The idea of building a wall on the U.S./Mexico border serves as a potent symbol across the political spectrum—a means of assuaging social and economic anxieties by placing them onto a remote frontier. Ieva Jusionyte will consider how an anthropological analysis of the state, borders, and security can help people understand the meaning and impact of such a wall. Drawing on ethnographic research with emergency responders who rescue those injured in government actions against drugs and unauthorized migration, she discusses how deploying “tactical infrastructure” (of which the wall is but one piece) changes everyday life on both sides of the border.
Ieva Jusionyte, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology
Recorded October 17, 2017
Transcript
[00:00:04.77] It is a great pleasure to introduce Professor Ieva Jusionyte, who is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard. She is our newest member of the Department of Anthropology and of what I like to call the Peabody community here.
[00:00:25.08] Professor Jusionyte holds a PhD and an MA in anthropology from Brandeis University and a BA in political science from Vilnius University from her homeland in Lithuania. She is quite cosmopolitan as you will see as this introduction goes along.
[00:00:44.28] She came to Harvard in 2016 after four years of teaching in the Department of Anthropology in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. As a social anthropologists of Latin America, Professor Jusionyte focuses on the enthographic study of security, crime, statecraft, and the media. And she has written extensively on these various topics.
[00:01:09.09] Her first book Savage Frontier, Making News and Security on the Argentine Border, published by the University of California Press in 2015, is based on ethnographic research with journalists conducted in the border area between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. This border area has long been an alleged haven of international organized crime, which the global media portrays as the hub of drug and human trafficking, contraband, and money laundering. Professor Jusionyte's work shows how local journalists both participate in and contest these global and national security discourses and practices.
[00:01:54.72] In 2015, she began ethnographic research on security infrastructures and emergency services along the border between Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona, the subject her talk this evening. Next year, she will publish the results of this work in a new book written from the perspective of Mexican and Mexican-American firefighters and paramedics, who work in the marginalized social space on the edges of two militarized states. The book shows what happens when security politics and humanitarian ethics violently collide.
[00:02:36.24] Most recently Professor Jusionyte's attention has turned to examining the political economy and cultural history of firearms in Mexico. This new project will document the social biography of the gun from its manufacturing through the legal and illegal circuits of exchange to its use at the interface of organized crime and the country's security forces. So heavy topics, one and all, actually.
[00:03:04.67] We are delighted to have the opportunity to learn this evening from Professor Ieva Jusionyte about a topic, actually several topics that are so relevant today. So join me in welcoming Professor Jusionyte, who will speak on the border wall life and injury on the front lines.
[00:03:21.09] [APPLAUSE]
[00:03:29.95] Thank you, Gary. Thank you, Jeff. I'm honored to have this opportunity to share my ongoing work with all of you. And this will be a rather abrupt start.
[00:03:44.35] So in March of this year, the US Customs and Border Protection solicited proposals to design President Donald Trump's signature campaign promise, the big, beautiful wall. The new barrier along the nearly 2,000 miles long boundary with Mexico must meet the following requirements.
[00:04:05.40] I quote, "The wall design shall be physically imposing in height. The government's nominal concept is for a 40 foot high wall. It shall not be possible for a human to climb to the top of the wall. The wall shall prevent digging or tunneling below it for a minimum of six feet. The wall shall prevent or deter for a minimum of one hour the creation of a physical breach using a sledgehammer, carjacks, pick-axe, chisel, torch or other similar hand-held tools. The wall design shall be constructable up to slopes of 45%. And the north side of the wall-- that is the US facing side-- shall be aesthetically pleasing in color, anti-climb texture, et cetera, to be consistent with general surrounding environment." End of quote.
[00:04:59.65] There were two options. One of them called for a wall of reinforced concrete, while the other left the material of the barrier unspecified. More than 200 companies responded with proposals.
[00:05:14.74] The proponents sought a structure that would not rely on razor wire or on electric shocks to deter people from crossing. It would be too embarrassing to see wounded bodies on the evening news or on social media for that matter. So the design had to be humane.
