Media,place-making,and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

Abstract

In this article, we trace shifting representations of a US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media during the rise of Donald Trump. We argue that the border is an American concept-metaphor that circulates and reshapes in media in response to political actors. We compare articles published in 2015, 2016, and 2017 about the Texas borderlands where the majority of Central American asylum seekers arrived. Crucial to Trump’s success, the narrow, racialized rendering of the border inadvertently provoked a wider array of representations in national news media but remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration. Our work contributes to scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands to lay bare underlying social tensions and potential violence. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places, crucial during times of surging populism and nationalism.

Keywords

Donald Trump US-Mexico borderlands

There are two narratives about what the border is . . . The farther away you are, the more chaotic and violent it appears, but when you live at the border, there is a different reality.

– Fernando Garcia, quoted in Wright (2018: 298)

If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!

–Trump (2018)

In the United States today, the phrase, ‘the border’, refers to the US-Mexico border. It does not refer to the Canadian border or American air and sea ports of entry. ‘The border’ is the primary discursive frame to talk about immigration and national security policies, especially since the increase in unaccompanied children from Central America crossing into the United States in the 2010s, Donald Trump’s rise to political power in 2015 and 2016, and the 2018 debate over the ‘caravan’ of Central American families traveling to the US border. In this article, we trace shifting representations of one US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media in the United States during the rise of Donald Trump to document escalating media attention to ‘securing’ the geopolitical borderline between the United States and Mexico. We argue that the phrase, ‘the border’, is a popular concept-metaphor (Moore, 2004) in the United States, reflecting specific cultural values carefully winnowed and repackaged within Trump’s political agendum. While a narrow rendering of the border was crucial to Trump’s success, it inadvertently provoked a small but significant, more expansive array of border representations in national news media. These broader, more nuanced national conceptualizations of the border nevertheless remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration.

The concept-metaphor of the border is a product of place-making through media and political actors rather than reflections of the realities of living in a complex, changing, and binational space. Concept-metaphors are commonly used terms that are both metaphor and explanation for cultural domains, such as gender and society (Moore, 2004). Concept-metaphors reflect core frames and values, ‘orient[ing] us towards areas of shared exchange’ (Moore, 2004: 73). They anchor dialogues across and within large, dispersed communities. Concept-metaphors exist in academic communities, such as the global in anthropology, as well as in the broader public, such as race. Prior to the political era of Donald trump, the border operated in American public and political discourse and media as a concept-metaphor for national conversations about difference and division around immigration, international relations, health care, and national security. US-Mexico border rhetoric had been racialized for decades, part of larger discursive regimes about Mexico, security and immigration (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Heyman et al., 2018; Nevins, 2010).

Identifying and charting dominant concept-metaphors such as the border in mainstream news media is especially important during times of surging populism and nationalism. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places and communities. Below, we show how Trump’s populist and xenophobic political platform strategically employed the border concept-metaphor in the media to attend to specific immigration and security concerns. Beginning in the summer of 2015, the border became central to Trump’s political campaign that demonized Mexican immigration.

Concept-metaphors

Concept-metaphors allow us to have conversations about shared cultural phenomena that structure our individual experiences. They are constitutionally unable to reflect daily practice (Moore, 2004). That is not their utility. Instead, academic and popular concept-metaphors alike act as

. . . a space of theoretical abstraction and processes, experiences and connections in the world, important not only to social scientists but now part of most people’s imagined and experienced worlds . . . Their purpose is to maintain a tension between pretentious universal claims and particular contexts and specifics. They are the ‘spaces’ in which details, facts, and connections make sense. (c.f. Moore, 2004: 71, 74; Strathern, 1991)

Recognized concept-metaphors become sources of combinations of existing ideas as well as new ideas. Academic inquiry routinely identifies and interrogates concept-metaphors, for example, the global or the market, for their assumptions and ontologies. There are moments in time when popular concept-metaphors come under scrutiny. Gender and race are two concept-metaphors perhaps most often critically analyzed in popular discourse. For national conversations and political dialogue, concept-metaphors can be powerful in creating spaces for action, such as public debate and subsequent civil rights laws related to equality across sexual, gender, and racial identities.

