Post/humanitarian Border Politics between Mexico and the US

People, Places, Things

V. Squire

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137395887
• eBook ISBN: 9781137395894
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

The author assesses the politics of different humanitarian interventions in the Mexico-US border region developing a unique perspective on the significance of people, places and things to contemporary border struggles.

1

The Sonoran Borderzone

Abstract: This chapter examines how relations of privilege and violence are integral to the formation and maintenance of the US–Mexico border, and considers the significance of humanitarian activism across the Sonoran borderzone. There is a longstanding relationship of asymmetry between Mexico and the US, which is evident in contemporary struggles over migration across the Sonoran desert. Such struggles can have lethal consequences where those travelling without authorisation are ‘funnelled’ through the desert as a remote and dangerous terrain. Squire reflects upon the potentials and limitations of humanitarian activism in this context, considering how humanitarianism emerges both as a mechanism of the power and as an ambiguous form of activism that mediates between contending forces of migration and of control.

Squire, Vicki. Post/Humanitarian Border Politics between Mexico and the US: People, Places, Things. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137395894.0006.

I am trying to remind myself that, for me at least, this is a privileged experience. I have an air-conditioned vehicle within a couple of miles that I will soon be able to get back into. I have more than enough water and food to last the hike. I have a dependable means to track my location. I have an excess of sun cream, and my walking boots are impenetrable. I am not fearful of the people with whom I am hiking, nor does their fitness impact upon my ability to exit the desert alive. Plus, if I bump into Border Patrol, I have a British passport as well as experienced humanitarian guides to help me explain my presence.

Nevertheless, I am struggling. My eyes are running because I am allergic to the desert dust. My hiking boots give me blisters, and I crave the battered old Birkenstocks that saw me down the Grand Canyon and back. Whereas my fellow hikers seem to be coping with the heat fine, it seems unlikely that I will ever adapt to the 40 degree Celsius temperatures of the desert in May. And although I am certainly grateful for the funding that I received to carry out this research trip, I am also missing my children very much. Actually, I am wondering if desk-based research might be a less stressful means of undertaking the research for my next project . . .

. . . That is: if I ever do any research ever again.

Then, once more, I am disturbed by how my concerns echo, yet remain so distant, from those whose desert crossing is a far less privileged experience.

. . . That is: concerns that remain pressing insofar as the energy remains to sustain them.

Introduction

This book provides insight into the ways in which relations of privilege play into the politics of migration and humanitarianism across the Sonoran desert between Mexico and the US. It seeks to contribute to the existing analyses of border struggles in this region in at least two ways: first, by reflecting on the ways that humanitarian activism involves diverse political interventions and, second, by considering how a ‘more-than-human’ approach can prompt consideration of the ways that physical as well as social forces shape humanitarian border politics. In focusing on diverse examples of humanitarian border activism, the book seeks to explore how the differential enactment and/or questioning of the boundaries of ‘the human’ can have ambiguous political effects. A more-than-human approach here is simply understood as one that situates people within a wider web of being or becoming, and that seeks to displace the privileges associated with ‘the human’ even whilst emphasising their on-going relevance to practices and analyses of humanitarian activism. What I call post/humanitarian politics thus provides for a distinct conceptualisation of humanitarian activism as a diverse set of interventions that involve more than just people, even while ‘the human’ forms a key stake (please see Chapter 2).

The book includes several vignettes such as the one earlier, which emerge from my participation in humanitarian activities in Arizona (US) and Sonora (Mexico) during two research trips in 2011 and 2012. Through these vignettes, I seek to forefront relations of privilege by exposing some key difficulties that emerge in the practice and analysis of humanitarian activism in this context. Far from escaping relations of privilege, the vignettes draw attention to some of the difficulties that emerge in attempts to challenge the privilege and violence that leave many migrants dead in the desert. I thus use these vignettes as openings by which to develop a more detailed observational engagement and discussion of different humanitarian interventions. My discussions of different interventions do not claim to be conclusive, but rather reflect an attempt to provoke deepened critical reflection on the ambiguities of humanitarian activism. This involves a methodological and conceptual approach that is less concerned with documenting the conscious understanding of research participants than it is with exploring the political consequences or effects of different practices and acts. In turn, this involves an understanding of politics as a form of contestation or disruption that need not necessarily be purposive or explicitly articulated as such, but that can rather be read in relation to actual or potential effects that are contextually specific (see also Squire, 2014).