[00:05:36.07] What does that mean? One owner of a construction company that submitted a bid for proposals who was the grandson of people who have come to this country without authorization explained. "We have several different options that meet what the government is wanting in terms of security, but at the same time is a very humane obstruction. And I just didn't want to wake up on Sunday morning and read about a dozen Guatemalan kids that were electrocuted or seriously injured. That would not have been something that my conscience would allow."
[00:06:15.10] So this double imperative off the wall, it must be effective at stopping an authorized entry, but also tasteful, called for a particular security aesthetic, a barrier that appears to be innocuous even though it is intended to harm.
[00:06:35.95] Six contractors were selected as finalists about a month ago. And they are now building eight 30 feet long prototypes on the strip of federal land in the San Diego border area.
[00:06:51.70] The idea of building a wall on the US-Mexico border taps a potent symbol to assuage nation's deep social and economic anxieties by replacing them onto a remote frontier. It is a metaphor that conjures up notions of fear and protection, a distraction, or perhaps a diversion, from the government's failure to provide security in other areas of everyday life. Walls are symptoms of crumbling state authority, a last resort to prop up withering sovereignty and recuperate legitimacy.
[00:07:31.48] In 2005, Janet Napolitano was then Arizona's governor and later became the Secretary of Homeland Security said something that has become famous since she uttered these words. She said, "You show me a 50 foot wall, and I'll show you a 51 foot ladder at the border." So more than a decade has passed, but the fortification remains the centerpiece of Washington's border policy.
[00:08:00.40] I have been conducting ethnographic research in the US-Mexico border region, most specifically in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, since 2015. As a political and legal anthropologist, I am particularly interested in questioning what we take for granted about the states, such as received notions of the legal and illegal crime and law legitimized in popular narratives, and instead producing knowledge grounded in the everyday lives of people and communities who experience the direct effects of security buildup.
[00:08:41.07] For them the border is concrete, not abstract. Rather than being metaphorical, it is material. It is aesthetic, and it creates affects. So today, I will talk about a central concern underlying my research and a major theme of my forthcoming book, which is the weaponization of terrain, or how the built environment and natural topography are used tactically to enable and facilitate violence. And to do this I will be joined both on political anthropology as well as forensic architecture theory.
[00:09:18.36] The US-Mexico border region has never been a place of settled sovereignties. Here, political topography competes with other claims on the landscape; indigenous forms of governance, knowledge produced by environmental science, neoliberal networks of profit making, and criminal economies to name just a few.
[00:09:40.15] National territories carved out of the contiguous desert terrain remain a fragile achievement. Since the early 2000s to strengthen their titles against the rival the rights to this space, US and Mexico have declared it to be a zone of two militarized conflicts-- war on terror and war on drugs-- without acknowledging that the same lethal weapons that will be deployed to wage these wars would be used against unauthorized migrants and refugees.
[00:10:13.11] This vicious cycle of security buildup and accumulating atrocities is unfolding on a volatile, ground. As temperatures in the area steadily rise, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. And even when reinforced with steel and concrete, the arbitrary boundary cutting across the desert does not prevent intensified wildfires or floods.
[00:10:41.81] But these concerns are subordinate to homeland security in the aftermath of 9/11. The Real ID Act that was passed in 2005 gave DHS authority to waive a number of laws that could interfere with their speedy building of the wall. Among the 37 laws that were waived was the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act American Indian, Religious Freedom Act, and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as well as other acts preserving clean air, migratory birds, national forests and parks, farmlands, rivers, and antiquities.
[00:11:25.00] Such an inauspicuous misalignment of politics and ecology compounded by warfare and lawfare keeps the border in a perpetual state of alert. Emergency can result from any combination of potential threats. And migrants may suffer a heatstroke when traveling through the desert trying to avoid checkpoints imposed on the roads. A train carrying hazardous materials may derail, polluting the rivers and washes that supply water to communities on both sides of the border. Or a security barrier put in place to prevent trespass might create an emergency by exacerbating the effects of a natural phenomenon.
