a longer examination of how performance and media technologies intersect at the border, see Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “The Datalogical Drug Mule,” Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 3 (2017): 9–­29. 6. John Corner, “Documentary Studies: Dimensions of Transition and Continuity,” in Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Berkshire, U.K.: Open University Press, 2008), 24. 7. In one recruiting video, the narrator claims CBP is “protecting some�thing that can’t be measured: a way of life, ours.” Paired with the “way of life”

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phrase are headshots of four agents: an Asian woman, a Black woman, a Black man, and a Latino man. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “The Border Is Where We Begin,” YouTube, April 2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=Qbc1uxaF_gA. In an informational propaganda video, a Black woman addresses the viewer by saying, “as a Border Patrol agent, I can tell you walls do work.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Walls Work,” YouTube, March 7, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPmBLc7_aSE. 8. John Davis, “Border Crisis: CBP Fights Child Exploitation,” Frontline, December 16, 2019, https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/border-crisis-cbp-fights -child-exploitation. 9. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 13. 10. Murphy Woodhouse, “Nogales Is Still Tunnel Capital, Despite Decline in Busts.” Nogales International, October 2, 2015, http://www.nogalesinterna tional.com/news/nogales-is-still-tunnel-capital-despite-decline-in-busts/article _db33c082-6890-11e5-a3d4-b78ca081ea7c.html. 11. Reason TV, “Rise of the Super Drug Tunnels: California’s Losing Fight against Smugglers,” YouTube, August 10, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pQK-QbtIf9I. 12. Drug Enforcement Administration, “2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary,” October 2015, https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files /2018-07/2015%20NDTA%20Report.pdf. 13. See Dan Frosch and Laura Meckler. “In Rush for New Agents, Border Patrol Weighs Changing Polygraph Program,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2017; and Jeremy Raff, “The Border Patrol’s Corruption Problem,” Atlantic, May 5, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/not-one -bad-apple/525327/. 14. Quoted in Woodhouse, “Nogales Is Still Tunnel Capital.” 15. For a longer analysis of these ideological negotiations and their implica�tions, see Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “Tunnel Risk and the Mediation of Border Security Spectacle,” in Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, ed. Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar (New York: Routledge), 303–­13. 16. Cynthia Sorrensen, “Making the Subterranean Visible: Security, Tun�nels, and the United States–­Mexico Border,” Geographical Review 104, no. 3 (July 2014): 342. 17. Henry Mendiola, head of security of NBC News and former director of the Border Patrol RGV Sector’s communication division (interview with the author, April 24, 2019). The incorporation of Border Patrol into DHS in 2003 (as Customs and Border Protection) resulted not only in expanded responsibilities for the agency but also increasingly higher quotas for new hires. Such

Notes to Chapter 2  209 bureaucratic pressures led to a loosening of restrictions in hiring practices. See Raff, “The Border Patrol’s Corruption Problem.” 18. A notable example of this is the struggle over public recognition for CGI-­enabled performances between the actors in green suits and the effects artists doing the animation. See David S. Cohen, “Andy Serkis vs. Visual Effects Animators: The Wrong Fight for Both Sides,” Variety, July 14, 2014, https:// variety.com/2014/film/columns/andy-serkis-vs-visual-effects-animators-the -wrong-fight-for-both-sides-1201260274/. 19. Indeed, as Gray Cavender and Mark Fishman point out, collaboration between media producers and policing agencies has a long history in reality TV. See Gray Cavender and Mark Fishman, “Television Reality Crime Programs: Context and History,” in Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs, ed. Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998), 1–­18. 20. Quoted in Maureen Cavanaugh and Sharon Heilbrunn, “Behind the Scenes of National Geographic’s Border Wars Documentary,” These Days, January 5, 2010, http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/jan/05/border-wars/. 21. Quoted in Cavanaugh and Heilbrunn. 22. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-­welfare Citizenship (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2008), 309. 23. Ouellette and Hay, 377. 24. Aaron Doyle, “Cops: Television Policing as Policing Reality,” in Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs, ed. Mark Fishman and Gray Cavender (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998), 112. 25. Alyssa Rosenberg, “How Police Censorship Shaped Hollywood,” Washington Post, October 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/opinions/ 2016/10/24/how-police-censorship-shaped-hollywood/. 26. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32–­36. 27. Drug Enforcement Administration, “2015 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary,” October 2015, https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/ 2018-07/2015%20NDTA%20Report.pdf. 28. Border Wars, “Tunnel Smoke Out,” season 4, episode 8 (August 27, 2012). 29. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 58. 30. See Jennifer G. Correa and James M. Thomas, “The Rebirth of the U.S.–­Mexico Border: Latina/o Enforcement Agents and the Changing Politics of Racial Power,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 2 (April 2015): 239–­54. 31. David Cortez, “Latinxs in La Migra: Why They Join and Why It Mat�ters,” Political Research Quarterly 74, no. 3 (September 2021): 688–­702.

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32. Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 59–­60. 33. Catherine Squires, “The Conundrum of Race and Reality Television,” in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 279. 34. See Holly Willson Holladay, “Back on the Porch: Southern Working-­ Class Whiteness and the Liberal Redneck Revolution,” Journal of Popular Culture 52, no. 3 (2019): 500–­517; and Richard Wells, “The Labor of Reality TV,” Labor: Studies in Working-­Class History of the Americas 12, no. 4 (2015): 33–­49. 35. Gareth Palmer, “The Wild Bunch: Men, Labor, and Reality Television,” in A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 255. 36. Laurie Ouellette, introduction to A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 6. 37. Shannon E. M. O’Sullivan, “Playing ‘Redneck’: White Masculinity and Working-­Class Performance on Duck Dynasty,” Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 2 (2016): 373–­74. 38. Christopher Lockett, “Masculinity and Authenticity: Reality TV’s Real Men,” Flow 13, no. 1 (2010), https://www.flowjournal.org/2010/10/mas culinity-and-authenticity/. 39. Border Wars, “Smuggler’s Tunnel,” season 3, episode 4 (September 18, 2011). 40. In addition to those quoted before, for an overview of these arguments see Shannon E. M. O’Sullivan, “Frontiersmen Are the ‘Real Men’ in Trump’s America: Hegemonic Masculinity at Work on U.S. Cable’s Version of Blue-­ Collar Reality” (PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2017). 41. See, for instance, Sasha Costanza-­Chock, “The Immigrant Rights Movement on the Net: Between ‘Web 2.0’and Comunicación Popular,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2008): 851–­64; and Summer Harlow and Lei Guo, “Will the Revolution Be Tweeted or Facebooked? Using Digital Communication Tools in Immigrant Activism,” Journal of Computer-­Mediated Communication 19 (2014): 463–­78. 42. Sasha Costanza-­Chock, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 47. 43. Karma Chavez, Queer Migration Politics Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 80–­84. 44. Costanza-­Chock, Out of the Shadows, 31–­32.

Notes to Chapter 3  211 45. Former U.S. Border Patrol agent Hank Hays quoted in Bill Broyles and Mark Haynes, Desert Duty: On the Line with the U.S. Border Patrol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 81. 46. Christine Stenglein, “Struggling to Hang on to 20K Officers, Border Patrol Looks to Hire 5K More,” Brookings Institute, July 7, 2017, http://www .brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/07/07/struggling-to-hang-on-to-20k-offi cers-border-patrol-looks-to-hire-5k-more/; Josef Tanfani, “In January, President Trump Vowed to Hire 5,000 New Border Patrol Agents. It Never Happened.” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na -border-security-20170818-story.html. 47. Discovery Channel, “Border Live,” https://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/ border-live/. 48. Michael Schneider, “Discovery Channel Pulls ‘Border Live,’” Variety, January 4, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/discovery-channel-border -live-1203099458/. 49. Staff associated with the show also speculated that airing against Live P.D. (A&E’s hugely popular live policing reality series) and the incessant TV news coverage of the U.S.–­Mexico border wall proposals and of the refugee claims from Central American migrants during late 2018 contributed to audience disinterest in Border Live. Against these two competing sources of live content, the Discovery Channel series failed to find an audience eager to consume more live content about the border or policing (Anonymous interview with the author, March 13, 2019). 50. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 10.

