Article Economy and Space

Environment and Planning A:

Economy and Space
The other U.S. Border? 2018, Vol. 50(5) 948–968
! The Author(s) 2018
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and fortification in DOI: 10.1177/0308518X18763816
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Southern Mexico

Margath Walker
University of Louisville, USA

Abstract
This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border
security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico
and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus
transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize
politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border
Program (Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave
the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked
upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices,
actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place,
which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated
practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-
related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity
through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The
second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance.
Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes
of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of
such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes
across different places.

Keywords
Border fortification, geopolitics, policy mobilities, Mexico, Herbert Marcuse

Corresponding author:
Margath Walker, Department of Geography & Geosciences, University of Louisville, 215 Lutz Hall, Louisville, KY 40292,
USA.
Email: margath.walker@louisville.edu
Walker 949

The Guatemalan border with Chiapas, Mexico, is now our southern border. (The United States
Department of Homeland Security’s Alan Bersin, quoted in Miller, 2014b)

Technological rationality operates as political rationality. (Marcuse, 1961 [2001]: 47)

Introduction
The two opening quotes, one by the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary
for International Affairs (and former border czar) and the other by the social philosopher
Herbert Marcuse, span a period of seven decades. Time notwithstanding, the first statement
could be construed as evidence for the latter, proof that ongoing processes of fortification
are steeped in a politics of rationality. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mexico’s
Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur),1 announced by Mexican President
Enrique Peña Nieto in July 2014 in response to pressure from the United States and
flows of Central American youth traveling to the US-Mexico border (Isacson et al.,
2015). While the implementation of the Program’s security-based measures is diffuse, ongo-
ing, and difficult to track, evidence of its impact is apparent throughout southern Mexico,
particularly in the municipality of Tapachula, about 20 km from Guatemala. The
Soconusco region (where Tapachula is located), has long been an important site of agricul-
tural production serving as a port between Mexico and Central America. Because of its role
as a first stop for migrants en route to the United States, Mexico’s “other border” is more
visibly geostrategic than in recent years (Ángeles Cruz, 2009). As a result, Mexico has
gradually begun to enforce strict policies aimed at shutting down transit routes. In an
effort to promote “regional security and prosperity” (CRS Report, 2016), the Southern
Border Program promises to increase security at 12 points of entry with Guatemala and
Belize as well as along several well-worn routes popular with migrants.
Concrete divisions have historically not been part of the landscape delineating the
572-kilometer shared boundary which continues to be bi-national in socio-cultural and
economic terms (Ordoñez Morales, 2011). People have migrated across this border for
generations for a variety of reasons: for work, because of ancestral linkages, for marriage,
and to escape violence. During the Guatemalan counterinsurgency war,2 thousands of
Guatemalan refugees fled the country. This exodus and its resultant targeting of indigenous
peoples by the Mexican government worked to concretize Mexico’s border enforcement
policy. Following the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the majority of Guatemalans
returned to Guatemala while others were naturalized or resettled on both sides of the border
(Cruz Burguete, 1998; Galemba, 2012). If border fortification has experienced theoretical
and empirical resurgence, Mexico’s southern border has remained relatively understudied in
the Anglo-speaking world. When it is an object of research, treatment has focused on the
discursive construction of a “border crisis” (Galemba, 2015), the politics of illegality in the
constitution of subjectivities (Galemba, 2012, 2013; Sanchez, 2014), consequences of uneven
enforcement (Castillo, 2003; Ogren, 2007), and the futility of preventing undocumented
migration to the United States by investing more resources into Mexican border policing
(Andreas and Duran-Martinez, 2013; Morton, 2012; Meyer and Seelke, 2014). This article
recalls attention to the site of the political border as a manifestation of technological ratio-
nality by examining how border regimes continue to be embedded in coordination across
space through the reproduction of the border industrial complex (Dear, 2013). Border
security (managed by public and private interests) occurs through a coalescing of
950 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

standardized administrative practice, vernacular forms of efficiency, and the illusion of

neutrality, all of which is undergirded by long histories of trilateral tensions.
The process through which porous boundaries are transformed into fortified borders
must grapple with the inner-workings of the containment of social change e.g. how borders
become a form of truth. Enter Marcuse. As a member of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse
([1944] 2002, 2014) was heavily influenced by Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason.
Like his colleagues, Marcuse politicizes the “dialectic of enlightenment” by distinguishing
substantive rationality from purely instrumental rationality. The latter operates as a form of
reductionism seeking to bolster forms of power by linking means to ends while upholding
the logics of efficiency.
Marcuse defines technology as a mode of production or totality of instruments, coincid-
ing with the modern distinction between science and art, consolidated in European thought
by the mid-19th century (McGuire, 2006) and characterized by the creation of new tools,
processes, and products. In his time, he specifically wrote about machinery, transportation,
roadways, automation, the assembly line, and what he termed the “terroristic technocracy”
(Marcuse, 1941: 139) associated with the Third Reich. He argued that the intensification of
labor and the organization of governmental, industrial and party bureaucracy were integral
to the war economies of Germany and the USSR. Currently, technology is almost too
extensive and pervasive to list although the material devices associated with increased
border fortification provides an excellent example. While technology carries with it the
potential for liberation, modern technology is rooted in an ideological structure calling
for unconditional compliance and coordination wherein human beings are enlisted in a
competitive and destructive social order (Marcuse, 1964). A highly rationalized and mech-
anized economy geared towards the greatest efficiency has ordered the social and economic
process resulting in oppression and continued scarcity.
Under advanced industrial capitalism, technology functions as an instrument of expedi-
ency dominated by ruling class interests which engenders its own rationality. Marcuse
argues that the decision to incorporate technological advances into society transforms
what is considered rational in that society (technological rationality). In other words, tech-
nology comes to replace ontology (Marcuse, 1960). Technological rationality3 is a pervasive
rationality oriented towards the performance principle wherein every technical item is given
a mission furthering competition and production. Comprising operational definitions,
formal logic, and the objective order of things (Marcuse, 1941) truth becomes defined by
measurement, calculation, internal coherence, and the reduction of experience to practice
organized by technology. Because technological society tends toward the annulment of its
foundational conditions, social relations of domination are mystified and oppression can
occur without physical domination (Farr, 2009).4 The result is “. . . the non-terroristic, dem-
ocratic decline of freedom-the efficient, smooth reasonable unfreedom which seems to have
its roots in technical progress itself” (Marcuse, 1961 in Kellner, 2001: 37).
On the one hand, this is a useful and enduring theory. On the other, Marcuse did not
engage in the kind of empirical work that the Frankfurt School envisioned (Jay, 1996). With
this thought in mind, I propose the concept of “techno-cultural rationalities” to attend to
the contextualized and culturally specific path of fortification regimes. The term refers to the
ways that rationality and the apparatus of technology (an accumulation of practice, actors,
objects, desires and discourses) moves from the abstract to the concrete. How does the
ontology of technology, replete with historical specificity and grounded logics of contingen-
cies, proceed in particular places?
I make the two-fold argument that the Southern Border Program (1) administers scarcity
through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial
Walker 951

