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

Abstract

The Hole in the Fence examines the design and effects of the contemporary border securityregime. Since 1994, the growth of military-style policing in the lands between the US andMexico has radically reshaped the path of illicit transnational migration. Newly erectedwalls, surveillance technology, and the stationing of an army of federal agents in theborder territory do not serve to seal off the national boundary. Border security ratherworks by pushing undocumented migration traffic away from urban areas and out intoprotracted journeys on foot through the southwest wilderness, heightening the risksassociated with entering the US without papers. Those attempting the perilouswilderness crossing now routinely find themselves without access to water, food, orrescue; thousands of people without papers have since perished in the vast deserts andrugged brushlands of the US southwest. In this border policing scenario, the US bordersecurity establishment does not act alone. From corporations to cartels, aid workers,militia men, and local residents, myriad social forces now shape the contemporaryborder struggle on the ground.The Hole in the Fence draws on the political theory of Michel Foucault and hisinterlocutors to argue that the US-Mexico border zone stands as a highly contemporarygoverning form that is based less on sovereign territorial defense or totalitarian capturethan on the multilateral regulation of transnational circulation. Accounting for theconceptual contours of the border scenario thus challenges many of the assumptions that underwrite classical political theory. This dissertation offers a vision ofcontemporary political power that is set to work in open and vital landscapes, and not infortressed prisons or deadened war zones. I articulate a mode of authorized violencethat is indirect and erratic, not juridical or genocidal. I explore a world of surveillancetechnology that is scattered and dysfunctional, not smooth and all-seeing. I assess theparticipation of human populations in progressive political intervention as being just asoften 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, policypapers, works of mass culture, academic scholarship, and self-authored media by ruralresidents to represent the contemporary border security environment. This pursuit isnecessarily interdisciplinary, moving among historical, cultural, ethnographic, andtheoretical forms of writing. Ultimately, The Hole in the Fence asserts that the southwestborder zone is a critical conceptual map for the rationality of political power in thecontext of neoliberal transnationalism—a formation that constantly engenders newmodes of persecution, struggle, subversion, and possibility.