Contention 1 – Border Crossing
“I Am Valerie”
By: Valerie Axtle
My grandparent’s crossed the border through deserts and huge rivers to come to America to have a better
life and create a future for their kids and grandchildren.
But what do they get?
They get people telling them that they’re lazy, that they don’t work hard, they get stereotypes telling them
that they aren’t good enough to be able to live in America and get treated like a human being.
My mother and father scarified everything so that I can have a better future.
But yet I have to go through day by day living with this identity that the border has given me and my
ancestors.
The moment my family crossed the border they were assigned an identity based off of their skin color.
I am not an alien.
I am not only good enough to clean houses.
I am not a person who doesn’t work hard.
I am not here to steal your jobs.
I am not only good enough at picking crops.
I am not an alcoholic.
I am a person who works hard at everything I do.
I am a person who wants more than just a job and money.
I am a person who strives every day to prove that my ancestors are hardworking people.
I am a person who goes day by day surviving in a society full of stereotypes.
I am Aztec (Azteca)
I am Latina.
I am Valerie.
And I choose my own identity.
Historically the border has been a cite of hatred, violence and abject racism. It
has caused wars and left a lasting legacy of fear and oppression that extends far
beyond the borderlands.
Gloria Anzaldua, 1987, Border Lands La Frontera, pgs 7-8, a scholar of Chicana cultural
theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, Seized complete political power,
stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el
destierro y el exilo fuimos desunados, destroncados, destripados-we were jerked out by the
roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our
history. Many, under the threat of Anglo terrorism, abandoned homes and ranches and went to Mexico.
Some stayed and protested. But as the courts, law enforcements officials, and government
officials not only ignored their pleas but penalized them for their efforts, tejanos had no other
recourse but armed retaliation. After Mexican-American resisters robbed a train in Brownsville, Texas
on October 18, 1915, Anglo vigilante groups began lynching Chicanos. Texas Rangers would take
them into the brush and shoot them. One hundred Chicanos were killed in a matter of
months, whole families lynched. Seven thousand fled to Mexico, leaving their small ranches and
farms. The Anglos, afraid that the mexicanos would seek independence from the U.S. brought
in 20,000 army troops to put an end to the social protest movement in South Texas .. Race
hatred had finally fomented into an all-out war.
In many Mexican homes that fear of violence and leaving has resulted in stories
designed to terrify people. Women considering border crossing encounter a
culturally rooted fear of leaving home for the broader world.
Gloria Anzaldua, 1987, Border Lands La Frontera, pgs. 35-36, a scholar of Chicana cultural
theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
It was known among the mexicanos that if you walked down the road late at night you would
see a woman dressed in white floating about, peering out the church window. She would
follow those who had done something bad or who were afraid. Los mexicanos called her “la
Lila”. Some thought she was la Llorona. She was, I think, Cihuacoatl, Serpent Woman, ancient
Aztec goddess of the earth, of war and birth, patron of midwives, and antecedent of la Llorona.
Covered with chalk Cihuacoatl wears a white dress with a decoration half red and half black.
Her hair forms two little horns (which the Aztecs depicted as knives) crossed on her forehead.
The lower part of her face is a bare jawbone, signifying --death. On her back she carries a
cradIe, the knife of sacrifice swaddled as if it were her papoose, her child. Like la Llorona,
Cihuacoatl howls and weeps in the night, screams as if demented. She brings mental
depression and sorrow. Long before it takes place, she is the first to predict something is to
happen. Back then, I, an unbeliever, scoffed at these Mexican superstitions as I was taught in
Anglo school. Now, I wonder if these stories and similar ones were the cultures attempt to
“protect” members of the family, especially girls, from “wandering” Stories of the devil luring
young girls away and having his way with them discouraged us from going out. There's an
ancient Indian tradition of burning the umbilical cord of an infant girl under the house so she will
never stray from it and her domestic role.
Even if Cihuacoatl is a mythic figure the violence experienced in border crossing
is not. Undocumented Females go through so many things to just get across the
border
Gloria Anzaldua, 1987, Border Lands La Frontera, pgs 12-13, a scholar of Chicana cultural
theory, feminist theory, and queer theory.
But big farming combines, farm bosses and smugglers who bring them in make money off the
"Wetbacks'" labor-they don't have to pay federal minimum wages, or ensure adequate
housing or sanitary conditions. The Mexican woman is especially at risk. Often the coyote
(smuggler) doesn't feed her for days or let her go to the bathroom. Often he rapes her or sells
her into prostitution. She cannot call on county or state health or economic resources because
she doesn't know English and she fears deportation. American employers are quick to take
advantage of her helplessness. She can't go home. She's sold her house, her furniture,
borrowed from friends in order to pay the coyote who charges her four or five thousand
dollars to smuggle her to Chicago. She may work as a live-in maid for white, Chicano or Latino
households for as little as $15 a week. Or work in the garment industry, do hotel work.