There is also a danger in concept-metaphors. Unquestioned concept-metaphors can be misunderstood as realistic renderings of daily lives. A kind of naïve realism can emerge, whereby there is a tendency to operate as if everyone thinks about and acts upon a concept in similar ways. Assumptions remain hidden. Diversity of experience and opinion go unacknowledged and excluded from policy conversations. Race, gender, and citizen are several telling examples in American history of concept-metaphors reproducing inequality through institutional and attitudinal discrimination. Once concept-metaphors are recognized as assumptions about the way people understand and see the world, they can become a site of ‘reformulation and resistance’ (Moore, 2004: 72). The concept-metaphor as an academic device is therefore critical in analyzing how the idea of the border operates in American popular understanding during increasing xenophobia toward immigrants, nationalism, and populism (Gusterson, 2017). We argue that the border in American news media and political discourse is a concept-metaphor, because in these presentations, the border is less a geopolitical location in the United States than a concept that embeds a metaphor for insecurity and lawlessness.

Who gets to define the border?

The border has been a cornerstone in domestic and international policy and public discourse about immigration, national security, and societal security since the mid-twentieth century and even more so in the post 9/11 world (Ackleson, 2005; DeChaine, 2012b; Weibel, 2010). Politicians, news media, academics, activists, artists, and people from the borderlands, all have attempted to define the border. Historians and social scientists place the US-Mexico borderlands within temporal histories of indigenous occupation, Spanish colonialism, internal American colonialism, and waves of migration from Mexican and American interiors in response to international and national economic policies (Alvarez, 2012). Prior to Spanish colonialism of the 16th century, dozens of indigenous groups moved seasonally through the region (Valerio-Jiménez, 2013). The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established the current borderline, and subsequent land development through agriculture and industry in the 20th and 21st centuries have led to dramatic population increases in border cities (Nájera, 2015; Ruiz, 1998). The region itself lacks definable borders, although 100 miles to the North and South are considered geopolitical boundaries for the purposes of enforcement (Plascencia, 2017).

Notions of race and class – difference writ large, are central to historical and current discursive treatment of the US-Mexico borderlands by the American body politic. Racist ideologies about Hispanics and, specifically, Mexicans permeate border discourse (DeChaine, 2012a; Heyman et al., 2018; Nájera, 2015; Plascencia, 2017; Valerio-Jiménez, 2013). Artists, scholars, and people living in the US-Mexico borderlands have challenged stereotypical, racialized renderings of the region (e.g. Anzaldua, 1987). These US-Mexico borderlands are metaphorical places of non-normative belonging, social disruption, and identity-making that can sometimes result in new forms of creative expression. For people who live in the US-Mexico border region, their communities and landscape are blended, bi/multicultural spaces rooted in deep histories of cultural and economic exchange (Heyman, 2012b; Vélez-Ibañez and Heyman, 2017; Wilson and Donnan, 2012). These lived realities and creative understandings of the US-Mexico borderlands contrast sharply with popular, political understandings of the border: us/them racial dichotomies and peripheral geographical areas in need of state control to manage that difference. The inaccuracy of portrayals of the US-Mexico border in news media (Alvarez, 2012; Chávez, 2001, 2008; DeChaine, 2012b; Fleuriet and Castañeda, 2017; Heyman et al., 2018; Heyman and Symons, 2012; Vila, 2000, 2005) and political discourse is fundamental to the national imaginary of ‘the border’.