hierarchies; and, that (2) informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of
governance. The separation of the argument into two parts serves primarily as a heuristic
device. Points one and two are entangled. In contrast to understanding border
fortification regimes as grounded instances of technological rationality, the purposeful con-
sideration of cultural context weaves together historical, performative, and socio-spatial
norms crystalizing the idiomatic circumstances facilitating or obstructing the implementa-
tion of the border industrial complex. Techno-cultural-rationalities takes seriously the
emergence of situated practices—or localized substantiations—which are themselves recon-
figured by diverse political contexts. The specific socio-material alignments, which facilitate,
produce, obstruct, or reconfigure instrumental reason can uncover the de-politicizing of
bordering processes and bring to light winners and losers of securitization by laying bare
vested interests.
What enables border fortification to be so resilient in Mexico is undoubtedly a compli-
cated affair. Nevertheless, certain elements of bordering should be highlighted. First, along
Mexico’s southern border, fortification cannot be separated from militarization associated
with the war on drugs. The intersection with supra-national geopolitical agendas is enfolded
within convoluted histories between the United States and Mexico and Mexico and Central
America. As a result, the calculation and efficiency, which is a cornerstone of techno-
rationalism is tied in with historical antagonisms often evolving into a politics that legiti-
mizes itself.
Second, the ongoing efforts and failures of fortification including the bordering, unbor-
dering, and performance of order must be read not solely against the logics of securiti-
zation but also from the perspective of particular cultural forms. An ontological
commitment to the productive apparatus (built upon technological rationality) does not
occur in a vacuum. For example, Mexico’s border regime is imprinted with a long history
of strong national identity (Mexicanidad) defined in part by the conception that the cul-
tural and political imperialism of the US is a threat to Mexico’s interests (cf. Bartra, 2002;
Del Val, 2006; Walker, 2011). There is also, contradictorily, a refusal to reject the north-
ern neighbor’s influence because of its association with progress. Related to that is the
preference to replicate “the other”, that which is not Mexican (Malinchismo) (cf. Day,
2005). Finally, there are the layers of bureaucracy that feature prominently in adminis-
trative practices within Mexico and are arguably one of the lures of the Southern Border
Program. The inclusion of these historical and contextualized elements allows us to pro-
vincialize or adapt Marcuse’s theory by attending to hybridization, localization, and
human agency. But, quite crucially, a Marcusean optic retains the importance of technol-
ogy as a psychic process rooted in the structure of experience. Read this way,
“technifying” the border is simultaneously a scientific achievement and an alteration of
our relationship to reality.
After reviewing literature on borders and fortification, the remainder of the paper
explores how fortification is enacted and negotiated in one key policy along the Mexico–
Guatemala border. The insights are based on the examination and compilation of docu-
mentation related to the Southern Border Program. Data consists of extensive database
searches across Mexican media, promotional videos and available government documents
along with US media coverage, Congressional Research Service Reports and websites with
coverage of the Southern Border Program. While this intervention is primarily theoretical,
interspersed throughout are observations culled from multiple trips to Mexico’s southern
border, which have included discussions with border crossers and Mexican govern-
ment officials.
952 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

Border fortification logics

Fortifying political boundaries is nothing new. The vast literature on the subject suggests a
renaissance of bordering practices. Jones and Johnson (2016) note that there are almost 70
border walls around the world. These constructions are accompanied by a host of hardware
and sophisticated technologies freighted with material and symbolic significance (Gregory,
2011; Till et al., 2013). State wall-building has indicated a waxing and a waning of sover-
eignty. Brown has suggested such infrastructure can reflect vulnerability in the face of
globalization and “late modern colonization” (2010: 24). Others have argued for fortifica-
tion as the re-inscription of state power (Butler, 2006; Jones and Johnson, 2016; Murphy,
2013; Nevins, 2010). Whether conceived as sites of securitization or as mobile spaces of
encounter (or both) (Walker and Winton, 2017), bordering occurs amidst and in fact, enacts
contradictory juxtapositions of flows and orderings within and beyond the state. Mezzadra
and Neilson (2013) go a bit further to discuss how the border is a methodological tool, a way
of thinking allowing us to grasp the struggle between heterogeneous mobilities and changing
economic processes.
In studying the global landscape of blockading, scholars have identified how domestic
and international scales are enmeshed and manipulated through the war on terror, entailing
the conflation of military, police, and civilian activities (Amoore, 2006; Coleman, 2007;
Cooper, 2006; Dunn, 1996; Vaughan-Williams, 2008). Border militarization becomes part
of a geo-economic logic driven by private corporations’ desire to expand market opportu-
nities related to security projects (Mercille, 2008; Vallet and David, 2014). The role of vested
interests in the flattening of security into securitization and the ways in which supra-national
geopolitics factor into the maintenance of fortification practices is an aspect of border
literature that relates directly to Mexico’s Southern Border Program. Closer examination
reveals that private companies are the winners of border fortification. Their ties to U.S.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) include everything from IT services to the uniforms
worn by employees. Many of these companies imbricated in the border industrial complex
are in the top tier of political giving in the United States (Hesson, 2013). Who wins and who
loses in the reproduction of the border industrial complex highlights how current policies
operate as a “long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policymaking in a
seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to
global capitalism” (Paley, 2014: 5). Paley argues that US-backed security strategies promot-
ing fortification and militarization can be a front to strengthen the business environment
ripening Mexico and Central America for foreign investment.
The US border with Mexico has long been considered a valuable economic resource, but
little attention has been directed at the cultivation of similar circumstances on the Mexico-
Guatemala border. Put another way, how and upon what logics has Mexico agreed to be the
“wall” for the United States? And how does the SBP proceed at its site of implementation?
Because the border is at once material and symbolic (Heyman, 1994; Jusionyte, 2015;
Reeves, 2014), the answer is hardly straightforward. In southern Mexico, fortification is a
manifestation of a tug-of-war between economic and cultural logics. Attendant processes
are an articulation (however incomplete) of historically uneven spatial relationships shaped
by (Walker, 2015) geopolitical pressures and practices. The “borderlands” between Mexico
and Guatemala are a place where securitization is pulled in different directions. The ongoing
hardening of the political boundary reflects the lure of closure, which is beginning to take
hold in familiar ways. Recent developments along this border indicate: a loss of alternative
understandings in opposition to the status quo; and reflect how common sense is corrupted
in service to conformity through the obfuscation of the underlying causes of securitization.
Walker 953

