Abstract
This article explores the relationship between information and mobility as it is manifest at the Mexico-US border and understands that border to be one, although very important, site of information processing and production. Within the electronic as well as the physical spaces of the Mexico-US borderlands, it is argued that practices of evasion and exposure produce specific forms of politics. These forms bear on the militarization of the border, particular bourgeois anxieties, various instances of violence, the pursuit of survival strategies and recognition, and the emergence of resistance and countertactics. Also considered are possibilities for alternatives to the ways mobility is governed and challenged in the borderlands especially as it bears on the lives of migrants.
The border is a striking site for the intersection of bodies, mobility, and information. Across most of the twentieth century, however, the border and information have received far less attention from scholars and policy makers than the relationship between bodies and mobility. This focus, associated with emergence of the field of migration studies, came to dominate thinking in the worlds of both policy and research and reflected the exclusionary and often violent formation of national populations and “societies” within territorialized states across the last two centuries.
Notably, there has been an expanding focus on the border among scholars in recent decades. This expansion in part flows out of a growing commitment to forms of critical analysis that takes institutional materialities seriously. It also likely reflects the surge in attention by states themselves to bordering and border security. 1 This expanding border focus has, on one hand, remained allied with migration studies, through analyses of the intensification of what is understood to be the governance of mobility, where movement is regulated in new and more powerful ways, with more restriction for some (nonelites) and less for others (elites). But it also signals, on the other hand, a shift in attention to include a focus on information, which elsewhere has been shown to increasingly occupy a range of scholars who are informed by critical theory and the biopolitical. 2
This article is consistent with this latter body of work. Its primary concern is the relationship between information and mobility. It assumes that from a broad perspective we can see the border as but one, although very important, site of information processing and production. The relationship between movement and information occurs across spaces and not just at what we might see as the crossing points, switches, or relays, of which the border is a particularly notable instance. 3 As celebrants of mobile technology are quick to point out, information about position can potentially be constantly generated: locating where something or someone is, where they are going, what they are doing, when they are doing it, where they are doing it. 4
Twentieth-century theorization of the relationship between movement and information emerged with the founding of the field of cybernetics in the 1940s, which first focused on the tracking of the movement of planes in order to coordinate antiaircraft artillery. 5 Cybernetics is organized around the concept of continuous feedback between the tracked object and the tracking system, allowing at any given time for mathematically derived information about the movement of the object and most importantly the anticipated trajectory of it moving forward.
Current manifestations of the originating “spirit” of cybernetics appear in efforts to build totalizing systems to anticipate action and movement under the rubric of what is called “predictive analytics” based on massive scale data mining and highly sophisticated analytic algorithms. 6 While this is strongly rooted in corporate intelligence agendas, the Edward Snowden revelations make clear that state intelligence organizations such as the National Security Agency have long sought total information awareness, in part on the assumption that predicting future scenarios regarding any given persons, group, or activity might be possibly based on a correlation of every possible piece of information that can be collected from any source and process, stored, and analyzed in massive server farms. 7 Relatedly, but from a different political orientation, international organizations, scientists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and activists have also sought to create large-scale systems to monitor and anticipate events and developments in areas from disease to climate change, based in part on long-standing imaginaries regarding the emergence of a civic-oriented “world brain.” 8
In the more site-specific context of the border, the same predictive analytic, total awareness ambitions are being pursued especially through projects developed by private security firms. 9 Just as in the more general cybernetic-inspired developments described previously, these high-security imaginings of what is technologically possible at the border can be contrasted with the civil-oriented efforts such as the tracking of patterns of migrant deaths at the US-Mexico border led by the organization Humane Borders in order to guide more accurately the aid offered to migrants in the locations they are crossing. 10
In crossing, these aided migrants try to evade being tracked, exposed, and ultimately confronted by security forces. I will argue in this article that these two logics, evasion and exposure, give a particular form to the relationship between mobility and information and are present across both the physical and electronic spaces of the borderlands. I will also try to show how the logics have distinct forms of politics associated with them.
In the first section, I consider the various ways that the electronic and physical borderlands intersect and take political form, especially with regard to processes of militarization. The second section explores various manifestations and effects of anxieties produced and amplified around the border. In the third section, attention is given to various forms of political contestation. The conclusion turns to the possibilities for alternatives to the ways mobility is governed and challenged in the borderlands.
