In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Countering negative narratives with an event that honors interconnectedness and subverts the border in Agua Prieta/Douglas, and a contested hotel--in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley--that is of great importance for Mexican American civil rights.
There is a reckoning with history happening at an old hotel with a horrific past and the RGV's first and only civil rights museum.
“This is the moment of solidarity. This is the moment for mutual support.”
As the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it in his book Upside Down: A Primer for a Looking Glass World, the terminology used in mainstream political discourse often describes precisely the opposite of reality. Cut-throat capitalism is free trade. Violence is law and order. Extraction of natural wealth from communities is increasing revenue.
So where does “border security” fit in to this? Part of the answer is that borders do not produce security but subordination. This point has been made for two decades now by sociologist Nandita Sharma (see the essay “Why No Borders?,” which she cowrote with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright). The point of borders is not to keep people out but to keep them in line. Borders are foundational to a global system fraught with injustice.
The struggle for no borders, Sharma explains, is a practical political project.
Sharma is the author of two books, Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of “Migrant Workers” in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). She teaches at the University of Hawai‘i.
During our conversation, I wondered aloud whether “no borders” is still a practical political project, now that Donald Trump will take office for a second term. She responded without hesitation, “It’s not only a viable step, it’s the only step.”
As we concluded, we discussed the provocative quote from Italian thinker, philosopher, and Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Those monsters are easy to identify with the incoming Trump administration and the nation-state it represents, along with increasing climate catastrophe. “This is the moment of solidarity,” Sharma said. “This is the moment for mutual support.” Indeed, she hinted, the moment has arrived to not only imagine but also to work for another possible world.
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In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A vivid depiction of what has been happening during the last eight weeks of resistance against border wall construction in southern Arizona’s San Rafael Valley.
Wall Watch combines geospatial mapping, archival research, and community participation to provide the public with an accurate, continually updated record of border wall construction along nearly 2,000 miles of the international border.
Worried about the future of democracy in the United States? Look to Indigenous histories; they have much to teach us about the struggle between liberty and empire.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
