Crossing With the Virgin: Stories From the Migrant Trail, by Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks (University of Arizona Press, 2010), paperback, 240 p.

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories From the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands, by Margaret Regan (Beacon Press, 2010), paperback, 256 p.

Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, by Kelly Lytle Hernández (University of California Press, 2010), paperback, 336 p.

Using the courts to condemn part of Eloisa Tamez’s land, the authorities put an 18-foot-high steel barrier in her backyard, a wall justified in the name of the political black hole called national security. In doing so, they effectively cut off access to the rest of the university professor’s property. Her family has held legal title to the land, originally more than 10,000 acres in size, since 1767, long before the land-hungry state and its colonists arrived on the scene. Since then, various factors—settlers and local officials’ legal chicanery, the distribution of subdivisions to heirs, and land sales—have shrunk it to a narrow, three-acre strip that extends from Tamez’s house all the way to the internationally recognized boundary about one and a half miles away.

Although this saga sounds as if it could have taken place in occupied Palestine, the Tamez family actually hails from thousands of miles away—in the Rio Grande Valley, near Brownsville, Cameron County, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Like many of their neighbors, the Tamez family gained title to their property from Spanish colonial authorities, but their Lipan Apache ties to the area’s land go back much farther. In the era of so-called Homeland Security, however, such roots mean little. As of January 2010, when the Tamez family was profiled in The Texas Observer, the federal government had seized land from 199 of the Tamez’s fellow county residents and bulldozed some of their citrus orchards, in order to make room for new border barriers.¹ Such developments, predicted Margo Tamez, Eloisa’s daughter, in testimony to the Organization of American States in 2008, will cut off Apache families from their sacred sites across the Rio Grande and undercut their ability to subsist on the land, forcing them to move elsewhere.²

Just as the Jewish-only settlements and what Israel calls the security fence are intended to inhibit mobility in Palestine, so, too, are the barriers that increasingly scar the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In both settings, mere walking—and other forms of everyday mobility—can be threatening to the authorities who seek to control the land and to keep out those deemed permanent outsiders. This dynamic is vividly described by the lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, a native of Ramallah, West Bank, in his Palestinian Walks. In this simultaneously beautiful, painful, and instructive book, Shehadeh recounts six long walks, or sarhat (the plural of the Arabic term sarha), which he describes as a kind of aimless wandering, “not restricted by time and place,” in which a hiker goes “where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.” Not a term applicable to just any walk, a sarha “implies letting go,” he writes. “It’s a drug-free high, Palestinian style.”

In relating the walks, which took place in the West Bank between 1978 and 2006, Shehadeh movingly explores the splendor and power of the area’s landscape and offers a sobering look at how Israel’s occupation has tragically transformed it so as to deny basic dignity to the Palestinian population. A key goal is to try and “record how the land felt and looked before this calamity” with the “hope to preserve, at least in words, what has been lost forever.” Among what has been lost is open space and the right “simply to walk and savor what nature has to offer … without anger, fear or insecurity … without the fear of losing what they’ve come to love.” In the context of Israel’s ongoing land theft, Shehadeh feels “like one who is told that he contracted a terminal disease,” with his time to live—to walk—“running out.”

Open space and the ability to simply walk are also increasingly under siege in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as compellingly illustrated by two recent collections of stories from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands—Crossing With the Virgin, co-authored by three members of the migrant humanitarian aid group Samaritans, Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks; and The Death of Josseline, by the Tucson-based journalist Margaret Regan. Traversing the borderlands, these works make clear, is often a death-defying undertaking for those who enter the United States “illegally” from Mexico. The arduous terrain and other environmental factors, combined with the distances that must be traveled to circumvent the ever widening policing apparatus, lead many to perish before they reach their destination. With more than 2,000 migrant corpses recovered in southern Arizona alone since the late 1990s, death has become a way of life in the borderlands region, which Regan calls a “killing field.”

The names and stories of these human beings who meet their untimely demise in the borderlands are largely invisible in mainstream U.S. debate on immigration issues. They include Lucresia Domínguez Luna, who perished in the arms of her 15-year-old son, Jesús, as they tried to reach a husband and father living and working in the United States, and whose story Norma Price poignantly recounts; also among them is Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros—a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador who died of hypothermia in southern Arizona while trying to unite with her family in Los Angeles—whose tragic plight Regan movingly narrates.

These deaths speak to the inherent flip side of “security” in a world of dramatic socio-economic inequalities. Security for those within requires insecurity for those defined as outside the sociopolitical-geographical boundaries of the planet’s relatively privileged portions, an insecurity produced by the very presence of the enforcement apparatus.

The policing of immigrants and regulation of territorial boundaries in the United States are hardly new. Yet it was mostly individual states, not the federal government, that policed human mobility—of citizens and non-citizens alike—until the 1870s. At that time Washington began passing laws restricting immigration on the basis of social, political, economic, and ethno-racial criteria. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—together with successful efforts by Chinese migrants and their supporters to circumvent Exclusion-related controls by, among other means, entering through Canada and Mexico—led to the first policing of migrants along U.S. territorial boundaries.³

The novelty of the present is the extent and depth of the exclusion and control apparatus. The Border Patrol, now the federal government’s largest law enforcement body, for example, has grown massively since the 1990s: In 1994, the agency had roughly 4,200 agents; today it numbers about 21,000. During that time, the number of immigration detention beds grew from 5,000 to 33,000, manifested by a network of about 350 federal, county, and local facilities where the Department of Homeland Security jailed about 380,000 migrants in 2009, according to the Detention Watch Network. The most visible manifestations of this growth are in the U.S.-Mexico border-lands, where the length of walls, fences, and barriers have increased from a few dozen miles’ worth in the mid-1990s to more than 600 miles today. And it is in this region where about 18,000 of all Border Patrol agents are deployed.

The Southwest was not always the agency’s geographical focus, as Kelly Lytle Hernández reports in her insightful history of the Border Patrol, Migra!. In the early years of the agency (established in 1924), the Canadian and Mexican border regions were assigned roughly equal weight—at least as indicated by the allocation of officers. But such relative parity quickly disappeared as federal authorities began to focus the lion’s share of enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico divide and people of Mexican origin.

What explains this shift, among other factors, is that unlike the part of the United States that abuts Canada, all of the U.S. Southwest, except a small portion comprising southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, was gained through war (1846–48). (In 1853, Mexico surrendered that small portion, in a land-and people-grab euphemistically called the Gadsden Purchase, in response to Washington’s threats to militarily take the resource-rich territory.) And the region’s southern boundary divides two countries whose dominant ethno-cultural composition and socio-economic levels diverge profoundly. The associated differences have long facilitated Mexico’s role as a source of low-wage and disposable labor for the United States. Mainstream U.S. society has historically framed these as racial distinctions, with all the inequalities and injustices they inevitably entail.

