Response paper week 5 Mario Macías

ANTH 584 - An Anthropology of Migration

Summary
From the lens of urban anthropology, Nunez’s work explores how peripheral places, such as
Colonias, can help us understand broader framings of the spatial dynamics of economic
globalization. Cities, communities and Colonias, center, and periphery spaces, help us to
understand the dynamics between capital, labor, and human interaction. Studying the El Paso del
Norte located on the periphery of the borderlands of the state of New Mexico, the author
suggests that the Colonias are spaces influenced by racialized, class-based, linguistic, and
gendered ideologies (2010: 147). Looking closely at the dynamics in these spaces can provide us
with tools for our understanding of the community building process. Making use of the work of
Setha Low, Nuñez mentions that colonias are “landscapes and places of experience and value,
social interactions, struggles, and personal histories of community members (2010: 148). Nuñez
continues by mentioning that there are precisely these spaces on the periphery where acts of
violence, product of economic crises, segregation, repression, and alienation, impact individuals
with greater severity, exposing the social inequalities characteristic of the urbanization process
take place. The colonies in the Borderlands are an iconic, since among their inhabitants, rely the
main gears of the workforce that make possible the operation of key industries such as
agriculture, the manufacturing sector, and services in bigger cities. The Colonies are not only
spaces of the periphery, but, in turn, host cultural wealth, a constant struggle for recognition and
subsistence. The colonies have been spaces that have attracted migrants to settle in these
territories and that over time have housed families, in transit spaces, and back and forth
movements across the border by their inhabitants. Local dynamics and settlement patterns have
changed dramatically since the 1990s and early 2000s, mainly due to the implementation of
NAFTA, and the 9/11 attacks. As a result, the colonies have been buffers zones at the midst of
two boundaries clashing, exposing the inequalities of capital, and the continuum of the urban and
rural, and the national-international-transnational.
In the introduction to the book “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence
in Texas,” Monica Martinez recapitulates the way in which the United States-Mexico border
came to be. Her work dates to the annexation of half of the Mexican territory to the United States
with the signature from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 to the second decade of the
twentieth century (1920). The borderlands are the history marked by violence, the rationalization
and segregation of ethnic Mexicans, the imposition of white supremacy, and the delimitation and
territorial jurisdiction of the border limits between these two countries. In detail, Martínez makes
a historical account of the importance of events that took place in the borderlands that continue
to have echoes in the violence, militarization and narrative of the "illegal" subject that the US
state seeks to maintain. The author mentions that looking to the past can throw threads into the
present situation on the border of anti-immigrant rhetoric, fear and terror as strategies of control,
surveillance and the use of force under the name of sovereignty and nation. One of the key points
in this process was the creation of institutions designated for the control and jurisdiction of the
border territory in order to protect the recently acquired territory from a latent and growing
“threat.” This paranoia for the security of the border territories was accompanied by the creation

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Response paper week 5 Mario Macías
ANTH 584 - An Anthropology of Migration
Week 5 – Life in the Borderlands
of institutions like Texas Rangers, in the 1920s the creation of the border patrol, and repeatedly
the use of the armed forces to protect this border. The US nation-building project since the
annexation of Mexican territory has sought to erase the histories and geographies of people who
previously inhabited the border areas and pose them as unwanted enemies of the nation state.
This project has not been a homogeneous one, but a changing one over time plagued with many
contradictions. The only constant in this process, Martínez suggests, has been the imposition of
American white supremacy on this geography through violence and terror. But the US project
has failed to completely erase the stories and accounts that are passed down from generation to
generation of inhabitants of the region who denounce the practices of violence and terror to
which they have been subjected. The oral accounts, Martinez suggests, are part of this project to
recover the untold stories of the border. Stories that seek to humanize and give face to the
Mexican populations that for centuries have inhabited the borderlands. Oral histories enable the
possibility of “recording community knowledge” (2018: 26).
Mendoza-Denton's work focuses on the sociolinguistic aspects of the growing Latino
population in the United States and its impact on the economic and political spheres within the
dominant American rhetoric. The author seeks to understand how, through language and its
practices, discourses are constructed and sustained in spaces of politics representation, identity
and claim of rights and space. Her work focuses on two specific points: first, in understanding
microstructural linguistic dynamics and variation in the growing Latino population; and second,
in how these are used in “discourse, folklore, language ideology, and the media” (1999: 376).
Through these linguistic forms, Latinos challenge structures of racism, militarization of the
border, normativity, and the idea of belonging, among others that are constituted through
contacts across “boundaries, borders, and isoglosses” (388). In her work, the author seeks to
break with more than physical and national borders, by suggesting that the fluidity of language
and the connectivity that it enables, allows us to think about diversity, and other forms of
connectivity outside the normative forms of citizenship. For her, there are many possible ways of
being and belonging. By jumping back and forth from the micro and macro levels, the author
helps us understand the impact that language in the process of formation of individual
subjectivities and sociopolitical aspects that constitute larger discourses of ethnicity, language,
and gender among the Latino community .

Critique
Martinez and Núñez's work made me think in detail about what Butler calls the "right to be
grief." Here, Butler asks us who are those that we grief, and those that are not, are not fully
consider humans in particular cultural context. In the works of Martinez and Nuñez, they
underline the question who count as a human, why, and what is the purpose of establishing this
ideology. I believe that these two authors do an excellent job of addressing these questions
through a historical approach. The objective on nation states continue in the same axis, that of
creating a public enemy that allows the justification of the militarization of the border and the
legitimacy of the violence that takes place in the borderlands. A key point is to bring back history
and oral accounts of those "forgotten" in the official history and erased from the Borderlands

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Response paper week 5 Mario Macías
ANTH 584 - An Anthropology of Migration
Week 5 – Life in the Borderlands
maps. Returning to Butler and her approach to grief, examples such as 9/11, comparing the
treatment of the AID epidemic in Africa and the United States, the war in Afghanistan, among
others, makes us think about who‘s lives count as lives and more importantly , who counts as
human? This public grief (and denial of grief) are crucial in reproducing the dichotomy between
"us" and "them" that works as the mechanism of power through which life is reproduced. The
regime in power and its regulations then determine who can be grief and who cannot (otherness)
devaluing the lives of certain individuals. So much violence, terror, fear, and surveillance in the
name of national sovereignty, territory, and national security.

Insight
In the last two sessions of this course we have seen that, unlike how the United States-Mexico
border is constantly portrayed in the media, the borderlands are spaces of diversity, culture,
cultural richness. Sadly, they are also witnessing spaces of violence, fear, the force of the state,
the social and economic injustices characteristic of our contemporaneity. But this opens spaces
for change, struggle, and resistance. The notion of community and solidarity is abundant, and
these can be key tools for significant structural changes in the lives and spaces of people in the
Borderlands. Justice must go beyond the social and incorporate economic and environmental
spheres in times as critical as this.

References
ALARCÓN, AMADO, and JOSIAH McC. HEYMAN. 2013. “Bilingual Call Centers at the US-
Mexico Border: Location and Linguistic Markers of Exploitability.” Language in Society
42 (1): 1–21.

Martinez, Monica Muñoz. 2018. Introduction to The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican
Violence in Texas. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University
Press. Pages 1-29.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1999. “Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology of US Latinos.”

Núñez, Guillermina Gina, and Georg M. Klamminger. 2010. “Centering the Margins: The
Transformation of Community in Colonias on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” In Cities and
Citizenship at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Paso Del Norte Metropolitan Region, edited
by Kathleen Staudt, César M. Fuentes, and Julia E. Monárrez Fragoso, 147–72. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112919_7.