In this book, I focus on what I call politics over government. This entails an emphasis on contestations or resistances that do not simply operate within an administrative or regulatory framework (broadly conceived), but that in some way can be understood as disrupting or challenging the relations of power and forms of perception or being that such a frame involves. A specific concern with relations of privilege and practices of violence animates my engagement of different humanitarian interventions here. In particular, the analysis reflects a concern regarding a wider public discourse and policy response that has been orientated towards preventing the entrance of undocumented migrants, along with the dehumanising processes that this entails (see Sundberg, 2008). In this context, the analysis strongly cautions against the victimisation of migrants as a means to counter such a discourse. Such an emphasis is important for this study, because relations of care are integral to humanitarianism, and can easily slip into unequal engagements with ‘victims’. So also is such a focus important in light of developments such as the rise in the numbers of unaccompanied minors from Central America crossing the Mexico–US border during the early part of the summer of 2014. These have led to a policy debate orientated to providing ‘relief to the effected children’.¹ By contrast, the analysis in this book seeks to challenge the assumption that migrants are either criminals or victims (see also Scheel and Squire, 2014). It does so through analysing the significance of humanitarian interventions as contestations or resistances that are involved in migration struggles (Stierl, 2014) or counter-conducts (Inda, 2008), yet often relate to these in ambiguous ways.

Although this book is thus empirically driven and orientated, it also involves a conceptual exploration of what I call post/humanitarian politics. I initially refer to humanitarian border politics, on the basis of my conceptual analysis of debates in critical border studies (please see Chapter 2). I go on to develop the concept post/humanitarian politics specifically on the basis of a ‘more-than-human’ appreciation of the ways that things and places, as well as people, are critical to an understanding of the ambiguities of different humanitarian interventions (please see Chapters 2–5). The term post/humanitarian politics in this regard is presented as such because it implies a particular methodological or conceptual approach (please see Chapter 6). I do not use the term posthumanitarian directly, because this may be misinterpreted as suggesting that the goals of the interventions in question are necessarily ‘posthumanist’ in some sense. By emphasising post/humanitarian politics, I point to a form of analysis that involves appreciation of the importance of concrete things and places (as well as people) to different humanitarian interventions, yet without assuming an emphasis on places and things or on physical forces to be the purposive design of such interventions. Invoking the concept of post/humanitarianism is thus to develop a conceptual and methodological approach that questions conceptions of humanitarianism that are uncritically human-centric in their formulation. It is also to draw attention to the ways that physical or material (as well as social) forces condition the emergence of humanitarian interventions across the Sonoran desert between Mexico and the US.

The terms ‘people’, ‘places’ and ‘things’ are not approached here as essentialised categories, but are rather strategically mobilised in order to provide a language of engagement that partially displaces ‘the human’. Concepts such as ‘subject, ‘space’ and ‘object’ are relatively abstract and universal, and so I choose instead to engage the terms ‘people’, ‘places’ and ‘things’ as situated conceptual categories that demand a contexualised form of analysis. People, places and things are thus neither understood as collectively representing the totality of existence, nor as representing different dimensions or levels of a wider system. In engaging ‘things’ and ‘places’ as well as ‘people’ within the analysis, my concern is not to shift attention to the political efficacy of ‘things’ (see Bennett, 2010) or to the ‘vitality’ of objects (Meehan et al., 2013) as a means to challenge the humanism of existing scholarship. Rather, I simply seek to draw attention to the wider web of being or becoming that a human-centric analysis risks overlooking, while at the same time drawing attention to the complex intertwinements of what are often crudely separated as ‘people’, ‘places’ and ‘things’. A more-than-human analysis of post/humanitarian politics thus does not signal the demise of humanitarianism or a rejection of the significance of people. Rather, it signals an analytical approach that questions the limitations of a human-centric analysis, particularly one that overlooks the importance of places and things, as well as people, to humanitarian interventions (please see Chapter 2).

The Sonoran desert

This book focuses on humanitarian interventions and activism across a particular ‘place’ or site: the Sonoran desert. The Sonoran desert covers the southwestern parts of the state of Arizona in the US, the southeastern parts of the state of California in the US, and the northern part of the state of Sonora in Mexico. This site is important for the analysis of humanitarian border politics developed here, because it forms a key crossing point for migration to the southwest of the US from the north of Mexico. To the west, the desert wraps around the northern part of the Gulf of California and borders on the Peninsular Ranges. To the north and northeast, it borders on the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau. To the east and southeast, it merges with mountain forests, whereas to the south it merges with subtropical forestland. Humanitarian activism has emerged in various forms in this context due to the specificity of the desert as a harsh environment for those people that attempt to cross it. The desert is dry, hot and vast. It is dusty and exposed. It is covered by cacti with attachments that, if left to their own devices, can attach to and work through the sole of an ordinary training shoe. Moreover, it is an environment with riverbeds that flood so suddenly that people, as well as things, are quite literally washed away (see Squire, 2014). A lethal site, the Sonoran desert is a key place for the enactment of humanitarian interventions. It is also one that renders visible the violence and contingency that is integral to the formation and maintenance of state borders, to the asymmetrical relations that these involve, and to the practices of unauthorised migration that emerge in such a context.