While the intensity of fear and loathing has ebbed and flowed, low-income Mexicans, and Latinos more broadly, have long been represented as the embodied antipathy of all that is hegemonically perceived as good. What has changed are the labels attached to them—“Communist,” “illegal,” “criminal,” and “terrorist” among the most socially marginalizing—and the related ideological smokescreens used to legitimize their exclusion, one of the most powerful being “the rule of law,” which in this case provides ever fewer protections for those caught up in the endlessly widening web of policing. As one Border Patrol agent jokes to Regan, the U.S. Constitution has an “asterisk” for the border region. Whereas the Bill of Rights prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Regan explains, the Border Patrol can enter anyone’s land (but not buildings) within proximity of the international divide, and set up checkpoints along roads to stop drivers—without probable cause.

The border zone is expanding, with the federal government now defining it as a 100-mile-wide strip that abuts the country’s edges. This definitional generosity allows the Border Patrol to establish highway checkpoints near White River Junction, Vermont; to conduct sweeps in the Greyhound bus station in West Palm Beach, Florida; or to board east-west-bound passenger trains in Havre, Montana—creating a policing area that includes nearly two thirds of the U.S. population in what the American Civil Liberties Union calls a “Constitution-Free Zone.”⁴ For proponents of such “thickening,” the federal government’s perceived failure to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering or residing in the United States necessitates ever more intense enforcement of the country’s perimeter. It also compels growing policing of migrants within: The federal government has exiled millions of people since the mid-1990s—fiscal year 2010 saw a record 392,862 deportations—and thus the separation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizen children from one or more of their parents.

Still, the changes are most profoundly felt in the locales that abut the U.S.-Mexico divide—which, despite its violent origins and the fact that migrants have long faced myriad forms of violence negotiating passage, allowed for relatively fluid movement between U.S. border towns and the “twin” population centers in Mexico until fairly recently. Those days seem quite distant, given the overlapping wars on drugs, “illegals,” and terror waged in the borderlands—the Border Patrol today says that it focuses on “preventing terrorists and terrorists’ weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States,” according to its website.

It is in this context that the wall-building spree arrived in Eloisa Tamez’s backyard. “I feel like we live in an occupied zone now,” the 17-year military veteran told The Texas Observer. Onetime mayor of Douglas, Arizona, Ray Borane echoes this characterization in a quote from Regan. He describes Douglas as “an occupied town”—with 453 Border Patrol agents stationed there in 2000, an almost eightfold increase over 1994—while likening it to “a militarized zone.” Regan later cites Mike Wilson of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose traditional lands are bisected by the international boundary, and who likens the Border Patrol on “the Rez” to “an occupying army.”

Speaking of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands more broadly, Crossing With the Virgin contributor Kathryn Ferguson describes the area as a “low-level war zone where there are men with guns—Border Patrol, National Guard, thieves, Minutemen, ranchers, hunters, helicopters, ATVs, horse patrols, and Humvees.” She later reports on a particular encounter: One night, while she and a friend drove northward from the international divide, stadium lights suddenly blinded them. They had encountered “a Border Patrol checkpoint, rigid-faced men with guns telling us to stop.” Despite being in southern Arizona, “I had to remind myself that this was my country,” she writes. “I was not in foreign occupied territory.”

It is easy to label such characterizations hyperbole. But to draw parallels between what transpires in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and conventional cases of occupation—as in, say, Palestine—is not to assert sameness so much as it is to highlight significant parallels. Most palpable is the systematic dehumanization they both involve, from depriving the indigenous populations of their resources and ways of life to the hunting down of human beings for the “crime” of entering national territory without sanction of the sovereign power.

The inhumanity is not always lost on its immediate producers. Lytle Hernández quotes from a 1978 interview with a Border Patrol agent: “If you look at the human aspects,” the agent said, referring to his work, “we are stopping starving people from coming in to work, [and] it is not pretty to look at.” Or as another agent explained in 2007, “It’s very hard to make this job look pretty. We’re fortunate enough to live in a country where there are lots of opportunities. And most of the people who we run into out here want to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, it’s our job to stop that dream. That’s what we do on an everyday basis.”⁵

Israel has its own Border Police, whose duties include apprehending and expelling unauthorized workers who are often, but not exclusively, Palestinian. In a collection of testimonies of female soldiers who served in the occupied territories released in 2010, a Border Policewoman spoke with regret about her work enforcing the boundary between the West Bank and Israel proper: “In half an hour you can catch 30 people without any effort.” As to what then happens to these “illegal aliens”—women, men, children, and elderly—she explained: “They would have them stand, and there’s the well-known Border Guard song (in Arabic): ‘One hummus, one bean, I love the Border Guard’—they would make them sing this. Sing, and jump … and if one of them would laugh, or if they would decide someone was laughing, they would punch him.” Such abuse, reportedly commonplace, “could go on for hours, depending on how bored [the guards] are.”⁶

While all relatively wealthy countries stymie the hopes, dreams, and livelihoods of the unauthorized migrants they capture, it is the deeply rooted nature of the ties between the supposed “us” and “them” in the case of Mexico and the United States, and Palestine and Israel, that distinguish the practices of control and exclusion. And it is their overlapping historical and contemporary geographies—which defy simple notions of “here” and “there,” despite the efforts of the boundary makers—that raise pronounced ethical issues. In an overt sense, Israel’s occupation is particularly harsh in policing mobility.

As part of its efforts to undermine Hamas and further its dispossession of the Palestinians by fragmenting their territory, Israel prohibits Gazans from pursuing university studies in the nominally Palestinian-governed West Bank, and has arrested and deported numerous students back to Gaza.⁷ At the same time, Israel seeks to control Gaza’s perimeter, in part by widening it, and violently enforces its will. Israeli soldiers frequently fire on Palestinians, including children, scavenging for construction materials among the ruins created by Israel’s January 2009 military assault on Gaza, for instance. In 2010, according to Save the Children, 26 such children were shot near the boundary with Israel, including 16 who were beyond the Israeli-imposed 328-yard no-go zone that extends into the Gaza Strip.⁸

Such levels of violence are not manifest in today’s U.S.-Mexico borderlands—the worst of it having been carried out in the 1800s and early 1900s by U.S. and local authorities, as well as Anglo settlers, as they subjugated and dispossessed the Native and pre-conquest Mexican populations. Nonetheless, recent years have seen numerous incidents of U.S. authorities, like the Israelis, firing upon alleged rock throwers or shooting unarmed border-crossers. Crossing With the Virgin contributor Norma Price describes the autopsy of 16-year-old Juan de Jesús Rivera Cota, killed by a Border Patrol bullet in 2005, for instance. But, as is normal for situations in which the system of control is strongly institutionalized and thus largely invisible as violence—at least to those who embrace it—so, too, are the dominant expressions of injustice and the accompanying brutality, migrant deaths being the most obvious one.

