Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative [1 ed.] 0816537194, 9780816537198

Citation preview

Coloniality of the

U-S///Mexico Border

Roberto D. Hernández

C O L O N I A LI T Y O F T H E U - S///M EX I CO B O RD ER Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative

The University of Arizona Press www​.uapress​.arizona​.edu

© 2018 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2018

ISBN-­13: 978-0-8165-3719-8 (cloth) Cover design by Nicole Hayward

Cover photo by Karina Zúniga - Para Ti Mujer series, with Diane Martinez Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created

with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hernández, Roberto, 1979– author.

Title: Coloniality of the US/Mexico border : power, violence, and the decolonial imperative / Roberto D. Hernández.

Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009772 | ISBN 9780816537198 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Mexican-American Border Region. | Violence—Mexican-­American Border Region—Sociological aspects. | San Ysidro (San Diego, Calif.)—Social conditions. |

Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico)—Social conditions. | El Paso (Tex.)—Social conditions. | Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC HM866 .H47 2018 | DDC 972/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009772

Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to all crossed by borders, those who cross borders, and most of all those who defy their raison d’être ///

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: Coloniality of Power, Violence, and the U-S///Mexico Border 1.

At Home in the Nation: On the Structural Embeddedness of Vigilantism and Colonial Racism

2.

94

Las Mujeres Asesinadas de Ciudad Juárez and the Double Bind of Their Representation/ability

5.

67

The 1984 McDonald’s Massacre and the Politics of Monuments, Memory, and Militarization

4.

36

Territorial Violence and the Structural Location of Border(ed) Communities

3.

3

128

“The Borders Crossed Us”: Anti-Mexican Racism as Anti-Indianism

154

Conclusion: Coloniality and the Decolonial Imperative

181

Notes Discography and Filmography Bibliography Index

195 215 217 237

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Map of San Ysidro in relation to San Diego Anti–driver’s license campaign billboard “Here Legally” shirt worn at anti-migrant rallies Lead pages to Samuel Huntington’s “The Hispanic Challenge” Map depicting troop movements across the border Image of Osama bin Laden with eyes on the U-S///Mexico border Uncle Sam recruitment poster Mothers Against Illegal Aliens Lalo Alcaraz, “Never Forget,” 2002 Changing municipal boundaries in a town in Alabama Map of San Diego city council districts, 2010 McDonald’s massacre memorial monument, 2000 Flowers in front of the McDonald’s following the shooting Photo of the McDonald’s site being bulldozed Makeshift altar raised at the site of the McDonald’s McDonald’s monument at Southwestern College Close-up of McDonald’s monument with steel fence Plaque in front of the memorial monument Plaque in front of the memorial monument with shadow

2 38 39 40 43 43 54 62 66 80 87 96 117 118 120 123 125 126 126

Acknowledgments

A

this has been a project a long time in the making. Having grown up in San Ysidro, one of the two main border communities addressed in this text, I began my research for this book on a horrific afternoon in the summer of 1984 when I was but a young child forced to confront the racialized realities of our modern/colonial world. The first persons to guide me both to and through this project, as they guided me on that day, were my grandmother, mother, and sister: Consuelo Delgadillo González, Consuelo Hernández Delgadillo, and Monica Delgadillo, who deserve first thanks, as they did then and do now! This research reached systematized maturation during my time at Berkeley. I thank Norma Alarcón, Mario Barrera, Ramón Grosfoguel, David Montejano, Laura Pérez, José David Saldívar, and the late, great Ron Takaki in the Ethnic Studies Department, who all supported the development of early portions of some of the chapters. As a fellow of the Institute for the Study of Social Change, I would like to thank Christine Trost, David Minkus, and my cohort of co-fellows who read and commented on various versions of chapter 2 in its early incarnations as part of the ISSC Working Paper Series: Cid Martinez, Victor M. Rios, Lilia Soto, and Rickey Vincent, among others. The Center for Latino Policy Research and the Decolonial Feminisms Working Group also provided a space and community for working through some of the ideas and arguments in this book. Ananya Roy was an anchor of support at Berkeley and deserves special appreciation. S WITH ANY BOOK,

xii Acknowledgments

My time at Berkeley was one in which I learned as much outside the classroom as I did within it. Various elders and communities of struggle, political/ intellectual growth, and ceremony in the Bay Area sustained my spirit during the long research, writing, editing, and rewriting process: I extend my thanks and solidarity to Betita Martínez, the late Richard Aoki, Roxanne DunbarOrtiz, Dan Siegel, Anne Weills, Ignacio Chapela, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Yermo Aranda, Crowbear Galindo, Tony Gonzales, Ken Moshesh, Harvey Dong, Noura Erakat, Carlos Muñoz, Robert Allen, Hatem Bazian, Charles Houston, Jorge Gonzalez, Daphne Taylor-Garcia, George Ciccariello-Maher, and countless others who formed the ranks of MEXA, Students for Justice in Palestine, Raider Nation Collective, and both the 1969 and 1999 Third World Liberation Front families. Without them this text would never have seen the light of day. This book also benefited from a supportive community of mentors and colleagues who welcomed me for a few years in both Black studies and Chican@ studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chela Sandoval, Jeffrey Stewart, the late Clyde Woods, Jonathan Xavier Inda, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Bill Robinson, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Christopher McAuley all facilitated many unfolding conversations and contributions that made their way into the text. My time at UCSB also led to critical comments on parts of the manuscript and important lasting collaborations with a number of colleagues: Maryam Griffin, Daniel Olmos, Steve Osuna, Cesar Rodríguez, and Xuan Santos. The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) has been one of my key intellectual homes. While there are too many to name here who have provided important feedback and exchange on the arguments I make in this book, I do want to acknowledge the unyielding support and principled examples of critically engaged scholarship on the part of Devon Peña, Emma Pérez, Deena González, Maylei Blackwell, Michelle Téllez, Lupe Gallegos-Diaz, Roberto Cintli Rodríguez, and Alfonso Gonzales, as well as my co-conspiring with Gabriel Soldatenko, Michael Soldatenko, Jason Ferreira, Jenny Luna, Melissa Moreno, Jimmy Patiño, Silvia Solis, Michael CalderónZaks, and the entire Indigenous Peoples and Knowledges Caucus. My colleagues at San Diego State University’s Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, who believed in me and my work when they took a risk in hiring me, have also remained a constant bedrock of support. I extend my sincere thanks and appreciation to Isidro Ortiz, Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Adelaida Del

Acknowledgments xiii

Castillo, María Ibarra, Victoria González-Rivera, and Emily Hicks. Anne Donadey, Irene Lara, Bill Nericcio, Ramona Pérez, Bertha Hernández, and Ozzie Monge have also provided important support and engagement and helped foster a space for the further development of my scholarship at SDSU. I also want to extend a heartfelt gracias to the various ongoing and rotating members of Accountability Café, who have provided a community of support for my writing since my return to San Diego. Many of the theoretical contributions of this manuscript owe a debt of gratitude to the intellectual communities I have been fortunate to help co-create with several colleagues through our work with Diálogo Global. I am very proud of what we have accomplished with multiple projects in Tarragona, Barcelona, Granada, Mexico City, and Cachoeira, and a vast online decolonial translation network. My colleagues and comrade scholars Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado Torres, Salman Sayyid, Hatem Bazian, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Linda Alcoff, Sabelo J. Ndluvo-Gatsheni, Tendayi Sithole, Santiago Slabodsky, Pablo González, Mariana Mora, and Alex Abbasi have each contributed in their own way to supporting me and my work, providing me with my occasional and necessary decolonial fixes and DBC to get me through dry spells. As one might imagine, several of the above communities overlap. My colleagues, friends, interlocutors, and comrade scholars Marcelle Maese and Mahdis Arzamandi deserve special thanks and recognition, as we have respectively and collectively walked together through several phases of this project and of our own academic and personal lives. In their own way, each has helped me maintain hope and focus as we have sought to build decolonial futures in the various communities in which we coincide. Infinite gratitude and appreciation does not begin to cover the support they have respectively provided to help bring this manuscript to press. Kristen Buckles at the University of Arizona Press has shown immeasurable support and patience in seeing this manuscript through from start to finish. When I was first deciding on a press, her name and reputation came up time and time again, nearing the status of legend, for how professional and supportive she is as an editor. I am happy to confirm that she is indeed a blessing to work with and has done more than I could ever imagine to help birth this project. This extends to entire team at UAP and copyeditor Matt Gleeson for their attention to details I would have surely missed otherwise. Thank you! Lastly, I want to thank Karina Zúñiga for the amazing photographic cover art, part of her “Para Ti Mujer” photo series with Diane Martinez. I came across

xiv Acknowledgments

this photograph late in the process, yet the timing could not have been better, as it brought full circle two central arguments in the book itself. That is, the fact that nation-state boundaries are a modern/colonial construct and mechanism to deterritorialize and divide Indigenous peoples, and the need to return to ceremony and the sacred elements themselves as part of the decolonial imperative that makes evident the unnaturalness of such national-territorial borders. The above is also central to the work and prayer of the Peace and Dignity Journeys that I and my partner Ymoat Luna have been fortunate to walk together, and which inform the spirit of this book. While many have contributed in various ways to bringing this project to fruition, I alone am responsible for any mistakes herein. Nevertheless, the last thank you, gracias, tlazocamatli, eyaay ahan belong to Ymoat and to the entire PDJ family across the continent, for sharing themselves with me, along with the spirit, prayer, ceremony, love, and patience necessary for the building of a world without borders.

Coloniality of the

U-S///Mexico Border

FIGURE 1  Map of San Ysidro in relation to San Diego, California. Illustration by Linda

Quiquivix, 2017, based on sources from the City of San Diego and Google Maps.

Introduction Coloniality of Power, Violence, and the U-S///Mexico Border We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.

—Popular proverb

Combating these historical forces of dehistoricization must be the most immediate objective of an enterprise of mobilization aimed at putting history in motion again by neutralizing the mechanisms of the neutralization of history. —Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination

W

“modern” world that is Manichean and self-deluding. It conceals power in plain sight, often in the name of a presumedly threatened “national security” that obfuscates its global nature through a compartmentalization into nation-states. Its concurrent underpinning logic, the underside of this Eurocentric modernity, is coloniality—which attempts to hide its particularity through claims to universality but is nonetheless refracted in our contemporary geopolitical ordering. Organized along nation-state lines, the interstate system and its concomitant national-territorial boundaries have become two of the most defining and taken-for-granted features of the contemporary modern/colonial world. The political-geographical boundaries of nation-states, however, can and do change despite their seeming permanence. They change as a result of historical geopolitical strife, and they are socially (re)produced and contested through the actions, practices, and ideas of not only state actors but also border community residents and other nonstate actors.1 It thus matters how we articulate and enunciate the ensuing assemblages of power. As such, the use of the inscription the U-S///Mexico border in this book is an act of cartographic and epistemic disobedience and a twofold attempt to intervene in the discursive hegemony of both U.S.-Mexico border studies and its critiques. First, the hyphen between E LIVE IN AN OSTENSIBLY

4 Introduction

the letters U and S is meant to disrupt the “hidden transcript” or unspoken logic of coloniality that monologically silences dissent and implies a timeless permanence, unity, and continuity vis-à-vis the term United States and its abbreviation. The implication muddles the fact that boundary change is a permanent feature of the interstate system on a large scale, including the United States’ colonial expansion and usurpation of Indigenous land. Secondly, this inscription of the term is an attempt to visually voice (protest against) the violence of the “triple fence strategy” now in effect on numerous parts of the border. The triple fence strategy was initiated on the San Ysidro-Tijuana border via Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 but has since expanded.2 It also stands as a model and starting point for the various proposals for a future border wall under the current fortyfifth presidential administration. Accordingly, this book posits violence and coloniality (as opposed to colonialism) as central analytical categories to use in challenging established nation-state and cross-border metropolis lenses through which scholars have analyzed the U-S///Mexico border and its attendant border cities. With a focus on San YsidroTijuana and El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, the book interrogates multiple forms of violence that are overshadowed by the attention to and sensationalizing of human and drug trafficking. This work analyzes two border localities yet is at once transnational, global, and historical in its approach. It highlights the need to recognize and reconceptualize “border problems” that serve as proxies for social processes of power and inequality rooted in historical colonial and racial divides. The political and media focus on a presumably recent border crisis conceals historical changes in the boundaries themselves. This study begins with a rethinking of the structural location and implications of San Diego-Tijuana and El Paso-Ciudad Juárez in an increasingly globalized world. It considers multiple forms of both real and symbolic violence (territorial, racial/gendered, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers. Accordingly, it provides a discussion of violence at—and because of—national-territorial borders, the possibility of undoing borders, and the decolonial imperative necessary for such possible futures. Boundary change has importantly occurred in Europe after World War II and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have seen it in the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, in Kosovo’s more recent declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, and in the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Boundary change is not limited to postwar restructuring or to Eastern European countries. Boundaries within the Middle East, including those involved in the continued and contested expansion of colonial settlements in Palestine, have changed in

Introduction 5

the last half of the twentieth century under various conditions, as have those of various African nation-states. The independence of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011 is a recent example. The U-S///Mexico border, unbeknownst to many, has also undergone a series of boundary changes since the end of the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848. The last major change was in 1963 with the resolution of the Chamizal dispute on the border between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.3 There have also been recent smaller changes with the ongoing San Ysidro land port-of-entry expansion project and the opening of the new El Chaparral exit port leading into Tijuana, Baja California. It is in this broader context of the local and historical social construction of borders and boundaries, as well as James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd’s (1999) call for attention to local specificity, that this study focuses on violence in the border communities of San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez within the larger border regions of San Diego-Tijuana and El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, respectively.4 Commonly referred to as “America’s Finest City,” San Diego has historically dwarfed the port-of-entry community of San Ysidro in both political considerations and the popular imaginary. By the same token, while the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez and narco-violence have come to define the twin border cities in the Chihuahuan Desert, the two have been collectively known as El Paso del Norte, emphasizing their role as a route into El Norte or the United States. Victor Ortíz-González (2004) has importantly referred to this dynamic in El Paso as that of a city in the service of somewhere else. The study of these two border regions and the cities and communities that compose them is illuminating for comparative work not only on the role and changing nature of nation-state borders, but also on the intrinsic presence of border violence in a modern/colonial world organized as an interstate system rather than individual and presumedly autonomous nation-states. Accordingly, I jump from the local to the global and back again, as life on the border is often experienced as the simultaneous negotiation of these scales. Moreover, it is at national-territorial boundaries that the face and contradictions of modernity/coloniality are laid bare. As a socially produced and contested space, the U-S///Mexico border is coloniality incarnate.

San Ysidro, Tipai-Ipai, and the Little Landers Colony San Ysidro is a small, predominantly Mexican, Spanish-speaking community located at the southern end of San Diego. It was originally and is presently home to various Kumeyaay nations—or Tipai-Ipai, as they refer to themselves—who

6 Introduction

continue to reside throughout San Diego County; neighboring Kumiai communities live from Tijuana to Ensenada in Mexico. The Spanish did not arrive in the San Diego area until 1769, despite a brief ten-day expedition some 165 years earlier. The early Spanish settlement was located near present-day downtown, fifteen miles north of San Ysidro, and was itself composed of a diverse mix of Indigenous, mestizo, and African people, with only a handful of Spanish settlers.5 While a Spanish mission was set up to the northeast of the settlement in 1769, a Church outpost or asistencia that would later be converted into the Ybarra Ranch was built toward the south, near San Ysidro. Following years of failed Christianizing attempts, a Kumeyaay raid in 1837 resulted in the Ybarra Ranch being abandoned for years, only later to be used by the Dranga family as a general store, and later still by the Little Landers cooperative organization as a clubhouse after the original homelands of the Tipai-Ipai had been divided by the imposition of the U-S///Mexico border in 1848.6 The introduction of the national-territorial divide separated what had once been the larger traditional territories of various Tipai-Ipai nations and left several of them south of the border, where over time they came to be known as Kumiai, following the Spanish pronunciation, while those in the English-speaking north came to be known as Kumeyaay. The Little Landers Colony (my emphasis), as it is often referred to, was part of a “back to the land” movement that thrived at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1909, William Smythe bought an extensive plot of land in San Ysidro and resold acre-sized lots to families seeking to live self-sustaining lives by working the land and combining their surplus products to sell in the San Diego market for communal benefit.7 The Little Landers Colony is considered by many to have set the stage for present-day San Ysidro, though the community’s annexation to the city of San Diego in 1957 (discussed in chapter 2) radically altered the social and political landscape. San Ysidro has since become home to the busiest border crossing in the world.

El Paso del Norte: From the Frontier of Globalization to Modernity/Coloniality Ciudad Juárez and its neighbor to the north—El Paso, Texas—also share a conflicted history built on the colonial enterprises of northward-migrating Spanish forces who encountered Jumano groups and other original peoples of the region, including Apaches and Comanches. Among the various Spanish

Introduction 7

colonialists who made the trek north was Juan de Oñate, the son of one of Hernán Cortés’s closest friends and accomplices. The younger Oñate’s venture across to the northern banks of the Río Bravo in 1598 during his travels is the reason for the original name of El Paso del Río del Norte;8 the name referencing this specific colonial endeavor was only later transposed onto the migration route into the United States today. The colonial history of both sites studied here should not go unnoticed, for in many ways it continues to inform and structure the discourses and logic of the violences that we see along the present-day border, which are central to this study.9 As the end of the twentieth century witnessed an increasing shift toward the globalization of capital, communications and information technology, and production and consumption—seen at its extreme in many Mexican border cities such as Ciudad Juárez or Tijuana—numerous scholars such as Ohmae (1990), Guéhenno (1995), and Giddens (1999) argued that nation-state boundaries would become equally obsolete, each emphasizing varying factors to which they attributed this coming change.10 While the function and location(s) of nation-state boundaries have undoubtedly been transformed over time, they have nonetheless maintained a central role in a continued partitioning of the globe along presumedly stable nation-state lines. They have at once hardened and become more fluid. In his groundbreaking study of El Paso, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous formulation of the western frontier as an uncivilized “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” Ortíz-González (2004) notably argues that despite changes in the border region, the area has nonetheless remained a symbolic frontier in the American imaginary.11 El Paso and Ciudad Juárez were once part of the “Wild West” or western frontier, and today they remain central to the tropes of the “laboratory of postmodernity,” “Murder City,” and the lawless frontier/frontera/border.12 One feature that has remained constant and provides a link between the frontiers of yesteryear and today is violence in various forms. Nevertheless, whereas Ortíz-González is concerned more with what is local about a border community in the context of globalization, here I am more concerned with how the local, in San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez respectively, provides a decolonial reduction that makes visible the coloniality that continues to shape the nation-state boundaries, which themselves function as mediating mechanisms for the interstate system and the spatiotemporal logic of modernity. For a long time, as in the work of Ratzel (1897) and Lapradelle (1928), geographers recognized nation-state borders as potentially violent, distant political

8 Introduction

and military “buffer zones” meant to demarcate the separation of nations.13 The emergence of highly populated border cities and entire border regions in what were once seen as desolate and remote “frontier” locations puzzled many geographers.14 Such changes were first interpreted as a phenomenon of globalization occurring in border regions throughout the world following World War II. Recent borderlands scholarship has noted that, rather than being desolate, such frontier zones have always been populated and have been sources of much concern for nation-states, including the United States and Mexico during the so-called Indian Wars of the 1880s.15 Furthermore, Immanuel Wallerstein has shown that globalization, far from being recent, is simply the current nominal designation for the “modern world-system,” or what Aníbal Quijano and others writing on the “coloniality of power” have called the “modern/colonial world-system,” birthed in 1492.16 While world-systems analysis and coloniality of power frameworks recognize ongoing change in our contemporary world, both foreground the necessity of a long-historical frame of analysis, or what Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of history termed the longue durée. This study proceeds with a longue-durée historical lens in mind, as such a lens is also a key to understanding local particularities, given that such boundaries and their surrounding regions, as local mediators of unequal exchanges between neighboring countries, also have a history of their own that does not always mirror that of their national or metropolitan center(s). As peripheral regions, these sites help make visible the contradictions of the national polity proper. Since the late 1970s we have been witnessing a complex and contradictory process. We are seeing a reentrenchment of national-territorial boundaries. This has meant the reinforcement of preexisting social boundaries and the emergence of new ones, both processes playing out primarily but not exclusively along said nation-state borders. Importantly, both state and nonstate actors have helped reinforce the borders. The social and political contestations have led to increasing hostilities and outright violence in many places the world over, with the U-S///Mexico boundary figuring prominently. Taken as a paradigmatic case, given its comparative import and its physical and structural location at the center of the modern/colonial world today, the U-S///Mexico border has generated a wide body of literature. Many, following the work of Herbert Bolton (1921) and John Francis Bannon (1970) on the Spanish frontier on the one hand, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s pathbreaking interdisciplinary work on the other, have increasingly addressed this important sociohistorical juncture in terms of the borderlands.17 I engage with, yet depart from, much borderlands literature

Introduction 9

(discussed further below), and also engage with the work of geographers who maintain an analytical distinction between the concepts of frontier, boundary, border, and borderlands. The latter work analyzes boundaries as lines of geopolitical demarcation between nation-states, frontiers as contact or peripheral zones, and the border and borderlands as distinct regions or social spaces where social and cultural interactions are informed by a nearby national-territorial boundary and the two (or more) nation-states it separates from one another.18 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron (1999), among others, have provided systematic conceptual distinctions between the terms frontier, borderlands, and border. They fall short, however, in their insistence on complete historical breaks between each of the concepts, failing to recognize the continuities that persist when viewed from a long-historical perspective.19 In a similar fashion, Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey identify what they see as a “three-part process that allows us to establish a chronology shared by many borders,” yet they argue that “in the long run, most borders are erased or dissolved” in a seemingly natural way.20 Their naturalizing of a contested historical process and their chronological spatiotemporal schema pose two problems. First, while borders do change, they do not dissolve as readily as Ganster and Lorey, Chang-Hee Christine Bae, or Dear and Leclerc suggest when they argue for the existence of transfrontier metropolises.21 Second, the chronology posed by Ganster and Lorey follows the logic advanced by Adelman and Aron, wherein complete temporal breaks are presumed between each of the “periods” in a crude historical materialist approach that fails to recognize Hegel’s Aufhebung; that is, the persistence of characteristics of a prior “period” sublated into the next period. Here I draw instead from neo-Marxist geography and worldsystems analysis to identify a historical system as the unit of analysis and to foreground the U-S///Mexico border as a socially and historically produced and contested space that is fundamentally a structuring mechanism not only of the United States and Mexico as neighboring nation-states, but of the modern/ colonial world in its entirety. World-systems analysis has produced a wide-ranging literature on various regions throughout the world and the long-historical political and economic relations between regions and/or nation-states as understood through the lens of core, periphery, and semiperiphery. Yet world-systems scholars have paid little attention to nation-state boundaries and border regions unto themselves. Some geographers have taken to world-systems approaches in their study of urban space, cities, and nation-states, notably David Harvey, Anthony King,

10 Introduction

and Michael Peter Smith. Lawrence A. Herzog is one of the few political geographers doing work on border cities or border regions who draws from worldsystems analysis. Yet he does not take the analytic leap necessary to shift the unit of analysis from nation-states and the state policies that affect the boundaries said to “contain” them to a historical system in which the nation-state form and its boundaries are constitutive of a larger sociohistorical process. As such, this study focuses on the U-S///Mexico border within the context of world-systems analysis, and on the local specificity of violence in San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez as a lens through which to interrogate the role of racial/colonial borders as a central structuring mechanism of the current historical system. I frame this work, with and beyond Wallerstein, through what Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano first named the coloniality of power, which I identify as the defining logics of the current historical system, with roots in the colonization of the Americas and the initial construction of the contemporary idea of race. Briefly, “coloniality of power” speaks first to a heterogeneous pattern of power constitutive of modernity, rooted not in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Europe at the advent of industrialization, but in 1492 in what liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel has called the “invention of the Americas,” the condition of possibility or “primitive accumulation” that allowed for the cotemporally “invented” entity of Europe to enter the “industrial age” over two hundred years later.22 Through this shifting of lenses, Dussel establishes “that while modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence, it also originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe” and has always had its underside.23 Second, it was in/through this initial encounter that the socially and discursively created concept of race as we know it today became the central organizing axis for ordering social relations, though with local variations.24 Third, the coloniality framework maintains that following the “independence movements” in Latin America in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and in other colonial possessions in Africa and Asia through the 1950s and 1960s, countries achieved not independence but “colonial independences,” as the same colonial patterns of power (structured along class, race, gendered, and sexual lines) remained largely in place in newly created nation-states.25 In effect, the coloniality framework points to the continuation of colonial situations without the presence of formal colonial administrations and to the state/structural administration and self-administration of a colonial order, operating simultaneously—yet with distinct dynamics—at global, nation-state, and epistemological levels.26 In sum, coloniality is the epistemological and material scaffolding for the social construction and reproduction of

Introduction 11

nation-state boundaries and identities and of national, racial, and sexual borders. Such an understanding, in turn, sheds a distinct light on the U-S///Mexico border, as it foregrounds the racialized/sexualized nature of violence on the border as being grounded in a colonial enterprise and episteme that manifests itself in local struggles. To date, attempts to address border violence have retained the nation-state as a central element, and as such they have remained trapped within the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.

Border(ed) Violence, Embodied Memory, and Community Resilience Just as boundaries play a significant role in the geopolitical ordering of the modern/colonial world—from the establishment of continental divisions in the sixteenth century and the formation of early national boundaries with the Treaty of Westphalia to the emergence of new colonial independent nationstates from the eighteenth century through the 1960s—so too do border cities, as places of inclusion, exclusion, and exchange. In such a world, violence, in the form of territorial or boundary disputes at the edges of empires and nationstates alike, has been an enduring feature during times of both war and nonwar, and it increasingly plays out in border cities in particular.27 Similarly, violence in border cities, in one form or another, has historically dominated headlines and continues to do so; yet this violence is often disconnected from its causes, rendering it a seemingly independent force of destruction.28 Such representations make violence appear to always be deviant and anomalous, despite its normative presence and prevalence in the everyday life of border communities, which nonetheless thrive. The representation of violence in U-S///Mexico border cities exemplifies the above dynamic. That is, rather than addressing its causes, we are instead inundated by headlines that posit violence itself as a central protagonist, thus normalizing it. Various forms of cultural production, in contrast, can at times provide a distinct view of the same processes and as such also form an important part of this study. To speak of violence on the border is to conjure up images of a presumed lawlessness associated, for example, with drug trafficking in Tijuana, human smuggling in Nogales, or the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez. A simple review of the San Diego Union-Tribune over the last decade reveals headlines such as “Overnight Violence in Tijuana Kills as Many as 8” and “Spike in Violence

12 Introduction

Yields Two Bodies, Three Barrels.”29 Here I am interested not in reifying such violence, but in exploring other instances of seemingly unconnected violence neglected by the attention given to the former—an attention that obscures as much as it reveals. Lost is the cause of said violence, for it is violence itself that emerges as the primary perpetrator of violence, noted only through gruesome details of decapitated heads and growing body counts. Horrific gore conceals the ordinary. Repetition obfuscates its historicity. In this regard, some cultural producers are not exempt either. In contrast, the understanding of violence I propose here looks beyond simple and limiting definitions of brute force and bloody death. When we consider violence in terms of its causes, techniques, strategies, and objectives, what becomes evident is the utility of violence as a tool wielded by many in variegated pursuits of power and domination, both physical and symbolic.30 Again, it bears mentioning that the State and nonstate actors alike share responsibility. While I outline my conceptualization of the mutually constitutive relationship between border violence and coloniality further below, a preliminary note of caution is necessary. Pierre Bourdieu warns us of a common misreading of “symbolic violence” when he states, “Understanding ‘symbolic’ as the opposite of ‘real, actual,’ people suppose that symbolic violence is purely ‘spiritual’ violence which ultimately has no effects. It is this distinction, characteristic of a crude materialism, that the materialist theory of symbolic goods . . . seeks to destroy, by giving its proper place in theory to the objectivity of the subjective experience of relations of domination.”31 The purpose here, then, is not to create dichotomous understandings of real or physical violence in contradistinction to symbolic or nonphysical violence. Nor is it to prioritize either “objective” or “subjective” experiences of violence, or even to illustrate the “objectivity” of the subjective experiences of domination. Instead, the purpose of these introductory words and the broader book is to take seriously the historicizing of border violence given the coloniality of power in the modern/colonial world. In other words, it is to ask how we make sense of border violence apart from its sensationalization by placing it in its proper sociohistorical context—that of the mediating mechanisms of an ongoing historical social system. This is not to say that there is an overarching structure—the modern/colonial world—that determines all aspects of everyday life for people, but rather that there is an at once dominant and totalizing, though never fully complete, set of relations of consent and domination that are constituted by and constitutive of said structure, which manifest themselves in daily local interactions, delimiting human agency.32 These social relations of power are concretized

Introduction 13

in the form of the diverse “national identities” that national-territorial boundaries engender and sustain. To understand border violence, we must therefore consider how it is produced and reproduced, oftentimes even by those on whom it impinges, and we must also understand how certain forms of violence render other forms of violence invisible or relegate them to the margins of violence literature. Realizing that my inquiries all fundamentally center on violence broadly conceived, as I began this research I started by focusing on the border community of San Ysidro where I was raised, and on the many direct and mundane experiences my childhood friends and I had while growing up. A personal, literal starting point to my questions—trying to make “objective” sense of subjective experiences that involved relations of domination—thus became a springboard for more pointed research questions. Growing up in the border town of San Ysidro only blocks from the border wall and with the words of Gloria Anzaldúa etched in my mind—“This is my home this thin edge of barbed wire”—I often looked out the window of my elementary school classroom and saw Border Patrol agents on the playground, chasing people who looked like me.33 This image would repeat itself throughout junior high and high school, and it has stayed with me as a reflection of my own presence in this country: perceived as “immigrant” and “foreign” despite formal status first as a legal resident and eventually as a citizen. The image would be reinforced when on the way home from school I was often stopped by the Border Patrol (i.e., the State) and asked where I was from, where I was going, and what I was doing. The terrifying schoolyard scenes constituted my first knowledge of and lesson in the existence of uneven social structures, power, and inequality. The Border Patrol’s intense interrogations in turn led me to develop my own questions. Seeking answers from elected officials seemed like a fruitless endeavor, as their attention lay elsewhere, given San Ysidro’s physical location in relation to San Diego. I did not allow these experiences to deter me, however. Nor did I erupt with rage, though I certainly could have. I did not know it then, but at that time my own questions were already seeking to understand the systemic and structural factors that accounted for such scenarios. While I have very vivid and clear images of the above experiences forever engraved in my thoughts, my own memory was born on July 18, 1984, when a gunman (a nonstate actor / civilian) stormed a McDonald’s two blocks from my childhood home and killed over twenty predominantly Mexican patrons and employees, wounding another eighteen. I cannot clearly remember anything

14 Introduction

before that day, but I remember that day. I remember how that day brought into focus the migrants I would see running across the school soccer fields, brought into focus the Border Patrol officers otherwise so close to my face that their own faces would blur. That summer afternoon, in essence, brought focus to my two-pronged question: Why are Mexicans in this border town hunted down and/or killed at a moment’s notice? Today, I can look back and say with clarity that I knew all too well, up close and personal, the definition posed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore that racism is “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”34 In San Ysidro, Mexicans are hunted down and many die. I did not want to be hunted down. I did not want to die. Although I had never lived in Ciudad Juárez or El Paso, a few years later it became evident—as NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, and the Zapatista National Liberation Army made headlines by taking over several municipalities in Chiapas—that in Ciudad Juárez young, brown-skinned Indigenous or mestiza women were being disappeared and dying. As the body count began to rise in Ciudad Juárez, by 1999 my attention had also turned there, at a time when little academic work had yet to be produced on the feminicides. I had traveled through Juárez only twice before, yet I instinctively knew that the fates of the two border communities and the violence they endured were inextricably linked. Having been born in Guadalajara but with family roots in Chiapas, at just over two weeks old I was brought by my parents to San Ysidro. When they crossed the border themselves in the mid-1960s, they did not go to Los Angeles or other popular destinations to the north. They stayed close to the border that they knew as home. My mother had been born in Guadalajara as well, but she spent her formative teenage years on the Mexican side of la frontera in Tijuana. The border was a familiar place to her. My father was also from the border, but one further south: he came from southern Chiapas near Mexico’s border with Guatemala. As lifelong fronteriz@s, they made San Ysidro their home, and later home to my sister and myself. When my mother went into labor with my sister, however, they headed south, to Tijuana, countering the logic of “anchor babies” referenced by anti-immigrant discourses, largely out of distrust of and unfamiliarity with U-S doctors. When I came along, my family was already in Guadalajara for an uncle’s wedding, otherwise I too would have made the voyage south in my mother’s belly to be born in Tijuana. This “thin edge of barbed wire” I/we call home is San Ysidro; others call it the busiest border crossing in the world, yet to me it is a small, predominantly Mexican town on the northern side of the U-S///Mexico border. San Ysidro is also the southwesternmost point

Introduction 15

of the continental United States. It is in this regard the culmination of a long historical process that entailed the ongoing expansion of the United States’ national territory and the relocation of its boundaries to locations further west and south. Mapped chronologically, it is an “endpoint” of sorts, and it is from San Ysidro that I turn around and look back east to critically reflect on and analyze the long historical processes, drenched in blood, that led to San Ysidro being the place that it is today. Accordingly, the blood spilled on July 18, 1984, is my own starting point, so to speak. And it is from here that I think. I think from what Anzaldúa called the “open wound” of la frontera, situated at the crossroads of more than five hundred years of colonization and the imposition of man-made national-territorial boundaries that have carved up land on this continent Abya Yala, Pachamama, Turtle Island, into the geopolitical units of nation-states.35 I think from the border, as it is the lifeblood spilled, in the present and historically, that animates the questions of this study. This seemingly benign revelation about San Ysidro as the endpoint of the frontier’s expansion began to take on a more insidious form, for it highlighted another aspect of the border violence that gave rise to my questions. It revealed the multiple layers that one would have to uncover if one hoped to address the violence that was itself bordered or marginalized with respect to other popular and scholarly discussions of violence, including the way in which San Ysidro is rendered invisible by the privileging of San Diego. Thus began my formal work on this project, as it became necessary to think about San Ysidro in its simultaneous relationship both to the border and to the racialized invisibility that the city of San Diego generated and obscured. Ironically, El Paso too has been rendered invisible in its visibility, because Ciudad Juárez’s prominence overshadows its sister city to the north, with the region as a whole seen as one of violence and vice. The difficulties and limits of researching these border(ed) communities, especially through a single method, were quickly made apparent. What little I found on San Ysidro was usually in literature archived or organized under the heading “San Diego.” San Ysidro was often discussed only in passing. As such, this book takes on an interdisciplinary form—part sociological, historical, and ethnographic, part auto-historia, testimonio, and literary and textual analysis— for it is only in this way that one can capture thinking from la herida abierta. San Diego is also a noticeable exception with regard to various socioeconomic indicators when compared to other border cities. For example, border communities on the U-S side of the border are among the poorest in the country, as is the case with El Paso, Texas, yet San Diego does not fit this mold.36 My personal knowledge of San Diego as a “border city” through growing up in

16 Introduction

San Ysidro also spoke to this anomaly. This issue of exception thus became a troubling concern in my work as well. Why is San Diego considered an exception? How might the relative invisibility of San Ysidro be an underconsidered element in the classification of San Diego as an exception? What do San Ysidro and other South Bay communities of San Diego tell us about the San DiegoTijuana border? Is San Diego, for that matter, a border city proper? Thus began my first acts of epistemic disobedience, as the dominant narrative did not correspond with my embodied experience and my memory of what I argue should more properly be called the San Ysidro-Tijuana border. Ultimately, these two border(ed) communities converge in interesting ways that are arguably linked to the question of violence, both state-sanctioned and extralegal. In the spirit of thinking from the borders—the many literal ones my family and I have called home, and the borders of race and mestizaje, methods and disciplines, genres and cultures, and local/global interfaces—the goal of this project is to counter the continued vulnerability to premature death in the embodied lived experiences of Indigenous, Mexican, Chican@, and Latin@ communities on the U-S///Mexico border. Indigeneity and Mestizaje on the U-S///Mexico Border

I address the above questions through a consideration of five manifestations of violence along the U-S///Mexico border, in an attempt to understand the historical relationship between coloniality and the construction and reproduction of racial/gendered and national-territorial borders through violence. A theoretical and historical understanding of coloniality and its material and epistemic dimensions at the global and national levels is central to this work. Such an understanding is also imperative in order to analyze the occasional reemergence of anti-immigrant groups that patrol the border and the sociogenic violence they represent. These civilian patrols highlight the long-historical discursive apparatus and the stakes of what is ideologically framed as an immigration debate, which presumes the stability and normalization of boundaries. Instead, I argue that the nominally “anti-immigrant” sentiment that plays out on the border is a long-historical incarnation of a racial/colonial objection to the Mexican not as immigrant but as coloniality’s all-too-familiar subject: the Indigenous other who appears as at once savage, uncivilized, and now illegal. The global and the national make themselves present in the local spatiotemporal ordering of populations and spaces, exemplified in the municipal annexation of San Ysidro to the city of San Diego and in the colonias that provide

Introduction 17

the Indigenous and mestiz@ labor force for the maquiladoras (also known as maquilas) in Ciudad Juárez. The 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre and its aftermath become one of the repercussions of uneven spatial distribution of racialized violence, as do the feminicide victims linked to colonias and maquilas, who, I argue, are also part and parcel of coloniality. Yet in all these cases communities resist and respond; they epistemically disobey, (re-)create alternative worlds, and envision new horizons through the music, visual arts, and literature that I study here, emanating from the borders’ treacherous geographies. Each of these cases and the responses to them illustrate how, despite increasing global political and economic integration, violence at the nation’s edges continues to unfold. With violence taking on new shapes and forms both physical and symbolic, it is thus necessary to pay nuanced attention to the continuities facilitating such trends if one is to propose remedies or solutions that strike at the colonial underpinnings of such violence. Interestingly, the responses to this violence are as varied as the concrete instances of violence themselves. Yet we must also be critical of how responses to violence can run the risk of reinscribing other colonial relations of power. Gloria Anzaldúa’s invocation of Chican@s and a “new mestiza consciousness” as a bridge between indigeneity and migrants (particularly Indigenous migrants from the south) becomes a case in point that is often misunderstood.37 Anzaldúa’s Mestizaje, Batalla’s Indigenous Reclamation

This study situates the U-S///Mexico border as a site of racial/colonial power, as expressed most vividly in Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic text Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), where she describes the border as an “open wound” that hemorrhages and creates a third culture. In many ways, my own work owes an extensive debt to Anzaldúa, and I see it as concretely grounding Anzaldúa’s claims in the specific case studies of San Ysidro-Tijuana and El Paso-Ciudad Juárez. I build on Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s classic México profundo: Una civilización negada (1987) and Cherríe Moraga’s “theory in the flesh” in which “the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born of necessity” in order to confront the violence of coloniality.38 I draw on Anzaldúa because she provides an analysis that makes visible the ways in which coloniality has historically functioned (via legal-juridical technologies and institutions, but also at the microphysical level of internalized social relations) to de-Indianize/deIndigenize diverse Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Latin America, rendering

18 Introduction

them mestiz@s initially and immigrants upon crossing a man-made border. She does the above by grounding Borderlands in the 1970 text Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán, written by Powhatan-Lenape historian and poet Jack Forbes, who is widely regarded as one of the first scholars in the context of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s to acknowledge the underlying Indigenous character of the Mexican@ population, not only in Mexico but also in the United States.39 Bonfil Batalla demonstrates how de-Indianization emerges as a “loss of the group’s original collective identity, as a result of the process of colonial domination . . . [but one that] does not necessarily imply the loss of Indian culture.”40 He further argues that we must differentiate biological from cultural processes of mestizaje, as the latter have occurred to a higher degree via deIndianization while the former have been limited and tied to forms of social organization, class, poverty, education, and segregation. Ironically, the logic of racialized/gendered superiority/inferiority, as lived in the flesh, facilitated the inadvertent cultural-civilizational continuity of Indigenous cultures, peoples, and knowledges that Spain and Mexico sought to eliminate. Indigenous cultures and lifeways thus persisted, given the socially stratified hierarchies, even amongst the de-Indianized Indigenous peoples (i.e., mestiz@s both rural and urban, peasants, and campesinos). The ideology that justified colonization was a redemptive campaign that revealed the conviction that the only path to salvation was that of Western civilization at the expense of indigeneity.41 In the national myth of Mestizaje, the “Indian” is relegated to the past, a relic to be celebrated, but not of the present or future. Moreover, modernity, treated as a superior civilizational program, is imposed on diverse Indigenous peoples and becomes reinscribed as a Manichean question of “development” that moves out of primitiveness toward one presumed model to be followed by all. Nevertheless, for Bonfil Batalla, Mexico remains an Indigenous civilization, albeit one negated by the project of modernity/coloniality. Similarly, a continuous, refracted, de-Indigenized Indigenous (migrant) presence and present exist and persist alongside recognized Indigenous populations in both the U-S and Mexico, as well as in the U-S///Mexico borderlands. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands provides the epistemic bridge between the two. Anzaldúa’s invocation of a “new mestiza consciousness” both weighs against and complements my claim that not just Mexicans and Chican@s but also Latin@s remain Indigenous-inflected populations, albeit de-Indigenized, socially speaking. My argument here is twofold. First, it becomes necessary to situate

Introduction 19

Anzaldúa’s initial intervention as a disruption of the historically and legally inscribed classification of Mexican@s as “legally white” even when their treatment in everyday life did not correspond to this legal pronouncement, given their lived experience of racism in the flesh. Moreover, Anzaldúa is herself often criticized for what is wrongly thought to be a celebratory embrace of the post–Mexican Revolution discourse of mestizaje as national identity, advanced through Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos’s articulation of Mexicans as a “cosmic race.” Vasconcelos’s national myth indeed was an overt attempt to move away from a presumedly backward Indigenous heritage by foregrounding racial miscegenation with Spanish, European, and other races. While Anzaldúa embraces the notion of a cosmic race through an acknowledgment of the fact of colonialism as producing mixed-race subjects (to invoke Fanon), it is my contention that she nevertheless uses Borderlands / La Frontera and the “new mestiza consciousness” as a counterdiscourse that, without essentializing any identity, can ultimately be read as an embrace of or return to the Indigenous that Vasconcelos sought to escape and render a relic of the pre-Columbian past. Viewing Anzaldúa’s mestizaje and de-Indianized Indigenous mestiz@s through this refractive lens has bearing on how one might engage conceptions of indigeneity when thinking across competing colonial contexts. The British, Spanish, and French, as well as the U-S and Mexico, have each had their own way of classifying and relating to Indigenous peoples, and all of these polities have shaped the present-day U-S///Mexico borderlands. Lastly, this Indigenous-inflected dynamic among Latin@s has complex implications for relations with and between Native nations in the United States, in terms of both the important and contradictory realities of Indigenous sovereignty in federal Indian law and the “browning” of the U-S. These are difficult but necessary conversations for any project that claims to think, act, live, and love decolonially. Yet we must go beyond equally Manichean frameworks of settlers and Natives that ultimately rely on and reify colonially constructed identities and implicit claims to authenticity.

Border Studies, Coloniality of Power, and Heterarchical Thinking Much has been written about the U-S///Mexico border and the borderlands, work that is often referred to collectively as border theory. These writings range

20 Introduction

from sociological, historical, and anthropological accounts of immigration to studies of the everyday practices of border residents. In a related vein, Gloria Anzaldúa takes the material conditions of the U-S///Mexico border as her point of departure in developing the notion of the borderlands and mestizaje as a third space, a condition of in-between-ness, where the border is representative of a contested yet potentially liberatory space. Literary and cultural studies scholars have furthered Anzaldúa’s work through a focus on cultural/ literary analysis and cultural production. Free trade, the maquiladora industry, border enforcement, surveillance, control, militarization, and low-intensity conflict have also been productive areas of research, alongside work on the urban and built environment.42 While there are too many contributions to mention by name, most border studies literature has been developed using one of two lenses. The first is a nation-state-centered view that looks south to the border, along with a complementary literature “looking north,” although the two are rarely in conversation. Each maintains either the United States or Mexico and its respective phenomena as the object of study. The other lens is a more recent transnational perspective that, under the rubric of globalization, considers the state-to-state relations between the U-S and Mexico (many also include Canada, given the importance of the North American Free Trade Agreement) but continues to insist on the nation-state as the unit of analysis. In both instances, the nation-state functions as a container of society, even if the particular policies of one state or the other are contested. When policies are contested, they are contested at the nation-state level, in turn reifying the interstate system and the presumed autonomy of each “container.” Missing from this literature are the key analytical insights offered by Latin American scholarship, in particular the conceptualization of the “coloniality of power” and the decolonial turn, as formulated by Aníbal Quijano and elaborated by Santiago Castro-Gómez, Ramón Grosfoguel, María Lugones, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Walter D. Mignolo, among others.43 I build on the above literatures that address the border but I situate this book within the interdisciplinary framework of coloniality, as it illuminates crucial elements neglected until now by border studies. Coloniality, as opposed to colonialism, brings to light a different way of conceptualizing the U-S///Mexico border that might otherwise go undetected when the border is studied through nationspecific or disciplinary frames. Specifically, the framework of coloniality aims to transcend the naturalized claims to national sovereignty and border security by historicizing and highlighting the simultaneously “national” and global colonial

Introduction 21

episteme that underpins violence on the border. When this is done, violence and coloniality prove to be central and mutually constitutive features of the interstate system, embodied at national-territorial borders. They are the underside of the modern nation-state and modernity rather than spaces of exceptionality in a thickening borderlands.44 Coloniality refers to a long-historical matrix of power constituted in and through persisting colonial situations or relations without the presence of formal colonial administrations. Contrary to conventional sociological thinking, the coloniality of power framework is attuned to historical change yet places an emphasis on continuities and persisting legacies despite discontinuities, change, randomness, and newness.45 In this sense, it is important to distinguish coloniality from colonialism, as the latter has often been understood as encompassing forms of (primarily economic) domination and exploitation pertaining to a specific time (the past) and specific spaces (the “non-Western” world). In contrast to literature on imperialism—even that which acknowledges the persistence of relations of domination and exploitation despite the end of formal empires—coloniality literature refuses the economic determinism of most critical approaches and points to the entangled nature of social categories of power (race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, etc.). Furthermore, instead of rehashing a tired debate over the meaning and factuality of the temporal frame of postcolonial critique, the study of coloniality conceptually draws on early work by Frantz Fanon, Georges Balandier, and Immanuel Wallerstein on “colonial situations” that evades the spatiotemporal trappings of much literature on “classic colonialism” to construct a different analytic framework in which the historical system is taken as the unit of analysis, as opposed to any given “society” (usually conceived of as nation-states across time).46 Viewed this way, colonial independence becomes visible. In other words, whereas classic colonialism has by and large ended (with notable exceptions such as Puerto Rico), global coloniality persists. A similar argument can be made with regard to Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc, who point to the existence of “postborder cities” (my emphasis), even as the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the escalation of deportations, first under President Barack Obama and now under President Donald J. Trump, highlight the persistence and continuing importance of the border in the daily lives of those who would dare transgress it.47 The concept of coloniality thus articulates the entanglement of a global division of labor and a global racial/ethnic hierarchy wherein race functions as an organizing principle of the modern/colonial world.48 Moreover, coloniality

22 Introduction

speaks to the entanglement of hierarchies at global, nation-state, and ideological/imaginary levels (the latter being the level of knowledge production); that is, there exists an entangled logic or set of logics that is simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by and with the structures and hierarchies that maintain colonial relations of oppression, domination, and exploitation without the need for formal colonialism—again with an emphasis on continuity over the discontinuities that dominate traditional sociological theory and research.49 For Quijano, “there is no overarching capitalist accumulation logic that can instrumentalize ethnic/racial divisions and that precedes the formation of a global colonial, Eurocentric culture.”50 Race and capital are instead mutually constitutive of one another, as manifested in a historical system. While in agreement with Quijano, María Lugones elaborates on the coloniality of power in new and productive ways. She criticizes Quijano and other authors who examine coloniality for maintaining normative understandings of gender and sexuality in their formulations, such that the concepts of male and female and a presumed heterosexuality are uncritically assumed and reified.51 Instead, Lugones excavates multiple and diverse understandings of gender in the Indigenous Americas that disrupt the normative male/female divide, and she illustrates how the dichotomous framework was constructed in and through the colonization of the Western Hemisphere. So rather than assuming, as some scholars and communities have, that a patriarchal gender system was imposed on Native communities, or that Native societies were themselves all patriarchal, Lugones elucidates diverse localized social systems that were impinged upon, though not always determined by, the totalizing gender system of coloniality, entangled with labor exploitation and racial/ethnic classification.52 These inherited understandings of gender, sexuality, and heteronormative masculinity make themselves felt on the U-S///Mexico border. As noted earlier, this does not mean that there is an overarching structure determining every aspect of the lives of people, but rather a totalizing and dominant modern/colonial world, never fully complete, constitutive of and constituted by such sets of social relations. Lugones’s work thus has important ramifications for the gendered discourses of race and nation mobilized by vigilante groups (discussed in chapter 1) and the particular forms of racialized/gendered violence and feminicide in Ciudad Juárez (discussed in chapter 4). As was the case with early critics of world-systems analysis, some have argued that coloniality of power is an overdetermining macrostructural theory that leaves no room for the agency of either individuals or communities

Introduction 23

affected by said structure.53 Greek social theorist Kyriakos M. Kontopoulos has analyzed key similarities and differences between hierarchical (macro) and constructionist (micro) theories, which provide important forms of social analysis but are both limited, in his assessment, by the weight they place on macro- or micro-level determining factors, respectively.54 Hierarchical theories must be distinguished from heterarchical theories as a way of bridging what is commonly seen as a macro-micro divide. For Kontopoulos, hierarchical or macrostructural theories provide overarching structural determinations of the local, while constructionist theories privilege the micro in their elaboration of global structures; yet neither establishes the mechanisms that link the micro and macro. Heterarchical theories, in contrast, avoid the overdetermination of the hierarchical and constructionist theories while allowing for a multiplicity of overlapping mechanisms at various levels—what geographers would see as multiscalar analyses. While some Black and Chicana feminist scholars have favored intersectionality as a theoretical lens, Lugones also provides a decolonial critique of that framework as one that reifies autonomous spheres which only at times intersect, as opposed to being themselves mutually constitutive. In a sympathetic yet critical assessment of the coloniality of power framework, Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez draws from Kontopoulos to bring Quijano into conversation with Michel Foucault. On the one hand, Castro-Gómez concludes that Foucault is a Eurocentric thinker, in large part because of the content of and points of reference for his considerations, evident throughout his many published books and lectures.55 On the other hand, Castro-Gómez nonetheless points to the non-Eurocentric value and contribution of Foucault’s method and his theorization of power, which allow for a heterarchical conceptualization of the coloniality of power, distinct from what he identifies as hierarchical thinking in Quijano’s formulation.56 Collectively, these writers provide an important basis for my own decolonial approach to the study of raced/gendered colonial and epistemic violence and coloniality of and on the U-S///Mexico border. The border between the United States and Mexico has often been the site of dramatic racial, anti-migrant, and/or drug trafficking–related violence. However, one of the central claims of this book is that when one pays attention to the longue durée, one sees a continuum of violence that is geographically and discursively embodied in the trajectory from the colonization, genocide, and epistemicide of Indigenous peoples and the kidnapping, transporting, and enslavement of African peoples to the uneven spoils of globalization that occur in spite of

24 Introduction

the borders said to contain the nation-state (and presumably its violence). The continuum of violence lives on through early notions of “savages” on the frontier to the current images of lawlessness associated with the southern border in the American imaginary. It is further exemplified in the recent U-S involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which mirror policy toward “hostiles” centuries earlier.57 Secondly, I consider how border(ed) communities have responded in the face of official negligence, challenging traditional articulations of citizenship, belonging, and humanity by engaging in epistemic and cartographic disobedience and declaring their “right to the city” and their right to dignity and justice despite vulnerability to premature death. Lastly, this book interrogates the discourses and popular imagery surrounding the aforementioned violences (colony-frontier-border-globalization) as recurring consequences rooted in the episteme of modernity/coloniality. Conceptualizing Real and Symbolic Violences

While violence as a concept can be a wide-ranging term, it is most often used to denote the use of extreme or brute force, physical in nature and meant to result in or consequently resulting in bodily harm. Nonetheless, scholars from various disciplines have elaborated on the significance and use of violence, as well as on other seemingly banal manifestations not usually thought of as physical violence. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois skillfully identify four major tendencies or categories of violence that they name direct political violence, structural violence, symbolic violence, and everyday violence.58 However, their consideration of direct political violence fails to appropriately distinguish in the way that Frantz Fanon does between political violence of two strands: on the one hand, the repressive violence of state/colonial forces, and on the other, revolutionary liberatory violence that aims to counter repressive state violence and, in the cathartic process, regain the humanity of those affected by such repression.59 While Fanon’s thinking on violence has been the subject of much debate, critiques of Fanon have usually emerged from positions of nonviolence that engage with one particular chapter of his The Wretched of the Earth, divorcing it from the larger body of his work, including the broader contextualization for his later writings on violence found in his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, and the concept of sociogeny as expanded on by Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter and Lewis R. Gordon.60 Instead, a broader reading of Fanon reveals the very specific ways in which his invocation of violence was guided by

Introduction 25

a view of it as a tool in a strategy whose objective was an ethical position against the dehumanization of coloniality. Fanon’s work, along with Bonfil Batalla’s México profundo, is in many ways central to this project, as his grounding of colonial violence in the scopic regimes of colonialism parallels and informs the understanding of coloniality that I adopt in order to understand the overdetermination of raced/gendered Mexican and Mexicanized bodies as a continuation across several centuries, despite changing legal and juridical forms and norms, of the colonial violence involved in the process of de-Indianization. Among the other categories proposed by Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, structural violence was originally articulated by John Galtung to define “the indirect violence built into repressive social orders creating enormous differences between potential and actual human self-realization,” and is now more broadly used to refer to long-term oppressive inequities that have been, consciously or otherwise, built into or institutionalized in the structures that order society.61 Symbolic violence, drawing from Pierre Bourdieu and his consideration and further development of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony vis-à-vis consent, refers to the internalization of structural violence and/or other forms of violence in such a destructive way that the very violence which impinges on someone is used to reinforce its action upon that person and make its imposition on others appear natural and legitimate. A key example that Bourdieu elaborates is the internalization of misogynist norms by women in light of experiences with violent masculinities.62 As for everyday violence, both Scheper-Hughes in her own work and Arthur Kleinman have proposed respective notions that are meant to illustrate the compounding of structural and symbolic violence in the everyday interpersonal relations of people.63 When street delinquency and domestic violence are cited as examples of everyday violence, it becomes clear that Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’s four categories do not have rigidly defined boundaries and at times overlap. These authors also falter in their analysis of the colonial continuity of various forms of violence. Nonetheless, a characteristic that most considerations of violence do share is the implicit—or in some cases explicit—binary distinction between legal/illegal, legitimate/illegitimate, or worthy/unworthy manifestations of violence, which Fanon establishes as Manicheanism brought on through colonialism.64 This Manicheanism informs the colonial logics of violence along the U-S///Mexico border; it is the architecture of domination that undergirds modernity/coloniality. The U-S///Mexico border is the focus here because no other two neighboring countries present sharper socioeconomic differences than do the United

26 Introduction

States and Mexico. Violence under such conditions merits further consideration because it speaks to the role of national-territorial borders in the maintenance of global inequality, and because a local consideration of violence can, as Anderson and O’Dowd suggest, be important for comparative work in other border regions. While the cases considered in this book noticeably vary in character and dimension with regard to the specific forms of violence—vigilantism, territorial annexation, mass shootings, and feminicide, to name a few—each offers insight into the presuppositions and conditions that make such violence(s) possible: an interstate system and the national-territorial borders and national identities it produces to obscure itself. Fanning the flames of a renewed antiimmigrant sentiment directed in large part at Mexican migrants in the United States, for example, has long been a central organizing tool of the Minutemen and other civilian patrols. It was elevated to a successful electoral campaign strategy under candidate Trump in 2015–16. Mexico figured prominently in the rhetoric of invasion and of jobs being stolen both domestically and through the exporting of industry that has characterized deindustrialization since the 1960s. The U-S///Mexico border in this regard becomes the geospatial manifestation of a binary illustrative of violent relations, that of the industrialized and the industrializing—or, put another way, the modern and the presumedly backward, traditional, or primitive. The result has been what some argue amounts to a virtual war zone on the U-S///Mexico border, which has manifested itself in actual shootings such as the McDonald’s massacre or in the low-intensity conflict of militarization, vigilantism, and feminicides. To these very visible forms of violence I add other instances that, while not as sensational, nonetheless have equally detrimental repercussions: namely, the cultural and epistemic violences that nurture and sustain the others. Epistemic and cartographic disobedience thus becomes not just an option but a necessity and duty, part of a decolonial imperative, if we are to combat the historical forces of dehistoricization so that we may seek answers outside the tired schema of national security.