Isolated and worried about her family back home, afraid of getting caught and deported,
living with as many as fifteen people in one room, the Mexicana suffers serious health
Problems. Se enferma de los nervios, de alta presion. La mojada, la mujer indocumentada" is
doubly threatened in this country. Not only does she have to contend with sexual violence, but like
all women, she is prey to a sense of physical helplessness. As a refugee, she leaves the familiar
and safe home ground to venture into Unknown and possibly dangerous terrain. This is her
home this thin edge of barbwire.
Entrance into the US does not ensure safety – it ensures a permanently
fractured identity – la mestiza cannot be wished away or assimilated.
Gloria Anzaldua, 1987, Border Lands La Frontera, pgs. 79-80, a scholar of Chicana cultural
theory, feminist theory, and queer theory
La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking,
analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western
mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals
and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new
mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She
learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She
learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic modenothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned.
Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. She
can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event which
inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I'm not sure exactly how. The work takes place
underground-subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs. That focal point or fulcrum,
that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the
possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or
separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In
attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than
the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness-a mestiza
consciousness-and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual
creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary as peer of each new paradigm.
Voting aff the mestiza consciousness is to endorse a rupture in dualistic thinking of the subject
object dichotomy
Gloria Anzaldua, 1987, Border Lands La Frontera, pgs. 79-80, a scholar of Chicana cultural
theory, feminist theory, and queer theory
En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on
the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By
creating a new mythos- that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see
ourselves, and the ways we behave- La mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of
mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner
and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The
answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females,
lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our
languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and
collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best
hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.
Plan – the United States Federal Government should substantially curtail it’s
domestic surveillance of the border between the United States of America and
the United Mexican States.
Contention 2 – Border Thinking
Customs and border patrol and the DHS are clear – border surveillance is crucial
to maintaining a “safe and secure” border. The technologies, infrastructure and
personnel at the border are all part of the surveillance used to maintain control.
Williams ‘9
Tiffany Williams, IACP Technology Center Outreach Coordinator, 9-9-2009, "Police Chief
Magazine," The Police Chief,
http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display&article_id=1
895&issue_id=92009
The mission of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) (U.S. Border Patrol) is to “…secure America’s
borders; to protect the American public against terrorism and the instruments of terror; and to enforce the laws of the United
States while fostering its economic security through lawful international trade and travel.”1 As a component of the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Border Patrol comprises approximately 20,000 agents that work at and around
U.S. borders in an effort to keep Americans safe. The U.S. Border Patrol patrols the United States’ southern border
from Texas to California, all of the Floridian border continuing along the Louisiana (the gulf coast) border and the Caribbean Ramey
sector of Puerto Rico. To the north, U.S. Border Patrol patrols the U.S. border from Washington to Maine. The
U.S. Border
Patrol is responsible for securing America’s borders beyond the specified ports of entry . This
encompasses different terrains and remote locations varying from the desolate deserts to water borders. To better secure the
borders, there are three main components employed: technology, infrastructure, and
personnel. The Enforcement and Information Technology (EIT) division of the U.S. Border Patrol Headquarters in Washington,
D.C., focuses on the technology aspect. Due to the breadth of the issues surrounding border protection, it is not
surprising that the U.S. Border Patrol’s responsibility for patrolling thousands of miles of the border requires its
technology “tool belt” to include emerging technologies that not only promote mobility, but also create
the best possible level of surveillance and protection. Remote Surveillance Systems Patrolling
remote areas of the borsder is an arduous task as these areas are ideal locations for persons intending to illegally
cross the border. The U.S. Border Patrol is able to better patrol these areas due in part to its deployment of the Remote
Video Surveillance System (RVSS). The RVSS is strategically placed along the northern and
southern borders and consists of two sets of camera systems affixed to a platform atop an 80foot pole. One is a thermal nighttime camera; the other, a color daytime camera. Their pan-tilt
ability allows them to move in different directions to ensure a comprehensive level of surveillance, for example, while one set
of cameras looks east, the other looks west, overlapping each other to cover all areas. To date,
there are about 290 RVSS sites across both the northern and southern borders. Some of these sites
are situated in such remote locations that they operate by solar energy and generators. The remote location of these
RVSS sites allows the U.S. Border Patrol to focus on potentially prime crossing points for illegal
traffickers. EIT division chief Steve Evans emphasizes that the system is “not a catchall.” But it is one of many helpful tools used
to fight illegal border crossings and ultimately allows the U.S. Border Patrol to strategically place its manpower. Mobile
Surveillance Systems In conjunction with the RVSS, the Mobile Surveillance System (MSS) that is used by the
U.S. Border Patrol allows the same type of security and surveillance as the RVSS, but it has the
mobile component that is necessary to cover a larger area. The MSS is a camera mounted on a
high pole affixed to a large flatbed truck, thus allowing it to be mobile. In addition to the camera
bundles, the MSS has a radar unit that is particularly helpful in the desert environment. Moreover, the U.S. Border Patrol
uses Mobile Remote Video Surveillance Systems (MRVSS), or “scope trucks,” that are smaller than the MSS
trucks and permit access to more remote locations. Unattended Ground Sensors The U.S. Border Patrol has been
using sensors to detect motion for years; however, it has adapted to evolving technologies that are more precise and intelligent.
