CEDLA Lecture: Wall as Weapon

Wall as Weapon: Infrastructure, Injury and Rescue on the US-Mexico Border
Ieva Jusionyte, Harvard University 

Criminalization of immigration since the 1990s, aggravated by concerns with terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, led the United States government to designate the border with Mexico as a source of threats and waging there what has been called “a low-intensity warfare.” The wall is a key component of what the Border Patrol calls “tactical infrastructure,” a weapon against those who try to cross into the United States without authorization. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with emergency responders on both sides of the border, where they rescue injured migrants as well as fight fires that know no political jurisdictions, this talk examines the negative effects of deploying both the built environment and the natural topography in the name of national security.