The year1989 was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, a guarded concrete barrier erected in 1961 to “protect” East Germans from fascist elements of the West. During its twenty-eight years of existence, the wall separated two ideologies but also many families and friends. Several died or were killed attempting to cross the wall and defect to the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a pivotal event in world history and a prelude to the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. Therefore, many international observers were astonished when twenty-seven years later, Donald Trump proposed in the 2016 American presidential campaign to build a barrier between the US and Mexico to “protect” Americans and to harden American immigration policies.
It is even more astonishing to find out in Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey’s new book that this kind of border wall has experienced a global proliferation: Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Uzbekistan, to name some instances (7–8). Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship, and the Security State (2020) examines the border-wall phenomenon that has grown in popularity since the 1990s. In this fascinating publication, Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey show the social, economic, and psychological impacts that a border wall generates in local communities.
This book focuses specifically on the border wall that separates Southern Texas from Mexico. The US-Mexican wall is “a combination of walls and barriers, sometimes including concertina wires and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents armed with M16 assault rifles” (8). Parts of the wall are also built on private lands, on university campuses, and sometimes several kilometres from the border. As the authors demonstrate, this situation raises complex social and national issues. On the one hand, national authorities claim that their goal is to protect Americans from Latino drug smugglers, terrorists, and rapists. Arguably, stopping the flux of illegal immigrants would allow authorities to have better control over the rising “alien” criminality and protect the cultural integrity of the nation. In this discourse, borderland citizens opposing the wall policy – predominantly Latin Americans – are perceived as ignorant, irresponsible, and unpatriotic.
The wall itself and the border are treated as an exceptional space, a liminal space. Chapter 1 presents a relevant visual ethnographic photo essay ofborder lands represented in the media. Most of the time, the land is shown either as an empty desert or as a war zone, bordered by Mexican poverty and lawlessness. Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey argue that this kind of imagery is produced to support and to justify authorities’ discourse about the wall’s necessity. The authors compare and contrast these popular images with visual and textual representations of the South Texas border region “as economically dynamic, dualcultural, and verdant with parks and preserves” (16). Ultimately, chapter 1 demonstrates how the militarization of the border bisects communities, parks, and ranches, and creates confusion and fear in the nearby population. The concepts of necrocitizenship as “state policies of exclusion circulating as natural features of the landscape, …the deterritorialization of Mexican-origin populations and their reterritorialization as intruders into that landscape” are central to Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey’s argument (15).
Simultaneously, as media and national policy makers conceptualize the southwestern border as a war zone, border residents living in that area are also perceived as a class apart. Unsurprisingly, borderland citizens perceive the border wall as an insult and an attempt at national separation. From the perspective of national authorities, this resistance is seen as a lack of patriotism in people who do not care for the nation. In this discourse, border residents are depicted as neither fully Americans nor as partners to Americans. The concept of patriotic citizenship as a response to these practices of exclusion is examined in chapter 2. The authors provide analysis of two annual rituals–El Veterano Festival and the Granjeno Friendship Festival–where South Texans demonstrate belonging to the United States through patriotism expressed in speeches, dancing, parades, and conjunto music. Through such social practices, one can examine the notion of citizenship as a discursive construct circulating through culture rather than as a legal status. In that sense, festivals are one of the many cultural practices in which citizenship is formed.
Chapter 3 addresses the concepts of sovereignty, race, and sexuality in the authorities’ discourse about the border wall. The spectre of violent Mexican men attacking innocent white women is central to the perception of thethreat of spillover violence, and it legitimizes the state’s funding of even deadlier means: patrol boats, helicopters armed with sharpshooters, aerostats, and other forms of security technology. In Texas state representatives’ marginalizing discourse, the border zone is overflowing with violence and criminal activity, and the term “spillover” functions to create a set of citizenship practices through using racist, sexist, and heterosexist constructions. In a new imagined concept of invisible, constant, and menacing border violence based on gendered imagery, the state contributes to reinforcing racism and violence within the nation’s boundaries, thus imprisoning their Latin-American citizens with both a physical barrier and a discursive wall.
In chapter 4, the authors examine how several Mexican-American leaders who are also veterans contribute to discussions on increasing Texas’s surveillance and security while also protesting the construction of a border wall-a paradoxical situation. In this chapter, one finds out that military service and patriotism do not automatically translate into support for border militarization. This chapter also addresses the need for commodity migration, more specifically in the field of agricultural labor.
Díaz-Barriga's and Dorsey’s final chapter is concerned with media representation of Latinx-Americans and border security. The authors examine more specifically Greta Van Susteren’s coverage of a widely circulated border security report onthe Fox News channel (in thetelevision program On the Record). Through misleading edited interviews and videos, the American commentator manages to reproduce the official marginalizing narrative concerning the unpatriotic Mexican-American. More specifically, the program opposes Mexican-American congressman Henry Cuéllar, who questioned the report and the legitimization of border militarization and the live comments of Army General Robert Scales and General Barry McCaffrey.This final chapter shows that the discourse about the unpatriotic Latinx citizen has pervaded important large-scale American media. The situation depicted in this chapter also raises questions about general populism, large-scale disinformation, and journalistic responsibilities, which the authors do not address. It certainly also demonstrates that “patriotism” can be a slippery term.
In Fencing in Democracy, Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey address border walls’ complex issues: national security, land ownership, isolation of a part of the population, racism, etc. They accurately show the dynamic between white English dominant discourse and Latinx resistance.The border wall demarcates national boundaries, but, as the authors argue, it also embodies “transformations in sovereign power and citizenship that ultimately imprison the populations they are meant to protect”(xi).The reconstitution of citizenship at borders is thus central to the discussion of militarization of border regions and state security. This 2020 winner of the Association of Latinx, Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award presents a rare and original insight into border wall studies. Overall, Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey’s research and use of different sources are impressive and their approach to ethnology is deeply original.
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[Review length: 1213 words • Review posted on February 17, 2023]