Fighting the wall: Understanding the impact of immigration and border security on local borderland identity in Brownsville, TX
Item
-
Title
-
Fighting the wall: Understanding the impact of immigration and border security on local borderland identity in Brownsville, TX
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:1b8347896b5f:12027
-
identifier
-
12709
-
Creator
-
Neck, Laura K.,
-
Contributor
-
Kirk Dombrowski
-
Date
-
2013
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Cultural anthropology | Ethnic studies | Borders | Hispanics | Identity | Immigration | Security | US-Mexico
-
Abstract
-
As part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 approximately 850 miles of the roughly 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border was slotted for the construction of a border wall. Between 125 -- 150 miles was scheduled to be completed in Texas by December 31, 2008. This dissertation explores how the U.S federal government's actions had direct and almost immediate consequences on its relationship with local borderland residents. Borderland residents are uniquely positioned both geographically and culturally within the nation-states they inhabit. The people who reside in the borderlands have a fundamentally different relationship with the state, not only because they live at the edges, but because they live in a space filled with obvious and physical manifestations of state power. The power of a nation-state is never more evident than at its borders, where it must necessarily assert and defend its territorial sovereignty through obvious control of the local, but more importantly for the state's objectives, national space. The construction of the border wall intensified this difference, increasing stresses on a population where issues of citizenship and racial and ethnic identity are already heightened, and shifting local focus away from citizenship as a primary identity marker and towards race and ethnicity instead, in many ways achieving the opposite of the federal government's stated intensions. The violence of seizing property and erecting a border wall resulted in the erosion of local borderlanders' sense of belonging as Americans while heightening their identity as culturally and ethnically Mexican, a fundamental shift from previous conditions in which local populations were more likely to stress their identity as U.S. citizens in direct, and favorable, opposition to Mexicans in Mexico and immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, in the United States. Using a multi-method approach including Respondent-Driven Sampling, interviews, and participant observation, this study follows the specific story of the border wall's construction in south Texas in order to trace out the exact ways, and in some cases, the specific moments, in which the state's actions to strengthen its claims over local spaces and citizens actually resulted in weakening those citizens self-consciously identified and internalized connections to the U.S. state.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Anthropology