Organization of the Book Given that national-territorial borders are often studied through the lens of the State and the national-territoriality they are said to contain, this study begins instead with a consideration of the ways in which civilians also maintain and reproduce the border from the bottom up. That is, how nonstate actors, civilians,

Introduction 27

and citizen patrols such as the Minutemen serve as the shock troops, past and present, that constitute the sociality and materiality of the national-territorial boundaries in places like San Ysidro and El Paso. El Paso, itself long considered the primary travel and crossing route dating back to the time of Oñate in New Spain, has since become second in primacy only to San Ysidro. Known as the “world’s busiest border crossing,” the community of San Ysidro was itself annexed to the city of San Diego in the mid-1950s, in what was publicly articulated as a dispute over water rights. This book argues that the histories and functions of these two border communities speak volumes about the prevalence of violence on the border as a manifestation of coloniality and, in turn, provide important analytical insight for the study of the gendered/racialized power dynamics that contribute to both real and symbolic violence on the border. This book is situated at the interdisciplinary crossroads of urban studies, border studies, and ethnic studies. It considers multiple forms of both direct and symbolic violence often overshadowed by attention to drug violence: the long history of frontier violence and the resurgence of vigilante-like anti-immigrant groups (ideological violence), the intersection of local annexation disputes with global capital flows (territorial violence), the 1984 McDonald’s massacre of predominantly Mexican patrons in San Ysidro (corporeal/racial violence), a subsequent fight over a memorial monument (cultural/symbolic violence), and critical responses (epistemic and cartographic disobedience) by cultural producers to both the very existence of the border and the violence it generates. In sum, this book considers the relationship between coloniality, nation-state borders, power, and violence. In chapter 1, I focus on the contemporary immigration debate and the relatively recent rise of civilian patrols operating along the U-S///Mexico border in order to understand the current context of anti-Mexican racism as a continuation of colonial violence and interrogate the shifting, gendered discourses of nation, citizenship, and belonging through which such colonial racism is articulated. First, I consider the shifting and gendered discourses of home and nation through which the boundaries of belonging are expanded and contracted in the national imaginary, both legislatively and discursively, to create changing narratives about who constitutes the nation/home, but always in relation to an imagined other. Second, through the published and public statements of civilian patrols along the border, I trace how the Minutemen and other civilian patrols have utilized discursive strategies that serve to normalize and naturalize the imagined inside of the nation, particularly as it relates to the racialized and

28 Introduction

gendered constructions of presumably fertile Indigenous Mexican migrants. I consider some of the responses by local migrant rights activists to the civilian patrols and argue that “vigilantism” is a structurally embedded form of border violence. Here, the extralegal complements state violence, and Mexican migrants become the unconscious Indigenous other targeted by historical racial/ colonial violence secularized into nation-state policies. Importantly, I reframe Wayne Cornelius’s work on the “structural embeddedness of demand for labor” and a related “ethnocultural objection” to argue that gendered discourses of home function as a “colonial/racial objection” that reproduces masculinist narratives of nation, citizenship, property, and belonging. Accordingly, I challenge the view that Latin@s, like previous generations of immigrants before them (Italians, Polish, etc.), will assimilate, for it does not concur with a nuanced consideration of the lived experiences of migrants who are, to cite Fanon, “overdetermined from without.”65 The discourses of vigilantes securing the frontiers from hostiles or runaway slaves, the borders from “illegals,” or the outer stretches of the homeland from terrorists are considered for the ways in which they construct and legitimate a colonialist and masculinist rendition of the nation, one in which civilians are willing collaborators upholding the rule of law while Mexican migrants appear as heirs to the role of the Indigenous “savages” of yesteryear. Chapter 2 focuses on the history of San Diego’s annexation of San Ysidro and other surrounding communities in the context of the historical process of barrioization, which sought to institutionalize practices of residential segregation. Although the spatial ordering of populations was present in the colonial encomienda, hacienda, and mission forms of social domination and labor exploitation, barrioization runs parallel to the development of ghettos following the nominal end of plantation slavery. Specifically, this chapter investigates the economic and political forces that led to boundary changes in San Ysidro and what is commonly referred to as South San Diego or the South Bay. Whereas scholarship on municipal annexations has focused primarily on the procedural mechanics and local dynamics that inform municipal boundary changes, chapter 2 argues that this approach is limited, as it overemphasizes the local economic and political dynamics. Instead, I argue that global capital flows and forces in border cities play a powerful role in municipal annexations, which become an important mediation between the local and global vis-à-vis the State. The annexation of communities in the South Bay also reveals an underlying racial dynamic that in this case used issues of water rights as a pretext for

Introduction 29

control over the border region. The historical experience of San Ysidro provides a framework for rethinking municipal annexations as territorial violence and as local reenactments of colonial enterprises at a metropolitan scale, and I consider the implications this framework has for ongoing debates over gentrification in border(ed) barrios. I briefly consider how the annexation informs San Ysidro’s relationship to the city of San Diego and has created a situation in which a large portion of San Diego lacks contiguity by land, resulting in significant political repercussions for San Diego’s Mexican population. The creation of a “Mexican district” has functioned as a containing mechanism vis-à-vis predominantly white communities in the northern and coastal parts of San Diego—the areas city boosters often point to when referring to San Diego as “America’s Finest City.” These northern and coastal communities represent modernity, while the darker peoples of San Diego, primarily Mexican, Black, Filipino, and Muslim, are relegated to the underside of America’s Finest City. San Diego’s Eighth District is composed of San Ysidro, the South Bay, and Barrio Logan—home to Chicano Park and the epicenter of Chican@ Movement activity in San Diego (and currently facing processes of gentrification)— along with a three-hundred-foot-wide strip of water within the Coronado Bay that was the subject of the annexation disputes of the 1950s. A major consequence has been that the Eighth District is often marginalized within citywide politics, yet subjected to additional scrutiny in times of fiscal and political crisis. The existence of a “Mexican district” thus highlights the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of Latin@s in San Ysidro and San Diego generally and brings into question the alternating displacement and respatialization of local and national concerns onto the U-S///Mexico border, often collapsed into a debate around national security that subsumes local concerns under the cloud of calls for border control. Furthermore, the marginalization of this district was also the condition of possibility for the slow police and emergency response when a gunman entered a local restaurant and began shooting one summer afternoon in 1984. Chapter 3 focuses on that instance of lethal physical violence—the July 18, 1984, massacre at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, where twenty-one people were killed and eighteen were injured—and the ensuing battle over how to remember its victims. The McDonald’s massacre is considered in the context of the economic forces that shaped the relationship between the two countries at the time, as the gunman had recently become unemployed due

30 Introduction

to deindustrialization and had moved to San Ysidro after a brief stint in Mexico, presumably “following his job” without success. Of the twenty-one victims, eighteen were Mexican, and of the eighteen wounded, fourteen were Mexican. The shooting was said to be “random,” but I argue that the shooter’s actions were a manifestation of a recurrent colonial logic in which Indian-hating on the frontier is sublated into its heir: Mexican-hating on the border. Local residents have also noted this in the popular press and in corridos (Mexican border ballads) about the massacre. Furthermore, I examine the resulting debate over a monument to be built in memory of the victims. A struggle between community members and city officials emerged soon after the massacre. At the heart of the issue were competing worldviews regarding death and its representation. The episode forced city officials to grapple with how the massacre would be inscribed in the public memory of San Ysidro. I examine these questions by interrogating the multiple interests involved, given the dynamics of power, race, place, and gender. Specifically, I analyze the clash of a predominantly Mexican community’s “cultural” (Indigenous-inflected) practices of mourning and lively remembrance with the city’s normative, secular, and civic use of public space aimed at forgetting instances of violence. In chapter 4, I interrogate the systematic violence on/of the U-S///Mexico border, with a focus on the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez. I analyze two popular accounts chronicling this violence: the corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” by Los Marineros del Norte (1999) and the novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Chicana author Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005). I place these two works in conversation with official accounts that tend to silence, deny, and obfuscate the reasons for such violence along the border. While the state discourse has been explicitly misogynist from day one, largely blaming the women for their own deaths, what might the cultural production emerging about and from Ciudad Juárez tell us about these atrocities? What does the killing, raping, and mutilating of predominantly young, brown, Indigenous and Indigenous-appearing working-class women tell us about everyday lived experiences of Mexicans along the southern portion of the U-S///Mexican border? Is it possible to hear the women themselves in such accounts? How are these experiences related to those of Mexicans facing vigilantes or neglect by local officials on the northern side of the divide? What do both tell us about the sociogeny of border violence? Lastly, in chapter 5 I consider how border residents and others have responded to, and in the process challenged, traditional articulations of identity, being, and

Introduction 31

belonging in a national body politic through different means of cultural production. The chapter examines the cultural production of three distinct musical groups: Tijuana No! (accompanied by Kid Frost), Aztlán Underground, and Los Tigres del Norte. All of these cultural producers work in different musical genres, are located in different urban spaces, and come from distinct experiences in relation to the U-S///Mexico border, yet they nonetheless evoke a similar hemispheric Indigenous consciousness. Their decolonial sonic geographies carve out a different cartography and spatiotemporal frame for thinking and being in the twenty-first century. Chapter 5 asks what it means when three musical artists speak to the same problematic, albeit from the significantly different traditions of ska/punk, rap/hip-hop, and corridos. How do the conceptual similarities in the themes informing the three artists’ songs point to deeper fundamental issues regarding Mexican@ experiences and cultural production along the ever-present U-S///Mexico border? The chapter attempts to make sense of this issue by positing the question of the border itself, and its crossing of peoples and shared communities, as a form of everyday violence. The border is interrogated as a central problematic in understanding the related themes of these different artists and other cultural workers who explore questions of border violence. After considering the various forms of violence in San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez, I conclude by addressing the broader implications emerging from the social, cultural, and political impact of this violence in border communities. I return to a consideration of the foundations, premises, and operative mechanisms of border violence as recurring manifestations of modernity/coloniality. The epistemic concealment and self-delusion itself leads to the violence of San Ysidro’s erasure from the popular imaginary and the designation of San Diego as an exception among border cities, along with the portrayal of Juárez as the worst of all border cities. Lastly, I articulate some of the theoretical and political implications that are revealed through the concrete study of raced/gendered violence in San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez and the workings of coloniality along the U-S///Mexico border. I conclude by illustrating how the U-S///Mexico border in this regard becomes the geospatial manifestation of a long history of racialized and gendered colonial violence, of the sociogeny of anti-Indianism and de-Indianization, and must be recognized as such if we are to do the work of walking toward a decolonial horizon. Decoloniality in this context must necessarily take the form of both epistemic disobedience and cartographic betrayal; it is not simply a decolonial option or road to be taken, but rather a decolonial

32 Introduction

imperative in which one must think, act, live, and love decolonially for the sake of the earth’s survival. We must break with the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality that limits our very possibilities of imagining any decolonial futures.

A Note on Terms Any book that sets out to challenge standard conventions of presumed normative concepts, identities, orthographies, calendars, cartographies, and epistemologies, starting with the three slashes in the title, is obliged to have an explanatory note on the use of terms. First, as outlined above, it is important to remind the reader of the crucial distinction between coloniality and colonialism that is central to the text, as they are not interchangeable. Coloniality as I use it here foregrounds the global, national, sociogenic, and epistemic continuities of racial/colonial logics, above and beyond the solely political, economic, social, territorial, and administrative connotations associated with classic colonialism. Second, while the term violences in plural may seem grammatically incorrect, I employ it to highlight the multiplicity of violences that cannot be encapsulated by adding a mere adjective to a presumed singular form. I do so because such a construction of a singular normative base, with added signifiers, is part of the epistemic entrapment that obfuscates more than it reveals about the underlying racial/colonial logics of diverse forms of violence in the modern/colonial world. The singular noun form suggests a certain naturalizing of what are ultimately intersubjective experiences. By abstracting in such a way, the singular form obscures the sites, logics, processes, and subjects that generate violence. In contrast, the plural form speaks to the heterogeneous forms of violence as well as to its verb function, which highlights the intersubjective nature of violence being enacted onto subjects. For the most part, I use the terms migrant and migration instead of immigrant and immigration because the latter terms normalize the existence of nationstate borders and a concern for who comes into a presumedly self-contained nation-state with historically stable national-territorial boundaries. One of the central arguments of the book hinges on this crucial yet often overlooked distinction, as the language of immigration is part and parcel of the naturalization of nation-state borders. As such, the book uses the terms migrant and migration

Introduction 33

throughout, with a few notable exceptions: sometimes immigrant and immigration are used to highlight the discourses of the right, or when citing other works that use this term or the names of official agencies, while other uses are marked as immigrant or immigration (with im italicized) so as to call attention to the rhetorical gesture being made and its mobilization, conscious or not, of a particular politics around said terms. In addition, I include variations of the terms racialized/gendered, raced/sexed, and gender/racial. While I recognize the distinctions between sex and gender, I use the above terms relatively interchangeably, depending on context and flow, although I do so following the work of María Lugones and the broader coloniality literature, where the various terms work in tandem to point to the inextricably entangled nature of race, gender, sex, and sexuality in the modern/colonial world. I generally use Mexican or Mexican@s to refer to people of all genders and gender identifications who share a history with the territory now known as Mexico, irrespective of citizenship status. I use Chican@s not as an ethnic identity but rather to refer to politically self-identified individuals or collectives, in keeping with the politics of self-naming that guided its usage in the Chican@ Movement period, and I use Chicano when referring to specific male-inflected contexts. I use Latin@s when referring to people with a shared history in Latin America, again irrespective of citizenship status or gender. My usage of the three is in keeping with the centrality of scopic regimes and the sociogenic principle inherent in modernity/coloniality. While I recognize that there is an ongoing debate in my field of Chican@ studies, as well as other fields, regarding the use of the affixes a/o, x, or @ at the end of Spanish-language words, I prefer the use of the @ for very specific reasons that rightfully deserve a monograph of their own. Nevertheless, at the risk of not doing the question justice, and as part of the decolonial imperative of humility and generosity that I outline in the conclusion, allow me to make mistakes in the following proposal of @ not just as a rupture but as a caracol zapatista, signaling another logic or way of thinking that undergirds my use of it. While the impetus for an x has emerged from a critique of the gendered (a/o) nature of the Spanish language, some feminist scholars have pointed to the difficult and painful years of work it took to include the a in the o/a affix, which now stands to be potentially invisibilized. Several Indigenous activists, elders, and thinkers have also pointed out that the affix controversies are intra-Spanish linguistic debates that have little to do with, and can further obfuscate, the work

34 Introduction

of Indigenous language and culture revitalization. Moreover, claims that the affix x is an allusion to the x in Nahuatl show a fundamental misunderstanding of the Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican gender systems. In fact, the @ is more in keeping with Indigenous approaches to gender in that it visualizes a circular spectrum wherein feminine and masculine life forces (not to be confused with biologically or socially constructed categories of gender: male and female, man and woman) coexist as energies within any given person or living being, including, for example, the four sacred elements. The spectrum here is conceived as circular, with fluid axes that speak to gender presentations, and not as a linear form with opposing poles that can be construed as reifying a gender dimorphism or binary. It is the existence of a multiplicity within a unity. The symbol @ is not just short-hand for “at,” nor is it strictly an a within an o, or an o within an a, but rather, if one explores its specific meanings and pronunciations across languages and cultures, the way in which it embodies a multiplicity in a unity becomes clear: ear, monkey tail, little duck, snail, and strudel are just a few of its many names and meanings. Just as importantly, the caracol as a form of social organization predates Spanish colonialism and the @ predates the Latin script. The latter is older than Spanish colonialism proper, for it first appeared as an Arabic marking in al-Andalus signifying a unit of weight, a part of a whole. More specifically, it is now referred to in Spanish as arroba, but this is derived from the Arabic ar-rubʿ, meaning “a quarter.” In other words, if one wants to honor and make visible the processes of dehumanization that rendered entire peoples less than whole human beings, then @ is precisely a pre-Spanish symbol that demarcates both a form of collectivity and a part of a whole, and thus one suited to convey all that has been raised as reasons to abandon the a/o affixes. Arguably, to respond to the a/o question without addressing the intra-Spanish, and therefore intracolonial, nature of the debate is itself an example of continuing to be structured by the epistemic and ontological prison of modernity/ coloniality that this book hopes to elucidate. Lastly, I reserve the term Xicano (in Nahuatl), Xicana, or Xican@ for more specific contexts where an explicit Indigenous affirmation of rootedness is at the heart or ombligo of the enunciation. It alludes to the political and Indigenist ground from which I share the words herein, taking full responsibility for any issues or further debates it may generate. As a Xicano entering this difficult but necessary conversation, I would be remiss if I did not mention, reiterate, adhere to, and respect the spirit and political underpinnings of the Chican@

Introduction 35

Movement for whom self-determination, and self-naming as its first instance, were key. From such an understanding, I am not, nor can I be, opposed to anyone choosing to adopt an -x for themselves, but I similarly would reject the imposition of an -x to name others, or a community as a whole, when they do not use that term for themselves. I offer the above as my own intervention in the aforementioned debate in hopes not of ending it, but rather of furthering it and opening new and little-considered possibilities. . . . c/s

1 At Home in the Nation On the Structural Embeddedness of Vigilantism and Colonial Racism We rededicate ourselves today . . . to the principles that made America great: the dream, the prize, the honor—American citizenship. —Good Fences Make Good Neighbors anti-immigrant rally

We are simply a big neighborhood watch group.

—Chris Simcox, Minutemen co-founder

I

I focus on the rise between 2004 and 2008 of the civilian patrols operating along the U-S///Mexico border, both in San Ysidro and beyond, in order to interrogate shifting discourses of citizenship and belonging, the persistent colonial logics of racism, and some of the mechanisms that, I argue, uphold this structurally embedded violence. I situate this chapter on the local particularities of the U-S///Mexico regions within a longuedurée analysis of the raced/gendered logics of nations and violence that Aníbal Quijano has termed the coloniality of power, as outlined in the introduction.1 I examine the physical and discursive manifestations of violence at the hands of (semi)organized groups, some including Vietnam “lifers,” who have organized themselves as civilian patrols on the U-S///Mexico border and continue in the long-standing American tradition of Indian- and Mexican-hating. This chapter seeks to understand the actions and collective subject-formation of these nonstate actors, the civilian patrols, and arguably to provide insight into the gunman responsible for the McDonald’s massacre discussed in chapter 3, by historicizing them in light of their previous incarnations associated with three distinct historical moments and conceptual frames: the frontier, the border, and globalization. I thus argue that the distinct manifestations of violence, frontier N THIS CHAPTER,

At Home in the Nation 37

vigilantism, and civilian border patrols follow an interwoven trajectory rooted in the dominant episteme of the first colonial encounter dating back to the end of the fifteenth century. In other words, recalling Fanon, the anti-Indian colonial violence exerted upon Indigenous-marked bodies that shaped the frontier has been relocated to the border (frontier’s end) in the guise of anti-“immigrant” and anti-“Latin@” sentiment. The initial colonial encounters in the Americas gave shape to the socially and discursively created categories of race as we know them today and made them the central organizing axes that ordered social relations.2 This process has been intricately gendered and tied to heteronormative conceptions of nation constituted from their inception as larger-scale replications of the ideal patriarchal family or “home.” In other words, the concepts of home and nation (e.g., homeland security) are meant to be mirror images of one another, and it is the role of Homo patriarcus (via exclusionary violence performed on racialized/gendered bodies) to ensure that such is the case. María Lugones’s analysis of the colonial/modern gender system is important; she elucidates how the male/female divide upon which the heteropatriarchal family is predicated, and subsequently institutionalized as the site for the exercise of unequally distributed power relations, is itself constructed on the premise of the simultaneous marking of racial and gender difference in bodies.3 Situated within this specific element of the coloniality of power and the modern/colonial gender system, I make three distinct but interrelated arguments about the civilian patrols historically and their resurgence in San Ysidro and the broader border region. First, I consider the shifting and gendered discourses of home and nation through which the national imaginary’s boundaries of belonging are expanded and contracted both legislatively and discursively to create changing narratives about who constitutes the nation/home, always in relation to an “other” or, as Chantal Mouffe has articulated, a self-affirming constitutive outside.4 These constitutive outsides have historically included the savage, the slave, the immigrant: those whom Gloria Anzaldúa called fronteriz@s, nepantler@s, the queer and the squint-eyed. The rich Manichean and dimorphic constructions have served to distinguish a “them” from the “we.” They have served to illuminate what Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter refers to as a process for making sense of the propter nos, the “for our sake”—that is, for the sake of the nation/ race/civilization.5 While today the “them” of the nation is frequently defined as the “terrorist,” the “them” or constitutive outside against which the border watch groups make sense of a constructed “we-ness” (as American-ness) has

38 Chapter 1

historically been the Native and the immigrant. In other words, the propter nos, the “for the sake of the nation,” is currently defined in relation to a nebulous terrorist, who along the border has become somewhat synonymous with migrants and refugees. Worse yet, in the portrayals made by some civilian patrol groups, there has been a metaphorical if not literal collapsing of the latter two into a new form of immigrant-refugee-terrorist—who even has a driver’s license, as was so vividly represented by a billboard campaign by the Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, which made targeted efforts in states across the country against providing licenses to migrants without proof of legal status (figure 2).6 Second, through the published and public statements of recent civilian patrols along the border, I trace what I argue is an ironic triangulated constitutive outside. But in this second case, it is the Minutemen and other civilian patrols that function as a distinct but related “them” or constitutive outside that serves to normalize and naturalize the imagined normative inside of the nation through the extremity of their discourses of exclusion directed at the primary constitutive outside—namely, migrants. By the imagined normative inside I mean what many observers, irrespective of partisan leanings, refer to as “middle America,” “mainstream America,” or—perhaps most importantly, as it relates to the racialized and gendered constructions of the nation—“your average everyday Joe” (whether Joe Six-Pack or Joe the Plumber). This normative inside is stylized at anti-immigrant rallies by demonstrators wearing shirts designed in San Diego that read “Here Legally” (figure 3).7 It follows that when the civilian patrols are portrayed as “vigilante” formations, as extremists, as bigots, as racists (which many of them admittedly are), a double maneuver is performed in which their “extremism” discursively constitutes them as an “outside” to the “mainstream.” The result is an effective

FIGURE 2  The

above ad was widely circulated during 2006. Similar billboards were posted in other states, including New Mexico. From the website of Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License.

At Home in the Nation 39

FIGURE 3  Popular shirt among anti-migrant crowds during 2004– 6 protests. Image taken from www .mikedesign.biz.

legitimating of a kinder, gentler racism on the “inside,” including the mainstreaming of anti-migrant politics/legislation—such as the Sensenbrenner bill (HR4437), the Secure Fence Act of 2006, and the series of anti-migrant laws passed throughout most of the 1990s in California and surfacing in various states and small towns across the United States today. Lastly, these first two interrelated arguments lead us to a third argument regarding the structural embeddedness of vigilantism and border violence. Through the work of Karl Polanyi and Mark Granovetter, and in conversation with Wayne Cornelius on the “structural embeddedness of demand for labor”— along with what he separately terms a persisting “ethnocultural objection”—I argue that gendered discourses of home and nation function to reproduce Eurocentric and heteronormative narratives of nation, property, citizenship, and belonging; I reframe Cornelius’s concept to suggest that there is a colonial/ racial objection at work. To understand what I mean by this distinction between ethnocultural and colonial/racial objection, we can recall the images of choice in Samuel Huntington’s now infamous Foreign Policy article “The Hispanic Challenge” (figure 4). Whereas ethnocultural is suggestive of a long list of literature on European immigrants who have assimilated after a few generations, which argues in particular that Latin@s, like previous generations of immigrants (Italians, Polish,

40 Chapter 1

FIGURE 4  The above image, originally by Edward Keating / New York Times Photos, is from the opening pages of Samuel Huntington’s article “The Hispanic Challenge” in Foreign Policy.

etc.), will assimilate, the data on the topic is mixed and suggests otherwise. While indeed some Latin@s assimilate, effectively being incorporated into the United States mainstream and sharing varying degrees of success, those who do so usually (though not exclusively) do it by virtue of actually having, or being perceived as having, lighter skin, and thus share in a symbolic whiteness.8 In contrast, among those portrayed by Foreign Policy we see dark-skinned, presumably fertile, young female bodies with several children in tow, invoking on the one hand an image of unassimilability, and on the other hand the image of the “Indian,” a long-familiar racial/colonial subject in the imaginary of the American hemisphere; it is these latter “Latin@s” that draw the ire of the border watch groups. Here it is useful to recall how the colonial construction of a complex racial caste system in Spanish colonial possessions, which has been effectively reduced to an amorphous “mestizo” category, translates largely for many into becoming “Latin@” in the United States despite having bodies scopically marked as Indigenous.9 In other words, the discourses of vigilantes securing the frontiers from hostiles or runaway slaves, the borders from “illegals,” or the outer stretches of homeland security (read here Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, etc.) to prevent terrorist attacks “at home” invoke familiar and recycled colonial tropes

At Home in the Nation 41

for the purpose of constructing and legitimating a white supremacist, masculinist rendition of the nation, free from “contamination” by nonwhite bodies. In each of these instances, the head of the household, imagined as a brave young man (usually white, though no longer exclusively so, hence the point about the expanding boundaries of inclusion and whiteness), protects his nation/territory just as he would his home/property (read: real estate, wife, children). This scale-jumping between discourses of home and nation, as feminist scholars such as Norma Alarcón, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Floya Anthias have shown, intimately ties together notions of nation-building and domesticity, producing myths of women as property, sovereign nations as female/home, and both as private/ domestic realms.10 The above are all imagined as internally cohesive, pure closed systems and their leaders or protectors (from threats both real and imagined) as men in the public realm of politics. The result thus structurally embeds the gendered political ordering of the modern/colonial world along the lines of nation-states, with boundaries to be protected by border (or civilian) patrols, so as to ensure that all the necessary outsides—immigrants, terrorists, other nations seen as invaders or “rapists” (of women and/or nations), and even “extremists” with a shared propter nos—stay in “their place.” In doing so, “the protectors” ensure that the insides (nations/women) remain intact, orderly, secure, sovereign, etc. While the above may sound overdeterministic and points to Emma Pérez’s cautionary note that patriarchy leaves few options, as women notably are mythically constructed as static representations to symbolize “the nation,” Zillah Eisenstein reminds us that “live women, rather than mythic ones, can always subvert this representation and the national boundaries constructed by it.”11 In other words, as the struggle over the McDonald’s memorial monument (discussed in chapter 3) shows, the homogenizing and totalizing tendencies of coloniality can be (and are) actively resisted.

Geographies of War, Then and Now In January 1969, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, wrote a short article titled “A Functional Definition of Politics,” in which he stated, “Politics is war without bloodshed. War is politics with bloodshed.”12 Echoing an earlier 1938 statement by Mao Tse-tung rather than merely inverting Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is politics by other means, Newton was advancing a distinct logic that recognized politics itself as war; this

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was to say that when it came to matters of race, a colonial war that began when Columbus set foot on the island of Hispaniola has been ongoing, making the distinction between politics and war a misnomer at best. Newton also noted the United States’ obsession with war, as exemplified by the insistence on war against everything—war on poverty, war on drugs, war on crime. This obsession, he said, was reflective of the country’s collective unconscious trying to come to grips with its self-delusion over its racial/colonial history and practices. With respect to the United States’ global “war on terror,” following the above, it is possible to argue that Newton had his finger on the pulse of the spatiotemporal workings of coloniality as a form of racial/colonial power. Nevertheless, the battleground of this “war” has taken on many fronts. While Afghanistan and Iraq have come to symbolize the landscape of this global war, the U-S///Mexico border has also been a focal point of various politicians and anti-immigrant groups who argue that the defense measures of homeland security—as part of the same war—require further militarization of the southern border. One image that was actively circulated among civilian patrol group networks, for example, is a map originally created to delineate the proposed border wall buildup in San Diego County (figure 5). The depiction, however, has been altered by one of the civilian patrol groups to include arrows signifying troop movements on a military battlefield. Yet another civilian patrol group altered an image of a map to suggest other battlefield plans for the “war on terror” on the U-S///Mexico border, in an interesting intersection with proposed legislation at the time. In that image (figure 6), the collapsing of racial/colonial politics and war is evident. It shows Osama bin Laden looking at a map, presumably of Afghanistan, but made to suggest the U-S///Mexico border; in the caption bin Laden says: “Guys, don’t worry all we have to do is get across the border. Then once [Twenty-Sixth District Congressman David] Dreier’s amnesty program kicks in we will be both US Citizens and Terrorist [sic]!!! I got it all figured out. Mexico is the key. . . .” It is worth noting that Congressman Dreier is a Republican who in 2004 ran a difficult campaign amid allegations that he supported an amnesty program. Those claims, represented by the map shown here, led Dreier to take much harsher stances on “illegal immigration,” crime, and the “war on terror” in his 2006 reelection bid. Border enforcement and immigration policy had generally stalled at that time, in part due to President George W. Bush’s conflicting sets of supporters— restrictionist, anti-migrant Republicans such as Pat Buchanan on the one hand, and neoliberal, free-trade business interests that rely on migrant labor on the

FIGURE 5  This map was circulated online with the title “Map Showing Invasion from Mexico” by anti-immigrant groups who altered it to depict troop movements from Mexico. In both this version and one focused on San Diego County, San Ysidro is notably absent, failing to register on the radar of either the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or anti-migrant groups alike. Taken from the website of American Border Patrol.

FIGURE 6  This image shows Osama bin Laden looking at a map of Afghanistan, yet the

commentary is meant to suggest that his eyes are set on the U-S///Mexico border. This is a higher-quality re-creation by the author of a meme created and circulated online by an anonymous commentator; it retains the meme’s original language.

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other. Nonetheless, stricter border enforcement measures without comprehensive immigration reform have since passed in the form of piecemeal legislation at the federal level, and deportations have been conducted at a faster pace since the election of President Barack Obama.13 Equally troubling, restrictionist laws at the state and local levels have also proliferated and intensified.14 In retrospect, however, it is clear now that the ambivalence of official policy helped give rise to the complaints by the most populist formations of anti-migrant civilian patrols at the time about what they called a porous U-S///Mexico border. As with Congressman Dreier’s shift to harsher policies from 2004 to 2006, the solidification of a push from civilian patrol groups helped to drive “the center” further to the right.15 The reemergence of such civilian patrol groups, particularly after September 11, 2001, also meant an increase in anti-migrant hostilities, and in some cases outright physical violence. However, when viewed historically, a continuum emerges: one that geographically, discursively, and corporeally follows a trajectory from early notions of “the frontier” to current images of lawlessness associated with the border in the American imaginary. It must also be acknowledged, though, that the trope of the savage or racialized undesirable has also transcended the national-territorial boundaries said to contain the nation-state (and presumably its violence) in a number of colonial expeditions informed by economic, militaristic, and other motives. This same trajectory can be noted in the discourse of the dangerous would-be terrorist suspect or constitutive outside that now informs the perpetual “war on terror.” By examining the history of frontier violence and the patrolling of the U-S///Mexico border by groups such as the Minutemen along with the post9/11 “war on terror” with its “preemptive strike” paradigm in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, this chapter asks the following questions: What, if any, are the connections between the violence of the frontier, the ongoing violence on the border, and the violence accompanying globalization, particularly in its post-9/11 manifestations? What are the foundations, premises, and operative mechanisms of such violences (frontier-border-globalization) and how are they mobilized in San Ysidro and El Paso? What connects contemporary civilian patrols to historical incarnations of vigilante formations? How have the civilian patrols and other nonstate actors facilitated a shift in the rhetoric around the issue of migration as it relates to questions of legality, property, citizenship, and the inability of the State to “control” its borders?16 Specifically, how do the patrols “jump scale,” shifting between discourses of home and nation to

At Home in the Nation 45

(re)spatialize and obscure constructions of an “immigration problem,” and therefore its root causes and the possibility of seeking fundamental justice and remedies?17 Ananya Roy’s conceptualization of “propertied citizenship” (my emphasis) is useful for understanding the resurgence of anti-migrant vigilante groups patrolling against undocumented migrants on the U-S///Mexico border.18 I draw on Mark Granovetter’s elaboration of the concept of “embeddedness” visà-vis Karl Polanyi’s “socially instituted processes,” as well as Wayne Cornelius’s usage of both in his articulation of the “structural embeddedness” of Mexican labor, to ask: Are anti-migrant vigilante groups and the concomitant violence on the border a structurally embedded feature of geopolitical boundaries?19 And, if so, what is their relationship to the State? How does their presence legitimate a gendered/racial state and the geopolitical ordering of the globe into an interstate system? While a right-wing nativist “intelligentsia” composed of figures such as Samuel Huntington, Pat Buchanan, and Victor Davis Hanson helped fuel the flames of anti-migrant sentiment at the turn of the twenty-first century, I here interrogate how the “ground troops,” or “Civilian Homeland Defense,” as one group calls itself, function to bring about a rearticulation of legality and belonging that extends earlier equations of whiteness and citizenship to reluctantly include some within the nation (“assimilated” Latin@s or Asian Americans, for example; here too lie the attempts to recruit a cadre of African Americans into several of the civilian patrols) at the expense of those deemed perpetually external to it (foreigners, migrants, terrorists). It is my contention that “fringe” groups said to exist outside the State—extralegal, extrajudicial elements such as the Minutemen, which is to say vigilante types—nonetheless function as an integral, internal mediating mechanism that allows the State to posture as neutral in the face of such blatant racism. In other words, vigilantes as fringe elements, in their extremism, are themselves a structurally embedded mechanism, a triangulated constitutive outside or an inside/outside that allows for the legitimation of a presumably moderate and neutral inside, the State, making this inside seem tolerable when it is nonetheless systemically racist; such a mechanism has arguably given rise to the Trump presidency today. At the time that the civilian patrols were most active, Democracy Now’s Juan González’s statement that “racist letters” he received made Lou Dobbs seem “positively warm and cuddly” exemplifies this point. While Lou Dobbs has largely vanished from the public eye, he nonetheless was instrumental in legitimating anti-migrant sentiment;

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Dobbs was key in ensuring that “the immigration issue” was perceived as a U-S///Mexico border–specific problem, or an anti-Mexican or anti-Latin@ problem, despite his claims to the contrary. Such is the long arc of obfuscating the racial/colonial order behind Trump’s border wall. As such, formal membership in nation-states is rearticulated by civilian patrols as propertied citizenship: membership is transformed into the embodiment of “the (white) American dream” of (home)ownership, while presumably “transient,” predominantly dark-bodied immigrants, themselves their own separate, second-rate sovereigns, become distinct nationless or “homeless” subjects in this context. They become constitutive outsides, criminalized and equated with thieves and burglars in someone else’s (American) home/nation; therefore, they are seekers of undeserved shelter and privileges at best, criminals and rapists at worst, “though some are presumably good people,” as candidate Trump declared when he first launched his 2016 presidential campaign.

Structural Embeddedness and Colonial/Racial Objection In a classic essay drawing from Karl Polanyi’s work on “socially instituted processes,” Mark Granovetter offers a critique of what he sees as oversocialized and undersocialized considerations of social structures, particularly, though not exclusively, economic structures (e.g., the market).20 Granovetter articulates how social structures are constructed from various social networks that function as structurally embedded intermediary mechanisms (between the micro and the macro) and which themselves constitute the necessary sociality of these structures even when they are articulated as purely asocial, as in the case of “the market” or “the secular bureaucratic state” as autonomous spheres.21 Wayne Cornelius (1998) draws on Granovetter to interrogate Mexican migrant labor in California and argues that it is “structurally embedded” in the economy, focusing on two issues. He points to the way in which employee social networks function to recruit new workers with little or no effort on the part of employers, and to migrant entrepreneurs’ practices of hiring from a predominantly migrant labor pool. In both cases, the demand/supply of migrant labor, Cornelius argues, remains steady and largely unaffected during fluctuations in the economy.22 While conceding that major changes in the economy have historically affected migrant labor pools, Cornelius suggests that social networks of Mexican migrant workers and their relationships with (largely) migrant employers

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dependent on such labor are “structurally embedded” and as such not dependent on the vagaries of the economy. A corollary made by Cornelius to this argument only four years later posits that there is an “ethnocultural objection” to migrants that exists and is itself not subject to shifts in “the market” but dependent on “noneconomic factors (especially ethnicity, language and culture)” (emphasis in original).23 In other words, anti-immigrant sentiment exists not just in times of economic hardship, but due to a rejection of migrants more generally. Notably, his argument regarding the persistence of an ethnocultural objection has received little attention compared to the rest of his oft-cited corpus of work. Yet it is important, I argue, for in Cornelius’s argument there is something else at play, a dynamic or logic that is itself colonial/racial (as opposed to “ethnocultural”) and also structurally and historically embedded in the United States in/through the colonial/racial social structures that preceded the formal founding of the nation. Further still, this colonial/racial objection incorporates immigrants as a constitutive outside that reinforces the sense of a socially constructed inside, an imagined “we” of the nation—what Wynter called the propter nos.24 At the same time, it depends on vigilante groups or “racial extremists” on the other end as a distinct form of constitutive outside whose (potential for) violence functions to legitimate the systemic inside/center (i.e., the State) or an internal anti-migrant sentiment of a particularly racial/colonial kind. The history of racial exclusion vis-à-vis violence and the role of the frontier as the “out there” that normalized the “here and now” of a colonial enterprise bear witness to a colonial/racial objection.25 The subsequent nation-building and “progress,” the contemporary militarization of and violence on the border, and the role of civilian patrols such as the Minutemen in maintaining a propertied sense of belonging and citizenship through discourses of nation and home further demonstrate how migrants are constituted as outside the home/nation.

Race, Nation, and Citizenship: The Western Frontier and Belonging The United States prides itself on having been built on the principles of equality, democracy, and justice, yet its trajectory has been a living experiment in ethnocentrism, slavery, land theft, violence, and racism.26 Separating themselves from a regime that did not administer their rights, the “founding fathers”—beyond

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any simple replication of power and privilege—committed atrocities against various Indigenous peoples “on the frontier” and enslaved Africans in the colonies, in acts worse than any that white American colonists ever endured at the hands of the British, as Ronald Takaki has pointed out.27 While Takaki distinguishes two socio-spatial places or sites of violence here, the two sites share points of reference as well as perpetrators of said violence. Central to that moment of “colonial independence” was a select group of people from the state militias referred to as the Minutemen, who were said to be prepared to fight for the freedom of the early colonists at a minute’s notice were the British troops to arrive. The militias were themselves composed of “free able-bodied white male citizens” who would provide for an “inherently racial . . . ‘common defence’ . . . in the context of slaveholding on the one hand and frontier settlement on the other.”28 Thus the militias, and the Minutemen in particular, alongside the founding fathers, played an important part in the establishment of the nation and the accompanying national imaginary thereafter. Upon independence from Britain, however, the colonists continued existing practices of slavery, displacement, exploitation, and imperialist expansionism. As such, “Mexican@s” in the newly established nation to the (at the time) westsouthwest, who in 1821 had also just achieved their own “colonial independence” from Spain, would also fall within the clutching grasp of a merciless westward movement. Peace, life, and human dignity, all godly attributes said to guide Protestant values, were unheard of in the wake of what was billed as “God’s will”: Manifest Destiny.29 The push westward would result in the deaths and removal to reservations of many Indigenous peoples further west; later some would be displaced to urban centers. Not long after, a war with Mexico would be triggered and the U-S census would declare the “end of the frontier” in 1891 following the massacre of hundreds of Lakota women and children at Wounded Knee.30 Frederick Jackson Turner’s proclamation of the significance of the frontier is telling: the frontier, Turner argued, offered “free land” that had once been outside the reach or control of the westward-moving “progress” embodied in Euro-American men. He further defined the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”31 The end or taming of the frontier thus signified a savage wilderness or territory coming “under control,” as Spanish and then briefly Mexican “control” of lands was seen as no control at all. The attitudes of Anglo superiority over Natives (and dark-bodied “mestiz@s” by extension) that called for the “civilizing” of the frontier eventually led to the usurpation of nearly half of Mexico’s territory at the time, turning

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many Mexicans who remained into “foreigners” overnight. The violence of the frontier, upon which the American character came to define itself, was soon complemented and replaced by violence on/across the newly demarcated border, the geopolitical boundary designating the “limit” of the “tamed” frontier.32 Many have documented the history and legacy of antagonism and violence since 1848 by “marauding Indians” and “Mexican bandits” on the one hand, and Texas Rangers, the Border Patrol, and other vigilante-like formations on the other.33 The war between the United States and Mexico and the resulting legacy of antagonism has since left generations of Mexicans in both nations resentful of the United States, yet economically dependent on it.34 Ironically, the dependence is itself a byproduct of the same U-S military, political, economic, and cultural invasions that created this resentment and perpetuate it today, most evident in the ongoing history of migration between the two nations. Historically the United States’ move to redefine the country in its national discourse as “a nation of immigrants” did not occur until after the 1960s, in response to social movements’ demands for decolonization;35 in theory, a distinction between legal and illegal migration has long been used to keep many out. This official distinction, as well as the lack thereof (in practice), has become a vital source of discrimination, particularly for those who enter, or are believed to have entered, the country from Mexico, whether “legal” or “illegal.” Viewed in light of Cornelius’s thesis of structural embeddedness, current immigration policy, despite its questionable effectiveness, ignores the vital role that foreign and trade policy play in creating the conditions abroad that inevitably force people to migrate. Rather than addressing the economic complexities that protect and serve to benefit U-S interests, the United States’ national imaginary has historically designated migrants as friends or foes according to economic necessities. In times of economic turbulence, migrants are targeted as the perpetrators of most societal ills. But as the economy flourishes, so does the relative acceptance of migrants who provide a source of cheap and exploitable labor. While some point to the historical discrimination against, for example, the Irish or the “Okies” as evidence of the overcoming of differences and eventual inclusion into the dominant society, these cases instead illuminate the reasons for rearticulating Cornelius’s “ethnocultural objection” as “colonial/racial objection.” The “ethnocultural objection” that, in Cornelius’s argument, overrides economic trends has coexisted with the need for and continued use of migrant labor and a political (racial) efficacy in maintaining such an order. So, even though some groups of people have been historically excluded only to be later included, the

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point here is that “later-included” groups that were initially excluded on the basis of ethnicity or culture (even if it was articulated as “race”) were subsequently included precisely because of “race,” or because of their racialization as part of (or into) the dominant “white” racial group, according to the intersection of coloniality and race. That is, given the way in which race operates to order social relations, the Irish, Italians, and Jews, for example, have become “white” despite ethnic differences. Meanwhile, for others (nonwhites), their rejection has been and continues to be based on “race” as marked scopically on their bodies, thereby limiting their possibilities of ever attaining any “racial inclusion.”36 Conversely, while some “ethnic” Latin@s may be integrated into dominant society, this usually occurs only to the extent that they are visually/scopically—that is, “racially”—white. Such schizophrenia in popular sentiment and policy can have devastating consequences and complicate the corresponding responses of migrant rights advocates. In the decades following World War II the United States developed another enemy; a new outside was articulated in both fascist Germany and, in a more substantial and prolonged way, the Communist USSR. The subsequent fall of the Soviet Union, which marked the official end of yet another war, the Cold War, also prompted a search for a “new” enemy/outside to rationalize a multibilliondollar budget for the defense industry. As the United States applauded the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, plans for a similar wall, the 15-foot-tall steel fence that now divides the United States and Mexico, were well under way. Given the importance (to the defense industry) of maintaining a militarized front at home—keeping an entire nation fearful of an imagined outside evil— and abroad to protect U-S investments, the “enemy” (of focus) constructed to promote the United States’ “national security” spending had become foreign “terrorists” years before the September 11, 2001, attacks. Although current national discourse is one of defending the homeland against terrorism, the stereotypical image of passionately anti-American, dark-haired, turban-wearing, bearded Middle Eastern men accelerated the targeting of communities of color and migrants in general. Despite the Timothy McVeighs, the Ted Kaczynskis, and the Nazi insignia–wearing high school kids spraying bullets on school campuses across the country, it is still the Rodney Kings, the Amadou Diallos, the ones who drive while black (or brown), and the Muslims or Arabs who “fit the description.” Accordingly, in response to the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma—a terrorist attack by a “white,” U-S-born, right-wing “extremist”— Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law the Antiterrorism

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and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, which, among its provisions, targeted both legal and illegal migrants, requiring immigration officials to detain and deport legal migrants convicted of felonies, even if they had already served time in prison for the crime.37 This law marked the beginning of the current shift to a blurring of the anti-migrant and parallel anti-terrorist discourses. The post–Cold War “enemy” has thus taken various shapes across the United States, varying geographically, both depending on and feeding off the fears of particular populations.

The Border Patrol, “Concerned Citizens,” and Terrorism While the latest “war” has manifested itself in various forms, its primary domestic battleground has become the U-S///Mexico border, where migrants have become the most visible and viable “enemies” and defense against terrorism has translated into defending the border. This fear and this nativist impulse have led to a resurgence of vigilantism and of extralegal as well as legislative or legal efforts against migrants. Despite the buildup of policing that emerged as a centerpiece of Clinton’s administration with policies such as Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, Texas (1993), and Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, California (1994), and which was exacerbated under President Bush and President Obama, anti-immigrant nativists commonly argue that the government has failed to do its job of controlling the border. According to Peter Andreas, this is a “nostalgic narrative” that imagines a border once “under control” and provides a rallying call to “regain control,” as was done with the frontier.38 While the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the one-time parent agency of the Border Patrol, has been reorganized as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), all under the new Department of Homeland Security, which has since become one of the fastest-growing federal agencies, some are still not satisfied. As the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over eighteen thousand agents (more than twice its membership numbers in 2001), the Border Patrol is, as of 2010, ironically over 52 percent Latin@. While, according to Timothy Dunn, the Cold War has shifted to a low-intensity war at the nation’s edge under the rubric of the new “war on terror,” what some nativists want is a full-scale militarization of the border.39 To date some of their wishes have been granted, as witnessed by a greater number of Border Patrol

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agents than ever before, increased use of the National Guard, and even several unmanned Predator B drones hovering above the U-S///Mexico border, yet calls to “regain” control of the border echo louder than ever, from San Ysidro and El Paso on to Washington, D.C. The Border Patrol’s growth over the years has been accompanied by “help” from several groups of “concerned citizens,” some paramilitary in orientation, who have unofficially joined in to assist in “controlling” the border. This is not new; it has been occurring in San Diego since the 1970s, yet a renewed wave began in the mid-1990s. In San Diego, as early as 1994 amidst the debate over Proposition 187—a measure that sought to deny services to any “suspected” undocumented migrants—a group calling itself the Citizen’s Patrol began illegally impersonating federal officers as its members combed San Diego’s Lindbergh Field International Airport asking Latin@s for their green cards. Reported attacks by another group, the Border Militia, on unsuspecting would-be border crossers east of San Diego also signaled that such “vigilante” efforts were on the rise.40 Chris Simcox, co-founder along with Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project, interestingly made this point: “We are three years post September 11, 2001, and still our government is more concerned with securing the borders of foreign lands than securing the borders of the United States.”41 Veiled in a newer language of compassion and citizenship, freedom and benevolence, the Minutemen have also gone to great lengths to appear mainstream, citing, for example, the likes of President John F. Kennedy on their homepage: “We need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life.”42 They additionally embrace a language of benevolence toward immigrants in their campaigns against them: “We Minutemen are not content with a solution that rewards those who capitalize on the misery of others. But the status quo is good enough for the so-called ‘human rights activists’ who are not offended when people are treated no better than chattel.”43 The group’s mission statement continues, “When Minutemen stand against the open borders coalition, we stand against systematic rape, abuse and exploitation of our fellow human beings. We bring water and food to those who are dying in the desert. We did not invite them, others did; but we will not abandon them to die as their enslavers do.”44 The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a reorganization of the initial Minuteman Project of 2005, still alludes, however, to the threat of terrorism in its rationale for policing the border, while attempting to connect itself to the Minutemen of 1775:

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Minutemen fought valiantly for liberty across New England and, together with the regular Continental Army, brought an end to British tyranny in the Colonies. . . . In recent times, the legacy of the Minutemen has been honored by

Americans who share a concern for homeland defense. . . . [S]ince the infamous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the term has also been applied to groups of volunteers that seek to protect America’s borders from unwelcome intruders.45

Although the “enemy” has been defined as “terrorists,” presumably Islamic fundamentalists in the United States’ current imaginary, nativist groups have advocated sealing the border to stop illegal migration as a way of keeping “terrorists” from coming into the country, implicitly blurring the distinction between the two, making a traditional call to arms with modified “Uncle Sam Wants You!” posters (figure 7) alongside new calls. For example, the civilian watch group California Border Watch’s web page “Starting Your Own Border Watch Group” exemplifies this trend: Starting a Border Watch unit is what every red blooded citizen and legal alien should be doing these days. The number one threat to everything you know and

love is not so much overseas anymore. It is a porous border! The enemies of our

well being [sic]. The destroyers of our children’s futures are among us, including Al Qaeda, says the rank and file Border Patrol Agents, says union leader TJ Bonner [sic]. . . . Al Qaeda is across the street planning the next slaughter of millions and

you sit on your hands and watch “I love Lucy” reruns. You need to be on the border with or without Border Watch. Form your own small or large unit and go for it.46

Making an appeal for fellow “red-blooded citizen[s]” to form their own border watch group and “go for it,” the California Border Watch makes a point of including “legal alien[s]” and jumps from “overseas” to the border to “across the street.” The nation, in their eyes, is figured here as the home where one watches I Love Lucy and a site where one must suspect one’s neighbors in the homes across the street, as they might be members of Al-Qaeda planning the next “slaughter of millions.” While one might wonder where the group gets its figures from, in a different article on their website Minuteman Tim Donnelly gives audiences a colorful idea of how CBW’s purported “slaughter of millions” might happen: “Terrorists who wish to convert by tyranny all who oppose their warped and radical version of Islam are free today to walk across the border unchecked with chemical,

FIGURE 7  Recruiting poster for the Minutemen. Variations on this image were used by Minutemen chapters across the country. From the group’s website, www.minuteman hq.com.

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biological and even nuclear materials. This is an unacceptable level of national security risk in a post-9/11 world.”47 Weapons not known to be in the arsenal of any nonstate “terrorist” group are here said to be within walking distance of U-S homes. While not everyone gets up from sitting on their hands and forms a border watch group, the efficacy of these groups lies in how they have effectively managed to shift the discourse about national security following the September 11, 2001, and subsequent attacks into a broad argument for securing the U-S///Mexico border from migrants. From their “outside” position as “vigilantes” they have facilitated a movement of the political landscape from the center further to the right, legitimating anti-migrant policy proposals. Through the opening of the discursive terrain that equates migrants with terrorists, anti-migrant violence since 9/11 has been directed not only at Muslim or Arab migrants, but also at Sikhs, Indians, and Latin@s—in all cases regardless of nationality or citizenship status—who increasingly “fit the description” and are confused for or assumed to be “terrorists.” September 11, 2001, gave rise to a new wave of migrant bashing through perpetuation of the logic of the frontier: fear of the “outside,” fear of the “other,” fear of the migrant, the “terrorist,” and any other “enemy.” The surge of vigilantism sought to tie itself to the post-9/11 discourse of security and homeland defense, yet history again shows us it is not at all new. Nor will it simply fade into the dustbin of history, for the 2016 presidential race gave it new life and the election of Donald Trump is increasingly normalizing it.