Another is Operation Streamline. Begun in 2005, the now border-wide program (minus California) processes hundreds of apprehended Mexican border-crossers on a daily basis through the federal court system and convicts them of the misdemeanor of illegal entry. Upon pleading guilty (which they invariably do), defendants receive sentences of anywhere from time served to six months and then are formally deported, thus making it a felony if they return and making them liable for anywhere from two to 20 years in prison.

I witnessed this scene in a Tucson courthouse in March 2009 as a federal magistrate convicted the afternoon’s 69 defendants, all with their hands chained to their waists and feet shackled. Afterward, the judge, a woman of Mexican descent born and raised in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, spoke to a group of university students visiting the courtroom. In response to a question about the program’s effectiveness in dissuading would-be unauthorized migrants, she characterized it as a complete waste of resources. When asked why she continued to do such work, the judge explained that she had kids to put through college. She later described her hometown as “like occupied territory.”

That the judge serves the very occupation she decries is unsurprising. It speaks to the contradictions and complexities that human beings embody, and is also a manifestation of how regimes of occupation can co-opt critics. To the extent that the regime has normalized the occupation—so much so that it is not visible as such—it additionally displays the success with which the occupiers have nationalized the mindsets of many: Today more than half of Border Patrol agents are Latinos, the vast majority from the border region. It thus also illustrates how the dispossession narrows the options for the land’s inhabitants, the borderlands including some of the poorest areas of the United States, with socio-economic indices for broad swaths of the Mexican-origin population especially dire. In the case of Palestinians, many perform construction jobs and labor in the very settlements in the West Bank and greater Jerusalem that exacerbate their plight.

In such contexts, the line between occupier and occupied, guard and policed, is often blurry at best: On January 10, U.S. authorities arrested Marcos Gerardo Manzano Jr., a Border Patrol agent, for allegedly harboring unauthorized immigrants at his home, one of them being his twice previously deported father. Some of his neighbors, almost all of whom are of Mexican descent, in the San Ysidro section of San Diego expressed sympathy for Manzano. “What could he do?” one neighbor was quoted as saying, adding in reference to Manzano’s father: “He’s family.” For U.S. authorities, such allegiance is the core of the problem: “His loyalty to his father was stronger than the loyalty to the Border Patrol,” one official stated condemningly, “and that’s the sad reality of it.”⁹

Supporters of occupation regimes justify the injustice in various ways, one being the invocation of the rule of law established by the conquering power. In this regard, the original injustice of colonization is perpetuated and obscured by what historian Arno Mayer has called a “violence of conservation”—physical and institutional brutality deployed to counter, and made necessary by, the individuals and groups who resist the social order that was violently brought about by an earlier wrong (a “violence of foundation” for Meyer).¹⁰

A second justification of occupation invokes “might makes right”: As one Israeli settler says to Shehadeh in defending his country’s presence in what is, according to international law, Palestinian land: “There was a war and we won.” His words made me recall a rally I witnessed in Los Angeles on July 4, 1997. The demonstrators were calling for a crackdown on unwanted immigration and for increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Among them was a woman carrying a sign directed at people of Mexican descent that read, “1848: You lost, we won. Get over it.”

What was lost to the pre-conquest populations and their descendants in both cases was not only land but, for those now cut off from territory to which they previously had access, all the associated rights, like the right to move, live, and work within the area. And for those members of the subjugated populations caught within the boundaries of the expanding entities or (in the U.S. case) who would later migrate to it, their rights in the new country would prove to be conditional and restricted. The theft was an inextricable part of the process to Americanize what is now the U.S. Southwest, and to make an Israel whose territory continues to expand.

What should give hope in the face of such injustices is that occupations are by definition temporary—or at least they are supposed to be. The United States has the advantage over Israel of having its ill-gotten territory legitimated by an international treaty, albeit one effectively realized at gunpoint, while having a considerable amount of time to dispossess and discipline the indigenous and Mexican populations it inherited and establish effective control. As such, the U.S. “occupation” is seen—at home and abroad—as something else, and certainly not temporary (at least in the foreseeable term). Hence, the conquest truly seems past, at least to many. In the case of Palestine, by contrast, the past visibly lives on, thus the international outrage directed at Israel and the direct resistance by Palestinians living under occupation.

Nonetheless, the distinct perceptions of the two situations speak, perhaps, more to the conventional nature of our definitions of occupation than they do to the depth and significance of the differences between the two sites. While Raja Shehadeh is clearly preoccupied with occupation of a conventional sort, his conception and critique of occupation concern much larger matters. In his book’s last sarha, he encounters an Israeli settler—one of the hundreds of thousands of colonists he despises for “the aggressiveness of their intentions and behavior toward my land.” In addition to stealing land and wastefully devouring the area’s fragile water supply, the settlers are an integral part of the Israeli system of control that stymies mobility. Shehadeh does not hide his rage from the settler. Yet, at the same time, he is able to see a connection with the young man due to a shared attachment to, and respect for, the land.

“I love these hills no less than you,” the settler asserts in response to Shehadeh’s challenge. “I was raised here. The sights and smells of this land are a sacred part of me. This is my home.” Shehadeh accepts the settler’s invitation to join him in smoking a water pipe of hashish. While Shehadeh feels a certain discomfort—“I began to feel guilty at what I was doing, willingly, sharing these hills with this settler”—he also is able to see beyond the clash between occupied and occupier: “But then I thought: these are still my hills despite how things are turning out. But they also belong to whoever can appreciate them.”

Here becomes apparent Shehadeh’s full critique of occupation, and of the two-decade-old “peace process,” which has served to further Palestinian dispossession and render a two-state solution almost unimaginable, given the breadth and depth of Israel’s presence in Palestine. What is at stake above all is how human beings behave toward the land and one another. In this sense, the problem is principally those who see the land as a blank canvas, one that they can carve up and fill without any regard for the flora, fauna, and physical landscape, and who show contempt for its human inhabitants and their ties to it.

In many ways, Shehadeh embraces practices that precede the very creation of the state of Israel. They include those of his paternal grandfather, a man who lived humbly in Ramallah while moving seasonally between the town and his fields in the nearby hills, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin, a people whose presence in the region goes back centuries. They had, Shehadeh writes, “a different vision of the land,” one that “saw it as an integral whole.” And then there are the Greek Orthodox monks who lead lives of contemplative seclusion in a centuries-old monastery near Jericho, an oasis of “tranquility and peace” where they do not “bother with the worldly events taking place outside their door.” Shehadeh wants to draw “inspiration from this long tradition, and search for a tranquil place” where he “could take refuge and sit out the bad times” and nurse his “despair about Israel’s unbridled power” as a “time comes when one has to accept reality, difficult as that might be, and find ways to live through it without losing one’s self-esteem and principles.”

