The Hole in the Fence: Policing, Peril, and Possibility in the US-Mexico Border Zone, 1994-Present

The Hole in the Fence examines the design and effects of the contemporary border security

regime. Since 1994, the growth of military-style policing in the lands between the US and

Mexico has radically reshaped the path of illicit transnational migration. Newly erected

walls, surveillance technology, and the stationing of an army of federal agents in the

border territory do not serve to seal off the national boundary. Border security rather

works by pushing undocumented migration traffic away from urban areas and out into

protracted journeys on foot through the southwest wilderness, heightening the risks

associated with entering the US without papers. Those attempting the perilous

wilderness crossing now routinely find themselves without access to water, food, or

rescue; thousands of people without papers have since perished in the vast deserts and

rugged brushlands of the US southwest. In this border policing scenario, the US border

security establishment does not act alone. From corporations to cartels, aid workers,

militia men, and local residents, myriad social forces now shape the contemporary

border struggle on the ground.

The Hole in the Fence draws on the political theory of Michel Foucault and his

interlocutors to argue that the US-Mexico border zone stands as a highly contemporary

governing form that is based less on sovereign territorial defense or totalitarian capture

than on the multilateral regulation of transnational circulation. Accounting for the

conceptual contours of the border scenario thus challenges many of the assumptions that underwrite classical political theory. This dissertation offers a vision of

contemporary political power that is set to work in open and vital landscapes, and not in

fortressed prisons or deadened war zones. I articulate a mode of authorized violence

that is indirect and erratic, not juridical or genocidal. I explore a world of surveillance

technology that is scattered and dysfunctional, not smooth and all-seeing. I assess the

participation of human populations in progressive political intervention as being just as

often driven by practical self-interests as by an ethos of self-sacrifice.

This study draws on a diverse archive of on-the-ground policing tactics, policy

papers, works of mass culture, academic scholarship, and self-authored media by rural

residents to represent the contemporary border security environment. This pursuit is

necessarily interdisciplinary, moving among historical, cultural, ethnographic, and

theoretical forms of writing. Ultimately, The Hole in the Fence asserts that the southwest

border zone is a critical conceptual map for the rationality of political power in the

context of neoliberal transnationalism—a formation that constantly engenders new

modes of persecution, struggle, subversion, and possibility.