Mari White ShellWST 200: Gender & Power (Womens

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Studies)Margo Tamez, InstructorMarch 21, 2008AbstractThe Function of Gender, Race, and Citizenship in Security:the Texas-Mexico Border Wall and Lipan Apache Women

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s TerritoriesOn October 26, 2006 Congress enacted the Secure Fence Act of 2006,(Pub.L. 109-367)and Actwhich allows for over 700 miles of barrier walls, vehicle barriers, infrastructure, surveillancetechnologies, and deployment of armed personnel and guarded checkpoints.

Numerous poor,indigenous, Hispanic, Latino, environmental, municipal, and land owners with private property,Spanish Land Grant, Mexican Land Grant, and Treaties protested the construction of the borderwall using Eminent Domain, and the Declaration of Taking. The U.S. constitution and theCongressional Omnibus Bill of 2007 mandated that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security(

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DHS

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) conduct prior consultation and negotiation with all impacted landowners. Among theimpacted were indigenous women, who were some of the first groups threatened with seizure of their lands, without due process, consultation, or negotiation. Among these, elder Eloisa GarciaTamez was the first indigenous tribal member with aboriginal and Spanish Land Grant titleclaims who refused to surrender her lands, and took on the brunt of official denouncements andlegal suits by the U.S. government. In doing so, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff charged thatSouth Texas landowners were attempting to

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dupe

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the federal government out of a largepayment for their lands. The federal government offered landowners $100 for, as Chertoff put it,

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their duty as American citizens

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to uphold national security.In the border wall conflict, indigenous sovereign peoples with ancient cultures which pre-date the U.S. Constitution, and European rule of law, and whose traditional territories straddlethe U.S.-Mexico border wall, are easily collapsed and reduced into dehumanized stereotypes.These stereotypes often get lumped into broadly generalized renderings of

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Mexico

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and

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Mexicans.

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An ideological war of symbols, rhetoric, media, and laws have historicalunderpinnings in a racially-based border policy

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trapping indigenous peoples into deadly zonesof increased militarization, poverty, exclusion and marginalization. This project will examine theintersections of gender, race, contested definitions of

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citizenship

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and sovereignty in the borderwall conflict centering the constitutional law case of Eloisa Garcia Tamez, a Lipan Apache elderof El Calaboz, Texas. This project will build upon the analysis of

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globalization and militarism

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and

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redefining security

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in Kirk and Okazawa-Rey; the

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state of women

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