En Contra de un Genocidio: Las Muertes en la Frontera

Haunting Memorabilia: Colonial Modernitites and Necropolitics along the Desert’s Highway

“In the desert, Levis last longer than meat.”
-Mexican Consul in Tucson
(from The Devils Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea)


This essay is an attempt to use the theoretical frameworks of necropolitics , colonial modernities , and haunting memorabilia to analyze the ways in which the migrant deaths at the border between the U.S. and Mexico are casualties that too often resemble genocide. The overarching questions are about whose deaths matter most along the U.S. –Mexico border? What are the implications of race and how does race matters along the border? Which deaths are visible and which are invisible? Putting side by side the usual ransoms offered by the U.S. government in its flashing red announcements on the San Ysidro port of entry for information that could lead to the arrests for the deaths of its border patrol agents who died in the line of duty against the unresolved death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas at the hands of the border patrol agents who teased and beat him to death the night of May 31, 2010 for reportedly ‘refusing deportation’. Whose lives matter? Whose bodies are disposable?

In an attempt to elucidate an answer to these questions, I will use theories read in the course, Jorge Ramos and Luis Alberto Urrea’s texts of investigative reporting on the migrant deaths along the border, the timeless and absurdly revealing “Paso del Norte” from El Llano en Llamas by Juan Rulfo, published in 1953. My theoretical framework though, will borrow from the theories of colonial modernity and necropolitics from Achilles Mbembe as well as the theories of haunting from Avery F. Gordon. Also, I will use a photograph taken by a Migrant as he or she made his or her way into across the desert and into the horror of being undocumented in this country. He or She is now a shadow.

U.S. – Mexico Border History and Memory

According to Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, to articulate the past historically means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. To seize, is to use force, to exercise power, thus history is an appropriation, it is a moment, (or a memory) captured within a power struggle, and thus history making is a tool of the ruling class to manipulate and control what, where, when, why and how are memories appropriated and implemented into the official history. In fact, this is precisely the mechanism by which the colonial archives are historically sealed. That is also the ways in which the colonial power is made invisible or naturalized and at the same time, it is what refurbishes colonialism into neocolonialism or even the problematic post-colonialism.

The sealing of the colonial archive by the colonialist and the policing of who has access is to its subjugating language, to its detailed uses, exertions and articulations of power as well as its classified information of its uses of terror are indeed the colonists most important ideological weaponry. Pierre Nora, in Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, sustains that “a process of interior decolonization has affected ethnic minorities, families, groups that until now have possessed reserves of memory but little or no historic capital”. In another part of his essay, Nora asserts that: “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present. History is a representation of the past”. The infrastructure of colonialism in one that has mechanized the political uses of the split and the sites of convergence (because it somehow it does both, divide and unite) of History and Memory, Nora’s Les Lieux de Memoire, in order to sustain the colonial order.

In fact, what Nora argues and what is relevant to me here is that there is a state orchestrated historical amnesia by the ruling class. It’s important to point to and deconstruct the political uses of forgetting, the construction of the subject who cannot remember, the erasures of certain collective memories, and the imposition of certain memorabilia that is the ideological sustenance behind U.S. Empire. One such example is the cry of “Remember the Alamo” , the slogan used by U.S. patriots to both remember and justify the “U.S. – Mexico War” of 1846-8 in its treasure box of national allegories. I recall a violent moment seating in a U.S. theater right on the San Ysidro border in which the colonial violence of this historic U.S. empire battle cry was transmitted to the present through the gasps and loud silences of a mostly Mexican audience as the preview screening of the film Remember the Alamo ended. History and memory were at full play in the audience reaction, the individual and collective masks of colonized psychologies were clearly exposed, and I was able to see the throbbing of the “herida abierta”, which is how Gloria Anzaldua refers to the “frontera” (the border) and to describe the violence of the colonial status of Chicano/as in the U.S. as an open wound.