By continuing to engage in the struggle to free the land, but in a way that goes beyond simple dichotomies of friend and foe and that embraces a belonging to something far beyond the here-and-now, Shehadeh leaves the reader with a vision that transcends the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Acknowledging the land’s permanence and the transient nature of any human construct, Shehadeh allows for a peaceful and just coexistence for all who reside in, and have a selfless, love-like claim to the contested land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Today’s U.S.-Mexico borderlands is also one of despair in many ways, but, like any place, it is also one riven with contradictions and instabilities. It is a region deformed by rapacious development, with threatened water supplies, the prospects of long-term drought exacerbated by climate change.¹¹ It is also one blanketed by a U.S. policing apparatus that harms the region’s landscape, flora, and fauna. Yet countless migrants continue to challenge the regime of exclusion and overcome it to varying degrees.

As Crossing With the Virgin co-author Ted Parks insists, “The migrants will come as long as the forces are in place” that drive them. For these reasons and more, it is thus hard to imagine the settler status quo’s long-term survival. However, given the growing intensity of occupation in the form of the ever hardening enforcement regime, it is also difficult to envision its end in the foreseeable term. Nonetheless that need not lead to an acquiescence to the unacceptable in the name of realism.

“Even if we take [unjust social arrangements] as givens for purposes of immediate action in a particular context,” writes political theorist Joseph Careens, “we should not forget about our assessment of their fundamental character. Otherwise we wind up legitimating what should only be endured.”¹² And given the fundamental character of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, any just solution to the ongoing, multifaceted war there must challenge its foundational violence, and the contemporary manifestations of that violence.

Perhaps a similar vision to that of Shehadeh provides the resources to enable us to carry on and to imagine and produce a world beyond occupation. It is a vision that respects the land’s power and embraces its beauty, and allows for fluidity in terms of passage and residence. It also appreciates that the land will far outlast the relatively short lifespan of human conflicts and injustices, and will ultimately endure despite the associated destruction.

1. Melissa del Bosque, “All Walled Up,” The Texas Observer, January 20, 2010.
2. Wendy Kenin, “Tamez Stronghold: Indigenous Response to the U.S. Border Wall,” Green Pages, July 17, 2009.
3. See Erika Lee, At America’s Gate: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
4. ACLU, “Are You Living in a Constitution Free Zone?” December 15, 2006.
5. Maria Politzer, “ ‘It’s Our Job to Stop That Dream’: The Endless, Futile Work of the Border Patrol,” Reason, April 2007.
6. Amir Shilo, “Female Soldiers Break Their Silence,” YNetnews.com, January 29, 2010.
7. Kevin Flower, “Israel Court: Deported Palestinian Court Can’t Return,” CNN.com, December 9, 2009.
8. Save the Children, “Dying to Work in Gaza,” January 19, 2011.
9. Richard Marosi, “Border Patrol Agent Is Charged with Harboring Illegal Immigrants,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2011.
10. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2002).
11. Lauren Morello and Climatewire, “Desert Southwest May Be First U.S. Victim of Climate Change,” Scientific American, December 14, 2010.
12. Joseph Carens, “Open Borders and Liberal Limits: A Response to Isbister,” International Migration Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 636.

Given the political and intellectual energy these get-togethers embody and help to spur on, the allure to participate by flying “there” is undeniable. They provide valuable opportunities for networking, debate, discussion, protest, and organization- or movement-building. They also speak powerfully to the willingness and ability of many to expend significant resources to advance weighty causes.

Such long-distance engagement also illustrates the scale of the challenges humanity faces. Indeed, the institutions and individuals who give rise to our most pressing problems typically exercise great mobility and exert their power in a manner that shows little regard for territorial limits. Accordingly, those of us who want to contest what they do often must labor across long distances to enable and strengthen relationships with others. And a common way we from the relatively wealthy parts and sectors of the planet do so is by flying.

The trouble with this is that flying is the single most ecologically costly act of individual consumption, one that requires the exploitation of large amounts of environmental and human resources. In a world of deep inequality, it thus also speaks to privilege — most notably what we might call ecological privilege — and its ugly flipside, disadvantage.

The exercise of this privilege flows from highly differentiated access to the world’s resource base and helps to intensify the planet’s degradation, contributing in the process to all sorts of unevenly distributed social ills. As numerous studies demonstrate, for example, climate change — to which flying contributes significantly — disproportionately harms people of color and low-income populations. Air travel is therefore inextricably part of the making of global inequities along axes such as those of race and empire.

That our decisions to fly have profound implications for the welfare of people and places across the globe illustrates how the movements of people are, among other things, “products and producers of power” — as geographer Tim Cresswell asserts. Those with more power consequently have greater mobility than those with less, while their mobility, in and of itself, helps to enhance their advantage over the less fortunate.

For those of us from the planet’s more privileged portions, acknowledgment of these ties should give serious pause before embracing the air travel that has become standard operating procedure among all too many. It should also compel us to engage political work in a manner commensurate with the ever-more-evident reality of a fragile and threatened biosphere. This requires a radical reduction in activism-related flying.

Because flying allows relatively quick travel over great distance, it facilitates far more resource consumption than other transport modes. Undoubtedly, many airborne voyagers would forgo trips is they had to use slower, more time-intensive, surface-level travel.

Moreover, the climate-destabilizing effects of air travel — per passenger mile — dwarfs that of other modes because of the enhanced climatic “forcing” it brings about: due to the height at which planes fly combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit, conventional air travel detrimentally impacts global climate approximately 2.7 times more than that of its carbon emissions alone, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yet it is striking how little one hears about this from those involved in environmental and social justice work. To many, the link between the problems they decry and try to remedy and their own consumption is seemingly invisible. Take, for instance, a Jan. 7, 2010 article by Orville Schell of the Asia Institute, where he works on, among other matters, climate change. Writing at TomDispatch.com, Schell laments the Himalaya’s melting glaciers. They are, he writes, “wasting away on an overheated planet, and no one knows what to do about it.” Meanwhile, he mentions that he has “roamed the world from San Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai” over “the past few months” — presumably by airplane.

Such a disconnect is hardly exceptional: a few years ago, a friend who works on climate issues for a progressive international NGO informed me that he and his colleagues had never discussed the ecological costs of flying in relation to their participation in meetings in distant locales.

Critical scrutiny of these costs did emerge somewhat in the context of the Dec. 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. The gathering reportedly generated 46,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide (an estimated 2,000-plus tons of which was due to President Barack Obama’s two Air Force One jets alone), the vast majority of which came from the flights of the delegates, officials, journalists, activists, and observers in attendance. (This is roughly equal to the annual emissions output of 660,000 Ethiopians or, given the profoundly different levels of consumption across the planet, 2,300 Americans — according to U.S. government data.)

But the voicing of concerns about such matters was isolated and, in places like the United States, almost non-existent — at least as indicated by media coverage.