Although greater weight is given here to the electronic spaces of the Mexico-US borderlands—in part because these have received little attention relative to physical spaces—I will try to make clear that both are always deeply imbricated. The emphasis I place on electronic spaces does not mean this is a study of the electronic face of transnationalism (which can include transborder virtual relations of migrants to hometown associations and the use of technologies to facilitate remittances or even practices such as cyber bride services). These instances are important and relevant as they do bear on evasion and exposure and have implications for life in the borderlands. However, the focus here is not on transnational relations but on the developments around the spatial–political differences and tensions produced by the binational nexus of Mexico and the United States. Finally, there is no attempt here to provide a comprehensive portrait or analysis of the borderlands in both its physical face and its electronic face. More modestly, my aim is to show and explore what I believe are two important logics in operation in the borderlands.
Borderlands Multiplicity
Although there are numerous topics of study bearing on the border, especially the one between the United States and Mexico—including gender, labor, and transnationalism—two themes have been especially important across a range of work. One theme is restriction, exclusion, control, fear, surveillance, and security, where in spatial term metaphors such as walls, zones, and regions predominate. 11 The other is subjectivity, resistance, place making, cultural hybridization, and narrativity with the metaphor of borderlands as central, emphasizing the continuity across national territories; and the possibilities of being at home is viable, despite the pressure of state, capital, and predominant nationalisms. 12 It is not hard to find both elements figuring within the same works and analyses. 13 Viewing the borderlands as containing both dimensions is consistent with the more general spatial understanding of the borderlands as composed of a multiplicity of levels, framings, social spheres, logics of power, subjecthoods, identities, places, many of which are visible and invisible according to a variety of optics from states to local communities. 14
Another notable distinction applicable to thinking about the borderlands, which holds for any space, is that between the physical borderlands and, what might termed, the electronic borderlands. The physical borderlands includes, of course, the actual border apparatus and associated state organs; the places across the border such as towns, cities, roads, symbolic buildings, and sites; and in the US-Mexico borderlands context, the desert. It also includes the bodies that move across and within, ranging from migrants (with “authorizing” documents or not), border guards, and local residents to drug gang members (or narcos), border crossing guides for hire (or coyotes) and activists both antiimmigrant and pro-immigrant/anti-border; and it includes the various aspects of the copresence of bodies and subjects in their embodied social relations.
The electronic borderlands can be understood to be composed, on one side, of the deployment and use described previously of information technologies by the state in various collaborations with corporations (recognizing that firms have transborder logistical security concerns tied to trade and post-Fordist production). 15 On the other side are the nongovernmental, civil- and civic-centered uses of digital technologies (which can be consistent with or counter to state and corporate interests). These include a range of websites, forums, applications, electronic content, and media developed and employed by Mexican and US activists (from across the political spectrum); by both cartels and anti-cartel groups; and by “hometowns” (i.e., individuals and organizations in Mexican towns generating web content for use especially by the broader immigrant diaspora in the United States). Cynthia Weber has also added the further distinction in the borderlands between “the theoretical and practical border between design and politics,” where “design,” or the aesthetic treatment of technology, becomes involved in security at the border; signals relationships between various players, namely, citizens, noncitizens, states, societies, and securities; works on one hand to secure the state through defensive systems and on the other to provide safe passage through the borderlands; and can function either to territorialize or to de-territorialize the borderlands. 16
It is important to emphasize that the physical and electronic are aspects of the borderlands multiplicity.
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Rather than in opposition, the physical and electronic are coproductive of the borderlands. As Latham and Sassen argue: Confining interpretation to the properties of these technologies neutralizes or renders invisible the social conditions and practices, place-boundedness, and thick environments within and through which these technologies operate. Such readings also lead, ironically, to a continuing reliance on analytic categorizations that were developed under other spatial and temporal conditions, that is, conditions preceding the current digital era. Thus the tendency is to conceive of the digital as simply and exclusively digital, and the nondigital (whether represented in terms of the physical/material or the actual, all problematic though common conceptions) as simply and exclusively nondigital. These either/or categorizations filter out alternative conceptualizations, thereby precluding a more complex reading of the intersection and interaction of digitization with social, other material, and place-bound conditions.
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Multitudinous Evasions and Exposures
But this drawing up and rendering does not necessarily imply the borderlands are on some evitable march toward greater legibility and visibility or exposed “order of universal security.” 20 Consider that the effort of the United States to expand its surveillance capacity at the border is mostly hidden from public view and itself partly in the shadowy, evasive, world of secret corporate and governmental practice.