Vigilantism, San Ysidro, and the Shifting Discourse of Citizenship The rise of recent vigilante groups has occurred at the intersections of reactionary nationalist moments (and movements) whose refusal to accept the realities of an increasingly globalized world has galvanized into a populist drive against migrants. Vigilantes have a long history in both the United States and Britain, as well as several other countries, most notably as civilian groups organized to protect communities from robberies.48 What distinguishes vigilante groups in the United States is the extralegal activities they have engaged in and their specific historical and popular connection to the idea of the western frontier and accompanying notions of lawlessness, both real and imagined.49 While the frontier has been extensively written about, the dominant trope has been that of a wilderness, a territory beyond the reach or control of formal judicial and

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policing boundaries; Abrahams notes that areas “where the long arm of the law . . . is significantly diluted or resisted have a frontier quality.”50 Similarly, Johnston has argued that the frontier is comprised of territories noted for their “transitory” state, moving from an “untamed” to a “civilized” form of order and control and undergoing other forms of “social transition.”51 To such spatial definitions, Melbin has added the idea of a temporal frontier: the eventual “settling” of extended hours of the night, after the end of the settling of territorial frontiers.52 Lastly, Slotkin has theorized the frontier and the hunter-hero as mythical tropes constituted by and through violence for the purposes of a regenerative vindication of the racialized expansionism of the “pioneers.”53 Nevertheless, Abrahams points to the role vigilantes played in securing the frontier from “hostiles” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.54 Interestingly, vigilante groups also had a significant presence in the U-S Southwest in the years immediately following the 1848 acquisition of more than half of Mexico, particularly in gold rush California and Texas, arguably frontiers themselves.55 Indian-hating and the lynching of Mexican@s alike were commonplace through the 1880s. While many Minutemen identify with the above history, James Huberty additionally felt a sense of doomsday affiliation paralleling the protagonist of The Turner Diaries (1978) as he stockpiled an arsenal of weapons and food before leaving Ohio for Tijuana and then San Ysidro.56 Traditional vigilantism, however, has at times been considered “self-help criminal justice” and has largely been about maintaining certain social orders.57 The question is: Which social order and in whose interests?58 In San Diego, one of the first vigilante formations in the last couple decades can be traced to Klan Border Watch, formed by Ku Klux Klan figureheads Tom Metzger and David Duke in 1977.59 Both Metzger and Duke would eventually run for public office. Various other “Light up the Border” groups would follow the lead of Klan Border Watch and become active throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Legislatively, passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986 granted what was seen as amnesty to nearly three million undocumented migrants, but it would also trigger a backlash that would emerge by the early 1990s in forms such as California’s Proposition 187, which focused on migrants as an economic burden and would pass by a two-to-one margin. Paraded as a way to stop illegal migration, Proposition 187 would have done nothing to curb migration, but would only have increased difficulties for migrants already residing in the state by denying essential services and justifying the official labeling of all Latin@s as “suspects.” Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego was also a

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part of the backlash, signaling a shift to prevention-by-deterrence boundary and social policing in response to the new displacement of agricultural workers from Mexico following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994.60 At a “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” rally organized by a group named American Patrol in early 1997, anti-immigrant protesters, including many white senior citizens bused in from as far as Long Beach 120 miles to the north and most wearing red-white-andblue attire, placed a large Confederate flag directly on the fifteen-foot-tall steel border fence in San Ysidro; ralliers shouted at counter-demonstrators, “Go back to the stinking swamps that you came from, you stinking cockroaches,” a line now memorialized in the documentary New World Border (Peek Media, 2001). The civilian patrol efforts were initially galvanized in Arizona in 2003 by the Barnett brothers and company—a group of armed ranchers claiming to be protecting their properties from “invading hordes” of undocumented migrants by openly holding them at gunpoint—and later under the banner of the Minuteman Project, guided by the leadership of Jim Gilchrist and Chris Simcox in April 2005.61 The media-savvy Minuteman Project would draw a lot of attention and would itself be later reorganized as the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps under the direction of Simcox, following a break with Gilchrist. It helped spawn vigilante groupings of various sorts, which emerged in numerous border regions and in states far removed from the nations’ borders such as Tennessee and South Carolina.62 Minutemen chapters have also attempted to patrol the northern border with Canada, particularly in the states of Vermont, Montana, and Washington.63 However, the efforts did not prove to be as successful as they claimed on either the southern or the northern border. Among the Minuteman offshoots in California, San Diego County became a focal point of activity. Following the media-boosted relative success of the April 2005 launch of the Minuteman Project in Arizona, a group calling itself the California Minutemen would begin to patrol the border east of San Ysidro, in Campo, three months later.64 Led by Jim Chase of Oceanside, who openly advocated the carrying of guns by his volunteers, nearly forty civilian patrol members either sat on lawn chairs or roamed areas of the border in the scorching mid-July heat. On that same weekend, however, two Mexican migrants were shot in the area—one while still in Mexico, only twenty or so yards from the actual border, and the other after already having crossed at least two hundred yards into the United States.65 While authorities and the San Diego UnionTribune dismissed the shootings as the work of “bandits” in the area targeting

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would-be crossers, the shooting victims themselves would tell another story. According to their accounts, both were approached in similar ways by people they described as masked gunmen, who, once they were only a short distance away, shot and then ran off into the dark night.66 In neither case was either of the two shooting victims approached and robbed, as has occurred elsewhere on the U-S///Mexico border when “bandits” have indeed attacked migrants. For his part, Chase denied that any of his men were involved in the shootings and argued instead that his patrols were the ones that were shot at from Mexico. Sheriff ’s deputies were unable to confirm Chase’s story and found no bullet marks or casings anywhere near his encampments.67 Chase had been the subject of controversy even before his mid-July patrol in East San Diego County. Earlier disagreements between Chase and another civilian border patrol crusader, Andy Ramirez, led to a split between the two after Ramirez accused Chase of “condoning the use of snipers” against migrants.68 Chase’s choice of words in his own defense would bear an eerie resemblance to his defense following the July 16 shootings, themselves occurring almost twenty-one years to the date after the McDonald’s massacre: “I keep hearing all these things: I’m a rogue. I’m a Rambo. I want to shoot the heads off people. . . . I’m a flower child compared to Gilchrist and Simcox.”69 While Chase maintained that in Campo those patrolling the U-S///Mexico border with him had “not discharged one round yet, not even in practice,” he did state that he had come across several other people who were conducting their own patrolling of the border. “The rogue theory is absolutely true,” he added.70 Two points are worth noting here: first, the idea of “rogues” that Chase points to; and second, the way in which he tries to differentiate and distance himself from Gilchrist and Simcox. The mention of a “rogue theory” serves to highlight precisely what I have been arguing. That is, the civilian patrols, just like right-wing anti-migrant politicians, strategically point to an external referent, a constitutive outside presumably more “extreme” than themselves to legitimate their own questionable practices. In this case, Chase points to the Minuteman Project co-founders as his own constitutive outside and acknowledges that the various patrols additionally attract “nonaffiliates” or lone individuals out patrolling on their own. At the same time, however, Chase, like other civilian patrollers, refuses to take any responsibility for the violence that the patrols foster on the part of so-called “lone wolves” not within their own official volunteer ranks. Also noteworthy is the Rambo reference, which is often seen as one of the constitutive elements of the “Vietnam lifers” on the border.

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Following the split with Jim Chase and the California Minutemen, Chinobased Andy Ramirez would announce plans for a second patrol in the San Diego area, this time under the name of yet another civilian patrol organization, Friends of the Border Patrol. Ramirez was no stranger to politics, as he had twice run unsuccessfully in the mid-1990s for the California State Assembly as a Democrat. Moreover, Ramirez was also a collaborator of Ron Prince, co-author of California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, and through Friends of the Border Patrol (FBP) began eyeing a run for a federal seat. Nevertheless, the “FBP Border Watch,” as he called the patrolling action planned for mid-September 2005, was yet another example of the mixed success of the civilian border patrols, as well as that of the legal observers responding to the border watchers. While claiming that over 125 people had been trained leading up to the event, and at one time claiming as many as 2,000 supporters, “Ramirez said that the only armed participants [would] be active or retired law enforcement.”71 On the eve of the event, Ramirez further claimed that 400 supporters would be present. Friends of the Border Patrol purposefully chose the anniversary of Mexico’s colonial independence, September 16, for their rally and began with a press conference in San Ysidro, patrolling after this east of San Ysidro in Calexico.72 The group would subsequently cancel the activities planned for that weekend just hours after they were scheduled to begin, when only about 20 to 30 volunteers showed up.73 Among those that did show up were Ron Prince and Donna Tisdale, an East County resident who had been involved with civilian border patrol efforts before.74 Ramirez would later claim that the dismal showing at the San YsidroTijuana border on September 16, 2005, did not result in the cancellation of activities, but rather in their group “going underground” and continuing their patrols on privately owned land in the Boulevard area, where Tisdale owned a large ranch.75 Despite the low turnout, the American Civil Liberties Union, Border Angels, and other legal observers were out in full force to monitor any civilian patrol activity. While these observers believed that their presence and the lack of FBP volunteers had led to the cancellation of the border watch, their celebration was short-lived, as roving patrols of observers later reported that a migrant had been shot out in the Boulevard area near the Tisdale ranch. Questions surfaced over whether this was the work of Ramirez and the FBP volunteers or of “rogues” who were potentially still out patrolling. In either case, the fact remained that even if the FBP event had been cancelled, it nevertheless had created the possibility for yet another violent attack on migrants in the area.

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The weekend ended on a somber note. Observers returned home for no more than a temporary rest, since another group, the Simcox-affiliated Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, was next in line.76 Their leader Tim Donnelly had already announced another patrol, this time in Jacumba on the weekend of October 2, 2005, a date that in San Ysidro and San Diego more broadly had long been commemorated by the local Mexican community as the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Olympics. The third patrol in the San Diego area in less than four months went largely without a hitch, as civilian patrollers and observers again roamed the rugged terrain of East County.77 Meanwhile, Ramirez and his Friends of the Border Patrol sought out real estate near the border to purchase for a permanent training and patrolling encampment for border watchers.78 Amid the growing tension in the summer and fall of 2005 in San Diego, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a migrant who was trying to cross the border just east of the port of entry in San Ysidro.79 It is in this context of state-sanctioned and extralegal violence that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger welcomed the “Minutemen” border watchers to his state.

“Block by Block” and Back Again One crucial distinction between the Minuteman craze and previous vigilante groups is the Minutemen’s carefully crafted discourse, regardless of their actual activities, as noted in the documentary by the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, and Project Witness, Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border (2005). The “new” incarnations of the Minutemen have gone to great lengths to appear mainstream, citing even a decontextualized Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in their call for volunteers for a border watch operation: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”80 The language of terrorism has been paradoxically accompanied by an inclusive discourse claiming compassion for migrants and acceptance of and concern for other American “minorities.” As one speaker noted at a rally in support of a state border police: “Something has to be done about the unsecured border. . . . [T]ake back Los Angeles block by block. They’re going to run all the Americans out of there, Blacks, and whites, everybody who is not Hispanic and there are a lot of good American Hispanics who feel the same way I do.”81 The issue of belonging is thus inevitably brought back to a rearticulation of citizenship as

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ownership. Taking back Los Angeles “block by block” marks a jumping of scale from the nation to the neighborhood and back again, in which the “sanctity” of the home and its surrounding blocks must be protected at all costs by securing the U-S///Mexico border. Blacks and “American Hispanics” are included in the above equation, though somewhat reluctantly, pointing to the ambivalence the civilian patrols have toward nonwhite peoples generally. The discourse of home and of immigration as home invasion is even more evident in the following comments by Minutemen backer John Main at the same Sacramento rally in support of the California Border Police Initiative: “You keep your door locked. . . . [If ] you have a welcome mat, that means you have a right to choose who comes in and who doesn’t.”82 California Border Watch leader Britt Craig echoed the above sentiments: “It’s a matter of sovereignty. . . . If you don’t claim your right to real estate, you lose it.”83 Perhaps one of the more glaring examples of such scale-jumping and the use of gendered discourse is the formation of a group called MAIA, or Mothers Against Illegal Aliens. Their emblem reads: “Protect Our Children, Secure Our Border” (figure 8). Here the protection of the nation, its social fabric, and its borders is equated with the need to “protect our children” in a home that is imagined as under threat of invasion. While the border has become the spatial manifestation of the contest over immigration, it is the broader imagined home (i.e., the nation) that has become the axis of this debate and of increasingly violent confrontations on the border. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Sheriff Robert De La Garza of Goliad County, Texas, upon visiting a local offshoot of the Minuteman Project, was alarmed at the questions they posed him as sheriff. De La Garza recounted how a “trigger happy” crowd’s comments were dominated by attempts to find excuses and justifications for legally shooting migrants in self-defense: “They kept talking a lot about shooting illegals, and what they could and couldn’t do to make it self-defense of life or property. . . . One woman kept asking, Well, what if they reach for a rock, can we shoot them then? What if they’re on private land? Can we shoot them for trespassing?”84 Whether the woman cited above was a member of Mothers Against Illegal Aliens remains unclear, but the idea of “trespassing” into the nation/home should not. Barbara Perry points to the victimization and “revictimization” endured by migrants at the hands of both Border Patrol agents and vigilantes alike “because of their particular fears of reporting abuses by civilians and state agents.”85 It is precisely this victimization and the consequent inability to seek due remedy because of fear that cast

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FIGURE 8  Mothers Against Illegal Aliens exemplifies the slippage between woman and

nation. Emblem taken from their website, www.mothersagainstillegalaliens.org.

migrants, both “legal” and “illegal,” as always outside. Yet their position filling the labor needs of the nation maintains them physically present while socially external, a constitutive outside that reinforces the imagined white nation. In a similar light, the structural embeddedness of migrant labor, despite a racial/colonial objection, has served to normalize anti-migrant sentiment and the complementary civilian patrols that police these social boundaries throughout different historical moments. While the civilian patrol groups are occasionally discussed as spontaneous citizen formations, many of their leaders and rank-and-file members are longtime law enforcement officers themselves or have other related experience, backgrounds, or political aspirations. In his book on the original Minutemen, David Hackett Fischer states, “The muster of the Minutemen in 1775 was the product of many years of institutional development . . . it was also the result of careful planning and collective effort. By the time of the Revolution, Massachusetts had been training, drilling, and

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improving their militia for well over a hundred years.”86 Similarly, the recent Minuteman Project and its affiliated and nonaffiliated offshoots must not be understood in a vacuum. Instead, as in the case of the vigilance committees of San Francisco in the 1850s, which sought to overthrow what they saw as a corrupt government, the groups’ long-term planning and engagement with mainstream politics reveals that they are not so extreme or “outside” the mainstream, even if they are constructed as such. A nuanced look at the current “vigilante groups” and the run for office by Minutemen co-founder Jim Gilchrist, or by Friends of the Border Patrol’s Andy Ramirez in the mid-1990s, as well as Chris Simcox’s short-lived bid for Senate, smacks of some stunning parallels to the vigilance committees of the 1850s and to Metzger’s and Duke’s attempts to run for office in the 1970s and 1980s. One Minuteman, Tim Donnelly, won a seat in the California State Assembly for two terms (2010–14), ran for California governor in 2014, and is currently making a second run for Congress. In other words, they are very much a part of the political landscape even if they are not recognized as such. In fact, an October 11, 2005, letter to the editor of the Washington Post pointing out the violence the civilian patrols engaged in or triggered received an immediate response four days later from Simcox, who made an effort to establish ways in which the Minutemen’s efforts had influenced policymakers to take action, thereby attempting to foreground their sense of civic duty and a relative “inside” position. Ironically, President George W. Bush would coincide with some migrant rights advocates in calling the civilian patrols vigilantes. It was President Bush’s comments that triggered my interest in this phenomenon, as they forced me to ask: What does it mean, and what is the function of the civilian patrols, if President Bush is referring to them as vigilantes? With the citizen patrol groups still largely constructed as and considered to be extremists or outsiders, their efforts thus serve to rationalize increasingly anti-migrant policies in Congress. As Susan Mains has argued, “While immigration concerns are made more concrete by focusing on physical sites of border crossing, these sites are frequently signifiers for much broader, wide-ranging, and punitive efforts to police national identity.”87 The efforts of the Minutemen have indeed proven to construct a particular image of national identity by spatializing migration as solely a border issue, and therefore one of national security, at the expense of a larger (inter)national discussion about the root causes of migration, not only from Mexico to the United States, but from the larger Global South to the Global North. While the border has become the spatial

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manifestation of the contest over migration, it is the broader, masculinized imagined home (i.e., nation) that has underpinned this debate and the increasingly violent confrontations on the border in Texas, Arizona, and California alike. Importantly, the civilian patrols reveal how race and gender are inextricably entangled when it comes to the coloniality of the U-S///Mexico border.

Conclusion So, who were the Minutemen? Who are those engaged in the civilian patrols? For that matter, who are the members of neighborhood watch groups, such as George Zimmerman, the man who fatally shot unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012? Are they all depressed, unemployed, angry white men who see themselves as victimized by Mexican and Latin@ migrants who, they think, are taking their jobs? Would James Oliver Huberty have joined their ranks had he not been killed by a police sniper when murdering people at the local McDonald’s in San Ysidro? The answers to these questions are both yes and no, as not all are poor and unemployed. In fact, a number are either current or former military, or current or former law enforcement officers; some are retired and some are unemployed; some are professionals and some are bluecollar workers; most are male and white, but many are female and some are even Latin@s or African Americans. The relatively diverse profile (economically and occupationally speaking, though less so racially) of these civilian border patrols reveals precisely that anti-migrant sentiment or colonial/racial objection is not necessarily subject to the fluctuations of the economy and, like the demand for migrant labor, is also a violent yet structurally embedded mechanism of the interstate system mediated by the U-S///Mexico border. It is a racial/colonial objection that precedes and has outlived the civilian patrols of the mid-2000s. As such, it follows that if migrant rights advocates continue to discursively construct the racism of vigilante formations as “extremism” and “outsideness,” then they too implicitly collaborate in the legitimation of a corresponding “inside” to which the vigilante groups function as a constitutive outside; one that differs in form, yet not in substance or in logic. Instead, migrant rights advocates should proceed from the understanding that the so-called “fringe” groups are indeed structurally embedded in the logic of home/nation that informs the broader spectrum of mainstream politics—which may be Democrat, Republi-

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can, or Green, yet is always rooted in the same Western, secular, liberal epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. Ironically, many of the efforts to respond to the civilian patrols have manifested themselves in equally masculinist ways, with well-meaning migrant rights advocates yelling at the top of their lungs, challenging the Minutemen types to fistfights, or commenting on their moniker as reflective of their lack of sexual potency. This scenario raises the question, then, of how to proceed against the civilian patrols in ways that do not reproduce the same entangled dynamic of presumably strong, virile, “masculine” men on the border protecting seemingly weak and defenseless women/nations—the latter in this case embodied by some of the migrants the civilian patrols pursue. In other words, if we are to work toward “a just world” and one without borders, then we must inevitably revisit not simply the constructions of particular borders in which such debates play out, such as the U-S///Mexico border, but also the premises, the logics, and the episteme that underpin boundaries, be they national-territorial, local, or those of race and gender. How? one might ask. A few examples come to mind. First, by finding practical anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist tactics to disrupt the activities of the civilian patrols, such as the use of radios to throw off their motion- and sound-detecting systems. On a discursive level, another example is cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz’s parody of the historical amnesia evident in the question “Why do they hate us?” posed after September 11, 2001, and the response sought by images of the twin towers with the words “Never Forget” above them (figure 9). Alcaraz’s image with the U-S flag as background includes the words “Never Forget,” but the towers are replaced by two teepees: the cartoon indeed asks us not to forget, yet it forces us to expand the spatial and temporal dimensions of our historical memory. The image invokes Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s call for us to have an expanded notion of the present—not a past in the sense of a series of temporally distant events, but a “long present”—to make better sense of our social reality today, with a keen awareness of the long history that the patterns of colonial/racial objection playing out on the border and elsewhere have, as they constitute modernity/coloniality’s raced/gendered underside.88 De Sousa Santos equally calls for a constricted sense of the future, in order for everyone to (re)invest themselves in the idea that the future is now, that we must all take responsibility for our shared futures in the present. To have an understanding of a “long present” is to work against the workings of epistemicide, which normalize national-territorial boundaries and construct

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FIGURE 9  Lalo Alcaraz’s syndicated cartoon calling for an expanded notion of collective

memory following the attacks of September 11, 2011. Courtesy of Lalo Alcaraz. Image first distributed by Andrews McMeel Syndication.

the United States as a nation of immigrants by erasing the Indigenous presence on the land, similar to the erasure of different knowledge and mourning systems, or the cartographic erasure of San Ysidro from maps of San Diego even as it remains hypervisible in the contest over “illegal” immigration. To think in terms of a “long present” further requires us to decolonize our conceptions of time, which privilege the short term over a historicity and epistemology of listening that takes the time to learn meaningful lessons from the past. Moreover, to maintain a vision of a long present against the workings of coloniality is to make visible the contradictions expressed by the U-S///Mexico border, even as they manifest themselves so explicitly as to desensitize us. While residents of San Ysidro and the U-S///Mexico border have long resisted coloniality, be it in the form of state or extralegal racial violence, in the next chapter I turn to the municipal and territorial domination and subjugation of an entire community via legal and juridical means. The annexation of San Ysidro into San Diego, which was largely opposed by San Ysidro residents, became in turn a crucial factor in the police response to the McDonald’s massacre.

2 Territorial Violence and the Structural Location of Border(ed) Communities Urbanism, as a general phenomenon, should not be viewed as the history of particular cities, but as the history of the systems of cities within, between, and around which the surplus circulates. . . . [T]he history of particular cities is best understood in terms of the circulation of surplus values at a moment of history within a system of cities. —David Harvey, Social Justice and the City

Cities accumulate and retain wealth, control and power because of what flows through them, rather than what they statistically contain. —Jonathan Beaverstock et al., “World-City Network: A New Metageography?”

I

Territorial Violence and Border(ed) Communities N HIS STUDY OF EL PASO DEL NORTE, Victor Ortíz-González notably argues

that El Paso has long been a city in the service of somewhere else.1 OrtízGonzález is pointing to how cities, as historical entities, must be understood both as locations and as relational spaces of circulation. Through a focus on San Ysidro and its relative invisibility in the American popular imaginary, this chapter aims to ascertain what structural location and function the community of San Ysidro has in relation to both the city of San Diego and the U-S///Mexico border. Like El Paso, San Ysidro has been a community in the service of somewhere else, often thought of as a transitory space and not a destination in its own right. The example of San Ysidro points to the uses of municipal annexation as a form of metropolitan colonialism. Most scholars of municipal annexations focus on two axioms—namely, economic logics or explanations, and political ones—while I instead argue that the annexation of San Ysidro to the city of San Diego points to the importance of global flows/forces in determining seemingly local territorial disputes.

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Here I posit municipal annexations as lower-scale reenactments of colonial enterprises in terms of the usurping of land and its incorporation into the jurisdiction of expanding social and political boundaries, premised on notions of the annexed territories’ lack of capacity for self-governing—in other words, a reproduction of the logic of modernity/coloniality. Thinking through municipal annexations in this light, as forms of metropolitan colonialism and territorial violence, carries significant implications for both urban and national body politics, as it highlights the workings of political and economic power concentrated in the hands of local business and political elites: a microphysics of power. Lastly, I trace the inability of modern liberal discourse to reconcile the inbetween position of cities with the reverence it holds for an ideal autonomous individual and its parallel, the sovereign state. In this paradoxical configuration, referred to in law as Dillon’s Rule, which maintains that cities are “creatures of the state” even if they predate their respective “creator-state,” cities maintain a position in limbo—collective though not totally autonomous and not quite of the state though an administrative arm of its rule. This paradox, visible in the relationship between San Ysidro and San Diego, allows for a creative disjunction in which to rearticulate competing notions of citizenship and claims to the State, and in turn has impelled many to ask: How do we decolonize the city?

National Borders, City Limits, and Municipal Boundary Changes As noted in the introduction, politico-juridical demarcations of the limits of modern nation-states—“borders,” as we know them—have been extensively written about in a wide array of disciplines. Municipal boundaries also provoke a wide range of academic and practical interest, yet they are more particularly inscribed in and limited to the politics of jurisdiction. In both instances, classical notions of jurisdictional boundaries such as those of cities, counties, and other divisions (states and nations included) say that the bounded entities share commonalities of governance. In other words, who governs is determined by and limited to the agreed-upon boundaries of any given territorial entity. While some argue that international bodies—manifested in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, for example—render nation-state borders increasingly insignificant, the process of globalization has signaled not a dismissal of boundaries, but their

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simultaneous fluidity and reentrenchment. Argued another way, political and economic flows and trends said to “know no boundaries” have caused nationstates—and border cities as centers of capital and nodes on networks of flow and circulation—to become increasingly present entities where politics and the production, reproduction, management, and consumption of capital are negotiated, shifting in response to both local and global forces. Moreover, post-structuralist theorists have complicated rigidly defined politico-juridical (and monolingual intellectual) boundaries, as well as traditional notions of governance, to ask not only who governs, but how one is governed, and how fragmented notions of governance affect rights and claims vis-à-vis changing articulations of citizenship. In this context cities, municipal boundary changes, and the negotiations of resident-citizens as actors—including their respective dynamics and trajectories with structural circumstances considered—all provide insights into the shifts of capital flows and the accompanying reconfigurations of social, gendered, racial, and political landscapes. Such shifts have altered the terms of governance and resulted in scholarly interest in cities as sites of multiple and often layered forms of contestation. Central to the study of spatial contestation have been concerns over sprawl, white flight, and the relationship of (re)development and suburbs to old city centers. Scholarship has focused on citizenship and how resident-actors negotiate the limits and “freedoms” of the structural impingements on their lives as they lay claim to social, political, and discursive spaces within and beyond city boundaries. It is thus necessary to ask what forms the continuously shifting social, political, and economic landscapes have assumed in order to understand the municipal boundary changes that precipitated, facilitated, or followed them, as well as subsequent changes in resident-actors’ claims. In this spirit, here I focus on the processes and politics of municipal annexation, with attention to California vis-à-vis the nation, as it provides a backdrop to the salient themes of (re)development, white flight / suburbanization, and gentrification. I focus on San Ysidro as a case that exemplifies the nexus of local, municipal, state, national, and international interests, which often are at odds with one another. The municipal annexation of San Ysidro to the city of San Diego consequently evades established literature on annexation in two ways. First, while most annexation literature focuses on local dynamics or circumstances informing boundary changes, the case of San Ysidro points to concerns over future global capital flows across the national boundary. Secondly, the local circumstances surrounding the annexation point to colonial dynamics on a metropolitan scale that carry significant implications for racialized communities in

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annexation disputes. A consideration of the epistemological foundations of the historical legal development of cities helps situate important questions about cities and citizenship. The chapter presents a framework—drawing on ideas that range from modernist political economy and neo-Marxist theorizations of circulation and accumulation of capital to postmodern, postcolonial, and post-structuralist readings of urban geographies of power—for resignifying municipal annexations proper and for thinking about them as forms of “metropolitan colonialism,” building on Anthony King’s (1990) work on colonialism and urbanization.2 Much of the literature in border studies can be divided into two branches: traditional (political economy, sociology, political science) and metaphoric (cultural studies, literary criticism, queer theory).3 Ananya Roy (2001) and Nezar AlSayyad (2001) acknowledge the important critical work produced through the metaphoric use of multiple notions of hybridity and the border.4 However, they also point to the despatialization, and in some instances depoliticization, that occurs when concepts such as the border, third space(s), or third place(s) are used uncritically, and the problematic renderings that have at times emerged from such perspectives.5 Accordingly, my aim here is a reterritorialization of the “border” city of San Ysidro—the physical place, its residents, and their lived experience—that recognizes the importance of what flows through this location as much as what is contained by it.6 I thus consider three types of spatial (re)configuration (segregation, suburbanization, and annexation) and the case of San Ysidro, California, to argue for an understanding of municipal annexations as a continued colonial enterprise by which capital effectuates “spatial-juridical fixes” to (re)open markets and extend its reach, at multiple scales, through use of existing and/or new networks of infrastructure.7 As is the case with its “national” counterparts, metropolitan colonialism is equally a racialized/gendered process.

Producing an “Urban Crisis”: Suburbanization, Segregation, and Annexation Asserting the existence of an “anti-urban” bias among the populace of the United States despite a constant push for (re)development, Robert Beauregard argues that the advent of industrialization served as a catalyst for the first expansions of fringe communities, marking a rejection of the perceived moral decay of cities and their social problems.8 As industrialization took hold, resulting in

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predominantly poor migrants coming to the cities, the growing white middle class began moving out and forming suburbs—the first evidence of “white flight.” By 1910, with the United States well on its way to becoming industrialized, suburban communities were also making their presence felt. According to Myron Orfield, however, they received an immediate response in the form of annexation attempts by established central cities. Orfield writes that before 1900 these attempts, facilitated by “liberal annexation policies . . . allow[ed] central cities to regionalize their governments,” but that “by the turn of the century, there was growing opposition” to the annexation attempts of such communities as well.9 The new suburbs undertook what Nancy Burns calls defensive incorporations.10 They began increasing political pressure on state legislators to curtail liberal annexation laws and liberalize incorporation procedures to “protect” the newly formed communities from the older city centers they had abandoned. Whereas uncharted growth was common prior to 1900—exacerbated by industrialization—most annexations occurring from 1890 to 1920 were functions of cities working to obtain the centralized, bureaucratized form called for by modernization.11 By the 1920s, however, annexations stopped almost entirely, only to return with the sprawl that accompanied the post–World War II period. While annexations have been occurring for over a century, the most explicit use of this process has been in response to the sprawl of the postwar 1950s. Mollenkopf notes that a series of annexations were triggered as “unintended consequences” of the New Deal programs of the 1930s, the development of highways, and the growth of defense industries, which tended to be oriented toward the suburbs (facilitated by new highways).12 The federal urban development programs’ agenda, including the 1934 Housing Act, called for, among other things, increased public housing while simultaneously increasing the availability of loans to homeowners. This led to an intensification of already existing racial and economic disparities. In other words, while the “young, second-generation, urban working class who had made the New Deal possible had been swept up to war or [out to] new, often suburban, production facilities . . . Black immigrants [sic] from the South partially offset the white exodus from the central cities” but were relegated to central city housing projects.13 Later neglected by Fair Deal administrators due to the racial makeup of the new residents, these “dilapidating” housing projects were perceived and paraded by city officials as additional evidence of decline, prompting further flight to the suburbs. The demographic shifts spurred by New Deal programs, “new” defense industries, and postwar suburbanization would leave central cities with few options

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but to go after the fleeing tax base, setting the stage for a wave of annexations during the 1950s. A 1960 census data report indicated that 2,425 municipalities with a population over 2,500 experienced annexations during the period from 1950 to 1960. California, with 188 annexations, was third on the list of states with the highest number, trailing only Illinois with 190 and Texas with 215. Together, California and Texas accounted for 34.3 percent of all people incorporated into new municipalities during the decade.14 This period also marked a shift in urban growth away from the Northeast and South to cities in the Southwest. Nonetheless, by the early 1960s, predominantly white “powerful suburban ring[s]” sprouting at the fringe of “increasingly darkened” central cities also served as a symbolic “suburban noose.”15 Such a demographic layout and racialized landscape would lead to the construction of the so-called “urban crisis.” Consequently, perceiving that the limits of the civil rights movement were being reached, predominantly Black urban residents in cities across the North, South, and Midwest increasingly identified their situation as one of “internal colonialism” in which they existed under the rule of predominantly white administrative bodies, and thus they began seeking “liberation,” much to the fear of the white populace.16 Suffocation by white suburban nooses coupled with unemployment and underemployment, inadequate housing and public services, police brutality, and general political disenfranchisement led to the uprisings of the Black Power struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and once again sent white middle-class residents packing to the suburbs out of fear of “racial revolt.” Ironically, suburban residents failed to recognize their complicity in creating and perpetuating such inequalities through the consequences of white flight. Mollenkopf, building on Gary Miller, concludes that “exclusionary and discriminatory incorporation practices . . . [and] ‘municipal boundaries, increasingly served to separate races and income classes,’” leading to increased segregation over the course of the 1970s.17 In this context, already (re)segregated cities faced further tax revenue decreases due to fleeing suburban residents and increases in demand for services on the part of their poorer Black and other “minority” residents. Suburbanization, as well as the incorporation and annexation struggles that accompanied the “urban crisis,” a codification of long-standing racial strife, assumed the dominant form of growth in the 1960s and 1970s. However, annexations took a slightly different shape than those of the 1950s. Previously dominated by struggles over city revenue, taxation, services, and “decline,” annexations now were initiated in response to political concerns over increasingly Black control of cities in the

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Northeast and South, and joint Mexican and African American control of cities in the Southwest. Segregation: Race, Poverty, and/or Culture?

In his seminal text The Contested City, John Mollenkopf wrote that in the United States, “as an urban nation, urban development issues have been a primary, if not exclusive, factor in our national political development.”18 However, this national political development has always been marred by the reality (and shame/denial) of slavery, genocide, and multiple forms of (usually racialized) segregation that have informed its historically shifting geography. Racialized spatial exclusion, or segregation, is historically entangled with national (urban) development, from early Jim Crow laws designating de jure separation and spatialized containment (ghettos, barrios, reservations, etc.), characteristic of most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to current de facto segregation via the creation of fortified enclaves, gated communities, and spaces of surveillance and exclusion (not just at the border) that often function to maintain spaces of leisure.19 As Manuel Castells notes, “Segregation happens both by location in different places and by security control of certain spaces open only to the elite.”20 In relation to “new urban segregation” and the emergence of “fortified enclaves,” Teresa Caldeira similarly asserts that “yuppies and poor migrant workers depend on each other,” albeit inhabiting separate spaces.21 Although manifestations of segregation have varied over the years, suburbanization processes and municipal boundary changes have often been complicit with, facilitated, and/or benefited from such exclusions. While the body of literature addressing classical forms of segregation is extensive, the Chicago school (Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth, to name a few) outlined a model of cities organized functionally in concentric circles relative to their productive necessities and laid the foundation for theorizing about urban segregation through ecological models.22 Reaching different conclusions, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis (1945) and Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City (1968) reflect this tradition. Drake and Cayton engage the classic theme of the “dual city”—a city that includes spaces of wealth as well as others marked by poverty—to interrogate and critique the concentration of racialized poverty in the urban ghettos of Chicago.23 Banfield, on the other hand, acknowledges the segregation of ghettos, but argues that it is constituted by economic as opposed to racial factors, basing this on the

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premise that racial prejudice has ended and in its place economic matters have come to dominate issues of inequality.24 Kenneth B. Clark, Robert Blauner, and Stokely Carmichael and Charles P. Hamilton, in respective works, maintained that segregation and racialized inequality were forms of internal colonialism, arguing that black ghettos and Mexican barrios were essentially colonies within the United States, as their residents lacked any sense of political or economic control over their own lives.25 They were spaces owned by white landlords, administered by white politicians, and kept under social control by white police forces that constituted an army of occupation. The economic rationalization in Banfield—that Blacks are but the “most recent unskilled and hence relatively low-income migrant to reach the city from a backward rural area”—upholds ideological constructions of rural/urban binaries, arguing that Blacks should be seen simply as a new migrant group who with time will lift themselves up by their bootstraps and escape both poverty and, in turn, the “ghetto.”26 By rhetorically reconstructing and reframing the legacy of slavery in terms of “rural to urban migration” (with all its problematic precepts), Banfield misconstrues the extent to which segregation can be attributed to racial/colonial factors and reformulates the specific racial/colonial character of segregated urban spaces in the service of a presumed “urban crisis.” In contrast to Banfield, Loïc Wacquant (1997) problematizes the connotative effects that follow from equating the “ghetto” with Black communities by considering how language discursively functions to perpetuate the idea of an “urban/racial crisis.” Where Wacquant falls short is in elaborating the concomitant role of race in the historical development of white flight and suburbanization, given his exclusive focus on the discursive construction of the “ghetto.” Wacquant’s analysis nonetheless challenges the implied social disorganization and exoticization of the “ghetto” in the work of most social scientists writing about urban spaces characterized as ghettos.27 In doing so, he challenges us to think through and beyond ideological and discursive functions of key conceptual and theoretical devices used by social scientists that, through their premises, perpetuate myopic and, in this case, Eurocentric views of society, poverty, and border(ed) communities. Annexations: Race, Border Cities, and Global Capital Flows

It is no surprise that much of the literature on annexation has been framed around two main axioms that I distinguish as economic and political expla-

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nations: (1) (re)incorporation of important tax bases with an eye toward the renewal of “declining” city centers, and (2) white flight and suburbanization due to presumed racial/urban “crises” in cities. Both types of explanation are often posited as manifestations of growth. Those of the first order frame the resulting annexations largely in economically reductionist terms. They are, per Robert Beauregard, discursive and ideological constructions used to maintain an impetus of growth and (re)development and, implicitly, segregated spaces.28 Such economic analyses abound in literature on municipal annexations. A second tendency has been to distinguish instances where political rationales veiling racially motivated efforts to dilute the power of the electoral bodies of municipalities act as the dominant force behind annexations. Studies on Houston and San Antonio, Texas, that examine the struggles of Mexican and Black populations following the Brown v. Board (1954) decision and the “formal” end of segregation, as well as studies of Richmond, Virginia, and Birmingham, Alabama, are particularly instructive in this area, as they all were bordered communities in a sense, given explicit attempts to dilute the voting power of the Mexican and African American communities.29 It is important to note, however, the role of race and the attendant power dynamics operating in both types of explanation. Both the economic and political dynamics are manifested not just at the fringe of cities (i.e., suburbs) but also at the fringe of the nation (border cities), as sites where multiple competing interests interact with and negotiate between local needs and the demands of global market forces. While economic and political factors appear—explicitly or implicitly—in the rationales for annexation, it is my contention that in the case of San Ysidro they do so following a seemingly “irrational” and contradictory logic when weighed against other annexations. Instead, without trivializing border residents or their concerns, I argue that, given San Ysidro’s status as a border city, control over the port of entry and its related capital flows was the motivating factor in the annexation process, rather than what or who was “contained” in/by the annexed neighborhoods. The importance of looking at border cities is thus twofold. On the one hand, there exists an operative dialectic between the local dynamics of cities (residents, economy, political culture, etc.) and the circulation of capital (goods, services, and products) that flows through these crucial localities in a system of cities.30 While this is an argument that could be made for border cities and nonborder cities alike, it takes on added significance in border cities given their place relative to the circulation of capital across boundaries and the fact that these

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are among the poorest communities in the United States. On the other hand, as representative of the limit (edge, frontier, border, etc.) of the nation, border cities also serve multiple roles of ensuring security, facilitating flows of local and international capital, and negotiating human exchange. The physical site of the border and its visibility make immigration concerns “more concrete,” and as such these sites often serve as stand-ins or proxies for efforts to delineate and demarcate national identity.31 In both instances, the local/urban dynamics of border cities intersect with and are at times undermined by national interests and the social investment in a presumably united, authentic, and untainted national body politic. In other words, the border has a social function of appeasing concerns of the national body politic about the need to “secure” it in order to protect and preserve the social fabric of the nation from “the foreign” or “the other” (i.e., the closing or reentrenchment of the border), while at the same time allowing entry to a sufficient number of “foreigners” to meet production and consumption demands (its relative opening), though these people will always be marked as outsiders. San Ysidro challenges this established literature, in that its annexation allows us to reconsider the ways that municipal governance is structured at the nation’s edges and, more importantly, to situate the way in which border communities are structurally located in simultaneous relation to both their larger urban surroundings and the U-S///Mexico border.

Classification Schemes and the Contested Logics of Municipal Annexation In an oft-cited, detailed 1960 legal treatise, Frank Sengstock classifies municipal annexations according to a five-part scheme he developed based on who holds “final decision-making authority” in the process of an annexation attempt.32 Sengstock’s classification system, which is still used by most scholars and practitioners today, includes the following paraphrased categories: 1. Popular Determination: citizen control over the process (via petition or voting)

2. Municipal Determination: unilateral authority resting with the city 3. Legislative Determination: annexations by legislative act

4. Quasi-legislative (or Administrative) Determination: determined by an appointed commission

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5. Judicial Determination: city, citizen, or legislative control, with court approval33

A complementary body of literature has focused on providing empirical support for Sengstock’s classificatory scheme. For example, Thomas Dye (1964) and Raymond Wheeler (1965) analyze factors contributing to differences in annexation rates. Dye finds that “the ease or difficulty of annexation procedures . . . does not appear to be predictive of annexation activity.”34 He argues instead that “older” cities were less likely to annex than “newer” cities. “Newer cities” here implies a bias toward cities in the West. Wheeler additionally finds that annexations were less likely when the “social distance” was greater (i.e., differences in socioeconomic characteristics between the city and the territory being annexed).35 This latter issue would be a key point of contention in the annexation of San Ysidro and the South Bay to the city of San Diego, given the socioeconomic differences between the annexing and annexed areas. The political and socioeconomic realities of racialized communities exacerbate the situation. For example, the electoral power of Black, Latin@, and migrant communities has been historically eroded by numerous factors including earlier restrictions requiring all petitioners to be citizens and homeowners. Electoral disenfranchisement via felony convictions, which disproportionately affects African American and Latin@ populations, and issues of immigration status have also prevented the full representation of Black and Latin@ communities in such decision-making processes.36 Voting eligibility was also an important aspect in the case of San Diego’s annexation of the South Bay in 1957. While Nancy Burns first articulated the idea of “defensive incorporation”— that is, of unincorporated areas becoming their own cities to avoid annexation into surrounding cities—Feiock and Carr have also recently presented a complementary notion of “offensive annexation” whereby “cities aggressively annex where there are minimal constraints on incorporation to preempt future incorporation efforts” by unincorporated areas.37 As issues related to sprawl and the revitalization of central cities persist, the role of annexation will continually be debated. Pressures to empower not only those who are affected by annexation but also municipalities, so that their capacity to manage growth effectively might be enhanced, are likely to increase. Moreover, where race and lower-income residents are involved, such debates are likely to be more contested. Below are brief sketches of the arguments surrounding annexation: the “economic logics” (or rationales) and the “political logics” (or rationales) of municipal annexation.

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Economic Logics of Annexation

Proponents of annexation often argue that changes to the economy, caused first by industrialization and then the postindustrial shift to a service economy, have resulted in an increase in people of color (migrant and Native, usually poorer) moving to city centers and becoming larger percentages of their population. In response, more economically stable white residents have moved to the outlying fringes, leaving behind cities with less tax-based revenue and more expenses in the form of increasing amounts of services to their newer, poorer residents. On the other hand, sprawl entails residents moving out of city jurisdictions, thereby evading taxation, but in many instances still making use of city services. Proponents of annexations argue that annexations are needed to make unincorporated areas pay for city services they receive. In contrast, opponents have made the argument—usually framed in the discourse of overextended city services and fiscal responsibility—that cities would spread themselves too thin and not be able to provide necessary services to outlying communities. While Feiock and Carr’s notion of “offensive annexations” may shed light on such annexation attempts, offensive or preemptive annexation has not always proved fruitful, as in Detroit, where, according to Orfield, ambitious annexation campaigns were unsuccessful and only served to exacerbate existing problems.38 There is widespread agreement among scholars that Nancy Burns’s notion of “defensive incorporation” speaks to situations in which those in the outlying areas are affluent white suburbanites who oppose annexation. However, what are the dynamics when the target area is not the subject of “defensive incorporation” or is not predominantly white and middle- or upper-class? Instead, in some annexation struggles, residents of target areas have explicitly articulated their opposition to annexation as a matter of an (internal) colonial land grab.39 Economic reasons given for opposing annexation have thus ranged from defensive incorporations to simple desires for autonomy. Yet there is also the fear that despite the lowering of taxes promised by annexation proponents—often with supportive projections from city and county auditor’s office reports—taxes will nonetheless increase. In some cases, target-area residents also fear they will end up paying for services they do not receive because of the extensive territory that cities cover, making certain services unattainable to all residents within the area of the proposed boundary change. This was the case in San Diego, where some South Bay residents opposed annexation in the 1950s, fearing that their tax dollars would be used to subsidize redevelopment efforts—ongoing at the time, in order to restore the fame it once gained by hosting the World’s Fair—of

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Balboa Park near the city’s northern extremities; Balboa Park was seen as too far away for many South Bay residents to benefit from or enjoy.40 Political Logics of Annexation

Even though most academic work on municipal boundary change, aside from the classificatory debates cited above, focuses on the economic and fiscal impacts of annexations, there is also some attention to the political dynamics of municipal annexations. Much of this attention offers a critique of the dominance of economic logic and discourse surrounding annexation. Race and racially charged motivations often underpin annexations, even when these motivations are framed or disguised by seemingly benign (in most cases) economic rationales. Accordingly, a consideration of the underlying racial (and colonial) subtext in annexation discourse reveals a more complex and gloomier picture. Numerous cases in the South (most notably Richmond, Virginia) and the Southwest (Houston and San Antonio, Texas) have involved predominantly white residents, often with business ties to the area, pushing for annexation of surrounding areas that tend to be inhabited by (predominantly, if not entirely) white residents.41 In particular, efforts have been indirect if not explicit attempts to dilute the growing Black or Latin@ vote. In Richmond as well as in Birmingham, Alabama, advocates couched their support for annexation in an argument appealing to “status” among cities, pushing for a “Greater Richmond” and a “Greater Birmingham” that would otherwise be overshadowed by the growing suburbs around them.42 The numbers, however, elucidate a different picture. In Richmond, for example, where fears arose of a majority-Black city and Black control of the “capital of the Confederacy,” the annexation of neighboring Chesterfield “enabled 47,000 people (97 percent of whom were white) to become city residents and participate in the 1970 councilmanic election which was less than a year away.”43 One other case involves a town in Alabama in which the city’s white residents made use of related and rarely used deannexation procedures. While the city had previously been in the shape of a square, predominantly white residents, claiming to want an octagonal city, voted to reduce politico-juridical boundaries by deannexing portions of the city. Though they cited a preference for one geometric shape over another, the residents used municipal boundary change to deannex the outlying areas that included most of the town’s Black population (see figure 10).44 The result was to minimize the nonwhite populations within the given city limits. What was once a town with a mixed Black and white population was transformed into a predominantly white

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FIGURE 10  The above image is a sketch of the changed municipal boundaries of a town in Alabama. The outer, solid lines represent previous city limits, while the lighter lines inside represent the new city boundaries after deannexation of predominantly Black neighborhoods. The result was a reconfiguration of the town to minimize the preexisting Black population. Image created by the author.

town as Blacks were excluded from the new city boundaries. This second group of analyses reveals how arguments seeking to advance the “greatness” of a given city are usually intricately tied to their racial makeup. Municipal Annexation and Racial Contestation

Recognizing that race plays an important role in disputes over municipal annexations leads to several questions. Namely: Who supports annexation? Who opposes it and for what reasons? The several cases cited above demonstrate that white city residents seeking to increase their tax base or maintain homogeneous demographics more typically support annexations. Meanwhile, opponents often include, on the one hand, white residents of surrounding suburbs that stand to be annexed to poorer and more diverse city centers who believe their taxes will subsidize social services for the city’s poor and minority residents, and, on the

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other hand, minorities who believe their voting base will be diluted or their taxes will pay for utility services in the areas to be annexed. While Beauregard notes that economist Bennett Harrison is one of few “to resist blaming inner-city minorities for fiscal problems,” he adds that “separating race from poverty and white flight” is a difficult task, as they are discursively and historically entangled.45 “Race,” Beauregard states, was “increasingly the glue that bound together all perceived problems of the declining cities,” particularly poverty and crime.46 In other words, with the consistent exception of affluent white communities engaged in defensive incorporation—a codified racial dynamic of its own— opposition to annexation has largely stemmed from “minorities” who seek to preserve their voting strength, resist their perceived criminalization, and, in some instances, articulate their opposition to a presumed “colonial” situation.47 Andrew Austin’s analysis directly addresses the continuing significance of race when he states, “Annexation alters the composition of the city, and thus the balance of power . . . in other words, annexation allows current decisive voters to influence the identity of the decisive voter in the future by the strategic addition of new voters.”48 While annexation discourse is usually framed in economic terms, and while “political” or racial/colonial decisions often carry fiscal implications, one must be able to distinguish the economic from the economically codified, as therein lies a narrative of race and power. While it is very difficult to disentangle economic factors from political and/or racial determinants, in practice they are much simpler to distinguish if one approaches annexation by looking and thinking beyond economic factors. Austin further concludes, “The results reveal a connection between annexation and migration.” While such a connection is often tied to “migration of the poor into the cities . . . the results show that racial motivations matter.”49 His findings corroborate my claim and underscore the need for broad analyses encompassing economic and political motivations, factors, and outcomes of annexations, as they clearly affect the identity of the constitutive memberships of cities and the claims to its rights, services, and protections that follow from such assemblages.

San Ysidro: “Is That in Mexico?!” San Ysidro, site of the world’s busiest port of entry, shares a simultaneous relationship with both the U-S///Mexico border and the city of San Diego, the downtown of which is some twenty miles to the north. While San Ysidro was

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once an unincorporated neighborhood, the growth of San Diego and debates over water services led to the eventual annexation of San Ysidro and the entire South Bay area into the politico-juridical boundaries (i.e., city limits) of San Diego in 1957. What is particularly unique about the San Ysidro-San Diego relationship is that at its root—and atypical of most annexation scenarios—it involved a struggle over control of the port of entry (the border), resulting in the political maneuvering that led to the annexation. In other words, keenly attentive to global capital flows, the city of San Diego wanted to lay claim not so much to the physical territory of the South Bay and what it contained in terms of residents and resources, but to the site of the border crossing, in order to benefit from the flows through it (goods, capital, labor) and thus to cement its own status, wealth, and power as an important node in a global network of cities. San Diego was equally invested in some form of local control over who could cross into Mexico, given the hype about access to various vices south of the border. As a community abutting the U-S///Mexico border, San Ysidro is a site and place where the multiscalar interests that intersect in all cities are especially evident, often at odds with one another, and dealt with through heated processes of negotiation. One of the most visible tensions is between national efforts to police the boundary and the local needs and rights of a predominantly Mexican community that often falls within the crosshairs of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. How are issues of governance and municipal services (to name a few) accounted for given the various local and federal actors and interests involved? Most recently, the creation of a binational mall, Las Americas, has raised similar questions.50 While this border community with close cultural, economic, and often familial ties to Tijuana, Mexico, is politically and jurisdictionally a part of the city of San Diego, it has historically been neglected by San Diego historians and politicians alike.51 My goal is to offer insights about the geographical and structural location of border cities in relation to the U-S///Mexico border, as it affects the enfranchisement of local residents in a globalized economy. To understand San Ysidro, then, one must consider the city of San Diego. San Diego, Water, and Annexation

Incorporated in 1850, San Diego underwent a series of changes culminating in the current city charter, adopted in 1931, which allowed business leaders to

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make use of at-large elections to install a city manager in agreement with their agenda.52 The new and weakened city council shifted its loyalties from voters to the city establishment, effectively and intentionally disenfranchising workingclass and “minority” voters.53 As these voting blocs were shut out of the political process, the business elite came to dominate elections and city politics generally. Hampered by the Depression, only after World War II did San Diego, fueled by massive federal spending in both military and social programs, grow rapidly, bringing new taxes and new citizens to the city. Anthony Corso (1983) maintains that, much like other Sun Belt cities, San Diego implemented ambitious, unplanned annexation programs, resulting in uneven residential sprawl and the continued strength of the pro-growth business community.54 As such cities expanded through annexation, the local tax burden for city services grew apace. It is in this context that annexations of the South Bay were attempted, contested, and eventually realized. Ever since at least the 1930s, San Diego has been subject to outside forces that have provided essential services such as water, power, and transportation. In May 1944, San Diego metropolitan area voters approved by a margin of fifteen to one the creation of their own San Diego County Water District to counter the influence of Los Angeles to the north. According to its charter, the new entity had the power to annex itself to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD). By late 1944 “drought and population growth had combined to exhaust most of the city reservoirs’ reserves,” leading it to seek other alternatives.55 San Diego’s pursuit of water would continue at least through 1962, when the Metropolitan Water District released a booklet, “Water for People,” which compared Southern California’s “thirst” to that of the Romans and Babylonians and noted these civilizations’ use of infrastructural advances such as aqueducts to bring water from “great distances.”56 San Diego thus implicitly recognized itself as a node within a network of cities and acknowledged that the processes of urbanization entailed much more infrastructural planning than is generally realized.57 Herein lies the drama of history, as most sources cite the annexation dispute as a matter of the South Bay being in desperate need of water services and the larger city of San Diego as the entity that would provide the needed water. Thus, for example, San Diego historian Richard Pourade suggests that one “thirsty” municipality with its own water district was seeking annexation to a larger, presumably thirstier, municipality. This was said to be the case despite San Ysidro

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(and Oceanside to the north) having an “abundance” of the “best local water” in the county, according to the county health commissioner.58 Nonetheless, most popular accounts and the two main existing academic treatments of San Ysidro also activate the “need for water services” narrative.59 Donald Kurtz’s anthropological study assumes an eternal relationship between San Ysidro and San Diego, with annexation mentioned in passing to situate the “poverty habitat” of San Ysidro.60 Margaret Ann Baker (1980), drawing on an internal colonialism framework, suggests that San Ysidro is structurally located as a “metropolitan colony” of San Diego. While elucidating a “colonial dynamic,” however, she fails to interrogate the crucial series of boundary changes that precipitated that relationship. Instead, San Ysidro, according to Baker, “gave up its autonomous past . . . and opted to become the official conduit of human exchange between Tijuana and San Diego.”61 Baker, whose rhetoric is similar to gendered discourse on annexations as “marriages” between two cities, as was seen in the case of Los Angeles and San Pedro, suggests that San Ysidro, and the South Bay generally, threw itself into the arms of San Diego, a thirsty lover in need of quenching satisfaction.62 While water was an important long-term issue for Sun Belt cities generally, as the work of Graham and Marvin (2001) points out63 —and indeed water quality in border communities is a concern—for the city of San Diego, improved control over the border and the economic development of the harbor also factored into the equation. In both cases, the city recognized the potential significance of such sites given the nature of the circulation of capital and goods on a global scale. With the postwar return of soldiers to San Diego (historically a military town) and the economic and population boom occurring in Tijuana, new concerns were raised. City officials expressed fear that “good American boys” were being exposed to “indecency” south of the border, paralleling concerns of the San Pedro Woman’s Club about drinking and prostitution in their port city.64 As officials in San Diego debated annexation of unincorporated areas near the border, including San Ysidro, Otay, and Nestor, Congressman Bob Wilson “introduced a new measure aimed at keeping teenagers out of trouble in Mexican border towns . . . [to] make sure that American juveniles aren’t exposed to vice conditions if they cross the border into Mexico.”65 Another factor at the time was that San Diego sought to make full use of the harbor to rival San Pedro to the north and Ensenada to the south, but, according to Pourade, San Diego “had met frustrations in the matter of commercial expansion: there was only so much

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waterfront within the jurisdiction of the City,” leading to intense contestation of the remaining shoreline.66 Like Los Angeles’s preemptive creation of a harbor commission before the city had a harbor, suggestions regarding the unification of political and economic jurisdictions over Coronado Bay were ongoing, so that when some area citizens petitioned for annexation, San Diego rushed to extend its boundaries to the border.67 Other citizens, however, opposed the annexation, and by the 1960s they, along with new citizens, mainly Chican@s, would challenge the ruling coalitions; they would demand equal treatment in education, city services, jobs, and access to city decision-making, arguing that the annexation had left them in a neglected position, since the South Bay was twenty miles to the south and not contiguous by land, separated from San Diego by National City and Chula Vista.68 While San Diego claimed that it had a stake in the unincorporated lands of the South Bay because of its “purchase of the Otay River water system,” the land was not “contiguous” to city limits and so a direct land connection was needed and actively pursued.69 The claim to having a stake in the South Bay was itself dubious at best, as it was the city of Coronado across the bay and not the South Bay that was benefiting from Otay River water.70 Pourade provides the most thorough account available: “There were conflicting claims to land under the bay, [so] a compromise was reached. Coronado agreed to let San Diego have a 600-foot wide corridor in exchange for Glorietta Bay. . . . Later, San Diego surrendered half the corridor to National City, under a threat of legal action.”71 The task of establishing a direct connection to the South Bay would create many difficulties for the city of San Diego, as other legal challenges would emerge. Pourade continues: In 1956 San Diego moved to annex a large area of the South Bay but met resis-

tance from . . . Imperial Beach . . . [which] incorporated as a separate-city [sic]. San Diego tried again, with the hope of . . . reaching clear to the International Border.