[00:12:10.43] This is, for example, what happened in 2008 when the Customs and Border Protection installed a five foot barrier inside the tunnel underneath the border between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, the sister cities that are together known as Ambos Nogales. They did it without notifying the International Boundary and Water Commission, which is responsible for reviewing plans that could affect storm drainage. And with the arrival of the monsoon rains in the summer, as the runoff washed downstream from Mexico to the US-- Mexico is uphill, upstream, and upwind from the United States in this border area-- the concrete wall formed a bottleneck. The water pressure kept rising until the old structure gave in and 1,000 feet of the tunnel collapsed, inundating the streets.
[00:13:02.81] Two days after the flooding, two bodies were recovered from the wash. US officials suspected they were unauthorized migrants who were inside the tunnels when the flood started. Mexican authorities declared their city a disaster zone and cited damage to nearly 600 homes and over a few dozen cars. There were calls for investigations and reparations. And in the end US government gave permission to lower the concrete barrier inside the tunnel by a foot and a half.
[00:13:36.15] So this example shows that modifications of the environment in the name of security have immediate effects on people who live in or who transit the border area. To understand how terrain and infrastructure are being weaponized, we must examine the conditions under which space is made tactical.
[00:13:59.06] The concept of field causality, which Eyal Weizman and forensic architecture team at Goldsmiths used to gather spatial evidence in cases of crimes against humanity, provides a helpful framework for capturing this indirect, slow and diffuse forms of violence, which some call structural or systemic violence, prescribed by policies operating through laws and carried out by human and non-human actors alike. So it includes the built environment, such as structures and infrastructure and technologies. But it also includes the natural environment, so the crust of the Earth and the ecological systems.
[00:14:51.66] So this approach requires abandoning the linear path between cause and effects. The federal agents didn't build the barrier inside the tunnel to flood the Mexican town and to drown two border crossers. But these emergencies resulted from a juncture of security policies and natural forces. "The field," as Weizman writes, "is a thick fabric of lateral relations associations and chains of actions that connect different physical scales and scales of action." So establishing field causalities entails acknowledging multiple agencies and feedback loops, including those actors that are ordinarily excluded from public discussions of violence, such as kinetic energy or the force of gravity mobilized as instruments of extra legal punishment for trespass.
[00:15:47.92] In the middle of the 19th century, which is now the steel wall separating Mexico and the United States in Nogales was just a small pile of rocks described as a pyramidal monument of dressed stone. It was put in place by the joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, which was sent to survey and map of the region following US-Mexican War, in which Mexico lost nearly half of its territory. And the new line, which was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, cut through the homelands of the Apapche, Pima, the Tohona o'Odham, among other peoples.
[00:16:31.26] Began in 1849, the boundary survey took more than seven years to complete as men who were sent to impose state definitions on the ground endure temperatures of over 100 degrees, shortages of food and water, and difficulties presented by the rough terrain of the region. In the 1890s, the pyramid of stones that the Emery's commission put in place was replaced by a six foot tall, four sided obelisk, and renamed boundary monument 122. It still stands today.
[00:17:09.55] The next turn in the story of the border wall might be rather unexpected. It was during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century when Presidente Municipalo, the mayor of Nogales Sonora, ordered the construction of the fence, so that US troops would not accidentally shoot Mexican people. The mayor didn't survive the third Battle of Nogales, but the government followed through with his plan and extended a single strand of barbed wire to separate the two cities.
[00:17:42.92] In 1929, it was replaced by a six foot chain link fence, which will remained the materiality form of the border for most of the 20th century. Still today, residents nostalgically remember the so-called picket fence between neighbors. It served as the boundary, as the marker of international boundary for legal purposes, but it was easily disassembled during parades on official, both American and Mexican holidays, allowing ties between the communities to be maintained.
[00:18:19.43] This changed in the mid-1990s. Operation Safe Guard in Arizona was a replica of Operation Blockade Hold the Line between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and Operation Gatekeeper on the San Diego Tijuana border. All of them put into practice the 1994 border patrol strategic plan, which assumed, I quote, "that those attempting to enter into the United States in large numbers do so in part because of the weak controls we have exercised over the southwest land border in the recent past."