There is no neat way to layout some sort of double movement across the borderlands, with the logics of evasion on one side and exposure on the other. Even so—or maybe because of that—I would like to explore how the two logics help us point to certain kinds of politics that operate especially at the interface of the physical and electronic borderlands. It is a politics that does not line up evenly across the sides of state, capital, cartel, civil society, migrant, or resident; in the sense that, as will be argued, evasion and exposure have no inherent ethical superiority in relation to one another. Despite the recent emphasis on transparency over the last decades as being a superior good, evasion can be viewed favorably in ethical and political terms, for example, through the practice of anonymity, which has been considered crucial for a free press that has traditionally relied on anonymous sources for politically sensitive information. 21 More broadly, within western modernity anonymity has been taken as liberating, providing possibilities for self-invention, unpredictable encounters in the city, or some distance from the reach and discipline of state or civil society organizations. However, anonymity has also been thought of as an aspect of an impoverished way of life or the result of forgotten histories and injuries, which tragically remains profoundly relevant to migrants, documented or undocumented. 22
Of particular interest here is not the designation of phenomena as in/visible, il/legible, un/detected per se, but rather the practices and agency that produce these forms; more specifically, the actions of evasion and exposure as they relate to border crossing (official and unofficial/sanctioned and clandestine); shadow markets and smuggling; violence; civilian resistance; and personal survival. Relatedly, we can see technology, both its digital and its nondigital forms, as not necessarily favoring evasion or exposure. 23 Digital technologies can be quite useful for evasion, allowing groups and individuals to hide behind digits and false identities, and it can be productive in exposure, involving not just state-centered efforts to detect illicit flows but also the outing of secret government programs in the name of transparency by whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning, with the aid of new media forms such as Wikileaks. This implies that the question of these technologies having some underlying neutrality is meaningless in that, again as Latham and Sassen put it, “the social conditions and practices, place-boundedness, and thick environments within and through which these technologies operate” is as much a part of technologies as any circuit or screen might be.
But the same can be said about nondigital technologies, such as those that might be used to evade detection in crossing borders. Consider the evasive tunnel building by cartels across the border to aid drug smuggling. Or the use of not just automobiles but horses on the part of US officials to physically patrol the border in order to detect and expose irregular crossings. The double movement of evasion and exposure is notably contained within the same technology of mounted patrolling, in that the return to the tradition of using horses is meant to help officers evade detection by the electronic devices used by smugglers. 24 The possibility that evasion and exposure can overlap or coexist in the same form, phenomena, or subject suggests they are not meant to be antonyms or even opposing practices but instead proximate imbricated logics of practice. The subject position of migrant, for instance, entails a range of evasions and exposures around, for example, the pressures of encounter at the border, possibilities of violence, US right-wing attacks, heat, and exhaustion in the desert. Why this might matter in political terms will become clearer subsequently.
Militarization
While the borderlands may be diverse and multidimensional, it is a profoundly unequal and disproportionate multiplex filled with powerful agendas and materialities. The most prominent being, of course, those of state and capital, which takes an increasing governance of movement through military form, that is, a framing that shapes the possibility of evasion and exposure in the borderlands. The state continues to expand its technology-based programs around the border, despite the abandonment in 2008 of the very ambitious Secure Borders Initiative (SBI) initiated in 2006 to expand and technologically update most of the border infrastructure, which had deep involvement by leading corporations such as Boeing. 25 In the aftermath of SBI, the state in close collaboration with firms are continuing to transform the border as evident in the increasing curtailment and strict enforcement of urban border crossing (forcing informal crossing attempts into the desert); the expanding use of drones to monitor the deserts; and the escalating employment of digital fingerprinting in places such as El Paso. 26 Private security corporations are also involved in the broader borderlands industry, most pointedly in the building and maintenance of private prisons, where firms like Corrections Corporation of America have been the major financial benefactor of the exploding number of migrant deportations and detentions. 27
If the militarization of the border is not a new trend, there are indications of the process being taken to new heights. 28 One indication is in the Southwest Border Initiative, a 2011 Motorola study to develop command and communications systems on the model of the professional military. 29 The use of command and control in this context is meant to alter the nature of human interaction about crossing, limiting the types of communication possible, who speaks to whom and when and where about what, attempting to create controlled hierarchies from state and corporate directors down to migrants. Another indication, continuous with this trend is application of the logics of war-fighting and notions of the control of battle space to the border that appeared in the recent strategic study sponsored by the State of Texas—as opposed to the Federal Government—and written by General Barry McCaffrey, a man who is somewhat notorious in the US military and security circles for his highly aggressive actions in the first Gulf War and is a former US Drug Czar in the administration of Bill Clinton. 30 Consistent with corporate involvement, it was the Colgen Company—a firm populated by former US military leaders such as McCaffrey—that was commissioned to undertake the study by Texas. McCaffrey’s approach enforced the idea that the drug war in the borderlands should be organized around militarized land-, air-, and cyber power, much like the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and be linked to migration overall.