The difference between national, popular understandings of the border and those of borderlanders, academics, and artists is due to the intensely political nature of borders and their metaphorical value of delineating concepts of citizenship and belonging (DeChaine, 2012a; Lucaites, 2012). A border must be regularly enacted and materialized by governments, citizens, and other actors (DeChaine, 2012b; Salter, 2011). Formal and practical claims of the border include definitions, defenses, and politics of enforcing a border, while the popular claims are the ways in which ideas of particular borders are shared, contested, and, sometimes, redefined (Salter, 2011). Donald Trump’s political rhetoric, in effect, tried hard to bind the popular claim of the border to unauthorized immigration that spurred violence and crime, all fixable by a wall. National news media, however, reacted by engaging a broader, deeper concept-metaphor of the border.

Concept-metaphors and attempts to define and use them can shape practice and policy, and the distance between daily life in borderlands and popular claims of the border is profoundly shaped by statecraft (Johnson et al., 2011; Nevins, 2010). United States’ political and public discourse has deployed the phrase the border with increasing frequency since the re-emergence of a national security discourse after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The border in current American narratives of security and immigration is a concept-metaphor with the following key elements: next to Mexico, corrupt, poor, overrun with unchecked and unauthorized immigration, dangerous due to overflow drug cartel violence, and most often, rural (Dorsey and Diáz-Barriga, 2010; Fleuriet and Castañeda, 2017; Heyman, 2012a, 2012b; Vélez-Ibañez and Heyman, 2017).

Methods

Data for this article are part of Fleuriet’s larger ethnographic project on place, narrative, and well-being in the US-Mexico borderlands. For this article, we used thematic analysis of news stories about the particular border region in South Texas called the Rio Grande Valley, consisting of the four southernmost counties of Texas. Simply called ‘the Valley’ by residents and other Texans, the region alternates between dense urban areas and swaths of rural ranch and farmland. It is the location in which the majority of Central American families and unaccompanied children have crossed into the United States to claim asylum in 2014 through today. The news analysis began as a collaboration on health care stories about the region from 2010 to August 2017 (Fleuriet and Castañeda, 2017). The present authors followed the same methodology but with a new dataset. We treated media production and consumption of stories about the Valley as a primary means to generate, bolster, or modify key cultural values about the border (Bird, 2010a, 2010b; Luque et al., 2013; Udupa, 2012). Our selection of news media outlets was systematic in geographical and political representation. We included most major mainstream media outlets in national markets, located in the following sources: ABC News Transcripts, CBS News Transcripts, Fox News Transcripts, MSNBC and MSNBC.com, The New York Times, National Public Radio, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. All but The Wall Street Journal were available through Nexis Uni; The Wall Street Journal was accessible behind a paywall and had its own search engine. The Nexis Uni database for the outlets often included multiple forms of media, such as print, online, and transcripts from television news shows.

We searched for ‘Rio Grande Valley’ and ‘Texas’. We excluded obituaries, opinion-editorials, and sports pieces that were score or drafting reports. The search yielded 780 articles (See Table 1). We sorted results by relevance for the timeframe. We used qualitative content analysis (e.g. Honey, 2013; Lincoln, 2014; Udupa, 2012) with iterative coding (e.g. Luque et al., 2013). We coded titles and articles for all years and sources. We began with a priori topical codes, based on our review of the literature, for example, Heyman (2012a, 2012b), Jusionyte (2015), and Chávez (2001), and ethnographic research, and added emergent codes. Irrespective of timeframe and political wrangling, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas enters the national news landscape invariably as ‘the border’.

Table 1.

Sources and article counts.