3. Digital Animation and Plasticity 1. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 21. 2. Eisenstein, 21. 3. In media studies, the first definition is best exemplified by Warner’s “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” while the second one can be found in Sarkar’s “Plasticity and the Global.” Kristen Warner, “In the Time of Plastic Representation,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 32–­37; Bhaskar Sarkar, “Plasticity and the Global,” Framework 56, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 451–­71. 4. Brian Larkin, “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 333. 5. Shannon Mattern, “Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures,” in The Routledge Companion to Media

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Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 323. 6. Mary Beltrán, “Fast and Bilingual: Fast & Furious and the Latinization of Racelessness,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 75–­96. 7. Kristen Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 18. 8. Vivian Sobchack, introduction to Meta-­morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xii. 9. Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 227. 10. Joel McKim, “Speculative Animation: Digital Projections of Urban Past and Future,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 288. 11. See Pamela Boykoff, “The Blurry Lines of Animated ‘News,’” CNN, February 1, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/01/30/taiwan .animated.news/index.html. 12. Craig Hight, “Primetime Digital Documentary Animation: The Pho�tographic and Graphic within Play,” Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): 23. 13. News Direct, “Drug Tunnel Discovered beneath US–­Mexico Border,” YouTube, April 29, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYW73-49gYs; News Direct, “Longest Ever Smuggling Tunnel Found at U.S.–­Mexico Border,” YouTube, March 3, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UCR9rzeQ-I. 14. Mike Jones, “Vanishing Point: Spatial Composition and the Virtual Camera,” Animation 2, no. 3 (2007): 231. 15. M. Jones, 235. 16. Esther Leslie and Joel McKim, “Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age,” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12, no. 3 (2017): 207. 17. Christian Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” trans. Françoise Meltzer, Critical Inquiry 3, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 658. 18. Dan North, Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects, and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 12; my emphasis. 19. Bob Rehak, More than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 3. 20. Timothy J. Welsh, Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 15. 21. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brains?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 21. 22. While the premise of this film sounds outlandish, it is not without reference. At least one reporter on border tunnels has described them as wide

Notes to Chapter 3  213 enough that “You could almost drive a Mini Cooper through [them].” See Jason Kersten, “Inside the Incredible Booming Subterranean Marijuana Railroad,” GQ, January 2014, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/20 1401/marijuana-railroad-mexican-drug-cartel-tunnels. 23. Building a trafficking tunnel set at a shipping port offers an unwitting irony given that, as stated in previous chapters, despite the popularity of tunnels in the public imaginary, most smuggling into the United States occurs through regular ports of entry. The filmmakers never remark on this point. “Races and Chases,” Fast and Furious, DVD Disc 2 Special Feature (Burbank: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2011). 24. Ian Failes, “Faster and Even More Furious,” FX Guide, May 12, 2009, https://www.fxguide.com/featured/faster_and_even_more_furious/. 25. Tara Bennett, “‘Fast and Furious’: 4x the Cars and Explosions,” VFXWorld Magazine, April 7, 2009, http://www.awn.com/vfxworld/fast-furious -4x-cars-explosions. 26. Christian B. Long, “Chase Sequences and Transport Infrastructure in Global Hollywood Spy Films,” Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, ed. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb (New York: Wallflower Press, 2016), 249. 27. Raka Shome, “Thinking Culture and Cultural Studies—­From/of the Global South,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2019): 196–­218. 28. Rebecca A. Sheehan, “Undocumation: Documentary Animation’s Unsettled Borders,” in Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity through Aesthetics, ed. Monica Hanna and Rebecca A. Sheehan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 44. 29. Bob Rehak, “The Migration of Forms: Bullet Time as Microgenre,” Film Criticism 32, no. 1 (2007): 29. 30. Mary Beltrán, “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (2005): 59. 31. Krin Gabbard, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 16. 32. Richard Corliss, “Fast & Furious: Auto Eroticism,” Time, April 3, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1889382,00.html. 33. Wesley Morris, “Fast & Furious: Ramped Up, Amped Up, but Going Nowhere,” Boston Globe, April 3, 2009, http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/ articles/2009/04/03/ramped_up_amped_up_but_going_nowhere/. 34. Kimberley Jones, review of Fast and Furious, Austin Chronicle, April 3, 2009, https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2009-04-03/760613/.

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35. Matthias Stork, “Chaos Cinema: Assaultive Action Aesthetics,” Media Fields Journal 6 (2013), http://mediafieldsjournal.org/chaos-cinema/2013/8/6/ chaos-cinema-assaultive-action-aesthetics.html. 36. Stella Bruzzi, Men’s Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 5. 37. Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 129. 38. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 64. 39. Larkin, “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure,” 333. 40. See “Border Wall System,” Customs and Border Protection, May 1, 2020, https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/border-wall-system. When the Biden administration began, this page became “Archived,” meaning it was no longer regularly updated by CBP. 41. See Charles Acland, American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 42. Nick Jones, “The Perpetual Motion Aesthetic of Action Cinema,” in A Companion to the Action Film, ed. James Kendrick (New York: Wiley, 2019), 105. 43. Stork, “Chaos Cinema.” 44. Geoff King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 94. 45. Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 113. 46. Lisa Purse, Contemporary Action Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 63. 47. That the only woman actively involved in this smuggling operation is the one in charge of guiding the drivers with her voice deserves note, as it speaks to the hegemonic belief that people tend to perceive female voices as “helping us solve our problems by ourselves,” while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. It likewise perpetuates gendered divisions of technological mastery, since both the smuggling drivers and the Border Patrol agents are men, while women become relegated to the “voice in the machine.” See Jessi Hempel, “Siri and Cortana Sound Like Ladies Because of Sexism,” Wired, October 28, 2015, https://www.wired.com/ 2015/10/why-siri-cortana-voice-interfaces-sound-female-sexism/. 48. N. Jones, “Perpetual Motion Aesthetic,” 102–­3. 49. Whissel, Spectacular Digital Effects, 22. 50. Whissel, 28.

Notes to Chapter 4  215 51. Indeed, I would argue that these vertical visual pleasures contributed to the series’ popularity and global appeal. After the fourth film was set in the U.S.–­Mexico border, the series went international, featuring new adventures for the heroes in places like Rio de Janeiro and Dubai. In particular, these adventures were often rendered as vertical, whether it was speed racing a car across towers in Abu Dhabi or driving up the Caucasus Mountains in Azerbaijan. 52. Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, 129; emphasis in the original. 53. Notably, the film became the first Hollywood release to be shown in theaters equipped with Motion Systems, a technology that allowed seats to move according to the images on the screen. Though it is unlikely most people experienced the film in this manner, thinking about the design aspect of this reception context accentuates the kineticism of the cinematic car racing sequence. See Allan Ford, “Fast & Furious 4 to Be First Theatrical D-­BOX Release,” Filmofilia, April 2, 2009, https://www.filmofilia.com/fast-furious-4 -to-be-first-theatrical-d-box-release-8067/. 54. Quoted in Michael Kaplan, “Taiwan Tabloid Sensation Next Media Recreates the News,” Wired, August 30, 2010. 55. Peter Travers, review of Fast and Furious, Rolling Stone, April 2, 2009, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/fast-furious-255909/. 56. Pansy Duncan, “The Cinematic Life of the Implosion,” Film Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2014): 40. 57. Duncan, 45; emphasis in the original.