Thus, fortification is an ideological formation that contrasts with Mignolo’s (2000) “border
thinking”, an emancipatory inclination recognizing the potential for transformation of the
hegemonic imaginary from the subaltern position. That is not to say that transgression and
porousness are not foundational to any theory of borders, nor that geopolitics “from below”
is not integral to quotidian geographies.5 Neither is it meant to project a hopeless scenario
connoting the futility of resistance. Instead, a Marcusean framing privileges how new forms
of social control are internalized with particular attention to the tools used to mold a reality
in which change is nullified through the perpetration of a formal rationality. Marcuse writes
this of the technical-political ensemble:

The technical apparatus of production and distribution functions, not as a sum total of mere
instruments which can be isolated from the social and political context without losing their
identity, but rather as an apparatus which determines a priori the product as well as the indi-
vidual and social operations of servicing and extending it, that is to say, determines the socially
needed demands, occupations, skills, attitudes-and thus the forms of social control and social
cohesion. (Marcuse, 1961 in Kellner, 2001: 42)

So, to contemporize Marcuse’s theory I would suggest that fortification is the contingent
socio-historical triumph of “thinking like an apparatus”. It is the circulation and introjec-
tion of instrumental reason perpetrated in part through standardization, categorization and
administration along with binary constructions of order and disorder. But, as shown in the
next section, border fortification is never a fully actualized regime, nor does it operate
according to immutable laws. It is transformed through interaction and it is here that the
concept of techno-cultural-rationalities is elucidating. When abstractions are grounded, they
intersect with the vernacular elements of the Mexican context to produce a particular
“mechanics of conformity” (adjustment to the prevailing socio-economic order) (Marcuse,
1941: 145) that is fractured, contradictory, violent, and incomplete.

Reproducing the complex

The official crossing at Ciudad Hidalgo-Tec un Umán is marked by a large concrete bridge
outfitted with metal gates, security agents and monitoring equipment. Underneath is a view
of the Suchiate River where dozens of rafts travel back and forth with goods and people.
The quick passage, occurring right under the gaze of border officials, costs US$1.35
(Personal Interviews) and is a bustling operation. The formal infrastructure appears stark
and lifeless when juxtaposed to the “actually existing” crossing. The ever-expanding border
enforcement apparatus proceeds amidst and seemingly (at least here) apart from business as
usual at the intersection of rhetoric and the reality of social conditions. This collision might
be interpreted variously as a politics of ambiguity or as a site of dissonance punctured by
dramatic slips between policy formulation and implementation. Amoore (2006: 338) writes
on the “ambivalent, antagonistic and undecidable moments” that make borders contestable
and unstable. Going further, it would seem that borders are not just about maximizing the
power of the state but are, in fact, leaky for a reason. While that reason may be deeply
rooted in the “macro”, it is the vacillation between the “micro” and “macro” that is
illuminating.
Mexico has been grappling with unilateral directives related to fortification from its
northern neighbor since the United States backed deportation campaign known as Plan
Sur in 20016 (Meyer and Seelke, 2014). More recently, in 2014, the State Department
reported that US$112 million was designated for Mexico’s border policing and
954 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

militarization. An unknown amount for the Mexican Navy/Marine facilities and training—
has come from the Defense Department’s counter-drug budget (Isacson et al., 2014; Miller,
2014a). One of the challenges to understanding the foundations of the Southern Border
Program is the lack of transparency,7 which stands in stark contrast to the visibility of the
infrastructure and its message. Tracking—whether it be dollar amounts, the identity of
recipients, or delivery of training and equipment—is complicated by several factors. Most
coverage describes the policy in general terms with little specificity. Funding comes from
different sources, much of it subsumed under the Mérida Initiative. The U.S. Department of
Defense has spent nearly US$60 million since, 2014 and the State Department an additional
US$90 million during the same time period but amounts designated specifically for Mexico’s
southern border are unclear. A recent memo from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
reports that in, 2016 US$86 million USD was budgeted for Mexico’s National Institute
on Migration (INM), the agency in charge of detention and eventual deportation of
migrants (Castillo, 2016). Another communication delineates that in FY, 2016 US$14 mil-
lion was to come from the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs
(INL), which falls under the Mérida Initiative, to support “the strengthening of Mexico’s
borders, with a focus on its southern border, with crucial nonintrusive inspection and
communications equipment as well as further related training” (Isacson et al., 2015: 16).
As of this writing, new figures have not been published. What we do know is that the SBP is
governed by the Coordinación para la Atención Integral de la Migración en la Frontera Sur
(CAIMFS, or the Agency for Comprehensive Attention to Southern Border Migration) with
two main headquarters in Villahermosa, Tabasco and Tapachula, Chiapas and divided into
five action areas, the exact nature of which are difficult to verify and distinguish from one
another. In addition, there is sufficient documentation through media and US and Mexican
sources to distill some of the discursive machinations of the SPB.8 Finally, some information
is available as to the categories of assistance. These read like a laundry list of predictive
calculability. Included is the aforementioned non-intrusive equipment (e.g portable VACIS
scanners, X-ray vans, and CT-30 contraband detection kits); biometric kiosks; construction
facilities for the INM, Customs, Marines, Federal Police; training for these agencies;
intelligence-sharing; workshops sponsored jointly by U.S. Northern Command and U.S.
Southern Command; and a “Document Verification for Travelers” program for the INM.
Government documents also suggest that U.S. geopolitical interests are at work in the
provision of equipment, training, communications, intelligence analysis, detection and mon-
itoring, and the planning and oversight of headquarter offices (Isacson et al., 2015). A small
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office
has been set up to monitor a Tapachula detention facility. The pressure of soft power has
been applied through terms like transparency, efficiency and accountability with the effect of
partially devolving US border patrol tasks to Mexico’s southern boundary. The violence of
policing mobility pre-dates fortification. In Mexico there is a long history of institutional
corruption (Morris and Klesner, 2010; Tyburski, 2012), the establishment of impromptu
military checkpoints/roadblocks and repressive actions by state and non-state actors against
whistle blowers (Lakhani, 2016; Ureste, 2016).

