More Writing Thursday: Borders and Migrants

Over the last week, I’ve continued to work on the fifth chapter on my little book on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. This chapter, as I set out last week, reviews the archaeology of forced migration and refugees as well as the archaeology of homelessness. I posted the first substantive section of this chapter on Monday. That section focused primarily on Jason De León’s work and his Undocumented Migration Project.

The second part of the chapter expanded this to a broader discussion of migrants, borders, and walls. There’s an immense quantity of scholarship on these topics over the last 20 years, and I invariably only managed to scratch the surface. As you might expect, I will continue to return to these sections and flesh our discussions and bibliography over the next few weeks, but for today and this week, this will have to suffice.

Enjoy and please feel free to make comments!!

The work of the Jason De León and the UMP represents part of a expansive and complex transdisciplinary critique of borders and a global archaeological interest in the material culture and experiences of migrants. For example, Wendy Brown’s work Wall States, Waining Sovereignty (2010) argues that as the forces of globalization have eroded the real sovereignty of nation states, they have increasingly looked to wall as the physical manifestation of their dissipating power (24). Reece Jones offers a similar argument in his 2012 book which understood efforts to fortify the borders in the US as part of global response to the war on terror. Militarized borders represent the desire of sovereign states to distinguish themselves from terrorists who, like global capital, are not constrained by the geographic limits of states. The construction of militarized border walls between the US and Mexico, for example, contributed to political rhetoric which characterized the residents of neighboring countries as a uncivilized, ungoverned, and violent. Needless to say, this also contributed to the dehumanization of those on the other side of the civilizing border (Jones 2012, 26-52).

Randal Maguire’s study of the Mexican-American border in the town of Ambos Nogales (2013), provided an archaeological perspective on the way what once was a symbolic a “picket fence” between the two countries was fortified in keeping with the United State’s policy of “Prevention by Deterrent.” At the same time, the border remains the most crossed borders in the world and the economies of communities on either side of the border as well as both countries deeply intertwined. The paradox between the flow of capital and goods across borders and the violence that it inflicts on human migrants represents an enduring theme in many of the critical studies of migrants in the contemporary world. The role of race, religion, wealth, and gender and other ethnic characteristics contributed further to the creation of “violent borders” that not only seek to define groups on the basis of nativist views of national identity, but also make the moving across borders personally invasive.

Archaeologist Uzma Rizvi’s discussion of moving through checkpoints in Iraq in 2009 emphasized the banality of these militarized interactions during which the sounds, objects, location, and practices of the militarized state contrasted with everyday conversations. Like the border wall between Mexico and the United States, the check points constantly disrupted movement through the cityscape (496). Moreover, the checkpoints required the categorization of individuals by gender, nationality, and ethnicity, and they imposed limits on her ability to document the encounter and photograph the spaces. The banal and even mundane conversations that Rizvi recorded during the encounters belied the structural violence these spaces produce by reifying a limited range of identities and military authority in the urban landscape. The construction and persistence of “peace lines,” the often substantial walls erected in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for example, served as much to formalize Protestant and Catholic claims to territory in the city and to reinforce the marginal relationship between the communities where these walls stand (McAtackney 2011, 82-86).

McAtackney’s study of Belfast’s peace lines, “Rizvi’s description of checkpoints in Iraq, and De León work in the Sonoran desert offer a distinct case-studies of the kind of violence that occur at borders. Reece Jones’s recent work, Violent Borders (2016), emphasizes the way in which global borders inflict violence on individuals and communities both in the name of the state and in the service of capital. Distinct from Brown’s reading of fortified borders as a rearguard effort to reinforce the relevance of the nationstate, Jones argues that borders remain a vital tool for creating pools of low cost labor and limiting access to natural resources and other forms of wealth. Moreover, as De León and others have shown, borders themselves do environmental violence to the landscapes through which they run. Studies of migration that seek to compare archaeological evidence for migrations with contemporary migrations have likewise emphasized the role that environmental conditions and climate change have played in forcing groups of people to move across state boundaries on a global scale (Morrissey 2015 with citations in Baker and Tsuda 2015). Of course, as Morrissey noted in his study of migration in Northern Ethiopia, the Ethiopian state’s highly-centralized control over land and food aide has as much an impact on the decisions on groups and individual to move as the increased aridity of parts of the country. In short, the political, social, and economic contexts for climate or environmental movement play a more major role in understanding the material realities of migration and borders. Takeyuki Tsuda, for example, worked to unpack the complex factors that have produced a largely negative view of Mexican immigrants when compared to immigrants from Asia countries (Tsuda 2015). He noted that the visibility of the border, among a number of other factors, contributed significantly to the view of Mexican workers as disruptive to American society.

Anna McWilliams study of the Cold War border installation provides a useful reminder that despite the massive and fortified appearance of contemporary borders, they can also be ephemeral and even evoke nostalgia (McWilliams 2013; 2015; Schofield 2009, 166;). The border installations, for example, in Czechoslovakia are now part of a large park. In the 1980s, the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria was not simply a national border, but part of the “Iron Curtain” that divided the the sphere of Soviet influence from the West. In the 21st century, much of the border installation has vanished into the woods and the paths once followed by border guards are now nature trails. The global scope of the Cold War, for example, produced the proliferation of walls, with the Berlin Wall being the most famous (Feversham and Schmidt 2007), and a prevailing sense of living on the “front lines” (Schofield 2009, 166-169) even when this border area is not geographically proximate to a national or regional boundary. The presence of hardened installation, for example, in the UK, Western Europe, or in rural North Dakota communicated the intercontinental threat of a Soviet attack. Today, many of these monuments stand abandoned or, like the Nekoma pyramid in Northeastern North Dakota, are in the process of being repurposed suggesting that while the physical monuments persist, their meaning in the landscape continues to change. Since 2001, there has been a concerted effort, for example, to preserve parts of the Berlin Wall which over the preceding decade were removed.