An expanding definition of "terror" ignites a more bellicose extension of the U.S. border abroad. A history of labor and mining and community written on borderlands' gravestones. And The Border Chronicle in Douglas and with Amy Goodman this coming week.
Just what did U.S. officials at the Border Security Expo earlier this month say about U.S. foreign policy, border extension, and a revival of the war on terror?
Mining operations have been in the center of borderland labor conflicts for more than a century. These photos tell the moving story of one such town, through its cemetery.
As widespread election border theater kicks in, the director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab talks about smart borders, border externalization, “identity dominance,” and what can be done about it.
Well, this week has been a doozy on the U.S.-Mexico border. There is the continued Texas standoff between the federal government and Operation Lonestar; the “Take Back the Border” convoy (also known as “God’s army”) and their political backers annoying and intimidating border communities such as in Eagle Pass; the failed impeachment of Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; and a shot-down so-called border bill, to name a few things. If you were wondering if border theater was going to kick in to overdrive this election year, you were correct. Border theater’s problem, of course, is that it tends to be myopic, based on distorted narratives, and ahistorical.
So often the result of this theater is a reductive conversation in the media: While some aspects of the border receive hyper attention, others—such as the massive border surveillance apparatus and its corporate sponsors—do not. Luckily, today we are joined by the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, Mizue Aizeki, to help us see the bigger picture. The Surveillance Resistance Lab is a think and act tank that builds research, strategy, campaigns, and networks of collaboration to scale up people’s ability to take on the threat of surveillance. Mizue is also coeditor of the book Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (out this month from Haymarket Books), as well as coauthor of many reports, such as The Everywhere Border: Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americas and Smart Borders or a Humane World? Mizue mentions all these works in our conversation—as we look at the border, its digitization, its externalization and expansion, and omnipresence in an election year that by all indications will put the border front and center.
Throughout the conversation, Mizue flips the border theater narratives on their head. She asks, “What if we acknowledge that borders are a form of state violence that enforce global inequality and unequal access to life? … What if the rules people are being asked to follow are fundamentally unjust, exclusionary, and punitive? … Just like most reasonable people wouldn’t see Jim Crow or apartheid as neutral legal regimes, we have to start seeing the U.S. immigration regime in the same way.”
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Just what did U.S. officials at the Border Security Expo earlier this month say about U.S. foreign policy, border extension, and a revival of the war on terror?
Torre Centinela, a Mexican surveillance hub that will share intelligence with U.S. and Texas law enforcement is slated to open soon. Olivares discusses his investigation on Torre Centinela and the private corporation running it.
Like environmental regulations, cultural-and historic-preservation laws are being systematically waived for wall construction—and border communities are paying the price.
Todd witnesses a border security spending frenzy at the annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix, a Q&A with the author of a new book on El Paso's importance to U.S. history and immigration, and much more!
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