Militarization of the sort described attempts to dominate the spatiality of the borderlands through both physical and electronic means. It implies the attempt to control information; to detect movement; to assume evasion is criminal or terrorist in intent/motive; and to set the terms of exposure as being about surveillance, tracing, arrest, interdiction, termination (death in the desert) and of course the facilitation of sanctioned migration and trade in, for example, agricultural and maquiladora factory-sourced products. The framing of space and mobility across the borderlands according to the logics of war fighting and battle space—allied to increasing accumulation by private security corporations and to authorized commerce and trade—limits the possibilities of evasion and exposure in that space. It represents a sort of emerging regime of governance of in/visibility and mobility in the borderlands, which at this point, as the discussion will indicate subsequently, is only dominant within the state defined border zone. 31
To appreciate the stakes of this process it is worth considering a straightforward alternative. That might roll back and demilitarize the border, not just to return to a more classic constabulary model but to seek after what is termed a “constabulary ethic,” where force is minimized and crime prevention is emphasized along with the human needs of those engaged (such as the demand among migrants for family reunion or political asylum). 32 Such an alternative would, in contrast, open up the possibilities of the governance of in/visibility and mobility more generally—and therefore the practices of evasion and exposure—locating them in the agencies of migrants, residents, and activists.
Border Anxieties
But it is mobility and evasion that risks exposure not only to unauthorized migrants but to cartel-organized drug-related crime. 33 The Mexican-based drug cartels are thought to thrive on evasion and exist in what has been termed the shadow economy, involving smuggling, piracy, and extreme violence. 34 Media, public, and official discourses of crisis at the border can be seen as producing what has been termed “border anxiety,” where the border is positioned, in the case of officials, journalists, and US citizenry, as a line against invasive, corrupting forces. 35
Official and public anxiety is only reinforced by the involvement of cartels in digital spaces, which takes a dualistic form, involving both evasion and exposure. Cartels are by their organizational nature very evasive. Even if there are grounds for being careful about claims regarding the involvement of cartels in activities beyond the drug trade—such as elusive cybercrime activities—the increasing panic about such endeavors has gone as far as assertions of cartel involvement in aiding global terrorist groups. 36
But at the same time, they expose themselves in bizarre ways. Cartels are increasingly involved in explicit online activities where exhibition on sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace involves bragging about violent exploits or asserting ones process and power over life and death. 37 Relatedly, a list of people marked for death was published online. These actions are consumed by the public in the United States and Mexico, contributing to public anxiety as well as a perverse public interest in songs about the cartels or what is called “narcocorridos.” These sorts of actions shape a certain image of life on the border, a sort of amplifier effect, whereby a popular culture is formed around cartels. While we might think it makes sense for the cartels to amplify their perceived power, there is no straightforward rationale in what they do. Why publish a list of intended targets if you really intend to kill them? These sorts of seemingly bizarre performances and exposures raise questions about motivations, which by necessity remain unclear. Like most everything else where there is a double movement of evasion and exposure, we might expect the relationship between information, identity, and power to intersect in tension-filled and ambiguous ways.
At a general level, anxiety around the border is not just a straightforward function of and attributable to the militaristic logics of threat associated with secret invasion or undetected unlawful or undesirable penetration put forward by officials or by xenophobic political entrepreneurs in the United States (the latter will be addressed subsequently). It can also be understood in more experiential terms, as what emerges when individuals, communities, and groups react to what they see as menacing violence. While such perceptions are imbricated with the political economy of fear described previously, the point is that residents and participants of the borderlands contend with anxiety through their own set of practices.
At the general level, the crucial differences in context and circumstances (regarding who is contending with what) are likely to be missed. There is in the borderlands, for example, what can be termed a bourgeois politics of exposure at play that takes form in the informational websites that are oriented toward the formally educated middle and upper middle classes. These uses—which both produce and contend with anxiety—can range from news and information aggregation to dissemination of interpretations of trends and the visualization of danger. They can be commercial or noncommercial and follow what are now standard formats, in effect doing with new media what might be expected of well-intentioned organizations and individuals under contemporary liberal capitalism. Frontera NorteSur is an example of a news aggregation site publishing articles about topics such as the effects of climate change in the borderlands or the patterns of femicide. 38 Another example is Mexodus, which uses the Internet to reveal a world that is otherwise hidden: in this case, the world of migration from Mexico understood as a world of seeking refuge (notably for Mexodus involving specifically upper-middle-class individuals who, it is claimed, are being pushed out of Mexico especially by cartel violence and corruption). 39
Also notable in this realm of bourgeois politics of exposure is the generation of a web page that can be labeled a Google death mapping (see Appendix, Figure A1). Whereas the NGO Humane Borders, mentioned previously, maps deaths associated with crossing the border, the death mapping (see Appendix, Figure A1) in contrast is focused on cartel-related deaths across Mexico. Rather than the more utilitarian aims in Humane Borders effort, this other death mapping is an example of how technology can be used to visualize a sense of crisis about an entire country, producing a social anxiety or moral panic about what might be at stake in crossing into, receiving migrants from, and remaining present in Mexico. The source of the page is a former Canadian police officer, Walter McKay, who offers his services for hire, via WM Consulting, as a security consult for North Americans in Mexico. 40 Clearly, we do not only have to rely on the state, capital, or organized crime to produce anxiety. Small business in the borderlands is also an active agent of visualizing panic.
