Edward. S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border. University of Texas Press, Austin, 2014, 346 pages, $40.20 hardcover, $18.73 softcover. ISBN: 978-0-292-75841-4.

See Eduardo Mendieta's most recent Society & Space contributions: Being-with as Making Worlds: The ‘Second Coming’ of Peter Sloterdijk

“Walled in and without Home”

Instructions to readers: Begin by reading the whole of Franz Kafka’s parable “The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel” pages 25-26 in Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (1961). Kafka, who saw the future without prophesizing it, wrote in parables and allegories. This particular parable came to mind as I read Casey and Watkins’s book, because it foresaw the useless violence, the grotesque expenditure, and the ultimate futility of such an enterprise: to build a tower to storm the heavens, to build a wall to keep people out and to give a false sense of security. Like the allegorical Tower of Babel and the real Wall of China, our great Wall on the border with Mexico, will be a shameful reminder of the US’s imperial hubris but also our failure to live by our own best political and ethical values.

On a more pragmatic, contemporary, and less literary level, I am writing this text in the shadow of President Obama’s speech, now christened “Come out of the Shadows,” as well as the partisan and exorbitant reaction by Republicans denouncing the President’s plan to “deal responsibly with millions of undocumented immigrants who already live in our country.” In other words, I write about Casey and Watkins’s very timely book, in the shadow of yet another staging of the US’s struggle with its imperial and racial history, on the one hand, and its project and promise to be a beacon of light for the "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free"—to paraphrase—on the other hand. This book is a celebration, and invitation to a reaffirmation, of this project and promise.

Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border is a sui generis text. There is nothing like it that I could compare it to. It is co-authored by a phenomenologist and a liberation psychologist, who have spent the last decade doing ethnographic work on the US-Mexico border. Calling it ethnographic work is perhaps misleading. What they have done is to “witness” the violence that is this border and the violence that takes place there relentlessly. The have traveled from one end of the border to the other, visiting local communities, educating themselves, and in the process us, about the transformation of the border into a killing zone.

Casey and Watkins’s book is also a historical reconstruction of a wall that now so visibly demarcates the will to exclude. It is also a very persuasive analysis that aims to show that this Wall—la Frontera—is part and parcel of a much larger socio-political logic that has its roots deep within the history of the United States itself. For the authors, the Wall is an expression of a “racial caste system” that continuously applies the logics of internal colonization to racialized populations in order to create internal colonies that can be used for cheap labor and that pacify through terror the general population. This was similarly the case in South Africa, and before that, we can go back to colonial Latin America, but examples also abound in the East, Japan versus Korea, or China versus Mongolia. Unfortunately, there are too many examples. Casey and Watkins make an even stronger argument than the one we may find in Memmi and Fanon with respect to Africa and Algeria respectively. The argument, to which I will return at the end of my remarks is that we have to think of the deliberate criminalization of the immigrant population as similar to the judification of the Black Laws after the Civil War, which gave us the “convict leasing system.” This means that the Jim Crow system that produced a legalized apartheid system in the US is today renewed in the “Juan Crow” Laws that crimininalize Mexicans, and Latino/as in general. The Black Laws, as well as Jim Crow Laws, had the general but explicit goal of criminalizing recently Freed Blacks, resulting in the abrogation of their recently won citizenship. The “Arizonification” of the US, the authors argue, is the latest iteration in the logics of criminalizing in order to throw racialized subjects into a zone of indistinction or exception, in which they are targets of both extra-legal and juridically sanctioned violence. At the same time such racializations turn these subjects into a kind of naked living labor that can be maximally exploited with the least investment or accountability. These lives are rendered disposable and beyond the registers of moral considerability.

This book is also much more. It brings to the challenge of the border an environmental sensibility that is as important as the very evident outrage at the human suffering it means for so many humans and non human beings. As I will argue later, the Wall and the border are an extermination zone that is indiscriminate. In addition, the authors include a chapter that reflects on the artwork that has been produced over the last decade to reflect on the wall, to transform it, to question it, to turn it into a mirror; a wall of dreams and memories. Finally, it should be noted that Ed Casey has acknowledged the work of many of his graduate students, who read parts of the manuscript and provided commentary on it, some of which has made its way into the pages of the book. Mary Watkins, in parallel, has acknowledged her own deep dialogue and reliance on her interlocutors, who are also named in the book. In this way, this book is more than ethnography and philosophy; it is also a testimony to real human interactions. People suffer, they resist, they act, they organize, they theorize, and they witness—this is another dimension of this book. Thinking is grief, and thus shame, and thus also a promise of a possible resolution, and avowal to come.

