Border Politics

Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization

Nancy A. Naples, Jennifer Bickham Mendez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479858170
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the current historical moment borders have taken on heightened material and symbolic significance, shaping identities and the social and political landscape. “Borders”—defined broadly to include territorial dividing lines as well as sociocultural boundaries—have become increasingly salient sites of struggle over social belonging and cultural and material resources. How do contemporary activists navigate and challenge these borders? What meanings do they ascribe to different social, cultural and political boundaries, and how do these meanings shape the strategies in which they engage? Moreover, how do these social movements confront internal borders based on the differences that emerge within social change initiatives? Border Politics, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, explores these important questions through eleven carefully selected case studies situated in geographic contexts around the globe. By conceptualizing struggles over identity, social belonging and exclusion as extensions of border politics, the authors capture the complex ways in which geographic, cultural, and symbolic dividing lines are blurred and transcended, but also fortified and redrawn. This volume notably places right-wing and social justice initiatives in the same analytical frame to identify patterns that span the political spectrum. Border Politics offers a lens through which to understand borders as sites of diverse struggles, as well as the strategies and practices used by diverse social movements in today’s globally interconnected world. Contributors: Phillip Ayoub, Renata Blumberg, Yvonne Braun, Moon Charania, Michael Dreiling, Jennifer Johnson, Jesse Klein, Andrej Kurnik, Sarah Maddison, Duncan McDuie-Ra, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Nancy A. Naples, David Paternotte, Maple Razsa, Raphi Rechitsky, Kyle Rogers, Deana Rohlinger, Cristina Sanidad, Meera Sehgal, Tara Stamm, Michelle Téllez

PART I

Gendered, Ethno-Nationalist Struggles and Militarization

2

“Border Granny Wants You!”

Grandmothers Policing Nation at the US-Mexico Border

JENNIFER L. JOHNSON

Introduction

On a bright October day in the desert, a dozen ladies array themselves to be photographed along the skeleton of a fence that demarcates the sovereign territory of the United States of Mexico and that of the United States of America.¹ Dressed uniformly in pink camouflage T-shirts and tennis shoes, they call themselves the Granny Brigade and have come to this place at the behest of Minuteman organizers. In a moment they will link their arms, twist their hips, and raise their legs to strike a classic chorus-line pose for the photographer.

This chapter examines how grandmotherhood is performed at the US-Mexico border in service of the new nativist movement in the contemporary United States and the broader ethno-nationalist project to which it contributes.² Like the photograph described above, it makes visible what remains largely invisible to both scholars and activists concerned with the US-Mexico border, namely, how the work of women, especially older women, sustains this project to police the geopolitical, legal, and cultural boundaries of the nation. Through a case study of one active Minuteman chapter and its articulation with national efforts to reach out to women, it elucidates how this collective impulse to protect the border incorporates women in seemingly contradictory ways that nonetheless work together to reproduce hierarchies of power grounded in both race and gender. Indeed, women’s work to keep new immigrants of color outside the boundaries of this imagined community we call nation appears inextricably tied to those women’s own gendered subordination within.

For the purposes of this chapter, I conceptualize the nationalist project underway in the United States as an effort to more tightly control or police membership in our national community that is evident especially, but not exclusively, in societal angst over the place of immigrants of color in America today. Scholars of globalization have theorized that as state boundaries in many parts of the world have become extraordinarily permeable to capital, goods, and information flow, governing elites have crafted new forms of control and sovereignty over national territories and populations (Ong 2006; Sassen 1996). In the United States, immigration policy that criminalizes unauthorized border crossers but not the employers and consumers that benefit from the cheap labor they supply constitutes one way that these projects sustain economic globalization even as they intensify control over and selectively exclude certain populations. I posit that the metaphoric and literal policing of nation described in this chapter exemplifies how private citizens participate in these exclusionary projects by helping to discursively delineate the line between those newcomers who merit permanent inclusion in our national community and those who do not.

Scholars of the US-Mexico border and Latino immigration to the United States have made similar arguments that point to the heightened salience of national borders in the context of economic globalization. Joseph Nevins, for one, has elucidated what he calls “the growing ‘gate-keeping’ role played by states [that] entails simultaneously maximizing what dominant classes represent as the benefits of globalization, while protecting against what they frame as the detriments of increasing transnational flows—especially unauthorized migrants” (2010, 10). Today, this gate-keeping project is spearheaded by the state and manifest most directly in policies that tighten security at the US-Mexico border and criminalize undocumented immigration, but it has deep historical roots that date back at least to the acquisition by force of large swathes of Mexico in the nineteenth century and subsequent attempts to “Americanize” this territory.

