Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country.
And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: Yes, that was the unmistakable voice of the 47th president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, on msnbc.
Welcome to Breeze Blocks, a podcast by Failed Architecture. My name is Nouria Rio Costa and I'm a journalist, jurist, curator and urbanist. And today I'm taking over Breeze Blocks to talk to you about borders.
That was the sound of a clandestine crossing. The moment when a group of around five or six people were crossing the wall, the tall, metallic man made barrier that divides Ciudad Juarez from El Paso. The wall that separates the United States of America to the north, from Mexico to the south.
This is Gabriela Sanchez, a Mexico born US based sociocultural anthropologist and global expert on border control.
[00:02:15] Speaker D: Hey.
So do you remember that I told you that my family was coming over to visit?
My mom wanted to come and see the fence, and it's already hard for me. I think it's also been hard for them to understand what I do, the kind of work that I do. And so I was a bit surprised that she wanted to go and see the fence.
And because it's not far from El Paso, it's maybe about 10 minutes from where we live, like the part of the fence that you could actually touch.
And she could see some people on the Mexican side just, you know, going about their thing.
And she kept saying that she hadn't thought about the border that way, that she never thought that the border was.
[00:03:08] Speaker E: Going to look that way or.
[00:03:09] Speaker D: And when I asked her what she meant, she said, well, I don't know, I thought he was bigger, taller, and it doesn't look like that. It's not the way I thought it would be.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: Gabriela told me this story a few months ago after we met in Rotterdam, when I asked her how her mother imagined the border wall to be. Just like you heard, she said she thought it'd be different, bigger, and made of concrete.
Borders are fictional constructs. We grow up with visual and social imaginaries of how they look, what they accomplish, and the ways they work.
And usually there's a common thread. They always seem to be far, but as Gabriela told me, borders are actually within us. They're always closer than they seem. And frontiers around the world have much more in common than we think they do.
Trump's statements on mass deportation are no strange thing. They're in fact an example of a global trend of fascist sentiments on the rise.
Trump's migration policies have a lot in common with problematic, well researched models like the Australian or Danish ones, and are also an inspiration for Europe today.
As leaders across the continent increasingly advocate for deportations and border externalization, the Union is in fact embracing formerly taboo approaches to migration.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: Yes, Europe is a garden.
We have built a garden. The rest of the world, most of the rest of the world, is a jungle and the jungle could invade the garden and the gardeners should take care of it.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Migration pact was a crucial step in taking back control of Europe's external border.
[00:04:55] Speaker F: Borders must be managed.
We will act to strengthen our external borders and prevent irregular migration.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: These were the voices of Josep Borrell, the former high representative of the European Union for Foreign affairs, with his now quite famous garden statement on AFB News, Member of European Parliament Thomas Tove and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen on excerpts by EU Debates TV showcasing a very clear position about border management.
But as safe and legal routes for people on the move diminish, this increased hostility of borders and border infrastructure renders these spaces in even more violent, uncertain and dangerous.
We are losing eyes on the ground and watchdogs like investigative journalists have it harder and harder to access critical information that actually tells us what is going on, if things are going wrong and who is to blame.
But borders are not just spaces of violence and mass control.
Borders, and this is something Gabriela always says, are also spaces of possibility.
Now you're going to hear some voices speaking in Spanish. It's a minute and a half clip and you can skip it if you want because right after we're going to hear Gabriela explaining it.
[00:06:22] Speaker G: So now they shoot straight. I mean, they don't wait, they don't, they don't try to stop. You could just shoot you.
[00:06:57] Speaker H: Dfo.
[00:07:40] Speaker F: So tell me, Gabriela, what did we just hear?
[00:07:43] Speaker E: This was a conversation, a very informal conversation that I recorded in May with a taxi driver. And, and he was very casually just talking about the fact that killings and shootings take place along the border and how the cars of some of the employees working at an international corporation had been targeted for smuggling drugs. So these are part of the everyday notions that people have about the border and what happens here and how this is part of the conversations that people sometimes have gotten used to have in the context of the U.S. mexico border. One of the challenges about being on the border is that we are hyper represented and this is not new, but right now, I think there's this climate of fear, of anxiety, of uncertainty that as people from the border we're trying to make sense of.
Everything changes every day in terms of policy.
We hear about somebody else who got arrested, who got stopped, who got pulled over by police, by border patrol, and there's really no clarity in terms of where we're going.
And at the same time, this is part of what we have been dealing with as border communities for decades.
Intimidation, harassment, the level of uncertainty over our immigration status, the level of surveillance, even, that we face. So none of this is new, but I think it has become intensified over the last few months, especially following the signing of the executive orders.
[00:09:27] Speaker F: What I find particularly interesting here is that none of this is new.
I wonder if actually it is the Internet, the virality of the images shared, and this overrepresentation that's exacerbated the climate of polarization around border management.
Let's backtrack a little bit and look at how these strategies have been deployed in the past versus how they are being deployed today. What are the things that have changed in recent times?
[00:10:00] Speaker E: I believe social media has definitely played a role in terms of the visibility of some of these events. I think the public by now is very much aware of the arrests that are taking place within, you know, in the interior, in places far, far away from the border.
And at the same time, we see here what we see on the US Mexico border is again, this repetition, this kind of cycle that we go through, and it's very much connected to the political climate. Every few years, we see people coming back to the border, the military, the National Guard, the escalation of the surveillance. We get to see this coming into our communities, into neighborhoods that are close to the fence. And by defense, I'm talking about this structure that divides both countries, both Mexico and the US or that separates Mexico from the US What I think is different this time is the fact that the way in which we talk about this level of control is out of fear.