4. First-­Person Shooters and Racialization 1. Steven Levy, “Inside Palmer Luckey’s Bid to Build a Border Wall,” Wired, June 11, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril -border-wall/. 2. For another example, see Jared Keller, “The Inside Story behind the Pentagon’s Ill-­Fated Quest for a Real Life ‘Iron Man’ Suit,” Task & Purpose, May 6, 2020, https://taskandpurpose.com/military-tech/pentagon-powered -armor-iron-man-suit. 3. Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 4. 4. Tara Fickle, The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 3. 5. Fickle, 7. 6. Notably, the FPS originated in Texas. The Dallas-­based studio id Software produced three games that “came to define the first-­person shooter,

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beginning in 1992 with Wolfenstein, then popularized with Doom in 1993, and made three dimensional with Quake in 1996.” Christopher B. Patterson, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 300. 7. Patterson, 44–­45. 8. Brian Larkin, “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 333. 9. Shannon Mattern, “Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures,” in Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 323. 10. Eszter Zimanyi and Emma Ben Ayoun, “On Bodily Absence in Humanitarian Multi-­sensory VR,” Intermédialités/Intermediality 34 (2019), https://doi.org/10.7202/1070876ar. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “The Actual and the Virtual,” Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 148–­52. 12. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 71. 13. Joel McKim, “Speculative Animation: Digital Projections of Urban Past and Future,” Animation 12, no. 3 (2017): 288. 14. Jesper Juul, Half-­Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 1. 15. Fickle, The Race Card, 125. See also Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender, and Space (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 166–­67. 16. Timothy J. Welsh, Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 15. 17. See Tim Surette, “Mexican Mayor Slams GRAW2,” GameSpot, March 9, 2007, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/mexican-mayor-slams-graw2/110 0-6167149/; and Brendan Sinclair, “Mexican Governor Orders Seizure of GRAW2,” GameSpot, March 23, 2007, https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ mexican-governor-orders-seizure-of-graw2/1100-6168009/. 18. Mark Brown, “Snuggle Truck iOS Game Ditches Immigrant Characters for Fluffy Animals,” Wired, May 3, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/ 05/iphone-snuggle-truck/. 19. See, for instance, Frederick Luis Aldama, “Getting Your Mind/Body On: Latinos in Video Games,” in Latinos and Narrative Media: Participation and Portrayal, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 241–­58; Osvaldo Cleger, “Procedural Rhetoric and Undocumented Migrants:

Notes to Chapter 4  217 Playing the Debate Over Immigration Reform,” Digital Culture and Education 7, no. 1 (2015): 19–­39; Osvaldo Cleger, “Why Videogames: Ludology Meets Latino Studies,” in Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (New York: Routledge, 2016), 87–­100; and Rebecca Sheehan, “Serious Docu-­Games: Empathy in Action at the Virtual Border,” in Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 88–­110. 20. Phillip Penix-­Tadsen, “Latin American Ludology: Why We Should Take Video Games Seriously (and When We Shouldn’t),” Latin American Research Review 48, no. 1 (2013): 185. 21. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in Cybersociety: Computer-­Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones (Sherman Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1995), 58. 22. James Newman, Videogames (New York: Routledge, 2013), 109. 23. Murray, On Video Games, 168; emphasis in the original. 24. Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 31–­32. 25. Mia Consalvo, “There Is No Magic Circle,” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 415. 26. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 11–­12. 27. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 46–­47. 28. See Shoshana Magnet, “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imagi� nary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2006): 142–­62. 29. See, for instance, Michael C. Reiff, “Review of Hell or High Water dir. by David MacKenzie,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 46, no. 2 (2016): 106–­8; and Fabian Orán Llarena, “Neoliberalism and Populism in Hell or High Water,” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 22 (2018): 247–­73. 30. See, for instance, Camilla Fojas, “Hollywood Border Cinema: West� erns with a Vengeance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 39, no. 2 (2011): 93–­101; and Kathleen Staudt, “The Border, Performed in Films: Produced in both Mexico and the US to ‘Bring Out the Worst in a Country,’” Journal of Borderlands Studies 29, no. 4 (2014): 465–­79. 31. See, for instance, Christopher Diffee, “Sex and the City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2005): 411–­37.

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32. Extra Credits, “Call of Juarez: The Cartel—­How Lazy Design Hurts Everyone,” May 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0ci6rYOleM. 33. Charles Ramirez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 19. 34. Jason Ruiz, “Dark Matters: Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Suburban Crime Dramas, and Latinidad in the Golden Age of Cable Television,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 37–­62. 35. See, for instance, Kent A. Ono, and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 36. Penix-­Tadsen, “Latin American Ludology,” 181. 37. Daphné Richemond-­Barak, Underground Warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 38. Paul J. Springer, “Fighting under the Earth: The History of Tunneling in Warfare,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 23, 2015, https://www.fpri .org/article/2015/04/fighting-under-the-earth-the-history-of-tunneling-in -warfare/. See also Arthur Herman, “Notes from the Underground: The Long History of Tunnel Warfare,” Hudson Institute, August 26, 2014, https://www .hudson.org/research/10570-notes-from-the-underground-the-long-history -of-tunnel-warfare. 39. See John Penycate and Tom Mangold, The Tunnels of Cu Chi: A Harrowing Account of America’s “Tunnel Rats” in the Underground Battlefields of Vietnam (New York: Presidio Press, 2005); and Gordon L. Rottman, Viet Cong and NVA Tunnels and Fortifications of the Vietnam War (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2012). References to this historical precedent now carry a xenophobic and racist framing of tunnel shutdown efforts. CBP agents wear “tunnel rats” shirts that recall the Vietnam War and the use of tunnels to fight the Viet Cong forces. See Steve Patterson, “Meet the Border ‘Tunnel Rats’ Patrolling Deep Underneath the U.S. Mexico Border,” NBC Nightly News, August 27, 2016. 40. Homeland Security Research Corp., Israel Tunnel Warfare, August 2015, https://homelandsecurityresearch.com/download/Israel_Tunnel_Warfare.pdf. 41. See Matthew Cox, “Army Is Spending Half a Billion to Train Soldiers to Fight Underground,” Military Times, June 24, 2018, https://www.military .com/daily-news/2018/06/24/army-spending-half-billion-train-troops-fight -underground.html; and Patrick Tucker, “‘Underground’ May Be the U.S. Mil�itary’s Next Warfighting Domain,” Defense One, June 26, 2018, https://www .defenseone.com/technology/2018/06/underground-may-be-us-militarys -next-warfighting-domain/149296/. 42. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 41.