These modern sensors are strategically placed upon the recommendation of the field agents in problem locations. The Unattended
Ground Sensors (UGS) come in three main forms: seismic, magnetic, and infrared. The seismic sensors detect ground movement; the
magnetic ones recognize metal in passing vehicles; and the infrared sensors respond to the breakage of spatial planes. The U.S.
Border Patrol is mindful of the environmental limitations of sensors, for example, the seismic sensors are not appropriate for
northern borders because of frozen ground affecting their functionality. The U.S. Border Patrol analyzes different terrains to
decipher which areas would benefit from what particular types of sensor in order to ensure their effectiveness. E3/IDENT The
E3/IDENT is a technology that was created to assist in evaluating arrests and in collecting the
biometrics and photographs of apprehended persons. This technology allows agents to secure
this information and forward it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Within 8 to 10 minutes, agents
will receive historic federal criminal information on individuals. Moreover, it will display whether or not an
individual currently is wanted for a criminal offense. Another component is its capability to access the
INS/IDENT database in order to search for possible immigration violations. Results and Moving Forward Assistant Chief of the U.S.
Border Patrol, Robert Nelson, claims that EIT “fills the immediate technology gap.” Both Chiefs Nelson and Evans stress the
importance of using technology to better secure U.S. borders. Chief Evans is constantly searching for and learning about emerging
technologies that will better assist his team in their mission. It is imperative to note that all
three components—
technology, infrastructure, and personnel—play important and interconnected roles in
securing U.S. borders. Overall, the combined use of all three contributed to 723,825 apprehensions in fiscal year 2008 and
ultimately assisted in keeping U.S. citizens safe.
Curtailing border surveillance deauthorizes the walls and policing of the status
quo. It allows for the elaboration of border thinking and the mestiza identity
which creates new horizons of hybridity and creative ethical possibilities.
Mena ‘13
Olivia Mena, is a doctoral student at the London School of Economics researching the contemporary proliferation of border walls
and fences around the world. 12/9/13 Intervention – ‘Removing the Monument to Overcoming Walls: Reflections on Contemporary
Border Walls and the Politics of De-bordering’ http://antipodefoundation.org/2013/12/09/removing-the-monument-to-overcomingwalls/
Only a few years ago, when global leaders celebrated the twentieth anniversary of this iconic wall’s destruction, several countries
were continuing to build walls in sites like the U.S.-Mexico border, Egypt’s border with Gaza, and all along Saudi Arabia’s borders.
Since 2001 there have been more than 30 new national border barriers—proposed, under construction, or finished—around the
globe.[1] These new fences
and walls are touted as necessary measures for the securitization of
national borders in the face of economic migration and global terrorism. The closure and
controls in the borderlands, the traditional laboratories for new forms of policing and
surveillance, are a particularly important place to think about our bounded present — a
contemporary reality where we experience the growing ontologies of walling that range from
gated residential communities
in metropolitan squares
(Blakely and Snyder 1999; Low 2003)
(Hancox 2011)
to portable protest walls deployed
to national border fences .
Some early inter-disciplinary discussions have started to identify contemporary national border walls and fences as part of a
coherent global phenomenon, opening up questions about the spatialities of nation-state sovereignty in relationship to unbounded
global capital, walls’ powerful symbolism, and the structures’ enduring consequences (Andreas and Synder 2000; Davis 2005; Brown
2010; Jeffrey et al. 2011; Jones 2012; Journal of Borderland Studies 2012). However, there
is a need to revisit some of
these recent assessments of the phenomenon of border walling with ‘border thinking’, an
epistemological position that was born in the borderlands, most notably in the work of Chicana theorist
Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), that opens up different kinds of resources and ways thinking that challenge
and de-authorize systems of closure and enclosure. Chicano/a theorizing, more than any other discipline, began
to elaborate the border as a central place to theorize the complex geo-political and postcolonial relationship between the United States and Mexico, emphasizing the ways in which
the borderland serves as a ‘heartland’ for new political horizons of hybridity, creativity, and
moral possibilities (Michaelsen and Johnson 1997: 3, 22). Border theory (Anzaldúa 1987; Hicks 1991; Rosaldo 1993;
Saldívar 1997) offers a unique framework premised in resistance that privileges the border as a
site of “creative cultural production” which calls out the “mixed” border inhabitant’s
(fronterizo and mestiza) birth right and expert knowledge in crossing physical, intellectual,
linguistic, and cultural barriers (Rosaldo, quoted in Michaelsen and Johnson 1997).