Chula Vista was joined by Imperial Beach in seeking to prevent the annexation

by challenging the legality of the corridor, but the filing of suits was not sanctioned in 1958 by the State’s Attorney General, Edmund G. Brown, as required by court decision. South Bay voters [finally] approved annexation . . . on July 16, 1957.72

Just as the desire to capitalize on Coronado Bay as a “gateway” to the Pacific (and Asian markets) drove the efforts one hundred years earlier of Boundaries

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Commission surveyors, who proposed the location of the border south of “New San Diego,”73 so too did interest in expanding markets south to Tijuana guide San Ysidro’s annexation. Victor Ortíz-González’s argument that the role of border cities in systems of cities vis-à-vis an overlapping world economy is that of “a site in the function of somewhere else . . . [where] local considerations . . . are pervasively subordinated to the nonlocal” takes on added significance in San Ysidro.74 He states, “Mexico’s northern border cities have some of the highest per capita incomes in the country, while most U.S. border cities have some of the lowest in the United States.”75 Thus it follows that San Ysidro’s location in relation to San Diego, its ports, and its proximity to the U-S///Mexico border have made it, rather than the “conduit of human exchange” envisioned by Baker, a type of “dual colony,” as it holds economic, political, and structural disadvantages in relation to both the city of San Diego and the U-S///Mexico border. In a similar vein, San Ysidro’s geographical location twenty miles south of the city center, with no direct land connection to the city of San Diego, places it in an extraordinarily awkward position. While strip annexations have been prohibited in other states, most notably Texas, the three-hundred-foot-wide corridor within the Coronado Bay connecting the city of San Diego proper to San Ysidro and the rest of the South Bay is legally recognized despite numerous challenges from the surrounding incorporated cities of Chula Vista, National City, Imperial Beach, and Coronado. In contrast, when some Texas cities extended their boundaries by annexing strips as narrow as ten feet, challenges led to the prohibition in 1973 of strips less than five hundred feet, and in 1987 the minimum was increased to one thousand feet.76 Yet in California, the San Diego-South Bay and Los Angeles-San Pedro corridors remain intact despite being much smaller. Stated another way, San Ysidro is restrictively connected to the “premium” infrastructure networks (the border and the ports), yet selectively switched on and switched off to meet its function “in the service of somewhere else.” The result of the annexation was that the city of San Diego now extended clear down to the U-S///Mexico border, yet its northern part was physically separated from the South Bay region by two distinct municipalities, National City and Chula Vista. The Eighth District would not be created until 1963, and even then the city remained organized through at-large elections that prevented anyone from San Ysidro from getting elected, as officials had to draw votes from the much larger electorate in the city of San Diego to the north. This led to many years of minimal and substandard representation in the city council, with several representatives elected through the citywide elections eventually

FIGURE 11  The

above map shows the 2010 geographical-territorial limits of the city of San Diego. The numbers (1– 8) represent the eight city council districts. District 9 was created in 2012. Downtown is in the Second District, from which most of the city extends to the north and east. The Eighth District is divided in two: the northern portion lies to the immediate southeast of downtown, and the southern portion includes San Ysidro, Otay, and Nestor (the “South Bay”). They are connected by a strip of water that runs down the Coronado Bay. Map from the City of San Diego’s website.

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resigning or leaving office under a series of allegations of corruption and misuse of funds. It was not until the mid-1980s that the Chicano Federation successfully ran a campaign for district-specific elections that included a lawsuit against the citywide election system for “diluting the impact of the Chicano vote.”77 While this campaign was successful, the Eighth District remains split between the historic Chican@ barrios of Logan Heights and Sherman Heights in the north and San Ysidro and the South Bay to the south. Invisibility in “America’s Finest City”

So why annex San Ysidro? Predominantly a working-class Mexican community, San Ysidro does not adhere to either the political or economic logics of annexation examined above. Residents would not increase San Diego’s tax base, nor dilute its “darkening” voting power. Instead, they would contribute to an overall “darkening” of the city of San Diego, and arguably create a strain in terms of the need for more social services. From the perspective of San Ysidro residents, the years would pass and they would still feel that they had not received the benefits and services imagined by annexation proponents. Nor has annexation to the city of San Diego meant that the predominantly Mexican community has increased its political strength or autonomy. Instead, one of San Diego’s first actions concerning the annexed territory, performed within a year of annexation, was to deploy police officers to the border for a twenty-four-hour watch to guard against underage boys being “led to vice” in Tijuana.78 It also took nearly five years for the “first drops of City water . . . to reach San Ysidro” in 1962.79 Many in San Ysidro had voted against annexation. While the overall South Bay vote was 804 to 575, in San Ysidro the vote distribution was more evenly divided, 369 in favor and 327 against.80 The annexation was decided by the votes of fewer than 1,400 residents in an area where the population was over 30,000 people. In San Ysidro fewer than 700 people voted, only a little over 5 percent of the population, which was roughly 13,000 at the time. The bulk of voter support for annexation came from Otay and Nestor, though it still represented a relatively small percentage of the overall population. What do these numbers indicate? How has San Ysidro fared today? How are we to make sense of the annexation of a predominantly working-class and minority community? While the annexation debate most explicitly centered on water, the border was implicated from the start. As early as 1930, when word was received from Washington that San Ysidro was to be the site of “U.S. Gate No. 1,” interests

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in San Diego began to eye San Ysidro for the presumed revenue that a new customs house would bring to the area. As such, an effort to incorporate San Ysidro as its own municipality was begun by local residents in January 1932.81 The dispute over this incorporation lasted months and, despite arguments by incorporation backers that the county had no jurisdiction over the matter, as state laws governed municipal incorporation and annexation, a strong and vocal opposition from the city of San Diego persuaded the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to block the incorporation on suspect legal and jurisdictional grounds.82 Economically, the proposed incorporation could be seen as a defensive incorporation, as local residents foresaw that the city of San Diego would eventually make a move to annex the communities adjacent to the U-S///Mexico border. Though the annexation resembles Feiock and Carr’s “offensive annexation,” albeit in the context of globalization, it also serves as a signifier for the policing of perceived moral and social boundaries.83 Municipal boundaries at the nation’s fringe, in this case, not only determine who governs and who is governed in a politico-juridical sense, but more significantly, such boundaries function to police the social borders that distinguish “us” from “them” in the broader national imaginary. While San Ysidro is a predominantly Mexican community at the fringe of the United States, in the public imaginary (of San Diego and otherwise) it is a part of Mexico.84 It has been spatially racialized through both politico-juridical boundaries (those of San Diego and the United States) and socially produced boundaries. In a similar vein, El Paso too is often overshadowed by Ciudad Juárez to the south. However, instead of a “city of walls,” the dominant form that “new urban segregation” is taking, San Ysidro is a city of/between freeways.85 Both types of socially constructed borders (infrastructural and moral) have thus allowed for a containing effect on residents and the de facto erasure of San Ysidro, which has been “disappeared” in the imaginary—from the Fodor’s travel guide omitting it on its map, citing Tijuana as twenty-three miles south of San Diego, to the official City of San Diego website omitting the major annexation from its timeline—to the point that when one says one is from San Ysidro, a common response is, “Is that in Mexico?!” or, “Isn’t that in Mexico?!” And, given Mexico’s politico-structural location in the world-economy, such an association implicitly reaffirms the disappearance and hence the colonial situation of San Ysidro in relation to the city of San Diego. The current distance, alienation, and perceived lack of representation, given the layout of the Eighth City Council District illustrated above, reinforce a sense of powerlessness and invisibility for

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San Ysidro residents. Just as important, though, the annexation of San Ysidro, and the South Bay generally, points to gaps in annexation literature, which is too mechanical (i.e., procedural) and too “local” or uniscalar. It elucidates the need for a multiscalar (local, state, national, and global) analysis that pays more attention to global capital flows, as Beaverstock et al. remind us when they write that cities matter “because of what flows through them, rather than what they statistically contain.”86

Epistemological (Dis)Entanglings and the Quest for Visibility To critically understand how the history of politico-juridical boundaries intersects with competing notions of citizenship, it is helpful to consider the work of Gerald Frug on the legal construction of cities. In City Making, Frug aptly refers to a paradox in preexisting cities’ confrontation with the emergence of the modern nation-state and the subsequent need to reconcile this discrepancy to suit modernist conceptions of individuals as autonomous subjects and States as sovereign bodies.87 Frug illuminates how “the legal conception of cities for hundreds of years” understood them “as created not by state governments but by their members—created [or incorporated], in other words, to pursue the interests of the people who live within them rather than those of the state.”88 This reading of cities would, in turn, lead to fundamentally different understandings of the current notions of and debates around citizenship, which, according to James Holston, is currently understood in law as membership in a national community, although claims to/on cities are resulting in renegotiations of such legal formulations in terms akin to those of Frug’s analysis.89 Current law, however, differs significantly. Drawing from Goerke, Frug argues that “with the development of modern political thought . . . ‘[the] Sovereignty of the State and the Sovereignty of the Individual were steadily on their way towards becoming the two central axioms from which theories of social structure would proceed, and whose relationship to one another would be the focus of all theoretical controversy.’”90 In this configuration, cities exist in a liminal position as “subjugated subjects”—part ruler, part ruled—and therefore, after much wrangling, current legal doctrine, referred to commonly as Dillon’s Rule, maintains the position that cities are “creatures of the State” regardless of historical precedence (i.e., which came first, city or State?). In other words, while citizens are empowered to dictate the course of cities, such power is limited and delineated by the State.91

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This situation, accordingly, matters most for cities that antedate their respective nation-state but also holds ramifications for cities where the historically recorded “creator-state” is different from its current “creator-state” (an obvious paradox already). In a related argument, Anthony King maintains that urbanization is constituted by, and embodies, processes of modernization, modernism, and colonialism that create territorial centers for managing the extraction and consumption of surplus.92 In the United States, and in California, one must therefore consider the circumstances that led to the creation of any municipality in its own context before interrogating multiple manifestations of growth (industrialization, urbanization, and suburbanization). The legal history of cities is thus equally as complicated as the history of boundary change accompanying it. At the center of historical tensions and anxiety lies debate over reconciling the preexistence of cities with later modern nation-states, as well as concerns over governance, the disciplining of subjects, and their claims vis-à-vis the reach of the State. King further notes that the study of urbanism requires studying systems of cities connected to one another in a world-system, which thereby constitute a colonial enterprise of sorts, albeit at a different scale, paralleling the modus operandi of classic colonialism in its internal logic and ideological justification.93 Stated another way, this means that the invocation (or implying) of the doctrine of terra nullius—the ideological justification for colonization of land, resources, and subjects based upon the assumption that the land was uninhabited or, where not empty, that people could not govern themselves—has been reproduced at the scale of the urban.94 Such ideological underpinnings were at work in the case of San Ysidro, as City of San Diego officials saw themselves as more fit to govern the border region than the immediate local residents were. In a similar vein, David Harvey’s work on “accumulation by dispossession” engages such an analysis, albeit from an epistemically complicit point of departure—a neo-Marxist yet developmentalist articulation of ongoing forms of “primitive” accumulation—that fails to problematize the “primitive” precept, arbitrarily rearticulating it as a matter of generalized dispossession (i.e., nonracial).95 In The New Imperialism, Harvey suggests the existence of a seemingly timeless dynamic of dispossession that is not properly historicized and therefore loses sight of the racial/colonial at work. In actuality, it follows that boundary changes in the “world urban system,” as in the modern/colonial world, not only set the context in which political subjects act, but also reasonably include elements and dynamics akin to colonial expansion and racial subjugation.

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In this regard, the territorial entity known as California, first inhabited by Karuk and Tolowa in the north and Kumeyaay bands near the present-day border with Mexico, with many other Indigenous nations in between, was colonized by a series of Spanish settlements, usually built around Catholic missions or military presidios. These pre-urban settlements, epistemologically entangled with the modernizing impetus of urbanization in the longue durée, included charters propagated by the Spanish Crown and later recognized by Mexico upon its “colonial independence.”96 These same charters were later recognized with relative ease by the next politico-juridical entities to take possession of said territories, Mexico (1821–48) and the United States (1848–present), as the guiding episteme has been one and the same. Therefore, after 1848, when the United States took possession of the present-day Southwest, while some previous territorial units were reorganized, they were not dissolved. Instead, they entered the union (or were “created,” per Dillon’s Rule) through newly formed juridical entities. California was admitted into the United States as a state in 1850. Similarly, the city of San Diego, while first established in its present location by the Spanish in 1602, was formally “incorporated” under a new system of governance in 1850: nearly 250 years old at the time, yet a “creature of a state” only 75 years in the making.97 So while San Ysidro was founded in the 1880s, or 1909 in the Little Landers narrative, according to Dillon’s Rule its history becomes entangled with and distorted by its multiscalar place as a particular type of node, a “border” city, within a global network of cities bound together by the flows of capital and the infrastructure that sustains such flows (in all its forms), which in turn constitute it as the “busiest” port of entry in the world despite its invisibility vis-à-vis the city of San Diego. The inability to reconcile the paradox embedded in Dillon’s Rule has thus led to the etching away of classical notions of citizenship that equate individual with nation, in turn leading to new articulations of localized or contingent forms of citizenship based upon petitioning at the local as well as national scale. In other words, despite the promises that accompanied annexation, San Ysidro has had little to show for it in terms of gains, remaining largely neglected by the city of San Diego. Its location in the Eighth District is at once overlooked in relation to Logan Heights and Sherman Heights and ignored, as all infrastructure in the border area is built with an orientation toward San Diego proper; that is, in the service of somewhere else. The infrastructure is geared toward commuters from San Diego to Tijuana or vice versa, those who travel through San Ysidro without stopping in San Ysidro. In the context of development projects such as

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the binational mall, arrangements such as community-benefits agreements that cut across the U-S///Mexico border have created spaces in which local residents, despite formal (national) citizenship status, negotiate grievances and open new possibilities of making a claim upon the local governing bodies. Yet the success of efforts to petition for shared infrastructure and representation that addresses local needs remains to be seen. In San Ysidro, reconstituted notions of citizenship have begun to empower residents in their concerns about development and displacement, but this comes only fifty years after the original annexation.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to point out the limits of procedural and local considerations of municipal annexations. Instead, historical changes in the politics and processes of municipal boundary change reveal that the dominant logics of municipal annexation—economic and political determinants—do not fully account for all the considerations and negotiations that go into municipal annexation disputes. The 1957 annexation of San Ysidro, California, by the city of San Diego challenges the established wisdom on municipal annexations for its myopic focus on procedural mechanics and on the local dynamics informing municipal boundary changes. Arguing that such literature is “too local,” I have suggested that attention must instead be paid to global capital flows and forces that circulate through border communities, which are just as pertinent in assessing the motivations that drive annexations. San Ysidro and its subsequent structural location vis-à-vis San Diego, like El Paso vis-à-vis Ciudad Juárez, confirms the need for such an approach. Through a long-historical, multiscalar lens and a legal history of cities, this chapter has also provided a framework for the rethinking of municipal annexations as territorial violence and as reenactments of colonial enterprises on a metropolitan scale. It is through this rethinking of the ongoing racial and colonial dynamics of municipal/urban politics that the implications of such a framework become evident, as we will see in the response of San Diego city officials to a massacre at a McDonald’s in the predominantly Mexican community of San Ysidro in 1984.

3 The 1984 McDonald’s Massacre and the Politics of Monuments, Memory, and Militarization “A man’s memories only have worth if they are lifeless. Buildings. Monuments. Statues.” She cuts a flower and streaks the pollen on my cheek. “This is a woman’s remembrance, the chain of never ending life.” —Rosa Martha Villarreal, Doctor Magdalena

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky1

O

an armed gunman stormed into a McDonald’s fastfood restaurant in the U-S///Mexico border community of San Ysidro and unleashed a flurry of bullets on the unsuspecting, predominantly Mexican patrons and employees. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, San Ysidro’s structural and geographical location in relation to the city of San Diego would prove to have devastating consequences that summer day, as it exacerbated the extent of the violent carnage during the shooting, prolonging the time it took for the police to respond. In the massacre’s aftermath, local residents were pitted against (physically and socially) distant city officials who, in these residents’ eyes, seemed indifferent and hostile to their desire for a community park to remember the victims. Since San Diego proper is located nearly eighteen miles to the north of San Ysidro, it took police an excruciating thirty-five minutes to get to the scene, extending the time that the gunman had to wreak havoc at the shooting site. A total of seventy-seven minutes would pass from the moment the police were first alerted until the time the gunman’s rampage was brought to a halt. Moreover, after the tragedy, as the community of San Ysidro struggled to heal and recover from the traumatic ordeal, an ensuing conflict N JULY 18, 1984,

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would emerge over what to do with the site of the massacre and how best to memorialize the victims of that tragic July afternoon.

If I balance my vertically challenged body, tiptoeing on the “border” that reinforces the steel-bar fence I am grasping to keep my weight from pulling me back off the concrete rim, then maybe I can catch a clear glimpse of the entire monument, free of its barred confinement. However, as I stand a short, husky five feet five, this becomes a difficult maneuver. Instead, I must settle for seeing it from a few feet away, where its caged existence is difficult to ignore. Or worse yet, if I am to get a complete, barless view of the memorial, I must press my face up against the bars—inverting the perspective, as if I were the one in prison. Sentenced to lockdown, the McDonald’s memorial monument has been mired in controversy since its inception, perhaps even since the day of the massacre itself, as local working-class Mexican@ community members struggled against predominantly Anglo and middle-class Mexican American city officials over its function and the acceptable forms of remembrance of the massacre victims it is meant to commemorate. At the heart of the issue lay this question: What is deemed an appropriate way of mourning and remembering our dead? The monument also symbolically stands as a representation of the selfdevouring undercurrent of mass consumption that American fast-food culture and society, as byproducts of coloniality, have swept themselves into, not without taking many in their wake. As with other public memorials erected at the sites of tragedies, each of the twenty-one stone pillars is in honor of one of the victims who perished during the heinous shooting. But, seeing this monument housed behind a steel cage reminiscent of prison bars, with the U-S///Mexico border wall visible in the distance, we must ask: What is the purpose of a caged memorial? In what way is the public memory of the massacre inscribed? What is it that is to be remembered, forgotten, quarantined, or contained via the metal cage? What larger power struggles might the battle between community members and city officials over the monument reveal? Lastly, what happens when different, and in fact competing, worldviews regarding death and its representation are at odds over the way a community’s history is remembered by different parties involved? These questions are the focus of this chapter, and I examine them by interrogating the massacre itself, the significance of its

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FIGURE 12  Monument to the victims of the 1984 McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, in

a photograph taken in 2000. The site of the McDonald’s is now a satellite campus of the nearby Southwestern College based in eastern Chula Vista. Photograph by the author.

occurrence at a McDonald’s only blocks from the U-S///Mexico border wall in San Ysidro, and the competing interests involved in the memorial monument dispute, while giving consideration to the dynamics of power, race, place, and gender in the ordeal. I engage in this discussion in the context of the subalternization of culture, knowledges, and “ways of knowing” that has wreaked violence upon border(ed) communities in and through the modern/colonial world. One of the constitutive elements of the coloniality of knowledge production has been its ability to relegate distinct local knowledges, histories, and practices to the realm of “myth,” culture, folklore, and tradition, understood negatively within a hierarchy of knowing that legitimates particular (Western) practices and histories as normative and universal.2 That is, Western ways of knowledge—in reality one particular local history among many—have been extended in a way that suggests their inevitability and supremacy. Specifically then, while the last chapter addressed the annexation of San Ysidro to the city of San Diego, here I am concerned with the 1984 McDonald’s massacre and the clashing of a Mexican community’s “cultural” practices of Indigenous-inflected lively

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remembrance and mourning with the city’s normative secular and civic use of public space, guided by Western patriarchal logics that understand the act of memorializing the dead, and memory itself, as “lifeless,” to be preserved and assigned value through buildings, monuments, and statues (as Rosa Martha Villarreal points out in the epigraph to this chapter). These differences in how we memorialize victims of a massacre became a heated point of contention following the shooting. In a similar line of critique, Chicana feminist theorist Norma Alarcón argues, “The juridical text is generated by the ruling elite, who have access to the state apparatus through which the political economy is shaped and jurisprudence is engendered, whereas representations in the cultural text may include representations generated by herself [Chicana, raced/sexed woman].”3 I thus juxtapose the caged memorial monument with another type of concrete building becoming increasingly salient throughout society, and arguably an unconscious monument to modernity/coloniality’s self-delusion: prisons. According to Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), it is through storytelling that Native Americans construct their reality or understanding of the world. She writes, “They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories . . . because we would be defenseless then.”4 Similarly, I have argued elsewhere that for some fronteriz@s, it is through corridos (discussed at length in chapter 4) that knowledge based on stories and narratives is constructed and understood.5 Not surprisingly, a few corridos have been written about the McDonald’s massacre, including one by José “Pepe” Villarino and Oscar Galván that I engage with below.6 It is within those hidden, subjugated, or unheard stories that (de)colonial subjects possess their own knowledge, a knowledge omitted from the dominant national narrative as creation story. The latter story is one driven by the illusion of happiness and the myth of violence (or the lack thereof ) that dominates the master narrative of this society—what people often take for granted or unquestioningly accept as “just the way things are.” This chapter thus posits a series of overlapping and competing stories, testimonies, and cultural texts as forms of decolonial knowledge production, as a way of pointing to what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “the objectivity of the subjective experience of relations of domination.”7 In what follows, several competing stories, knowledges, and claims of truth are interwoven with empirical research to bring to light a narrative about McDonald’s, the 1984 massacre in San Ysidro, its causes and representation, and the memorial monument.

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“¡Jesús Está en Tijuana!” / “Jesus Is in Tijuana!” In the now-classic comedy Born in East L.A. (1987), the film’s protagonist Rudy, played by Cheech Marin, is a United States citizen inadvertently caught in a raid on a Los Angeles factory by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents while attempting to pick up his cousin Javier, played by Paul Rodriguez. (What was then the INS has now been reorganized into USCIS and ICE— U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—both within the Department of Homeland Security.) Rudy is subsequently deported despite his repeated protests to the INS agents that he is a U-S citizen, a Chicano who was born in East Los Angeles and doesn’t even speak much Spanish (although he knows some German from having served time in the United States military). His protests are to no avail and Rudy ends up in Tijuana. Meanwhile, having recently crossed the U-S///Mexico border without proper documentation, his cousin Javier, lost, arrives at the factory late, avoiding the raid. With an address in his hand, he eventually ends up in Rudy’s home, as Rudy struggles to get back across the border. In perhaps one of the movie’s most comical scenes, Rudy attempts to make a collect call for help from a Tijuana pay phone, but Javier mistakes the voice on the answering machine, hidden in a niche behind a hologram portrait of Jesus Christ, for a message from the Lord declaring, “Javier, I am in Tijuana!” A confused Javier, clearly feeling tenuous in his new surroundings, proceeds to make the gesture of a cross over his head and chest in acknowledgment of Jesus’s “apparition” to him, while in Tijuana Rudy is arrested for beating the phone in frustration—as he too is lost in his new surroundings—and taken to a questionable jailhouse. The deportation and answering machine scenes are later followed by another phone call, this time from Rudy’s neighbor asking for some beer, and Javier proceeding to bring a “tall boy” of Coors raised above his head in offering to the portrait of Jesus, which from Javier’s angle seems to wink back at him in appreciation. The scenes are meant to contain a metaphor hidden in plain sight for how the U-S///Mexico border entraps documented and “undocumented” brown bodies alike. Much like Frantz Fanon’s articulation of being “overdetermined from without,” Rudy’s brown body and mere presence at the local factory mark him as a likely “undocumented” migrant, a fact that outweighs his clearly spoken English, his military service, and his vociferous insistence that the INS agents are making a big mistake. After he is deported, Rudy’s arrest highlights another contradictory reality of the United States’ claim of modernity

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in the form of heightened social progress, alluding to the U-S prison population, which was experiencing unprecedented growth in the 1980s, the period when the film was being made on location in Los Angeles, Tijuana, and San Ysidro (the latter roughly a year after the McDonald’s massacre). If the epigraph by Dostoyevsky that opened this chapter is correct, if “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” then what can be gleaned from the rising incarceration rates in the United States and the drastic overrepresentation of Blacks and Latin@s in prison during a time of deindustrialization, the same phenomenon that led to Huberty relocating to San Ysidro? Is it that Blacks and Latin@s are prone to criminality? Or might it say something about the degree of “civilization” of a society still marred by racial/colonial logics that increase the likelihood of certain bodies to be incarcerated and/or subject to “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” even as some of its colonial subjects pay reverence to the delusion?8 In any country, prison is presumably where society sends its failures. The question that begs asking is: What do you do when an entire country, or civilization for that matter—a society as defined in the modern/colonial imaginary that equates nation with geographic-territorial boundaries—is itself failing? Aimé Césaire warned us shortly after the horrors of World War II that Western civilization is decadent and, in turn, indefensible. Notably, on April 15, 2000, the United States’ prison population surpassed the two-million mark, by far the highest of any nation. This transpired as various McDonald’s—perhaps the most commonplace symbol of American culture other than Nike—were erected in countries around the world, considered by many a sign of modernity and progress for those nations, given their presumed need to emulate the West once Fukuyama had declared the “end of history.”9 The American incarceration rate, given the epigraph above, would imply that we live in a decadent society. According to the Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), in April 2000, despite being home to only 5 percent of the people in the world, the U-S contained 25 percent of the world’s prison population.10 The figure has now surpassed the 2.3-million mark. The drastically high numbers would appear to paint the image of a downtrodden nation in ruin and collapse, yet the United States prides itself as a bastion of democracy and freedom, a Picasso of the modern world. Perhaps the most adequate characterization, however, is that of a moving hologram portrait— much like a kitsch image of Jesus Christ with eyes that follow yours, as they did Javier’s—that provides different images to the viewer, varying with the angle

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or (social and racialized/gendered) position in the modern/colonial world from which one observes it. For a privileged few who live without many cares in the world, Jesus may appear to have a serene face that transmits a sense of tranquility, as if they can rest assured that their prayers have been surely answered—the comfort of their middle- to upper-class home and lifestyle serving as testament to their personal connection with a higher power. However, for most, such as Javier, Rudy, or countless others whose daily life is a constant battle to make ends meet and avoid being deported or killed by police or civilian shooters alike, the image provided for their viewing (or consenting) pleasure is one of a Jesus agonizing in pain, as if wanting to scream but having to hold it in, a mood often reflective of their own as they struggle to stay afloat. In other words, it is an image of a hegemonic colonial imaginary, an internalization of the contradictions between the rhetoric of modernity, state and corporate interests, and the increasingly global sociopolitical reality—shielded, of course, by a veneer of Golden Arches and reminders to “Just do it!” As such, the angle I take, or rather where Jesus’s eyes and my own meet, given my social, political, economic, and historical location within the modern/colonial world and the European/non-European racial/ethnic hierarchy, is one of a neck-straining eighty-degree upward gaze. In other words, it is a perspective, as Mariano Azuela so eloquently articulated, of los de abajo, looking up at the coloniality of power and the ensuing privileged interests and structures that inform the everyday lived experience along the U-S///Mexico border.11 As I grew up in San Ysidro, within a mile of the U-S///Mexico border, my lived experience attests to Gloria Anzaldúa’s characterization of la frontera as an open wound, “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.”12 Symbolically submerged within the literally bloodstained landscape of the open wound’s hemorrhaging, the predominantly Mexican community I call home is no stranger to the rampant violence of the U-S///Mexico border. This violence in a myriad of forms is currently being intensified via the increasing militarization of the same border. In relation to the focus of this chapter—the events that took place at the San Ysidro McDonald’s on July 18, 1984—what follows is a composite of views on the role of McDonald’s in the modern/colonial world and why the massacre’s occurrence there holds all the more significance when we consider the logic of coloniality. It is then followed by a testimonio or personal narrative

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account that informs this conversation, as the gruesome killings transpired a mere two blocks from my childhood home at the time.

The Politics and Symbolic Economy of McDonald’s in Modernity/Coloniality In the American imagination’s creation story, the three fences of Operation Gatekeeper’s “triple fence strategy” along the San Diego-Tijuana border become white picket fences, safeguarding self-deluding, sheltered minds from the punctum sight of the violent reality that created, shaped, and continues to reinforce the existence of this nation. The customary three meals a day, Happy Meal included, make it easy to forget, or refuse to remember, that countless others do not eat three meals, two meals, or much less one “happy” meal on any given day. Yet McDonald’s, one of the story’s many protagonists (or antagonists, depending on how your eyes are set on Jesús—to kitsch or not to kitsch?), continues to open franchises in nation after “industrializing” nation. At one point, a new McDonald’s was opening somewhere in the world roughly every three hours.13 Rather than arriving at a myopic assumption that the McDonald’s phenomenon is a positive turn toward a united global community, the completion of the unfinished project of Modernity, as even some Eurocentric leftist thinkers have called for, one can derive from Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid’s “On Seeing England for the First Time” that the proliferation of McDonald’s is an act of colonization, dominance, and death: I did not know then that this statement, “Draw a map of England,” was something far worse than a declaration of war, for in fact a flat-out declaration of war would have put me on alert, and again in fact, there was no need for war— I had

long ago been conquered. I did not know that this statement was part of a pro-

cess that would result in my erasure, not my physical erasure, but my erasure all the same. . . . I did not know very much of anything then— certainly not what a blessing it was that I was unable to draw a map of England correctly.14

McDonald’s, with its “globally recognized” golden arches, is ostensibly part of a process of westernization (or Westoxification, to invoke Ali Shariati) that, in “supersizing” its operations across national-territorial and cultural boundaries, so to speak, is bringing about the cultural death of entire societies. In short,

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whether directly or indirectly, consciously or not, the results are an assault on distinct cultures and cuisines and their supplantation by a new modern westernized story that has conceded its sense of self to a civilization of death. One striking example in Mexico is the traditional breaded steak or milanesa, which has now been displaced by the new McMilanesa, ultimately nothing more than a disfigured breaded hamburger patty. Then there is the McTorta, whose Wonder Bread–style hamburger bun shares no resemblance to the baguettestyle pan birote that makes the Mexican sandwich a torta. The full Mexican McMenu, not surprisingly, includes all that is American about McDonald’s: Big Macs, fast food, “french” fries—with side orders of the violence of cultural genocide that Mexican intellectual Octavio Paz argues is implicit in modernity, exemplified in the project of Western hegemonic cultural imperialism: What sets the worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions, and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weak-

ens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.15

McDonald’s, arguably along with Starbucks and other Western corporate brands emblematic of modernity/coloniality, shares part of the responsibility for the extinction that Paz articulates. In a parallel vein, engaging the longue-durée approach of coloniality, Portuguese legal scholar and social theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos has referred to the impacts of colonization on cultural and knowledge production as “epistemicide,” denoting that the very forms of thought and social-cultural spaces from which one thinks and knows the surrounding world have been increasingly decimated and replaced by one dominant form of Western epistemology. 16 Nonetheless, the rise of toxic fast-food outlets across the world has significantly altered the geography and cultural landscape of Western and non-Western nations alike to fit into a more uniform, westernized, and increasingly Americanized mold. While such cultural exchange is indeed not unidirectional, the impact of American culture cannot be denied. Interestingly enough, according to Thomas Friedman, no two nations that possess (or are possessed by) a McDonald’s have ever gone to war with one

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another. While this is arguably a reformulation of the “democratic peace” thesis challenged by Barkawi and Laffey as an imperial peace within an interstate system, as discussed in the introduction, it follows in Friedman’s work that upon the establishment of a McDonald’s within the national-territorial boundaries of any given nation-state, the nation-state in question gains—to date without exception, according to Friedman—the acceptance of the McDonald’sbearing nations: a protection from future hostilities, in a sense.17 In this context, McDonald’s serves as a stand-in for Western modernity and capitalist democracy, and some would even go so far as to argue it is a “natural” by-product of a Western liberal society. However, others such as John Tomlinson argue that this dynamic is rather a case of submission to a culturally imperialistic force, one that bears a striking similarity to the Mafia’s extortion of businesses in exchange for “security” and “protection.”18 In either case, McDonald’s and the existing geopolitical order (i.e., the interstate system) that deems resistance to be terrorism thus become the arbiter of international agreements to cease hostilities, even as they contribute to (cultural) genocide and epistemicide. In the United States, the elimination of cultures that Paz warned about takes on new meaning, for physical erasure is part of the working narrative. Mass shooting sprees in the U-S experience have had two popular sites: fast-food restaurants and the postal system, one a federal carrier/communications service or agency meant to do the work of connecting peoples nationally and globally, and the other a multibillion-dollar industry that stands as a pillar of Americans’ fast-paced society.19 More recently, schools have become a third site of mass shootings, one that is equally relevant, for it is in the school system that a society is said to impart its values to its youth so that they may become good citizens who reproduce the current order. McDonald’s, referred to by Life magazine as “this most American of institutions” even within the context of reporting on the massacre,20 helps exemplify how “the American way of life” that it endorses and, sometimes without welcome, exports around the world is constituted by and permeated with violence. In these sites, cultural systems and bodies collide. As Denis Johnson, one of the great communicators of America’s trauma culture, describes it in his novel Angels: “The fast-food universe [is a] tiny world half machinery and half meat.”21 Exposés such as the films Fast Food Nation (2001) and Super Size Me (2007) have since depicted further details of the workings of the fast-food industry. As early as 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle illuminated how since the beginning of the mechanization of society, industrialized factories have

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had their abundant share of violence and death, manifested in different forms (e.g., slaughterhouses, workplace accidents). Since the turn of the century, race, gender, and class have figured centrally in the equation, as workers of color and poor whites were often the first victims of the advent of such factories. With the rise of maquiladoras along the U-S///Mexico border, working-class Indigenous and mestiza women were for several decades the majority of workers and the lifeblood of the industry, although the workforce demographics have recently leveled off, with women now making up just over 50 percent of the rank and file. Ironically, the social imaginary of this nation continues to deny the reality of violence, even as this violence continues to plague its own factories, restaurants, backyards, front yards, living rooms, schoolyards, and, more importantly, bodies. There are many who dismiss violence in the United States as random acts; however, others know better, informed unfortunately by the violence that shapes everyday lived experiences, particularly for women and communities of color. Critics of McDonald’s have pointed out what they believe is wrong with the fast-food giant. First, McDonald’s has spent a fortune on advertisements, trying to cultivate an image of being a caring and “green” company that is also a fun place to eat. Children are lured in, dragging their parents behind them, with the promise of “free” toys and other gimmicks. But behind the smiling face of Ronald McDonald lies modernity’s underside—the interest of McDonald’s is in expanding its markets, whatever the cost. John F. Love’s biography of the fast food giant, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches (1986), lucidly describes the rise of the chain through cutthroat competitiveness as it actively sought to edge out its burger-selling counterparts at all costs. Secondly, while millions of people are starving, as noted above, without even one “happy” meal, vast areas of land in poor countries are used for cattle ranching or to grow grain to feed animals to be eaten in the fast-food outlets.22 McDonald’s continually promotes meat products, encouraging people to eat meat more often, resulting in the overuse of food and land resources that go toward the raising of cattle and other livestock for the fast-food slaughterhouses. To feed livestock, it takes an amount of grain equal to roughly seven times the amount of meat and by-products that are produced. On a related note, animal rights activists have even argued that on a vegetarian diet Britain could easily be self-sufficient in food. The third major criticism is that McDonald’s is also destroying the earth. McDonald’s has admitted to using beef reared on land that was formerly rain forest, preventing the regeneration of forests. The use of farmland by multina-

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tionals and their suppliers has also displaced entire communities, largely Indigenous people and farmers, forcing local people to move on to other areas and cut down more trees. Lastly, considering that McDonald’s is the world’s largest user of beef, it is worth noting that methane emitted by cattle reared for the beef industry is an important contributor to global warming, relatively speaking.23 These criticisms are complemented by many health risks that accompany fast food. McDonald’s promotes its food as healthy and affordable, but the reality is that the costs are high in overall health impacts that contribute to groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death: high levels of fat, sugar, and salt and low levels of fiber and vitamins contribute to high rates of illnesses. A toxic diet of this type is linked to a greater risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other diseases. The food served by McDonald’s also contains many chemical additives, some of which cause ill health and hyperactivity in children. Meat at fast-food restaurants is also the cause of the majority of food poisoning incidents in recent history. In 1991, McDonald’s restaurants were responsible for an outbreak of food poisoning in the United Kingdom in which people suffered serious kidney failure.24 Despite industry claims of humane environments for the raising of livestock, critics allege that the menus of McDonald’s and the entire industry are also largely based on the torture and murder of millions of animals. Animal rights activists claim that most of these animals are intensively farmed, with no access to fresh air and sunshine and no freedom of movement.25 Referred to as “humane slaughter” in the industry, the practices are as questionable as the term. Workers at McDonald’s don’t have it so good either. Aside from the wellknown low wages earned by McDonald’s employees, George Ritzer points to the lack of overtime rates provided, even when employees work very long hours.26 Pressure to keep profits high and wages low results in understaffing, so staff have to work harder and faster; consequently, accidents, particularly burns, are very common. Many employees are both citizens and migrants who have very few work options and so are forced to accept these menial jobs.27 Not surprisingly, staff turnover at McDonald’s is high, making it virtually impossible to unionize and fight for better wages and working conditions, which suits the company’s anti-union history. Criticisms of McDonald’s have come from a large number of people and organizations over a wide range of issues. In the mid-1980s, London Greenpeace drew together many of those strands of criticism and called for an annual

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World Day of Action against McDonald’s. Efforts continue to occur every year on October 16, with pickets and demonstrations all over the world. McDonald’s, which spends over one billion dollars a year on advertising and promotions, is trying to silence the worldwide protest campaign by threatening legal action against those who speak out.28 Notably, “anti-globalization” protests often target McDonald’s, Starbucks, and American and European banks. Image control has always been a top priority for McDonald’s generally, and this would be an issue following the massacre in San Ysidro, as the company made it a point to immediately provide money for a fund created to help survivors and their families after the massacre and made efforts to publicize its donation.29

July 18, 1984—San Ysidro, CA: The McDonald’s Massacre Few would expect that a trip to McDonald’s, a walk through the Golden Arches of the embodied American dream, could be deadly. However, on the afternoon of July 18, 1984, many people were proved wrong. As 4:00 p.m. neared, an alleged Vietnam veteran named James Oliver Huberty walked into a local McDonald’s restaurant in the town of San Ysidro, located within a mile of the U-S///Mexico border and three miles east of the Pacific Ocean, and opened fire on the unsuspecting customers and employees.30 It is critical to note that despite the town’s proximity to the beach, there are few, if any, surfers in San Ysidro. In other words, the lived experience and reality of San Ysidro and its residents is shaped not by its relation to the coast but by its relationship to the increasingly militarized border. The residents of this border community—as well as those in its counterpart across the border in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico—are most effectively characterized as fronteriz@s, given the relative frequency with which many cross the border in both directions. Nearly 90 percent of the town’s population at the time of the shooting were Mexican@s, both United States citizens and “legal” residents included. Many routinely cross the U-S///Mexico border, legally or not, in search of work, to visit family, or simply to shop or eat at the local restaurants on either side, such as McDonald’s or Tacos El Gordo in Tijuana. In fact, several customers, and even some of the employees, who would encounter the shooter James Huberty on that fateful Wednesday afternoon were from Tijuana, although this detail is not commonly acknowledged by most U-S sources.31 Seven of those shot were residents of Tijuana, yet the shooting never registered as an international incident.

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Huberty, on the other hand, had recently moved to San Ysidro from Canton, Ohio, where he had been employed as an embalmer and later a welder, only to lose that job and a succession of other jobs thereafter. While living in San Ysidro, he had worked as a security guard until also being fired from that job a few months before the shooting.32 His inability to maintain a job undoubtedly led to a growing frustration, as it would with any other person. However, the results are not usually so detrimental or, I argue, so targeted. Huberty did seek mental health support in the weeks leading up to July 18, but his calls were often left unanswered and his messages were not returned. Rather than pathologize Huberty, however, we should also consider the socioeconomic circumstances under which he was operating. The most stable employment Huberty had known in the previous years was as a welder. When his factory shut down in the early 1980s, it happened at a time when the popular perception in the American imaginary (only partially accurate) was that jobs were being shipped to Mexico. While such shutdowns were symptomatic of a broader deindustrialization that was sweeping the heartland of the United States, many workers who lost their jobs blamed Mexico and Mexican workers rather than the corporations who left them unemployed in their search for workers they could pay a fraction of U-S salaries, or the governments whose policies enabled looser labor and environmental protections and gave tax incentives for relocation. Huberty in particular would end up in San Ysidro, in a misguided attempt to “find his old job” and “get it back,” spending a few weeks trying to locate his old employer in Tijuana. Whether or not his factory had relocated to Tijuana remains unclear, but one thing that is certain is that Huberty did not get his job back. It is within this context that we must consider how James Oliver Huberty began shooting, not “randomly” but rather premeditatedly, at the predominantly Mexican customers and employees whom he arguably viewed as responsible for his own unemployment, after having specifically told his wife he was going out to hunt Mexicans that day. Deindustrialization—the exporting of jobs and production abroad in search of not “cheaper” but underpaid labor and new markets—which followed much in the logic of globalization and the cultural imperialism of the global reach of McDonald’s, was for all intents and purposes “let off the hook,” not readily identified as the main culprit behind his unfortunate circumstances. In other words, there was no structural analysis to account for what led up to the massacre. Instead, most commentators individualized the attack in much the same way that Huberty individualized his sense of who bore responsibility for his unemployment.

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Dressed in a black T-shirt and military-style camouflage fatigues, Huberty entered the fast-food restaurant carrying a 12-gauge pump-action Winchester shotgun, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 9mm rifle similar to a militaryissue M16.33 He soon unloaded hundreds of bullets, pumping them into the bodies of children and senior citizens alike, blasting the McDonald’s into a blood-soaked slaughterhouse much like those from which it derives its toxic patties. While many of the gory details emerged in local newspapers in the weeks that followed, local cultural producers also narrated the events of the day, as the corrido “La Masacre de San Ysidro” by José “Pepe” Villarino and Oscar Galván illustrates: El muy cobarde tiraba

The coward would fire on

disparó cienes de balas

he fired hundreds of rounds

a los de afuera y adentro; traía mucho armamento. Tres compañeros pequeños

people outside and inside;

he had plenty of weapons. Three youngsters

quedaron acribillados;

lay riddled with bullets;

los dejó crucificados.

left them for dead piled in a heap.34

el asesino endiablado

the diabolical assassin

Huberty was fully armed with a variety of accessories and a canvas bag full of ammunition slung over one shoulder. He reloaded his weapons twice as he circled the room, killing anyone he found still alive. A few, miraculously, were able to subvert Huberty’s agenda by feigning their death, including one of the three young boys, one of them my neighbor, whose images circulated around the world. The body count at the McDonald’s massacre site was twenty-one dead and nineteen wounded, before a single shot from a police sharpshooter—ironically, firing a rifle from the roof of the post office adjacent to the restaurant—struck Huberty in the chest and brought his killing spree to a halt.35 No one was spared in the attack. Only a handful were able to escape, but not without their own traumatic physical and psychological wounds.36 Of the twenty-one people who were killed, all but three were Mexican@s. Seven of them were Mexican nationals in San Ysidro for the day. Of the nineteen injured, fourteen were [email protected] Days later, a July 20, 1984, headline in the San Diego Union read, “They Represented All Walks [of life],” detailing their occupations, lifestyles, and ages,

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but not speaking to their transnationality as [email protected] The sketches of the victims of the most heinous mass shooting since Charles Whitman had gunned down sixteen people at the University of Texas omitted the one common characteristic most of them shared: a significantly large majority of those killed or wounded were Mexican@s. For Huberty and his victims, the metaphor of the border as “a war zone” was a reality, years ahead of when most scholars would note the beginning of its militarization.39 Cuerpos hundidos en sangre

Bodies covered with blood

todo a muerte hería

were seen all over the place.

aquel horrible día.

It looked like a war zone.

parecía zona de guerra

The stench of death was everywhere.

The corrido later continues: El pueblo de San Ysidro

The town of San Ysidro

que odiaba a los mexicanos

that he hated Mexicans

Tenía esto ya muy patente

su plan cargaba en la mente.

already knew of his notions and that his plan was preconceived.

Ya ven hermanos y hermanas

So you see my brothers and sisters

maldecía a la raza

his dislike for “La Raza”

su destino concebido he aquí lo acaecido.

with his actions well planned, and this is what resulted.40

There are some who insist the massacre was an isolated incident, a random act involving a sick individual, not possibly a representation of this great nation, which at the time was hosting the 1984 Olympics. The same people might also argue the same of the Rodney King beating and the violence following the verdict, the Oklahoma bombing, the Unabomber attacks, and shootings at Columbine and other schools. Yet this self-deluding perception, akin to blaming violence on the violence itself without consideration of its root causes, results in a reductionist analysis and is in and of itself a violent act, for it denies the history and enduring legacy of modernity/coloniality that inform this nation, built on and reinforced through the maintenance of a violent society. It exemplifies the ways in which border violence is itself bordered or relegated to the margins of discourse on violence, along with attempts to truly grapple with the underlying causes.

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According to San Diego historian Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The media coverage of the shooting . . . varied according to geographical distance from San Diego. The local media reported events in great detail and for a longer period of time while the national press limited itself to more general overviews.”41 The incident was covered by the New York Times, the newspaper of record for the Library of Congress, as the act of a “coast man” who randomly and with “no known motive” went insane, shooting and killing people at a McDonald’s.42 That no surfers were shot and that the victims were largely Mexican remained unreported in this coverage. And while it was true that the shooting occurred near the coast, in the broader American imaginary this massacre might very well have been in Venice or Santa Cruz. Conversely, the corrido’s account points to Huberty as an American with alleged ties to white supremacist groups, who killed Mexicans at the U-S///Mexico border; the event was similarly reported in the alternative press on both sides of the border, as well as in establishment newspapers in Mexico.43 While it can be argued that both accounts are technically correct, the different corresponding reference points, the U-S///Mexico border on the one hand and the coast on the other, reveal much about the politics of knowledge, its production, and its legitimation. Venues that think and produce knowledge from the perspective of those in subaltern locations within the geopolitics of knowledge conveyed a longer-term historical outlook and moral outrage at the bloodshed marring the San Ysidro border, while those constituted by and beholden to the coloniality of power attempted to frame this as a “coastal” shooting devoid of overtly racial undertones. La prensa del otro lado

The press from the Mexican side

y los cronístas gabachos

and the U.S. press never

lo juzga supremecista

lo rechazan por racista.

Pero uno que otro decía con mucha ira y fervor

saben que todo esto es cierto

que James fuera un malhechor.

says he’s a white supremacist,

mentions any racial tendencies. But one or two would say with anger and fervor,

they know all of this is true

that James was a wrong doer.

In contrast to the mainstream accounts, most notably in the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune, the corrido related that day’s trajectory from the

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perspective of those in San Ysidro who face constant Border Patrol harassment and live a daily reality largely informed by the existence of the U-S///Mexico border. Accordingly, the corrido asserts that Huberty was a racist and highlights the massacre’s meaning for the Mexican community.44 As of this writing, the corrido “La Masacre de San Ysidro” had not been put to music. One of its composers, José “Pepe” Villarino, said that it would not be put to music until about twenty-five years after the massacre to avoid possible trauma for the survivors.45 Thirty-four years later, it has yet to be recorded. According to Phil Moomjean, one of the first emergency workers to enter the McDonald’s after Huberty was killed by a SWAT team sniper, “The scene was carnage. . . . It was just like Vietnam.”46 Another first responder, SDPD officer Arthur Velásquez, commented that one of the shooting victims said that “the gunman yelled ‘that he had killed many in Vietnam and he wanted to kill more.’”47 While it remains unclear whether Huberty was a Vietnam veteran, ethnic studies scholar Larry J. Estrada (a Vietnam veteran himself ) has argued that the advent in the 1980s of war movies such as Rambo (1982), which depicted a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran, Commando (1985), and Cobra (1986) represents the creation of a Vietnam “lifer” genre with which many civilians increasingly identified.48 That is, the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan (no stranger to Hollywood) witnessed the rise of the “angry white male” brilliantly depicted years later by Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down (1993), for whom the time had come to “take our country back” from the real and perceived advances made by communities of color in the United States and to reverse the United States’ defeat abroad in Vietnam. The point here is that James Oliver Huberty—who, according to a neighbor, had made comments the day before suggesting animosity toward Mexican@s—believed it was “just like Vietnam,” resulting in a gruesome outcome for San Ysidro.49 The Vietnam “lifer,” then, is best understood as one for whom the Vietnam War never ended, who years afterward was/is still seeking to “win the war” by bringing it “home” to the United States against those seen as representing the enemy within. It is in this context that Huberty’s claim to have “killed many in Vietnam” situates his shooting spree within a long trajectory of U-S violence and equally connects him to the long line of so-called “random” shooters in similar attacks over the last few decades. Recognizing the long history of coloniality’s inability and unwillingness to serve justice to border(ed) communities, and invoking an image reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the corrido concludes:

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Vayan, vayan angelitos

Go, go little angels

vayan díganle al Señor

go and tell the Lord

aquí sufrieron el dolor.

suffering our pain.

que se apiade de nosotros

to have mercy on us

The corridistas thus invoke the moral high ground by calling on “little angels” to serve as the winged messengers that will convey this horrible atrocity to others, just as they perhaps see no recourse other than the knowledge production represented by their own cultural work, given the everyday violence faced by many along the U-S///Mexico border.