[00:18:57.36] So the centerpiece of the plan was what's known as the prevention through deterrence strategy, which called for bringing a decisive number of enforcement resources to bear in each major entry corridor. These resources increased the number of agents on the line, aided by more sophisticated fencing and technology, including night vision scopes and ground sensors, had to raise the risk of apprehension to the point where many would consider it futile to attempt illegal entry. And the plan predicted that as a direct consequence of the security build up in urban areas, the illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain I cite here-- less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.
[00:19:51.61] This new barrier was made from surplus steel planks that the US military used as portable pads for landing cargo planes and helicopters during the Vietnam War. Even the US Army Corps of Engineers, the ones who designed the M8A1 style solid corrugated steel panels, acknowledged the flaws of their construction. The landing pads had rough edges and frequently ripped the tires of heavy aircraft. So by the end of the war the military had to replace them with aluminum mats and relegated these M8A1s for taxiways and parking lots.
[00:20:35.59] After Vietnam, the landing mats were easily repurposed for other ends. They became free army surplus. And some of them when redeployed to the US southwest border. Each mile of the fence required about 3,000 of these metal sheets. And by 2006, they were used to build over 60 miles of border fence in California, Texas, and Arizona. In Nogales, the steel barrier extended for 2.8 miles and ranged from eight to 12 feet high.
[00:21:10.33] In 2011, several years after the government passed the Secure Fence Act, which called for another physical infrastructure enhancement in order to achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders, the rusty-- you can't see this in this black and white photograph-- but this rusty and aesthetically displeasing landing mat wall, its color, purple and green, reminded some of a bad bruise.
[00:21:41.98] It was replaced by sturdy and taller bollard-style barrier, which is made of rectangular steel tubes, reinforced with concrete, with metal plates on top. Extending up to 20 feet above the ground and 10 feet below the surface, this new wall was designed to act as a more effective deterrent against climbing over or digging under. The see through fence was also safer for the border patrol because they could anticipate incidents of rocking, that is when agents would be pelted with stones from the Mexican side, and assaults on agents went down significantly.
[00:22:26.14] There are currently about 700 miles of fence along the US-Mexico border, close to 400 miles of pedestrian fence, mostly bollard style like this, and at least 300 miles of vehicle fence, which is made of these criss cross beams, known as Normandy barriers and really low. They are part of what CBP calls tactical infrastructure, which they define as an assemblage that includes roads and bridges, drainage structures and grades, observation zones, boat ramps, lighting and ancillary power systems, as well as remote video surveillance, that all together make illicit cross-border activities, such as the funneling of illegal immigrants, terrorists, and terrorist weapons into our nation more difficult and time consuming.
[00:23:22.30] So criminalization of immigration, which took off in the 1990s, aggravated by concerns with terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, led the US government to designate the border with Mexico as a source of threat and begin waging in the borderlands what has been called by some scholars a low intensity warfare. Manuel Padilla, who was the former chief of the Tucson sector border patrol, explained, "The threat and terrain dictates the strategy and equipment. There is not one single piece of equipment or technology or infrastructure that is a panacea to border security."
[00:24:03.60] According to a Congressional Research Service report published in 2009, border fencing is most effective for its operational purposes when deployed along urban areas. In the rural areas, USBP has a tactical advantage over border crossers because they must travel longer distances before reaching populated areas.
[00:24:26.04] So this map is produced by an organization known as Humane Borders. And it shows that prevention through deterrence didn't stop unauthorized migrants from crossing the border. It didn't deter them. But it did work as intended. Redirected from urban areas and forced to travel over more hostile terrain, migrants died, often from dehydration and heat stroke from exposure. So these red dots mark over 3,000 deaths that occurred in this region over the past 18 years. In cooperation with the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, the Humane Borders keeps a website, where you can see all of these deaths listed by where the human remains were found, what's the suspected reason of death, and any other information that is available.
[00:25:30.54] So let me go back to that.