Ironically, an organization critical of efforts to regulate carbon emissions, “Americans for Prosperity,” raised the issue. Trying to discredit U.S. student activists who had disrupted one of the Tea Party-allied group’s climate-change-skeptic sessions in Copenhagen, it posted a video on YouTube titled “Eco Hypocrites Fly in Jets Across Atlantic to Attack AFP.”



Given Americans for Prosperity’s climate-change-denial politics and the fact that its representatives had also flown to Denmark, it is difficult to take seriously its accusation of hypocrisy. That said, it forces the question of how one justifies an oversized ecological footprint — as Grist, the online environmental magazine put it in relation to flying to Copenhagen — “to help save the planet.”

What is striking about the Grist piece (May 17, 2009) is that it merely mentions ships as a low-impact alternative to flights, but only after saying that flying “is pretty much the only option” for non-European attendees. More importantly, it didn’t even raise the option of not going to Copenhagen — and pursuing other courses of action to advance a climate justice agenda in relation to the conference. To give one example, how about organizing in one’s hometown during the gathering and pressuring elected officials from the area to actively support a strong international agreement?

This is not to say that no one should have gone to Copenhagen — or to call for the end of all gatherings that involve long-distance travel. Nor is to say that no one should ever fly. For some, attending meetings in far-flung locales is absolutely necessary. But for many their attendance is not vital to the cause’s advancement. Moreover, some who would normally fly can get there by other means. And, of course, perhaps the in-person gathering need not take place, and would-be participants can figure out other ways to communicate and collaborate, and to further their political agenda.

In other words, there are alternatives to what has become the default option. But for great numbers of us, consideration of such alternatives doesn’t happen — in large part because flying is so easy and inexpensive, at least in the financial sense.

Not having to seriously consider alternatives to the dominant ways of doing things is one of the beauties of privilege — for those who have it at any rate. According to a 2008 study by researchers at Britain’s Exeter University, supporters of “green living” — those who try to live lightly by, for example, rejecting bottled war, biking or walking whenever possible, recycling and composting — are the most likely to engage in long-distance flying.¹ These relatively wealthy folks are also as resistant to changing their high-flying practices as those skeptical of climate change science.

This demonstrates how privilege is structured into the social order in such a way that it is invisible to many, or comes to be seen (at least by its defenders) as the natural or acceptable order of things. There are important questions that privileged people simply don’t ask or don’t have to answer. Here’s one: how do you justify the appropriation of an unsustainable and socially unjust share of the biosphere’s resources in a manner that concentrates benefits among a minority, and detriments in those associated with a disadvantaged majority?

In posing such a question, I am mindful of Derrick Jensen’s warning (Orion, July/August 2009) against thinking that taking shorter showers will change the world. Those working for ecological sustainability and justice, Jensen argues, must not retreat into a comfortable focus on individual consumption and avoid the very necessary and hard struggle against powerful structures and institutions that drive much of the destruction of the biosphere.

At the same time, we should also avoid the trap of making a simple distinction between the individual and the collective, agency and structure. The work-related flights of social and environmental justice advocates add up in significant ways. A roundtrip flight between New York City and Los Angeles on a typical commercial jet yields an estimated 715 kilos of CO2 per economy class passenger, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization. This results in what is effectively, in terms of climatic forcing, 1,917 kilos, or almost two tons, of emissions.

Opinion varies as to what is a sustainable level of carbon emissions per capita were the “right to pollute” allocated equitably among the world’s human inhabitants. What they all suggest is that flying and a sustainable lifestyle are at fundamental odds.

The London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) posits two metric tons per person at present as the cut-off. But if we project into the future and assume a need to cut global emissions by a whopping 90 percent vis-à-vis 1990 levels in the next few decades to keep within a safe upper limit of atmospheric carbon, the IIED asserts we must achieve 0.45 tons per capita. Either way, that New York-L.A. flight at best effectively equals the allowable annual emissions of an average resident of the planet or exceeds it manifold.

Such numbers have led analyst and activist George Monbiot to conclude in his book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, that “most of the aeroplanes flying today be grounded.” In addition to meaning the end of distant holiday travel “unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there” (e.g. by bus, train or ship), it also means “most painfully,” he says in reference to himself, the end of airborne travel to “political meetings in Porto Alegre.”

Part of the problem associated with challenging ecological privilege is that, like all systems of structural violence, the myriad costs and injuries associated with it are rarely visible to the beneficiaries in any sort of immediate, tangible, easily accessed way. Of course, there are rare occasions when the costs of the typically out-of-view extraction and production of the carbon-based fuels that drive modern transportation become horrifically visible: when we see, for instance, images of oil-soaked pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico, or view and listen to video of inhabitants of the Niger Delta’s ravaged villages who have the misfortune of sitting atop lucrative oil deposits.

But in terms of the consumption of petroleum, the resulting harm is cumulative over time and space, its effects socialized and delayed, while the benefits (getting from point A to B quickly) are individual and immediate. So phenomena such as increased desertification, biodiversity loss, drought, or rising sea levels — and the attendant human and non-human dislocating and destructive consequences — seem distant, and unrelated to “us.” They become what anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls “the violence of everyday life,” or what writer Rob Nixon characterizes as “slow violence.”

Raising the issue of air travel’s ecological footprint, and the environmental and social hazards associated with flying, does not make for comfortable discussion. My experience is that some respond defensively, many engage in verbal acrobatics or make jokes as a way of deflecting the conversation, or some simply ignore the matter and change the subject. At the same time, a small but not insignificant number acknowledge the need to greatly reduce that footprint. Yet few actually follow through in terms of the ethical and ecological implications of that acknowledgment.

It seems that too many environmental and social justice advocates think they should be exempt from reducing their aviation-related footprint because their work is important. They continue their airborne ways because they don’t see “realistic” alternatives, and, perhaps, more importantly, because they can.

It is not that the exercise of privilege can’t be put to good use, but such action always and inherently also brings about injury. So the question we have to grapple with individually and collectively is, does the resulting good compensate (at the very least) for the harm, while laying the groundwork for eliminating the system of privilege and disadvantage — what ultimately, from a social and environmental justice perspective, has to be the goal of progressively minded folks?

As someone who has engaged in more than my share of activist-related flying over the years — to go to protests and conferences, to participate in national and international meetings of organizations I have been involved in, to lobby government officials, or to give lectures — I appreciate the many positives associated with long-distance travel in furthering a transformative politics. It has allowed me to connect and collaborate with old friends and colleagues on important matters and make new ones, and to learn a great deal — in addition to have a good time and to visit interesting places.

Yet, in looking back, I have to admit that most of it was unnecessary. Given the heavy socio-ecological costs involved, I could and should have pursued far more environmentally sustainable alternatives that would have involved my staying put physically, while still being in position to connect with people afar and advance the struggle. (As Bill McKibben argues in his book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough Planet, Internet-related communication can and must serve as the substitute “trip” for the jet travel that climate change and falling oil supplies no longer permit.) And if it was so important that I go “there” in person, I should have, and could have in most instances, taken the time to travel slowly and on the Earth’s surface.