Source	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017 through August	Total
ABC Transcripts	0	0	0	0	5	0	0	0	5
Associated Press	10	12	11	19	86	20	22	24	204
CBS Transcripts	1	1	3	0	10	0	1	2	18
CNN Transcripts	3	3	0	0	25	2	5	10	48
Fox News Network	1	1	0	1	35	5	2	9	54
MSNBC and MSNBC.com	2	1	0	4	31	2	2	0	42
The New York Times	12	16	16	24	62	9	10	26	175
National Public Radio	0	3	6	4	19	11	4	16	63
USA Today	0	3	2	8	18	4	4	2	41
The Wall Street Journal	3	3	3	8	21	7	10	9	64
The Washington Post	4	2	1	4	30	7	12	6	66
Total	36	45	42	72	342	67	72	104	780

2015: the border encounters Donald Trump

Through early 2015, the border concept-metaphor had a suite of attributes: unauthorized immigration, health care shortage, Hispanic voters, Central America and Mexico, and the region as a security threat to the United States (exemplar stories: Harris-Perry, 2015; Markon and Partlow, 2015; Meckler, 2015; O’Reilly et al., 2015b; Sherman, 2015a; Soffen, 2015; Weber, 2015). As the year began, national news about the US-Mexico border region largely focused on increased National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety presence in the Valley. These were state responses to the 2014 Central American children immigration phenomenon – in 8 months, more than 50,000 migrant children were detained (Dewhurst in Cavuto, 2014), a 100% increase from the year before. The Valley was the primary crossing site for the children. Stories about increased border securitization, immigration reform, and children’s detention centers were common (exemplar stories: Bustillo and Koppel, 2015; O’Reilly et al., 2015a; Weber, 2015). For example, Robbins and Weber wrote about the Texas legislature’s approval of an 800 million-dollar budget for ramping up border security through 2017, including gunboats, a high-altitude plane, a crime data center, grants for year-round helicopter patrols, a training center for local law enforcement agencies, a dozen Texas Rangers to investigate corruption and new state troopers assigned to the area. Children crossing the US-Mexico border in the Valley became enmeshed in state-level political discourse about Mexican drug cartel violence and criticisms of the Obama administration (exemplar stories: Robbins and Weber, 2015; Weber, 2015).

Health care shortage stories lingered about the closure of reproductive services clinics due to Texas House Bill 2 in 2013 and its US Supreme Court challenge (exemplar stories: Bravin, 2015; Fernandez and Eckholm, 2015; Sherman, 2015b; Soffen, 2015). The Rio Grande Valley figured prominently for three reasons: the Valley’s lack of adequate women’s reproductive health care in the region (broadly and specific to abortion care), the number of poor women and/or unauthorized immigrant women who could not leave the region to get care elsewhere, and the availability in Mexico of a drug that could induce abortions. In these news stories, the border became a gloss for unauthorized immigration and poverty contributing to health care shortages. For example, in June of 2015, Brevin discussed the Supreme Court’s temporary block on certain House Bill 2 provisions due to the possible ‘undue burden’ impact on West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. Amy Hagstrom, President of Whole Woman’s Health in the Valley, argued that the law was designed to ‘make abortion unavailable and unaffordable by closing down clinics’, especially in the Rio Grande Valley (Bravin, 2015). This would disproportionately impact unauthorized immigrant women, because regular border patrol checkpoints interrupt all outgoing highways from the Valley. At checkpoints, members of each car must disclose their citizenship status to Border Patrol agents.

Donald Trump launched his campaign in August 2015, and his campaign increasingly gained traction throughout the latter part of 2015. From this point on, news stories about the border were almost uniformly politicized in the context of the presidential election. As presidential contenders and Republican political discourse emerged to challenge the Obama Administration, the border raised the specter of communities dominated by unauthorized immigration, violence, and drugs. Stories about the increase to the state budget for border security, the addition of more state troopers to the Texas-Mexico border, and the extension of the deployment of the National Guard troops predominated (exemplar stories: Burnett, 2015a, 2015b; Markon and Partlow, 2015; Preston, 2015; Robbins, 2015).

