The Managed Violences of the Borderlands: Treacherous Geographies, Policeability, and the Politics of Race

Abstract

Shifts in border and migration governance since the 1990s evident in the intensification of militarized policing in the Mexico–US borderlands and crystallized in the funneling of a large percentage of migrants into the treacherous geography of the “killing deserts” constitute managed forms of violence that are inextricably linked to the racialization processes of American empire. Such managed violences generated another treacherous geography, the critical and “contaminating” socio-spatial formation of Barrio Libre, a transnational 'hood incarnated by a severely marginalized population of young people and instantiated in a sewer system that ran under the border. I advance the concept of policeability to capture the daily instantiations of the managed violences of the borderlands, evident in dramatic displays of state power and in the informal managements of everyday life.