[00:25:35.59] The task of mitigating dangerous situations caused when any combination of forces, including crisis that result from a lethal overlay of security policies and the environment falls into the hands of emergency responders. In Nogales, these are firefighters who are trained as EMTs, paramedics, hazardous materials technicians, and equipped to perform confined space rescue, swift water rescue, and other types of rescue. So they are my vantage point to examine the weaponization of terrain on the border.
[00:26:15.69] Although I also did the research in hospitals and with humanitarian aid organizations, most of my field work for this project has taken place in fire departments in the US as well as in Mexico, interviewing people, accompanying them to emergency calls, attending conferences and meetings and so on. Local emergency responders have a pragmatic, or a hazard oriented, disposition towards the region that many know only from sensational and politicized media coverage. Previously called smoke eaters and associated with untamed bravery, by the beginning of the 20th century, firefighters have evolved into a highly trained, specialized all hazards task force, the embodiment of what the historian Mark Tebeau described as the melding of men and technology into an efficient, life saving machine.
[00:27:16.86] Their performance hinges on competence, practical types of knowledge, the know how of the city and the country acquired through repeated encounters with dangers presented by urban and natural landscape. Rescuers are uniquely attuned to the characteristics of space. And their professional training provides them with tactical advantage over difficult terrain.
[00:27:43.07] But what remains obscured in this focus on emergency responders' practical engagement with the material environment is politics and law that makes it possible to use the environment to perpetrate violence. Many emergencies along the US-Mexico border result from the state's attempt to impose illegal grid over the region's rebellious topography.
[00:28:10.62] Dispatched to correct the deleterious effects of the narco guerre in Mexico and immigration policies in the US, emergency responders are the ones who witness and experience the most palpable effects of border militarization. They rescue injured border crossers who fall off the fence and those who are found hurt or dehydrated in the desert. They fight wildland fires that are started by migrants in distress, as well as those that are used by smugglers to divert attention. And they are routinely called to the border patrol stations to take undocumented minors with seizures, fever, or heat illnesses to the hospital.
[00:28:53.91] Rather than being accidents-- that is unexpected occurrences that happen unintentionally and result in damage, a definition of an accident-- emergencies on the border are often caused by government policies. When, in 1994, the infamous prevention through a deterrence strategy was adopted, increasing the length and height of the border fence in urban areas, instead of stopping unauthorized entry, it multiplied the number of dead and injured migrants. Along the US southern fringe, border related trauma has become so common that it no longer surprised anyone and no longer made it to the news.
[00:29:36.78] In Douglas, Arizona, which is a town about two hours east of Nogales, fire department personnel have been called to care for patients with orthopedic injuries-- they call them fence jumpers-- so frequently that they now refer to the cement ledge, which is abutting the international wall, as the ankle alley.
[00:29:59.52] The changing design of the barrier also produced different types of trauma. When the landing mat wall was erected in Nogales, emergency responders were regularly called to help border crossers who were injured by the sharp edges of the fence, the same fence that ripped the tires of military aircraft. So there were large gashes, degloving injuries, and limb amputations.
[00:30:24.39] Alex Flores, who has worked for the Nogales Fire Department since the mid 1990s, recalls, I quote, "When they, border crossers, were climbing down, they would slip and the hands would get stuck up here, so they could get their fingers cut off. They would land on this side and the finger parts would land on the other side. So we told the guy, sorry, your fingers are gone. And I don't know how many times we searched and searched and never found the fingers. In some places, they used to have openings at the bottom with grates on them for the water to go through. You could still see across and you could see the fingers on the other side of the border and the people over here. Sometimes we would reach over and grab the body part and put it on ice. I thought it was just inhumane."
[00:31:10.92] Over the years, as the form and texture of the fence changed, so did the mechanism of injury. While the early version made of corrugated sheet metal caused gashes and amputations, the present wall, which is much taller and is difficult to hold onto, results in multi-system trauma. Most commonly these are ankle, leg, femur fractures.