Survival and Self-help Human Security
Overall, what is distinct about the bourgeois renderings of border anxiety is their remoteness from direct exposure to and involvement in the everyday violence and force of the border. Indeed, this positionality is consistent with liberal bourgeois subjecthood, which has the option of comfortably adopting a “view from nowhere” with regard to social issues. 41 There are informational interventions that, on their surface, appear proximate to these remote renderings but which actually are notably different, as suggested already in the difference between what is visualized by WM Consulting as opposed to by Humane Borders. Sociodigitizations of the borderlands become complicated once anxiety is a direct everyday issue involving lived danger rather than a matter of more remote assessment of risk as is seen in bourgeois renderings. It is in this everyday encounter that evasion reenters the scene especially through the practice of anonymity.
On one hand, this direct anxiety can remain consistent with the framing of the “threat from or in the south” discussed previously. For example, a threat was made via mobile phone messaging on the life of Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona who has been very controversial regarding border issues. 42 A communication was put out, offering large sums of money for his assassination. In this case, more important than the source of the threat and its credibility is the resonance of the threat and how it is amplified by the media. Anxiety and panic were created surrounding violence spilling across the border, through the use of anonymous cell phones to threaten even law enforcement.
On the other hand, in the context of the perception of direct danger, social media can also be seen quite differently: that is, as a personal participatory media used as a form of survival and resistance to cartel violence, involving the logics of exposure in the name of what can be termed self-help human security. Consider the chat feed “Nuevo Laredo en Vivo” or “Nuevo Laredo Live.” 43 This feed (and website) provides a space where people post information about when and where they believe cartels are going to show up in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, where it is considered risky, and where security forces are absent or present. The premise of this effort is that the public media and local police are not providing information and security regarding the cartels because they are fearful of reprisal due to numerous deaths of journalists, or because they are being paid off by the cartels. On websites and feeds like Nuevo Laredo en Vivo people self-organize to give each other the information that they need. As is well known, the state itself is compromised in many ways by the cartels’ influence, leading residents to question “who can be trusted.” In the end, the public relies on itself for such information, using tools like Neuvo Laredo en Vivo. Evasion takes place not only in the anonymity of the posters and tweeters but also in the very logic of the project: to avoid places where cartels might be present.
The stakes of this sort of evasion are high given the effort underway by the cartels in recent years to break online anonymity and to stop anti-cartel bloggers and posters through intimidation tactics. For example, hackers were reportedly hired to determine the identity of anti-cartel media producers (especially by tracking IP addresses) with exposed identities consequently leading to those bloggers’ deaths. 44 An especially infamous case is the killing of a blogger whose online identity was NenaDLaredo (woman of Laredo) who posted on Nuevo Laredo en Vivo and was found dead with a sign accompanying her body, which said (translation) “I’m the Laredo Girl, and I’m here because of my reports … you don’t want to believe me … this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and the navy … ZZZ” (see Appendix, Figure A3).