By the fall of 2015, presidential campaigns were in full swing, and another, albeit smaller, influx of unauthorized immigration occurred, though these included adults as well as unaccompanied minors, migrants from Mexico and asylum seekers from Central America. The November Paris attack happened, and the news about more immigrants in the Valley often referenced the increasing national fear that terrorists would enter the United States from Mexico. For example, Preston (2015) emphasized that most people attempting to cross were still Central American families and unaccompanied minors fleeing gang violence, poverty, and sexual and domestic abuse, but noted three Syrian families also presented themselves at the Laredo checkpoint for asylum and five Pakistanis and one Afghan individual were apprehended in Arizona. In this and other stories, the Valley became the exemplar threat raised in political debates over national security.

The year 2015, then, continued to populate a concept-metaphor of the border with attributes of unauthorized immigration, health care shortages, Mexico and a security threat to the rest of the United States but increasingly narrowed to an articulation of unauthorized immigration that necessitated securitization and militarization. Articles about immigration were not about the human cost of crossing the US-Mexico geopolitical borderline, the daily lives of Valley people as they are – or are not, impacted by the increased immigration, or ongoing, non-law enforcement responses to immigrants and asylum seekers. Instead, the immigration articles largely focused on issues of legality, numbers, threat, and law enforcement responses – that is, securitization and militarization, both part of political discourses building up to the 2016 presidential election.

2016: the border as a threat to the United States

In 2016, the Rio Grande Valley and the border appeared in national news media about Hispanic voters and the lead up to Super Tuesday (exemplar story: Goodwyn, 2016). For a short time, the border as a threat to the United States was parlayed into a potential influence on national politics by virtue of the region as central to immigration reform and wooing Hispanic voters. National Public Radio (NPR; Goodwyn, 2016) covered the Clintons visit to Texas, in which Bill Clinton mocked Donald Trump’s ‘make America great again’ slogan, stating that America was ‘already great’, due to the contributions that immigrants made to America. The Clintons cemented their alliance with Hispanic voters by referencing their ‘forty years of history with the black and Hispanic communities’, (Goodwyn, 2016) including Hillary Clinton’s time in the Valley as a Yale law student working in voter registration.

News media about the Valley, abortion care, and national security followed for a brief period (exemplar stories: Baier, 2016; Barnes, 2016; Burnett, 2016; Kendall and Bravin, 2016; Thomas, 2016). Health care shortages momentarily made headlines again in June 2016 as the Supreme Court heard the case against House Bill 2. Burnett (2016) wrote about the inaccessibility to abortions in Texas, specifically in the Rio Grande Valley due to its poverty and its proximity to Mexico with the so-called abortion pills. After that, however, national security articles quickly dominated, returning to Donald Trump’s claims about unauthorized immigration, such as ‘Illegal immigration is going to stop. It’s dangerous. It’s terrible. We either have a border or we don’t. And if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country. Remember that’ (quoted in Burnett, 2016).

With the election of Trump in 2016, the concept-metaphor of the border became increasingly restricted to ‘the wall’, the border representing a generalized threat from ‘outside’ the United States, especially from Mexico and Central America (exemplar stories: Galvan, 2016; Lemon, 2016). Trump had started talking about building ‘a wall’ early in 2015, but the presidential rallies and debates in 2016 generated a specific news focus on ‘the wall’ as a serious element of Trump’s political strategy.

Restricting the border to a place of foreign threats and foreign people as a political strategy appears to have worked to rally a political base. In November 2016, newly elected President Trump used ‘the border’ to reference new national policies about immigration, national security, and militarization of borderlands regions. National news reported on another ‘surge’ of Central Americans, ostensibly immigrating before Trump’s actions to increase surveillance and deportations and to build more barriers along the US-Mexico border (exemplar stories: Jordan, 2016; Whelan, 2016). Then small but significant modifications to the threat-based concept-metaphor of the border appeared, taking the form of local voices from Southern Texas borderland communities, referencing binational linkages between the United States and Mexico, whether family, environment, or economy (exemplar stories: Jervis, 2016a, 2016b).