[00:31:35.24] Once, when Nogales Fire Department was tied up working a structure fire, Rio Rico responded to provide mutual aid in the city. And one of the paramedics from Rio Rico recalls, "We were sent to the border. A lady who had to paid to go up the ladder. She decided she didn't want to jump. And whomever she paid push her off the fence. There's a good 10 feet of jagged rocks near the fence. When she fell, her ankle was so severely broken it was almost amputated from her foot. She had tib fib fracture, possible femur fracture. And her foot was literally separated. She couldn't even feel it. When I put my hand to palpate, I could almost put my fingers through, I could see my bloody glove."
[00:32:20.54] A surgeon I interviewed at the level one trauma center in Tucson, which is the closest trauma center to the border area, told me that he treated many border crossers with orthopedic injuries. It's a pattern of injury. He explained, "When someone falls and lands on their feet, the energy is transferred from the feet all the way to the spine."
[00:32:41.07] The stretch of the jagged rocks was fortified with cement that the paramedic mentioned is at the center of town, right next to the Customs and Border Protection parking lot. Emergency responders who were called to help numerous patients on this strip of land, small piece of land, told me, "They are there to injure people so that they couldn't run from the border patrol. What other reason are these rocks for? Traumatic falls are first programmed into the built environment, yet we rarely see the victims that tactical infrastructure has so consistently produced."
[00:33:26.58] Mutilated bodies have been made invisible in part due to the effective work of emergency responders who will lift them up into ambulances and rush them to the hospitals where doctors attend to their fractures and replenish their dehydrated bodies with fluids before ICE locks them up in detention centers. So people who have been hurt by the wall live in the shadows of public life with renal failure or permanent limp, bound to a wheelchair or missing a hand.
[00:33:56.46] Emergency responders occupy a unique structural niche in the contemporary state. They are neither part of the US security apparatus, like the border patrol or the National Guard, nor part of the humanitarian establishment, like the Red Cross, church-run shelters or humanitarian aid groups, such as No More Deaths or Tucson Samaritans. As uniformed representatives of the local government, they are mandated to rescue people hurt in the militarized border area, but they find themselves caught between the security logic, or the imperative of the counter terror state, which aims to enforce the border no matter the social and ecological costs, and their obligations to help people, or humanitarian reasons.
[00:34:45.84] They are assigned to this splintered space of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the bureaucratic field, where the left hand of the state that's oriented to its social welfare is remediating the negative effects resulting from the actions of the right hand, which is government institutions responsible for enforcing economic discipline and social order. To quote Mario Novoa, the chief of Douglas Fire Department in Arizona, "We help everyone. It's human nature to want a better chance of life. We all have the same red blood." A firefighter in Nogales also told me, "We are not in the business of law enforcement or immigration enforcement. We are in the business of helping people."
[00:35:31.98] A similar sentiment was expressed by his captain when he said, "We're not border patrols. Since he's on this side of the fence, wherever it is, we had been told to treat that patient." The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, known as EMTALA, requires health care providers to treat anyone who needs emergency medical care regardless of income or immigration status. However, due to lack of federal mechanisms to compensate fire departments for helping unauthorized migrants emergency, medical services are being forced to merge with immigration policing.
[00:36:09.66] Since 2014, when Arizona exhausted Section 1011 funds, which was this program known as Emergency Health Services Furnished to Undocumented Aliens and reimbursed ambulance services at Medicare rates, now the only recourse for them to recuperate costs for the costs, including fuel and medications, is through th the border patrol, which entails asking federal agents to take unauthorized migrants into custody in order to get TAR, which is a treatment authorization request, before transporting them to the hospital. ACLU in Arizona also criticized some counties for violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment when they found that the sheriff's departments were selectively referring 911 calls from migrants in distress directly to the border patrol, completely bypassing first responders.
[00:37:12.27] At stake here is the definition of security. In the border zone protection from harm, which falls under the purview of public safety, cannot be contained within the contours of the state. Not only do borders by the mere existence create incentives for crime and escalate violence, but they don't stop floods and droughts and wildfires or hazardous materials from crossing over and impacting people and environment on the other side. Before it divided in Nogales, the border made Nogales, made this bi-national town, because settlements on both sides of the border grew when it became the site of one of the oldest railway connections between US and Mexico in the late 1800s.