Perhaps an honest study of the open wound may as well be a point of departure. Along that, though, one thematic question that may serve as the historical/memorial context of the colonial archive may be to ask how does one remember the “U.S.-Mexico War”. This key question must me answered in all its multiplicities, that is, the question must be asked over and over again just is the same ways as the colonial order is repetitious in space and time. So what is remembered about the so called war, when is the war remembered, where is the war remembered, how is the war remembered, and why is the war remembered are questions that need to be repeatedly posed if one’s political project here is to exercise a form od decolonizing journalism here within academic research, that is, unveil or begin to break the seal of the colonial archive.

In Nietzche, Genealogy, History, Michel Foucault makes two claims that serve my analysis of History and Memory as it relates to migrants who die along the desert attempting to reach the “American Dream”, that should instead be conceived as the American Horror. One, Foucault posits the body as the site of memory: “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body”. A genealogical reading of History and Memory in the path of death along the border is misconstrued if the corpses of the migrants are not read as the carriers and targets of colonial violence, if the freedom and right to kill of the U.S. empire, permitted and naturalized by its state of exception, is not recognized and challenged from the articulation of the horror done to the body and life of the migrant. How is the protection of U.S. sovereignty involved in political deaths along the border?

The attempt to answer such a question takes me to a second use of Foucault and that is how he uses the concept of liberty as the invention of the ruling class. This is particularly interesting as it applies to some of the discourse of the Minuteman Project as they embark on a quest to save “American liberties”. A Minuteman statement, in Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.-Mexico Border, said: We do not give away the American Dream. This dream of liberty, this dream of freedom, this dream of a government ran by ‘We, the people.’ That’s the reason I’m here as a Minuteman –I want to keep that dream alive.” This Minuteman quote though, has less to do with Foucault and more so with ideas masked ideas of sovereignty and freedom and democracy particularly in a space like the border which is a battleground and thus reigned by a state of U.S. exception.


Necropolitics

In the opening of “Necropolitcs”, Achille Mbembe states: “This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manisfestation of power .” Necropolitics, as a work of death, both in ideaological as well as material, uses the legal frameworks available to defend the sovereignty of the nation-state from perceived threats, these usually coming from and in the body of a racialized other. The most widely publicized example being the genocide of the Jews under German Nazi empire. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico Border, the death camps take the shape of a desert, or a train or a truck or the beatings of the border patrol agents.

Mbembe’s articulation of Necropilitcs draws on the concepts of biopower, notions of sovereignty, and the state of exception. Another important analysis in Mbembe’s essay is (to): “start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty –and therefore of the biopolotical”. As such, ideas around the concept of democracy such as sovereignty and American exceptionalism have more to do with a totalitarian state than with democracy now, in other words, democracy is a dark empty nebula that has been extinct of democratic properties. For instance, the current anti-immigrant laws that passed in the Arizona state legislature SB 1070 which mandated the expulsion of undocumented residents out of the state are a clear of example of what Mbembe calls: “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destructions of human bodies and populations. The Arizona desert is indeed the devil’s highway, as Luis Alberto Urrea’s journalistic account depicts the drama of the twenty-six migrants who embark to cross into the U.S. through the desert of Yuma Arizona; twelve barely make it, but fourteen collapse from heat-strokes in the sand.

Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, narrates the haunting horrors which continually take place in the desert: “men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they came from, one of them was barefoot. They were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked. Their eyes were cloudy with dust, almost too dry to blink up a tear. Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, standing in crowns from their scalps, old sweat because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine, the poisons clogging their systems.”

Although Urrea’s beautiful language and landscapes of the desert are stunning, they strike an uncomfortable reading, for the juxtaposition of wild life aesthetics and human death create a surreal picture of the colonial drama between the U.S. and Mexico. The lacunae in Urrea’s account of the tragedy though, and a key factor for me, is an analysis from a critical race, class, gender perspective. He doesn’t even mention that word racism! What would Urrea think about connecting notions of biopower with the incessant deaths of racialized undocumented human beings along the border? Mbembe, on the contrary, posits: “In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die.”