State borders and the governing of mobility

A brief consideration of the historical formation of the state border between the US and Mexico underscores the contingency and violence that marks both the spatial division of the Sonoran desert, as well as the practices of governing human mobility that such a division entails. Situating the origins of the modern US–Mexico boundary in relation to the territorial conquests and imperial competition of European colonialism, Joseph Nevins (2010) highlights the ways in which the US capitalised on the instability of a newly independent Mexico in the nineteenth century. The expansionist tendencies of the US led to a two-year war between the US and Mexico during 1846–1848, which culminated in the US occupation of Mexico City. In light of this occupation, the two parties signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848. This involved the ceding of about 40 per cent of Mexican territory to the US. At this time, the US thus annexed around 1 million square miles of Mexican land, along with 100,000 Mexican citizens and 200,000 Native Americans (Ibid.: 23). It was at this point that the Sonoran desert was divided between Mexico and the US, and that the states of Arizona and California were constituted as part of the newly expanded US. Nevertheless, there were some on-going border issues between the US and Mexico following the Treaty, which the Gadsen Purchase of 1853 (ratified in 1854) resolved through US purchase of southern Arizona (Heyman, 1991:9). Far from a ‘natural’ separation of people and places, the division of the Sonoran desert between Mexico and the US is thus the contingent result of a struggle to re-draw borders in terms that form the territorial unit of the US as we know it today. Moreover, it is a contingent separation that is politically contentious on various grounds.

One of the problematic implications of the division of the Sonoran desert between Mexico and the US is that it prevents indigenous populations such as the Tohono O’odham from freely moving across their traditional homeland (see Erickson, 2003; Madsen, 2007). Prior to colonisation, the Sonoran desert was not divided by state boundaries. During the 1800s the desert formed part of ‘a dynamic, multinational zone of fluid identities and flexible social boundaries’ (Nevins, 2010: 23–24). This subsequently became subject to nationalisation, and was for many years a site of conflict and attempts at pacification (Ibid.). Indeed, the Sonoran desert can be understood as such to this day. The institutionalisation of US Border Patrol has been integral to processes of nationalisation and pacification. This developed in a punctuated way in response to the on-going migration of workers from Mexico to the US throughout the 20th century, and was formally institutionalised in 1924 (Ibid.: 37–45). As we will see, US Border Patrol has become an increasingly prevailing force across the Sonoran desert over recent years. Yet one of the key arguments of this book is that increased controls are not simply indicative of the intensified violence of contemporary and historical bordering practices that are contingent in their formation. So also do I suggest that any escalation of control must be understood in relation to the contestation of such practices (see e.g. Mountz, 2010; Nevins, 2010; Spener, 2009; Squire, 2011). Both today and in the past, the Sonoran desert has been a crucial site in understanding struggles over the formation and maintenance of state borders between the US and Mexico (Sundberg, 2008, 2011). This is particularly significant at the current juncture, given that the desert marks a transition between regions of diverse living standards.

Asymmetric divisions

Contemporary struggles over human mobility occur in the context of a long-standing history of migrations between and across what we now know as Mexico and the US, as well as in the context of a history whereby what were indigenous lands became nationalised territories. Moreover, they occur in the context of more recent shifts in the governing of migration from Mexico to the US, and in related changes in patterns of Mexico–US labour relations. During World War II, the US institutionalised a programme by which to bring experienced workers from Mexico to the US. Known as the Bracero programme, this filled the labour gap caused by the war and granted regularised Mexican migrant workers with a range of protections. It primarily involved agricultural and railroad workers and continued formally until 1964 in response to industry demand. The US government presented the programme as an alternative to irregular migration and subjected un...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Sonoran Borderzone
• 2  A More-Than-Human Analysis of Humanitarian Border Politics
• 3  People, Privilege and Pity
• 4  Places, Violence and Response-ability
• 5  Things, Gifts and Solidarity
• 6  Post/Humanitarian Border Politics
• Bibliography
• Index