In what follows, and given the richness of the book, I would like to focus my remarks on some reflections on the meta-phenomenological or topological-phenomenological reflections that we can find in the first part of the text. I want to raise some issues about the political-philosophical status of borders and then I want to return to the provocative thesis that we think the criminalization of Mexican and Latino/a immigrants as a re-tooling, re-articulation and reviving of the Convict Leasing System that emerged with the Black Laws.

I would like to use a topological figure that Ed Casey introduces in the first part of the book, mostly authored by him, namely the “bivalve.” The bivalve is a “structure …formed from two surfaces that fold out from a central edge acting as a hinge for these same surfaces” (page 39). I will suggest that this book exhibits elements of a bivalve. The hinge is evidently La Frontera, the Wall that marks the border between the US and Mexico. One surface extends into what I would call a meta-phenomenology of edges, by which I mean that the first part offers us phenomenological analyses of how entities (in this case, a nation, the U.S.) are bounded, i.e. determined as being their selves in relationship to their delimitation. The other surface extends over the historical body of the US with its racial histories, internal colonies and legislated racial hierarchies that find their acme in the border, but whose capillaries extend throughout the entire social-economic-political fabric of the US. In the first section we are invited to think of the “border” and the “boundary” in general as instances of edges. Edges are where beings begin to cease to be what they are and thus, to paraphrase Heidegger, for that very reason they are where they presence their being most lucidly or starkly. An example that illustrates Heidegger’s claim is the human being’s relationship to that which most decisively defines them, namely their finitude. To be human is to be finite, to be finite is to confront our temporality, this means to confront our mortality. The edge of human existence is death, and how we come to it reveals the truth of our being. If we are beings unto death, it is how we die that reveals most strikingly the nature of our being. For this reason, the edge is an ontological event of the first order. Thus, the edge is the spatio-temporal horizon of the event. Still, the claim is that borders, like edges in general, are unstable, and thus they are always turning into boundaries. In fact, one of the important things this book does is to show the utter insanity of trying to turn the border into a stable entity when in fact there are places where this border is anchored in moving and shifting entities such as a river. The river’s bed, on which the border rests, is supposed to be the ground for the border, but this riverbed moves with the seasons, floods and droughts. This demonstrates that the wish to impose upon nature a legal fiction is always undermined and rendered laughable.

Casey, however, goes on to disaggregate the topological logics of the edge between the US and Mexico. What we have is not simply a binary of border and boundary, but a “gamut” of terms that reveals other topological process. Casey names five: “boundary, borderland, border, walls and fences, and borderline” (page 21). I would like to linger briefly over these terms and suggest that some others should be added. Indeed, the edge between the US and Mexico is both long, arduous, and above all, the product of a very particular history, as Mary and Ed so eloquently argue throughout the entire book. As we know, the US began with the twelve colonies, and then over less than two hundred years, has quintupled its original territory. The colonies, as we know, were imperial outposts. For these colonies, their walls where the inner edge of an imperial frontier; for beyond the walls of the colony lay territory not yet inside the wall, but soon to be. The colonial wall bisects space: on one side, the rule of law and the imperial security; on the other, an empty space of lawlessness and therefore a zone to be pacified and owned. Thus, we could say that the edge also contains frontiers. When we think how the Louisiana Purchase created the impetus to engage in further imperial expansion, which resulted in the war with Mexico of 1846-48, then we have to think of the present US-Mexico border as the inner marking of an imperial frontier.