Jorge Ramos, in Dying to Cross, another chronicle of another atrocity in another fatal attempt of getting into the U.S. this time the case of nineteen people who died of asphyxiation, dehydration and heat exposure after being trapped in a trailer truck in Victoria, Texas in May 2003. Among the dead was a five-year old child whose body had stiffened as he hugged unto his father who was also dead. When the doors opened, Ramos narrates: “There was no light inside the trailer, and there were no flashlights handy, either…Inside, the dim shadows seemed to suggest piles of sweating flesh and broken wills. Not everyone jumped out of the trailer. Walking like zombies, some people found their way to the truck and, with difficulty, lowered themselves down the two or three steps that separated them from the ground. The few people who still found themselves with a bit of strength left in them helped the others out of the truck. When the doors were opened, some had regained consciousness, and with painstaking effort dragged themselves toward the door. Those who remained inside the trailer scarcely moved. Some were still as stone. We will never know exactly how many people were traveling inside the trailer.” Nineteen died and fifty-five survived, however there may have been eighty or one hundred. How many escaped? That will never be known for sure, concludes Ramos.

Mbembe allows a frame by which reported migrant deaths, about 3,600 reported deaths between October 1994 and October 2005 (these calculated number does not include the unreported deaths) may elucidate on how biopower is enforced in the border to kill people. Mbembe states that “the control of who lives and who dies is established through a biological caesura between the ones and the others, what Foucault labels with the term racism.” According to Mbembe, Hannah Arendt “suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death. Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death’. In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, ‘the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death”. What is important about this thread of theory in Mbembe’s necropolitcs is how sovereignty or the political and military assertion of biopower is linked to the conception and arrangement of the modern state: “Foucault states clearly tha the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function. Indeed, they can be seen”. These line of argument leads Mbembe to make a link of modernity, to concepts that are in turn produced by the modern states such as terror, class formation, and most importantly, the extraction of capital via slavery or more succinctly, out of enslaved bodies.

Colonial Modernities

Mbembe asserts that: “Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation. In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception. This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a “home”, loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master.” I posit, that this is a haunting close resemblance to the neo-slavery condition of the undocumented migrant who, I argue, if he or she is not killed by the border crossing as it (the desert, the ocean, the car, the border patrol agent) functions as a colonial modern tool of biopower and its politics of death, and he or she succeeds in entering the American horror, then he or she is left with a life to be lived as a shadow, as a subhuman, as a neo-slave of American capital, a mere instrument of labor. And pets, in America, have a loftier value.

Mbembe unveils the American horror of undocumented slave labor: “As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she as a value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity…Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life. As Susan Buck-Morss has suggested, the slave condition produces a contradiction between freedom of property and freedom of person.” This is exactly what the consul of Mexico in Tucson is indirectly saying to his interviewer Luis Alberto Urrea in The Devil’s Highway, of course in other words: “In the desert, Levis last longer than meat.”

Haunting Memorabilia

Photograph 207, of Adler’s Border Film Project, which is a publication resulting from the social experiment of distributing Kodak cameras to both Migrants and Minuteman on the U.S. –Mexico Border, is of a human bone. Perhaps in contestation of the consul of Mexico in Tucson, this bone decided to stay, to leave a trace, to haunt. This picture of this human bone may have haunted the consul perhaps, may want to haunt us or may haunt the presidency of Los Pinos in Mexico City or the White House in Washington D.C. This bone of a migrant who fearlessly left a trace of its existence was captured in a photograph by a migrant whose Kodak camera was, according to record, distributed in Naco, Sonora, and whose returning envelope was anonymous and I wonder what could have been in the migrants mind as he or she took the picture of the bone he/she encountered on his/her way across the desert.

Avery F. Gordon’s ghostly matters: Hauting and the Sociological Imagination, contends that: “to confront those who were lost on their way to North America in the flow of a juridically enforced international trade in human property is to contemplate ghosts and haunting at the level of the making and unmaking world historical events.” Adittionally, for Gordon, haunting recognition is a special way of knowing what has happened or is happening. She considers three characteristics of haunting: “One, the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the propriety and property lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. Second, the emphasis that the ghost is merely a symptom of what is missing, it gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. From a certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope. Finally, the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of concern for justice. Out of concern for justice would be the only reason one would bother”. In the concern for justice, one must ask, I ask, where do we place the memory of the migrant ghosts that continue to haunt the along the border, their families, the conscience of those who are willing to remember the deaths of the thousands who became ghosts at the border? Do the ghosts haunt The White House in Washigton D.C.? Los Pinos in Mexico City?