As other chapters in this volume highlight, the complex and frequently violent history of nation-building at geographical peripheries shapes the nature of contemporary border politics and the variable significance of race and ethnicity in these politics. In the case of the United States’ southern periphery, this history spans the nearly two hundred years since Anglo settlers, motivated by a belief in their Manifest Destiny and in some instances the intent to perpetuate slave-holding, began colonizing the Mexican territory that would become the states of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Kansas (Perea 2003). As data on the lynching of Mexicans and violence perpetrated by self-appointed agents of justice like the Texas Rangers indicate, these settlers policed the racial boundaries of an incipient national community well before and after the stroke of a pen marked the official boundary separating the United States from Mexico on the map (Acuña 2000; Carrigan 2004; Gordon 1999; Yoxall 2006). By the 1920s, however, the dominant expression of anxiety surrounding the place of Mexicans in the body politic had shifted from vigilante violence diffused throughout the Western states to a fixation with immigration focused geographically on the border and borderlands. In part, this concern responded to an uptick in border crossings from the south prompted by the turmoil of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and the earlier Chinese Exclusion Act that had rerouted Chinese immigration from Ellis Island to surreptitious entry by land. It also reflected, however, profoundly racist ideas fostered by the turn-of-the-century eugenics movement that associated Mexicans (and other immigrants of color) with dirt, disease and genetic degeneration (Stern 2005, 2004).

The link between these ideas and the imagining of Mexicans as outsiders to the nation strengthened with the passage of laws that at once legitimated national origins construed in racial terms as the legal basis for determining immigration and citizenship eligibility and assigned those who violated these statutes to the category of “illegal alien” (Chavez 2008a; Nevins 2010; Ngai 2004). The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 and the unprecedented policing of Mexican border-crossers through Draconian measures such as quarantines and mass deportation reinforced this association between alleged racial inferiority, illegality, and Mexican national origin, even though Mexicans were technically exempt from the national origins quotas of the day. This history paved the way for the conflation of “Mexican” and “illegal” so central to immigration politics in the United States today and which lends plausibility to nativist claims that opposition to Mexican immigration is race-blind, motivated solely by a desire to uphold the law.

Moreover, these early developments established the physical space of the borderlands as a privileged site for the production and reproduction of meaning surrounding the place of Mexicans in the body politic. This is evident today in the way that social movements on both sides of the contemporary immigration debate embrace this space as a stage on which to enact competing visions of who belongs (or should belong) to the national community and on what basis. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo has documented, for instance, how religiously-inspired immigrant rights activists mobilize annual vigils at the border fence that dramatize family separation caused by restrictive immigration policies to challenge notions of national inclusion and exclusion pinned to arbitrary distinctions such as country of birth (2008). Similarly, but for distinct ideological purposes, the Minutemen rally at the border fence to enact rituals drawing on historically-fraught images of an embattled frontier that frame Mexicans as intruders and perpetual outsiders, and private citizens—largely white, working-class, and male—as the legitimate gate-keepers of nation. Circulated widely by mass media, these rituals and images contribute to what Chavez calls a “spectacle of surveillance” that has very real consequences for how we as a nation construct the boundaries of belonging (2008a, b).

Existing studies of the Minuteman movement highlight how these performances are inflected by race, class and gender by focusing primarily on the actions, bodies, and sensibilities of men engaged in the quasi-militaristic activities associated with patrolling the border (Castro 2007/2008; Chavez 2008b; Doty 2009; Shapira 2013). Although the precise line of argument varies, these studies share the assumption—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—that the Minuteman movement responds to twin imperatives that have gained urgency in post-9/11 America: to bolster national security against a foreign enemy and to shore up white, working-, and middle-class masculinities threatened by economic globalization, multiculturalism, and the advances of feminism in the late twentieth century. Fewer studies have analyzed the actions, bodies, and sensibilities of women. Oliviero, however, has begun the task of interrogating how femininity factors into the Minutemen’s show of militarized masculinity by examining the role of guns in the construction of what she calls “armed femininity.” Citing recruitment materials posted to the Minuteman Project’s website that portray women wielding firearms, she argues that “the gun becomes the symbol through which these women can access normatively masculine spheres of power, allowing them to transgress gendered boundaries enough to participate in militarized imaginings of nation” (2011, 696).

This chapter explores how a different symbol and the identity it connotes—grandmotherhood—enables women to participate in the nationalist project promoted by the Minutemen, and how the gendered nature of this project intersects with its racial/ethnic dimensions. Other social movements have united women around the experience of grandmotherhood to protest the disappearance of family members by repressive authoritarian regimes (Arditti 1999) or to wage antiwar campaigns (Kutz-Flamenbaum 2007; Narushima 2004; Roy 2007; Wile 2008). In these cases, grandmotherhood as a frame that inspires collective action and imbues it with the potential to effect change draws on the moral authority that women claim as mothers, but also on assumptions about the complacency and apolitical nature of old age. The politicized enactment of grandmotherhood, situated at this particular intersection of age and gender, introduces an element of surprise into collective action that differentiates it from movements that mobilize around motherhood. Kutz-Flamenbaum describes this dynamic in the following terms: “Ageism and dominant gender norms construct the grandmother as a nice old lady content with the domesticity of baking cookies and spoiling her grandchildren dismissing the knowledge, wisdom, and skills that come with many years of living. We do not expect grannies to be out protesting” (2007, 97). Nor, I would add, to be policing the US-Mexico border.

