The rugged border: Surveillance, policing and the dynamic materiality of the US/Mexico frontier

Abstract

This paper explores US Department of Homeland Security surveillance programs in the United States/Mexico borderlands, with an emphasis on the quotidian role of a dynamic more-than-human landscape in frustrating the department’s enforcement practices and ambitions. The paper is based on several years’ ethnographic research in southern Arizona, archival research, and semi-structured interviews with current and former government personnel. By unpacking the quotidian challenges confronted by Homeland Security personnel, the paper contributes to a post-humanist theory of terrain, shifting the focus of geographic inquiry to the ways that the qualities of certain spaces, objects, and conditions may resist or impede everyday navigation, centralized vision or administrative practice. Yet, as the long saga of Department of Homeland Security surveillance initiatives would suggest, the impediments of terrain are by no means final or determinant. To think through this indeterminacy and its implications for the geographic composition of state practice, the paper proposes that the latter be approached “metabolically,” with state security and surveillance practices continuously animated by a dynamic exterior as agents and agencies seek to overcome tactical and strategic limitations by incorporating, digesting and subjecting ever-greater kinds and volumes of objects, bodies, landscapes, and data to centralized legibility and control.