Notes to Chapter 4  219 43. Galloway, 63. 44. Andrew Kurtz, “Ideology and Interpellation in the First-­Person Shooter,” in Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young, ed. Ronald Strickland (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 113. 45. Levy, “Inside Palmer Luckey’s Bid.” 46. Matthew Payne, Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 56. 47. Amanda Phillips, “Shooting to Kill: Headshots, Twitch Reflexes, and the Mechropolitics of Video Games,” Games and Culture 13, no. 2 (2018): 145. 48. In addition to the authors already cited, see Sue Morris, “First Person Shooters—­A Game Apparatus,” in ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces, ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 81–­97; Gerald Voorhees, “Play and Possibility in the Rhetoric of the War on Terror: The Structure of Agency in Halo 2,” Game Studies 14, no. 1 (2014), http:// gamestudies.org/1401/articles/gvoorhees; and Victor Navarro, “I Am a Gun: The Avatar and Avatarness in the FPS,” in Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-­ Person Shooter Games, ed. G. A. Voorhees, J. Call, and K. Whitlock (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 63–­88. 49. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 12–­13. 50. Michael Nitsche, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 162. 51. Tom Senior, “Call of Juarez: The Cartel Review,” PC Gamer, November 12, 2011, https://www.pcgamer.com/call-of-juarez-the-cartel-review/. 52. Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 63. 53. C. B. Patterson, Open World Empire, 49. 54. Game FAQs, “Call of Juarez: The Cartel—­Guide and Walkthrough,” July 31, 2011, https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps3/621206-call-of-juarez-the -cartel/faqs/62744. 55. Josef Nguyen, “Performing as Video Game Players in Let’s Plays,” Transformative Works and Cultures 22 (September 2016): 1.2, https://journal .transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/698/615. 56. Espen Aarseth, “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player,” in Proceedings of the 2007 DIGRA International Conference: Situated Play, ed. Akira Baba (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2007), 130–­32. 57. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 52.

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58. Eugene Thacker, “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simu�lation,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 75.

5. Speculative Design and Sustainability 1. Sophie Weiner, “The Subway Is Still Fucked,” Splinter News, November 15, 2018, https://splinternews.com/the-subway-is-still-fucked-1830480479. 2. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, “John Cena,” season 24, episode 6 (October 10, 2018). 3. Noah is not alone in making this joke. In January 2020, Seth Meyers included the following joke in his opening monologue: “The Border Patrol announced yesterday that it has discovered a 4000-­foot-­long tunnel going from Mexico to the U.S. which is 70 feet below ground and has a ventilation system, electrical cables, an elevator, and rails for moving items. Said New Yorkers, ‘Does it go to Brooklyn? Sounds amazing. Can we get that?’” Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Leslie Jones; Max Greenfield; Taika Waititi; Chris Coleman,” season 7, episode 59 (January 31, 2020). The recurrence of this specific joke format speaks to how the sophistication of the U.S.–­Mexico border tunnels enable cognitive connections to other underground infrastructures and allow for moments of critique to emerge. 4. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 2. 5. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 32. 6. Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou, “Design in the Borderlands: An Introduction,” in Design in the Borderlands, ed. Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5. 7. See, for instance, Daniela Rosner, Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018). 8. In addition to the influences of Gloria Anzaldúa and Oscar Martínez mentioned in the introduction, another relevant influence here to distinguishing the borderlands from the border comes from Gastón Gordillo’s theory of terrain, which draws attention to the “material multiplicity” of natural landscapes that “escapes political capture.” Gastón Gordillo, “Opaque Zones of Empire,” Space and Politics, June 25, 2013, http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.com/2013/ 06/opaque-zones-of-empire_25.html. 9. Andrea Ballestero, “The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/ Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal,” in Infrastructure, Environment,

Notes to Chapter 5  221 and Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Kregg Hetherington (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 17. 10. Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (New York: Verso, 2016), 9. 11. Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “First-­Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–­Mexico Border,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 10, no. 2 (2021), https://csalateral.org/issue/10–2/ first-person-shooters-tunnel-warfare-racial-infrastructures-us-mexico-border -llamas-rodriguez/. 12. See Jesse Lasky, Walter Jetz, and Timothy Keitt, “Conservation Bioge�ography of the US–­Mexico Border: A Transcontinental Risk Assessment of Barriers to Animal Dispersal,” Diversity and Distributions 17 (2011): 673–­87. 13. Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, ‎Pablo J. Boczkowski, ‎and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 221. 14. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 4. 15. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 15. 16. Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 5–­6. 17. Todd Miller, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights, 2017), 47–­48. 18. Jessica Blythe, Jennifer Silver, Louisa Evans, Derek Armitage, Nathan J. Bennett, Michele-­Lee Moore, Tiffany H. Morrison, and Katrina Brown, “The Dark Side of Transformation: Latent Risks in Contemporary Sustainability Discourse,” Antipode 50, no. 5 (2018): 1206–­23. 19. Enrique Leff, “Political Ecology: A Latin American Perspective,” Desenvolvimento e Meio Ambiente 35 (December 2015): 39–­40. 20. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 109. 21. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 22. Jacob Smith, ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10120795 23. Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski, introduction to Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (New York: Routledge, 2016), 7. 24. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 25. See, for example, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013);

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and Pablo Vila, Border Identifications: Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the US–­Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 26. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.–­Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 11; Jones, Violent Borders, 32–­37. 27. Ronald Rael, Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.–­ Mexico Boundary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 5. 28. Rael, 4–­5. 29. This is the interpretation that Judith Torrea suggests in the review of the project for MoMA. See Judith Torrea, “Borderwall as Architecture (Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello),” MoMA, November 19, 2014, https://www .moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/designandviolence/borderwall-as -architecture-ronald-rael-and-virginia-san-fratello/. 30. S. D. Liddick, “A Sewer Runs through It,” San Diego Magazine, December 2007, http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/San-Diego-Magazine/ December-2007/A-Sewer-Runs-Through-It/. 31. Rael, Borderwall as Architecture, 60. 32. See Jonathan Krohn, “Geographer. Humanitarian. Felon?,” Huffington Post, May 30, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scott-warren-arizona -undocumented-migrants_n_5ceee754e4b00cfa19658ebd. 33. Camilla Fojas, Migrant Labor and Border Securities in Pop Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 47. 34. Cameron Tonkinwise, “How We Intend to Future,” Design Philosophy Papers 12, no. 2 (2014): 169. 35. Rosner, Critical Fabulations, 14. 36. Jussi Parikka, “Inventing Pasts and Futures: Speculative Design and Media Archaeology,” in New Media Archaeologies, ed. Ben Roberts and Mark Goodall (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 219. 37. Lacy Cooke, “This Alternative US–­Mexico Border Wall Is Made from Recycled Shipping Containers,” Inhabitat, December 19, 2016, https://inhab itat.com/proposed-alternative-to-us-mexico-border-wall-built-with-recycled -shipping-containers/. 38. Dan Howarth, “Beautifying the Border Proposal Replaces US–­Mexico Fence with Landscaping,” Dezeen, December 20, 2016, https://www.dezeen .com/2016/12/20/beautifying-border-proposal-domo-architecture-design-re places-us-mexico-fence-landscaping/. 39. Fry and Kalantidou, “Design in the Borderlands,” 5. 40. Howarth, “Beautifying the Border.” 41. Mark Jarzombek, “The School of Architectural Scandals,” e-­flux, October 29, 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/history-theory/2251 82/the-school-of-architectural-scandals/.

