De-Border Yourself/Desfronterízate (original) (raw)

New Global Studies, 2019

Abstract

FOR A PDF, PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE WITH YOUR EMAIL. In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoing calls to “build the wall” along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump’s campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump’s call to “build the wall,” I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the “we” it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the order exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.

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