Obviously, social and environmental justice advocates are hardly among the principle forces bringing about the planet’s degradation. But what we do matters — for better and for worse. As Monbiot points out, “well-meaning people are as capable of destroying the biosphere as the executives of Exxon.” So, if for no other reasons than the necessity of “walking the walk” and the demands of a biosphere under siege, we need to hold ourselves to a much higher standard in terms of how we conduct ourselves.

By challenging our own ecological privilege and working to find less environmentally destructive methods of connecting with others, we lessen our complicity in racism, imperialism, and other malignant “isms” that disproportionately harm peoples and places on the national and global margins. We also show others — activists, friends, and family members who fly unhesitatingly — that not only is another world possible, but also some of what needs to be done to bring about that world.

1. If you would like to see the actual study, please write to ude.rassavnull@snivenoj.

The movie receiving these fawning reviews is Sin Nombre (Without a Name), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. His first feature-length film — “[o]ne of the most memorable directorial debuts in recent memory” according to the Post — it won the California-born and –raised Fukunaga the directing and cinematography award in the dramatic competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

There is certainly much to recommend the film. It tells a visually compelling tale that takes the viewer on a gripping journey from the streets of Tapachula, Chiapas — a mid-size Mexican city on the border with Guatemala — to Mexico’s boundary with Texas. In doing so, Sin Nombre brings the audience into the underworld of Mexican youth gangs, one depicted as often horrifically violent, while providing a window into the grueling trip from southern Mexico taken by many Central American migrants to reach the United States.

The movie revolves around a young member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, Willy, and a young Honduran woman, Sayra, who is trying to reach the United States with her uncle and her father, recently deported from New Jersey, and who she hasn’t seen since she was a child. The two teenagers’ paths cross on the top of a freight train, an efficient but highly dangerous form of transportation for migrants traveling to “el Norte.” On the trip, Sayra develops — rather far-fetchedly — a deep attachment to Willy as he tries to outrun his former gang brothers intent on hunting him down.

While the story in and of itself is quite engrossing, it presents a largely one-dimensional view of Mexico as a land of violence with few honorable people. At the same time, it presents no context to help the viewer understand who the gang members are, and how and why they — and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) itself — came to be.

Apart from a single reference to the gang’s presence in Los Angeles, there is no mention of the MS-13’s origins in southern California, and the U.S. government’s role in facilitating its emergence and spread. Salvadoran migrants, whose very residence there was owed to U.S. support for El Salvador’s brutal military-oligarchy alliance, created the gang in the 1980s as a form of self-protection. U.S. deportations of members helped to internationalize the gang, which now has a strong presence in many Central American countries, and in southern Mexico.¹

Given the focus of the film, it is perhaps far too much to expect Sin Nombre to address such matters. But is begs the question of what the movie — or, more precisely, the filmmaker — is trying to accomplish by focusing on gang violence and its intersection with the Central American migrant passage through Mexico. It is in this area where Sin Nombre proves to be quite problematic and confusing.

A question-and-answer session with Fukunaga and Focus Features CEO, James Shamus, following a recent showing of the film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, helped to shed some light onto the production- and marketing-related thinking surrounding the film.

Shamus somewhat cryptically called the film “radically political” (suggesting that it was so in a progressive sense), and praised the fact that it gives voice to people rarely heard in feature films — Latinos (which is like lauding a film on the Bloods and the Crips for giving voice to African Africans). He also gushed about how the film is bringing large numbers of Latinos into art-house theaters, evidence of its cross-over appeal.

Fukunaga indirectly took issue with Shamus’s suggestion that Sin Nombre was political. “I didn’t write it as a political film,” the filmmaker asserted. “I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind.” Instead, he stated that he wanted viewers to have an “experience” and to “make up their own minds.” The question is, what is it that he wants people to make up their own minds about?

In published interviews, Fukunaga makes clear that the migrant journey — specifically the dangerous odyssey by train from the Mexico-Guatemala border to the U.S.-Mexico divide — and the violence and suffering that surround it is his intended focus.² Yet, this is at best a secondary aspect of the film, as Sin Nombre privileges the gang-related drama to a great extent. And in doing so in the way that it does, the film paints a picture of Mexico — and, by extension, its people — that is anything but flattering. Indeed, it is difficult to come away from the film not feeling a sense of revulsion toward and fear of many things Mexican, in particular the country’s men. In this regard, the film plays into some of the worst stereotypes that fuel anti-migrant sentiment — especially as it relates to Mexico.

Undoubtedly there is a lot of brutal violence — perpetrated by Mexican authorities, gang members, and bandits — associated with the migrant passage from southern Mexico to the United States.³ And, in addition to the deaths and injuries brought about by such brutality, innumerable migrants lose their lives or limbs each year by falling off and underneath what many call the “train of death” or “the beast.”⁴ Sin Nombre provides a valuable glimpse into these varied forms of violence, but the film doesn’t give the viewer a sense of the frequent nature of the fatalities and injuries associated with the train itself.

At the same time, Sin Nombre makes invisible the U.S. enforcement apparatus. In terms of the actual movement across the U.S.-Mexico boundary, it only shows a single unauthorized crossing, one that is successful and seemingly challenge-free. The films does this despite the fact that the size of the boundary and immigration apparatus has exploded in the last 15 years — the U.S. Border Patrol, for instance, has more than quadrupled in size (there are today 18,000+ agents) during this period. Meanwhile, more than 5,000 migrant bodies have been recovered in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since 1995, a tragic manifestation of the boundary’s “hardening.”

In addition to such misrepresentation, the movie effectively exculpates the United States for its role in helping to make Mexico a grueling zone of passage for migrants from Central America and beyond.

In the 1980s, during a northward exodus of Central American refugees, Washington put considerable pressure on Mexico, and assisted Mexican government efforts, to crackdown on third-country nationals migrating without authorization through Mexico to get to the United States.⁵ Since the 1990s, U.S. authorities have intensified such pressures and efforts,⁶ while extending them geographically so that the U.S. boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus is today effectively present in Mexico and in countries well beyond.⁷ In other words, the arduous and dangerous journey across Mexico that the film helps bring to light has been made in no small part in Washington, D.C.

Given this reality — and the almost omnipresent and highly charged nature of present-day debates surrounding immigration and boundary enforcement — it is, at best, pure fantasy to think that one can avoid politics in making a film that is to a significant degree about migration from Mexico and Central America. The title of one of Howard Zinn’s book says it best: You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.

To pretend that you can be otherwise facilitates the myopic thinking that led Fukunaga to make a film that purports to be a sympathetic portrayal of the migrant passage, but that ends up obscuring much and inadvertently fueling some of the flames which underlie the very making of the journey’s fatal obstacles that seem to concern him.