Of course, the ZZZ represents The Zetas, the most notorious of the cartels. 45 Based on former special ops commandos from the Mexican military, the Zetas are responsible for increased levels of violence. They also appear to approach information in a more sophisticated manner than other cartels, as though they were involved in information warfare. Social media users and producers in the context of border anxiety, understandably given the context, desire anonymity, even if it is hardly a guarantee of safety. 46 How much this ecology of violence in the borderlands shapes social relations, culture, and citizen journalism is indicated by the web effort called “Cronicas De Heroes,” which reports and maps what are identified, anonymously, as heroic efforts of various forms in Juarez (see Appendix, Figure A2). A hero is someone who might help a child in trouble, aids in the arrest of a cartel member, or helps a migrant pass from Guatemala to Mexico. Of course, these heroes remain anonymous, as do the submitters of the reports and stories of heroes. Once again, the double movement appears in the anonymous exposure of good deeds in what is reported by the director of the site to be an attempt to counter anxiety and pessimism. 47
Crossing
The double movement of evasion and exposure is not limited to web pages, chat rooms, Twitter feeds, or data generation and visualization. It emerges in significant forms around a technology that is itself grounded in this double logic: the mobile phone, which is easy to hide in physical terms (in bags, pockets, or vehicle compartments) but which exposes its users to a wide range of information and communication and to being surveilled and tracked. Mobile technology in the borderlands opens onto a range of micro-practices conducted around and across the border in the everyday. It also plays into the fearful imagination of the US public of an everyday communication tool being used by evaders, smugglers, the undocumented, and the coyotes who guide them, labeled “cyber coyotes”; not unlike the way citizen band radios were producing anxiety about their use in the 1970s and 1980s around the border to evade border patrols in other such entrapments. 48 Notably, practices around the use of phones to foster evasion rely on the logics of exposure. Messages that expose the position of border patrols engage in a sort of practice of counter-detection. But the tracking by migrant groups of patrols leaves migrants vulnerable to being tracked via satellite and cell tower triangulation techniques.
Situated a distance from bourgeois moral panics associated with coyotes and cartels, developed by activist and scholar Ricardo Dominguez with a logic of an emancipatory mobility in mind, is the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT). The tool is a cell phone with GPS that allows clandestine migrants to locate where depots of water have been left by the so-called border angels who are humanitarians seeking to prevent deaths from crossing the desert. TBT shuts off immediately after a onetime use, so that the border patrol tracking described previously is impaired. 49 The TBT thus allows a dangerous space to become safer. 50 A similar tool was conceived by Reverend Robin Hoover founder of Humane Borders who also distributes the phones to coyotes based on the premise that aiding anyone in the process of crossing is a moral good, from a humane standpoint. 51 These tools expand evasive practices of clandestine crossing by rendering the borderlands—and its potentially lifesaving resources—more transparent.
Politics of Evasion and Exposure
But what is exposed—especially through the microtechniques of the mobile phone—need not only be thought of in terms of information that directly aids survival of an individual. Another way mobile phones have been used—in a more indirect and political form—is to expose acts of violence. This practice has now become familiar in cases of police abuse in stop and frisk programs or in popular demonstrations. 52 In the case of the borderlands, a pointed example of this is the video taken associated with boy killed in Juarez by US border guards supposedly because he was throwing rocks at the guards and thereby threatening them (established procedure allows guards to use guns against what is deemed a threatening rock attack). The video taken with a phone cast doubt on whether he was indeed throwing the rocks that supposedly provoked the deadly response. 53 In addition, the video also cast doubt on whether the guards were on the US side of the border, raising the issue—advocated especially by the family of the killed teen and their supporters in Mexico—as to whether they should face the Mexican legal system in which the shooting would be a serious crime. The double play of evasion and exposure here is taking form across opposing sides of conflict with the evasion of US officials in tension with the exposing actions of nonofficial witnesses who cannot expose the officials to the formal justice system and are left only with collective condemnation. A similar dynamic emerged earlier on the US side of the border involving young activists in the 2007 No Border Camp event. They were attacked violently by Border Guards using batons, prods, and pepper gas and the events were captured on video and posted online. 54
While these developments, from a media standpoint, can be viewed through the lens of citizen media and the emergence of a bottom-up “fifth estate,” what is of specific interest here are the implications they hold for the politics of exposure and evasion. 55 Such a politics, as argued previously, cannot be understood outside of the relationship between physical and electronic spaces. The stakes of the physical and electronic are amplified with events in either space. In this respect, the distribution of videos exposing border patrol riots or violence against unarmed teens raises the perceived value of successful evasive action to avoid documentation or detection (hiding shield numbers or confiscating and restricting electronic devices) as well as the impetus to terminate any actions (such as a protest) to limit the creation of documentable events and its dissemination—even using violence to do so (as we’ve seen in New York and other occupy sites), recognizing that such termination efforts open the possibility of more videos and thereby further feedback.
It is important, however, to be careful about any assumption that the politics of exposure as anti-evasion, even when it involves mobilized individuals, is naturally allied to a progressive optics and agency. Although it is sponsored by the State of Texas and developed by the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition and an IT firm, Blue Servo allows any individual to take part directly in surveillance of the border. 56 Through web cameras placed across the spans of the border that are accessible via the Internet, vigilant citizen observers are expected to sit at computer monitors watching and waiting to observe unauthorized crossings. Related efforts have emerged, without overt official sponsorship, using Google Earth to detect and expose holes in the fence.