Notes to Chapter 5  223 42. Forensic Architecture, “What Is ‘Forensic Architecture’?,” https://foren sic-architecture.org/about/agency. 43. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso, 2012). 44. Such shortsightedness is endemic in mainstream discussions of the U.S.–­Mexico border. Beyond the domain of speculative design, similar problems arose during the public debates over border-­wall funding in late 2018 and early 2019. Although the Democratic opposition’s reluctance to pay for the structure itself was a symbolic victory over the president’s insistence on a physical barrier, there remained wide consensus across political lines for further investment in “border security,” broadly construed. The term included not only more fencing but also any number of surveillance technologies and human patrols. These measures likewise disrupt the ecologies of the border and perpetuate human and animal deaths. See Shirin Ghaffary, “The ‘Smarter’ Wall: How Drones, Sensors, and AI Are Patrolling the Border,” Vox, May 16, 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18511583/smart-border-wall-drones -sensors-ai. 45. Fry and Kalantidou, “Design in the Borderlands,” 4; emphasis in the original. 46. Sandra Dibble, “Tijuana Sewage Pills Have Been an Environmental Problem for Decades So What’s the Solution?,” San Diego Union-­Tribune, March 25, 2018, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border-baja -california/sd-me-border-sewage-20180305-story.html. 47. Chloe Jones, “A Different Border Crisis,” Cronkite News, May 7, 2019, https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2019/05/07/mexico-arizona-border-waste water/. 48. On thinking through participatory politics in relation to fluids, see Lisa Björkman, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 49. For every U.S. dollar, Mexico contributes $2, and another $3 comes from other public and private sources. Yet despite the growing need to finance wastewater treatment and clean water projects, the U.S. Treasury Department requested zero new funding for the bank in 2018, citing budget constraints. See Tim Vanderpool, “The Festering Sanitation Crisis at Our Border,” onEarth, December 3, 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/festering-sanitation-crisis -our-border. 50. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe El-­Khoury (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 57. 51. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 52.

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Notes to Chapter 5

52. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 88. 53. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 26. 54. Edwin Agudelo, “A Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales,” Borderwall as Architecture (blog), December 22, 2008, http://border wallasarchitecture.blogspot.com/2008/12/practice-in-excavating-and-envi sioning.html. 55. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 25. 56. Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham: Duke University Press), 95. 57. Rahul Mukherjee, “Anticipating Ruinations: Ecologies of ‘Make Do’ and ‘Left With,’” Journal of Visual Culture 16, no. 3 (2017): 302. 58. Parikka, “Inventing Pasts and Futures,” 210. 59. See also Gabriel Cuellar, Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weiz� man, “Ruins Under Construction,” in Architecture after Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013): 68–­83. 60. Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), xviii. 61. See Kristine Phillips, “U.S. Border Agent Who Repeatedly Shot Mex�ican Teen through a Fence Acquitted of Murder,” Washington Post, April 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/24/u-s -border-agent-who-repeatedly-shot-mexican-teen-through-a-fence-acquitted-of -murder/; and Jack Herrera, “Border Patrol Fires Tear Gas at Migrants Attempt�ing to Cross the U.S. Border in Tijuana,” Pacific Standard Magazine, January 5, 2019, https://psmag.com/news/border-patrol-fires-tear-gas-at-migrants-attempt ing-to-cross-the-us-border-in-tijuana-in-photos. 62. Will Parrish, “The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contrac�tor Are Putting a Native American Reservation under ‘Persistent Surveillance,’” The Intercept, August 25, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border -patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/. 63. Puar, The Right to Maim, 73. 64. Kate Groetzinger, “Texas Border Sheriffs: There Is No Crisis and We Don’t Want Trump’s Wall.” Texas Observer, January 24, 2019, https://www .texasobserver.org/texas-border-sheriffs-there-is-no-crisis-and-we-dont-want -trumps-wall/. 65. Uncertain Commons, Speculate This!, 7. 66. Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, and Mark Williams, “Human Biotur�bation and the Subterranean Landscape of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 6 (June 2014): 7.

Notes to Conclusion  225 67. Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 11. 68. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 255. 69. Consider also that conservationists worry about the continuous defor�estation around the U.S. border with western Canada as a result of the increased imposition of surveillance technologies in this area. See Claudia Sadowski-­ Smith, “U.S. Border Ecologies, Environmental Criticism, and Transnational American Studies,” in American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship, ed. Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144–­57. 70. Thomas Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism, and Power in the Nineteenth Century,” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 99–­122. 71. Alenda Chang, “Environmental Remediation.” Electronic Book Review, June 7, 2015, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/ remediation. 72. Because of this long-­term commitment, ecological projects are also victim to the whims of changing federal governments. Consider that the Border 2020 plan, instituted in 2012, was meant as a transnational cooperative initiative spearheaded by local chapters of federal organizations, but suffered significant cutbacks when Scott Pruitt became the head of the EPA and sought to massively scale down the agency’s projects. See Alexander C. Kaufman, “Scott Pruitt’s First Year Set the EPA Back Anywhere from a Few Years to 3 Decades,” Huffington Post, January 20, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ pruitt-one-year_us_5a610a5ce4b074ce7a06beb4. 73. Jenna M. Loyd, “Prison Abolitionist Perspectives on No Borders,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, ed. Reece Jones (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 104. 74. See Geoffrey Boyce, Sarah Launius, and Adam Aguirre, “Drawing the Line: Spatial Strategies of Community and Resistance in Post-­SB1070 Arizona,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2017): 187–­216.

Conclusion 1. Delaney Hall, “The Tunnel,” 99% Invisible, January 29, 2019, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-tunnel/. 2. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular.’” Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. Raiford A. Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage, 2005), 65.

226 

Notes to Conclusion

3. Bishnupriya Ghosh, “Looking through Coca-­Cola: Global Icons and the Popular,” Public Culture 22, no. 2 (2010): 343. 4. See Amanda Philipps, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 171–­81; and T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 10–­14. 5. See Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “The Sewer Transnationalists: Playing Col� laboration in the U.S.–­Mexico Border,” OneShot: A Journal of Critical Games and Play 2 (2021), http://oneshotjournal.com/the-sewer-transnationalists/. 6. See Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez, “Ambos Nogales Repair: Critical Play and Vital Infrastructures in the Border City,” in Routledge Companion to Media and the City, ed. Erica Stein, Germaine R. Halegoua, and Brendan Kredell (New York: Routledge, 2022), 145–­53.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aarseth, Espen, 153 ABC, 40; ABC 10, 95; Nightline, 47–55, 62, 206n33 action films, 20, 190; and digital animation, 23, 101–3, 107–28, 192; global action thriller, 110–12 action maelstrom, 119 affirmative speculation, 161–62, 164, 181 affordances, 3, 5; of digital animation, 23, 100, 102–9, 123, 126, 128, 149, 154, 192; of documentary genre, 31, 33; of reality TV, 70; of tunnels, 13–14, 190; of video games, 133, 136–37 Agudelo, Edwin, 172–85. See also Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, A algorithms, 17, 103, 131; coding, 102, 133; control, 102; corridors, 132, 143–49

Ambos Nogales Repair, 192 American Trucker, 84 Anderson Cooper 360°, 44, 47, 54–63, 207n42 Andreas, Peter, 11–12, 68 Anduril, 129, 142, 155 animation, 17, 24, 129, 131–36, 150, 168, 190, 206n30, 209n18; affordances of, 23, 100, 102–9, 123, 126, 128, 149, 154, 192; and plasticity, 99–128 Anti–Border Corruption Act, 72 anti-immigration advocates, 45 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 8, 220n8 architecture, 9, 17, 179, 184, 190; architects, 11, 18, 168; corridors in, 14–16; in first-person shooter games, 143–49; and speculative design, 167–72. See also Borderwall as Architecture Arizona, United States, 72; Douglas, 1, 8, 11, 78, 189–90; Naco, 227