Technifying hierarchies
In this section, I outline the SBP’s attempts to discipline borderlands and migrants by
delimiting, reordering and securitizing movement. The extent to which the policy “succeeds”
is due in part to the construction of spatial hierarchies operating under discourses of order
and accompanied by increased documentation in service of sorting bodies. The recent
Walker 955

buildup of border infrastructure and paraphernalia effectively administers scarcity by ren-

dering security in its narrowest form. Such a practice should be read against the regional
histories and hierarchies (e.g. techno-cultural-rationalities) of this area. Central tenets of
techno-rationality like profitable efficiency, systems of standardized control and self-
administration appear in new technical forms and techniques removed from moral consid-
erations and political, social, and economic realities. The strength of boundary policing
wherein borders both thicken (Rosas, 2006) and migrate under the cloak of a highly rational
and professional bureaucracy lies partly in its intersection with Mexican nationalism.
The first action area of the Southern Border Program seeks to regularize border move-
ment through formal and orderly border crossings. An internal government document from
Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior obtained from The Globe says the program’s goal is to
“overcome common challenges related to migration and respect for human rights” and to
establish “a more modern, efficient, prosperous and secure border” (Nolen, 2017). The US
government has praised the technology and training accompanying the first plank of the
program for establishing order (Joffe-Block, 2016) suggesting a pragmatic matter-
of-factness.
Part of the first action area is the increase in regional visitor visas which effectively reifies
the spatial and ethnic hierarchies between Mexico and its southern border states. In 2011,
the US Department of Defense launched a Mexico-Guatemala-Belize Border Region
Program designating as much as US$50 million for training, patrol boats, night vision
equipment, communications equipment, and maritime sensors. Guatemalans and
Belizeans became eligible for visitor’s visas allowing them to cross into Mexico to shop or
work for a few days. Hondurans and Salvadorans, highly represented among migrants
heading north, were excluded. Under the Southern Border Program, Mexico plans to
grant citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua regional visitor permits.
A Regional Visitor Card can be obtained with proof of official identification, fingerprints,
and an interview with Mexican diplomatic representatives and immigration authorities.
Valid for five years, visitors from these countries can enter four southern Mexican states
(Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, and Quintana Roo) for up to three days. While SBP enables
“regularly and orderly” trips, these visas are not useful to trans-migrants (immigrants whose
daily lives depend on interconnections across international borders). The regulations asso-
ciated with the Southern Border Program stand in stark contrast to the free passage
accorded Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua through the Central
America-4 Border Control Agreement, which does not require any presentation of docu-
ments between those four countries. It has recently come to light that the Mexican govern-
ment aims to establish five poles of economic development in five southern Mexican border
states (for a total of 187 economic projects) with the understanding that the program will
depend on migrant labor in the agricultural sector. Whether bureaucratic protocol will
infuse that sector is open to question. Historically, enganchadores (recruiters) have con-
nected Guatemalan workers with Mexican farmers. Apart from that, those who cross the
border for labor, shopping, or small-scale commerce generally do not pass through the
official crossings (Isacson et al, 2014; Personal Interviews).
It is all the more interesting if we consider the state of Chiapas as a window on cross-
border relations and state-sponsored nationalism. Until, 1822 Chiapas was part of
Guatemala. Galemba (2012) writes that the post-colonial imposition of the political bound-
ary cut off ties between indigenous populations spanning the border. In the early-20th
century, the Mexican state conducted nationalist Mexicanization campaigns. These were
aimed at differentiating Mexico from Guatemala with specific attention to indigenous
populations that shared cross-border identities and languages. Hernández-Castillo (2001)
956 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

(cited in Galemba, 2012: 829) comments on the explicitly anti-Guatemalan elements of