The intersectionality of grandmotherhood, however, extends beyond its age and gender dimensions to include race and class, though the latter remain largely unmarked in the predominantly white, middle-class movements cited above and in the Minutemen’s deployment of grandmotherhood analyzed below.³ To the extent that the image put into play by these movements relies on connotations of full-time, stay-at-home grandmotherhood dedicated to the superfluous tasks of baking cookies and spoiling children, it ignores the experiences of working class grandmothers and grandmothers of color burdened with providing for the essential material needs of family well into old age and often through sustained employment outside the home. Mary Romero has shown how the nativist movement in the United States, through organizations like the Arizona-based Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, capitalizes on these unmarked differences by framing opposition to immigration as a native-born mother’s duty to protect her family from the myriad threats posed by dark-skinned immigrants, especially the dangers presented by unfit mothers. The rhetorical move she identifies hinges on impugning immigrant women by measuring them against impossible standards of “ideal” motherhood grounded in the privileged experience of white, middle-class women (2008).

Romero’s findings on the uses of motherhood to mobilize women for racially and ethnically exclusionary agendas resonate strongly with broader insights gleaned from feminist scholars of nationalism attentive to intersectionality. These scholars note that women have long been marginalized but not absent from racially and ethnically exclusive projects, even though mainstream theorists of nationalism have typically not taken them into account (Hogan 2009; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Wilford and Miller 1998). They have also observed, however, that notwithstanding some cross-national and historical variation, nationalist discourses have proven remarkably and consistently patriarchal, subordinating women to men as a means of achieving exclusion on the basis of race-ethnicity. In practice, this has manifested as an emphasis on wives and mothers who accomplish the work of the nation as biological reproducers who uphold ethnic and racial homogeneity as well as transmit cultural markers that define the dominant in-group (Albanese 2006; Brennan 2008; Koven and Michel 1993; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989).

Although motherhood—and by extension, grandmotherhood—as a mobilizing frame clearly has the potential to unite women across ethnic and racial lines, chapters in this volume on border politics raise the question of whether and how the dynamics of territorially-grounded social movements and struggles attenuate this possibility. As McDuie-Ra (chapter 4) brings to light in his case study of ethnic minorities in the India-Burma borderlands, motherhood may be a powerful means of enabling women to act collectively and to do so across ethnic boundaries by drawing on gendered commonalities and subsuming ethnic differences. In the context of competing territorial claims that unfold in borderlands, however, motherhood may lose its ability to bridge ethnic divides even among women who have overcome these differences under other circumstances. Applied to the polarized politics of immigration in the contemporary United States, McDuie-Ra’s insights beg the question of how the long history of conflict surrounding the US-Mexico border weights the uses of motherhood and grandmotherhood toward collectively underscoring rather than undercutting racial and ethnic divides as criteria for inclusion in the nation.

To shed light on these issues, this chapter analyzes two moments of Minuteman activism in which women are integrally involved. The first is the mobilization of Operation Granny Brigade 2007, a recruitment campaign-cum-publicity stunt orchestrated from the Arizona headquarters of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC). The MCDC is one of two organizations that planned and executed the debut of the Minuteman movement in 2005, though it disbanded officially in 2010 in the wake of several high-profile controversies.⁴ Through Operation Granny Brigade, the MCDC attempted to publicly construct grandmothers as uniquely patriotic subjects and to marshal grandmotherhood as a resource to enhance the movement’s stock of political capital. It did so by staging grandmotherhood in defense of nation at the US-Mexico border.

The second moment of activism I describe is the enactment of grandmotherhood at the border nearly three years after Operation Granny Brigade in 2007. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a Minuteman chapter that had participated in Operation Granny Brigade 2007, I contrast the glorification of “border grannies” during public spectacle with the ordinary and understated work that border grannies do during the chapter’s monthly border gatherings. During these “musters,” volunteers physically patrol border areas and report unauthorized crossings to the Border Patrol. Although Minutemen engage in a variety of activities ranging from protests at day labor recruitment centers to fundraising campaigns to build or repair border fencing, these musters constitute the symbolic core of Minuteman activism. Examining the gendered division of labor that unfolds during these musters is, therefore, crucial to understanding women’s position and power within the movement.

Methods

This chapter is grounded in archival data downloaded from the Internet and ethnographic data gathered during the early stages of an ongoing study of women’s participation in an...