Another officially sponsored effort, relying on crowdsourcing, is the “build the border fence” movement, whereby the Arizona government seeks small donations online through the “Build the Border Fence” website (see Appendix, Figure A4). The idea is that not only are citizens potential surveillors of the border, but they are self-funders, donating money to join the movement against migrants crossing through the holes in the fence.
Complementing this is the effort of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples (the same commissioner of the Colgen report on the border as a war zone) to gather human testimonials and firsthand accounts of negative experiences in the borderlands and publish them on a “Protect your Texas Border website.” Here we see nonanonymous exposures through the personalization of the border from a fear standpoint, compared to the personal stories of migrants we might be more used to or in the Heroes of Juarez mentioned previously. 57 Staples’ use of the Internet takes a different direction, using a technology—we might see as facilitating movement in other instances—to reinforce fear and anxiety and the desire for restricted movement. In this case, the border anxiety generated is one where the public must confront the potential for direct victimization or harassment, creating a public and cultural imagination of fear around both the physical and virtual borderlands. 58 In a sense, this is a perverse mirror reflection of the actual victims in border towns especially on the Mexican side.
Peter Andreas has suggested that border control is a public performance. 59 Blue Servo citizens’ surveillance and in the donations to build the border fence are consistent with this performativity. In each instance of an escalating play between evasion and exposure (in this case eluding migrants vs. vigilant citizenry), the militarization and surveillance, both symbolic and physical, translates “what is already a harsh landscape into a hunting ground for undocumented human beings” who then have to take increased risks in order to avoid detection. 60
Countermoves and Resistance
The examples of visualizations to expose violence (rather than just undermine evasion) suggest that resistance to abuses, injustice, and restrictiveness is possible. It can take form deeply anchored in the electronic realm in terms of actions but still have effects in physical spaces. Border Haunt (see Appendix, Figure A5) is an interesting aesthetically oriented political project that attempted to swarm the Blue Servo observers described previously in order to undermine their efforts.
The Border Haunt creators did so by producing an extensive database of names of those who died crossing the border and loading it onto the Blue Servo servers. Like a digital sit-in, the swarm attempted to stop as well as devalue the Blue Servo effort. Such devaluing relied on inscribing new meanings and questions for all those who access the website. Blue Servo users, in the midst of the swarm, could no long carry out their task of stopping migrant movement. In effect, Border Haunt is attempting to displace the Blue Servo exposure politics with its own exposure of the names of victims; all the while remaining evasively anonymous in its swarming.
A related effort involving electronic sit-ins and swarmings was waged against Minutemen, a civil society organization with members who physically patrol the US-Mexico border seeking directly to stop illegal immigration. 61 A resistance campaign was launched against the Minutemen operating around Campo, California along the border called “SWARM the Minutemen: South West Action to Resist the Minutemen,” involving individuals working within the digital/arts resistance movement to protest the Minutemen’s presence and restrictive activities at the border. SWARM used an application called FloodNet, which requests files on target servers, which are then not found. The effect is to slow down and interfere with those servers. It also places logs and files of the names of those who died crossing and “requested files like justice, appear repeated thousands upon thousands of times.” 62 This effort was not naive about the effects of the temporary disruption and reversal of power involving the operations of Campo Minutemen in that it was especially interested in exposing their activities and revaluing them as unjust via the creation of a media event. 63
The alternative to the more transparent, collective effort to undermine power in the borderlands that SWARM the Minutemen represents is the anonymous effort associated with hacker organizations such LulzSec. LulzSec draws its name from “lulz” which is a variation on “laugh out loud or LOL” and “sec” for security. 64 What they did was hack and distribute on PirateBay (a public torrent sharing website), copies of information, e-mails, and secret manuals used by the Arizona Law Enforcement to track, profile, and apprehend migrants. In other words, these are documents that Arizona Law Enforcement would not want to see exposed. A related case is the hacking of e-mails of a corporate executive involved in the development of border weapons and cyber security strategies for the firm Vanguard Defense Industries (another example of the private security industry involvement and prowess). This executive whose e-mail was hacked is also a member of InfraGard, a very important and secretive collaboration between state law enforcement, military, and private sector to share security-related information, especially around the border (a group many fear is a form of private sector spying and snitching to the state). 65
LulzSec’s actions represent a clear instance of a double movement, that is, evasion in the name of exposure and transparency. The logic of hacking in these cases can be understood as a matter of evading in order to expose. The stakes of exposure for LulzSec are not everyday survival in any direct sense the way it is on the Nuevo Laredo forum. But the stakes of evasion are. Anonymity is a matter of survival in that LulzSec’s acts of taking possession and publishing secret government documents are viewed as criminal. This resistance through evasion is similarly practiced by clandestine migrants where the logic might also be written as “we evade in order to expose”—or what could label as exposing evasions—but in this case, exposure is a matter of gaining access, exposure to selves and bodies to the United States and the United States to them. Richard Sennett suggests there is an “art of exposure” in what Frederick Jameson describes regarding disruptive presences involving “insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities”—as one might understand the US social field. 66