For example, Frank Bajak (2016) introduced local voices of dissent against the border wall. The Rio Grande Valley, which was previously documented as one of the poorest regions in the United States, became the ‘bustling, fertile Rio Grande Valley’. Local residents were more in favor of the existing ‘“virtual wall” of surveillance technology’, including tower-mounted surveillance cameras and ‘blimp-like’ aerostats that monitor the borderlands region through remote controlled cameras. The region remained framed as an area in need of securitization, just not the kind Donald Trump proposed.

News media began to cover the numerous challenges to building additional sections of a border wall, lending the border breadth that had been missing in the preceding 12 months. For example, Valley residents lost land when the previous wall sections were constructed during the George W. Bush administration, and some residents were still waiting for government payment for land (Jervis, 2016a). Other residents experienced the proposed wall as a challenge to their cultural and land heritage (Jervis, 2016b). Areas of existing wall were dubbed ‘breaks of privilege’, such as the area near a golf club and resort (Bajak, 2016). Valley political leaders disagreed with additional wall construction, though had varying opinions on the utility or need for other barriers (e.g. Chozick and Fernandez, 2016). Geological and financial considerations were raised. Many areas along the South Texas-Mexico borderline have erosion-prone soil, which can decrease the integrity of wall construction (e.g. TK, 2016). These new angles to ‘the wall’ story presented a region, landscapes, and communities with complex challenges to additional wall construction rather than a regional, violent, uncontrolled threat to the United States that should be ‘walled off’.

2017: the border returns to its original contours

From January to August 2017, national news stories about the borderlands region of South Texas still trended toward a narrow emphasis on securitization and militarization, yet with attention to local lives and environments and international relations with Mexico impacted by the proposed wall (exemplar stories: Fears, 2017; Jan, 2017; Lavandera, 2017). An Associated Press news story about House Speaker Paul Ryan’s visit to the Rio Grande Valley (The Associated Press, 2017b; also see Flegenheimer, 2017; Rein, 2017) included a sidebar with Ryan’s tweet about how the border is a risky, menacing place that needs more law enforcement. To be sure, themes of securitization and militarization persisted in 2017, and notably, the picture in the story about Ryan’s visit was not of the urban Valley with 1.4 million people but the rural, brush country parts with a river snaking through it. The national news surrounding Ryan’s visit reinforced that there was still the rhetoric of the border as the place where the United States keeps bad people out and the border as unruly and in need of more law enforcement (see for example, Guilfoyle et al., 2017).

But there was the sense in 2017 articles that the border may also be people living there long-term, with vested interests, and diverse points of view (exemplar stories: Ahmed et al., 2017; Fernandez, 2017; Lavandera, 2017). For example, Nixon (2017) wrote about the residents of Los Ebanos, Texas, gearing up for legal battle against the federal government for the right to retain their property. Nixon discussed how many residents in this small border town had already lost land, or had land bisected by the wall erected a decade ago. Ninety cases remained open against the federal seizure of privately owned land since 2008. Many residents were confident they could wait out President Trump’s tenure by using the courts to stall.

Also during 2017, there was an explicit recognition of the environment: the water, the endangered animals, and migratory flyways potentially impacted by the wall. Stories began to reflect the complexity of building a wall, drawing in other border attributes (e.g. Caldwell, 2017). Any wall construction must adhere to the 1970 Water Treaty with Mexico (Burnett, 2017a), which prohibits building a wall or levee in the Rio Grande flood plain that cuts through private and federal land. Another story focused on the executive director of the National Butterfly Center located in the Valley, presenting the perspective of Texas naturalists on the proposed border wall (Hardy, 2017) and possible legal challenges to it. Hardy (2017) and others (Burnett, 2017b; Fears, 2017; The Associated Press, 2017a) wrote about the Valley’s Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, an essential area for endangered species and one of the most popular bird watching destinations in the United States. A wall through the refuge would destroy habitat and cause a significant decrease in ecotourism dollars, a major part of the local economy. Each of these stories resisted an overly simplistic rendering of the border, although they remained within the primary theme of border security (such as Bajak, 2017).