Lets take up the five terms introduced by Casey and put them in a slightly different order: boundary, borderland, border, and borderline. I think this sequence makes a lot of sense in terms of the edge becoming more concrete, or being historically specified more distinctly. Borderlands are where the edge as boundary becomes determined. Borderlands create a region of determinancy; where what belongs is in and what does not is out. Alternatively, this borderline also marks who belongs and who does not. The borderline is the specification of the determinacy of the boundary, for stepping, crossing, or assailing it becomes a violation or infraction. What is bounded in by the borderline is sheltered or exposed in that place of determinancy. Then, there are walls and fences, which are now the specific forms in which the borderline is made concrete. How we mark the borderline is contingent. We could use a hedge of shrubs, a stone marker, a tree line, a river, the ridge of a mountain, or a natural barrier to mark where the boundary becomes a line. The Wall, which is also a very tall fence, in the case of the US-Mexico borderland, however dissimulates, disguises, and conceals something that is distinctive about this borderland, which as Anzaldúa wrote, is an “open wound.” The Wall that separates the US and Mexico is a mask, a loudly-silent presence, a monolith of violence, but also a veil of ignorance and concealment. This Wall hides from us, those who are behind its putative protective shelter, and the violence that it is and the violence that takes place in its shadow (on both sides of the wall). This means that we have to think of edges as also creating what both Mary and Ed refer to, using Agamben’s language, as zones of exception. I would even go further. I would say that edges that turn into imperial frontiers must create zones of exception that de facto entail the creation of killing zones and/or lethal zones. The borderland between the US and Mexico has become a killing zone enforced by vigilantes and border patrols, allegedly exercising their right to defend society, through violence if necessary. This borderland is also an ecological lethal zone, for humans as well as for other non-human animals and other forms of life. As we read in the book, the construction of the Wall has meant destroying habitats, creating run off that pollutes water statuaries, and lethally disrupted corridors of migration. The Wall that marks the border in the in-between of the boundary of the US and Mexico is a totem of and to death; a thanatological dispositif.

In fact, the Wall itself is just one gear in the machine that the borderland has become. Like Ed and Mary, I have also visited the border, and I have also spoken to some border patrol. They explain that in many cases the Wall is there to both deter and funnel, that is, to create a momentary impediment or obstacle to push would be transgressor into a certain region or area. We know for a fact that the wall funnels would-be immigrants into the desert. The border patrol also explained that they don’t rely on the wall alone. The system of surveillance and tracking extends deep into the US. This is why I think the boundary between the US and Mexico is also an imperial frontier, as on both sides of the wall there is a whole system of racial profiling that is part of our racial ordering. In as much as would-be transgressors or jumpers of this wall approach it and leave it behind by navigating a whole subterranean world of coyotes, vigilantes, corrupt cops, and of course exposure to death, through a kind of death march, the Wall in fact projects both a killing and lethal zone far beyond its actual location. The Wall’s shadow is nothing but this zone of lethality and its shadow economy reaches far into the US and Mexico.

In what remains, let me turn to what I take to be one of the strongest thesis of the book, namely that we ought to think of the relentless and insidious criminalization of Mexican and Latino/a immigrants as a renewal and extension of the post-Bellum “convict lease” system that took freed slaves of plantation owners and turned them into slaves of the state. As Angela Davis has shown throughout her work on prisons, the convict lease system was one way in which the citizenship and liberty that had been granted to Blacks were suspended and withdrawn. As Davis has also argued, the 13th amendment abolished private slavery and “involuntary servitude” while at the same time establishing the possibility of “slavery” by another name, as a form of punishment. With the 13th amendment, American democracy is stillborn, born dead at the moment of its universal proclamation, for now the state can enslave as punishment. This is what DuBois called “abolition democracy,” by which he meant both the democracy abolition spawned, but also the abolition of democracy precisely because the 13th amendment laid the foundation for the use of servitude to the state as a form of punishment. I want to suggest, following Orlando Patterson (1985) and Lisa Marie Cacho (2012) that the 13th amendment, which unleashed the Black Laws of the Reconstruction Period, re-enacted the type of “natal death” that was slavery, and the circumstance of finding yourself in society as always already a criminal that leads to your “social death.”