Conclusion
The value of these disruptive presences will continue to be ignored, if not hunted down, in the war and profit imaginaries of state and capital. How far this hunting might go driven by neoliberal, hypersecurity ridden border anxiety is hinted at by recent borderlands dystopic visions. The online “company” Cybracero Systems is a political spoof started in the 1990s that develops a clever notion of virtual migration. As realized in its website, Mexicans are working on the Mexican side of the border, moving machinery, through their body, kinetically, that is on the US side of the border. 67 The 2008 film Sleep Dealer explored this notion, imagining a “dystopic world…[where] the only way to cross borders is through virtual means.” 68 In an imagined future, then, the world “becomes a borderized virtual space where cities such as Tijuana continue to attract migrants from the global south by way of offering virtual access to the utopian ‘American Dream.’” 69
But this article has tried to emphasize that such visions—both fictional and imagined in by capital and the state—while they may express anxiety-driven desires, run up against the intricacies and heterogeneity of physical space and its imbrication with the electronic. It has been suggested here that anonymity is central to the generation of this complexity. Although liberal and democratic theory has given place to anonymity as, for example, integral to the making of the individual private sphere or the unencumbered exercise of the voting franchise, critical theory has only begun to think through the implications of, for example, transgressive practices of groups like Anonymous. Along these lines, this article has sought to raise the question of whether anonymity as it emerges across the borderlands—especially involving migrants but also all those mobilized around the issues of borderlands mobility—represents a way to be political and at the same time deny the state the full effects of its rendering practices (territory, bodies, and identities). It is far from clear how to evaluate what might be a practice for survival or the creation of a new politics. Sociologist Néstor Rodríguez looked at migration as something analogous to the autonomy movement in Italy, of self-autonomous workers associated with activist/theorists like Toni Negri in Italy, which was very much against state power and capital but also against any top-down program to reorganize society. 70 Even if we assume no self-conscious political resistance to the vast inequalities and restrictions that have been labeled by observers Global Apartheid, the question is are we ascribing too much to this inadvertent resistance? 71 Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman think we are ascribing too much, and they question the depth and resonance of any resistant politics of border crossing. 72 The alternative is to accept that what is at stake is a sort of micro logics of the pursuit of human security in the face of cartel violence, economic want, or desire to return to see family.
I would go further in questioning the ascription of an inadvertent politics of resistance to border crossing: we are yet again forcing migrants to be a certain way. Such ascribed incidental politics constitutes another way migrants, who need to evade the state border to cross, are being exposed and made to be political by force. However, we saw in the United States in 2006 that migrants can act on their own terms as a mass to take to the streets. 73 By remaining anonymous in a mass exposing anonymity, they enacted another instance of the double movement of “exposing evasions” that has emerged across the borderlands, as we have seen previously in Nuevo Laredo. These street protests suggestively pointed to ways to build a politics around anonymity that fully engages migrants who seek determination over how they are presented and represented. This might be understood as a counter to Foucault’s panopticonic diagram, where the surveillor sees without ever being seen—instead this other politics involves exposing without being exposed.
But ultimately this evasive exposure ought to translate into a politics at the border. It has been argued elsewhere that border crossers should be able to control their identity and relationship of their identity to the state. 74 If the border is generally a space where the relationship between the state and the migrant is unmediated, the question emerges as to what is at stake in evading that direct confrontation in an ethics of evasion, allowing for anonymous passage. 75 Such passage would be mediated by civil society organizations independent of state and capital agendas and programs. Grassroots civil society should seek to begin to govern mobility and the security of presence from below: to take on the hyper-nationalist right wing that is against this (and that really only seeks to act like a state).
Ultimately, in concepts such as mediated passage, TBTs, but also command and control and blue servo, electronic and cultural spaces emerge as sites where the alternative meanings of the borderlands can be produced and fought over. Migrants should be producers and governors of these realms. Knowledge, information, and claim production around the border—which is increasingly becoming most easily done electronically—is not something that can be left only to experts, officials, hobbyists, and academics.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Author’s Note
This article would not have been possible without the help of Tesni Ellis whose research, transcription, and insights were invaluable.
Acknowledgment
I also thank Reza Hajivandi for his research and Dave Synyard as well as Adam Kingsmith for their help as well as the Departamento de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, and the York University Critical Border Studies Series for their engagement with this research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.