That afternoon marks the day the ensuing violence gave birth to my memory. I was only a child, five years in this world, awakened to the harsh reality of the McEra and the violence that the jolly redheaded clown I grew up admiring represented. To this day I can still remember the tragedy that took place at that McDonald’s only two blocks away from our small vecindario-like apartment complex. It was around half past three o’clock when my abuelita, my mom, my sister, and I finished shopping for groceries at the nearby Big Bear market, four or five stores down from the McDonald’s. As we drove out of the parking lot, the summer heat coupled with the giving heart of a loving grandmother allowed for the simple words, “¿Quieren una nieve?” (Do you want an ice cream?) The car was instantly filled with the youthful happiness of two children, five and nine years old, considering the prospect of an ice cream sundae from McDonald’s, with strawberries and peanuts on top, of course. “¡Sí, sí, una nieve, Abuelita!” (Yes, yes, an ice cream, Grandma!) It was my mother’s instinctive sense to protect her children— perhaps from a sick tummy, since we had not eaten, or perhaps it was a gut feeling, border gnosis subconsciously warning her of the impending tragedy— that took hold of her as we were about to enter the McDonald’s parking lot. The uttering of the words now forever engraved in my mind— “No, Máther, no han comido, y al cabo que ahí tenemos nieve en la casa” (No, Mother, they haven’t eaten, and besides, we have ice cream at home)— was, as I vividly recall, what kept us from going into the McDonald’s parking lot only minutes before James Huberty would do so. Empty stomachs and the gallon of aging chocolate chip ice cream gathering frost in the back of the freezer kept us away, protecting us from the violence

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that was about to ravage our small border community and shock (at least very temporarily) the entire nation. All it took was the difference of making a right turn rather than a left at the stop sign that separated death from our home up the street. As we drove up Averil Avenue and made another left turn on Blackshaw Lane, where three young boys who would not return home that day often played, we began to hear gunshots ring out. Not knowing where they were coming from but frightened by the closeness of their thunderous BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!, we hurried home. As we reached our apartments, Villa Esperanza (Place of Hope), our next-door neighbor Pedrito was trying to sneak out of his home and join our three young friends, who had earlier invited him to bike down to McDonald’s for an ice cream sundae. Fortunately for Pedrito, the gut feelings were at work in his apartment also, as time after time either his mother or sister would catch him and bring him back home. As we unloaded the groceries, I remember that my sister and I asked why he was so eager to sneak out. His response was that he wanted to join our other neighbor David and two friends named Omar and Joshua, who were going to the McDonald’s. At that moment, my sister exclaimed, “Watcha, el ghetto bird!” and pointed to the sky. We saw the police helicopter hover above. In San Ysidro this was not an uncommon sight, but a strange feeling filled the air this time, as inside the phone rang, and soon afterward my mom hollered at us to come in. My Tía Pati, huddled in the safety of her own home fifteen minutes away in Chula Vista, had called to check if we were all right and to tell us to tune in to Channel 39, as reports of the shooting hit the airwaves. The McDonald’s down the street, which we had nearly visited, where three youngsters were spending their week’s allowance on a sundae, was under siege by one James Oliver Huberty, whose name is still remembered in people’s minds while the names of all the victims are often forgotten. By then Pedrito had also heard the news, and this time, on his fourth attempt, he was successful in sneaking out from under his mother’s watchful eye, taking a pair of binoculars with him. Thirty or so minutes later he returned, tears flooding his eyes. Pedrito, only ten at the time, had seen the bodies of our three childhood companions lying next to their bikes, motionless. It was not long after Pedrito’s return, with the images by then being flashed on television sets across the country, that we knew this situation to be very real. Pedrito’s tears confirmed it. Our bodies were paralyzed by his silence. The twenty-one children and adults killed at the McDonald’s that day were already

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being talked about in the media as a record high for mass killings in the United States in a single day. Two points are important here. First, the horrific fact that there seemed to be someone keeping tally, with body counts looked at as if with the hope of one day reaching if not surpassing them. Second, we must acknowledge the ongoing violence of short-term memory—that is, the denial of the countless thousands of Indigenous people, Blacks, Mexican@s, and people of Asian descent who have died in this nation throughout its history but who, because of its history, are apparently not part of the tally, as to count them would require an acknowledgment of the violence of modernity/coloniality. The aftermath of the massacre also became as heated as the debate over the motives and the police response, which some argued was delayed, when a quicker response could have saved some lives. The slow police response was— ironically, though nothing surprising or new to area residents—a result of the annexation that was supposed to bring more city services to the South Bay, yet left San Ysidro under the jurisdiction of a municipal body twenty miles away. Reports later surfaced that the chief of police was out at a reception on a local beach, which contributed to the lack of coordination of the first responders on the scene. While the San Diego Police Department insisted that all of the shooting occurred within the first ten to twelve minutes of Huberty’s arrival at the McDonald’s, witnesses and survivors declared otherwise. Instead, they reported that Huberty kept shooting throughout the ordeal, for about forty minutes—at times pausing and pacing, but then shooting again at anything or anyone that moved—before the police finally engaged him. One of the most alarming accounts came from one of the three neighborhood kids on bikes, Joshua Coleman, who reported that after the initial rounds of shooting his victims in cold blood, Huberty walked around kicking bodies that lay on the floor. Those who showed signs of life were shot again at close range. The elevenyear-old Coleman was also nudged by the killer’s military-style boots but he feigned death, the only way he thought he might survive. And while Joshua did survive the ordeal, the psychological trauma has been too much to bear, as he has hardly had a “normal” life since. Another young survivor, Betty Romo, age fifteen, who also had enduring trauma from the massacre, would have the psychological and emotional scar reopened when, walking to school a little over a year later, she encountered two young undocumented migrants running in her direction. Recognizing their situation, she simply stopped in her tracks so as to not impede their passage or be in their way. Moments later, however, a Border Patrol agent fast approached,

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presumably hot on their trail. As he neared Romo, the agent reached for his gun, and seeing this, she recalled the horrific events of July 18, 1984. Instinctively fearing for her life at the prospect of a gun being drawn near her, she ran for safety, attempting to hide in a nearby yard. Not long after, Border Patrol agents would find her and insist that the fear that caused her to run into the yard was proof itself that she was likely an undocumented migrant. Much like Cheech Marin’s character Rudy, Romo protested that she was a United States citizen, a minor who according to immigration law at the time was not required to carry proof of residence. This was insufficient for the Border Patrol agents, and Romo soon found herself penniless and alone in Tijuana for the next three days. 50 Having endured the McDonald’s massacre, the young woman found the already traumatic experiences she had survived further aggravated by the sociopolitical reality of living near the U-S///Mexico border. The case of the McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro is important, as it involved a mass killing in a public space. The trauma of the event was inscribed not only in the minds of survivors, victims, and their friends and families, but also collectively on San Ysidro residents who frequented the McDonald’s or simply recognized the colonial/racial dynamic that informed the shooting. In this sense, it was arguably reminiscent of the systematic killings of Native peoples that led to the eventual creation of the border and the current globalizing phase of modernity/coloniality, as many Mexican@s knew all too well that numerous frontier massacres had seen more than twenty-one people killed at once. Particularly traumatic for many was the contradiction between what they knew to be true, confirmed by their own lifelong experiences with the Border Patrol in the area and reaffirmed in Tijuana news broadcasts, and the failure of U-S media outlets to make any mention of race when talking about the incident. The massacre, now considered the first in a series of such “random” shootings, further galvanized pro–Second Amendment gun rights activists eager to arm themselves against the perceived “urban crisis” discussed in chapter 2. Interestingly, the shooting is also credited as having helped give rise to the self-proclaimed civilian “border militias” involved in detaining and/ or shooting migrants—a reenactment of the frontier mentality and a shining example of the coloniality of power that I have been trying to elucidate on the U-S///Mexico border. A memorial monument has since been erected to commemorate the tragic day of the McDonald’s massacre, but this too would be the subject of a racialized battle between San Ysidro residents and San Diego government officials. I now

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turn to what I contend is the subsequent continuation of the violence endured on July 18, 1984, through an ongoing battle between conflicting ways of knowing and remembering the dead within an already psychologically and emotionally torn border community.

The McDonald’s Memorial Monument Not long after the McDonald’s massacre on July 18, 1984, questions began to surface about what was to become of the bullet-ridden and blood-soaked fastfood building. Would it reopen? If so, when? Some immediately called for the McDonald’s to be shut down, the building razed, and a park in honor of those killed—with space for a public altar—to be opened in its place. Not surprisingly, city officials twenty miles to the north of San Ysidro balked at the idea of a park and public memorial with altar space. The City of San Diego had different ideas about what to do with the site, as did the McDonald’s Corporation; each had their own version of how the massacred would be remembered. According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, history, its production, and public memory are a reflection of power in which “power is constitutive of the story. . . . Power itself works together with history. . . . [It] does not enter the story. . . . It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation. . . . In history, power begins at the source.”51 In the context of U-S///Mexico border history, as would be the case with the San Ysidro massacre, this has resulted in a downplaying of opposing views and often conflicting, even dichotomous, accounts of the same event, perhaps the most notable example being the Battle of the Alamo.52 Trouillot thus rhetorically asks whether the Battle of the Alamo stands as “a moment of glory during which freedom-loving Anglos . . . chose to fight until death. . . . Or is it a brutal example of U.S. expansionism, the story of a few white predators . . . providing, with their death, the alibi for a well-planned annexation?”53 In contrast, Emma Pérez reiterates Pilar’s famous assertion in the 1999 movie Lone Star, “Forget the Alamo!”54 Not surprisingly, the Alamo, too, has been the subject of various corridos. Following the McDonald’s massacre, a similar battle ensued, which centered on the memorial monument and the way in which the massacre was to be remembered. In this struggle, what was revealed were the complex ways in which San Ysidro’s working-class Mexican@s remember and honor their fallen loved ones, while the efforts of city

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FIGURE 13  Photograph

of the front of the McDonald’s within days of the shooting. Courtesy of Voz Fronteriza and Salvador Reza, editor at the time of the massacre.

leaders to memorialize the day’s tragedy instead served as veiled attempts to forget (if not deny) the racialized reality and sociopolitical implications of the massacre. Immediately after the horrendous killings, flowers, candles, water, food, fruit, photos, sweet bread, and a host of other personal articles traditionally used in Mexico to remember the dead were brought and placed at the site of the shooting. Placards and posters filled with written messages in honor of those who had passed complemented the abovementioned items. The Mexican altar tradition was introduced into a public space, as the site essentially became a living altar. For many Mexicans in San Ysidro, the spiritual and healing practices of altar building at the exact location where a person dies are seen as a way of ensuring that the spirits of the deceased know that they are not being forgotten. The water, food, fruit, and other perishable items known as spirit food are first prayed with and then left at the altar in order to help nourish loved ones in their journey to the spirit world. The flowers, candles, and other (usually personal) items serve as reminders that their spirit beings are in our memory, as they are still living energy. This practice, dating back to las Américas precolombinas, is a tradition, according to Rosa Martha Villarreal, usually carried out by Indigenous communities and in particular by mothers, for the Spanish, usually men, were seen to remember things through lifeless objects such as statues and monuments.

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It is also a way for a community to collectively grieve and to forever celebrate the lives of those who have passed, as the maintenance of the altar is continued for years, often with specific community members or relatives assigned as caretakers. Following the massacre, flowers, candles, and posters remained at the site, while McDonald’s considered various options as to what to do with the property. According to John F. Love, “any hesitation on closing the store quickly disappeared when the McDonald’s representatives attended the funeral, toured the community and met with Monsignor Francisco Aldesarro, the spiritual leader of the Catholic community.”55 Upon consideration of the community’s potential reaction, as evident in the ongoing maintenance of the altar spaces, it was concluded that any decision “to reopen that McDonald’s—with so much human emotion attached to the site—would have been absolutely wrong.”56 What to do with the site was still up in the air. Controversy was soon stirred when a wrecking crew moved in and demolished the building in the early hours of the morning of September 7, 1984, without warning. With the building gone, so too was the living altar on the outer perimeter of what not long before had been a busy McDonald’s. Figure 14 is a photograph taken on the morning the McDonald’s was brought down by .

FIGURE 14  The McDonald’s site being razed soon after the shooting. Photograph courtesy of Consuelo Delgadillo.

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the wrecking crew. Behind the morning haze one can see the city of Tijuana roughly one mile away. Only debris, a few red bricks, and the cedar brush out front on San Ysidro Boulevard remained. Nonetheless, community members continued to bring flowers, only to have them occasionally removed. The community also began to pressure city officials more adamantly for a park and a memorial for the altar to sit on, seeing that the site would soon be completely empty. City officials, however, were reluctant to move on or commit to any future plans for the site, as it still belonged to McDonald’s. The corporate offices of McDonald’s responded with an approach that showed a concern with image control and public relations. The company took extra care to ensure that information was dispersed about its initiative to show its compassion for the families of the victims by shouldering costs related to funeral arrangements, hospital bills, counseling, and flying in relatives.57 McDonald’s also cooperated significantly with the public in a self-described effort aimed at keeping “open communication with the news media, providing all the information they had available,” through the establishment of a “media central” at their corporate office in Chicago.58 Management had expressed its shock, sympathy, and disbelief immediately after the incident. However, the extent of demonstrating their sympathy was to cancel television advertising one day after the shooting, suggesting that this would somehow assist victims’ relatives in the grieving process. Worried about the potential loss of business at other McDonald’s restaurants, they felt that these moves would help the company defuse negative coverage. Lastly, and significantly (for McDonald’s at least), they donated the lot to the city and opened a new franchise two blocks west of the original site. In this way, they lifted from their own shoulders the burden of having to decide what to do with what had become an increasingly contested site. That such initiatives helped McDonald’s to regain its original market share despite an initial sales loss was later revealed by a public relations journal to have been an important consideration in the corporation’s decisions, as “eradicating the . . . tragedy from the public memory” is often top priority among crisis managers.59 Once the city was officially in charge of the land and continued to be reluctant about deciding what action to take, a fifty-three-year-old disabled teacher and his wife, Tom and Alicia Arena, chose to take matters into their own hands. After a year had passed with still no resolution from the city council on any plans for the massacre site, the Arenas came down to the location with wood and the necessary tools, then “dug a foundation for a temporary wooden shrine”

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FIGURE 15  After the McDonald’s was bulldozed, local residents arranged a makeshift altar to the victims of the massacre on the same site. Photograph from San Diego UnionTribune / ZUMA Press.

and raised a makeshift altar for the victims that was immediately put to use by community residents.60 The altar, however, was raised without the permission of the city and became a symbol of the struggle between the local working-class Mexican@ community and the predominantly Anglo and middle-class Mexican American city officials. Time after time, the city asked the Arenas to remove the altar, citing concern for the property. However, the Arenas refused to bring down the makeshift shrine, prompting assistant city manager John Lockwood to suggest possible legal action against them if they did not comply. Tom Arena responded in kind: “If he’s so concerned about the property . . . why aren’t they also concerned about the cars that park there and the people who throw beer bottles? Who’s kidding who about what?”61 In the view of Arena and many area residents, the lack of care and action on the part of officials implied that the City of San Diego did not consider the slain Mexican patrons and employees to be significant, in turn reopening never fully healed wounds over the annexation of the area and its precarious situation given the city council district boundaries. At the heart of the issue stood an important question posed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tenfold ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths that marks the violence in the occupied territories. That is, how is it that in colonial/racial contexts some deaths and

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bodies are seen as having more value and are therefore worthy of remembrance while others are not seen as even worthy of being mourned?62 The disputes over the monument reflected both racial and class conflicts over urban space and competing perceptions of how to best remember the victims. The city’s hesitancy to allow the predominantly Mexican community to preserve their altar, honoring their dead the way they knew best, was a manifestation of a larger problem. City officials eventually did live up to their initial threats and responded to the makeshift altar by occasionally removing flowers and assigning Parks and Recreation employees to “clean up” the site. As the Arenas continued to maintain the altar, a month after the heightened tension with city hall, the shrine was vandalized, with no clue left behind as to the perpetrators or their motives.63 The Arenas rebuilt the altar only to find it repeatedly vandalized, with even small statues of La Virgen de Guadalupe smashed. By midNovember, the Arenas decided to abandon the shrine, as the constant rebuilding was becoming an emotionally overwhelming process. A distraught Tom Arena said, “They’ve destroyed it, desecrated it. . . . The candles, every time we try to light them, we go there in the morning and find them scattered all over the lot.”64 Some community members openly expressed their suspicions that the city officials themselves were behind the vandalism. Others cited the San Diego Police Department as the likely culprits. Nonetheless, city officials again warned Arena to remove the shrine or pay the cost of having the city remove it.65 It was not until the Arenas’ decision to abandon the altar that the City of San Diego, surprisingly, decided to finally consider what it was going to do with the land. The eventual result was the scrapping of any plans for a public park. Instead, the city sold the lot to a local community college, Southwestern College, which eventually built a satellite of their main campus ten miles northeast of San Ysidro in eastern Chula Vista. When the Southwestern College Education Center opened its doors, it offered a full array of services to meet local student needs, including financial aid and academic counseling. Its development was initially touted as an effort to bring desperately lacking opportunities to the San Ysidro border community. Ironically, its course offerings seemed more guided toward promoting classes for the management of the then-growing maquiladora factories in Tijuana. While this helped meet the needs of the cross-border business community, it meant the school involving itself in the globalizing trends that characterize U-S economic and cultural violence, arguably an important factor in the massacre itself. For example, according to the satellite campus’s website, “Japanese language courses

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are offered to employees of nearby maquiladoras (twin plants).”66 There is also a mentor/intern program available that “allows employers to help develop a pool of future employees while students acquire the skills necessary to succeed onthe-job.”67 These courses are not meant for assembly-line workers but rather for mid-level management, to help them communicate with corporate executives. One can deduce which students take the Japanese-language courses, as sitting in front of huge machinery for prolonged hours each day while earning measly wages and laboring under poor working conditions does not require foreignlanguage skills (unless operating manuals are not translated). In fact, such forms of labor do not require any talking at all, and even demand silence, both auditory and sociopolitical, with regard to labor organizing for better conditions and wages. While San Ysidro residents did not succeed in obtaining the park with living altar space they wanted at the site of the massacre, Southwestern College did eventually erect the much-fought-for memorial monument that San Diego city officials had been reluctant to concede. In front of the Southwestern College Education Center now stands the San Ysidro massacre memorial, which honors the memory of the twenty-one victims of the 1984 tragedy on the site. College officials worked with civic leaders to solicit contributions for the construction of the memorial.68 However, of the eighteen submissions considered, the one selected caused uproar among San Ysidro residents. Local migrant rights advocate Christian Ramirez noted that “many in the community were unhappy with the marble block monument, because neither it nor the accompanying plaque give a real description of what they say happened on this site on that day in 1984. They feel the white marble and vague language obscure the pure hate and racism that manifested here, a hate which is still very much alive.”69 A number of the submissions were hailed in the television media at the time as artistically refined but too graphic in their depictions of bodies in pain. In the end, an appointed panel of judges composed of city and community college officials decided on the particular entry that became the monument. It is my contention, however, that the one selected and erected was indeed the most traditional or “plain” monument of all: it appeared Southwestern College did not want a graphic depiction that would voice the violence done to the victims and the community on July 18, 1984. I conducted a search over the course of at least five years, following many leads and being given much more runaround, talking to Southwestern College staff, administrators, librarians, facility managers, even

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FIGURE 16  This

photograph depicts the McDonald’s memorial shortly after a renovation that resulted in the replacement of the original tall metal fencing around the monument with a shorter set of bars. Photo courtesy of Consuelo Delgadillo.

professors in art and architecture, yet I was unable to retrieve copies of the seventeen other submissions. Nonetheless, the information I was able to gather about the submissions paralleled an important discussion in a 2002 article by Andrew Shanken in which he noted that following World War I there was a public debate over how veterans of that war would be remembered. Between the two world wars, what came to be known as “traditional monuments”—obelisks, statues, triumphant arches, etc.—were often the monuments of choice to memorialize historical figures, war heroes, and other notable individuals. Following World War II, however, “living memorials” in the form of parks, community centers, libraries, and so on became the favored way to remember wartime casualties and the like.70 The monument at the McDonald’s more closely resembled the traditional approach to monuments, whereas the requests of the community resonated more with the latter approach: the idea of a park as a living memorial, with a “living altar” for the memory of the dead, was seen as embodying a “living” relationship. This

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latter vision, however, never materialized for the families of the victims and other residents of San Ysidro. It is here, in the choice of monument, that the violence of short-term memory takes hold. In particular, the community college, under pressure from their governing board and city officials, opted for the architectural creation that appeared to be an attempt to forget and gloss over—or more accurately, whitewash—the living memory of the victims. In a very real sense, it functioned as further violence toward the survivors’ families, for it signified to them that their relationship with their loved ones was itself dead, that it would be experienced only through the inanimate concrete and marble of the memorial monument. And in doing so it further meant, as noted above, that, regardless of their intention, the action of city officials would be experienced as an active denial of the right to mourn their dead. The groundbreaking ceremonies for the memorial structure, comprised of twenty-one white hexagonal pillars and designed by former Southwestern College architecture student Robert Valdez, Jr., were held on July 18, 1990, on the sixth anniversary of the tragedy; the memorial was later dedicated on December 13, 1990. The “whitewashing” or twofold erasure of memory occurred first in the fact that the pillars, meant to represent the victims, were devoid of color or “white,” when the racialized bodies of most victims were, in a very real sense, not white—marked as brown and “foreign” by the border only a mile away regardless of their formal immigration or citizenship status. Although the monument is indeed a beautiful piece of work, Southwestern College officials involved in the monument selection noted that many of the other submissions seemed to better represent both the events of July 18, 1984, and the victims aesthetically and artistically. Ultimately, the bland nature of the chosen structure further disembodied the people killed on that tragic day, transposing the memory of their lively existence, which had been acknowledged by the colorful altar that once stood in its place, into colorless, lifeless pillars. Immediately after the opening of the memorial, however, the flat tops of each of the monument’s pillars came to replace the community altar that the Arenas had so courageously fought to maintain years earlier. Tolerated at first, as their presence was believed to be only temporary, inspired by the recent dedication of the memorial, flowers and candles again adorned the site that had once been stained with blood. As relatives and community members continued to place their flowers and make other offerings on the new “altar,” so to speak, Southwestern College and city officials became increasingly disturbed by the (minor,

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FIGURE 17  Close-up of the McDonald’s memorial monument after the steel cage fencing was replaced with a shorter fence, yet one that still prevents mourners from using it as an altar on which to place flowers, candles, and other items. Photograph courtesy of Consuelo Delgadillo.

if any) financial cost and physical energy they expended to remove old flowers or “clean” the memorial. Despite family members coming and continuing their role as caretakers of the new monument-turned-altar, maintenance was later cited as the reason for enclosing the memorial monument within a metal fence to prevent access. Southwestern College and city officials argued that the occasional spilled wax and other items left behind affected the aesthetic value of the monument, making this their justification for the steel cage that was erected months later. The imprisoning of the renewed altar space, as illustrated by the images here, constituted a second act of violence toward the ways in which the predominantly Mexican@ community remembered their dead, preventing the community from raising their own altares, which are traditionally recognized as a necessary part of maintaining communion with deceased family members. As it stands now, there is a bronze plaque inscribed with the names of the twenty-one victims in front of the memorial with its twenty-one columns. Embedded in the sidewalk in front of the Southwestern College Educational Center, it was once the only accessible part of the memorial, as the rest was behind bars. The renovation of the site led to the replacement of the original

FIGURES 18 AND 19  Two pictures of the dedication plaque at the massacre site, taken at different times of day, hence the shadow on the bottom image. Photographs by the author.

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fence with a smaller metal fence, but now the plaque is also behind the bars. On the plaque is the following inscription: “The San Ysidro Memorial is dedicated to those who died so tragically on July 18, 1984, and to the survivors who bear the scars of that day.” While each victim is now memorialized on the bronze plate, one cannot help but notice that at certain times of day the ever-present cage casts its daily shadow over it, symbolically “imprisoning” the names in much the same way that the rest of the memorial is imprisoned every day, at all times. As the setting sun moves west, in the direction of Border Field State Park, where the U-S///Mexico border wall extends into the Pacific Ocean only two short miles from the site of the McDonald’s tragedy, the shadow on the plaque becomes a manifestation of the community’s ongoing struggle to remember their dead in the way they have been taught to—with flowers that represent “the chain of never ending life.” The plurality of different ways of knowing, free of the confinements of the epistemic and ontological prison of modernity/coloniality that says there is only one way to remember the dead, is what transcends into never-ending life. The notion that there is but one way to view life and death, as Octavio Paz formulates, is itself precisely what brings on cultural genocide—or perhaps more accurately, epistemicide—resulting not just in physical erasure but, as Jamaica Kincaid suggests when speaking of colonization, in the wiping away of the very capacity to think, live, die, and mourn otherwise. The memory of the massacre victims is thus not yet fully free, as it is haunted by reminders of that day, and of Huberty in particular, by virtue of the nearby border wall that on occasion attracts other fatigue-wearing “lifers” also seeking to make their last stand against what they see as a Mexican invasion. The border wall, Border Patrol, and modern-day “vigilantes” now further sanctioned by the Trump administration serve as a constant reminder of the threats posed by those who have taken their lost (and in some cases imagined) fight in the jungles of Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq to the brush of the Tijuana River valley and the dry mountainous terrain east of the San Ysidro port of entry. Nonetheless, each year on the anniversary of the massacre, survivors, friends, and family gather at the memorial and “cross” the metal fence—the monument’s border, so to speak—to place (if only for that day alone) their flowers, candles, virgencitas, pan dulce, and other personal items on the monument qua altar to their loved ones, bringing new life to their memory. Yet, as we will see in the next chapter, the problem of mourning and memory is equally if not more complicated in the case of the murdered young women of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

4 Las Mujeres Asesinadas de Ciudad Juárez and the Double Bind of Their Representation/ability The overt sexualization of the bodies—not just murder, but violation and mutilation of the maternal organs, the breasts and nipples, the wombs and vaginas. . . . A cost-effective way of disposing of non-productive/reproductive surplus labor while simultaneously protecting the border from infiltration by brown breeding female bodies. —Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders

The abolition of this rite [widow sacrifice in India] has generally been understood as a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men”. . . . Against this is the Indian nativist statement, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: “She wanted to die,” still being advanced. . . . The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness. —Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

The juridical text is generated by the ruling elite, who have access to the state apparatus through which the political economy is shaped and jurisprudence is engendered, whereas representations in the cultural text may include representations generated by herself [Chicana, raced/sexed woman]. —Norma Alarcón, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics”

S

the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, which neighbors El Paso, Texas, has been the site of the murders of over four hundred women, many raped and mutilated, with over four hundred more reported missing or kidnapped. Despite a series of arrests over the years, the killings continue and the perpetrators roam freely amid allegations of police INCE 1993,

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incompetence, complicity, and involvement. While theories on who may be responsible vary widely—from serial killers to satanic cults, an Egyptian chemist “mastermind,” drug cartels, Los Rebeldes (a local gang), los choferes (maquiladora bus drivers), los juniors (protected sons of the rich), the high concentration of sex offenders across the border in El Paso, and corrupt police—there has been a lack of response on the part of police in seriously pursuing many of the angles of investigation. While figuring out who is killing the women of Juárez is important, a related question is also: What is killing them? What are the circumstances under which this type of killing—feminicide, meaning the killing of women because they are women—is tolerated and persists with impunity? Moreover, what does the murder, rape, and mutilation of predominantly young, brown, Indigenous and Indigenous-appearing working-class women tell us about everyday lived experiences along the U-S///Mexico border? How does the ongoing killing of women in Ciudad Juárez fulfill a function in the service of somewhere or something else? Lastly, while the state discourse has been explicitly misogynist from day one, largely blaming the women for their own deaths, what other popular accounts are there relating to these atrocities? What is the cultural production emerging about and from Ciudad Juárez? And is it possible to hear the women themselves in such accounts? In this chapter, I interrogate the systematic violence on/of the U-S///Mexico border with a focus on the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez and analyze two popular accounts chronicling such violence: the corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” by Los Marineros del Norte (1999) and the novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005). The creation of the dividing line between the United States and Mexico in/through the ongoing unfolding of the interstate system and the militarization of national-territorial boundaries—both processes constituted in and by the violence of modernity/coloniality—are the sociopolitical and historical context for the subalternization of brown-bodied women that marks the border as a contested terrain and a site of oppositional cultural production. I interrogate the ongoing killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, as the murders are indicative of the politically and violently charged border environment and, in turn, both articulate and disrupt the rampant violence that constitutes la frontera. These killings are representative of a border region that, in becoming an increasingly militarized zone, has set the stage for a cultural and epistemological battle among different forms of knowledge production and legitimization. As such, I view these different forms of cultural

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production, the corrido and the novel, as alternative constructions of knowledge from the underside of modernity, which challenge the subjugation and subalternization of brown-bodied women on the border. Gloria Anzaldúa’s characterization of the border region as an open wound, “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,” is as relevant today in Ciudad Juárez as it was for San Ysidro when she first pronounced it only three years after the McDonald’s massacre.1 It makes visible the nature of contact zones as a continuation of long-standing colonial encounters reenacted on a daily basis. The results are a climate of hostility and constant cultural tension. Born out of expansionist aggression, la frontera has been a fertile home to violence and conflict. However, the extent and contested nature of the violence and bloodshed (as examined in the cultural texts herein) are often overshadowed and undermined by mainstream information outlets or by the sensationalization of violence associated with human and drug trafficking, as outlined in the introduction. In the United States, information chronicling such violence has a U-S-centered, xenophobic, and anti-Mexican focus. Meanwhile, in Mexico (and in Spanish, itself a second-order language in the global hierarchy of knowledge production) the distribution of knowledge is limited and often, as in its counterpart to the north, adheres to largely Eurocentric, patriarchal, racist, classist, and sexist norms. Although both conform to a broader Western empiricist drive that often undervalues cultural texts, I take cultural texts to be forms of knowledge production in which raced/sexed subjects have the possibility of self-representation, though not without the danger of reproducing colonial epistemes. So rather than providing a mere translation of the two texts, my goal is to illustrate an(other) thinking/logic that underpins cultural productions, speaking to/from the violence that has shaped the experience of la frontera across geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries/borders alike.

The U-S///Mexico Border(s) in the “American” Imagination Looking at the intersection of histories between the United States and Mexico, we see an experience rooted in the colonial enterprise of the “discovery” of the so-called New World. No other two neighboring countries have such sharp socioeconomic distinctions between them as those between the United States and Mexico. The history of the U-S///Mexico border, like that between many other countries, has been that of a contested terrain since before the border

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was fixed in its current location in the period roughly between 1848 and 1853. Mainstream positions such as Frederick Jackson Turner’s personal account of westward expansionism, under the guise of objective American history, have championed what in 1885 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton called “noble ‘settlers’ and pioneers struggling quaintly in the frontier wilderness” in their attempt to bring it the advent of “civilization.”2 Such depictions deny the violence and pillage that many peoples suffered at the hands of westbound travelers. After the initial “settling” and claiming of many lands from the Native inhabitants who had lived along the Atlantic coast for millennia, and its continuation across the Mississippi, Anglos eventually set their eyes on the western and southern parts of this continent. The current U-S///Mexico border and the territory transferred with its creation are thus part of an imperialist expansion that required the usurpation of land, subjugation of its people, and decimation of the associated knowledges and histories. Manifest Destiny, imagined as being “God’s will” that Euro-American settlers should expand their grasp on the continent from “sea to shining sea,” was rooted in an epistemological space very similar to that of the Catholic Church’s “salvation,” carried out by the Spanish conquerors three centuries earlier. The two colonial projects, coupled with capitalist expansion, were imbued with a self-perceived, self-serving notion of European superiority, and Ciudad Juárez would be on the receiving end of both of them. First the Spanish came from the south, led by Juan de Oñate in 1598, and later Anglo settlers would come from the east, led by Sam Houston, Stephen Austin, and others. In fact, an early boundary dispute over what is now the U-S///Mexico border was, according to Joseph Nevins, a manifestation of a much larger problem: a lack of agreement among the competing empires of France, England, and Spain. Nevins dates the first dispute over Texas and the subsequent boundary line along the Rio Grande to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, before Mexico became a nation-state: “President Thomas Jefferson foreshadowed U.S. expansionist designs for Mexico expressing the view that Louisiana included all lands north and east of the Rio Grande, thus laying claim to Spanish settlements such as San Antonio and Santa Fe.”3 When a nominally “independent” Mexico, still dominated by locally born Euro-descended elites who had pushed out their Spanish-born forefathers, later opened its Texas territory to Anglo migration in 1821, these claims resurfaced. Feelings of superiority among Anglo settlers toward the Spanish, local Indigenous peoples, and Mexicans (the perceived mongrel offspring of the two), along with the notion that Mexicans should

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never be allowed to govern over Anglos, led to open hostility in Texas. 4 As Mario Barrera states, “There was a history of unrest and tension between the Anglo settlers in Texas” and the Mexican government, which came to a head in the short-lived 1826 Fredonia Revolt.5 Disputes with overt racial motivation culminated in the Texas Revolt, the Texas Declaration of Independence, and the formation of the Lone Star Republic. Continued boundary disagreements and the annexation of Texas to the United States led to the U.S.-Mexican War, whereby the U-S took half of Mexico’s territory in 1848. The Paso del Norte that had previously operated as a larger region now found itself divided in two, on different banks of the Rio Grande. The shared, and seemingly jagged, edges of the two neighboring countries have since been plagued by violence and conflict, varying in nature over time according to the respective political and economic pressures of each nation, but not free from the multiple colonial histories that shaped the region. Many published works from the early 1880s through the time of the Mexican Revolution, including those of Frederick Jackson Turner (noted earlier), though ostensibly proffered as objective reporting, in actuality functioned to protect and serve the interests of the established elite, policing what information was appropriate for dissemination.6 Today’s ambiente fronterizo varies little from these antecedents. History and its production continue to be a reflection of power, as Trouillot reminds us, where “power begins at the source.”7 In the context of U-S///Mexico border history, this has resulted in a downplaying of oppositional views and often conflicting, even dichotomous, accounts of the same event, evident in the stories of figures like Joaquín Murrieta and Juan Cortina.8 In the same spirit, Pancho Villa is viewed differently in El Paso’s military bases than in the colonias of Ciudad Juárez. What then, we should ask, is at stake when the same acts are condemned by some people and glorified by others? How can we read power in these accounts? In whose service are the legitimized and sanctioned narratives produced, reproduced, and circulated? Foucault, among others, has shown that it is not enough simply to ask, “What happened?” Rather, one must consider what the existing power relations are that guide both a story’s narrative and the production of counternarratives. In this case, this means the counternarratives to dominant discourses that shape violence-submerged border communities. One must therefore look at the relationships of power that underline both an “incident” and its narration(s), as the hegemonic interests they aim to protect usually guide official reports, news, and other “legitimate” accounts. One must consider the process of selection

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that determines which information is necessary and which ends up, whether overtly or covertly, being omitted, as many “incidents” remain unreported in mainstream media. It is also critical to understand the existing power structures behind the eventual circulation of information. This is the case when it comes to issues of violence specifically and oppositional cultural production generally. At times it is only in cultural texts, if at all, that occurrences along la frontera are recorded—as in corridos, for example, which aim to inscribe individual experience into a collective (though usually masculine) memory.9 Along la frontera, relationships of power and protected interests were usually those of Anglo pioneers, settlers, and Texas Rangers; in contemporary border discourse, this has translated into the Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government personnel or relatively privileged classes (e.g., transnational corporations, executives, ranchers, and civilian patrols). This dynamic of power and knowledge varies in context, of course, but not in its intent or consequences, and it has equally extended to the conflicting accounts regarding the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. While the militarization of the border, heightened since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, had the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border region as one of its main targets beginning with Operation Hold the Line in 1993, such federal lawenforcement efforts have also been accompanied by anti-migrant legislation and public initiatives. Most notable among these are California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, the federal H.R. 4437 in 2006, and Arizona’s SB 1070 in 2010, which have increasingly galvanized a long history of conflict between Anglos and Mexican@ and Chican@ communities. Although major portions of each were ruled unconstitutional and later overturned, the long legal battles have been complemented by growing anti-migrant protests. Following the passage of Proposition 187, for example, a nativist organization called Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) organized several protests, which twice erupted into open confrontations and fistfights with migrant rights activists. Interestingly, the first protest resulting in violence was symbolically organized for July 4, 1996, at the Federal Building in Westwood, California (an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood). The second major confrontation occurred at the same location four years later on July 4, 2000, and was filled with placards and chants of “Remember Westwood!”—a symbolic invocation of calls to remember the Alamo over a century earlier. Such theatrics were intended to invoke a sense of patriotic duty to fight to the death against perceived “invading” Mexican “forces”/migrants.10 Similarly, “Remember 9/11” has figured prominently in more recent calls for border security.

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Organizing “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” rallies at the U-S///Mexico border, reminiscent of the “Light Up the Border” rallies of the early 1990s, VCT and other right-wing formations such as the Minutemen have openly voiced fear over what they call a “Mexican reconquista” via migration and become increasingly involved in lobbying elected officials. Other judicial measures, including the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, both in 1996, also contributed to a growing sense of hostility against Latin@s, Mexican@s, and Chican@s that has culminated in the election of Donald Trump and calls for Mexico to pay for an extended U-S///Mexico border wall. It is in this context that we must also consider the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez. The structural violence of anti-immigrant sentiment and the increased military presence alongside what was then the INS and Border Patrol (now Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, respectively) has led to a series of “cultural, institutional, ideological, and economic transformations” on the U-S///Mexico border.11 Consequently, the “normalization” of violence along the border, resulting in devastating human rights implications, especially for women, has also become commonplace.12 Drawing from the historical use of rape as a weapon of war, Sylvanna Falcón contends, “Militarization ideology is embedded with issues of hyper-masculinity, patriarchy, and threats to national security . . . [hence] the gendered effects of militarization at the U.S.-Mexico border.”13 Since the creation of JTF-6 in 1989, numerous cases of alleged rape by INS and Border Patrol agents have been reported and substantiated. Unfortunately, only a few have resulted in convictions.14 The most shocking figures come from the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso border, where nearly four hundred women have been killed since 1993. Many of these victims were sexually assaulted or raped; however, the bulk of such cases were dismissed, as many of the women were depicted as having led “double lives,” issues that I expand on further below. Falcón argues that militarization allows for both the “normalization” and tolerance of violence against women. This process of the normalization of violence has permeated both sides of the border, as “Special Forces” officers on the Mexican side have complemented border militarization in El Paso. U-S border enforcement agents have only been implicated in a few cases of sexual assault and rape, and they have not been directly implicated in any of the murders in Juárez. Meanwhile, their counterparts in Ciudad Juárez have been implicated in both types of crimes. Authorities have also failed to take

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much action in investigating the murders, itself an example of the normalization of violence that Falcón asserts is common along the border. A parallel to the dismissive effects of media accounts in Ciudad Juárez can be drawn from what Peter Andreas has referred to as an issue of image control in the current process of border enforcement.15 This can be seen as a process that seeks to simultaneously appease both right-wing fears (would-be voters) and agricultural employers / corporations (would-be campaign contributors). Andreas notes that San Diego’s Operation Gatekeeper (1994), El Paso’s Operation Hold the Line (1993), and other border control initiatives have functioned to control the image in the popular eye, while undocumented workers continue to cross in less populated and less visible areas, ensuring an ongoing labor force.16 Mario Barrera’s seminal study Race and Class in the Southwest (1979), one can argue, foreshadows the fortification of highly visible points along the border to give the false impression that the border is secure. In Barrera’s prescient assessment, this is a matter of appeasing “the broader class interests [that] call for tightening-up [the border]” while the State allows a steady flow of migrants to continue crossing in order to fulfill “the particular interests of Southwestern employers in cheap labor.”17 And, one can add, to satisfy the need for labor (particularly by women) in the maquiladora industry south of the border, as the heightened enforcement ensures that many do not cross and instead stay in Mexican border cities where the maquilas abound. Barrera outlines the intersections of the State and the capitalist classes, arguing, “The state looks after both the particular and the general interests of capitalists, [while recognizing] that the two sometimes get in the way of each other.”18 In a prediction that resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Barrera anticipated at the time that the State “[would] in all likelihood adopt a compromise . . . in which the state responds to various situations by furthering the interests of groups from the dominant class while striving to maintain legitimacy and preserving its own neutral image.”19 The State’s conflicting positions desensitize pertinent issues and deny the causes of the conflict—an ongoing contact zone (rife with sociopolitical, economic, and cultural struggle) between two nations at the edge of one of modernity/coloniality’s mediating mechanisms in the interstate system. In turn, the border or mediating mechanism obfuscates how the interstate system is built upon and requires readily inexpensive and expendable forms of labor. This labor’s “transnational” composition only exacerbates its expendability.

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The seemingly contradictory views noted above are “managed” through image control: favorable news reporting in the media. In times of economic recession, mainstream media outlets have blatantly stated or subtly implied that the border is “a war zone” undergoing an “invasion” by invoking the imagery of a flood of immigrants “pouring” across it.20 Several mainstream news magazines have gone so far as to suggest that if the “problem” of “illegal aliens” could be solved, so too could unemployment rates, welfare rolls, drugs, and crime be reduced.21 With regard to the killing of women in Juárez, it is implied if not explicitly stated that the problems “south of the border” are to blame, truncating any sense of shared (structural) responsibility for the situation. It is precisely these and other conflicting perceptions, accounts, and interests that I attempt to bring to the forefront by focusing on cultural production as a window that is representative or indicative of local residents’ concerns, which are often obscured by mainstream media. Cultural texts have frequently served as an alternative vehicle for dispersing information and stories often omitted from both media and official police or governmental reports and discourse. Elsewhere I have argued, for example, that corridos speak to, of, and from the violence that is commonplace in the daily functioning of la frontera.22 In contrast to both border violence and its “legitimate” narration, both of which function in the service of the production and perpetuation of the raced/sexed logics of modernity/coloniality, I turn now—in conversation with Gayatri Spivak’s tantalizing question “Can the subaltern speak?”—to corridos, and by extension other cultural forms, that attempt to “voice” the stories of women located within the underside of modernity/ coloniality and omitted from legitimated histories of both the U-S and Mexico.

Corridos and “Cultural” Texts as Knowledge Production According to Vicente T. Mendoza, Mexico’s leading corrido scholar, the corrido’s origin is in the Spanish romance and it functioned in reality as a form of popular press, not on a daily or weekly basis but rather an eventual basis; that is, according to the course and development of life in Mexico.23 Several studies on Mexican corridos have focused predominantly on their role and contemporary origin in the Mexican Revolution. Most notable are those by Vicente T. Mendoza (1939, 1954, 1964), Merle E. Simmons (1957), Américo Paredes (1958), José David Saldívar (1986, 1997), María Herrera-Sobek (1990), Ramón Saldívar

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(1990), Alfred Arteaga (1985), and José E. Limón (1992).24 Corridos have maintained a significant influence in the daily functioning of Mexican lives, including along the border, as a means of carrying information to the people. As an instrumental part of peoples’ daily lives, corridos have been important to the way people made sense of their reality on an everyday basis. Not surprisingly, violence and resistance make up a prevalent theme in much work by corrido scholars. As Américo Paredes and José E. Limón chronicle, the corrido in its primary function serves to tell a story, usually of a glorious event, a tragedy, or heroic deeds and courageous men. While they place the corrido’s origin in conflict on the U-S///Mexico border, in The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (1990), María Herrera-Sobek places its origin in Spain and is critical of the corrido’s hero paradigm, arguing that it relegates women to secondary roles, framing women under four main archetypes: (good/bad) mother, goddess, ([un]faithful) lover, and soldier.25 Herrera-Sobek contends that, contrary to the way they are popularly imagined, corridos are also sung by and about women. From this juncture, Paredes, Limón, and Herrera-Sobek concur that by taking an active role in narrating the trajectory of the corrido, the corridista, as José David Saldívar suggests, “reconcile[s] individual experience into a collective identity” and becomes part of the people, establishing a personal connection to the story.26 This is significantly different from the common “detached” indifference of anthropologists, government bureaucrats, and news reporters, who seek to disconnect from their object of inquiry. Corridistas thus situate themselves within the perspective of the (relatively) subjugated knowledge to be spoken/ sung in much the same way that Native Americans construct their reality or understanding of the world through storytelling. Similarly, through corridos and other forms of cultural production (such as narratives or storytelling), fronteriz@s produce knowledge and reality. It is within those hidden, subjugated, or unheard stories that the subalternized racial/colonial subjects possess their own knowledge and self-representations. Here it is important to note the more recent phenomenon of narcocorridos and their classification vis-à-vis corridos. This ill-advised designation, implying a tie to drugs and drug trafficking, in effect taints the image of this music. Consequently, many corridos fronterizos are dismissed as narco-related and therefore criminal, rather than being critically studied as examples of knowledge production embodying oppositional discourses and counternarratives that speak to the political economy of the border’s informal sector and the normalization of its accompanying violence in their own right. This process of “folk-anization,”

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similar to the phenomenon of hip-hop being categorized as “gangsta rap” despite its many socially conscious messages, deactivates the critical reality embedded in the lyrics of the two genres, although both often demonstrate the problematic representations that Herrera-Sobek points to in traditional corridos. While there are admittedly narcocorridos that openly glorify drug trafficking, they cannot be simplistically dismissed, because closer examination reveals that they too communicate underrepresented knowledge about and offer insight into the persistence of violence en la frontera. While the point, according to Alarcón, is not to claim a “new” genre or subgenre, the way Paredes and Limón do by declaring the corrido to have been created on the border only about 150 years ago, what we have is a matter of “a ‘new’ dispossessed figure” who is only able to represent her- or himself through various changing cultural forms.27 Nonetheless, Herrera-Sobek argues that the border “is a powerful space that over the passage of time has acquired mythic proportions and is frequently thematized . . . [as it is] an appealing setting for poetic imagination . . . immortalized and mythicized in the lyrics of many corridos and canciones.”28 As Norma Alarcón points out, “the modes of autohistoricization in and of the borderlands often emphasize or begin with accounts of violent racialized collisions.”29 This tendency is an indication, I would argue, of the violence constitutive of borders. Corridos fronterizos thus emanate from the border and crystallize a major portion of a particular Mexican@ and Chican@ experience. As such, both corridos fronterizos and the Mexican@ and Chican@ experience are connected to the U-S///Mexico borderlands as a space not bound by territoriality, but rather one that encompasses the spaces informed by their relationship to the border, as demonstrated by the transnationality of Los Tigres del Norte, now based out of San José, California. We see this connection reflected in Los Tigres del Norte’s 1989 tribute to the very genre that made them famous, their corrido titled “El Corrido”: Como la corriente

Like the current

Que baja en torrente

That flows torrentially

De un río crecido

Impetuoso y bravío.

Voz de nuestra gente

Of a swollen river

Impetuous and fierce. Voice of our people

Un grito reprimido

A repressed scream

Eso es el corrido.

That is the corrido.

Un canto valiente

A valiant song

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Voz del oprimido

Voice of the oppressed

Calificativo

Qualificative

Un retrato hablado Y hasta exagerado.

A spoken portrait

And even exaggerated.

Tribuna que ha sido

Tribune that has been

Ese es el corrido

That is the corrido

Que me han enseñado.

That I have been taught.30

Del pueblo juzgado Ese es el corrido

By the people judged

That is the corrido

The opening verses are their attempt to delineate the characteristics of a corrido. The Río Bravo can thus be said to be a river of blood: a metaphorical convergence of the blood in Anzaldúa’s depiction of a hemorrhaging wound that continues to ooze as two worlds grate against one another and the literal blood of the many people who die attempting to cross this river or to simply live by it (like the women of Juárez). The use of the metaphor of the river to highlight the corrido’s strength is striking, but undoubtedly no coincidence or surprise to those who live the everyday reality of violence in the borderlands. José David Saldívar (1997) points out the transnational nature and influence of Los Tigres del Norte and their corridos.31 Their music crosses as many borders as they speak of when they sing of migrants’ physical crossing of geopolitical boundaries. Ironically, it is a river (or rather multiple rivers: the Río Bravo, the Tijuana, and the Gila) that forms major portions of the topography of the border in the region. Even though the Río Bravo only extends from the Gulf of Mexico through Texas, it is commonly invoked (as the Rio Grande) in the imaginary of the frontier. Corridos fronterizos thus emanate not just from a lived experience of migration and crossing of the geopolitical boundary, but from the border itself, pronounced as the river that separates Mexico and the United States in the western imaginary. In San Ysidro, where I grew up, the steel-plated metal sheets that constituted the border wall (though such a wall was said to exist only between the two Berlins) in effect embodied modernity/coloniality and progress, slicing the “North” of this continent apart from the “South.” As a man-made construction, it “complemented” the Río Bravo that divides Juárez from El Paso. In this light, the U-S///Mexico geopolitical boundary was then, and continues to be, a site of the ever-shifting creation and contestation not only of nations, but knowledges and epistemologies and life itself, both physically and metaphorically. Corridos,

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or the “cultural” as a form of knowledge production, can thus function (though they do not always do so) as a vehicle for the decolonization of local histories and knowledges that are absent from national(ist) discourses and colonial imaginaries. Los Tigres del Norte would eventually produce a corrido on the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, though here I turn instead to Los Marineros del Norte, who produced the first of several corridos written on the murders.

“Los Crímenes de Juárez” (1999): “Patriarchy Leaves Few Options” In Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, just across from El Paso, Texas, over four hundred women’s bodies have been found raped, tortured, and mutilated since 1993; as many as four hundred other women are still missing. While family members and women’s rights activists have attempted to bring attention to these ongoing murders as a matter of feminicide, the official government line has changed frequently over the years. Initially officials dismissed the gravity of the killings, arguing that the women likely lived a “double life”—a euphemism for them being seemingly innocent women during the day who became irresponsible partygoers at night— and therefore engaged in behavior that brought danger upon themselves. At other moments, they responded to reports of missing women by telling family members that the young women probably ran off with their boyfriends and would eventually come back. Furthermore, there were attempts to argue that the number of dead women was “normal” for a city the size of Ciudad Juárez.32 However, none of the official positions of the police and other local and state authorities ever placed responsibility on the perpetrators of the killings, notwithstanding several high-profile arrests that failed to stop the murders. Throughout the shifting police and government lines, largely reinforced by mainstream press coverage on the killings, there remained one constant: leaping hurdles to relieve the perpetrators and themselves of any responsibility by overtly oversexualizing the women and blaming them for their own deaths. In contradistinction to such official positions, I examine two alternative accounts—a corrido and a novel—each relating their view of the killings, in order to provide examples of how cultural texts as conveyors of knowledge produce narratives about the violence that differ from official accounts. Elsewhere I have comparatively considered corridos on the killing of women in Juárez, the shooting death of Esequiel Hernández at the hands of U-S Marines on

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the border, and the 1984 McDonald’s massacre in San Ysidro, California, and found that the corridos convey popular accounts often at odds with the official narratives.33 The McDonald’s massacre, addressed in chapter 3, like the murders in Ciudad Juárez, involved multiple killings of brown bodies in public space, reminiscent of (albeit at a different scale than) the “mass killings” or the American genocide of Native peoples that led to the eventual creation of the border, and which are similarly omitted/distorted in the nation’s creation stories. While the Juárez murders have occurred over the span of twenty-five years rather than being a single event, the comparison nonetheless illustrates how such killings speak to the normalization of (border) violence against negatively racialized and gendered people, both in the actual acts and the lack of investigation thereafter. The Ciudad Juárez-El Paso region has not been immune to the violence that has plagued other border cities since the creation of the current border (i.e., the formal spatialization of the frontier and its attendant violence on the current site of the U-S///Mexico boundary). While the rate at which bodies have been found has decreased in recent years, the total number of victims found scattered throughout Ciudad Juárez since 1993 nonetheless continues to rise without foreseeable end. As mentioned earlier, Falcón (2001) illuminates the normalization of violence against women that militarization on the U-S side of the border has been perpetuating. Through a consideration of rape as a technology of war, Falcón contends that discourses and practices of militarization constitute an inherently hypermasculine and patriarchal order in which gendered violence against women is within the “rules of engagement,” so to speak.34 It contributes to the perception of the U-S///Mexico border as a war zone. As such, the raping and killing of hundreds of women is testament to the violently charged atmosphere of the border and its characterization as both a metaphoric and a literal war zone of the type that San Ysidro residents noted after the McDonald’s massacre. While the victims in the McDonald’s shooting were mostly Mexican, in the war against women in Ciudad Juárez the victims have also shared a recognizable similarity. Almost all of the murdered women have been poor, young, and brown-skinned, with long black hair and Indigenous facial features. Their ages have ranged from the early teens through thirty-five, with only a few falling outside that window. In other words, the war-zone atmosphere on the border in many ways is a continual reenactment of the colonial raced/gendered violence that came to dominate the landscape of this continent five centuries earlier and spread through the Spanish, Mexican, and American frontiers until they

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interfaced and resulted in the present-day U-S///Mexico border. Border violence exists in the service of the ongoing perpetuation of modernity/coloniality. In Ciudad Juárez, the physical violence has been compounded by city officials and authorities reluctant to thoroughly investigate the murders, who instead most commonly charge that the women possibly led “double lives.”35 Initially, a substantial part of the popular and academic literature produced on the murders, including that on the political Left, followed the government line.36 Most speak of the violence in relation to the conflict of “traditional” rural women coming face to face with the process of rapid modernization prevalent in Juárez and not being able to adapt. Much of this view has also instilled the idea that the murders are themselves a consequence of the growing number of maquiladoras in this border city. A clear example of this has been the popular linking of the murders solely to the maquiladora industry, at the expense of noting other instances of violence toward women. In fact, an early report documenting the initial 160 murders indicated that only about 25 percent of them (at the time) involved women who were or had been employees at a maquiladora.37 The underlying presupposition of such explanations thus restricts analyses to myopic assumptions that the women “worked during the day” but were “party girls” at night. Moreover, it foregrounds the maquiladora industry and by extension re-centers an economically reductionist analysis of capitalism at the expense of other possible explanations. This position, given the authorities’ invocation of the necessity for women to “behave” in a “traditional” ladylike manner, is a direct manifestation of a “virgin/whore” dichotomy that falls directly in line with the “double life” campaign advanced by city officials. It thus implies that the actions of the women themselves led to their premature deaths, and not the violence of the entangled raced/sexed logics and modus operandi of modernity/coloniality. Most newspaper and police accounts follow the aforementioned logic, placing emphasis on the last four decades since the creation of the Border Industrialization Program that brought maquiladoras to the border. Ironically, many “left-leaning” writers have aligned themselves with this logic to advance what they see as a “worker-centered” position against the evils of industrialization and capitalism for the proletariat. This view has the effect of denying the ongoing history of violence on the border/frontier, dating back to expansionist modern/ colonial enterprises that wreaked havoc in the Americas through the imposition of global racial, gender, and ethnic hierarchies, among others. According to Rosa-Linda Fregoso, to argue that the murders are maquila-related is in and

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of itself problematic and an act of violence, as one fails to problematize and instead ahistoricizes patriarchy and the existing socially constructed hierarchy used to subordinate women within male/female relationships in both the private and public spheres.38 Both Fregoso and Monárrez Fragoso argue instead that what we have in Ciudad Juárez is an issue of feminicide,39 which I contend is a racialized feminicide rooted in over five hundred years of contact, the border being the contemporary spatialized manifestation of an ongoing “colonial contact zone.” In fact, in a critical 2001 letter to the international community, SOS Initiative, a women’s group in Ciudad Juárez, made the controversial assertion that there had been more deaths in Ciudad Juárez up to that point than throughout the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas—an actual war zone—yet more attention had been drawn to Mexico’s southern border.40 Their point was not to compare the levels of violence and make a case for which is worse. Instead, their letter was meant to increase the visibility of the sexism and misogyny embedded in society, as exemplified by the normalization of violence against women in the undeclared war zone of Mexico’s other (northern) border, which rendered their deaths illegible. With the exception of Fregoso’s, Monárrez Fragoso’s, and the SOS Initiative’s positions, the majority of the early discourse surrounding the murders in Juárez was both disturbing and problematic. In contrast, the 1999 corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” by Los Marineros del Norte provides a more thorough and critical account, as it openly charges the police with inefficiency in the matter. Though not the only corrido to have been written about the women of Juárez, it is perhaps the first one about these atrocities. In it, Los Marineros speak to the silence of the authorities and society in general regarding the deaths. Voy a dar los pormenores

I am going to give the details

Ya encontraron a otra joven

They’ve just found another young woman

De la mafia de la frontera Violada y asesinada

¿Quiénes son los responsables? Nadie quiere saber nada.

Of the mafia of the border Raped and murdered

Who are the ones responsible?

No one wants to know anything.41

Los Marineros refer to both the increasing number of victims and the police’s reluctance to act despite their hesitant acknowledgment of the atrocities being committed in Juárez, suggesting that all the police know is that there is an amorphous “band” committing the crimes.

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Ya la suma está muy alta

The sum is already very high

Ni las leyes ya descartan

Not even the laws rule out

De los crímenes en Juárez Lo que ahí está sucediendo Solo saben que una banda

De asesinos andan sueltos.

Of the crimes in Juárez

What is happening there

All they know is that a band

Of murderers are on the loose.

Cuentan las autoridades

The authorities say

Que atrapan las jovencitas

Who trap the young women

Después que no las quieren

When they no longer want them

Que son varios los sujetos

Y hasta abusan de su cuerpo Las matan y para el cuento.

That there are several culprits And abuse their bodies

They kill them and end of story.

The corrido further articulates the broader public unwillingness to even discuss the killings, detailing the abuse to the women’s bodies and their “disposability.” Although the corrido is better than the complicit accounts of newspapers and police, it fails in one critical way. In the end, it resorts to a paternalistic attitude when it cautions young women to be careful and watch out for themselves. In this regard, Los Marineros do not differ much from the governor from the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), Francisco Barrios, whose pronouncement at the time “urged parents to know where their daughters were at all times, especially at night.”42 Sung in a slow lamenting tone, like that of an agonized father who has lost his patriarchal command over his own family and is crying at the news of something terrible happening to his children, the corrido concludes: Esto que les canto

This that I sing

Cuídense todas las jovencitas

Take care all young women

Es la pura verdad

Que no les vaya a pasar.

Is the pure truth

That this doesn’t happen to you.