228 

Index

47; Phoenix, 34; San Luis, 13; Tucson, 37, 53, 63 asylum, 13, 36. See also refugees Austin Chronicle, 116 authenticity, 6, 36, 44, 48–49, 83–84, 103, 191 Ax Men, 83 background checks, 74 Balibar, Étienne, 3 Ballestero, Andrea, 7, 159 Barker, Jennifer, 120 Barrios, Daniel, 206n33 BBC: Newsnight, 28, 45–47 Beautifying the Border, 160, 168–70 Beltrán, Mary, 101, 115 Ben Ayoun, Emma, 132, 156 Benjamin, Walter, 14 Berg, Charles Ramirez, 138 Berlin Wall tunnels, 10, 32, 39–41, 43, 45 blue-collar work, 82–91 Blunt, Emily, 139 Bogost, Ian, 145–46 border, definition, 3–4, 8 Border 2020 plan, 225n72 border issues, 3–4, 6, 8, 10, 19, 25, 95, 192; definition, 5 borderlands, definition, 8 border line drawings/shots, 112–13 Border Live, 67–68, 70–71, 77–78, 84, 92–98, 211n49 border-making, 3, 18, 113, 193 borderscapes, 3 border securitization, 25–26, 70–72, 91, 115, 160–61, 164, 172, 185, 186 Border Security, 67 border spectacle, 33, 43, 47, 62–65

border studies, 7, 22, 42, 192; critical, 163–64 Border Tunnel Task Force Act, 68 border wall, 15, 26, 130, 157–58, 180, 191, 223n44; challenges to, 7, 13, 17, 160, 164–72; representations of, 27–28, 28, 30, 50, 104, 117, 211n49; symbolic power of, 19–20, 42 Borderwall as Architecture, 160, 164–67, 170, 172 Border Wars, 67–68, 70, 74–89, 92–93, 97–98 Boston Globe, 116 Breaking Bad, 138, 191 Bridge, The, 112 broken-world thinking, 161 Brown, Wendy, 19, 42 Bukatman, Scott, 116, 125 Bush, George W., 89, 166 Caldwell, John, 34, 50 California, United States, 104, 171; Berkeley, 20; Calexico, 165; Jacumba, 157–58; Otay Mesa, 56–59, 61; Sacramento, 95; San Diego, 16, 55, 61–62, 72, 75–76, 168; San Ysidro, 103 California Water Quality Control Board, 166 Call of Duty, 129–30, 142, 150, 191 Call of Juarez, 130–33, 135–38, 141–54 Camarena, Roberto, 1, 199n1 Campbell, Howard, 72 Canada, 10, 199n2, 201n21, 225n69 Cavender, Gray, 209n19 CBC News, 30 CBS, 37, 40–41, 53

Index  229 Central American migrants, 18, 36–37, 71, 179, 211n49 Chang, Alenda, 186 Chapo, El, 21 checkpoints, 5, 13, 15–16, 36, 130, 159, 164–65 Chihuahua, Mexico, 134 cinematic kineticism, 116, 127 citizen journalism, 56 citizenship, 5, 9 class, 2, 18, 78; blue-collar work, 82–91 Clean Air Act, 185 Clean Water Act, 166, 185 CNN, 20, 47, 54, 56, 58, 60. See also Anderson Cooper 360° Coal, 84 Cold War, 12, 39–41 colonialism/imperialism, 5, 12, 174, 178; in action films, 112, 115, 128; in first-person shooters, 24, 130–31, 134–38, 143; neocolonialism, 19. See also frontier ideology; Manifest Destiny Comisión Estatal de Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, 165 Consalvo, Mia, 135 contras games, 138 Cooper, Anderson, 190; Anderson Cooper 360°, 44, 47, 54–63, 207n42 Cops, 67, 77, 83 Corliss, Richard, 116 corridoricity, 17, 103, 126, 133, 146–47, 149, 154, 170 corridors, 1, 14–17, 59–60, 169–70; in action films, 120, 139; algorithmic, 132, 143–49; in first-person shooters, 24, 132, 143–54 Cowen, Deborah, 16

Cowie, Elizabeth, 32 “crisis at the border” discourse, 19, 36 critical design studies, 159, 176 critical makers, 159 critical media studies, 23, 191–92 critical race and ethnic studies, 9 Cruz, Ephraim, 15 Cuidad Juárez, Mexico, 11, 134 Daily Show, The, 157–58 dark ecology, 166 Deadliest Catch, 83–84 debilitation, 7, 159, 178–81 Debord, Guy, 43 decolonization, 163 Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, 206n33 De Genova, Nicholas, 32 del Toro, Benicio, 139 design thinking, 166–67 Diesel, Vin, 109, 115 disability, 179–80. See also debilitation; maiming Discovery Channel, 67, 92–94, 211n49. See also Border Live Doane, Mary Ann, 36 documentary genre, 17, 71, 102, 103–4, 112, 127, 169, 192; affordances of, 31, 33; and reality TV, 72–74, 77, 84, 95; and TV news, 23, 31–33, 39–50, 55–56, 63 DOMO Architecture + Design, 168 Double Negative (DNeg), 110 Doyle, Aaron, 77 DREAM Act, 89 drug cartels, 43, 109, 130; and border tunnels, 11, 13, 18, 20, 45; Call of Juarez, 130–33,

230 

Index

135–38, 141–54; and guns, 95; Jalisco New Generation cartel, 11; Sinaloa cartel, 11, 18, 20. See also narcotraffickers Duck Dynasty, 83–84 Duncan, Pansy, 127 Durango, Mexico, 18 East/West Berlin. See Berlin Wall tunnels Eisenstein, Sergei, 99, 102 Elden, Stuart, 14 Ellis, John, 44, 48 Elsaesser, Thomas, 103 embedded reporting, 54–56, 93, 132, 206n29 Enfoque, 64 EPA, 166, 225n72 Escobar, Arturo, 163 establishing shots, 27–30, 30, 47, 104–5 Farina, Dennis, 199n1 Fast and Furious, 101–3, 107, 109–28 Fay, Jennifer, 163 FBI, 101, 109, 115 Fickle, Tara, 131 figural malleability, 2, 13, 102, 133 firmative speculation, 161 first-person shooters (FPS), 17–18, 129–31, 155–56, 169, 190, 215n6; algorithmic corridors in, 143–49; frontier ideology in, 131–38, 143, 147–48; politics of, 132–36; tunnel warfare in, 24, 138–43; white supremacy in, 149–54 Fishman, Mark, 209n19 Fiske, John, 29

Florida: Miami, 20, 168 Fojas, Camilla, 22, 167 forced migration, 12 Forensic Architecture, 170 Fox News, 56, 191 France, 15, 39 Frank, Reuven, 44 Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 83 Friendship Park, 168 frontier ideology, 24, 83, 134; in first-person shooters, 131–38, 143, 147–48. See also colonialism/ imperialism; Manifest Destiny Fry, Tony, 159, 168, 170 Fuller, Mary, 134 Gabbard, Krin, 115 Gadot, Gal, 120 Galloway, Alexander, 141 GameSpot: GameFAQs, 150–51 Garcia, Joe, 72 gender, 63, 69, 93, 189–90, 214n47; in the Border Patrol, 82, 214n47; in first-person shooters, 137, 141, 143; in reality TV, 70, 78, 83–84; in TV news, 32, 62–64. See also masculinity global border regime, 21–22 globalization, 12, 18, 20, 137 Global North, 5, 12, 19, 26, 112, 115, 139, 162, 166 Global South, 12, 19, 69, 112, 115, 139, 166, 167 “good enough” worlds, 184–85, 187 Google Maps, 129–30 Gordillo, Gastón, 220n8 GPS, 122 Graham, Stephen, 14 Grant Theft Auto, 116 Graves, Bill, 84–85