It is easy to decry migrant deaths and the many forms of suffering endured by unauthorized migrants as they make the dangerous trek to the United States. Everyone from the Minutemen to the most ardent congressional advocates of increased enforcement does so. It is much more difficult — and important — to analyze and challenge the factors and agents that compel migrants to leave their homes and that deny them passage and entry to the relatively safety and security of places like the United States. Because it does the former without doing the latter, while reinforcing ugly images of Mexico that inform anti-immigrant sentiment, Sin Nombre is hardly progressive or radical, and is regrettably part tragedy in more ways than one.

1. Alfonso Gonzales, Rethinking U.S. Involvement in Central America’s War on Gangs, Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 2006.
2. See, for example, indieWire, “Cary Joji Fukunaga on ‘Sin Nombre’: Border Crossings, Authenticity, and Authorship,” indieWire, March 17, 2009.
3. See N.C. Aizenman, “Meeting Danger Well South of the Border,” Washington Post, July 8, 2006: A1+; Velia Jaramillo, “Hipocresía migratoria,” Processo.com.mx, August 14, 2006 and Jeremy Schwartz, “Mexico’s Southern Border Snares Central American Migrants,” The News & Observer (North Carolina), March 10, 2007.
4. Christine Evans, “Train Jumping: A Desperate Journey,” Palm Beach Post, November 11, 2006; a compelling photo essay — with audio — accompanies the article. See also Mariana Van Zeller, “Death Train,” Current TV, Nov. 25, 2005; and “Amputee Shelter,” Current TV, Jan. 4, 2006.
5. See Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home, Austin: The Center for Mexican American Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, 1996.
6. Ginger Thompson, “Mexico Worries About Its Own Southern Border,” New York Times, June 18, 2006.
7. See Michael Flynn, “Dondé está la frontera?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 58, No. 4, July/August 2002: 24-35.

Hernández’s and Banuelos’s paths crossed in the context of the “War on Drugs.” Banuelos was a member of four-person surveillance unit, part of the first armed U.S. military mission to the Mexican border region since 1914. The mission took place under the auspices of Joint Task Force Six (JTF-6), the inter-branch command unit that provided operational, training, and intelligence support from the Pentagon to federal, regional, state, and local law enforcement counter-drug efforts within the United States.¹

Banuelos and his fellow Marines had been deployed to Redford, Hernández’s tiny hometown (with a population at the time of a little more than 100 people) to monitor individuals smuggling drugs from Mexico across the Rio Grande. No one in Redford, apart from Border Patrol agents in the area, knew that the Marines were there.

On May 19, 1997, Hernández, whose post-high-school plan was to join the Marines, took out his goats near his family home, which lay about 200 yards north of the US-Mexico divide. He carried a .22 caliber rifle to ward off wild dogs. According to the soldiers, Hernández fired at them twice. Twenty minutes later, the young man was dead, Banuelos having fired a single shot.

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández², a compelling documentary which aired throughout the United States on July 8 on PBS’ Point of View (POV), sheds important light on the tragedy. Employing interviews with members of the Hernández family, the three other marines who were members of the JTF-6 unit (Banuelos declined to be interviewed), law enforcement officials, lawyers involved in the case, and members of the Redford community, the film provides a comprehensive view of the murder.

It also makes a clear statement that Esequiel Hernández was the victim of a soldier who acted inappropriately and — most likely — criminally. Hernández, it seems, never threatened the Marine unit as Banuelos claimed. Because the soldiers were camouflaged and hiding amidst vegetation at a distance of more than 200 yards from where Hernández allegedly fired his rifle, it would have been impossible for him to see them, no less to know that they were Marines. More importantly, Banuelos and the unit he led pursued Hernández after the high school student fired his rifle, closing the gap between them and their alleged assailant to about 100 yards. If Hernández were a threat as Banuelos alleged, why pursue him — especially given that he was walking away from them and the soldiers’ rules of engagement limited pursuit to when necessary for self-defense? Moreover, while Banuelos fired upon Hernández, he said, because the 18-year-old was about to shoot Lance Corporal James Blood, one of the other members of the unit, Blood rejects the claim in the film. As Jane Kelly (among others), an FBI agent interviewed in the film points out, Banuelos’s bullet penetrated Hernández’s right side under his arm, a point of entry inconsistent for someone supposedly positioned to shoot at Blood; indeed, it appears that Hernández was facing away from the Marine unit when he was shot.³

While such matters were central to Hernández’s untimely demise, so, too was the effective criminalization of the impoverished farming town’s population. Redford, so went the intelligence JTF-6 and the Border Patrol provided to the Marines, was a center of drug traffickers: 70-75 percent of the population was allegedly involved in the illicit trade. As the notes of the staff sergeant who briefed the soldiers before they were deployed to the town read, “Redford is not a friendly town.” Through such cartoon-like depictions, Redford became an enemy locale — as have so many other places across the country and throughout the world in the ever-expanding and never-ending “war on drugs.” Given the information they received, Banuelos and his unit were fully expecting some “action,” but they did not observe any drug-trafficking-related activity, leading Ronald Wieler, one of the unit members, to conclude that “In a way, it was like we were there for nothing.”

The fact that the Marines were in Redford, and that the federal government had sent them there says a lot about how important segments of the ruling class perceive the border region and its residents. As Enrique Madrid, a local historian in Redford, asserts in the film, “Presidio County is one of the poorest in the State of Texas, one of the poorest in the nation, and South County is the poorest part of that poor county. And yet they send us Marines instead of educators. They send us Border Patrolmen instead of doctors.” Seen from Washington, the border region—Redford included — is first and foremost an area of existential threats to the larger national body, an area that needs to be secured — whether it’s against “illegal” migrants crossing the boundary to “steal” jobs, or against would-be terrorists.⁴

The shooting death in Redford is also just one of many tragic illustrations of the ludicrous lengths to which the drug war and the border war have been taken and how they continue independent of their effectiveness in combating the “threats” from without they purport to eliminate. In the case of the war on drugs, for example, the federal government has spent many hundreds of billions of dollars over the last three decades. Nonetheless, the street price of drugs has steadily declined during that period — an indication of just how little impact Washington’s “war” has had on transboundary smuggling.

In addition to the huge demand within the United States that fuels the drug trade, the sheer volume of pedestrian and vehicular traffic crossing the divide make drug interdiction efforts largely futile — at least as they relate to the US-Mexico boundary. As a Reuters journalist recently wrote while observing the scene at the San Ysidro (southern San Diego) port of entry through which an average of 150,000 people enter the United States on a daily basis, “Looking south out of a window at the busiest border crossing in the world, the phrase looking for needles in a haystack comes to mind, along with the realization that America’s war on drugs cannot be won. Unless the laws of supply and demand are miraculously suspended.”⁵ But such dispassionate analysis gets lost in the overheated rhetoric of the “law-and-order” crowd or dismissed by those with vested interests in furthering the enforcement regime given the institutional and political pay-offs.