Although the corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” by Los Marineros del Norte, to their credit, does not follow the persistent virgen/puta dichotomy present in other accounts, the paternal attitude in this last stanza is suggestive of the overarching Oedipal father, simply worried and lamenting, as opposed to actively

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engaging in an open condemnation of the feminicide that Fregoso and Monárrez Fragoso assert is prevalent in Ciudad Juárez. The corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” resonates with the corrido titled “La Delgadina,” referenced by Emma Pérez in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), in which Delgadina thwarts the sexual advances of her father and is subsequently blamed for his action: The father’s desire leads to tragedy for both father and daughter. The lesson, however, is for Delgadina who had no choice but to guard her womanhood. Entering sexuality is her burden. Her sexual, enticing body tempted her father— she

becomes the evil Eve, the temptress who caused her father’s ruin. Delgadina, like any other young woman, was supposed to have hidden her sex. She is to blame for having a sexed, female body that a man will desire.43

The corrido of Delgadina embodies the male fantasy, which in the current state of the modern/colonial world and its constitutive Euro/non-Euro racial/gender hierarchies is too often an actual reality. Listening to the corrido of Delgadina and witnessing the violence wreaked upon the women in Ciudad Juárez, we see how sexual violence and misogyny reproduce themselves through acceptance: “It is through patriarchy that women’s desire is silenced.”44 The corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez,” like “La Delgadina,” focuses attention on the sexualized bodies of the women in Ciudad Juárez, even if it does not elucidate that these are not just any young women but rather dark-skinned Indigenous women. Moreover, rather than questioning patriarchy and feminicide, it merely cautions the women to take care of themselves, implicitly acknowledging that the murders will indeed continue, as patriarchy remains intact. As Pérez notes: As a sexed woman, she enters a double bind. There is no way she can guard her

sex enough from male seducers. . . . She is still blamed because she caused her father

to desire her. The patriarchy is not blamed, however. It is left intact. The father is pitied and she is jailed. She exemplifies what will happen to the daughter who refuses patriarchal seduction. . . . The patriarchy leaves few options.45

In the case of Ciudad Juárez, the options have equally been dim. Although an Egyptian migrant and several different “criminal bands” have been arrested for the murders over the years, young brown Indigenous women continue to

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be found raped, mutilated, tortured, and killed. It is the burden of the women to look out for themselves, since systemic and structural change in the form of fundamental challenges to the racialized patriarchy of modernity/coloniality is not a concern, nor is it even discussed among authorities or society at large. Instead patriarchy entraps women, leaving them with few choices, although family and community members have actively organized for years under the banner of ¡Ni Una Más! (Not One More!) In Ciudad Juárez, as in San Ysidro, racialized and gendered border violence in effect becomes a manifestation of a long-festering racial/colonial or frontier violence that leads to the premature death of predominantly dark, Indigenous Mexican bodies.

Desert Blood (2005): “Poor Juárez, So Far from Truth, So Close to Jesus” Near the turn of the twentieth century, President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico famously remarked, “Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos” (Poor Mexico, so far from God, yet so close to the United States). Díaz’s statement was seen as a reflection of his frustration with Mexico’s presumed “inability” to “develop” (or “modernize,” as was the discourse of the time) like its neighbor to the north. He would turn his frustration into policy by importing a team of white American and European advisors, referred to by many as “los Científicos” (the Scientists), under the assumption that Mexico’s own Indigenous and mestiz@ population did not have the capacity to bring on the modernization for which he yearned. This personal pursuit eventually cost him the presidency with the onset of the Mexican Revolution at the hands of Mexico’s majority Indigenous and mestiz@ population. A century later, there are those who similarly advance the hegemonic discourse of modernization and development and point to the maquiladora industry as a model that has helped, and will continue to help, Mexico rise among other “developing” nations. Perhaps ironically, most critical commentators charge that “development” in Mexico is in fact happening and that this is itself the problem, as it comes with a high cost: the displacement of Mexico’s poor, particularly Indigenous communities in the south. Modernization and development have ultimately been the discourse and logic of modernity/coloniality over the last two centuries. Yet even in Mexico many analysts uphold the Western monological discourse of development, even two decades after the Zapatista uprising in Chi-

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apas, which was carefully planned to coincide with the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Zapatista rebellion is an indication of the failure of these economic policy initiatives, which directly dismantled some of the constitutional protections won during the Revolution, particularly Article 27, which protected communal property interests. Mercedes Olivera, for example, suggests that the ongoing murders in Ciudad Juárez “demonstrate the failure of the neoliberal system to provide either development or a model of democracy” for Mexico.46 While her commentary is critical of neoliberal economic policies, it is easy to misread her argument as implicitly assuming that such policies, if simply readjusted or properly applied, can indeed help the “developing” country in question to lift itself out of the implied backward “traditions” (local patriarchy) that hold it back. In other words, critics must be careful not to reify the logics of modernity/coloniality in their own opposition. In another context, Spivak adds: Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness but into a violent shuttling that is the displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism and development.47

Development in this light is thus a classic case of what Spivak calls “White men saving brown women from brown men.”48 Development, or an imagined linear progression into the ranks of the “first world,” is seen as the antidote when in fact it is the problem. From the perspective of racial/colonial subjects, what Mexico needs is not more modernity, for modernity has in fact been present in Mexico, only it has been experienced more in the form of its underside: that is, as coloniality. In other words, discourses of development and modernization are in the service of modernity/coloniality. To this conversation, Spivak further adds that the latest discursive innovation of capital has been the attempt to link the language of gender to that of development, still another form of complicity in the silencing of the colonized women. “In this phase of capitalism/feminism, it is capitalist women saving the female subaltern.”49 However, “in an effort to combat the dominant discourse” and the binaries it imposes—women/whores, development/backwardness, tradition/modernity—along with the attendant violence in Ciudad Juárez, “local groups developed an alternative strategy emphasizing existing gender inequalities which are creating an environment where such gender-based crimes can be

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committed with impunity.”50 It is at this crucial intersection that Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005) interjects itself with an allusion to Porfirio’s famous statement that instead references the unresolved and ongoing killings of women as well as the Mount Cristo Rey statue that overlooks the desert border towns of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua: “Poor Juárez, so far from Truth, so close to Jesus.”51 This bathroom graffiti, which appears time and time again in Desert Blood, guides the efforts of the protagonist Ivon Villa on her mission to find out who the killers are. The novel, written by a native of El Paso, is grounded in the story of Ivon Villa, a Chicana lesbian doctoral student at UCLA who returns for a brief visit to her hometown El Paso in order to adopt a newborn baby from a young expectant mother in Ciudad Juárez with the help of her social worker cousin Ximena. As Ivon negotiates entanglements with multiple (old and current) lesbian lovers, the novel takes a sudden turn when the expectant mother turns up dead before her meeting with Ivon, her unborn fetus ripped from her belly. Within days of this traumatic experience, Ivon’s younger sister Irene also goes missing. What was to be a quick trip to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez amidst a pending dissertation deadline becomes a frightening experience among the various forces at “play” in the abduction, torture, rape, mutilation, and killing of mostly poor, young, brown women.52 In the process, Ivon’s dissertation, initially on bathroom graffiti, suddenly becomes an entry point to thinking about the murders, as misogynist bathroom scrawlings uncover codes/secrets relating to the ongoing murders as well as intersections with pornography, the maquiladora industry, the police, and a whole other set of characters. This novel can be read in various ways. A quick read can yield a reasonable critique that, contrary to their foregrounding in the book’s subtitle, the “Juárez Murders” simply become but a backdrop to a tale of lesbian love and a woman’s quest to find her missing sister. One might be inclined to critique a narrative whose main point appears to be to suggest that the brutal killings of women over the last twenty years are not just an issue for Ciudad Juárez but affect women in El Paso and New Mexico too, as Gaspar de Alba raises this issue often, at the risk of subtly tapping into an unconscious presupposition about the value of United-statesian lives in a global hierarchy that places them above all others. Some may read Desert Blood as saying, “Hey, wake up! People from the U-S are dying too!” as if this now makes feminicide a problem to worry about. However, to do so would by extension reify or benignly accept the idea that the lives of the poor, young, brown women are not worth all that much, at least not

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when compared with “American” lives. Through such a reading, one could even argue that the novel has the effect of displacing the violence committed against the women of Ciudad Juárez. However, a more nuanced reading of this novel, and of Gaspar de Alba’s trajectory and work, reveals much more than what is visible at first glance. The fact that Desert Blood is written by a Chicana is important, as Norma Alarcón has argued in a different context: “That is, in the Mexican-descent continuum of meanings, Chicana is still the name that brings into focus the interrelatedness of class/race/gender into play and forges the link to actual subaltern native women.”53 While Gaspar de Alba’s narrative may seem problematic at first, it instead points to the entrapment of young women on the border in a double bind. Similarly, one can also read the novel as the creative rendition of a Chicana author who strategically makes use of conflicting ideological and structural impingements in the service of enabling ethical positions and commitments vis-à-vis the young, brown-skinned, Indigenous women disappearing in Ciudad Juárez. Read in this light, Desert Blood emerges from what would otherwise be a superficial reading and “brings into focus” a complexity of issues at play in this part of the U-S///Mexico border. As the novel progresses and the reader walks through various theories regarding the ongoing feminicides, Gaspar de Alba foregrounds multiple questions of value. That is, through the development of her main character Ivon’s shifting dissertation topic, Gaspar de Alba brings attention to the value (or rather devaluation) of women’s work, women’s lives, and women’s bodies. What we, the readers, are provided with is a thoroughly theorized Marxist consideration of the subalternization of brown female bodies at the violent intersection of modernity/coloniality and the militarization of the U-S///Mexico border that deems “muchachas del sur” completely expendable. That these killings are happening on the border is key, Gaspar de Alba explains, because it provides a “cost benefit way of displacing non-productive/reproductive surplus labor while simultaneously protecting the border from infiltration by brown breeding female bodies.”54 Luce Irigaray long ago argued that women’s value is posited as a commodity to be exchanged between men, which itself, in turn, reproduces more value both by giving birth to labor power and also in that its own value is flexible, determined by the worth given to it by men’s desire. Women “have value only in that they serve as the possibility of, and potential benefit in, relations among men.”55 Moreover, Irigaray argues, “the circulation of women among men is what establishes the operations of society, at least of patriarchal society.”56 Yet

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what we see in Juárez, as advanced by Ivon Villa’s newfound dissertation topic, is that the cost of that reproduction is deemed too high, and it is not just any women who are being disposed of. The sexual value of women’s bodies is used until completely depleted. Seen as expendable, the bodies eventually become more valuable, or less expensive, through their disappearance—in other words, through the premature death of these young, dark-skinned, Indigenous women. Melissa Wright also writes about the various understandings of value with regard to women within a patriarchal society generally and Juárez in particular. When it comes to the relative value of the potential breeder / woman worker, “in fact, that worker is viewed as intrinsically designed to be temporary, because the value that she brings to the workplace diminishes over time, rather than increasing.”57 She, the female maquila worker, is seen as not worth the time, energy, salary, or investment of skills training simply because “they can get pregnant, and that’s the threat they pose when they come this close to the border.”58 Her sexed—and, on the border, sexed/raced—body becomes a liability, not just in terms of becoming unproductive labor, but in terms of becoming reproductive at the U-S’s doorstep. As new “muchachas del sur” are displaced from their home regions by NAFTA and make their way to the U-S///Mexico border, whether to work at the maquilas or not, these poor, brown, Indigenous women are seen as having lived out their utility, their use value, and are left only with sexual value, until that too runs out. Wright, like other commentators, also points to the way many officials “frequently resorted to the age-old ‘blame the victim’ strategy . . . a ‘double life’ campaign, a discursive strategy for thrashing the victims by linking them to prostitution and declaring them unworthy of all the attention.”59 At this juncture, the issue of women’s public visibility takes on a different dimension of value: “The discourse of prostitution as the degraded outcome of the public woman is therefore a technology for normalizing female disappearance in a context where creating a sense of a normal city is valuable.”60 An illuminating illustration of this point, Wright notes, is the passing of a bipartisan law in Ciudad Juárez that “minimized sentences for rapists who were ‘provoked’ by their victims, while . . . fully exempting rapists from conviction if the victim were a prostitute.”61 Irigaray, however, does note one distinct and crucial understanding of the worth of women once they are mothers: “As both natural value [the ability to reproduce] and use value [labor], mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order” within a patriarchal society.62 While victims’ mothers in Juárez understand this

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axiom of patriarchy and have organized against the killings by invoking their motherhood, they nonetheless get threatened with violence against their lives just the same. Several victims’ mothers have reportedly been killed, along with multiple witnesses as well as lawyers who have also been disappeared or shot for organizing against the feminicides and police impunity. In the concluding chapters of Desert Blood, as the murders continue and Ivon Villa’s dissertation begins falling into place, she makes several assertions that bring her Chicana lens into focus. Gaspar de Alba writes, “In a society where women are second-class citizens . . . where cows and cars are worth more than the lives of women, we are talking about the complete devaluation of the feminine gender, as well as the utter depreciation of the female laboring class.”63 In an earlier moment of clarity, as Ivon thinks about her still-missing sister, she adds, “The irony of it: an assembly worker disassembled in the desert. Dearest mother of god, she thought, maybe that’s what they are doing to Irene.”64 Here, the disassembling of women’s bodies and the exclamation “Dearest mother of god” can be understood as a Chicana’s invocation of the memory of Coyolxauhqui, who was dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli for being seen as a traitor to her people. In this regard Norma Alarcón notes, “In the Americas, then, the native woman as ultimate sign of the potential reproduction of barbarie (savagery) has served as the sign of consensus for most others, men and women. Women under the penalty of the double-bind charge of ‘betrayal’ of the fatherland (in the future tense) and the mother tongues (in the past tense), are often compelled to acquiesce with the ‘civilizing’ new order in male terms.”65 Similarly, the mothers and families of the victims have felt themselves placed in a double bind when it comes to the murders and their representation. The result has been the need to ask U-S authorities for support in the investigation of the murders and police complicity, at the risk of charges of “betrayal” by other Mexicans; they find themselves trapped between patriarchy and imperialism. However, to these charges, as well as those of calling in “White men to save brown women from brown men,” another Chicana, Representative Hilda Solis from Los Angeles, has asserted that this is not a matter of imperial benevolence but rather an issue in which the U-S must take some responsibility, as U-S companies have contributed to the environment in which these murders have occurred and as families on both sides of the border have been affected, thereby making it a binational issue. Despite Representative Solis’s welcome intervention, we must remember, however, that it is not solely the maquilas that

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are to blame, but rather the entanglement of the racialized and gendered logics of modernity/coloniality. In this regard, cultural texts like the corrido “Los Crímenes de Juárez” and the novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, along with other examples of cultural and knowledge production, go a long way toward not just “giving voice” to raced/sexed colonial subjects, but rather ensuring that their own voices are heard. In Ciudad Juárez, as in the case of sati in India, the young, brown Indigenous bodies themselves are the voices, which are not to be read or interpreted, but rather to be heard in their own right and listened to in their violence-shattering decolonial condemnation: ¡NI UNA MÁS!

Conclusion Violence on the U-S///Mexico border exists as background and soundtrack to the everyday lives of raced/sexed colonial subjects. As long as the geopolitical and socioeconomic boundaries exist, cultural texts will also continue to provide us with alternative accounts that challenge the hegemonic narratives. Fronteriz@s will continue speaking to and against border violence when and as it emerges in new forms. Cultural workers as knowledge producers will continue conceptualizing, creating, and conveying evolving decolonial counternarratives and strategies within their verses and lyrics. Thus, one cannot discount the role of cultural texts or cultural/knowledge production as counterdiscourse or contrapunto to the violence faced in everyday realities along the border. The corrido fronterizo and the Chicana novel provide us with different accounts, operating through distinct logics and epistemic points of departure that are used to make sense of and bring meaning to everyday lived experience. For the most part, life along the U-S///Mexico border is permeated with violence in various forms. It is out of violence itself that the social and cultural divide was created, only later incorporating and appropriating the geospatial dimensions of the Ríos Bravo, Tijuana, and Gila, and other rugged terrain. However, although rivers only flow in one direction, as does hegemonic discourse, when the contents of any river are so abundant that they can no longer be contained, the river flows into new terrain. The water eventually gives rise to new life. In a sense, the rivers that are now the border between the United States and Mexico flow in various directions. They contradict the modern conventions of geopolitics, and in doing so they flow and spill over, north and south, south and north, east and west, Western and non-Western, exceeding the limitations

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of legitimized knowledge to give rise to new life, decolonial knowledges, and voices that will not allow themselves to remain silenced. In the following chapter I turn to broad and explicit forms of epistemic and cartographic disobedience, challenges to the violence of the U-S///Mexico border from voices that openly question the legitimacy of national-territorial borders, departing from an Indigenous-centered perspective. For many who rally around the cry of “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” there is an acknowledgment that anti-Mexican sentiment is indeed a form of antiIndianism that predates the existence of the current national-territorial boundary between the two nations. Morever, just as Ortíz-González has argued that El Paso is an invisibilized border city in the service of somewhere else, so too is border violence rendered invisible in the service of the continued perpetuation of the raced/gendered logics of modernity/coloniality. The sonic texts in the following chapter accordingly emerge from other fronteriz@s who have sought to think, write, and produce music and knowledge from the border itself, as a way of countering erasure and bringing the long present into focus.

5 “The Borders Crossed Us” Anti-Mexican Racism as Anti-Indianism What must be done is to restore this dream to its proper time, and this time is the period during which eighty thousand natives were killed . . . and to its proper place, and this place is an island of four million people, at the center of which no real relationship can be established . . . where the only masters are lies and demagogy.

S

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

grow louder and louder. The surrounding brush violently sways from side to side, nearly uprooted. A helicopter hovering overhead nears and you hear the desperate words:

TRONG WHIRLING SOUNDS

Levántate compadre / ¿Qué pasa? /

¿Oyes ese zumbido? /

Sí, compadre. . . . /

Es el helicóptero. . . . /

Métete debajo de esos matorrales / de volada, apúrate. /

Híjole, se me hace que ya me agarraron /

Eso es lo de menos compadre / se me hace que ya nos llevó. . . . / la que nos trajo compadre.

(Get up, compadre / What’s happening? / Do you hear that noise? / Yes, compa-

dre. . . . / It’s the helicopter. . . . / Get under those bushes / quickly, hurry up. / Oh shit, I think they got me. / That’s the least of it, compadre / I think the one that’s taking us away / is the one that brought us here, compadre.)

These words are the opening exchange from the 1990 hit song by Tijuana No!, “La Migra” (The Border Patrol), whose cartography and soundscape bear an eerie resemblance to the terrain just blocks from my childhood home near the

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Tijuana River estuary, where the metal wall that makes up the U-S///Mexico border in the area known as Friendship Park extends into the Pacific Ocean, emitting a rhythmic rumbling sound as wave after wave crashes against its corrugated steel. Elsewhere, the swooshing sounds of a torrential river’s currents gush through the trenches and valleys of the Rio Grande basin, increasing in strength and force as the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, and in early June 2000, to the fleeting sound of “Agarra la cuerda. . . .” (Grab the rope. . . .), the rapid waters swallow two migrants attempting to cross the border near Brownsville, Texas. Much like the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre in 1984, this horrifying scene, along with the accompanying screams and gasps of worried onlookers and would-be rescuers, was caught on a news reporter’s camera and broadcast in national Spanish-language news for days to come, making local U-S news only in passing. While these were nowhere near the only drowning victims in that region of the border, nor the only ones caught on camera, in this case the last gulps of air into the drowning victims’ lungs and the subsequent bubbles were audible to those on the riverbanks.1 Such are the sonic geographies etched on the landscape of walls and rivers along the U-S///Mexico border by long histories of state-sanctioned and extralegal violence. In this chapter, my aim is to make audible the materiality of the U-S///Mexico border and to understand the contested nature not only of the region itself but also of the epistemic and cartographic disobedience embedded in narratives that have sought to make sense of the borderlands. The purpose of engaging with sonic geographies and considering “border music,” with San Ysidro and Ciudad Juárez in mind, is to better understand the implications and stakes of the salient debates around the spatial and temporal frameworks used in the study of the U-S///Mexico border. Specifically, through a close reading of three songs—Tijuana No!’s “Stolen at Gunpoint,” featuring Kid Frost (1998); Los Tigres del Norte’s “Somos Más Americanos” (2001); and Aztlán Underground’s “Decolonize” (1998)—I argue for a spatiotemporal frame distinct from the dominant focus on 1848 in much Chicano studies and border studies literature.2 A different spatiotemporal frame elucidates the lived experiences of fronteriz@s and in turn dislodges the designation of San Diego and El Paso as border cities, in favor of thinking from a decolonial cartography of open wounds. If we are to fully appreciate the soundscapes outlined above, we must consider how border theory has been approached given the geopolitics of knowledge, or where one is “thinking from” in relationship to power. Anzaldúa’s open wounds of the borderlands, forged in blood, like those I knew growing up in San Ysidro,

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are grounded in the historical and material realities of the present-day twothousand-mile geopolitical divide but extend to include many borders—racial, sexual, linguistic, and psychological, among others. That is, the borderlands that define and divide places and populations, while in one sense “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” are also very real material sites of conflict.3 Thinking, feeling, and speaking from “this thin edge of barbwire” she calls home, Anzaldúa points to the borderlands’ many inhabitants as those whom borders fail to easily define: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the mulatto, the mongrel, the mestiza, etc. Following Anzaldúa, a broad array of scholars have deployed the trope and metaphor of “the border” in the service of highlighting multiple crossings, hybridities, and borders in their respective objects of study and disciplines.4 What is often missing in such invocations of Anzaldúa, however, are the material histories and legacies of violence constitutive of her articulation of a critique of modernity/ coloniality’s juridical-political partitioning of the globe into geopolitical units (nation-states). Anzaldúa’s distinct epistemic location and point of departure is reflected in her graphic corporeal-cartographic depiction of the “staking [of ] fence rods in her [Mother Earth’s] flesh” as a way of visualizing the embodied experience of colonization and national-territorial boundaries.

The Borderlands Academic Complex and Cultural Production While the metaphor of the border has generated several insightful analyses, some of its applications instead obfuscate the workings of power and violence that are formative in the work of Anzaldúa. An example of the oftenproblematic uses that I refer to as the borderlands academic complex can be found when, for example, Josh Kun writes of “the aural border” as one of mixing, hybridity, and fluidity of languages, genres, and sounds, seemingly devoid of the conflictual history and colonial encounters that inform such mixing.5 By borderlands academic complex, I mean politically safe and institutionally supported adaptations of Anzaldúa’s border that—even if inadvertently—conceal power, for they remain within the epistemological-cartographic prison of modernity/ coloniality. Institutional support is received through acclaim, circulation, and awards: a hegemonic counterinsurgency strategy whose function is to dislodge its counterpart, an emerging epistemically and cartographically disobedient discourse on violence and the militarization of the border that began gaining

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currency in the mid-1990s.6 To be clear, my argument is not reducible to a humanities / social science divide. José David Saldívar’s “transfrontera contact zone,” for example, draws on Mary Louise Pratt to make colonization visible and is thus cultural studies work in the tradition of Anzaldúa. Instead, the epistemological-cartographic prison I am referring to is one in which even that which presents itself as critical discourse remains committed to the spatiotemporal logics and trappings of modernity/coloniality. Rather than examining the cultural production of, for example, Pepe Villarino and Oscar Galván on the San Ysidro massacre, Chunky Sánchez on the community takeover and creation of Chicano Park in 1970, or Sánchez’s more pertinent song “Pocho” (1979), Kun points to La Pocha Nostra and suggests that “the border is mobile and fluctuating, no longer bound to one specific geographic configuration; it belongs to a continental map of communities in motion and cultures in contact.”7 For Kun, the “musical and technological mergers” embodied in the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the “hybridized and recycled” sounds of rock en español stand in contradistinction to the sonic geographies along the U-S///Mexico border, in the form of the familiar shrieks of desperation in response to the state-sanctioned violence of policing people’s movements across man-made geopolitical boundaries, the racialized feminicides, or the extralegal violence of the civilian patrols. Moreover, the only things visibly recycled in San Ysidro are the corrugated steel landing mats once used in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq that now make up the bulk of the U-S///Mexico border wall in the area. Absent in much of the work by the many practitioners of the borderlands academic complex are the embodied understandings and the intersections of violence and colonization central to Anzaldúa’s theorizations. As addressed in chapter 4, corridos have long narrated the border, making it audible to listeners both close to and far from the two-thousand-mile line.8 Yet in seeking to archive a border soundscape or genealogy, “understanding the aural border as both an archaeology and a genealogy of ‘subjugated knowledges’ or ‘disqualified knowledges’ that unveils the many multivalent ways the very idea of the border gets constructed and disseminated through sound and music,” Kun only briefly points to corridos.9 While, to his credit, this can be read as a desire to expand the scope of what is understood as border music, since corridos have long held this distinction, his frame of reference using rock en español as “transborder performance” reveals his conceptualization of the border in relation to the borderlands academic complex—the latter itself functioning

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to “border” actual lived experiences and cultural and knowledge production along the national-territorial divide. In his widely circulated article “The Aural Border” (2000), Kun opts for the hybrid sounds of rock en español and the audio tracks accompanying the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra collective as markers of a future in which the border is erased through the unrelenting mixing of peoples, cultures, and sounds. He argues that “in terms of musical geography and sonic migration, the ‘borderless future’ that Gómez-Peña performs and theorizes has already been realized by the music of rock en español itself, which has been a key point of cultural contact—a sort of musical hyperspace—between Latino/a communities on both sides of the border.”10 It is important to note that the performance art and written work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña (along with that of Néstor García Canclini) has, indeed, been cited by some authors such as Ortíz-González and Patricia Price as illustrative of a depoliticized claim to cross-border hybridity that I identify as the orientation of the borderlands academic complex.11 However, despite Kun’s romance with it, Gómez-Peña’s work is much more complex and indeed exemplary of the constant tension between the desire for a borderless world and the stark material realities of the actual existence of border walls written in violence. As early as 1990 in Border Brujo, for example, Gómez-Peña’s science fiction–inspired performance tells of a prophecy of the future existence of maquiladoras built right on the border, bisected by the national-territorial boundary, with the factory floors on the Mexican side and the corporate headquarters on the United States side.12 In this “twin-plant,” Mexican laborers are relegated to the assembly line south of the border, while managers and supervisors are able to cross freely between the United States and Mexico. The scenario painted by Gómez-Peña has yet to happen. Yet the onetime-projected binational Gateway of the Americas mall in San Ysidro (later renamed more simply as the Las Americas mall) actually came close to it. What is key here, though, is that Gómez-Peña, like Anzaldúa, does not lose sight of the materiality of geopolitical and economic difference signaled by the border. So, while rock en español and other musical formations such as the Monterrey-based rap of Control Machete or the ska / punk rock sounds of Maldita Vecindad are indeed as “transnational” as Nike or McDonald’s, here I trace a different genealogy or sonic geography made audible not by mobility across borders or hybridity at borders, as posited by Kun (and the borderlands academic complex), but by its rootedness and its insistence on the materiality of the border and on another cartography and calendar of knowledge altogether.13

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In other words, I am interested in how anti-border musics reconceptualize the inherited spatiotemporal frames of the modern/colonial nation-state through a focus on the embodied experience of crossing borders and being crossed by borders. What, then, does a different cartography and calendar of knowledge sound or look like? As I seek to answer this question, corridos enter and are woven through this account, and they merit consideration, but the story and song do not end there.

Corridos and Chican@ Cultural Production Focusing again on cultural production as knowledge production, in this chapter I engage with corridos and other forms of border music that interrogate border violence and the subjugation of non-European knowledges as part of the realm of “culture” and “folklore.”14 I posit the early to mid-1990s as central to understanding shifts in Chican@ popular culture and cultural production, as a burgeoning recession gave rise to a renewed wave of anti-migrant sentiment felt most prominently in California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, long before the creation of the Minutemen Project or the Tea Party that led to the election of Trump. The rise of political mobilizations among California’s Chican@/Latin@ youth in this period also corresponded with the three main songs that constitute the focus of this chapter—and which themselves were arguably inspired by and reflective of the political currents at the time. California’s Proposition 187 in particular is often upheld as the prime catalyst for a renewed wave of Chican@ movement activity and attendant cultural production. Instead, I argue that a distinct spatiotemporal frame, foregrounding 1992 and protests against quincentennial celebrations of Columbus, provides a crucial lens for understanding cultural production in the borderlands at the time. I thus consider the creation of the U-S///Mexico border as one interface of an interstate system and its current militarization (processes that are both constituted in violence) to be the sociopolitical and historical context marking the borderlands as a contested terrain and a site of epistemic and cartographic disobedience and resistance. Accordingly, many scholars have pointed to various types of “folk” music as serving an important role in the conveyance of popular incidents to a broad audience and constituting a form of knowledge.15 Corridos have long been noted as the “informative press of the people,”16 yet the predominantly male heterosexualist positionality of most corridistas has often reproduced impingements upon

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Mexicana/Chicana subjects.17 Not surprisingly, such masculinist cultural production often mirrors much Mexicano/Chicano political and scholarly emphasis on a presupposed universal subject, assumed to be male, able to enter into a “contract among equals” (also presumably other males), an emphasis reflected in the heightened attention to 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as the birth of the Chicano as a historical subject. This position is ironically mirrored in much of the discourse of migrant rights advocates, including those responding to the civilian border patrols in San Diego County, who often are content with simply invoking the territorial claim of a previous nation-state with its own colonial independence as the basis of defending migrants’ rights. It can be seen most clearly, for example, in pronouncements such as “This used to be Mexico!” often witnessed among legal observers shadowing the civilian patrols. Needless to say, the above position also stands in stark contrast to the embodied understanding of colonization etched particularly on the female body through both racial and sexual violence, as noted above by Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminist scholars who have also drawn on the U-S///Mexico border as a source of political and intellectual inspiration. As such, Norma Alarcón has argued that claims to any nation-state (Chicano or otherwise) are limited, for the realms of the law and economy have always benefited the ruling elite, usually men. In contrast, Chicanas or raced/sexed women have had to rely on representations in cultural texts.18 For Alarcón, then, nationalist or nation-state projects inevitably relegate women to the “home” or the private realm in the same way the discourses of the civilian border patrols and the officials of Ciudad Juárez do, without allowing the means or spaces for women to voice themselves. It follows, then, that other transnational sounds as cultural texts have also shaped Mexican@ and Chican@ experiences and their epistemic disobedience, despite receiving less scholarly attention.19 While recognizing border music’s historically masculinist/paternalistic limitations, I nonetheless argue for the possibility that corridos and other artistic/ cultural productions and texts can provide alternative ways of explaining how it is we come to know our social world. I take heed of María Lugones’s call for a “decolonial feminism” that recognizes the possibility of “male” feminist positionings and articulations through a critique of the rigid male/female binary constituted in what she calls a “colonial/modern gender system.”20 In short, I argue that cultural texts’ ways of conceptualizing, creating, and conveying the world around them provide alternative epistemic views and “ceremonial discourses” that simultaneously articulate and disrupt the existing geography and raced/

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gendered violence constitutive of la frontera.21 Epistemic disobedience exists in the face of the juridical text and dominant state-figured narratives that foreground a naturalized sense of a territorial boundary and corresponding national identity for the sake of “security” and the protection of national interests in San Ysidro, Ciudad Juárez, and elsewhere, however they are imagined or dictated by the necessity of the times. September 11, 2001, Operation Gatekeeper before that, and even Operation Wetback in the 1950s, for example, have served to further “naturalize” an otherwise unnatural boundary. A related argument, then, is that the centrality given by many male Chicano scholars to 1848 reproduces the epistemological prison of modernity/coloniality and logics complicit with colonization as lived through or experienced by the raced/sexed body. How, then, does the border itself figure not only in corridos, but also in the sonic geographies of various (cross-)border or “transnational” groups that cater to Mexican, Chican@, and other audiences? My analysis of the songs mentioned above highlights certain limits and implications of the borderlands academic complex. In particular, the three tracks not only “cross” the border or make the Rio Grande and the helicopters hovering over San Ysidro audible, but also take a firm political, intellectual, and indeed decolonial and ethical stand against both the U-S///Mexico border and the modern/colonial juridical concept of nation-states that boundaries demarcate more broadly. Specifically, through a close reading of these three songs, I attempt to delineate what I call a decolonial anti-border politics that places bordered violence front and center and highlights the existence of cultural texts articulating an Indigenous and feminist sensibility, cartography, and calendar.

Chican@ Studies and the Sonic Geographies of the U-S///Mexico Border In a 2006 article on Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, Héctor Calderón aimed to move “beyond scholarly, linguistic, and political borders” when he noted that “Chicana and Chicano studies as practiced in the United States has become, especially in literary scholarship, almost exclusively an English-language study of the U.S. Southwest.”22 For Calderón, “U.S. scholars engaged in ‘border studies’ more often than not stop at the border. The same is true of Mexican scholars engaged in the Mexican version of border studies.” For many on both sides, “a clear political and disciplinary borderline divides the

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greater Mexican cultural diaspora that has existed in North America since the sixteenth century.”23 While Calderón focuses on a particular rock band, Maldita Vecindad, he provides a longer and more expansive genealogy of crossborder music than does Kun, noting that Maldita Vecindad was influenced by and began as a group that often invoked “the music of Pérez Prado, Tin Tan, Lalo Guerrero, and Don Tosti fused . . . with rock, punk, ska, Algerian, and Moroccan rhythms to end up playing ‘un funky mambo, o la cumbia punk o el chacha reggae.’”24 Calderón’s genealogy thus charts a cartography and calendar distinct from the crossing of the U-S///Mexico border post-1848 that has been paradigmatic of Chican@ studies. The three songs here offer us an opportunity to intervene, with and beyond Calderón, in both Chican@ studies and border studies debates, while bringing the two fields into conversation with Quijano’s and Lugones’s respective work on the coloniality of power and gender. As I have been showing, the U-S///Mexico border has been stereotypically associated with violence and conflict, which itself is often distorted by historical accounts and official information outlets alike.25 In the United States, the discourse of “border violence” is constructed with a U-S-centered, xenophobic, and anti-“migrant” emphasis on hypersensationalized stories of immigrant invasion and drug violence. It usually projects a problematic discourse of “anarchy” and “lawlessness” associated with drug and human trafficking, divorced from the historical and material political economy that makes such extraofficial business enterprises possible. Spanish-language news outlets, in contrast, tend to only serve local markets. As with knowledge production generally, where “if you publish in Spanish, normally publications do not go beyond the local circuit,” until recently the same could be argued about music, though this is increasingly less the case.26 Although corridos are primarily written and sung in Spanish, José David Saldívar nonetheless notes in reference to Los Tigres del Norte that “border music is simultaneously national and transnational in that it affects everyday life in the local (Silicon Valley) region and thematizes the limits of the national perspective in American Studies.”27 Moreover, in the case of corridos generally, and the music I consider below, the content of the songs often draws on the lived experiences of Mexican@s on both sides of the frontera. The groups in this study also voice their lyrics in Spanish, English, Spanglish, and a few Indigenous languages. I illustrate, however, that rather than assuming a subordinate position in relation to the hierarchies of language and knowledge, they function as critical interventions expressing lived experiences of the U-S///Mexico border. The purpose, then, is not to merely translate

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the ska-punk-rap-rock-corridos’ lyrics, but rather to attempt to elucidate the epistemic and cartographic disobedience present in a particular phrase shared by the three songs. Moreover, I will examine what epistemic and political work is present in the three musical ofrendas and what they offer us for rethinking geopolitical, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. “Voz de nuestra gente / Un grito reprimido . . . Eso es el corrido”

In the previous chapter, we saw how the corridos “La Delgadina” and “Los Crímenes de Juárez” addressed sexual violence, albeit by placing the onus on women for their own safety. This chapter focuses on corridos and other songs that shed light on the violence and politicized nature of the shared border between the United States and Mexico, while simultaneously shifting the epistemic and spatiotemporal frame through which we more commonly understand this border. In contrast to the work of leading corrido scholars noted in chapter 4, Celedonio Serrano Martínez (1973) does not trace the corrido’s poetic form to the Spanish décima, arguing instead that it is derived from Nahuatl (Aztec) poetry, or la itotolca náhuatl.28 Chican@ corrido scholars such as Paredes (1958), brothers José David Saldívar (1986, 1997) and Ramón Saldívar (1990), HerreraSobek (1990), Arteaga (1985), and Limón (1992) have paid equal attention to corridos written on both sides of the Río Bravo / Rio Grande.29 Although some distinguish between Mexican and Chican@ corridos, others uphold a sense of continuity between the two. Here, I am not concerned with making such distinctions, if they indeed exist, but rather with looking at how corridos written about, from, and on both sides of la frontera are subsequently reflected in other musical genres that also consider the U-S///Mexico border as a central problematic. Importantly, the corrido tradition, according to Paredes, is grounded in the narration of histories of border violence. This is precisely an element that binds the three songs that are the focus of this chapter. Los Tigres del Norte—considered by their fans to be “los reyes del pueblo,” the kings of the people—do indeed symbolize the simultaneously national and transnational nature of corridos. After their own crossing of the border in the 1960s and relocation in San José, California, it would be several locally produced albums later that their 1974 song “Contrabando y Traición” (Contraband and Betrayal)—sometimes popularly referred to as “La Camelia,” after one of its main protagonists, and later rereleased on an album of the same name, Contrabando y Traición (1988)—would make them a household name. In part,

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the appeal of “Contrabando y Traición” rests in the protagonist Camelia, who, unlike most female characters in Mexican songs at the time, emerges as an active agent in determining her own circumstances. After crossing the U-S///Mexico border with her lover Emilio and delivering a drug shipment, she shoots him and takes both their cuts of the money rather than allow him to return to another lover in San Francisco. The 1974 song is both popular and pointed to as marking the beginning of a particular brand of corrido, the narcocorrido, with its open and brazen lyrics about the trafficking world, although prior songs had made occasional references to the industry.30 Yet, while it spawned a whole genre of its own, including several follow-up corridos and movies detailing the exploits of Camelia, another important aspect of the song is its popularly recognizable opening lines: “Salieron de San Ysidro / procedentes desde Tijuana. / Traían las llantas del carro / repletas de hierba mala” (They left San Ysidro / coming from Tijuana. / They had the car’s wheels / full of bad herb [marijuana]). The purpose here is not to dwell on the drug trafficking, which, as explained in the introduction, often serves to obfuscate other relations of violence, but to highlight that for Mexican migrants and Chican@s alike, San Ysidro has long been etched in the popular imaginary as the border-city counterpart to Tijuana. Following their first Grammy Award in 1988 for the album Gracias! . . . América . . . Sin Fronteras (1986), in Corridos Prohibidos (1989) Los Tigres debuted the song appropriately titled “El Corrido,” as a tribute to the genre that made them famous. As noted in chapter 4 but worth repeating here, the opening verses attempt to illustrate some of the traits, characteristics, and qualities of the corrido as a vehicle for social and political protest, while making vivid references to the Río Bravo / Rio Grande, which forms the border proper through Texas and part of New Mexico and is often seen as the region that birthed this musical form. Como la corriente De un río crecido

Que baja en torrente

Like the current

Of a swollen river

That flows torrentially

Impetuoso y bravío.

Impetuous and fierce.

Voz de nuestra gente

Voice of our people

Un grito reprimido

A repressed scream

Eso es el corrido.

That is the corrido.

Un canto valiente

A valiant song

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For Los Tigres, it is through the corrido that the voice of the people is heard, rising from a repressed call to attain the ferocity of a river, unstoppable and daring. With this force the corrido tears through the blank pages that omit a community’s story—voicing the histories once silenced in the written record of master narratives. The corrido is thus a valiant song that carries with it the story of a people. The above characterization is one of creative dissent, of a form that serves to illuminate a popular history or history from below. Los Tigres del Norte’s corrido continues: Voz del oprimido

Voice of the oppressed

Calificativo

Qualificative

Un retrato hablado Y hasta exagerado.

A spoken portrait

And even exaggerated.

Tribuna que ha sido

Tribune that has been

Ese es el corrido

That is the corrido

Que me han enseñado.

That I have been taught.

Del pueblo juzgado Ese es el corrido

By the people judged

That is the corrido

The corrido serves as voice for the oppressed, whose force lies in their collective strength, like that of a grown river. The corrido is poetically referred to as a spoken portrait. In this image the corrido captures a moment the way a photograph or painting does and then relates it, bringing it to life, conceptualizing, creating, and conveying the world around it. Here it is useful to remember the vignettes that opened this chapter, the rushing of the river itself, the fierce gushing sounds. While this song acknowledges that at times a corrido can exaggerate an account, its transparency serves to remind the audience that often within colorful tales there nonetheless exist important facts to relay. The second stanza further illuminates the way in which the corrido is grounded in an oral tradition, passed on from corridista to corridista. Each generation of corridista thus exercises his or her obligation to the people by publicly reciting the verses passed on by previous generations of corridistas, as would storytellers of itotolcas náhuatl and other Indigenous traditions. In other words, corridos, like the sounds of the river that tell us tales of the many lives lost in its currents, speak to us and share with us subjugated knowledges of U-S///Mexico border crossings and many other migrant tribulations.

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Los Tigres del Norte bring el corrido itself to life by characterizing it as a roaring river whose fierce torrent breaks the silence of barren land when it rises over the banks that aim to contain it. It is keeping in mind this description of the corrido, and its influence mirrored in/on distinct border music genres, that I turn to a discussion of the three songs noted above and their function as productions of knowledge that set in motion an alternative discourse with epistemic potential for countering hegemonic and colonial/racial realities by mapping and chronicling a different cartography and calendar of knowledge and an inherently anti-border politics. The critique of and challenge to hegemonic discourses found in the three songs that I identify as anti-border music seek a critical approach to the violence at the nations’ shared edges and, moreover, contest the logics of nation-state borders proper.

Border Music and Anti-border Manifestos My aim in this chapter is to explore the logics and implications of cultural production, grounded in historically nuanced understandings of the materiality of the U-S///Mexico border as it impinges upon the lives of those who cross it or are crossed by it. In what follows, I focus on three distinct performers spanning different musical styles, located in different urban spaces, and having different experiences in relation to the U-S///Mexico border, who all nonetheless speak to similar concerns. First, however, a preliminary note on border and anti-border music is in order. While we have become accustomed to calling corridos—and the hybrid sounds of numerous rock, punk, and ska bands— “border music,” I am concerned with how, in the very act of naming them such, we run the risk of reinscribing them into a national-territorial narrative premised upon said borders that many of them are eager to abandon. To illustrate the point, let me provide a distinct yet related example. In reference to migrant rights advocacy at the time of California’s anti-migrant initiative Proposition 187 in 1994, Linda Bosniak noted the conundrum many activists found themselves in: The point is that progressives’ acquiescence to national border enforcement works

at cross-purposes with their commitment to defending the interests of the undoc-

umented. For to the extent they retain the attachment, or acquiescence, to borders,

they ensure that the immigrants will continue to be marginalized; but conversely,

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to the extent they effectively attack the marginalization the immigrants suffer, they necessarily must challenge the enforcement of borders as well. The two

commitments (against marginalization of persons and for borders around the community) are mutually incompatible, at least where the status of undocumented immigrants are [sic] concerned.31

In other words, for Bosniak, the naming of “immigrant advocacy” as such serves to structure the limits of political discourse within a framework of competing national-territorial bodies, without allowing migrants to be divorced from it and thought of as human beings in their own right, for they are seemingly bound almost naturally to the body politic of one modern nation-state (sending country) or another (receiving country). The border is thus inadvertently normalized and naturalized in the very act of taking a stand in favor of those it impinges on, trapping advocates in the epistemic/cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. In a similar vein, yet speaking to the rise of transnational labor union organizing, Bosniak continues: It is no doubt premature to characterize this tri-national, grassroots effort against NAFTA as one that entirely transcended the conventional national political

imagination. For while forging cross-border alliances . . . the ultimate objective of

these alliances still remained that of compelling individual nation-state govern-

ments to better protect the interests of nation-state members from the damaging effects of corporate-driven economic globalization.32

Paradoxically, the transnational activism of the anti-NAFTA campaign and of migrant rights advocacy efforts is often recognized as a “necessary strategy” for pursuing justice, perhaps the most effective one, but this occurs within the individual states whose very legitimacy is reinforced in the act of challenging the excesses of modernity/coloniality. It is worth taking a step back and considering how the same can be argued with regard to transnational or cross-border music. That is, in crossing musical borders, the border is itself rendered present and visible, albeit crossable, by the engagement in a transnational act that nonetheless maintains “the national” however much it is problematized. In light of the questions posed by Bosniak, the three songs by Los Tigres del Norte, Tijuana No! with Kid Frost, and Aztlán Underground need to be thought of as principally decolonial or anti-border rather than cross-border or transnational music,

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for they challenge the cartography and logic of the interstate system on which coloniality depends. Specifically, I am interested less in providing a reading of than in thinking through the three anti-border songs: “Stolen at Gunpoint,” by Tijuana No! with Kid Frost; Los Tigres del Norte’s hit “Somos Más Americanos”; and, perhaps more familiar to English-speaking audiences as it relates to this chapter’s subtitle, Aztlán Underground’s “Decolonize.” In these examples, the three groups of performers, each drawing from distinct musical traditions and locations on both sides of the border, or in Tijuana No!’s case “from” the border itself, use the exact same line in their lyrics: “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us.” It is this shared lyrical phrase that forces us to think about the nature of the border beyond the physical, discursive, and/or musical crossing of the U-S///Mexico national-territorial boundaries, thinking instead of the epistemic and cartographic spatiotemporal logic of modernity/coloniality that informs the history and role of nation-state borders themselves.33 What does it mean when three groups speak to the same problematic, albeit from the significantly different musical traditions of ska/punk, rap/hip-hop, and norteñas/corridos, and from different places: San José via Sinaloa, Tijuana via Mexico City, and Los Angeles (or the City of Angels) via Manifest Destiny? Where do San Ysidro, the women of Ciudad Juárez, the Kumeyaay, or Chican@s who are crossed and bordered by a number of overlapping colonial/racial histories fit into these lyrics? How do the analytical and conceptual interventions in the three songs point to deeper fundamental issues regarding Chican@ and Mexican@ cultural production and the ever-present, seemingly natural and timeless, yet strictly post-1848 U-S///Mexico border? While the three genres in question each have attendant linguistic and even regional, yet simultaneously transnational, subcultures, my analysis of the songs in the context of the groups’ music broadly points to shared concerns across the seemingly different sets of cultural formations. What, then, are the politics that underlie the shared sonic geographies of “Stolen at Gunpoint,” “Somos Más Americanos,” and “Decolonize”? What are the decolonial implications in the connections among these musical offerings/ofrendas and the collective sensibilities that, I argue, they point to? What is the future of U-S///Mexico (anti-)border cultural production, and what decolonial futures does it attempt to imagine into being? With these questions in mind, rather than performing a close reading of the songs, I’ve approached this research in a different way. To outline briefly, like Anzaldúa, I first ground my reading of these sonic texts in the material

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conditions that have contributed to the relatively recent popularizing of the common line at issue here: “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us.” By this, I mean the slogan’s popular familiarization beyond Chican@ communities, since for many it has become such a common dicho or saying that one may not fully grasp its underlying politics and implications. In order to trace the phrase’s popular history, some have pointed to the most recent round of migrant rights marches dating back to 2005 or to the 2010 film Machete. I consider these explanations, as well as some of the other scholarly and popular attempts to explain the origins of the above slogan, and then turn to the lyrics themselves. Lastly, I conclude by elucidating what I argue are the politics, poetics, and implications of the shared lyrics, and how such lyrics point to a shared collective memory with a long-historical, Indigenous, feminist, and anti-border decolonial imperative that forces us to think beyond the U-S///Mexico border and Chican@ studies and border studies as currently conceptualized.

So, When Did We Not Cross the Border? Many in various forms of print and electronic media and academic circles alike have pointed to the recent migrant rights marches as the moment in which “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us” gained broad currency as a political slogan. If so, we must then ask, Where is the Chican@ impulse in this analysis, if there is one at all? I will return to this question and also hopefully problematize it as well. Many seasoned observers—including, among other scholars, Rubén Martínez, in an article titled “Prop 187: Birth of a Movement?”—have also pointed to the 1994 mobilizations against California’s Proposition 187 as the moment when this saying emerged as a widely circulating narrative aiming to disrupt the criminalization and illegalization of a Mexican@ and Latin@ presence in the United States. In a related vein, others still have attempted to draw a more direct lineage to the Chican@ Movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the popular slogan “Somos un pueblo sin fronteras” (We are one people without borders), used by the organization Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), which also published a newspaper titled Sin Fronteras. These histories in some ways also intersect. In Chicago, for example, one of the main organizational bases for the 2005 and 2006 migrant rights mobilizations was Centro Sin Fronteras, whose history is distinct from yet shared with that of CASA in California.34

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Vicki Ruiz, in Latinas in the United States, takes us further and points to several turn-of-the-century women writers such as Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Sara Estela Ramírez, and sisters Andrea and Teresa Villareal as being the first to express the sentiment in response to being separated from their families after 1848, when Mexico lost nearly half its territory to the United States.35 In each of these cases, whether one points to the popularization of the saying in 2005, 1994, the 1960s and 1970s, or the late 1800s, one thing is clear: the reference point is the changing of the physical location of one national-territorial boundary, the pre-1848 U-S///Mexico border, from its prior location to its current location, and the related historical moment resulting in the “transfer of land” from a presupposed and unquestioned colonial independent nationstate to another through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In other words, in thinking about the familiar chant “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” many scholars, activists, and critics have attempted to identify its origin as hinging precisely on 1848. While we see this reflected to varying degrees in the three songs “Stolen at Gunpoint,” “Somos Más Americanos,” and “Decolonize,” we also see a different cartography and calendar of resistance lying in these tracks. In Perspectives on Las Américas (2003), a transnationally oriented collection that bridges a divide between Latin@ studies and Latin American studies, the editors Lynn Stephen, Patricia Zavella, Matthew C. Guttman, and Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, in their introduction based on the 1848 calendar, suggest not only “1848 as reference point” for the field, but the notion of “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us” as “paradigmatic in Chicana/o Studies,” pointing to Rudy Acuña’s Anything but Mexican (1996) and Américo Paredes’s Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexico Border (1993) as markers of this link.36 While most Chican@ studies scholarship has privileged 1848 as a crucial point of demarcation for Chican@ history and the CASA slogan “Sin Fronteras” is common in this narrative, the explicit pronouncement “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” has not figured as prominently in Chican@ historiography until very recently. A related issue in need of some discussion is that CASA is commonly seen as having “won” a political and ideological battle in the 1970s against a rival Chican@ Maoist organization, the August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM), which argued that the Southwest was a distinct Chican@ nation (with its own borders separating it from Mexico and the U-S). This was in contrast to CASA’s view, which argued for the socialist “reunification” of Old Mexico and Stolen Mexico, retaining its pre-1848 borders with the then-smaller

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U-S in the north and Guatemala in the south. In either case, national borders remained but were simply relocated; and with the August Twenty-Ninth Movement, a new colonial independent nation would have been arguably born without much consideration of the various Indigenous peoples for whom areas in the U-S Southwest are their traditional ancestral homelands.37 In contrast, as noted earlier, much of Chicana feminist historiography, including Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, has long argued for a different spatiotemporal frame in which colonization as an embodied sociohistorical process lived through and enacted on bodies is traced back to what Frantz Fanon calls its proper place and its proper time. In other words, to the initial encounter of westward-bound sailors and the people of this hemisphere in 1492, and the consequent partitioning of the globe along nation-state lines. Stolen at Gunpoint: From 1848 to an Island of Lies and Demagogy

So why focus on these particular songs? Let me highlight a few points in each. First, by way of introduction, Tijuana No! is a Mexican ska/rock/punk band from the border city of Tijuana, often characterized by the penetrating social critique of its lyrics, in which the group has openly expressed its support for the Indigenous Zapatista uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in 1994. They have also made reference in their songs to ongoing international conflicts revolving around issues of race, colonialism, apartheid, and migration policies in the United States. Kid Frost, whom they partner with in “Stolen at Gunpoint,” is known as a pioneer of Chican@ rap made famous by his hit single “La Raza” (1990).38 In “Stolen at Gunpoint,” Tijuana No! and Kid Frost begin by making a direct reference to 1848, as the vocalist awakes “feeling suddenly in my throat un veneno” (a venom) after “dreaming about López de Santa Anna,” Mexico’s longtime, multi-term president during the mid- and late 1800s, realizing that “this motherfucker gave the güeros our terreno” (United-statesians our territory). Extending a gesture of generosity, the lyricist indicates that “we wouldn’t mind to share [sic] it with los gabachos,” while bitterly referencing Santa Anna’s handing over of the current-day U-S Southwest with a stroke of the pen while held at gunpoint, a moment many Mexicans resent and credit for bringing an end to the U.S.-Mexico War. “Asking myself where is Pancho Villa?”—who could have presumably thwarted the United States’ advance— the singer points to “a full-scale invasion” and a fight with “the Ku Klux Klan y el pinche gobierno.” The first series of verses ends with a stark reminder in a

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resoundingly deep voice, “Nosotros llegamos primero” (We got here first), before Kid Frost takes over. Whereas the chorus lists off the various states that changed hands in 1848—“California, stolen at gunpoint! Arizona, stolen at gunpoint! Tejas, stolen at gunpoint! Nuevo México, stolen at gunpoint!”—the song includes a few other lines: “El Álamo, stolen at gunpoint! Aztlán, stolen at gunpoint!” Here, the invocation of El Álamo, a key contested site that has long served as a rallying cry for U-S nationalism, functions to dislodge from the American imaginary the image long associated with this now-memorialized historical museum. Aztlán, on the other hand, is often symbolically used as a name for the U-S Southwest; its original invocation by the poet Alurista to signify a spiritual homeland was later coupled by Chican@ Movement leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales with a specific territoriality.39 Notably, in “The Aural Border,” Josh Kun writes that Tijuana No! “duet[s] with LA Chicano rapper Frost on ‘Stolen at Gunpoint,’ an urgent demand for the mexicano reconquest of what became the US southwest after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”40 Apart from his problematic invocation of the white supremacist fear of an imagined “mexicano reconquest” of the Southwest, often heralded by the civilian patrols and other like-minded anti-migrant groups, what Kun fails to mention is that the chorus continues with two additional lines—“Puerto Rico, stolen at gunpoint! America, stolen at gunpoint!”—to the fading repeated sound of “We’re gonna get it back. . . . We’re gonna get it back. . . .” Does the line “We’re gonna get it back,” along with the prior one, “Nosotros llegamos primero,” refer to the Southwest or to the unmapping of hemisphere-wide borders? Kun’s reinscription of the 1848 framework, which posits a Chican@ decolonial imaginary as one grounded in a “reconquest” of the Southwest, obfuscates the epistemic disobedience of a different cartography and calendar operative in “Stolen at Gunpoint.” Rather than boxing this indeed anti-border anthem into a constrictive frame suggestive of 1960s nation-statisms such as those of CASA and ATM, the inclusion of Puerto Rico, which was occupied in 1898, points to a broader anti-imperialist and internationalist impulse in “Stolen at Gunpoint.” Furthermore, “America, stolen at gunpoint!” makes fairly explicit that what is at stake for Tijuana No! and Kid Frost is not simply a return to an earlier geopolitical arrangement whereby the pre-1848 border of Mexico is reinstated, but rather an appeal to the unmapping of national-territorial and juridical boundaries proper. In other words, they point, as have many

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Chicana feminist scholars and some Chicano scholars, to colonization and to the imposition of borders rooted not in 1848 but in 1519 and 1492, as the hemispheric mapping of America and Puerto Rico are both suggestive of the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean as the moment when “dissension breaks out in every direction.” While Kid Frost’s vocals following the chorus sonically return the listener to the specificities of 1994 California with a direct challenge to Governor Pete Wilson, he speaks of the border in plural form: “You say we crossed the borders, shit, the borders crossed us” (my emphasis). Kid Frost’s sonic geography makes clear the scale-jumping from Aztlán to Puerto Rico to America to California and back again, emphasizing the many borders that crossed the various peoples of the Americas. We thus see in “Stolen at Gunpoint” a longer historical sensibility suggestive of Chican@ feminist and hemispheric Indigenous concerns that predate 1848, related to modernity/ coloniality in the Americas and how Indigenous peoples have been crossed by nation-state boundaries generally, as expressed in the legal history of the city of San Diego in chapter 1.41 América Is a Continent: “Somos Más Americanos . . . Que Todititos los Gringos”

Los Tigres del Norte, in addition to being considered “los reyes del pueblo,” are also regarded by many as the “voice of the migrant.” Indeed, many of their songs hold migrants in high esteem and seek to afford them the dignity they deserve, relating terrifying tales of crossing the border and dealing with Border Patrol abuse, as well as other stories of the hardships of migrant life.42 In “Somos Más Americanos,” Los Tigres continue this trajectory of defending the rights of migrants in their music, but with this song they exceed their previous pronunciations. In it, they surpass their 1986 hit “América”—titled in reference to the continent, and not the United States’ discursive claim to represent the entire Western Hemisphere—which proudly proclaims, “De América, yo soy” (Of America, I am). With another reminder of the fact that America is a continent and not just the United States, in “Somos Más Americanos” we are treated to a more defiant Tigres del Norte, whose lyrical precision offers an important and poignant history lesson elaborating on their 1986 song. The corrido “Somos Más Americanos” begins with the vocalist recalling his many unpleasant encounters with the likes of the civilian patrols.