Index  231 Great Britain, 39 guerrilla warfare, 10 guns, 11, 16, 95, 139, 173 Gutman, Matt, 47–54, 62–63 Guzmán, Joaquín “El Chapo,” 11, 18 Halberstam, Jack, 172 half-real, the, 133 Hall, Delaney, 189–90 Hall, Stuart, 191 Haraway, Donna, 167 Hawkins, Gay, 172 Hay, James, 76 Hecht, Kevin, 37–39, 48, 62, 78–79, 84–85, 89, 91, 95, 190 Hernández, Kelly Lytle, 82 Hight, Craig, 103 homeland security discourse, 21, 76–77. See also U.S. Department of Homeland Security Hong Kong, 126 humanitarian aid, 15 Ice Road Truckers, 83 id Software, 215n6 immersion, 103, 107–8, 119, 133, 190–91 Imperial Valley, 165–66 implosions, 127–28 indexicality, 6, 18–19, 31–32, 41, 44, 61–62, 100, 103, 110, 118 Indigenous peoples, 23, 69, 131, 136, 162–63, 167 individualism, 25, 148, 151, 154; rugged, 68, 70–71, 77–78, 83, 84 infrastructuralization, 7–8, 159–60, 187 infrastructures of the border, 13, 109, 130–32, 136, 155, 159

interdisciplinarity, 22 International Boundary and Water Commission, 166, 171 International Outfall Interceptor, 171 Iraq War, 54–56, 206nn29–30 Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 11, 139, 178–79 Israeli occupation of Palestine, 10–11, 139, 178–79 Jalisco New Generation cartel, 11 James Bond films, 110 Jaramillo, Deborah, 31, 56, 206nn29–30 Jarzombek, Mark, 15, 170 Jason Bourne films, 110 Jenkins, Henry, 134 Jones, Kimberley, 116 Jones, Mike, 104, 107 Jones, Nick, 122 Jones, Reece, 19, 21 journalism. See citizen journalism; embedded reporting; TV news Juul, Jesper, 133 Kalantidou, Eleni, 159, 168, 170 Kennedy, John F., 40 Kersten, Jason, 16 KGUN, 53 KOLD, 37–38, 38, 47, 53 KPNX, 34–36 KVOA-TV, 63–64, 64 Lai, Jimmy, 126 Langley, John, 77 Laporte, Dominique, 172 Larkin, Brian, 101, 117 latent commons, 184 Latino threat narrative, 9, 138

232 

Index

Lattice, 129, 131, 155 Law on the Border, 67 Leff, Enrique, 162 legal/illegal divide, 83 Levy, Steven, 129 liveness, 36–37, 71, 93 Live P.D., 211n49 living in common, 162 Long, Christian, 110 Loyd, Jenna M., 187 Luciano, Lilia, 95–97 Luckey, Palmer, 129, 142–43 ludology, 131, 134–35 magic circle of play, 131, 135 maiming, 178–79. See also debilitation Makeshift, 53 Malabou, Catherine, 108, 127 Manifest Destiny, 137. See also colonialism/imperialism; frontier ideology maquiladoras, 166 Maquilapolis, 112 Marshall, Kate, 17 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 9 Martínez, Oscar, 8, 220n8 masculinity, 63, 137, 141; white, 32, 70, 83–84 Mayans M.C., 21 media archaeology, 159, 174, 176 media effects, 70 media studies, 2–3, 5–7, 22, 163, 211n3; critical media studies, 23, 191–92 media theory of the border tunnel, definition, 3 mediation, 29, 163–64, 176; in action films, 100, 102–3, 116–20, 125–26; of border tunnels, 2–10,

13–22, 25–26, 159, 189–93, 195; definition, 4; in first-person shooters, 133, 136, 142; in reality TV, 71–74, 78, 84, 91, 96–98; of ruins, 174; in TV news, 31–33, 41, 43, 46–64 Mejia, Antonia, 34 Mendiola, Henry, 208n17 methodology of book, 5–6, 22. See also thinking infrastructurally Metz, Christian, 107 Mexicali, México, 165–66 Mexican Brown, 82–83 Mexican Policía Federal, 95 Meyers, Seth, 220n3 microgenres, 113 “migrant caravans” discourse, 36–37 migrants’ rights activism, 89 militarization of the border, 2–5, 13, 15, 19–21, 76, 158, 185 Minow, Newton, 40 Mitchell, Greg, 40 morphs, 102 Morris, Wesley, 116 Morse, Margaret, 54 Motion Systems, 215n53 Mukherjee, Rahul, 174 Muñoz, José Esteban, 172 Murillo, Lupita, 63–64 Murray, Soraya, 135 mutual aid networks, 160 NAFTA, 166 narcocultura, 20 Narcos: Mexico, 21 narcotraffickers, 6, 8, 11, 20, 21, 64, 87, 115, 185. See also drug cartels National Geographic (channel), 67. See also Border Wars nationalism, 33–34, 70

Index  233 national security, 2, 5, 8, 16, 25, 73, 76, 155, 161–62, 185, 187 nativism, 5, 20, 26, 68, 180 Nava, Gregory: El Norte, 21 NBC, 34, 40–41, 44, 63; NBC News, 208n17 Nemser, Daniel, 130 neoliberalism, 8, 12, 78 New River, 165–66 News Direct, 103–6, 106, 126, 128 News 4, 63–64, 64 Newsnight, 28, 45–47 Next Media Animation (NMA), 126 Nguyen, Josef, 151 Nightline, 47–55, 62, 206n33 9/11, 8 99% Invisible, 189–90 Nitsche, Michael, 146 Nixon, Rob, 163 Noah, Trevor, 157, 220n3 Nogales, Mexico, 11, 30, 34, 37, 45, 63, 71–72, 75–78, 171. See also Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, A Nogales International Wastewater Treatment Plant, 171 Nogales Station, 72 Nogales Tunnel Task Force, 34, 37, 63, 71 North, Dan, 107 North American Development Bank, 171 NPR, 15 Obama, Barack, 89 Ochoa, Maria Paula, 64–65 Oculus, 129 Ortiz, John, 115 Ouellette, Laurie, 76, 84

Pacific Ocean, 166 Palestine: Israeli occupation of, 10–11, 139, 178–79; West Bank, 7 Palmer, Gareth, 83 Palmer, Lindsay, 56 Pantera, El, 21 Parikka, Jussi, 167, 174, 176 Parks, Lisa, 14 participatory media, 89 Patrolling the Border Wall with a U.S. Border Agent, 30 Patterson, Christopher B., 131, 150, 153 Paullier, Juan, 45 Payne, Matthew, 143, 147 PC Gamer, 147 Penix-Tadsen, Phillip, 134, 138 performativity, 164; and reality TV, 67–98 Peters, John Durham, 173 Phillips, Amanda, 143, 192 Pierson, Ryan, 200n7 Pike, David, 14 Pittman, Tom, 53, 78–79, 85–87, 190 plasmaticness, 99–100, 102 plastic infrastructures, 100–102, 108–9, 123, 128 plasticity, 25, 108, 149; and digital animation, 99–128 Pokémon Go, 129–30 political geography, 7 Practice in Excavating and Envisioning Ambos Nogales, A, 160, 172–85 process effects, 107 propaganda, 23, 40, 56, 67, 70–74, 97–98, 207n7 Pruitt, Scott, 225n72