[00:38:01.11] Throughout the 20th century, the border provided opportunities for commerce, both legal and illegal, contributing to further urban growth. Today in Nogales, Arizona, has just over 20,000 residents. More than 90% of them are Hispanic or Latino. They identify themselves as Mexican. And many are dual citizens.
[00:38:23.10] At least 10 and possibly 20 times as many people live on the other side in Nogales, Sonora, which swelled when migrants from other regions came looking for work and eagerly joined the ranks of cheap, non-unionized labor force in American owned assembly plants. There were more than 100 maquiladoras in the city, manufacturing everything from door knobs and locks to components for aerospace industry and hospital supplies, including, perhaps ironically, IV tubing, cervical collars, and nitrile gloves that emergency responders in Arizona use when treating injured border crossers.
[00:39:05.01] That's just the extension of the city. And this is the extension of that city. It's just got a border in the middle of it, a captain in Nogales fire department once told me. Trying to disentangle the two communities according to the jurisdictional boundary conflicts with operational logic of emergency response. Critical infrastructure in Ambos Nogales is intermeshed. Up to 1,600 trucks loaded with fresh fruits and vegetables pass through the port of entry every day. And that's 1/3 of all US imports from Mexico.
[00:39:39.81] Union Pacific trains also cross the divided city every day. Northbound railway carries Ford cars from the company's manufacturing plant in Hermosillo. And southbound it hauls tanks with propane gas and industrial chemicals, mainly sulfuric acid bound to the copper mines in Sonora.
[00:40:01.05] Running parallel to the railways in Nogales wash, which I already mentioned, the intermittent stream that serves as the major gravity drainage system for both cities, begins uphill in Mexico, flows through a three mile long tunnel, and re-emerges about one mile north of the border in Arizona. The wash gathers so much water that it not only takes away people, but also vehicles. And the rescue operations that begin in Mexico often end up in the United States as body recoveries.
[00:40:34.29] Then there is the IOI, which is an international outfall interceptor, a fancy name for a sewer line, which carries raw sewage from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, to the wastewater treatment plant in the Rio Rico, Arizona. And this too often ruptures, for example, when blocked by bundles of drugs, flooding the streets with toxic organic waste. People, too, have been swept in the sewer and recovered miles north of the border.
[00:41:08.92] All of this infrastructure goes through the tunnel, which shows cracks and is at risk of structural collapse. As one public health official described the situation, these are three layers of nightmare and perhaps more. And this is just official critical infrastructure. Over 100 illicit cross-border tunnels have been discovered in Nogales since the 1990s.
[00:41:32.64] Terrain plays an important role in emergency scenarios on the border. As I mentioned, Arizona is downstream, downwind, and downhill from Sonora. A former Santa Cruz County emergency manager who later administered EPA's border 2020 program liked to say, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in Nogales, Sonora, doesn't stay there. It comes and affects us." So in 1983, Mexico and the US signed the La Paz agreement for the protection and improvement of the environment in the border area, which also included provisions for working together in emergency situations located within 100 miles of the border.
[00:42:17.98] Ambos Nogales and other sister cities in Arizona and Sonora have signed mutual aid agreements to assist each other in emergencies that threaten public health, safety, and welfare of residents on either side of the border. Dozens of emergency responders in Mexico have been trained as hazmat technicians. Northcom, EPA, and the state of Arizona provided them with equipment, such as hazmat kits and fully encapsulated level A suits required to work in hot zones of chemical and biological emergencies.
[00:42:51.41] So what we see in Nogales is a misalignment of two security paradigms, two security paradigms with different approaches to space. The first enacted by CBP is territorial. It is based on the Westphalian system of sovereign nation states codified in international law. It is anchored onto a piece of land endowed with nationalist imaginaries and circumscribed by political boundaries. Its operative principle is the defense of this enclosed space. Hence, the importance of fortifying the barrier, the border wall, tactical infrastructure, deployed to control desired and undesired flows.