Mexican nationalism during this period: “these indigenous populations at the border
didn’t just represent a cultural backwardness, but also anti-nationalism”.
Despite such campaigns, for most of its history Chiapas has had ties with bordering
Central American states through ancestry or seasonal migration patterns (the coffee plan-
tations function as one major attractor of Guatemalan migrant workers). The state is known
for its agricultural richness and natural resource base, the control of which has spawned
uprisings by indigenous and activist groups. From a state-centric perspective, Chiapas has
been perceived as a site of extraction that periodically must be tamed (Castillo, 2003; Collier
and Quaratiello, 2005). The Mexican army has over 60 encampments in the highlands of
Chiapas, a region with historical or contemporary Zapatista influence (Isacson et al., 2014).
The official rhetoric of the five-pronged SBP with its veneer of neutrality promoting safety in
efficiency, is all the more compromised in light of recent reports that a growing number of
indigenous Mexicans are detained by agents (Lakhani, 2016). Mexicanidad is veiled as
neutral administrative efficacy.
The SBP is engaged in hemispheric re-mappings reliant upon tiers of subordination.
Thus, the border-fraught with contradictory and improvised policies becomes the node
around which new economies are based (and old ones are reinforced?) It actively divides
up and sorts places into greater or lesser importance indicating “how persistent colonial
modes of thought are in geopolitical reasoning and how Northern specifications of the
global continue to reproduce the South as inferior; subject to surveillance, development
and management in Northern terms” (Agnew, 2003: 104). The socio-political aspects of
techno-rationality are metabolized through the localized imperatives of vested interests9
whereby higher prosperity requires spatial differentiation. State-led bordering practices pro-
duce and reproduce value and exchange that on the surface appear illogical. Borders are not
simply about stopping movement, they are about the politics (and political economy) of
movement. In this instance, the incompleteness of fortification at the national scale facili-
tates what is already happening, i.e. the business as usual model of procuring labor for
development in Mexico’s border states. Some flows are to be detained, others are to con-
tinue informally; almost a formalization of transgression. The Guatemala–Mexico border
now becomes the dividing line between the North and Central America all the while uphold-
ing an enforcement regime honoring and reinforcing uneven relations between Mexico and
the United States. Informalization as an organizing logic espouses the taken for granted
liaison between freedom and repression reflecting an inveterate hesitancy to think beyond
the given. The effect is a denunciation of any reckoning with existing conditions. The power
of negativity, so crucial to individual liberation and defined through autonomy and dissent,
is liquidated. Once again, a fortified border advances through the denial of historical and
technical foundations.

One-stop bordering

Business, technics, human needs and nature are welded together into one rational and expedient
mechanism. He will fare best who follows its directions, subordinating his spontaneity to the
anonymous wisdom which ordered everything for him. (Marcuse, 1941: 143)

In this section, I focus on the second line of action in the Southern Border Program: the
improvement of infrastructure and equipment at customs ports of entry and other border-
crossing stations. The checkpoints, “belts of control” and infrastructure described below
Walker 957

should be understood in multiple ways. First, processes of border fortification are an adap-
tation of a technical regime (referred to in the section’s opening quote) that always includes
informality. Second, the application of technology is at times efficient and at others mis-
guided but cannot be separated from the imperative to produce an image of security. Border
security in southern Mexico is increasingly employing strategies to “secure the volume”
(Elden, 2013) as part of extra-territorial geopolitical initiatives related to distanced security
concerns about human mobility. Peña Nieto has been a vocal proponent of U.S. backing for
a stronger security effort along the southern border, perhaps seeing the writing on the
geopolitical wall. Pillar 3 of the four-pillared Merida II Initiative, “creating a 21st
Century Border”,10 is becoming the largest of the pillars, in dollar terms, due to deliveries
of expensive scanning equipment to both of Mexico’s borders (Seelke and Finklea, 2016). As
such, the SBP continues to be caught up in multi-scalar webs of policy making and subject
to the US–Mexico bilateral agenda. Critics have noted that using funding from Mérida is
problematic from the inception because that initiative is intended to combat drug trafficking
not to address migration and border issues (Vega, 2016).
Under the second objective of the SBP is the strengthening of mobile checkpoints
(volantas) and the creation of Comprehensive Attention Centers for Border Transit
(Centros de Atención Integral al Tránsito Fronterizo, (CAITFs). Technically the CAITFS
pre-date the Southern Border Program but they have now become a central pillar of the
border zone strategy. Similar to shiny new shopping malls, these “super-checkpoints” por-
tray a picture of convenience and efficiency representing a single window of interaction for
those who pass through. All vehicles must go through the checkpoints and drivers and
passengers of buses must dismount. The CAITFS combine eight agencies: Customs
(Servicio de Administración Tributaria, SAT), the Army (Secretarı´a de la Defensa
Nacional, SEDENA), the Navy (Secretarı´a de Marina, SEMAR), the Federal Police, the
INM, the federal Attorney General’s Office (Procuradurı´a General de la Rep ublica, PGR),
and agricultural and health inspectors (Isacson et al., 2015; Vincenteño, 2016).
Construction, in conjunction with support and advice from the United States, has not
been completed on all checkpoints.
Relatedly, in March 2014, Peña Nieto’s administration devised a plan to organize border
security efforts into three virtual geographic tiers, called “belts of control”. The proposal
entails establishing three security cordons at fixed distances. The first line runs approximate-
ly 30 miles from the Guatemalan border, and comprises 11 official entry points already in
existence at the international borderline.11 The second is about 100 miles from the
Guatemala border at four sites in Chiapas and one in Tabasco. The third security belt
stretches along the Isthmus of Tehuántepec in Oaxaca. The mission has been characterized
by the Mexican government as the “technification of vigilance along the southern border”
replete with recommendations for drone use, the installation of sensors, and instructions for
collecting biometric data. Mexico’s National Security Agency (CISEN) has denied financial
support for these operations given the current economic climate of the country implying that
most of the funding comes solely from Mérida (Tourliere, 2017).
The mobile checkpoints, which frequently change geographic location, are outfitted with
personnel from security, migration, and customs agencies (some include Federal Police) in
addition to US-donated scanning, sensors, and intelligence-gathering equipment (Isacson
et al., 2015). Some have more sophisticated equipment than others. The goal of the check-
points is to channel and trap migrants and smugglers. Attempts to witness firsthand the
interactions at the volantas were thwarted but subsequent conversations yielded some infor-
mation including the fact that Mexicans and Central Americans are stopped randomly and
958 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