Ethics and politics cannot be separated – building the surveillance technologies
at the border is an ethic of security and hostility we must reject that ethics
without abandoning the law to create more radical hospitable ethics. It is the
best way to disrupt the naturalization of the exclusion and violence against
Latina/o people and culture.
Zylinska 04 (Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths,
University of London, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies Vol.18 No.4, July 2004, pg. 526)
The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and prospective guests - even, or perhaps especially , unwanted
ones - is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical problem. ‘It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one’s
identity, one’s space, one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp. 149/151,
emphasis added). Of course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming or even impossible. But ethics
in fact spans two different realms: it is always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for
my place under the sun and open to the alterity of the other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos, of singular
customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see ethics as situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer
we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in fact, why we will be
responding to it no matter what. Even if we respond ‘nonethically’ to our guest by imposing on him a norm or political
why
legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended
period of time, send him back, cut off his benefits or place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In
our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction , which does not of course mean that
we will ‘respond ethically’ to it (by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies
the paradox, we will respond ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will make us take a stand, even
if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has
happened). The ethics of bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws
this sense,
and acts of the polis and delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging .
Indeed, in their respective readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law towards the foreigner
that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered but also that we can think community and kinship
otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based on what Derrida calls ‘a conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the
familial despot, the father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality’ (2000, p. 149),
openness towards the alien and the foreign changes the very nature of the polis , with its Oedipal
kinship structures and gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations developed by queer communities but
also as a result of developments in genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity and kinship that
protects state boundaries against the ‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be left wanting. This
is not necessarily to advise a
carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all passports and opening all borders
(although such actions should at least be considered ), but to point to the possibility of
resignifying these laws through their (improper) reiteration. Enacted by political subjects whose own
embodiment remains in the state of tension with the normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie
these laws, the laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf. Butler 1993, p. 231).It
is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political subjectivity and kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and
Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from
Levinas’ writings - indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler allows us to
redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question the mechanisms of their constitution. Her ‘others’
are not
limited to ‘the stranger’, ‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the more acceptable others
who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the
drag queen / people whose bodies and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship
structures - that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of universalization, Butler
mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus creates an
opportunity for its radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not thus
amount to waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum seeker to knock, and extending a
helping hand to him or her. It also involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my life to
the extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a stranger in the skin of my own
home.
Plan is a key reimagination of the legal and surveillance structures of the border
– imagining the plan happens is important to stop the criminalization of un or
under documented migrants which fosters a broad climate of racism and
xenophobia.
Mena ‘13
Olivia Mena, is a doctoral student at the London School of Economics researching the contemporary proliferation of border walls
and fences around the world. 12/9/13 Intervention – ‘Removing the Monument to Overcoming Walls: Reflections on Contemporary
Border Walls and the Politics of De-bordering’ http://antipodefoundation.org/2013/12/09/removing-the-monument-to-overcomingwalls/
Historically, border walls have been a key marker of spatio-political reconfigurations of
extractive global economies that set territorial limits for human participation and labor. In the
colonial context in particular, these spatial divisions were constitutive of racialized lines of
participation and segregation . These spatial divides serve as the foundations for new juridical
frameworks of exploitation and exclusion. Working on the margins and thresholds is a
strategic way of expanding borders juridically and politically (Weizman 2012: 94). In the
contemporary context of different borderlands communities, where the terrestrial movement of capital and
humans converge, this often takes shape in vertical arrangements that include not only walls and
fences, but also bridges, drones, blimps, helicopters, and other tools of war and surveillance.
These infrastructural changes are constitutive of legal changes, which increasingly criminalize
and monetize the act of being un- or under-documented and foster a wider cultural climate of
xenophobia and racism.
The new ‘legibility of statecraft’ that these walls offer recasts the terms of belonging and
exclusion inside the heterogeneous realities of the borderlands (Scott 1998). Because a rhetoric of
‘national security’ or a ‘state of emergency’ is often used to justify the securitization of national
borders, the legal avenues for people challenging these structures, and the polices and
practices they symbolize and engender, are limited.
At a time when there are more memorable instances of contemporary wall building than the tearing down of walls, I want to recall
two important recent instances of de-bordering from different communities challenging the legitimacy of the border walls that cross
them, and conclude by situating the
politics of de-bordering as a crucial component in the imaginative
and political work of envisaging convivial counter-geographies of hospitality.