Research Summary

My book manuscript, Bodies on the Line: Life, Death, and Authority on the Arizona-Mexico Border, offers an ethnographic analysis of contemporary struggles over border control, humanitarian intervention, and unauthorized migration. It draws on over 30 months of multi-site field research between 2002 and 2007 focused on the politics and practices surrounding the death of border-crossers attempting to enter the United States through the Sonoran Desert region.

Over the course of five chapters, I trace the productive tension between efforts aimed at protecting this border from unauthorized migration and migrants from the effects of extreme desert exposure. Through this discussion, my dissertation-based work develops an examination of the political potency of these migrants’ physical exposure, their representation, and the mobilization of their stories in relation to the articulation of power over people and space.

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My focus on the management of border crosser death and trauma conceptualizes a politics of life that re-imagines the relationship between authority, legitimacy, and rights. By “politics of life,” I refer to the dynamics that place the bodies, lives, and deaths of these people at the center of the struggle to intervene on this sociopolitical landscape.
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This border politics manifests in discourses and practices through which the significance of these crossers’ physical exposure is denied or restored, and by which competing efforts to minimize, revert, or disregard their distress are justified. In this sense, my work considers the production of legitimacy, authority, and exclusion by examining the policing, protective, and preemptive efforts of actors on both sides of the boundary and the immigration debate. From this vantage point, this study contributes to the scholarship on security, violence, humanitarianism, and biopolitics through a critical assessment of the conditions that turn arrests into rescues, migrants into mere bodies, and rescuers into outlaws.

Missing migrants. Mexican Consulate in Tucson. Photo by Rocio Magana

This study contributes to the scholarship on borders, security politics, civic interventions, and biopolitics in at least in three significant ways. It provides a critical account of the blurring divide between enforcement and endangerment, policing and rescuing, which offers a fresh examination of the dynamics that characterize contemporary unauthorized migration and territorial enforcement. It also offers an analysis of boundary-making that goes beyond topography and geopolitics to suggest that the increasingly commonplace selective protection and devaluation of life itself is at the center of the diffused production of power, inequality, and exclusion.