that upgrades in technology are in part an attempt to keep better records for the
Mexican and U.S. governments (Personal Interviews). Reports generated at the volantas
suggest that border logics are propagated and internalized through a slew of performance-
based indicators relying primarily on quantification. Effectiveness of the program hinges on
statistics such as: apprehensions of “Northern Triangle” citizens;12 deportation of unaccom-
panied children; numbers of CAITFS; the issuance of visiting and work permits facilitating
the movement of (some) border residents; and Mexican Federal Police presence (INM, 2015;
Isacson et al., 2014).
To cast action areas 1 (regularization of border movement) and 2 (infrastructure
improvement at crossings) in explicitly Marcusean terms, achievement has been transformed
into standardized efficiency: “. . .the individual’s performance is motivated, guided and mea-
sured by standards external to him, standards pertaining to predetermined tasks and func-
tions. The efficient individual is the one whose performance is an action only insofar as it is
the proper reaction to the objective requirements of the apparatus, and his liberty is confined
to the selection of the most adequate means for reaching a goal which he did not set” (1941:
142). The rationalization of border fortification appears in administrative form through the
atomization of function. Personnel are employed with goals of demarcating the border,
surveilling, and controlling flows of drugs and people. Under the cloak of efficiency, the
person in charge of an element of enforcement is transformed into an extension of border
fortification. Casey and Watkins write about this in relation to the US–Mexico border:
“They too become a kind of technique, a matter of training rather than individuality,
requiring the expert rather than the complete human personality” (2014: 17).
In the context of southern Mexico it is not much different. Personnel act as agents of
techno-rationalism, administering questionnaires verbally according to pre-set standards.
The Southern Border Program narrows the scope of security, in effect producing “progress
in domination” (Marcuse, 1966: 89). In its conflation with securitization, security becomes a
measurable and visible outcome. Its nationalization is bolstered by (and perhaps equivalent
to) market security achieved through contradictory policies that lead to freer trade but more
restriction on labor and human mobility. Centered on the state, security is to be doled out
on the individual scale through selective visas. Thus, security is about making eligibility
finite; abandoning a robust view of a multi-faceted human security. The logic of safeguard-
ing Mexico’s national space results in the saturation of the southern border with soldiers
and police.
Marcuse (1941), drawing on Veblen (1918), is eerily relevant when he describes how
technological forms of life keep watch over socially constructed limits. The machine process
requires a knowledge oriented to a:

ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact quantitative terms. This class of knowl-
edge presumes a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman, such an
attitude as will readily apprehend and appreciate matter of fact and will guard against the
suffusion of this knowledge and putative animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-
personal interpretations of the observed phenomenon and of their relations to one another.
(Marcuse, 1941: 142)

Critical or substantive rationality, based on a deep understanding of the means and the
ends, or, the meanings and values circulating in the lifeworld, is replaced by a common sense
that is corrupted in the adjustment to the facts of life that the exploitative system has
established in the first place.
Walker 959

The mixed messages of border technologies

Infrastructure associated with the SBP can be instructive on Mexico’s contradictory rela-
tionship with the United States. While Marcuse himself did not take up the subject of border
infrastructure specifically, he did focus on how technology reflected social processes. For
Marcuse, fortification (itself based on technological rationality) is an instrument of accu-
mulation and authority, a point supplemented here by highlighting the idiomatic internal-
ization and enactment of the Southern Border Program. The peculiarities of context, i.e. the
blurred lines of legality culminating in the visibility and tolerance of the “illicit”, work as
facilitators of the status quo. Geopolitics unfolds through the paradoxical simultaneity of
blockage and passage. The border is disciplined in line with techno-rational logics while
mundane “unauthorized” crossing ensues, diverting, subsuming and observing fortification.
In one of his more pessimistic writings, Marcuse explains how thought and behavior are
reproduced within a given system, rendering alternatives illusory. In short, the individual
comes to identify with society:

. . . But the term ‘introjection’ perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by
himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society. Introjection
suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the
‘outer’ into the ‘inner.’. . ..Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by
technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and
industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes
of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment
but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with
the society as a whole (Marcuse, 1964: 10).

To extrapolate from that, I would argue that the infrastructure of fortification is a telos that
operates in myriad registers. Its stubborn materiality echoes the internalization of the per-
formance principle but also embodies imaginations of the future, government visions and
psychic desires. A wall is a living archive. Within it lies the impetus to replicate the United
States despite Mexico’s contentious relationship with it (for some examples of US–Mexico
relations see Riding, 1985; Purcell, 1997; Fox, 1999). Ongoing construction of border for-
tifications could be read as a manifestation of that desire. This may be tied in with notions of
modernity—the desire to consume and emulate products and ways of life. In this instance,
the logics of fortification operate as a sort of bureaucratic Malinchismo,13 defined as the
pursuit of the foreign at the expense of one’s own culture.
But techno-cultural-rationality must also grapple with the meaning of long-term invest-
ment in various stages of completion, including suspension (Gupta, 2015). The production
of a recognizable form does not always achieve duplication and processes of emulation are
neither coherent nor complete. Performative sovereignty and acting as a (cracked) buffer
state suggest flexible securities that advance and retreat according to long-standing cultural
and political tensions. To return to the border for a moment, reports from the Washington
Office on Latin America (Isacson et al., 2014) have confirmed that US-donated equipment
was either not used or unsuited for the geography of the Mexico–Guatemala border.
Biometric equipment was largely unemployed at the checkpoints. Observation towers
were seemingly useless amid the densely forested region. While I would contend that
there is significant evidence that informality and transgression are enlisted in governance
along this border, periods of suspension in construction, ongoing porousness, and intermit-
tent implementation are their own condition with their own accomplishments. Slippages and
960 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

incoherences in the transformation of a porous boundary to a fortified one do not signify

that there is not a disciplining and re-ordering at work in line with technological imper-
atives. Although the project remains unfulfilled, the enactment of the border regime pro-
duces its own contradictions and disorder. Likewise, SBP is “successful” in producing an
image of security at the national scale to some degree because of contextual and historical
factors described throughout the paper some of which can be more fully understood by
taking a longer view of hemispheric relations and the history of U.S. intervention
(cf. Andreas, 2012) hinted at here but beyond the scope of this paper.