[00:43:38.23] In recent decades, we've also seen a shift in this paradigm as the category of risk expanded to include all threats and hazards. Security tactics adapted to the logic of anticipation and preparedness and adopted practices of preemption, including mitigating potential threats before they ever reach the territorial boundaries. Yet this paradigm continues to rely on a purely legal definition of defensible space.
[00:44:09.37] A different paradigm, in this case at least fleetingly presented by the EPA, works on scales that are both smaller and larger than sovereign states. It is anti-territorial, but not anti-spatial. It takes the materiality of terrain very seriously. Rather than being a blank screen on which political aspirations are projected or a site of an emergency that randomly falls on one or the other side of a jurisdictional line, this paradigm acknowledges that the environment, both built and natural, acts to make emergency happen.
[00:44:49.90] Emergency responders are caught up in this tension between the two paradigms of security. On the one hand, fire and rescue departments across the US have become increasingly enfolded into the operations of the national security state and absorbed into political and administrative system of Federal Emergency Management. On the other hand, however, their work requires pragmatic engagement with built and natural environment that depoliticizes space and that allows for a temporary erasure of legal boundaries.
[00:45:22.90] On the US-Mexico border, the jurisdictional line brings this disjuncture of two security paradigms into focus. It is here that we must account for the role of law in deliberately modifying the environment to cause harm, yet it is also here that we see how the politics of space can be suspended and supplanted by the primacy of physical terrain.
[00:45:50.65] Since the wildfires that start on one can in one country often jump to another-- for example, US Forest Service and the National Forestry Commission, CONAFOR, in Mexico have an agreement which allows these agencies to combine resources to fight wildland fires when they are 10 miles within the international border. So it allows US helicopters to fly into Mexico to do water drops or Mexican crews to come work in the US.
[00:46:20.44] In municipal fire departments in Ambos Nogales have an even longer history of cooperation in different emergencies, from structure fires to search and rescue operations. Since Nogales Sonora has very few hydrants, it's a long tradition for the firefighters in Nogales, Arizona to supply them with water, often hooking up hoses to hydrants on the US side and passing them over or through the fence to their peers in Mexico to extinguish fires.
[00:46:52.84] And this is the now famous photograph of a 2012 fire, which happened in Nogales Sonora in Hotel San Enirque when the fire department from Nogales, Arizona, brought a ladder which is over 100 feet, extended it over the wall and helped the Mexicans extinguish the fire. The American firefighter who was in the bucket directing the aerial attack was technically inside Mexican territory, without any special permission, so for a longest time his colleagues mockingly called him mojadito, a wetback, which is usually a derogatory term used to refer to unauthorized Mexican migrants by invoking the real or metaphorical crossing of the Rio Grande. So this photograph by Manuel Coppola is an iconic representation of the brotherhood that exists between Mexican and American firefighters.
[00:47:52.94] So I will end by reference to a quote from Franz Kafka's novel, The Great Wall of China. I will not read the quote here. The idea is that the Great Wall in Kafka's novel had to be built piece by piece and the way jubilant celebrations held to mark the completion of each new section, which is a powerful parable of state building.
[00:48:21.01] The US-Mexican border wall will never be finished. Topography makes it impossible and unnecessary. Like the Great Wall of China, it is being constructed piecemeal and to boost the faith of those who participate in the Sisyphean effort, as well as to assuage the impatience of those who strongly support the project without ever having seen the border. Politicians make speeches against the background of the ever taller and more technologically sophisticated fence. At the press conference, which was held during his visit to Nogales in April, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the border the ground zero in the fight against criminal gangs and cartels.
[00:49:02.98] To the public, the material form of the border wall is less important than the metaphor. The metaphor unites the nation. It provides historical continuity and marks the territorial boundary of state sovereignty, offering imaginary protection against people that many only know through their negative representation. But the steel barrier cleaves communities and mutilates bodies. And I try to show that it works also as a weapon in the government's wars on immigration, just as it does in its war on drugs and terror.
[00:49:42.10] Thank you very much. I wanted to say a special thank you to my research assistant Michelle Borbon for finding some of the amazing photographs that are used here.
[00:49:52.15] [APPLAUSE]