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Ya me gritaron mil veces

I have been screamed at thousands of times

Que me regrese a mi tierra

To return to my land

Pero quiero recordarle al gringo

But I want to remind the gringo

La frontera me cruzó a mí.

The border crossed me.43

Porque yo no quepo aquí.

Que yo no crucé la frontera

Because I do not fit here.

That I did not cross the border

Los Tigres explicitly point to the border crossing and dividing entire peoples and communities. They continue: América nació libre.

America was born free.

Fue el hombre que la dividió.

It was man that divided her.

Pa’ que yo la brincara

So that I could jump it

Ellos pintaron la raya,

Y ahora me llaman invasor.

They painted the line,

And now they call me invader.

While Los Tigres do not specify who “they” are, in context it is clear they are referring to the historical subject of modernity/coloniality: the invading Imperial Being (i.e., white European heterosexual Man and his U-S Euro-descended counterparts) at the center of the interstate system. It is at this point that the historical correction emerges: Es un error bien marcado.

It is a well-marked error.

¿Quién es aquí el invasor?

Who here is the invader?

Nos robaron ocho estados.

They stole eight states from us.

These first verses end with, “Soy extranjero en mi propia tierra / Y no vengo a darles guerra / Soy hombre trabajador” (I am a foreigner in my own land / And I do not come to give them war / I am a working man). Making an appeal to the fact that the issue is not one of reconquest, as Kun suggests with “Stolen at Gunpoint,” but rather of coming in search of work and a livelihood, Los Tigres make clear where they stand with regard to the history and existence of the U-S///Mexico border. It could be argued that their claim to “eight states” is indicative of a concern with 1848 (yet again), and while this concern is present in the song, Los Tigres quickly expand their cartography and calendar in the repeated and unapologetic chorus that instead speaks of the dividing up of the entire continent, which in their view was born free.

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Spoken slowly and in a serious tone, the interlude qua history lesson includes the following lines: Indios de dos continentes Mezclados con español.

Y si a los siglos nos vamos

Indians of two continents Mixed with Spaniard.

And if to the centuries we go

Somos más americanos

We are more American

Que el hijo del anglosajón.

Than the son of the Anglo-Saxon.

Somos más americanos

We are more American

The reference to “Indians of two continents” and the calling upon the centuries of history that precede the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as with Kid Frost and Tijuana No!, here too points to Los Tigres del Norte’s keen awareness of a longer historical experience of colonization that informs the U-S///Mexico border. An important aspect of the complexity in the vision of Los Tigres del Norte is that they acknowledge the mixing with Spanish blood (even if historically limited and on uneven terms) and the different set of colonial relations when the Indians of two continents encountered the Spanish. In their final analysis, however, Los Tigres’ invoking of a long line of Indigenous descent is contrasted to the shorter spatiotemporal frame of the children of the Anglo-Saxon in the Americas. Despite a name-by-name listing of the southwestern states, the coloniality of the border figures in their sonic geography not only in the form of the U-S///Mexico border, but in that of all those borders that crisscross the two continents of the Western Hemisphere and their inhabitants. In the final lines, Los Tigres del Norte reiterate their longue-durée, continental, and embodied understanding of those deemed migrants in the United States: Soy la sangre de indio

I am the blood of the Indian

Soy mestizo.

I am mestizo.

Soy latino

Y si contamos los siglos

I am Latino

And if we count the centuries

Aunque le duela al vecino

Even though it may hurt our neighbor

Que todititos los gringos.

Than each and every last one of the gringos.

Somos más americanos

We are more American

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In line with the increasingly brazen and pointed critiques that Los Tigres have offered in many of their corridos over the years, “Somos Más Americanos” stands as a key moment in which they explode the limits of the 1848 narrative and recount a longer historical trajectory, calling into question not only the existence of the U-S///Mexico border, but borders throughout the Americas. In doing so, they express a long-held anti-border hemispheric sensibility reminiscent of that in José Martí’s “Nuestra América,” but one that is at the same time racially inflected in terms of an Indigenous and mestiz@ presence in Las Américas. Proudly standing with those pictured in Samuel Huntington’s article “The Hispanic Challenge,” Los Tigres provide an analysis that is indicative of a decolonial imperative to engage in an anti-border politics that precedes not only 1848 but the formation of the modern nation-state system proper. Decolonize: Aztlán Underground’s Aztlán Beyond the U-S Southwest

In Aztlán Underground’s song “Decolonize” we have perhaps the most direct use of the shared phrase “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” The longest track on the album it appears on, over seven minutes long, “Decolonize” includes a complex interweaving of lyrics, sounds, instruments, languages, and tempos, and is AUG’s premier anti-border anthem. Based out of Los Angeles, Aztlán Underground has long been known for capturing an anticolonial psyche and decolonial attitude, and for bringing audiences to a transcendent state with a fierce rhythm that is used to convey a message of self-determination, autonomy, decolonization, and liberation. The song “Decolonize” begins with “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” shouted three times. The group points explicitly to 1848 soon after that. Yet we see a quick jump to colonization more broadly: “Stranger in your own land under exploitation / this is the state of the indígena today / under the oppression of the settlers’ way.” Aztlán Underground’s pointed naming of settler colonialism is important, as it stands in contradistinction to most Chican@/1848 understandings of colonization. Instead, it speaks more to a common understanding within Anglophone Native studies of colonization in the Americas as primarily a settler enterprise (although it should be said that Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises varied).44 Often misconstrued as having a more nationalist politics, Aztlán Underground developed an Indigenist and hemispheric consciousness from their early years. Not long after lead singer Yaotl repeats the line “This is the state of the indígena today / under the oppression of the settlers’ way,” we hear

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a shift to a thunderous bass and the use of the line “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” repeated three times, followed by, “Yet the settler nation lives in disgust!” The track on the album is a live recording, and in it this fastpaced sequence is repeated three more times, with cheering, moshing throngs of fans calling back in unison the memorized lines of AUG’s anti-border sonic geography: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! Yet the settler nation lives in disgust!” Much like Los Tigres del Norte’s racially inflected “Somos Más Americanos,” Aztlán Underground also analyze with clarity how race continues to operate in the United States, and in doing so they too bring about a reconfiguration of the cartography and calendar of Chican@ cultural and decolonial resistance. You try to be white and it’s very respectable. But be Xicano and it’s highly unacceptable.

Then we’re termed Hispanic, as if we were from Spain. Trying to insert us in the American game

And we’re called wetbacks, like we’ve never been here.

When our existence on this continent is thousands of years.45

In these lines, Aztlán Underground, like Tijuana No! with Kid Frost and Los Tigres del Norte before them, force us to expand our spatiotemporal frame and quickly remind us (twice), “This is the state of the indígena today / under the oppression of the settlers’ way.” Most importantly, they also assert that, as self-described indígenas and Xicanos, their understanding of what it means to decolonize, as their song title suggests, entails a critique of settler colonialism and nation-state borders, as noted by the oft-repeated lyrics “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! Yet the settler nation lives in disgust!” Writing of the emotional effect of rancheras (northern ballads) on their audiences, Chicana scholar Yolanda Broyles-González states that there exists a “consonance of bioenergies across generations and geographies” of listeners.46 Such a release of energies and such moments of collective consciousness and epistemic disobedience as rehumanization are evident in AUG’s audiences, as spontaneous moshing at their performances often intensifies again and again with the lyrics’ changing tempos. In the track at hand, as the dance floor settles, we hear yet another shift to a slower, deep, melodic Indigenous floor drum and the sounds of a conch shell being blown in the background, calling everyone to attention.

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This multifaceted shift is disorienting—perhaps unusual to some in the audience not previously familiar with Aztlán Underground, who came seeking their hard punk sound—yet calming and soothing. “To the Earth . . . to the Air . . . to the Fire . . . to the Water. . . .” the audience hears, as the Indigenous chants of a Lakota Honor Song in the background begin to grow louder and louder, and the bass drum deeper and deeper. “The Eagle and Condor have met” is announced, in reference to the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a spiritual and continental run started in 1992 and completed every four years, aimed at bringing together Indigenous communities from throughout the Americas.47 To suggest that the “Eagle and Condor have met” is to point to the realization and continued work of the reunification of the continent’s Indigenous peoples.48 The Honor Song and the drumbeat are the only sounds we hear for a short while; then they are followed by the slow-spoken, subtle, yet stern words: We must realize / our connection to this land.

From Xicano to Lakota / we’re all sisters and brothers . . . from the top of Alaska to the tip of South America Abya Yala, Anahuak, Turtle Island.

The various names above, each a distinct Indigenous reference to the North and South American continents as one, are recited. Epistemic and cartographic disobedience is enunciated and enacted, as a different sonic geography extending over “506 years of indigenous resistance” is embodied and chronicled as a living theory in the flesh.49 The Honor Song continues amid a proclamation of cihuatl (women) reclaiming their place in a balanced set of social relations. Then we hear one more time, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us! Yet the settler nation lives in disgust!” However, this time it is followed by an unambiguous “GET THE FUCK OUT, GET THE FUCK OUT, get the fuck, get the fuck, get the fuck, get the fuck OUT!” This sequence is repeated four times before a final “GET THE FUUUUUUCK OUT!” While the “hardcore” lyrics are indicative of the musical genre and subculture of Aztlán Underground and many of their fans, their concluding lines and post-track remarks at this live recording—“Y que viva el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional” (And long live the Zapatista National Liberation Army)—leave no doubt as to whether the group adheres

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to an 1848 reading of colonization or one grounded in over five hundred years of resistance. They thus coincide with what the Zapatistas also invoke when they speak of the long night of five hundred years as the basis of their group’s rebellion and struggle. While as early as 1990 Adelaida Del Castillo noted that the timeline of 1848 that often takes precedence in Chican@ studies discourse might be in need of some revision, Aztlán Underground’s sonic geography enacts a broader and longer cartography and calendar of Chican@ historiography.50 AUG’s “Decolonize” highlights what I have attempted to elucidate as anti-border music, which not only transcends national-territorial boundaries, as does rock en español, but also challenges simplistic nationalist frames that retain allegiances to nation-state borders.

Conclusion While all three songs in this chapter reference the U.S.-Mexico War of 1845– 48 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, these musical ofrendas must not be considered border music in a traditional sense, for we risk compartmentalizing them within certain (trans)national narratives and temporal and spatial schemas. Rather, we should recognize these sonic texts for the work they do to shift the cartography and calendar of decolonial knowledge. As I pointed out earlier, the tendency to place the origin of the phrase “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” in either the migrant marches of 2005 or the protests against Proposition 187 in 1994, or to pair it with CASA’s “Sin Fronteras” motto in the 1960s and 1970s, misses a different articulation at play. While Proposition 187 came in 1994—the same year as NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising—what are we to make of the year 1992, which is often left out of the phrase’s genealogy? Prior to the 1994 election there were a series of mobilizations in California, the Southwest, and throughout the Americas to protest the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. As I have argued, the phrase “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” points to the colonization of the Americas and the emergence of nation-state boundaries as a modality of population management and social relations since 1492, and its popular currency today can instead be traced to the lead-up to the quincentennial protest activities. That is, to the decolonial epistemic and cartographic disobedience that Indigenous peoples, and detribalized Indigenous peoples

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(Xican@s included), have articulated as a critique of modernity/coloniality proper. To assume that the statement “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” is grounded in a narrative that merely replaces one colonial independent nation-state (the United States) with another (Mexico), or that it blends the two into a new hybrid and unproblematized aural border (as does the borderlands academic complex), is to underestimate its epistemic point of departure, political trajectory, and implications. Such a position, using 1848 as a paradigmatic reference point, does not interrogate how Mexico has also functioned to effectuate an erasure of Indigenous peoples within its juridical boundaries, akin to San Diego’s erasure of San Ysidro or El Paso’s function in the service of somewhere else. The framework of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo further limits the possibilities of a decolonial feminist analysis, like that of Anzaldúa, by reducing colonization to a contest between two nation-states rather than an embodied, lived condition, which many Chican@ feminists have long argued it is, pointing to 1492, 1519–21, and their aftermath. Instead, I locate the shared sonic geography of the three songs analyzed here—the call “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”—as a critique of a modern/colonial Eurocentric political project resulting in the contemporary geopolitical alignments of nation-states today; a critique of the maps and calendars of los de arriba. Decolonization, in this regard, entails not a redrawing of national borders but an active attempt to stand against all borders and the interstate system they enforce, rooted in a modern/colonial episteme that seeks the management of bodies through raced/gendered discourses of home and nation on the one hand and through treaties among men on the other. We should thus heed Los Tigres del Norte, who insist on America as a continent, recognize the current materiality of the U-S///Mexico border when they foreground the racial/gendered colonial violence of Ciudad Juárez, and place this border where migrants and others like Camelia who have had to cross it for their livelihood (legitimate or not) recognize it to be: in San Ysidro rather than San Diego, in El Paso del Norte (a region that encompasses both cities) and not just Juárez.

Conclusion Coloniality and the Decolonial Imperative Shopping Without Borders

—Motto of the Las Americas mall, located next to the U-S///Mexico border wall

I

a book such as this one might refuse to write itself while confined to any particular territoriality, bound by any nation-state boundary. Instead, despite several drafts and just as many missed deadlines, it was only when I was flying over the Amazon, the Equator, and multiple lines in the sand that were nowhere in sight that these words allowed themselves to come to life. Some of the earlier drafts were crafted in la Gran Tenochtitlán in the context of a Latin American feminist/decolonial thought seminar, then reworked in Granada in the shadow of the Alhambra while several colleagues and students discussed historic al-Andalus at a summer institute, Critical Muslim Studies. Further revisions were made alongside Candomblé practitioners, activists, and comrade-scholars from as far away as Azania at a first-of-itskind Decolonial Black Feminism summer school, while engaging with Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Angela Figuereido, elders and knowledge keepers of the Irmandade da Boa Morte—the Sisterhood of the Good Death that facilitated the manumission of enslaved Africans from Salvador de Bahia to Cachoeira— and Ochy Curiel, who hails from an island in which “eighty thousand natives were killed . . . where the only masters are lies and demagogy.” As we flew over the territories of the Kuna Nation, I was reminded of the Peace and Dignity Journeys in which the ceremonial staffs representing dozens of northern Eagle and southern Condor nations have been joined a number of times. This book began grounded in the possibility of thinking violence from the open wound T IS FITTING THAT

182 Conclusion

that is the U-S///Mexico border. Now it doesn’t so much conclude as hope to open a new horizon in order to dream a world beyond and without nation-state borders and the national-territorial identities they engender within the current modern/colonial world. To be clear, this is not a call for the cosmopolitanism of Western political, economic, and intellectual elites, but for a break with the epistemological and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality, which is territorially demarcated through nation-state boundaries: staked fence rods on Mother Earth’s flesh. I remain steadfast in the argument that violence on the U-S///Mexico border reveals the racial/colonial origins and continuities of the interstate system. The act of writing this text has itself been a cathartic, if only preliminary, attempt at embodying and enacting an epistemic and cartographic disobedience as a decolonial imperative and praxis of liberation.

The U-S///Mexico Border Today As Operation Gatekeeper enters its twenty-third year, the contradiction represented by the phrase “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” shared by the three songs discussed in chapter 5, finds a peculiar manifestation in a shopping mall built right up against the border wall near the port of entry in San Ysidro, where one can actually park right up against the corrugated steel landing mats, with Border Patrol vehicles hovering nearby atop the Tijuana River control channel. A lot has changed since the days when it was still an unincorporated area, and even since that dreadful day when James Oliver Huberty walked into the McDonald’s and turned the community upside down, yet a lot remains the same. San Ysidro has grown in size and population, with several new housing developments and a redevelopment corridor down the main boulevard leading to the port of entry, but it remains a predominantly Mexican community. Amid such growth, talk of another deannexation attempt in the late 1990s never materialized, and the city council district partitioning also remains roughly the same. The Eighth District is still split between the Barrio Logan, Sherman Heights, and Golden Hill areas to the north and San Ysidro, Otay Mesa, and Nestor in the south, connected only by the threehundred-foot-wide strip of water within the Coronado Bay. The recent creation of a ninth city council district has absorbed and contained the emerging migrant and refugee communities of City Heights. The two portions of the Eighth District continue to compete for their elected representative’s attention while

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the previous city councilman finishes his combined jail/probation sentence on a bribery conviction. Meanwhile, the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez continue unabated, and few have ever been convicted of these crimes. Jennifer Lopez and Minnie Driver have starred in respective Hollywood films about the women in Juárez, while narco-related made-for-TV miniseries proliferate, offering a green light to continued calls for control of the border. Accordingly, the U.S. State Department issues occasional travel warnings for both border towns and tourist destinations amid intermittent spurts of narco-violence. While one of the stated purposes of the original annexation of San Ysidro and the South Bay to the city of San Diego was to increase representation of area residents within the metropolitan core of the expansive county, questions remain about the unequal access to and distribution of resources across city districts. The McDonald’s that reopened blocks from the massacre site remains in business, while year after year on July 18, family, friends, and residents converge at the memorial monument, converting it into an altar to commemorate those who lost their lives there in 1984. The Southwestern College satellite campus itself was recently redeveloped and expanded into a two-story complex, broadening its maquiladora management course offerings, while the monument remains in a cage, albeit a shorter one to minimize obstacles to its visibility. Immigration continues to be a hot-button political issue. The civilian patrols (temporarily) gave way to the Tea Party, which refocused its anger on President Barack Obama generally, yet calls to secure and “regain” control of the U-S///Mexico border continue despite the record number of raids and increased police cooperation with immigration officials under the Obama administration. The election of Donald J. Trump has made the present situation of the U-S///Mexico border(ed) communities seem bleaker, but also strengthened their resolve to imagine and enact decolonial futures. Meanwhile, artists, musicians, migrant rights advocates, and cultural workers remain as busy as the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, countering the latter’s efforts through various means, including music such as that considered in chapters 4 and 5, or continuously shifting artwork on the border wall that calls for an end to Operation Gatekeeper and other policies. The irony of such contradictory tensions is not lost on the landscape, as two other developments worth noting demonstrate most clearly. First, in 1997, only a few years after the launching of Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego County region, plans were first unveiled for what was boasted as a state-of-theart shopping mall complex that was to span both sides of the U-S///Mexico

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border and include a new pedestrian port of entry along with a number of high-end retailers such as Neiman Marcus. The project sought to take advantage of recently declared blighted zones abutting the border wall in San Ysidro to the immediate west of the existing port of entry. The areas that were opened for (re)development included a largely open field only yards away from the brush and shrubbery of the Tijuana River. Also included were a few small lots owned locally by San Ysidro residents who had lived near the border for at least several decades, but who were bought out. Much like gentrification efforts in other urban centers and the fight for control of the border discussed in chapter 1, redevelopment has come to San Ysidro with an eye toward capitalizing on cross-border traffic to expand the local retail markets (already aimed at working-class shoppers) to now include middle-class Tijuana shoppers. The events of September 11, 2001, put a damper on the Tijuana portion of the mall, yet the new PedWest pedestrian port of entry recently opened and the motto “Shopping Without Borders” remains only yards away at the Las Americas mall. Modernity/coloniality’s doublespeak is increasingly difficult to conceal, yet selfdelusion remains the strongest weapon in the arsenals of the U-S and the West. The second development was a general redesign of the port of entry itself, whose facilities were becoming operationally outdated and unable to keep up with the high density of cross-border traffic at the world’s busiest border crossing. This project has advanced under the rubric of the need for increased border security. The fortresslike architecture of domination and surveillance coexists with the brand-new department stores nearby. The two developments also overlap with local efforts to revamp existing infrastructure and locate a model public transportation center just north of the original pedestrian border crossing in San Ysidro. The idea of the transportation hub is to accommodate the San Diego Trolley (light-rail train system), taxis, Greyhound buses, and other locally owned commuter buses in light of the high traffic to and from the U-S///Mexico border and points both south and north of the boundary. The initial proposal for the binational mall included plans for a hotel complex, a museum, and a library; but, following the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings in New York in 2001, border expansion and redevelopment efforts dating back to the mid-1990s began stressing security aspects of the national-territorial boundary, despite neoliberal discourses of regional integration that suggested the contrary. Amid continued emphasis on expanding free trade after NAFTA, a parallel discourse of “secure borders” highlighted a tension between local needs and desires and national security and migration

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enforcement policy imperatives. In the article “San Diego-Tijuana: Reinventing a Border Crossing,” San Diego–based geographer Lawrence Herzog, for example, argued that the construction of the new border crossing facilities should resemble that of airports in both aesthetic design and function, “visually appealing to the user . . . constructed of glass, filled with sculpture, art, bookstores, cafes, and restaurants,” in order to serve as a welcoming space for travelers.1 The Department of Homeland Security and the General Services Administration, however, circulated five possible designs for the new port of entry. The latter’s sketches all included high-tech, fortified cement structures meant to architecturally convey impenetrability and the surveillance of all movements and actions, while Herzog’s vision for the port-of-entry facilities ironically mirrored some of the early design sketches for the mall. Herzog’s premise of the San Diego-Tijuana border region being an integrated cross-border metropolis obfuscates the paradoxical reality that the border has a dual main function. On the one hand, it does serve to facilitate the “circulation of people, vehicles, goods, services, capital and technology within a bi-national living space,”2 while on the other hand it functions for the purpose of national-territorial security, which Mains reminds us is always already about patrolling the racialized and gendered social fabric of the nation.3 Herzog argues that the current port-of-entry complex, which he describes as a “cross between a prison and a military encampment,” is obsolete—an outmoded and “ugly reminder of international boundaries of the nineteenth century” that has no place in the twenty-first-century U-S///Mexico borderlands, and which betrays the border’s first function as a conduit of exchange.4 He notes that most border “users” are not security threats but rather cross-border commuters engaged in business, leisure, or other forms of travel, and asserts that the port of entry should thus cater to their aesthetic sensibilities and not to the (real and/or imagined) exigencies of national security discourse. To his credit, Herzog has remained optimistic. However, the hypervisibility of the securitized architecture serves as a reminder not of outmoded borders of the past, but of the continued power differentials between two countries/regions, and of the fact that the social function of the border is part of a racial/colonial scopic regime. The continued impingements of power and the coloniality of the U-S///Mexico border have thus made epistemic disobedience and cartographic betrayal a necessity. Alongside the increased architecture of security and surveillance, border community residents, artists, musicians, writers, and scholars alike continue to challenge not only the policies of border security but the very naturalization of historically

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and socially produced national-territorial boundaries and the corresponding national identities they presume to encapsulate. While we can observe that the border region functions for some as a binational living space, relatively speaking, by generalizing and falsely observing the San Diego-Tijuana border region as an integrated cross-border metropolis, Herzog not only obscures competing narratives about the border but collapses multiple and competing interests together, suggesting that the integrated metropolis is a universally accepted framework. In contrast, this book demonstrates that while the border region may be economically and socially integrated in some respects, it is politically and materially marked by different forms of racial/colonial violence, particularly for Mexican@s, Chican@s, and Latin@s who live near or on both sides of, or who cross, the U-S///Mexico border. As such, rather than being illogical or a contradictory anomaly reminiscent of the past, the increased solidification and securitization of boundary enforcement serves a structurally necessary and logical function that aims to uphold and perpetuate the constitutive Manichean contradictions of modernity/coloniality. In other words, lending credence to the work of Andreas (1998) and Nevins (2002, 2010), the border functions to appease concerns from the national body politic about the need to protect the nation-state from presumed foreign threats, while still allowing in the sufficient amount of foreign labor to meet the demands of employers. The seemingly paradoxical openness and closing of the border serves an economic, political, and ultimately social purpose of racial/colonial nature that supersedes the hybrid, integrated, borderless or cross-border metropolis that Herzog, Kun, and others long for in their work. This is not to say that a borderless future is out of our reach, but rather that these latter analyses fail to account for the materiality of the present border, while a long-historical perspective brings to light both the changes undergone over the years and the fact that more changes are in fact both possible and necessary.

Of Colonial/Racial Borders and Decolonial Horizons Critics of U-S///Mexico relations and U-S foreign and migration policy are often and pejoratively labeled proponents of “open borders.” The limits, myopia, cartographic/epistemic imprisonment, and ultimate failure of such a condemnation can be ascertained in the phrase itself, for it seeks to naturalize the most unnatural of boundaries and simply assumes the eternal presence of a border gate, so to speak, to be opened and closed at will. I have a different proposal or

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set of proposals for pursuing new horizons as part of a decolonial imperative, which I outline below. First, a proposal for thinking about these proposals: We must allow ourselves to make mistakes in the process of making proposals for challenging and rethinking not just the content but the premises of modernity/coloniality’s naturalized truth claims; and let us, in that spirit, create and construct together. This sentiment and attitude lies at the heart of the decolonial imperative, which implies as a starting point a spirit of generosity and reciprocity even in the most difficult moments, when we may be at odds with one another and there seems to be an impasse, no way out of the political and intellectual cul-de-sacs we often find ourselves in. Chela Sandoval has likened the above scenario to a moment of crisis, calling for a theory uprising as a way out of these cul-de-sacs.5 It is in this way that we can envision and work toward enacting a borderless future without losing sight of power and without reproducing any further colonial impingements. Proposal one: We must bet on neither the crossing, nor the opening, nor the closing of borders and of the walls of modernity/coloniality, but rather on their undoing and denaturalizing. How so? one might ask. Proposal two: We must begin the intellectual, political, and indeed spiritual work that we do by always acknowledging and thanking the original and customary guardians, spirits, and peoples of the land we walk upon. We should not hesitate to also acknowledge the original peoples who have passed a bit of themselves on to us through our own grandmothers and grandfathers, in order to ground ourselves in a sense of self, or a return to the self, as Ali Shariati would remind us. We must do this because one of the central ways in which not only colonialism but coloniality functions—the latter being a distinct sociohistorical phenomenon that is intricately tied to colonialism but also supersedes it, and should be distinguished—is via the erasure and enclosure of entire peoples, lands, languages, knowledges, subjectivities, and forms of social relations that deviate from the norm that I have been referring to here as the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. Proposal three: The crucial distinction between an analysis of colonialism and of the workings of modernity/coloniality is central to any intellectual endeavor or political project that names itself decolonial. This distinction is necessary even if counterintuitive, because the political economy and spatiotemporal episteme of the westernized university (not just the neoliberal university, but knowledge production writ large over the last several centuries) has privileged the constant insistence on new theories, whether for the sake of career advancement or based on an unquestioned faith or infatuation with novelty

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and newness. This mode of producing knowledge, an obsession with destructive critique and newness for newness’ sake, has, after all, been one of the central tenets and organizing spatiotemporal logics of modernity/coloniality ever since the “discovery” of the “New World,” a logic by which all existing peoples and knowledges were to be destroyed and all things new assigned an a priori positive value in contrast to the presumably outmoded old. We must thus remember the words of Chicana elder and longtime, grounded activist-intellectual Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, who notes that when we talk about Indigenous traditions, languages, and knowledges, it is not about “going back” to anything. It is about remembering something ancient and creating something new. That is, we must take Indigenous knowledge systems seriously for what they can teach us about the present moment. Ironically, we have reached a point where one of the latest academic and activist trends has been simply to add the word decolonial or decolonizing to any myriad of tried and tested theories without necessarily yielding any new, radically different, or pathbreaking openings that would allow us to challenge the existing structures of power or their micro-reproductions at the level of face-to-face social relations. Paraphrasing Angela Davis’s words with regard to a similar marker, the word critical, is wise in this context as well. Davis reminds us that the mere invocation of the word critical does not in itself ensure criticality. As such, conceptual clarity, coherence, congruency, and consistency in our analyses matter. Proposal four: If we are to talk about decolonizing or a decolonial imperative, then we must take the time to ask with seriousness and rigor, What exactly is it that we are decolonizing from? It is not sufficient to simply add the keyword of the moment if we do not have a clear and specific grasp on or diagnosis of the extent and depth of the problem; that is, a sociogenic diagnosis of modernity/ coloniality that makes clear what we need to decolonize from and why it is required of us. This includes an understanding that any newly formed political order will always create new, unforeseen exclusions and silences, to which we must also turn our attention. Without such serious reflection, we are left with an implicit, even if inadvertent, dichotomous construction of a “bad” situation, structure, relation of power, etc., in comparison to which our own invocation of the decolonial is automatically and unquestionably positioned as and presumed to be a “good” and thus inevitable, linear, and morally superior solution or endpoint. Yet such a practice inevitably loses sight of power and runs the risk of reproducing more or new colonial impingements.

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I would thus argue that decoloniality or the decolonial cannot just be an added signifier. All concepts are relational and contextual, and thus they draw their meaning from the constellation of concepts with which they are entangled. For example, we can have on the one hand a nationalism invoked by those in power, as has been the case with most patriotic commitments used as a way to silence dissent. But we can also have a different nationalism, for lack of a better term, tied to a different constellation of concepts; a nationalism that seeks the liberation of occupied Palestinian territory but would also set as its own horizon the need to abolish itself should it become a repressive nation-state enterprise. In other words, it cannot be a mere inversion of a relationship of power, whereby racial/colonial subjects simply respond with their own brand of patriotic nationalism while retaining or reproducing the colonial logic of nation-states and national-territorial boundaries within the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. Instead of inversion, we need to explode the very architecture of existing structures of domination and exploitation. Proposal five: The decolonial imperative is thus explicit about a decolonization that is not just territorial, as advanced by previous anticolonial movements, but rather an ongoing sociogenic and psychic process that has coloniality as its diagnosis. One that addresses not just classic colonialism or neocolonialism but coloniality in its complexity as that from which we are attempting to delink and disidentify. One that we come to know more as a mode of being and walking in the world than as a destination to be arrived at and celebrated, much less with a flag. Concepts are thus not static; there are no inherently good concepts that must be embraced (the decolonial or the critical, say) or bad ones that must be dismissed, as some have considered to be the case with nationalism, often confused with nation-statism. An example of nation-statism has been the uncritical equating of Aztlán with the U-S Southwest as the basis for a new Chican@ nation-state, one that simply redraws or relocates existing colonial national-territorial boundaries, as opposed to the spiritual return to self of Alurista or Cherríe Moraga’s Queer Aztlán. Concepts should not be unquestioningly embraced or dismissed without careful consideration of their own horizon of meaning. Proposal six: The decolonial imperative is a mode and form of metacritique that questions the questions in terms of external structures and internal psychic presumptions. Decoloniality thus requires that we have an analysis of coloniality not only as a condition of colonialism, but in its own right as a deeper, imbricate set of structures that affect not just land but knowledge, subjectivity, and social

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relations. This implies having the self-reflectivity and humility to acknowledge that even in the moments when we think we are being critical, we might indeed be critical on the one hand while nevertheless reproducing the logic of power or coloniality all over again on the other. It is, then, within an understanding of coloniality—which precedes the nation-state and is prolonged beyond the existence of formal colonial or neocolonial administrations—and not colonialism that we should situate our analyses. Coloniality is at once material, national, global, and also interpersonal, epistemic, and psychic. Such a framework allows us to historicize and problematize the concept of the interstate system itself while remaining self-reflective, since given the coloniality of language and communication within which our own discourses operate, we too often reproduce and reify even that which we claim to be challenging. As such, the cursory invocation of the decolonial also produces as its own mirror image particular conceptions of what is colonial that can be invoked against anything with which we disagree. Yet doing so without conceptual clarity about modernity/coloniality can also serve to reinforce the very same structure. Proposal seven: If our sense of the decolonial is being invoked or defined based on an understanding of colonialism, we are further obfuscating modernity/coloniality. And even in that “challenge” we are locking ourselves into the very same colonial logic and terms of the epistemic/cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. Instead I propose a rereading that explodes the limits of our understanding of both the colonial and anticolonial and moves toward a distinct decolonial imperative: that is, the seeking of a horizon that attempts to evade the very structuring logic itself, which has restricted our ways of thinking about, in this case, borders, causing us to see them as merely open or closed. The two concepts, of open and closed borders, reinforce and normalize that very same mediating structure of the interstate system yet again. Instead, we must take seriously the question inspired by the Zapatista struggle in the Lacandón Jungle: that of whether or not another world is possible.

Clearing and Dreaming Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, gives us a different look at the above questions through the lens of civilizations. First, a caveat: while Césaire uses the language of colonialism, Lewis Gordon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and others

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have demonstrated that he had his finger on the pulse of modernity/coloniality as a civilizational package that birthed colonialism proper. That said, instead of accepting that civilization is itself intricately tied to a colonial project that “civilizes,” he insists that it is colonialism that decivilizes. Colonialism decivilizes both by definition and by its use in the service of power and dehumanization as an underlying sociogenic logic of modernity/coloniality. We have been civil peoples. We have been good people. We have known other ways. We have known how to be good to one another, but it is modernity/coloniality and a self-deluded Western civilization as a colonial project (named as such only over the last century) that has decivilized us. Roger Garaudy reminds us that in the broader historical scheme, the wrongly named “Western civilization” is an anomaly that stands out as the most destructive civilization in world history.6 In its modern/colonial form, it has compartmentalized itself in the form of an interstate system with national-territorial borders as mediating mechanisms that determine who properly belongs as a citizen of any of its multiple subdivisions, in order to veil its true nature. And if coloniality is itself always already decivilizing, then what happens to those of us within the framework of the interstate system of modernity/coloniality who have been deemed uncivilized, primitive, illegal, or noncitizens? What happens when all we do is strive to become civil, modern, or a citizen according to the spatiotemporal logics, ethical standards, and discourses of the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality? We strive to belong and to be accepted, but it is according to the terms of modernity/coloniality, according to the definitions of citizen and human proposed by a civilizational project that has been the most destructive and dehumanizing enterprise the Earth has known. That is a rather low standard. If coloniality has been a process of dehumanization, then why would those who have been dehumanized seek the recognition of Imperial Being in its various forms? “Hey, look over here, look at me, I am human too!” “I am a worker, not a criminal!” “No human being is illegal!” All of the above are pronouncements by immigrant rights advocates who have accepted the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. Such a low standard! Why seek entry into that family of the human if the human in question has been a mediocre being who has wrought destruction the world over? If that human has facilitated dehumanization? Modern citizenship bears the fruits of the labor as well as the scars of colonial/racial subjects forced

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to transgress all sorts of national-territorial boundaries and social, political, raced/gendered, and economic borders alike. We should not want to be that Human, that form of being in the world. We should not want that citizenship, nor any of the national identities it offers us. We should not want to be Mexican . . . or United-statesian . . . or any other national identity that is a product of the national-territorial entities produced by the modern/colonial world. We should reject and disobey that epistemic and cartographic dead end. We should not accept ideas of citizenship, being, and belonging tied to the constellation of concepts of modernity/coloniality, which has placed them in the service of power in the form of subsidiary national-territorial states. If modernity/coloniality and its outsourced nation-states decivilize, then to tie ourselves to that logic of citizen/noncitizen-yearning-to-be is to accept a low standard. It is to accept mediocrity for ourselves. Instead we must think of something different. We deserve a dignified existence that yearns to be more than mediocrity. As such, we have a decolonial imperative to clear away the delusions that obfuscate possible exits from the prevailing colonial political order. Only then, once the dust is clear, might we begin to dream again. Dream again of a different way of being, a different civility that we do not even yet know, for which we have no word. One that we have yet to name and/or remember. We must remember the words of Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan Indigenous scholar and poet, who was among the first academics to insist to Mexican@s and Chican@s: “You belong! You are indigenous to this land, don’t you forget that!” And Forbes would also warn: Why do we take at face value the history of the Wétiko as written by the Wétiko? . . .7 In the 1970s Forbes, like Césaire before him, already understood the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/ coloniality. So, while Chican@ studies and ethnic, women’s, queer, and borderlands studies must challenge and have challenged Eurocentric constructions of history, nonetheless these academic fields have at times continued within the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality, both in their content and their mode of critique. And it is this destructive mode of critique and being, which seeks to destroy and not convince, impose and not construct, that we need to challenge as well. In the introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre warned Europe: Fanon is not speaking to you. The decolonial imperative means that we are no longer speaking to that which deems itself modern and civil but is really a project of decivilization (i.e., the various modern/colonial states

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and their various arms, institutions, and mechanisms). It means that we should instead speak to each other horizontally and intercommunally, because if we get stuck in any dividing line already structured by power between the citizen and noncitizen, legal and illegal, male and female, Mexican and United-statesian, then the fact of this line entraps us. Nevertheless, Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval “through and with” Roland Barthes would tell us, “Let’s look at that line”—the line between the civil and the uncivil, or between nation-states, in this context through the lens of power. The very fact of that line reveals a contradiction between any two terms/things on either side of the line. Let us not get stuck in the structure of power that takes the form of an enclosure like a box. As Indigenous public intellectual and scholar Steven T. Newcomb has said, “It is not just even enough to think outside the box, but to realize that there is no box, there is an idea of a box.”8 And to the extent that we keep thinking about open or closed borders, then we are right back in the box of the epistemic and cartographic ordering of the interstate system, naturalizing the existence of national-territorial boundaries, even when we claim to be outside of said box. In other words, even though one may be advocating an “open borders” position seemingly outside of the box, it is still being defined by the naturalized idea of the box (i.e., interstate system) itself. That said, it is this punctum, this moment of exposing the dividing line between the civil and the uncivil, that reveals the contradiction. And through it we need to find that third meaning, to again use Chela Sandoval’s reading of Barthes; we need to begin to have a conversation that provokes cartographic and epistemic disobedience that acts toward making visible a third meaning, as-yet unnamable: a “new” form of being and belonging that is not about open or closed borders; a world without borders that we do not yet know, but whose dim light is seen in the distance, felt in the gut, dreamed, imagined, set as a decolonial horizon of possibility. And to end, I paraphrase the words of Eduardo Galeano: What good is the horizon if one can never reach it? Well, it serves to keep us walking. And I hope that we continue to walk together in a good way. To be good to one another. To have the difficult but necessary conversations, not from the starting point of a Eurocentric mode of critique that is ultimately destructive and decivilizes, but from that of a spirit of humility, generosity, relatedness, and reciprocity. That horizon that we have no name for must also include not just a critique of the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality, which manifests itself in the interstate system and national-territorial boundaries, but also

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a constructive critique that clears in order to dream. Every world must first be dreamed, and dreaming a new world together requires us to unhinge ourselves from the colonial, compartmentalized thinking that has also separated us from she who has the stakes anchored across her flesh. If geography is the science of writing the world (into being), how might we consider the ways in which the Earth already speaks in and for herself ? We should unthink the boxes of nation-states by again learning or remembering to listen to the Earth, to the water, to the air, to the sun; to the scaly swimmers, the creepy crawlers, the four-legged and the winged, to all who share our concern about the existence of the border and for whom epistemic and cartographic disobedience toward the prison of modernity/coloniality is a way of being. For it is the four elements of life themselves that, along the southwestern point of the U-S///Mexico border wall, where the steel landing mats enter the Pacific Ocean, have indeed rejected and rusted away that most unnatural of boundaries time and time again. The decolonial imperative is a politics and praxis of liberation and of life, with and for others, that evades the modern/colonial logics of death and compartmentalization, be it among humans or between humans and all other forms of life.

Notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

Néstor P. Rodríguez, “Social Construction.” Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise, 125– 30. Martínez, Troublesome Border, 24– 28. Anderson and O’Dowd, “Borders, Border Regions and Territoriality.” Griswold del Castillo, “Natives and Settlers,” 13– 14. It should be noted that at the time the Spanish officials in what was then New Spain had a complicated casta system with as many as thirty-two categories for classifying the children of mixed parentage, so the above categories likely do not grasp the complexity that existed among them. The number of Spanish who came to the Americas was relatively small and belies the presumed one-to-one Spanish-Indian equation often connoted by the term mestizo. Herbert C. Hensley, “Untitled,” in Early San Diego: Reminiscences of Early Days and People (1876– 1957), California Room Collection, RCC979.498, San Diego Public Library. The above manuscript consists of 646 typewritten pages in three volumes. The copy in the San Diego Public Library’s collection is a duplicate copy that accompanied Hensley’s notes on the Dranga family. Little Landers, “Advertisement: San Ysidro, Home of the Little Landers Colony,” 1909, Little Landers Collection, 13747– 2 and 137474– 2A, San Diego Historical Society. Lugo, Fragmented Lives, 23– 24. For an explanation of the term violences, please see the final section of this introduction, “A Note on Terms.” Ohmae, Borderless World; Guéhenno, End of the Nation-State; Giddens, Runaway World. For other works addressing the end-of-century shift toward globalization, see Sassen, Losing Control?; Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents; Harvey, Spaces

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

Notes to Pages 7–10

of Capital; Castells, Power of Identity; Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism; Fernández-Kelly, For We Are Sold; Peña, Terror of the Machine; and Salzinger, Genders in Production. Ortíz-González, El Paso. Turner’s original phrase is found in Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 32. García Canclini, Culturas híbridas; Bowden, Murder City. Ratzel, Politische Geographie; Lapradelle, La frontière. Herzog, Where North Meets South, 15– 20. See also Rankin and Schofield, “Troubled Historiography.” Martínez, Troublesome Border, discusses the long history of cross-border raids by many distinct Indigenous groups, such as the Apache and Yoemem, who had their original lands bisected by the imposition of a national-territorial border. See also Ganster and Lorey, Borders and Border Politics. Wallerstein, Capitalist World-Economy; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”; Mignolo, Local Histories. Mignolo draws from Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel to argue that the creation of the modern worldsystem as the current historical social system implicates colonization; hence the need to name it modern/colonial, for the two are opposite sides of the same coin. See Alvarez, “Making of an Anthropology of Borderlands,” for a great review of literature on the U-S///Mexico border and borderlands in the field of anthropology and other disciplines through the mid-1990s. Border and borderlands literature has proliferated in recent years yet largely remains within the same frameworks I discuss above. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise, 8– 9. See also Anderson and O’Dowd, “Border, Border Regions and Territoriality,” 594– 95. See Adelman and Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders.” Ganster and Lorey, Borders and Border Politics, xv. Bae, “Tijuana-San Diego”; Dear and Leclerc, Postborder City. While Bae addresses the particularities of the San Diego-Tijuana region in a nuanced way, more troubling is the work of Dear and Leclerc, who suggest a heterogeneous yet unified region stretching from the northern reaches of Los Angeles through Orange County and the diverse microregions of San Diego County to extend across the U-S///Mexico border to Tijuana, Tecate, and Rosarito, despite the glaring problems presented by the collapsing of constitutive racial/gendered, economic, topographic, and juridical-administrative divides. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 535– 36; Dussel, Invention of the Americas, 19– 26. While Quijano’s and Dussel’s respective work has not been widely recognized in the United States until recently, various authors throughout Latin America have long engaged with it. Dussel, Invention of the Americas, 9– 10. Walter Mignolo draws from the work of both Aníbal Quijano and Enrique Dussel to explicitly link the two arguments, articulating coloniality as precisely the underside of modernity. See Mignolo, Local Histories, ix– x, 17– 18.

Notes to Pages 10–21

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

197

Quijano, “‘Raza,’ ‘etnia,’ y ‘nación,’” 170. Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad,” 11. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism and Latin America,” 570. Barkawi and Laffey, “Imperial Peace.” Barkawi and Laffey make a nuanced argument for a change of focus from the “democratic peace” thesis— the assumption that democratic nations are less likely to war with one another, which implicitly assumes the liberal democratic nation-state as a norm and ideal— to renewed attention on the international workings of peace as an agreement between liberal nation-states to use force toward achieving shared international political and economic goals. Their argument for a change in the unit of analysis from the nation-state to an international system of states parallels, with a few important differences, my argument for using a historical system as a unit of analysis. On the presence of such violence in border cities, see, for example, Graham, “Cities as Strategic Sites.” Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction: States of Violence,” 2. Dibble, “Overnight Violence in Tijuana”; Dibble, “Spike in Violence.” Skurski and Coronil, “Introduction: States of Violence,” 4. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 34. See Kontopoulos, Logics of Social Structure, especially chapter 10. I will elaborate on this work below. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3, 13 (emphasis mine). Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 2– 3. Peach, “Income Distribution,” 9. For Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness,” see Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 77– 91. Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 23. Bonfil Batalla’s book was translated into English and published as México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (see the bibliography). I am drawing my understanding of refractive theory from French’s reading of Borderlands, which foregrounds Anzaldúa’s engagement with Jack Forbes. See French, “Borderlands of Borderlands.” Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo, xviii. Bonfil Batalla, 62. Key “border texts” include Anzaldúa, Borderlands; José David Saldívar, Border Matters; and Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border. Refer to the bibliography for full information about these and other works mentioned above. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”; Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social”; Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad.” See also Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects; Lugones, “Heterosexualism”; Lugones, “Coloniality of Gender”; and Mignolo, Local Histories. See Rosas, “Thickening Borderlands.” For a related argument that predates the coloniality framework, see Quijano and Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept.”

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Notes to Pages 21–37

To this framework we can also add an early essay by Peter Puxley on Aboriginal communities in Canada that is relatively underconsidered by U-S academics but read broadly by Native studies scholars. See Puxley, “Colonial Experience.” Dear and Leclerc, Postborder City. Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 533– 36. A good explication can be found in the section “Four points of clarification” in Grosfoguel and Georas, “‘Coloniality of Power’ and Racial Dynamics.” This is the description of Quijano found in Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects, 18. Lugones, “Heterosexualism,” 187– 89. Lugones, 203– 4. For an overview of world-system critiques, see Arrighi, “Capitalism and the Modern World-System.” For critiques of coloniality, see various articles in “Latin America, in Theory,” special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 1 (Winter 2007). Kontopoulos, Logics of Social Structure, 222– 33. Castro-Gómez, “Michel Foucault,” 156– 59. Castro-Gómez, 164– 65. An array of scholarship on the Middle East has begun to elaborate this position following the publication of Gregory, Colonial Present. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction: Making Sense of Violence,” in Violence in War and Peace, 1– 31. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 71– 76. See Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle.”  Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 169. See also James, Resisting State Violence. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 33– 42. See, for example, Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping; and Kleinman, “The Violence of Everyday Life.” Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, “Introduction,” in Violence in War and Peace, 3– 4. Fanon, Black Skins, 115.

Chapter 1 1. 2. 3. 4.

Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 533–80. Quijano, “‘Raza,’ ‘etnia,’ y ‘nación,’” 170. Lugones, “Heterosexualism.” The term constitutive outside is employed here in the way it is used by Chantal Mouffe, where real or perceived violations of norms serve to reify the very same norms that are being violated. See Mouffe, Return of the Political. See also Roy, “Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship,” 464. I choose this term to emphasize the racial and othering nature of anti-immigrant hysteria, which in my opinion supersedes what Wayne Cornelius has called an “ethnocultural objection” (“Ambivalent Reception,” 180), a term that I feel does not capture the complexity and historicity of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Notes to Pages 37–44

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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Wynter, “1492,” 47. The Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License ran similar campaigns in at least twelve states between 2004 and 2008. These appeared on the website http://www.secure license.org (accessed December 2006), which is no longer online and is now available only through www.archive.org. The group has since morphed its image and website in order to appear like legitimate security consultants. See more at https:// www.idsecuritynow.org. I have observed these shirts to be a common presence at anti-migrant rallies. Upon searching for their source, I found that the address one could order them from was based in San Diego. One of the ads is still available, though only through www .archive.org, using the following URL: http://www.mikedesign.biz/T-shirts.html (accessed April 2018). See, for example, Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists. An interesting point noted by Indigenous-identified “Latin@s” is that Mexico officially claims to be a nation that is 60 percent mestizo, 30 percent Indigenous, and 10 percent European (completely erasing smaller but nonetheless important populations of African and Asian descent that only recently are being recognized). Meanwhile, in the United States, the most common form of establishing who is Indigenous is by means of blood quantum requirements that vary from one Indigenous nation to another, a practice that has been contested since its inception. Nevertheless, if one were to apply the most conservative of contested U-S blood quantum requirements to Mexico, the demographics would be closer to 60 percent Indigenous and only 30 percent mestizo, with the larger share of the remaining 10 percent being heavily Afro-descendant Mexicans. Arguably, one would have a similar representative sample among “Latin@s” in the United States. For pathbreaking elaborations of these positions, see Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-Nation-State; Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem, Between Woman and Nation; and Ranchod-Nilsson and Tétreault, Women, States, and Nationalism. Eisenstein, “Writing Bodies on the Nation,” 42. Newton, “Functional Definition of Politics,” 147. Newton began elaborating this line of argument as early as 1967, in a shorter piece with a similar title published in the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service 1, no. 2 (May 15, 1967): 4. These writings prefigure later articulations on politics and war by French theorist Michel Foucault between 1971 and 1976, following his engagement with Black Panther members and his visit to Attica Prison while in the United States. See also Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers.” See Gonzales, Reform Without Justice. See Varsanyi, Taking Local Control. The civilian patrol movement in many ways can be seen as a precursor of the Tea Party movement that shaped later political transformations and in turn gave rise to the election of Donald J. Trump. In this chapter I focus solely on the civilian patrols, though the research here, mostly conducted in 2004– 8, can elucidate how

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

Notes to Pages 44–51

the Tea Party gained the political clout it once claimed and morphed into the “Make America Great Again” crowd. Roy, “Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship,” 475. Neil Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics”; Mains, “Maintaining National Identity.” See Roy, “Paradigms of Propertied Citizenship.” Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure”; Polanyi, Great Transformation; Cornelius, “Structural Embeddedness of Demand.” Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure,” 483– 87. See also Polanyi, Great Transformation. See also Krippner et al., “Polanyi Symposium,” which is an edited transcript of a conversation at an April 2002 conference “intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept” (109). Conversation participants included Mark Granovetter, Gillian Hart, Giovanni Arrighi, and Michael Buraway, among others. Cornelius, “Structural Embeddedness of Demand,” 125– 28. Cornelius, “Ambivalent Reception,” 165, 180. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge”; Huntington, Who Are We; and Wynter, “1492.” Little and Sheffield, “Frontiers and Criminal Justice,” 796– 97. Feagin, Racist America. Takaki, Iron Cages. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 25. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. Takaki, Iron Cages, 263– 64. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 32. On the definition of the American character by frontier violence, see Slotkin, “Apotheosis of the Lynching.” See Mirandé, Gringo Justice, 112; Paredes, With a Pistol; De León, They Called Them Greasers. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. Dunbar-Ortiz, “Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!” Frantz Fanon’s articulation of the “fact of blackness” as an overdetermination “from without” speaks to the ways in which conceptions of race are visually marked on dark bodies. See Fanon, Black Skins, 116. Similarly, Mary Waters argues that “racially” white individuals can choose to accentuate their difference (ethnicity), for example on St. Patrick’s Day or during Oktoberfest, while those racially categorized as nonwhite do not share the luxury of this “option,” as their bodies are markers of (racial) difference on an everyday basis. See Waters, Ethnic Options. Williams, “Law Aimed at Terrorists.” Andreas, Border Games, 142. Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 30.