Whose security?
In this final section, I examine the last three action areas of the Southern Border Program to
reveal the costs of technological rationality on this border. Enhanced border securitization
translates into the triumph of vested interests, maintenance of the status quo and increased
burdens upon certain populations. The protection of migrants is the third action area of the
Southern Border Program. The most visible result has been the increased presence and
activity of the INM supported by the Federal Police. President Peña Nieto assured the
assembly at the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants in, 2016 that Mexico
has always been “a place of origin, transit, destination, and return for people” (Castillo,
2016). Contrary to such statements, experts have commented that the protection of migrants
and security do not weigh evenly. Between July 2014 and June 2015, there was a 71%
increase in apprehensions of Central American migrants (Meyer et al., 2016). In 2016,
arrests were 63% higher than in 2014 and 88% higher than in 2013 (Castillo, 2016). The
crackdown indicates that Mexico has retained its restrictive policy towards those fleeing
gang violence while scores of human rights abuses continue to be reported (Ureste, 2016).
The militarized security-based approach has included increased policing of cargo trains
(known collectively as La Bestia “The Beast”), and the Mexican Navy’s (SEMAR) con-
struction of 12 “advanced naval stations” in the southern border zone where at least 50
Marines are stationed at each post (SEMAR, 2013). The stated purpose of the stations is to
combat “the criminal groups that have attacked and systematically harmed the migrant
population and the inhabitants of [the] country’s south-southeast region” (Isacson et al.,
2015:11). In addition, SEMAR is in the process of building a large naval installation
“for important activities” outside of Tapachula (Mexican Government, 2016). Heightened
vigilance means that migrants must seek more dangerous routes in order to escape violence
and survive now that they are isolated from networks of shelters along traditional routes
(Sorrentino, 2015). Academic and media sources confirm that enhanced border securitiza-
tion has made travel and crossings more illicit and risky (Brigden, 2016; Galemba, 2017).
Efforts along Mexico’s southern border coincide with government seizure of the country’s
railroad system. In August of 2016, the Communications and Transport Ministry reclaimed
ownership of “The Beast”. Interestingly, the two lines of northbound cargo trains are lightly
policed suggesting that the priority here is line with US interests but continues the “selective
permeability” (Anderson, 2001) characteristic of borders in general (Castillo, 2016;
Ureste, 2016).
Differentiation through technologies of fortification begs the question: security for
whom? Policing is highly racialized and not just the job of the authorities. In her ethno-
graphic work, Galemba (2017) shows how border residents themselves use racial stereotypes
and fears to construe the Central American migrant “other” to protect themselves from
being mistaken as smugglers and as migrants. Mexicans are also stopped at these check-
points, particularly those marked as indigenous (Lakhani, 2016). Scalar (and
Walker 961

narrow) visions of security translate into a subset of inhabitants bearing the burden of
these logics.
The fourth and fifth areas of action of the Southern Border Program are overlapping.
They include regional co-responsibility (efforts to coordinate personnel based on a vision of
shared responsibility) and inter-institutional communication among various government
agencies. The Coordinating Office for Comprehensive Attention to Migration at the
Southern Border (Coordinación para la Atención Integral de la Migración en la Frontera
Sur) was established under the fifth action. This body was officially created on 8 July 2014
under the leadership of Senator Humberto Mayans, who left the Senate to become the
Southern Border Coordinator and returned to the Senate in fall, 2015 after leaving the
Coordinating Office. In August 2015, the Coordinating Office was closed and functions
have been distributed throughout southern Mexico under various names14. The impact of
the office is difficult to identify. At the discursive level, one of the main tasks has been to
investigate crimes against migrants. Mexico’s particular process of decentralization wherein
authority is vested at the regional scale but not empowered with financial or bureaucratic
resources (Wilson et al., 2008) has sometimes meant that offices play a limited role in
contrast to the stated mission.
Nevertheless, the need for coordination among various agencies ranging from the military
to the municipal police has been central to SBP. The southern border region has been a
primary site of coordinated federal and state operations to, in the words of the INM, “rescue”
migrants (Mariscal, 2015). The reality is a focus on the apprehension and detention of
migrants which, under law, can be carried out with the support of Mexico’s Federal Police
(Isacson et al, 2015). What is more, the distinct institutional mandates of the numerous
security agencies with overlapping responsibilities have been confusing to those most affected.
As noted earlier, media, official reports, and observation confirm border residents’ and cross-
ers’ impressions that opportunities for corruption have proliferated. The INM has a small unit
called “Grupo Beta”, charged with providing humanitarian assistance to migrants. The group
has offices in towns along the train line in Chiapas, Tabasco and Oaxaca. Reports of Beta
agents aiding in migrant detentions and alerting police to migrant locations are on the rise
(Sorrentino, 2015). This comes on the back of a longer legacy of distrust of institutions.15
Scholars have focused on the “biopolitical turn” of fortification (Dillon, 2002, 2007;
Larner and Walters, 2004) but few have commented on the techno-rationalism implicit in
these policies. The Southern Border Program represents an epistemological shift in thinking
about mobility. Mexico now views migrant flows as a threat to be controlled rather than a
humanitarian phenomenon concerned with the management of vulnerable groups. Habitual
geographies are transformed through hardening boundaries, encompassing a politics that is
legitimized by the administration and management of processes. The accompaniments to
smart border agreements, technology transfers, and spending not only ensures that Mexico
passes the hegemon’s security test but reflects the transformation of a porous and compli-
cated geography into a policy site reduced to control. According to Duncan Wood, director
of the Mexico Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center:

I’m aware of the criticisms, but I see (The Southern Border Program) as a positive development
in terms of Mexico getting more of a handle on who is coming into the country. You’ve actually
now got a Mexican strategy for the southern border, when before you had a policy vacuum.
(Eulich, 2015)

The southern border is now marked by and celebrated rhetorically for a technological and
bounded consistency that was not present before. Border fortification is assessed by its
962 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

proximity to a regulative ideal; an abstraction obfuscating politics and profit maximization.

Techno-rationality’s neutralizing tendencies conceal what Marcuse calls the materialization
of values “the translation of values into technical tasks” (Marcuse, 1964: 232). On the
surface, the pragmatism of technical reason works to cast the Southern Border Program
variously as the best (i.e. only) option, a necessity to solve a “crisis”, or as a success. The
effect of discursive maneuvers related to the policy leave the causes and conditions of
migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. Reform and assis-
tance- no longer construed as urgent- do not move beyond the goal of creating a “21st
Century Border”. The persistent reiteration of a securitized border (that can only be realized
through “technification”) is contingent upon the denial of contradictions upholding claims
to reality. The problematic nature of prevailing social and economic relations (e.g. why are
people migrating? How has the war on drugs exacerbated mobility?) is not the object of
scrutiny because a central feature of the instrumentalism of techno-rationality is the elision
of the political nature of “truth”. One such truth is how geopolitical security conceals
economic interests, all the while eclipsing alternatives and confining change to its own
institutions. This much is clear: techno-cultural-rationality works to neutralize the politics
of complex geographies quietly cultivating the growth of the border tech industry and
concealing the market incentives backing militarization and securitization.