News media in 2017 also started to talk about the binational economy; the border now included reference to its productive economy, rarely remarked upon before (exemplar stories: Carlton, 2017; Meckler, 2015). To be sure, the Valley as the border continued in national news almost always in reference to Trump’s Wall and Trump’s Border, but the border as a concept-metaphor now allowed for other attributes not entirely scripted by national politicians. For example, Carlton (2017) discussed the economic decline among border businesses due to loss of revenue from Mexican shoppers who stopped shopping in American border cities in protest after the presidential election or in fear of increased delays by border law enforcement.

Trump’s oft-repeated claim that Mexico would pay for the new parts of the border wall pulled international relations into the border concept-metaphor in a new way, as well. The focus on international politics within the border concept-metaphor was primarily on relations between the United States and Mexico. Previously Mexico was a backdrop for the threat; now, it was a source of funds for additional wall construction. Trump blamed Mexico for what he viewed as unchecked immigration into the United States, and he repeatedly publicly claimed Mexico would ‘pay for the wall’ (e.g. CNBC, 2016; Pirro, 2015). In 2017, Mexican President Peña Nieto pushed back, canceling meetings with President Trump and publicly calling him to task. The border became part of a larger, public debate between the two presidents. Estepa (2017) wrote about a series of President Trump’s tweets that detailed his reasons why Mexico would have to pay for the border wall, such as ‘tremendous drugs are pouring into the United Sates, at levels no one has ever seen before’ and ‘the wall will stop much of the drugs from pouring into this country and poisoning our youth’. The Mexican government responded, ‘on the basis of the principles of shared responsibility, teamwork and mutual trust’, they could solve the problems that the drug trade had caused. They would not negotiate public policy on social media platforms – and notably, not pay for a wall (Estepa, 2017). Elements of the earlier, broader concept-metaphor contributed to the story: immigration, violence, drug related crime, economics, environment, and international politics.

To further illustrate the dominance of securitization and militarization, we note here that despite the Valley having the first case of local transmission of the Zika virus in the United States in 2016 and Zika making another Valley appearance in 2017, Zika did not become part of the border concept-metaphor. In 2017 through August, the border concept-metaphor continued to revolve around Mexico and immigration with some modifications, noted earlier, around the fringes. In May and July 2017, CBS (Pelley and Lapook, 2017) and The Associated Press (2017c), respectively, reported on the first instance of the Zika virus in Texas. These were the only two mentions of Zika in the Rio Grande Valley in 2017 articles in our search results.

The border according to Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s presidential bid and campaign in 2015 and 2016 included very specific political framing of the US-Mexico border; it is where violent criminals from Mexico and drug and human smugglers cross into the United States with relative impunity (Gravelle, 2018), and the US-Mexico border is the primary threat to the national security of the United States. Trump’s virulent public statements against Mexican immigrants (Hill and Marion, 2017; Hooghe and Dassonneville, 2018) similarly positioned the border as perilously open. Trump’s solution was a wall that would extend from the Gulf Coast of Texas to the shore of San Diego, California, immediate deportation of unauthorized immigrants, and deterrents such as parent-child separation for families upon unauthorized entry into the United States (for additional detail, https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/immigration/, access date: 7 December 2018; Hill and Marion, 2017; Stringer, 2018).