Notes to Pages 52–59

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

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For extensive consideration of vigilante and quasi-vigilante violence on the border and in surrounding areas through the 1980s and 1990s, see Novick, White Lies, especially chap. 7, “Sin Fronteras: Anti-Immigrant Hysteria and the Rise of the Racist Right,” 167– 202; and Bender, Greasers and Gringos, chap. 8, “No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed: Subhumanity,” 114– 53, especially 127– 34. Simcox, “About Us.” Donnelly, “Article— Liberal Media.” Donnelly, “Article— Liberal Media.” Donnelly, “Article— Liberal Media.” Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, “History.” California Border Watch, “Border Watch in a Box.” Donnelly, “Article— Liberal Media.” Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens, 19, 87. See Brown, Strains of Violence; Burrows, Vigilante!; Rosenbaum and Sederberg, “Vigilantism”; Dimsdale, Vigilantes of Montana. Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens, 24. Johnston, “What is Vigilantism?,” 220– 24. Melbin, “Night as Frontier,” 5– 6. Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens, 78. Mirandé, Gringo Justice, 100– 117; Senkewicz, Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco; Myers, San Francisco’s Reign of Terror; De León, They Called Them Greasers, 30– 33. Holmes and Holmes, “Understanding Mass Murder,” 55. Little and Sheffield, “Frontiers and Criminal Justice,” 797. Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens, 74– 79. Novick, White Lies, 168. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise, 3. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Blood on the Border”; Buchanan and Holthouse, “Playing Rough.” Berestein, “Border-Watch Squabble.” Fahrenthold, “On Patrol in Vt.” Magnus, “Vigilantes at Border Won’t Be Tolerated.” Berestein, “2 Mexicans Are Shot.” Berestein, “2 Mexicans Are Shot.” Berestein, “2 Mexicans Are Shot.” Berestein, “Border-Watch Squabble.” Berestein, “Border-Watch Squabble.” Berestein, “2 Mexicans Are Shot.” Berestein, “Group Has 125 Trained.” Berestein, “Group Has 125 Trained.” Berestein, “Border-Watch Group Reaches Crossroads.” Berestein, “Group Has 125 Trained.” Bennett, “Border Watch Postponed.”

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Notes to Pages 60–72

Berestein, “Border Watch Planned for East County.” Moran, “Volunteers Begin Border Watch.” Berestein, “Border Watch Group Could Rent.” San Diego Union-Tribune, “Man Is Killed by Agent.” See this quotation at http://www.minutemanhq.com/state/read.php?chapter= WA&sid=477 (accessed May  20, 2018). See also David Holthouse, “Despite White Supremacist Ties,” at https://www.alternet.org/story/152218/despite_white _supremacist_ties%2C_nativist_minutemen_project_founder_gilchrist_stumped _for_gop_candidates. C. Johnson, “State Border Police Measure.” Weiser, “Immigration Clash at the Capitol.” Seper, “Vietnam Vet Holds Vigil on Border.” Buchanan and Holthouse, Playing Rough. Perry, In the Name of Hate, 220. Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 151. Mains, “Maintaining National Identity,” 212. Santos, Renovar la teoría crítica, 20– 21.

Chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Ortíz-González, El Paso. See King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, especially chapters 1 and 4. See Palafox, “Opening Up Borderland Studies.” Roy, “Reverse Side of the World”; AlSayyad, “Hybrid Culture.” See also Smith and Katz, “Grounding Metaphor.” For an excellent example of an analysis in this light, see Ortíz-González, El Paso. The term spatial-juridical fixes is a play on David Harvey’s work regarding “spatialtemporal fixes” as ways in which capital reorganizes itself across geographies over time. My usage here is to suggest that while geographies may remain the same, changing jurisdictional boundaries can also perform similar effects in the service of capital. See Harvey, New Imperialism, 87– 89, 115– 24. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 12– 16, 123. Orfield, American Metropolitics, 134. Burns, Formation of Local Governments. Mollenkopf, Contested City, 37. Mollenkopf, 58– 59, 119– 21. Mollenkopf, 73. All figures above are from United States Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Information Paper. The report is itself a compilation of summarized information from the individual state reports that appeared in table 9 of Series PC(1), “Number of Inhabitants,” 1960 Census of Population. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 98. See Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power.

Notes to Pages 72–82

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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Mollenkopf, Contested City, 37. Mollenkopf, 11. On fortified enclaves, see Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves.” On gated communities and spaces of surveillance, see Davis and Moctezuma, “Policing the Third Border”; and Mike Davis, “Fortress Los Angeles.” See also Mitchell, Right to the City. Castells, “The Space of Flows,” 348. Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves,” 121. Susser, “Manuel Castells,” 4. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, especially chapter 8. Banfield, Unheavenly City, especially chapter 4. See Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power; Clark, Dark Ghetto; and Blauner, “Internal Colonialism.” Banfield, Unheavenly City, 68. Wacquant, “Three Pernicious Premises,” 341– 42. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 12– 16, 123. See Rosales, Illusion of Inclusion. Ortíz-González, El Paso. Mains, “Maintaining National Identity,” 211. Palmer and Lindsey, “Classifying State Approaches to Annexation,” 61. Sengstock, Annexation. Dye, “Urban Political Integration,” 445. Wheeler, “Annexation Law and Annexation Success,” 355. Ewald, “Civil Death.” Feiock and Carr, “Consequences of State Incentives,” 10. Orfield, American Metropolitics, 134. For example, see Gillette, “Annexation or Occupation”; and Connerly, “One Great City.” Kaye, “South Bay to Vote on Annexing.” See Moeser and Dennis, Politics of Annexation, especially the introduction. Moeser and Dennis, Politics of Annexation, 5; Connerly, “One Great City,” 52. Moeser and Dennis, Politics of Annexation, 7– 8. This striking reference is from Berri, “Annexation and Municipal Voting Rights,” cited in Austin, “Politics vs Economics,” 505n9. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 155. Beauregard, 155 (my emphasis). Juliet Ann Musso notes common approval of annexations by target-area residents who are promised an increase in “police protection.” Musso, “Political Economy of City Formation,” 148. Austin, “Politics vs Economics,” 501– 2 (my emphasis). Austin, 528. This is an issue that is considered briefly in the conclusion. In September 1982, five students at San Diego State University undertook a research project on the history of San Ysidro. The resulting booklet of essays provides

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52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Notes to Pages 83–89

a good starting point for future work on San Ysidro: Griswold del Castillo, San Ysidro Community History Project. The city charter of 1931 is still in place and, amid fiscal uncertainty and near bankruptcy, the most recent mayoral elections resulted in the shifting of power from the city manager to the mayor. See Mott, San Diego– Politically Speaking; and Stone, Price, and Stone, City Manager Government in San Diego. Bridges, Morning Glories, 35, 169. Corso, “Anti-City.” Shragge, “I Like the Cut of Your Jib.” Cited in Pourade, City of the Dream, 203– 4. Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, 58– 60. San Ysidro Border Press, “Local Water Is Best in County.” See, for example, San Diego Union, “South Bay Annexation Vote Today”; and San Diego Union, “South Bay Approves Annexation to City.” Kurtz, Politics of a Poverty Habitat, 7– 8. Baker, San Ysidro, 36– 37 (my emphasis). Christman, “To Have and to Hold,” 34. Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. San Diego Union, “Civil Rights Bill, Border Ban,” B1. See also Christman, “To Have and to Hold,” 37. San Diego Union, “Civil Rights Bill, Border Ban.” Pourade, City of the Dream, 211. Higgins, This Fantastic City, 153– 57. On Los Angeles and its harbor commission, see Christman, “To Have and to Hold,” 37. Kurtz, “Chicano Student Activists.” Higgins, This Fantastic City, 153– 57. Wallace, “Coronado’s Water History.” Pourade, City of the Dream, 218. Pourade, 218– 19. Terrazas, “Regional Conflict,” 166– 67. Ortíz-González, El Paso, xxiv. Ortíz-González, xxxvii. Texas Senate Interim Committee on Annexation, Interim Report. Ortiz, “¡Sí Se Puede!,” 143– 44. San Diego Union, “3 Steps Remaining,” A29. Baker, San Ysidro, 46. San Diego Union, “South Bay Approves Annexation.” San Ysidro Border Press, “Want Incorporation Here.” San Ysidro Border Press, “Incorporation Fight Is Again Delayed by Board.” Mains, “Maintaining National Identity.” To this day, I am amazed at the number of blank stares that I get when I introduce myself as being from San Ysidro. Many people I have encountered believe it is in Mexico, and then proceed to want to tell me of their drunken adventures in Tijuana.

Notes to Pages 89–97

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

205

Cf. Caldeira, City of Walls. Beaverstock, Smith, and Taylor, “World-City Network,” 126. See Frug, City Making, especially chapter 2, which is an excellent consideration of the legal history of cities. Frug, City Making, 5. Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship.” Frug, City Making, 31. Frug, 45– 48. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy, 3– 7, 13– 15. King, 68– 77. For an example of the terra nullius assumption, see Schweikart, “Financing the Urban Frontier,” 186; see also Neil Smith, New Urban Frontier, for a similar dynamic. Harvey, The New Imperialism. Articulating the notion of “coloniality of power,” Aníbal Quijano differentiates “colonial independence” from independence with decolonization (following Fanon) to suggest that ideologies of “national identity,” “independence,” “development,” and “progress” are implicated in the epistemological underpinnings of modernity and obscure the continuities of “colonial situations” that persist despite “formal” independence. For more on such distinctions, see Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”; Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America”; and Mignolo, Local Histories. Mignolo outlines the overlapping layers of modernity when he speaks of the “modern/colonial” as two inextricable sides of the same coin. See the discussion in the introduction. See San Diego History Center, “Timeline of San Diego History.”

Chapter 3 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

This quotation is found widely on a variety of web pages dealing primarily with prison justice, including the website of the organization Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons, which was formerly at www.noprisons.org. The quotation can be found directly through archive.org at https://web.archive.org/web/200212082 02918/http://www.noprisons.org:80/archive/Vol.%2016,%20March%202001/mar 2001page2.html. The famous formulation derives from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The House of the Dead, originally written in Russian in the mid-nineteenth century but still very relevant today. Ironically but significantly, it was also found on a few “correctional” services web pages, meant to convey the idea of the prison-industrial complex as just and functional. See Mignolo, Local Histories, 37– 39. Mignolo is indebted to Aníbal Quijano for his own work on coloniality, and he relies heavily on Chicana thinker Gloria Anzaldúa in his understanding of how particular knowledges have been subalternized and function as forms of border gnosis. Alarcón, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera,” 357. See Silko, Ceremony, 1– 4. See also Ščigulinská, “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” 345. Hernández, “Violence, Subalternity and El Corrido,” 141.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

Notes to Pages 97–108

Hernández, 137–52. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 34. The quotation here is Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s working definition of racism. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28. Watson, Golden Arches East, 4– 5. Watson notes that in 1996 Belarus and Tahiti became the 100th and 101st countries to open a McDonald’s. Prison Activist Resource Center, press release, April 15, 2000. Paper copy in author’s possession. Mariano Azuela’s novel Los de abajo is an account of the Mexican Revolution from the perspective of those struggling against the Porfirio Díaz regime and encroaching U-S corporate interests at the time. This perspective, according to Walter D. Mignolo, suggests thinking from the subaltern side of the colonial difference. See Azuela, Los de abajo; and Mignolo, Local Histories, 19. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3. Watson, Golden Arches East, 3. Kincaid, “On Seeing England,” 34. Paz, interview with Rita Guibert, 267– 68. Santos, Una epistemología del Sur, 12, 81. See also Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking.” Friedman, Lexus and the Olive Tree, 239– 51. While some argue that there have been exceptions, Friedman has countered that these are recent occurrences and the exceptions that give strength to the general rule. See Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism, 75– 79. Seltzer, Serial Killers, 29– 35. Gomez, “Ninety Minutes at McDonald’s,” 76. Quoted in Gilligan, Violence, 199. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 255– 57. Schlosser, 8, 261. Royle, “51st US State?,” 52. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 133– 35. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 144. Leidner, “Fast-food Work in the United States,” 18– 19. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 238, 245. Salvá-Ramírez, “San Ysidro Massacre,” 38, 40. Golden, “21 Die in San Ysidro Massacre.” Villarino, “La Masacre en San Ysidro,” 236. Golden, “21 Die in San Ysidro Massacre,” A1, A3. Golden, A3. Villarino, “La Masacre en San Ysidro,” 237, 239. The translation/interpretation of the Spanish original into English was done by the songwriters, Villarino and Galván, themselves. Villarino, 236. Hough et al., “Mental Health Consequences.” Villarino, “La Masacre en San Ysidro,” 235– 36.

Notes to Pages 109–123

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

207

Froelich and Gandelman, “They Represented All Walks.” While Timothy Dunn points to 1978 as the beginning of the loosening of restrictions that would lead to the militarization of the border, later operations at various sites on the border between 1993 and 1994 are often cited as exemplary of the lowintensity conflict and militarization of the border. See Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 19– 22. Villarino, “La Masacre en San Ysidro,” 238, 240. Griswold del Castillo, “San Ysidro Massacre,” 66. New York Times, “Coast Man Kills 20.” Griswold del Castillo, “San Ysidro Massacre,” 72. Griswold del Castillo, 74. Phone interview with Villarino, June 26, 2000. Golden, “21 Die in San Ysidro Massacre,” A3. New York Times, “Coast Man Kills 20.” Personal communication with Larry J. Estrada, National Association for Ethnic Studies, San Francisco, California, March 30, 2006. Cummings, “Neighbors Term Mass Slayer.” Reza, “15-Year-Old San Ysidro Girl.” Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 28– 29. While Trouillot discusses the example of the Alamo briefly, see also Flores, Remembering the Alamo; and Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 9. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 126– 27. Love, McDonald’s, 381. Love, 381. Salvá-Ramírez, “San Ysidro Massacre,” 40, 41. Salvá-Ramírez, 40. Salvá-Ramírez, 38, 41. Pierce, “Couple Building Massacre Shrine.” Lubrano, “City Defied on Shrine.” Butler, Precarious Life. San Diego Union, “Memorial at Massacre Site.” Okerblom, “Vandals Force Abandonment of Shrine.” Okerblom, “Vandals Force Abandonment of Shrine.” This was on a previous web page of the Education Center at San Ysidro, satellite site of Southwestern College. Accessed May 14, 2018, https://web.archive.org /web/20030124111240/http://swc.cc.ca.us/AboutSouthwesternCollege/SanYsidro Campus/index.htm. Ibid. My emphasis. Local artist and selection committee member Victor Ochoa, interview with the author, June 23, 2011. Lydersen, “Living in Terror.” Shanken, “Planning Memory.”

208

Notes to Pages 130–137

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3. Saldívar, Border Matters, 172. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise, 16. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 9. See Mark Cronlund Anderson, Pancho Villa’s Revolution by Headlines. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 128– 29. Limón, Mexican Ballads. José David Saldívar, “Toward a Chicano Poetics,” 12. For an interesting and thorough account of the nativist perspective on the 1996 incident, see the website The New American: http://thenewamerican.com/tna /1996/vo12no17/vo12no17_revolution.htm. For a look at the 2000 incident, see the website of the Orange County– based organization called Voices of Citizens Together (VCT): http://www.americanpatrol.com/RALLIES/JULY42000 /album0.html. Both can be accessed through the home page of VCT: http://www .americanpatrol.com. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 32. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War”; Dunn, “Border Militarization,” 7– 8. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 35. Davidson, Lives on the Line, 108– 9, and chapter 3. Andreas, “Escalation of U.S. Immigration Control,” 593– 94, 606. Andreas, “Escalation of U.S. Immigration Control,” 608– 10; Andreas, Border Games. Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 173. Barrera, 172– 73. For relevant material, see chapter 6 of that book in particular. See also Gonzales, Reform Without Justice. Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 173. Chávez, Covering Immigration, 252– 53. In the cases of the shooting death of Esequiel Hernández and the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, both occurring in different border towns, the imagery became more than just a metaphor, as the Marines that shot Hernández and the perpetrator of the McDonald’s massacre all perceived themselves as indeed being in “a war zone.” See Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest, 128; and Chávez, Covering Immigration, especially chapter 5. Hernández, “Violence, Subalternity and El Corrido.” Mendoza, El corrido mexicano, xiii. See Mendoza, El romance español; Mendoza, El corrido mexicano; Mendoza, Lírica narrativa de México; Simmons, Mexican Corrido as a Source; Serrano Martínez, El corrido mexicano no deriva; Paredes, With a Pistol; José David Saldívar, “Toward a Chicano Poetics”; José David Saldívar, Border Matters; Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido; Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative; Limón, Mexican Ballads; and Arteaga, “Chicano-Mexican Corrido.”

Notes to Pages 137–151

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

209

See Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido. José David Saldívar, “Toward a Chicano Poetics,” 12. Alarcón, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera,” 360. Herrera-Sobek, “Corrido as Hypertext,” 257. Alarcón, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera,” 358. The translation of “El Corrido” by Los Tigres del Norte is my own. José David Saldívar, Border Matters, 3– 7. Wright, “From Protests to Politics,” 378. Hernández, “Violence, Subalternity and El Corrido.” Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 35. Monárrez Fragoso, “La cultura del feminicidio,” 97. See Nathan, “Death Comes to the Maquilas”; and Quinones, True Tales from Another Mexico. Monárrez Fragoso, “La cultura del feminicidio,” 110. Fregoso, “Voices Without Echo,” 145. Fregoso, “Voices Without Echo”; Monárrez Fragoso, “La cultura del feminicidio.” SOS Initiative, “Juárez Women,” 22. Los Marineros del Norte, “Los Crímenes de Juárez.” All translations of lyrics from this song are by the author. Wright, “From Protests to Politics,” 378. Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary, 115 (emphasis mine). Pérez, 116. Pérez, 115 (emphasis mine). Olivera, “Violencia Feminicida,” 106. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 304. Spivak, 287. Spivak, 386. Marchand, “Neo-liberal Disciplining,” 91. Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood, 335. For a moment in which the book’s plot is well described within the text itself, see Gaspar de Alba, 119. Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism,” 379. Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood, 333. Irigaray, Sex Which Is Not One, 172. Irigaray, 184. Wright, “Manifesto Against Femicide,” 561. Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood, 254 (emphasis in original). Wright, “From Protests to Politics,” 377. Wright, 377. Wright, 378. Irigaray, Sex Which Is Not One, 185. Gaspar de Alba, Desert Blood, 323. Gaspar de Alba, 255. Alarcón, “Chicana Feminism,” 377.

210

Notes to Pages 155–158

Chapter 5

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

A version of this chapter was published as “Sonic Geographies and Anti-Border Musics: ‘We Didn’t Cross the Border, The Borders Crossed Us!’” in Performing the US Latina & Latino Borderlands, ed. Arturo Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter García (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 235– 57. Used with permission of Indiana University Press. The drowning scene is addressed within the context of U-S///Mexico border militarization in the documentary New World Border, dir. Casey Peek. Available online at https://vimeo.com/113536141. An important qualification must be made. While not an absolute gendered divide, there is an overarching pattern or tendency on the part of Chicano male scholars to provide a minimal passing reference to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and consequently foreground an 1848 timeframe to the study of Chican@ history. There are some significant exceptions to this pattern. It is important to note both the pattern and the exception at the risk of creating a false dichotomy between Chicano and Chicana scholars. I thank Reynaldo Macias for his attention to this qualification. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3. Examples of such uses of “border/borderlands” abound. A review of various fields, from anthropology to queer theory, film studies, literary criticism, and history, to name a few, will yield echoes of Anzaldúa. Kun, “Aural Border.” See Dunn, Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border; Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise; Mignolo, Local Histories; and Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method. Kun, “Aural Border,” 15. On Chicano Park, see, for example, the documentary Chicano Park, dir. Marilyn Mulford, prod. Mario Barrera and Marilyn Mulford. Chunky Sánchez and Los Alacranes Mojados’ famous anthems “Chicano Park Samba” and “Pocho” can be found on their 1979 album Rolas de Aztlán. The corrido is most commonly known as a type of popular folk ballad made famous during the Mexican Revolution, addressed at length in chapter 4. It exists primarily along the U-S///Mexico border, although variations exist in numerous regions throughout Mexico. Kun, “Aural Border,” 1. Kun, 21. See Ortíz-Gonzalez, El Paso, especially the introduction; and Price, Dry Place. Border Brujo, perf. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, dir. Isaac Artenstein. My usage of this phrase is doubly significant. First, it is a reference to the call made by Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon and the Caribbean Philosophical Association for a “shift in the cartography of reason” as a decolonial project rooted in epistemic shifts represented by interventions like ethnic studies. Second, it refers to Subcomandante Marcos’s attempt to sketch a “cartography and calendar” of theory, difference, resistance, land, fear, memory, and war in a seven-part series of

Notes to Pages 159–168

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

211

talks titled “Neither Center, Nor Periphery” at the Primer Coloquio Internacional In Memoriam Andrés Aubry in San Cristóbal in December 2007. Elsewhere I interrogate three “incidents” marred by violence and the consequent corridos that narrate the events to illustrate how corridos, in serving as oppositional accounts, are not simply folklore or “cultural” production, but articulations of subaltern knowledge as an underlying logic and sense of knowing. See Hernández, “Violence, Subalternity and El Corrido.” See Angela Davis, Blues Legacies; Rose, Black Noise; and Woods, Development Arrested. Mendoza, El corrido mexicano, viii. See Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido; and Pérez, Decolonial Imaginary. Alarcón, “Anzaldúa’s Frontera,” 357. A few exceptions include the work of Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Ramon Saldívar, José David Saldívar, Calderón, Deborah Vargas, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Victor Viesca. See Lugones, “Heterosexualism.” Roberto Cintli Rodríguez, Our Sacred Maíz, 72– 73. Rodríguez points to the limits of thinking of such viewpoints as counternarratives, for in the very act of countering, they implicitly reposition the master narrative as central. Ceremonial discourses, in turn, point to those challenges or critiques that have a longer epistemic point of departure predating the arrival of Europeans in las Américas in 1492. Calderón, “Cultural Mosh Pits,” 97. Calderón, 97 (my emphasis). Calderón, 114. See Trouillot, Silencing the Past. See Mignolo, Local Histories, xiii. In a related vein, Mignolo has argued that the subalternization of knowledge, which occurred initially as a result of European colonial expansion, also has linguistic dimensions; see Mignolo, Local Histories, 71. José David Saldívar, Border Matters, 3. See Serrano Martínez, El corrido mexicano no deriva. For an account of the critical implications of Serrano Martínez with regard to the issue of subaltern knowledge production, see Hernández, “Violence, Subalternity and El Corrido.” See Paredes, With a Pistol; José David Saldívar, “Toward a Chicano Poetics”; José David Saldívar, Border Matters; Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido; Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative; Limón, Mexican Ballads; and Arteaga, “Chicano-Mexican Corrido.” Astorga, Mitología del “narcotraficante,” 127. Bosniak, “Opposing Prop. 187,” 593. Bosniak, 610. While a number of Chicana and Mexicana musicians and artists such as Cihuatl-Ce, Cihuatl Tonalli, In Lak Ech, Lila Downs, and Mujerez de Maíz have long engaged in the shifting of the cartography and calendar of knowledge that forms the basis of this article, my choice of the three songs here is based strictly on this shared phrase.

212

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

Notes to Pages 169–178

Myrna García’s work is very instructive in this regard. See Myrna García, Sin Fronteras. Ruiz and Sánchez Korrol, Latinas in the United States, 301. Stephen et al., Perspectives on Las Américas, 10. The contrasting views are detailed in the August Twenty-Ninth Movement’s bestknown pamphlet, Fan the Flames, circa 1972. Richard Rodríguez writes a piercing critique of Frost’s heteronormative masculinity in his construction of nation/family. I concur with Rodríguez, yet Frost’s presence in “Stolen at Gunpoint” points to the contradictory subjectivity of colonized Chicano subjects struggling against their emasculation and dehumanization, and it should be examined in this multifaceted way in light of such complexity. See Richard T. Rodríguez, “Verse of the Godfather.” I have on occasion run into and chatted with Alurista at Chicano Park Day in San Diego, celebrated each year on the Saturday closest to April 22 in honor of the park’s founding on April 22, 1970. Alurista makes a similar gesture in the documentary Quest for a Homeland, which is one part of the four-part PBS series Chicano! (1996). In it he states with a look of amusement: “I presented it the next day . . . as a poem. As a poem that I thought encapsulated the spirit of the moment. I never planned anything else.” Kun, “Aural Border,” 19 (my emphasis). While broader Indigenous concerns are not explicitly the subject of this chapter, see Crum, “Border Crossings”; and Firebaugh-Luna, “Border Crossed Us.” These sources respectively point to how the border has divided the Kumeyaay, Tohono O’odham, Iroquois, and Blackfeet into separate nations. For a study of their famous song “La Jaula de Oro” (The Golden Cage), see José David Saldívar, Border Matters, 3– 7. Los Tigres del Norte, “Somos Más Americanos.” All translations of lyrics from this song are by the author. For a thorough review of the literature, see Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies.” The lyrics are cited from the original CD, which included a 26-page booklet with lyrics of all songs on the album translated into Spanish, Basque, and French. This speaks to both the “internationalist” politics of AUG and their global reach. Broyles-González, “Legendary Lydia Mendoza,” 198. See Hernández, “Running for Peace and Dignity.” In 2017, a student group was created at UCLA that took the name “Eagle and Condor Liberation Front” as a recognition of the necessary and ongoing work that the vision and prayer of the Peace and Dignity Journeys calls for. Their initial work through zines, workshops, and a speaker series all points toward the decolonial imperative I am trying to outline in this book. While the song on the album was a live recording from 1998, hence the 506 years, at all subsequent live performances AUG have mentioned the number of years since 1492: 526 and counting. . . .

Notes to Pages 179–193

50.

213

Del Castillo, Between Borders, vi (n3). Although Del Castillo notes that some historians have pointed to 1600, “since it documents the first Mexican [sic] settlement of Mexico’s far Northern frontier in El Paso,” this periodization still inaccurately foregrounds the nation-state— and Mexico at that, which she wrongly gives as the name of the region. At that point it was still New Spain, and Mexico would not come into existence for another 221 years. Moreover, this periodization ultimately re-centers Spanish colonialism, even if inadvertently, for the mention of 1600 also avoids dealing with the eight to twelve decades since the arrival of Cortés and Columbus, respectively.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

Herzog, “San Diego-Tijuana.” Available online at https://www.voiceofsandiego .org/topics/news/san-diego-tijuana-reinventing-a-border-crossing/. Herzog, “San Diego-Tijuana.” Mains, “Maintaining National Identity.” Herzog, “San Diego-Tijuana.” Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 2, 79. Notably, Sandoval indicates that “Theory Uprising” was originally meant to be the title of her book, but the very constraints of academic discourse and disagreements with the press prevented this title from moving forward. See Sandoval, 199n13. Garaudy, Diálogo de civilizaciones, 7. Amongst the Cree and other Algonquian Indigenous peoples of the territories known today as the northeastern United States and Canada, wétiko is a word associated with cannibalism as a disease. In Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, Forbes uses the word wétiko to characterize the history of colonization on this continent, shaped by greed and gluttony as the basis for the insatiable consumption of land and peoples. For Forbes, it is a form of psychopathic behavior in which the wétiko “consumes other human beings for profit” and obfuscates said cannibalism by projecting it as a practice of the Indigenous peoples/lands it consumes. This was a comment shared by Newcomb during the discussion session at an event in which we both presented on the question of the Vatican rescinding the papal bulls that are the basis for the Doctrine of Discovery, now codified in U-S/ Indian treaty law via the Marshall decision and all subsequent decisions because of Marshall’s explicit citation of the Doctrine of Discovery as a precedent. The event, titled “From First Nations to the New America,” was organized by several committees of the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Diego, California, and held on March 16, 2013.

Discography and Filmography

Discography Los Alacranes Mojados. “Chicano Park Samba.” Rolas de Aztlán. Alacran Productions ARS-052579, 1979. ———. “Pocho.” Rolas de Aztlán. Alacran Productions ARS-052579, 1979. Aztlán Underground. “Decolonize.” Sub-Verses. Xicano Records and Film CD/3, 1998. Kid Frost. “La Raza.” Hispanic Causing Panic. Virgin Records 91377, 1990. Los Marineros del Norte. “Los Crímenes de Juárez.” Cantan Corridos. Luna Music, Sony Music Entertainment CD/88663, 1999. Los Tigres del Norte. “América.” Gracias! . . . América . . . Sin Fronteras. Fonovisa 5066, 1986. ———. “Contrabando y Traición.” Contrabando y Traición. Fama LP, 1974. ———. “El Corrido.” Corridos Prohibidos. Fonovisa Cassette 350107, 1989. ———. “Somos Más Americanos.” Uniendo Fronteras. Fonovisa CD/6145, 2001. Tijuana No! “La Migra.” Rock del Milenio. Sony BMG/RCA 64712, 1999. ———. “Stolen at Gunpoint.” Featuring Kid Frost. Contra-Revolución Avenue. Sony BMG/RCA 54712, 1998.

Filmography Border Brujo. Performed by Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Directed by Isaac Artenstein. Cinewest Productions and Sushi Inc., 1991. Distributed by Third World Newsreel. Born in East L.A. Directed by Cheech Marin. Clear Type Productions, 1987. Distributed by Universal Pictures. Chicano Park. Directed by Marilyn Mulford. Produced by Mario Barrera and Marilyn Mulford. New York: Cinema Guild, 1989.

216 Discography and Filmography

New World Border. Directed by Casey Peek. Oakland: Peek Media, 2001. https://vimeo .com/113536141. Quest for a Homeland. Vol. 1 of Chicano!: History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Produced by Héctor Galán and Mylène Moreno. Los Angeles: National Latino Communications Center, 1996. Video recording. Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border. Directed by Witness, Inc. New York: Witness, Inc., American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2005. DVD.

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Index

Abrahams, Ray, 56 Adelman, Jeremy, 9 African Americans, 45, 48, 64, 73–75, 77, 99 Alabama, 79–80 Alamo, 116, 133, 172 Alarcón, Norma, 41, 138 Alcaraz, Lalo, 65 Al Sayyad, Nezar, 70 American Civil Liberties Union, 59–60 American Friends Service Committee, 60 American Patrol, 57 American Revolution, 52–53, 62–63 Andreas, Peter, 51, 135, 186 “angry white male,” 64, 111 Annales school, 8 Anthias, Floya, 41 anti-immigration, 16–17, 27–28, 42–43, 47, 63–64, 133, 172 anti-Mexican sentiment, 14, 25, 36, 40, 45– 46, 49, 56, 153 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996, 50–51, 134 Anything but Mexican, 170 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 8–9, 15, 17, 37–38, 100, 130, 168–69, 171

Apaches, 6–7 Arizona’s SB 1070, 133 Aron, Stephen, 9 assimilation, 39–40 August Twenty-Ninth Movement (ATM), 170–71 aural border, 158, 180, 182 Austin, Andrew, 81 Austin, Stephen, 131 Aztlán, 18, 169–173, 189 Aztlán Underground, 30–31, 155, 167–68, 172, 176–79 Barthes, Roland, 193 Beauregard, Robert, 70, 75, 81 Benjamin, Walter, 111–12 Berlin Wall, 50, 139 Birmingham, AL, 75, 79 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 41–42 Black Power, 72 Blauner, Robert, 74 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 17–19, 25, 197n38 Border Angels, 59 border cities: globalization and, 92; lawlessness of, 8; national appeasement by,

238

border cities (continued ) 76; as poorest communities, 75–76; vice and, 84–85; violence in, 11, 31–32. See also border wall; feminicides; frontier Border Industrialization Program, 142–43 borderlands academic complex, 156–59 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 17–20, 156, 171 Border Militia, 52 Border Patrol: abuses by, 60–62, 111, 173, 182; in border cities, 13–14; border cities and, 82; Donald J. Trump and, 127; growth of, 51–52; history of, 134; impact of, 13–14; McDonald’s massacre and, 114–15; migrant right advocacy and, 183; organization of, 51; origins of, 133 border wall: Border Patrol and, 13; challenges to, 129, 166–67; as corrugated steel, 50, 57, 139, 155, 157, 182, 194; crossings of, 174; future of, 186–190; gender and, 65; globalization and, 75; history of, 176; homeland security and, 45–46; image control of, 135; migrant labor and, 135; militarization of, 50–52, 100, 106, 129, 133, 141, 156–57, 182; normalization of, 65–66, 161, 167, 187, 190; race and, 65; San Diego County and, 42; as security, 4; as unnecessary, 65, 158, 168, 180–81, 186–190; violence and, 11, 31–32, 44, 47, 52, 61, 64, 100, 109, 138, 156–57; as a war zone, 109, 143. See also border cities; feminicides; frontier Born in East L.A., 98–99 Bosniak, Linda, 166–67 boundaries: colonialism and, 91; dismissal of, 68–69; fluidity of, 4–5; globalization and, 68–69; municipal annexations and, 68, 71; politics of jurisdiction and, 68; segregation and, 73 Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 25, 97 Brown v. Board of Education, 75 Broyles-González, Yolanda, 177 Buchanan, Pat, 42–43, 45

Index

Burns, Nancy, 71, 77 Bush, George W., 42–43, 51, 63 California Border Police Initiative, 61 California Border Watch, 53 California Minutemen, 57, 59 Catholic Church, 92, 131 Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), 169–170, 179 Centro Sin Fronteras, 169 Ceremony, 97 Césaire, Aimé, 99, 190–92 Chase, Jim, 57–59 Chican@ Movement, 169, 189 Chican@ nation state, 189. See also Aztlán Chican@s, 32–33, 85, 159–66 Chicano Federation, 88 Chicano Park, 157 Chula Vista, 85–86 citizenship: civilian patrols and, 36, 52; civilian patrols and, 60–61; forms of, 92– 93, 191–92; Minutemen Project and, 47; municipal annexations and, 68, 90; proof of, 98; as property, 45–46; race and, 45 Civilian Homeland Defense, 45 civilian patrols: citizenship and, 36, 52, 60– 61; colonialism and, 36–37; as constitutive other, 38–39, 63; Donald J. Trump and, 127; the frontier and, 36–37; history of, 27–28; leadership of, 63; normalization of, 60–61, 64–65; origins of, 55; patrols of, 60; perceptions of, 38–39, 60; politics and, 63; as racists, 38–39; recruitment efforts by, 53; resistance to, 65; responsibility and, 58; rogue theory of, 58; Tea Party and, 183; vigilantism and, 36–39; violence by, 16, 61–62, 157. See also California Minutemen; Minutemen Civil Defense Corps; Minutemen Project; vigilantism civilizational critique, 18, 39–40, 48, 99–102, 190–94 civil rights movement, 72

Index

Clausewitz, Carl von, 41–42 Clinton, Bill, 50–51 Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, 38 Cobra, 111 Cold War, 50–51 Coleman, Joshua, 114 colonialism: civilian patrols and, 36–37; constructive critiques for, 193–94; gender and, 37; independence from, 48–49, 59, 92, 167–68, 176–79, 187; language of, 190– 91; legacy of, 4, 190; Manicheanism and, 25; patriarchy and, 37; race and, 10, 37 coloniality: definition of, 10–11, 20–22; as a framework, 10–11, 20–21; justice and, 111; mass consumption and, 95; modernity and, 10–11, 18, 21, 147, 153, 174, 187–88; progress and, 139; U-S///Mexico border and, 185 coloniality of power, 20, 36, 100 Columbus, Christopher, 42, 179 Comanches, 6–7 Commando, 111 Condor nation, 178, 181 constitutive outsiders, 37–38, 45–46, 55 “Contrabando y Traición,” 163–64 Control Machete, 158 Cornelius, Wayne, 39, 45–47, 49 Coronado Bay, 85–86, 182 corridos: as alternative knowledge sources, 30–31, 136–40, 152–53, 159–60; cultural production and, 159–61; importance of, 135, 152, 162–63, 165; language of, 162; lived experiences and, 162–63; as male dominated, 159–160, 162, 164; McDonald’s massacre and, 97, 99–100; origins of, 136–40, 163–65; river imagery of, 139–40, 152, 161, 164–66; sexual violence and, 163; shared lyrics of, 168–69; as a storytelling device, 165–66; types of, 137– 38; women in, 164. See also Los Tigres del Norte; Los Marineros del Norte Corridos Prohibidos, 164–65 Coyolxauhqui, 151

239

cultural genocide, 95–97, 102–3, 116–21, 124– 27, 161–62 Customs and Border Protection, 134 Davis, Angela, 181, 188 The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, 145 decolonial imperative, xiv, 4, 7, 26, 33, 160–61, 176, 182, 186–90, 192–94, 212n48 decoloniality, 19–20, 31–32, 66, 155, 160– 61, 167–69, 180, 181 186–90, 192–94, 210–11n13 decolonization, 7, 49, 140, 176, 180, 205n96 “Decolonize,” 155, 168, 176–79 defensive incorporations, 71 Del Castillo, Adelaida, 178–79 Democracy Now, 45 Department of Homeland Security, 98, 133, 185 deportations, 44, 98, 115 Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, 30, 128–29, 148–52 Diallo, Amadou, 50 Dillon’s Rule, 68, 90, 92 Discourse on Colonialism, 190–91 Donnelly, Tim, 60, 63 Dreier, David, 44 driver’s licenses, 38 dual city, 73 Duke, David, 56, 63 Dunn, Timothy, 51 Dussel, Enrique, 10, 196n16 Dye, Thomas, 77 Eagle and Condor, 178, 181, 212n48. See also Peace and Dignity Journeys Eighth District, 28, 88–89, 92, 182 Eisenstein, Zillah, 41 “El Corrido,” 138–40, 164–66 El Paso: history of, 6–7, 27; port of entry and, 5; in the service of somewhere else, 5, 67, 153, 182; Spanish settlements and, 6–7; violence in, 27, 31–32

240

Epistemic and cartographic disobedience, 3, 16, 17, 26–27, 31–32, 94, 97, 117–21, 124, 153, 155, 156, 159–63, 172, 178–80, 182, 185, 192–94 Epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality, 11, 32–35, 48, 65, 127, 156–57, 161, 167–68, 182, 186–87, 189, 189–94 expansionism, 14–15, 47–48, 56, 91, 130–31 Fair Deal, 71 Falling Down, 111 Fanon, Frantz, 19, 21, 24–25, 28, 37, 98, 154, 171, 192–93, 200n36, 205n96 Fast Food Nation, 103 Feiock, Richard C., 77 feminicides: blaming the victim for, 30–31, 129, 140, 145–46, 150; border violence and, 11–12; colonialism and, 180–81; continuation of, 183; corridos about, 30–31, 129, 140, 143–45, 157, 168; double life and, 140, 151; knowledge distribution about, 130; knowledge production about, 129– 30; labor and, 149; maquiladoras and, 17, 142, 150; motherhood and, 150–51; normalization of, 30–31, 140, 142, 150; patriarchy and, 129, 144; police response to, 30–31, 128–29, 142–44; prostitution and, 150; rate of, 128–29; response to, 142; suspects, 129; _irgin/puta dichotomy and, 142, 144–45; women’s value and, 149–50. See also Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders; “Los Crimenes de Juárez” Figuereido, Angela, 181 Fischer, David Hackett, 63 Forbes, Jack D., 18, 191–92, 199n39, 213n7 Foucault, Michel, 23, 132, 199n12 founding fathers, 47–48 Fredonia Revolt, 132 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 142–43, 145 Friedman, Thomas, 102 Friendship Park, 154–55, 194

Index

Friends of the Border Patrol (FBP), 59– 60, 63 frontier: borderlands and, 9; civilization of, 48–49, 55–56; civilian patrols and, 36–37; corruption in, 134–35; expansionism and, 130; history of, 47; lawlessness of, 7, 134–35; myth of, 44; narcocorridos and, 138; as an open wound, 8–9, 15, 100, 130, 135, 139, 155–56, 181–82; patriarchy and, 130; perceptions of, 44; racism and, 130; settlement of, 48; sexism and, 130; violence and, 44, 47, 129–130, 141–42. See also border cities; border wall Frug, Gerald, 90 Galeano, Eduardo, 193 Galván, Oscar, 97, 157 Ganster, Paul, 9 García Canclini, Néstor, 158 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 129, 148–52 genocide, 141 ghettos, 28, 73–74 Gila River, 139, 152 Gilchrist, Jim, 52, 57–58, 63 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 13–14 globalization, 7–8, 36, 44, 55, 67–69, 75, 91–92, 106–7, 121 global warming, 105 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 157–58 “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” rally, 57, 134 Gramsci, Antonio, 25, 135 Granovetter, Mark, 39, 45–46 Harvey, David, 9–10, 81, 91, 202n7 “Here Legally,” 38–39 Herrera-Sobek, María, 136–38, 163 Herzog, Lawrence, 10, 185–86 “The Hispanic Challenge,” 39–40, 176 Hispaniola, 42 home and nation, 37, 39, 41, 44–45, 61, 64, 160 homeland security, 39–40, 42–43, 45–46, 50, 63, 184–85

Index

Homo patriarcus, 37 Housing Act of 1934, 71 Huberty, James Oliver, 56, 64, 99, 106–7, 110–11, 182 Huitzilopochtli, 151 Huntingon, Samuel, 39–40, 45, 176 identity, 11, 13, 63, 191–92 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 134 Illinois, 72 immigrants: assimilation of, 39–40; deportations and, 44, 98, 115; driver’s licenses and, 38; European, 39–40, 49–50; Latin@s, 40; legal status and, 38; race and, 45–46; social networks, 49; social networks of, 46; as term in book, 32–33; as terrorists, 37–38; undocumented, 98; violence against, 57–59, 61 immigration: causes of, 63; deportations and, 98; as illegal, 66; as Mexican reconquista, 134; policies for, 49; preventionby-deterrence policies, 56–57; racism and, 49–50, 59, 65; raids and, 183; reform of, 44, 63; sexism and, 65; as term in book, 32–33; as terrorism, 41–44, 50–51, 55, 60, 133 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 51, 82, 98, 134, 183 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 51, 98, 134 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), 56 Indian Wars, 8 Indigeneity: Chican@s and, xiv, 17–20, 31, 33–35, 161, 162, 169, 171, 173, 176–80, 192; colonialism and, xiv, 4, 17–19, 23, 25, 48–49, 56, 65–66, 114, 131–32, 154; decoloniality and, 169, 171, 173, 176, 179–180, 188, 192–93; de-Indianization, 17–19, 25, 31; feminicides and, 14, 30, 129, 140–52; immigration and, 16–17; Mexican@s and, 16–20, 28, 30, 37, 56, 96–97, 104, 117–18,

241

129, 153, 171, 175–76, 199n9; mestizaje and, 16–20, 37, 40, 146, 156, 175–76, 195n5, 199n9; scopic regimes, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 28, 30–33, 37–40, 50, 98, 129, 141, 149–50, 187–89, 191–93, 200n36; sexuality and, 22, 28, 34 Indigenous peoples, 17–19, 92. See also Indigeneity; Native Americans industrialization, 70–71, 78, 101, 107, 142–43 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 68 Islam, 53–54 Jefferson, Thomas, 131 Jim Crow laws, 73 The Jungle, 103 Kaczynski, Ted, 50, 109 Karuk, 92 Kennedy, John F., 52 Kid Frost, 30–31, 155, 167–68, 171–73, 177 Kincaid, Jamaica, 101 King, Anthony, 9–10, 70, 91 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 60 King, Rodney, 50, 109 Klan Border Watch, 56 Ku Klux Klan, 56, 171 Kumeyaay, 5–6, 92, 168 Kumiai, 5–6 Kun, John, 156–59, 162, 172, 174, 186 Kuna Nation, 181 Kurtz, Donald, 84 labor, 16–17, 21–22, 39, 42–43, 45–46, 49, 63– 64, 76, 104, 122, 135, 149, 158, 186, 191–92. See also migrant labor “La Camelia,” 163 “La Delgadina,” 145, 163 Lakota Honor Song, 178 “La Masacre de San Ysidro,” 108, 111 “La Migra” (The Border Patrol), 154–55 La Pocha Nostra, 157 “La Raza,” 171 Las Americas mall, 158, 183–84

242

Latin@s, 32–33, 40, 45, 55, 64, 99 Latinas in the United States, 170 “Light up the Border,” 56, 134 Limon, Jose E., 136–38, 163 Lone Star Republic, 132 longue-durée, 8, 36, 92, 102, 175 Los Angeles-San Pedro corridor, 86 “Los Crimenes de Juárez,” 129, 143–45, 152, 163 los de abajo, 100 Los Marineros del Norte, 129, 140, 143 Los Tigres del Norte, 30–31, 138–40, 155, 162–66, 173–77 Lugones, María, 20, 22, 37, 160 Main, John, 61, 185 mainstream media, 133 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 20 Manicheanism, 3, 18–19, 25, 37 Manifest Destiny, 48, 131, 168 maquiladoras, 17, 20, 104–5, 121, 135, 142, 150 Martin, Trayvon, 64 Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita,” 188 McDonald’s massacre: border drownings and, 155; border violence and, 13–14; corridos about, 97, 99–100, 140–41, 157, 168; death toll of, 108–9, 113–14; description of, 108–9, 112–13; legacy of, 17, 29–30; local news media and, 110; mainstream media and, 108–9; McDonald’s and, 116–21; memorial design for, 122–27; memorial to victims of, 30, 41, 94–97, 183; police response time to, 29–30, 66, 94, 108–9, 113–14; response to, 29–30, 93, 182; San Ysidro’s annexation and, 29–30; site of, 116–121; Southwestern College and, 121–27; temporary altar for, 116–21; victims of, 108 McVeigh, Timothy, 50, 109 Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), 83 Metzger, Tom, 56, 63 The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis, 137 Mexican Revolution, 136–37, 146

Index

Mexico profundo: Una civilización negada, 17–19, 25 migrant labor, 16–17, 42–43, 45–46, 49, 63–64, 76, 104, 122, 135, 149, 158, 186, 191–92. See also labor migrant right advocacy, 166–67, 191–92 milanesa, 102 Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, 52, 57, 60 Minutemen Project, 27–28, 44–45, 47, 52, 57, 62–63, 159 Minutemen Project in Arizona, 57 misogyny, 25, 30, 129, 143, 145, 145 modernity/coloniality, 10, 18, 25, 33–34, 68, 98–99, 101–2, 109, 115, 127, 129, 139, 147, 153, 156, 161, 174, 186, 187–88, 190–91, 198n23, 205n96 Mollenkopf, John, 71–72 Montana, 57 Mothers Against Illegal Aliens (MAIA), 61 municipal annexations: citizenship and, 83; city services and, 78, 80–81; classification system of, 76–77; as a colonial enterprise, 68, 72, 78, 84, 93; deannexation and, 79–80; defensive incorporations and, 71, 77; economy and, 71–72, 75, 77–78; gender and, 84; minority control of cities and, 72–73, 77, 79–80; politics of, 79–80; race and, 72–74, 77–78; surveillance and, 73; tax base and, 71–72, 78, 80, 83; voting rights and, 77, 80–81 Murrieta, Joaquín, 132 Nahuatl, 33–34 Nahuatl (Aztec) poetry, 163, 165 narcocorridos, 137–38, 164 nation: home and, 37, 39, 41, 44–45, 61, 64, 160; as paternalistic, 40–41; white supremacy and, 40–41 National Guard, 51–52 Native Americans, 5–6, 17–18, 37–38, 40, 48, 97, 131, 137, 146, 178–180, 192, 196n15, 212n41, 213n7–8. See also Indigeneity; Indigenous peoples

Index

Nevins, Joseph, 131, 186 New Deal programs, 71 The New Imperialism, 91 New Mexico, 164–65 Newton, Huey P., 41–42 New World, 130, 188 New World Border, 57, 130 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 20, 57, 133, 146–47, 150, 167, 184 Obama, Barack, 44, 51, 183 O’Dowd, Liam, 5, 26 Old Mexico, 170–73 Oñate, Juan de, 6–7, 27, 131 Operation Gatekeeper, 51, 56–57, 101, 135, 182–83 Operation Hold the Line, 51, 133, 135 Ortíz-González, Victor, 7, 67, 86, 153, 158 othering, 37–38, 41, 55 Palestine, 189 patriarchy, 22, 37, 97, 129, 141–43, 145, 178–79 Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), 144 Pax, Octavio, 102 Peace and Dignity Journeys, xiv, 178, 181, 212n48 Pérez, Emma, 41, 116, 145 Perspectives on Las Américas, 170 “Pocho,” 157 Polanyi, Karl, 39, 45–46 Pourade, Richard, 83–85 Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), 99 prisons, 51, 94–95, 97, 99, 195, 199n12, 205n1 Project Witness, 60 propertied citizenship, 45–46 Proposition 187, 52, 56, 59, 133, 159, 166–67, 169, 179 propter nos, 37–38, 41, 47 prostitution, 140, 150 Puerto Rico, 172–73 Quijano, Aníbal, 8, 10, 20, 22–23, 36, 196n16

243

race: colonialism and, 37; homeland security and, 45–46; immigration and, 45–46 Race and Class in the Southwest, 135 Rambo, 58, 111 Ramirez, Andy, 57–59, 63 Ramirez, Christian, 122 Reagan, Ronald, 111 Rights on the Line: Vigilantes at the Border, 60 Río Bravo, 139, 152, 164 Rio Grande, 131–32, 139, 161, 164 Ritzer, George, 105 rock en espanol, 157 Romo, Betty, 114–15 Roy, Ananya, 45, 70 Saldívar, José David, 136–37, 157, 162–63 Saldívar, Ramón, 136–37, 163 San Diego: as a border city, 15–16; Eighth District and, 89, 92; globalization and, 67–69; history of, 82–83; as a military town, 84; South Bay and, 85; voting rights and, 28, 82–83, 88–90, 182; water access and, 83–84 San Diego-South Bay corridor, 86 San Diego Union-Tribune, 57–58, 108–10 San Diego Water District, 83 Sandoval, Chela, 187, 193 San Pedro Woman’s Club, 84 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 65, 102 San Ysidro: as a colonial enterprise, 180; description of, 5–6, 14–15; Eighth District and, 89, 92; history of, 5–6, 27; James Oliver Huberty and, 99; location of, 86, 94; as part of Mexico, 89; port of entry and, 5; port of entry redesign, 184– 86; in the service of somewhere else, 86, 92, 180, 182; violence in, 27, 31–32; voting rights and, 28, 88–90, 182 San Ysidro’s annexation: boundaries and, 70; citizenship and, 70, 90; city services and, 88. 113–14; as a colonial enterprise, 69; defensive incorporations and, 89;

244

San Ysidro’s annexation (continued ) economy and, 69; globalization and, 69–70; history of, 28–29; legal challenges to, 85; McDonald’s massacre and, 29–30; port of entry and, 81–82, 88–89; race and, 69, 88–89; resistance to, 66; San Diego-South Bay corridor, 28, 182–83; San Diego-South Bay corridor and, 86; San Ysidro’s opposition to, 88, 93; terra nullius and, 91; voting rights and, 86–90; water access and, 82–83 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 192 school shootings, 50, 103, 109 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 60 Secure Fence Act of 2006, 39 Sengstock, Frank, 76–77 Sensenbrenner bill (HR4437), 39 September 11, 2001, 50, 52, 65, 184 Shariati, Ali, 187 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 97 Simcox, Chris, 52, 57–58 Simmons, Merle E., 136–37 Sinclair, Upton, 103 Sisterhood of the Good Death, 181 slavery, 28, 40, 47–48 sociogeny, 16, 19, 21, 24–25, 28, 30–33, 37–40, 50, 98, 129, 141, 149–50, 187–89, 191–193, 200n36 Solis, Hilda, 151–52 “Somos Mas Americanos,” 155, 168, 173–76 SOS Initiative, 144 Southern Poverty Law Center, 61 South Carolina, 57 Southwestern College, 121–27, 183 Sovereignty of the Individual, 90 Sovereignty of the State, 90 Soviet Union, 50 Spanish settlements, 5–6, 92, 131 spirit food, 117 Spivak, Gayatri, 136, 147 sprawl, 69, 78, 83 St. Clair Drake, 73 “Stolen at Gunpoint,” 155, 168, 171–73

Index

Stolen Mexico, 170–73 suburbanization, 71–72, 74–75 Super Size Me, 103 Takaki, Ronald, 48 Tea Party, 159, 183 terra nullius, 91 terrorism, 37–38, 40–41 Texas, 72, 86, 131–32, 164–65 Texas Rangers, 49, 133 Tijuana No! 30–31, 154–55, 167–68, 171–73, 177 Tijuana River, 139, 152, 155, 184 Tin Tan, 162 Tisdale, Donna, 59 Tlatelolco massacre, 60 Tolowa, 92 Tomlinson, John, 103 torta, 102 Tosti, Don, 162 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 160, 170, 172, 175, 179 Treaty of Westphalia, 11 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 132 Trump, Donald J., 45–46, 55, 127, 134, 183 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 7, 48, 131 The Turner Diaries, 56 The Unheavenly City, 73 University of Texas, 109 urbanization, 20, 83, 91 urban/racial crisis, 74–75 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), 51, 98 U.S.-Mexican War, 5, 48–49, 132, 170–73, 179 U-S///Mexico border: 1848 origins of, 170, 172, 176, 178–79; border drownings and, 155; border theory and, 19–26; coloniality and, 185; control of, 183; corridos and, 162–63; cultural production about, 168; decolonization of, 168, 180, 194; disobedience toward, 3–4; economy of, 25–26; as Eurocentric, 174; future of, 186–90; gender and, 22–23; history

Index

of, 130–32, 176; homeland security and, 3–4; as an interstate system, 3, 159 and, 3; materiality of, 166; militarization of, 159, 194; naturalization of, 185–86; as open, 186–90; as an open wound, 181–82; oppositional views about, 132; Pacific Ocean and, 155; payment for expansion of, 134; perceptions of, 27–28; power of, 17–18, 185; race and, 22–23, 152; reclamation of, 172, 174–75; San Ysidro port of entry redesign, 184–86; sexism and, 152; Tijuana River and, 155; violence and, 8, 11, 16–17, 31–32, 152, 162 Vietnam “lifers,” 36, 58, 111 vigilantism: history of, 44; as self-help criminal justice, 56. See also civilian patrols Villa, Pancho, 132, 171 Villarino, José “Pepe,” 97, 111, 157 Villarreal, Rosa Martha, 97, 117 violence: blaming the victim for, 145–46; in border cities, 11; causes of, 11–12; colonialism and, 141–42; frontier and, 141–42; history of, 12; as inherent in the system, 25; modernity and, 129; race and, 52, 56; real, 24–26; sexual, 30–31, 41, 52, 134, 141, 143, 145–46, 160–61, 163; symbolic, 12, 24– 26; as term in book, 32–33; as a weapon,

245

134, 141, 143; against women, 30–31, 41, 52, 134, 141, 143, 145–48, 160–61. See also feminicides Voices of Citizens Together (VCT), 133 voting rights, 28, 75, 77, 80–83, 86–90, 182 Wacquant, Loïc, 73–74 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 8–10, 21 war on crime, 42 war on drugs, 42 war on poverty, 42 war on terror, 42–43, 51 “We didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us,” 31, 153, 168–70, 176–80, 182 white flight, 69–72, 74–75, 78 white supremacists, 40–41, 110 World Bank, 68 World’s Fair, 78–79 world systems theory, 8–10, 22–23 World Trade Center, 184 World Trade Organization (WTO), 68 world urban system, 91 World War II, 8, 50, 83 Wounded Knee, 48 The Wretched of the Earth, 192 Wynter, Sylvia, 24, 37, 47 Zapatista rebellion, 143, 146–47, 171, 179

About the Author

Roberto D. Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, where he teaches comparative border studies and decolonial theory. He co-edited Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without.