Conclusion
In order to account for the site specific reconfigurations associated with the securitization of
the Mexico–Guatemala border, this paper has developed the concept of techno-cultural-
rationalities, an extension of Herbert Marcuse’s technological rationalism. Techno-cultural-
rationalities understands fortification as an historical form of instrumentalized reason; one
which seeks to ground rationality and the apparatus of technology, which Marcuse wrote
about in a general way. Specifically, I have highlighted the routes through which hegemonic
policies are negotiated and implemented in Mexico’s Southern Border Program. Vernacular
elements of efficiency, standardization, administrative practice, the veiled neutrality of
policies, and the complex histories of trilateral relationships become the basis for the repro-
duction of the border industrial complex. These turn on the duality of the administration of
scarcity buttressed through the renewal of spatial hierarchies, and informality and trans-
gression as a mode of governance. Under the auspices of security, order and bureaucracy,
we are able to see a process of redistribution and accumulation conceived as a complex of
methods and tools that advance rationality.
The “technification” of borders reminds us of the continuity of conditions compelling us
to revisit Marcuse. The value of techno-rationality lies in the acknowledgement that humans
may control individual technologies but the technological system shapes activities and
relations. The concept of techno-cultural rationalities hones in on the interplay and out-
comes that are reproduced and transformed through forces in real places. In other words,
unmooring Marcuse’s work from his original spaces of engagement urges a reckoning with
the particular conditions supporting the status quo. Marcuse argues that the taken-
for-granted liaison between freedom and repression, productivity and destruction, and dom-
ination and progress results from our own historical organization of society and therefore is
open to re-imagining (Marcuse, 1955). Although Marcuse argues that the technological
apparatus has eroded individuality, he sees the liberatory potential of technics in the pursuit
of individual fulfillment: “Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty,
scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil” (Marcuse,
1941: 139). Through “spatializing’” his writings, it becomes possible to see how
Walker 963

technological rationality in its varied contradictory guises and registers enacts spaces of
limitation. Significantly, the extension of Marcuse’s original theory in the form of techno-
cultural-rationalities illustrates that border processes are not simply a matter of whittling
down, but rather a constrictive and productive re-spatialization, which carries with it the
potential to produce new sites of resistance and conformity.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

Notes
1. Documentation shows that the Programa Frontera Sur is referred to also as: The Comprehensive
Plan for the Southern Border (CPSB). I will refer to it as The Southern Border Program and/
or SBP.
2. Over the course of the 36-year-long civil war that began in 1960 and ended in 1996, more than
200,000 people were killed. About 83% of those killed were Mayan. U.S. involvement in the
country’s war included training officers in counterinsurgency techniques and assisting the national
intelligence apparatus (see the Report: “Guatemala: Memory of Silence” https://www.aaas.org/
sites/default/files/migrate/uploads/mos_en.pdf).
3. Techno-rationalism, techno-rationality, and technological rationality are used interchangeably
throughout the article.
4. This is not the place to launch into a full-fledged defense of Marcuse’s vast theoretical contribu-
tions. Suffice it to say that he has many critics, some of whom focus on the stability he attributed
to capitalism and the lack of agency ascribed those purportedly dominated by vested interests. It is
here that I would side with Kellner (2001) and Farr (2009) in their submission that Marcuse
eschews technological determinism by avoiding a view of technology as merely a byproduct of
the economy.
5. Although I would find a division between “vernacular” and “official” problematic but I cannot
take that up here.
6. This regional program backed by U.S. authorities resulted in large-scale police actions along
Mexico’s southern border (with the cooperation of Central American nations) culminating in
the reduction of the flow of undocumented migrants by 30%.
7. Aside from the decree establishing the Coordinating Office and a report of its work from July 2014
to July 2015, there are no official documents available outlining the Southern Border Program and
its different areas (Isacson et al., 2017).
8. These include but are not limited to: Testimony from General Charles H Jacoby to the House
Armed Services Committee, 3 March 2013. Available at: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/
AS00/20130320/100395/HHRG-113-AS00-Wstate-JacobyG-20130320.pdf; ICE communication
available at: https://www.wola.org/files/120227_ICE.pdf; INM 2015. Boletı́n INM No. 29/15 avail-
able at: http://www.gob.mx/inm/prensa/el-instituto-nacional-de-migracion-informa-9564; and
México: Presidencia de la Rep ublica, Tercer Informe de Gobierno, September 2015, http://www.
presidencia.gob.mx/tercerinforme/; Presidencia de la Rep ublica, Que es el Programa Frontera Sur
July 2015, https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/articulos/que-es-el-programa-frontera-sur
9. Some examples of vested interests in this case would be: the state’s need for laborers, the role of
consumers in economic growth and those profiting from their association with the border indus-
trial complex through employment, contracts, and so on.
964 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(5)

10. In April 2010, Mexico and the United States issued a declaration of the 21st Century Border, an
extension of the Mérida Initiative enacted in 2008 by US Congress.
11. It is worth noting that there are competing reports as to whether there will be a 12th site of entry.
Official discourse suggests that there will be but analysis by media and nonprofits on the ground
continues to reference only eleven (Isacson et al., 2015).
12. The Northern Triangle refers to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
13. While the term has a long cultural history, Day’s (2005) work discusses the concept in relation to
neoliberalism. I draw on it here to highlight the practice of adopting a value system of another
culture thereby implicitly accepting the terms of one’s own subordination.
14. https://www.iom.int/news/new-office-vulnerable-migrants-opens-southern-mexico
15. Numerous examples appear in Mexican media (cf. http://imagendelgolfo.mx/resumen.php?id=
41048380). For an example of scholarship on the subject see, Schedler (2007).

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