An excerpt from Urrea’s text describes the Ziplock bags in which the items left behind by the men who died (the Yuma 14) are filed in the Mexican Consular office in Tucson, AZ:

These were the things they carried.

John Doe # 36: red underpants, mesquite beans stuck to his skin.
John Doe # 37: no effects.
John Doe # 38: green socks.
John Doe # 39: a belt buckle with a fighting cock inlaid, one wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans.
John Doe # 40: no effects.
John Doe # 41: fake silver watch, six Mexican coins, one comb, a belt buckle with a spur inlaid, four pills in a foil strip –possibly Advil, or allergy gelcaps.
John Doe # 42: Furor Jeans, “had a color piece of paper” in pocket.
John Doe # 43: green handkerchief, pocket mirror in right front pocket.
John Doe # 44: Mexican bills in back pocket, a letter in right front packet, a brown wallet in left front pocket.
John Doe # 45: no record.
John Doe # 46: no record.
John Doe # 47: no effects; one tattoe: “Maria”.
John Doe # 48: Converse knockoff basketball shoes.
John Doe # 49: a photo ID of some sort, apparently illegible.

They came to the broken place of the world, and taken all together, they did not have enough items to fill a carry-on bag.

El Llano en Llamas, which translates to the burning plains, is a collection of short stories published in 1953 and were penned by the legendary Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, comes full circle in my analysis of colonial modernity, necropolitcs and the haunting memories of those migrants who have died and those who live a life-in-death in the U.S. in conditions of neo-slavery. The specific story I refer to is titled “El Paso del Norte”, the path north, and the dialogue between the ghost of the son as he informs his father of his death as he was shot by a border patrol agent crossing the Rio Bravo:

-Padre, nos mataron.
-A quienes?
-A nosotros. Al pasar el rio. Nos zumbaron las balas hasta que nos mataron a todos.
-En donde?
-Alla, en el Paso del Norte, mientras nos encandilaban las linternas, ibamos cruzando el rio.
-Y porque?
-Pues no lo supe, padre.

The border must be analyzed in ways in which it is key locale of global market profit continual profit of the market/the millions of investments that go into a business are done only after a careful analysis of its profitability, as such, the construction of the virtual wall, the rise in patrol, the new methods of crossing, both legal and illegal are a multinational business. No coincidence that also the state of California failed to sign the law which would have granted driving permits to undocumented California residents, there is big money being made both on the legal and illegal markets that profit hugely from the undocumented population.

There is a silence about the blatant continuation of profit for the United States economy as a result of the “U.S.-Mexico War” that resulted in the appropriation of half of Mexico’s northern territories by the U.S. government in 1848 . The profits are the economic and discursive reaps from biopower, necropilitcs, and colonial modernities as systems of subjugation that keep all immigrants (whether they are naturalized citizens, hold legal resident status or are undocumented) as America’s cheap labor source. The growth of the militarization of the U.S.- Mexico border, must be analyzed vis a vis the growth of the U.S. Prison Industrial Complex as sublets of U.S imperialism abroad.

Lawmakers in Arizona are preparing a new anti-immigrant law which will deny U.S. citizenship to newly-born of undocumented parents.

sin titulo

oscilar entre el norte y el sur
ver los pastos verdes de la jolla
tan bien cuidados, con sus ramitas
podadas a la perfeccion

como sera limpiar las ventanas
de esas mansiones en north torrey pines road
ver el mar sin verlo, o sentirlo
tan espectral, tan frio e inaccesible

tomar el camion de la tarde
el 30 que atraviesa y regresa
al sur a todos los podadores de plantas
y limpiadoras de cristales

devolverles la mentira: adios patroncito
hasta manana senora
deseando jamas regresar al norte
mas no tener otra opcion que volver

al dia siguiente, y oscilar
entre el norte y el sur, de nuevo.