The convict leasing system allowed the state to lease criminals for ridiculous fees to plantation owners, but also railroad builders, who use their cheap labor to enrich themselves. But now that these “prisoners” were not their property, as were their former slaves, they did not have to or had mind to care for them. This is why the convict leasing system has been deemed “worse than slavery.” As David Oshinsky has shown in this important work “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996), the convict leasing system was established in the south to deal with two key challenges facing Southern society: labor shortage and the need to restore white supremacy. The abolition of slavery had left many southerners without their free labor and they now had to treat their ex-slaves as co-citizens. What is important to note is that the convict leasing system turns over to white southerners an incredibly lucrative business, in which they privatize all gains, while all costs and liabilities of caring for convicts is pass on to the state. Leasers had a minimal responsibility to feed their leased criminals. Everything else was up to the state. Here we have an early version of neoliberal super-exploitation and the industrial prison complex.

Indeed, the criminalization of Mexican and Latinos operates on the logic established with the 13th amendment; servitude as a form of punishment. Note for instance, as Mary Watkins chillingly tells us by relaying a calculation projected by Eliot Shapleigh, who is a Texas Senator, from District 29 (El Paso area). According to him, if we took the forty-three-counties that make up the area of the border in Texas and were to make a state out of it, a 51st state, this state would standout in the following ways:

It would:

Rank 1st in poverty and unemployment

Rank 1st in Spanish spoken at home

Rank 16th in land size (the 16th largest state!)

Rank 3rd largest with a foreign born population

Rank 3rd largest with a female head of household

Rank 5th with civilian population in military duty.

Rank 51st with per capita income at 15,570, just above the poverty line for an individual, and certainly below the poverty line for a household of four.

This 51st state, made up of the counties that make up the border region in Texas alone, would be de facto a military state, an internal colony, a zone of exception, an extended detention center, a zone of suspended legality, a zone of indistinction in which neither human rights nor citizenship rights are either respected or acknowledged. But this state would also constitute a labor camp, which, like the convict lease system, allows for maximal capital extraction at a minimum cost to capitalist investor. It is true that as of 2011 the Wall had cost some 22.4 billion, with 6.5 billion of maintenance and repairs per year. These costs, however, are born by the Federal State. The colonial frontier of the US-Mexico borderland is also an extended labor camp that allows US capitalism to “offshore” labor costs by criminalizing a population that for the last two hundred years has served as a “standing reserve” of life, people, and culture for the US.

Ed and Mary, towards the end of the book, in a postlude 2, reflecting with Derrida, write “we are only truly at home with ourselves when we are open to receiving the other. Is a home a home when it keeps the stranger out? The paradox he [Derrida] is working to unveil is that without welcoming the stranger, the host is a hostage in his own home. While the host is inside, without inviting the guest, he is on the outside of the inside. Only the invited guest can invite him into the inside of his own home” (page 250). In fact, we can go farther along and claim that like one’s supposed mother tongue, to which we can make only attenuated claims, we are not even at home in our home. Our home is the home that our parents open to us, and then we to our kids, and them to their kids, and then their kids to their kids and so on. The home is a place without owner, a place of sojourn, of refuge, of sheltering, and hospitality, precisely because we are coming to the world as guests. What the Frontera with its thanathological totem has done is to wall us into a militarized society that spells social death for many, and that perpetuates and renews the curse of its racial past by criminalizing those who are trying to escape the conditions we created through our voracious economy that forces them to migrate. Our task and challenge is, as Ed and Mary urge us to do, to awaken from our colonial and racial nightmare and begin to imagine a future without this Wall. The Germans dismantled theirs. Why shouldn’t we able to do some dismantling with ours? President Obama in his “Come out of the Shadows” speech noted that: “We were strangers once, too.” As strangers, they invited generations of immigrants to become “American” and to contribute to the building of a vibrant and more embracing democracy. Those generations, in turn, invited us to continue building that democracy, but over the last decades instead of building the pillars of the temple of justice and equality, we have built Walls of social death. When will we march to the Wall and against this totem of death?

References

Paterson O (1985) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cacho LM (2012) Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press.

Kafka F (1961) Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken Books.

Oshinsky DM (1996) “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: New Press.

Please cite as: Mendita E (2014) Walled in and without Home: Casey, Edward. S. and Watkins, Mary. 2014 Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, reviewed by Eduardo Mendieta” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Open Site (26 November 2014).