Trump’s tweets, interviews, and comments during rallies, debates, and the Republican National Convention in 2015 and 2016 evidenced his belief that the border was a danger and threat to American security and way of life. The primary crossing site on the US-Mexico border in 2016 was the Rio Grande Valley. The majority of immigrants were from Central America and, second, Mexico. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on 21 July 2016, Trump said of unauthorized immigrants,

The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources . . . We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities. (emphasis added)

Trump’s construction of the border soon thereafter became a powerful concept-metaphor whose primary attribute was an exclusionary wall. In a 24 August 2016 appearance on the Hannity Show (Hannity, 2016) on Fox Network, he fashioned the border thusly:

It’s not a question of wanting [to build the wall]. We have no choice. We have no choice . . . And it’ll be a real wall. It’ll be a real wall. It won’t be one of these little toys that you see every once in a while, our government throws up a little wall like this. Do you ever see the picture in the magazines where a ramp goes up and down? I don’t know why they don’t just push it over, it would have been cheaper, but . . . The drugs, the drugs come over, and the cash goes back . . . I think the height could be 35 to 45 feet. That’s a good height.

In sum, Donald Trump’s meteoric rise in national politics in 2015 and 2016 in part was based on a political agendum that consciously crafted an US-Mexico border imaginary to generate fear through a blending of national security concerns, xenophobia toward Mexicans, criminalization of immigration, and an idea of the US-Mexico border as porous. The only solution forseeable by the Trump nationalist campaign was additional securitization and militarization in US-Mexico borderland regions and faster deportations. Trump’s restrictive vision of the border was a deliberate strategy for political success.

As a concept-metaphor, the border has resisted Trump’s vision to some degree, especially within the workings of the national news media. Concept-metaphors necessarily involve a degree of intangibility and tension (Moore, 2004). As the border concept-metaphor narrowed with Trump’s discursive framing, it became central to national news stories, which meant more and varied attention to the region. Small but noticeable reconfigurations of the US-Mexico border concept-metaphor back into something more complex and nuanced began appearing in national news storylines.

Conclusion: why identifying the border as a concept-metaphor matters

Anthropology as a discipline has been much in the forefront of intellectual work that seeks to demonstrate the value of the local; its creative powers of reformulation and resistance. (Moore, 2004: 72)

Our work is part of a growing body of scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands (e.g. Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; DeChaine, 2012b; Nevins, 2010; Vélez-Ibañez and Heyman, 2017). Such analysis of border rhetorics lays bare the underlying social tensions and potential violence of political eras to contribute to ‘a counterhegemonic intervention’ (DeChaine, 2012: 9). The enduring qualities of the border concept-metaphor are easy to identify as largely manufactured when one lives and works in the Valley. In the Valley, leaders and other residents often talk about American assumptions about life in the US-Mexico borderlands. During fieldwork, Fleuriet regularly encountered local Valley leaders in economics, health care, and activism who were disgruntled or disgusted with the continual portrayal of the border as unmanageable, corrupt, and dangerous. Donald Trump’s campaign took those assumptions, made the racism in them explicit, and wove them into his political strategy.

Political strategies and their discursive regimes can become backgrounds for tragedies. In August 2019, a white supremacist orchestrated a mass shooting of Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, and his manifesto used the same language as President Trump when referring to Mexican immigrants (Ura, 2019). The border as a concept-metaphor of the United States in Trump’s political discourse is a story about Others that weakens the nation by preying upon such pre-existing biases. While beyond the scope of news articles gathered through August 2017 for this analysis, Trump’s use of the border concept-metaphor in the late 2010s directly influenced events such as the El Paso shooting, the 2018 mid-term elections, the government shutdown of 2018–2019, and the enduring fallout of family separation policies. President Trump’s border encapsulates a particular politico-moral logic that supports deployment of thousands of additional military troops to the US-Mexico border, additional wall construction and xenophobic immigration and citizenship policies, such as revocation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship. To say that the attributes of the border promulgated during 2015, 2016, and 2017 determined the balance of power in US politics and thus affect the rest of the world would be an overstatement. Yet, the influence of the border concept-metaphor in American political life is indisputable, and the question of who gets to define the border is more important now than ever.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the research assistants Itzel Corona, Milena Melo, and Ryan Logan who worked with the first media dataset (years 2010–2015).

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

K. Jill Fleuriet

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