This is especially true in regards to immigration and boundary policing. Despite massive growth in enforcement resources and personnel — especially since developments initiated in the mid-1990s under the Clinton administration — unauthorized migrants continue to enter the United States via its southern boundary. Research undertaken in 2005 found that, while it is now much more difficult to cross the U.S.-Mexico divide than in the early 1990s (about one-third get caught on any given trip) and that, as a result some in Mexico stay at home rather than even try, it also established that 92 to 97 percent of Mexican migrants continue to try to cross until they succeed, and that there has been no significant impact on the propensity of would-be migrants to attempt the journey. This does not mean that further intensification of enforcement could not have a significant impact on the number of unauthorized entrants.⁶ (Plans are afoot to double the number of Border Patrol agents over the next decade and to build hundreds of miles of additional walls, fences, and vehicle barriers.) Indeed, in some (largely urbanized) locales where enforcement personnel and infrastructure are concentrated, there has been a marked decline in unsanctioned crossings. However, given the depth and scale of the transboundary ties, the power of the forces driving migration, and the resolve and resourcefulness of migrants, it is pure fantasy to think that U.S. authorities can fully “secure” and regulate the boundary. But from the perspective of the border/immigration enforcement complex, “failure” only serves as justification for more of the same.

As such, like the drug war, the border war and the war on unauthorized immigrants rely increasingly on various forms of violence, terror, and simple meanness. In San Diego, for instance, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been setting up occasional checkpoints of late about 100 yards north of the boundary — pulling people out of Mexico-bound vans and buses and detaining “illegals” as they leave the United States.⁷

In Nashville, Tennessee and neighboring Davidson County, local authorities (like so many locales throughout the United States) are increasingly cooperating with the federal government in the policing of immigrants. In early July, police in a Nashville suburb arrested Juana Villegas after stopping her for a routine traffic violation for driving without a license — normally a misdemeanor for which citations are issued. (Since 2006, Tennessee bars unauthorized migrants from obtaining drivers licenses.) Nine-months-pregnant at the time, Villegas was forced to go through labor while a police officer guarded over her hospital bed to which one her feet was cuffed for most of the time. After her release from the hospital, officials kept her from her new-born son for two days, preventing her from nursing him and from even taking a breast pump into the jail.⁸

The ties that the “illegal” has to the community and loved ones (including U.S. citizens) in such cases are largely irrelevant from the perspective of federal authorities. For example, individuals married to U.S. citizens, but who have committed the “crime” of entering the United States without authorization after a previous removal are barred from having the legal ability to renter the country for ten years — even if they have U.S. citizen children.⁹ So much for “family values.”

These present-day developments — like the JTF-6 effort to police Redford in 1997 — are part and parcel of a larger project of nationalizing the U.S. portion of the borderlands, an ever-expanding space given the growing ties between places and peoples within and from the United States, and those within and from Mexico and beyond. Inside the United States, this involves a disciplining those of us who don’t think and act sufficiently in national terms.

As The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández makes clear, Redford was, in many ways, just as Mexican as American with townspeople crossing the Rio Grande regularly — and without government inspection — to visit family and friends on the other side of the river, or to engage in commercial transactions. According to Jake Brisbin, a Presidio County judge interviewed in the film, “On a map, the river is an international boundary. In reality, it is something you walk across to get something you need one way or another.”

And it is this reality that the border-immigration war seeks to change. In this regard, one cannot divorce Hernández’s killing — or the indignities suffered by Juana Villegas — from the larger history of conquest and pacification involved in the construction of the US-Mexico borderlands (a point that the film does not touch upon).

The making of the US-Mexico divide and the associated recasting of social relations has always involved violence. It was through conquest — and large-scale brutality — that the United States gained the territory that now comprises the borderlands and squelched large-scale resistance to its colonization project over the subsequent decades. Nonetheless, resistance continues through today — largely in the form of unauthorized migrants, individuals who refuse to see their livelihoods circumscribed by national boundaries, ones predicated on profound socio-economic injustices.

Esequial Hernández’s killing is just one of countless thousands of untimely and unjust fatalities related to the ongoing struggles in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It is conservatively estimated that over 5,000 migrants have lost their lives trying to traverse the U.S.-Mexico divide without authorization since 1995 alone. Given that this figure is based on actually recovered bodies, the true death is undoubtedly much higher.

The US-Mexico boundary involves killing of people from both sides of the line (and it always has) — most especially low-income people of color given the inextricable ties between the making of the United States, and the production of a whole host of deeply unequal social relations along axes of race, class, nation, and gender within the United States and across the globe.

May we remember Esequial Hernández Jr. as one example of this territorially embodied injustice, and draw upon that memory to fuel a struggle against the divide, the violence it reflects and reproduces, and the associated practices and ideologies that underlie it.

1. In 2004, JTF-6 was reorganized and renamed. Now called JTF North, the command is, according to its website, “tasked to support our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies in the identification and interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the continental United States.” Transnational threats are “those activities conducted by individuals or groups that involve international terrorism, narcotrafficking, alien smuggling, weapons of mass destruction, and includes the delivery systems for such weapons that threaten the national security of the United States.” See here.
2. See here.
3. See Monte Paulsen, “Fatal Error: The Pentagon’s War on Drugs Takes a Toll on the Innocent,” Austin Chronicle (Texas), December 25, 1998.
4. On the official website of U.S Customs and Border Protection, it states that the Border Patrol’s “priority mission” is to prevent “terrorists and terrorists’ weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States.” See here.
5. Bernd Debusmann, “America’s Unwinnable War on Drugs,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 3, 2008.
6. See Wayne Cornelius, “Introduction: Does Border Enforcement Deter Unauthorized Immigration?” In Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending Communities, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and Jessa M. Lewis, 1–15. La Jolla, Calif.: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007; and Fuentes, Jezmin, Henry L’Esperance, Raúl Pérez, and Caitlin White. “Impacts of U.S. Immigration Policies on Migration Behavior.” In Impacts of Border Enforcement on Mexican Migration: The View from Sending Communities, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and Jessa M. Lewis, 53–73. La Jolla, California: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2007.
7. Richard Marosi, “Border Busts Coming and Going,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2008.
8. Julia Preston, “Immigrant, Pregnant, Is Jailed under Pact,” The New York Times, Jul 20, 2008.
9. Anna Gorman, “Immigration Law Means a Borderline Existence for U.S. Wife of Mexican,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2008.

   For those trying to get to the United States from elsewhere, but via Mexico, it is certainly far tougher to reach their destination given the difficulties non-Mexican national have in entering and traversing Mexican territory. No doubt, the percentage of such migrants who eventually succeed in reaching the United States is lower than that of Mexican migrants. See N.C. Aizenman, “Meeting Danger Well South of the Border.” The Washington Post, July 8, 2006: A1; and Michael Flynn, “Dondé está la frontera?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 58, no. 4, (July/August 2002): 24-35.