234 

Index

Puar, Jasbir, 178–79 Purse, Lisa, 120 Queen of the South, 21 queerness, 89, 131, 172 racelessness, 115 racialization, 9, 22, 69; in first-person shooters, 129–56 racism, 5, 24, 88, 128, 134, 136–38, 143, 191; white supremacy, 9, 149–54. See also Latino threat narrative Rael, Ronald, 164 Raley, Rita, 133 Rangan, Pooja, 63 realism, 6, 29, 31, 56, 99–100, 109, 118, 122, 136 reality TV, 9, 18, 21, 23, 99, 209n19; affordances of, 70; and documentary genre, 72–74, 77, 84, 95; gender in, 70, 78, 83–84; mediation in, 9, 71–74, 78, 84, 91, 96–98; and performativity, 67–98 Reason TV, 72 refugees, 179. See also asylum Rehak, Bob, 113 remediating tunnels, 185–97 Reuters, 103 Rio Rico, México, 171 robots, 52–54, 206n33 Rolling Stone, 127 Rosenberg, Alyssa, 77 Rosner, Daniela, 167 ruinous speculation, 160, 164, 172–85, 187 Ruiz, Jason, 138 San Diego Tunnel Task Force, 16, 72 scalar thinking, 25

Schatz, Thomas, 137 Secure Fence Act, 166 Senior, Tom, 147 Señora Acero, 21 Señor de los Cielos, El, 21 sewer systems, 11, 21, 37, 39, 161, 169, 171–73, 185–87, 192. See also wastewater treatment plants Sewer Transnationalists, The, 192 Shaw, Adrienne, 150 Sheehan, Rebecca, 112 Sicart, Miguel, 135 Silicon Valley, 129, 155 Sinaloa cartel, 11, 18, 20 slavery, 10, 137, 138 slow violence, 163 Smith, Craig, 53 Smith, Jacob, 163 Smuggle Truck, 134 smuggling, 2, 13, 57, 166, 214n47; in action films, 101, 109–11, 111, 114, 118–19, 122–23, 125; in first-person shooters, 134, 147; ports used for, 43, 213n23; in reality TV, 68–69, 85, 87, 95; tunnels used for, 8, 11–12, 53, 72, 106, 109–11, 111, 118–19, 147, 159 Sobchack, Vivian, 102, 117 social justice, 25, 170 social media, 89 solutionism, 21, 159, 166–67 Sonora, Mexico: Agua Prieta, 1, 189; Naco, 47 Sorrensen, Cynthia, 73 Soviet Union (USSR), 10, 39–40, 99 special effects, 9, 23–24, 101, 107–8, 113, 116–19, 123–27, 190, 192 spectacle of reality, 32–33, 42, 63–64 spectacular whiteness, 57

Index  235 speculative design, 9, 24, 192, 223n44; and sustainability, 157–87 Squires, Catherine, 83 Stack, Robert, 1 Starosielski, Nicole, 163 state-thinking, 171–72 Stein, Nicholas, 75–76 Stoler, Ann Laura, 174 Stork, Matthias, 119 supply chains, 16 surveillance, 2, 155, 160, 167–68, 182, 191, 223n44, 225n69; in action films, 112–14, 118, 120, 122; in border infrastructures, 7, 13, 21, 130; in reality TV, 76 sustainability, 3, 8, 24–26, 192; and speculative design, 157–87 sustainable development, 162 Swamp Loggers, 84 Swartz, Lonnie, 179 Taiwan, 103 tariffs, 166; tariff-free zones, 5 Taylor, T. L., 192 technofuturism, 191 technological awe, 73–74 techno-solutionism, 21, 159 Telemundo, 21, 64, 65 televisuality, 33–39, 192 terrorism, 41, 76, 166 thinking infrastructurally, 13–18, 22 Tijuana, Mexico, 37, 57, 103–4, 165–66, 168 Tijuana Airport, 37 Tijuana River, 165 Time magazine, 116 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, 134 TOMONews, 126–27

trafficking, 43, 213n23; in action films, 101, 109, 115, 117, 122, 127; definition, 12; in first-person shooters, 130, 137, 139, 148, 154; narcotraffickers, 6, 8, 11, 20, 21, 64, 87, 115, 185; in reality TV, 68–73, 78, 95–97; tunnels used for, 1–3, 8, 11, 13, 19–21, 37, 42, 44–50, 57, 62, 78, 95–97, 157–58, 169, 182, 186, 189; in TV news, 37, 44–50, 57, 62, 64. See also drug cartels transmedia organizing, 89 transnationalism, 5, 8–10, 12, 16–17, 26, 115, 135, 137, 173, 185, 192 Travers, Peter, 127 Trump, Donald, 88, 157 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 184 Tunnel, The, 40–41, 44 tunnelicity, 13–18, 59, 126, 169 Tunnel Task Forces, 10, 190; in reality TV, 23, 67–78, 82, 84, 87–91, 95, 98; in TV news, 34–35, 35, 37, 53, 63 tunnel warfare, 10, 24, 132, 138–43, 149, 154 TV news, 9, 99; and documentary genre, 23, 31–33, 39–50, 55–56, 63; and spectacle, 27–65 12 News, 34, 35 2008 global economic crisis, 127, 137 Uncertain Commons, 161, 181 Underground Railroad, 10, 201n21 undocumented migrants, 9, 15, 89 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, 12 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 158

236 

Index

Universal Studios, 101, 109 Univision, 64 Unsolved Mysteries, 1–2, 8, 189, 199n1 U.S. Border Patrol, 1–2, 15, 53, 72, 154, 159, 173, 189, 208n17; in action films, 112–13, 120; in reality TV, 91; RGV Sector, 208n17; violence by, 167, 178–79; white supremacy in, 9, 82–83 U.S. Coast Guard, 74 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 2, 13, 20–21, 24, 109, 114, 117, 129–30, 167, 190, 207n7; Frontline, 71; in reality TV, 70–81, 81, 83, 86, 89, 91–97; in TV news, 29, 34–39, 41, 48, 52–57, 62; What Lies Beneath, 67, 70–74, 84, 89–92, 92, 98, 206n33 U.S. Department of Defense, 11, 142, 206n29, 206n33 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 2, 11, 13, 20–21, 25, 68, 70–77, 89, 129, 162, 185–86, 191, 208n17 U.S. Department of State, 40 U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 40 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 74, 77; HIS, 68 Vietnam War, 10, 139, 218n39 Villeneuve, Denis: Sicario, 139–41, 149 Virilio, Paul, 14 virtual reality (VR), 24, 108, 129, 132, 134, 155–56 Vogt, Doug, 54

Walker, Janet, 163 Walker, Paul, 109, 115 War on Drugs, 1–2, 8, 13 War on Terror, 41 Washington, Cynthia, 37–39, 47 wastewater treatment plants, 164–66, 171, 223n49. See also sewer systems Waters, Colin N., 182 Watson, Mary Ann, 39 Weber, Samuel, 33 Weeds, 21 Weir, Bill, 93–94, 94 Weizman, Eyal, 7, 170 Westerns (film genre), 136–37; neo-Westerns, 138 Whissel, Kristen, 102, 123 White House, 37 whiteness, 2, 5, 115; in first-person shooters, 134, 137–38, 149–54; in reality TV, 70, 75, 78, 82–91; spectacular, 57; in TV news, 32–33, 47, 62–63; white masculinity, 32–33, 70, 83–84 white supremacy, 9; in first-person shooters, 149–54. See also racism Widner, Gary, 72 Williams, Mark, 182 Williams, Rosalind, 182 Wired, 53, 142 Wollen, Peter, 29 Wonders, Nancy, 69 Wong, Diana, 12 Woodruff, Bob, 54 xenophobia, 134, 218n39 Zalasiewicz, Jan, 182 Zimanyi, Eszter, 132, 156

Juan Llamas-­Rodriguez is assistant professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.