I think that many of us had already gotten used to being checked, going through the checkpoints, going through the border, going through the bridges. But we were not used to seeing the presence of border patrol farther from the fence or to hear the helicopters so early in the morning, you know, hovering over our homes.
So the intensity of the surveillance and control is something that is definitely new and especially for those of us who have or who believe that we're already used to this level of surveillance and control.
[00:11:37] Speaker F: You told me that story about your mother and her reaction to the wall. Maybe let's stop a little bit here and unpack the representation of the border that's been done and how you've felt that that has personally affected you.
[00:11:55] Speaker E: One of the things that I find really interesting when people come visit to the border is precisely how they say. There were many ways I picture this border, but none of them compare to seeing it from here.
Being on the border, having lived on the border for so long, we get used to this. Different representations or different manifestations in our daily life.
It's very interesting when we invite people to the, to the borderlands in how they express this kind of surprise over the fence and the structure.
They find it sometimes intimidating. But then if you go down the road or along the river, you see that the fence comes to an end. And then this architecture or this manifestation of power that is communicated by this metal construction vanishes. And then you keep following the political border, what we have learned to consider as the border. And then you will find a river, then you may find another spot where there's really no construction or no structure that separates both countries, where people actually go back and forth.
So I think that in people's collective imagination here, I'm talking about everybody else that is not from here, from these communities, the border and then the fence in particular is built or created or expected to look in a certain way.
Very, very high, top notch technology with border patrol all around it.
And once you're here, people start seeing that, yes, there's a level of militarization, there's a level of police presence, but it is not uniform.
The quality and the maintenance of the wall also varies and is impacted by the environment, the water, the wind, just the desert climates.
For many people, when they come and visit us here on the border, there's that fence that they built in their imagination and what they actually see on the ground.
[00:14:16] Speaker C: Gabriela's words here are very precise. Her descriptions of the US Mexico border render it tangible, fleshy, alive to the elements. And this tells me one thing.
The border we know the border presented to us in the media is an abstraction, hearing instead of seeing that border. And Gabriela's description, as well as in the sounds and textures that were heard at the start, helps make it clear that the border is very real.
[00:14:43] Speaker I: It lives.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: And it requires a vast and great effort to keep it alive.
The Mediterranean Sea, for example, the border that's closest is often described as a graveyard. But this description leaves very little room for reflection on what graveyard means on a human scale. Where every life lost in that graveyard is a universe.
I asked Gabriela if she could talk about other instances of this kind of distancing between the border spectacle and the border as it is lived. She started with the architecture of the Israeli occupation of. Of the West Bank.
[00:15:19] Speaker E: One border that felt the closest to my experience living on the US Mexico border were the checkpoints going in and out of Palestine.
The level of architecture, the channeling, the funneling of people, the restrictions, the uncertainty, not knowing how long it's going to take for you to cross, not knowing if you're going to be able to make it to work, to school, or to receive medical treatment.
And also the kind of verbal abuse that you can experience at this checkpoint by border officials, by immigration enforcement.
How there's this level of intimidation that occurs because of course, you know that you cannot speak up as somebody who's going to be, who wants to or who is aspiring to cross that border. You cannot protest, you cannot speak up, you cannot defend anyone else if you witness that an abuse is taking place because that can potentially compromise your ability to cross.
This is the border where I felt this replication of the border space, this again, this border architecture, or how it is reproduced by the States to control, to channel, to funnel people in a certain way.
[00:16:38] Speaker F: The. This idea of the generation of an artificial border where there wasn't one in the first place is also something that I remember thinking when I first started looking into the externalization strategies of the European Union through agreements with Tunisia, with Mauritania, with Libya, where it's almost as if the border, that is a European border, that is a physical element, either be it a sea or mountain, it's just like construct it through policy, which is not even tangible, but that de facto, it's just pushing that border onto the other side of the Mediterranean, into Africa.
What are your thoughts here? And maybe you can actually stop and unpack a bit the concept of externalization for our listeners as well.
[00:17:29] Speaker E: I love how you're talking about the Mediterranean space because I think along the US Mexico border, I'm Mexican, I grew up in central Mexico. And I remember thinking about the border not the way we think about it now, but as a desert, as this desert landscape. I used to think more growing up as a child as this space that you need to. That you had to cross to get to, as we call it in Mexico, el Otro Lado, to the other side.
But it was never about this political space. It was more about the nature.
I remember during my first years of fieldwork and work In Northern Africa, I remember how the sea had also been manufactured in migration policy as this dangerous space, in a fashion that was very similar to the way in which we used to talk about the deserts that connected Mexico with the United States. So I think there has also been this weaponization of the geography in terms of policymakers, politicians speaking about deserts, speaking about oceans or the sea, as this inherently dangerous space, when policies have, in fact, been the ones that have created this risk and danger. Because people don't have to travel through these routes, relying on risky mechanisms, they can actually travel safely the way those of us who have the privilege of traveling with visas and with passports do.
Everybody should have access to those. But then, in the logic of policy, all of these natural spaces become constructed as lethal, mortal, dangerous, when they were not originally like that. When we talk about externalization, we are primarily referring to the practices from countries from the Global north that involve the expansion or the pushing out of their borders farther out and primarily onto countries from the global South.
So in the case of the eu, all of these agreements that the EU has been signing with countries throughout North Africa, particularly to contain and to stop the arrival of people to the EU in Latin America, we also see border externalization, especially in the case of the United States, which has signed agreements with multiple countries across Latin America that aim to contain the flow of, or the mobility dynamics, rather, of people coming North.
That has obviously changed in the context of the Trump administration. But the measures that aim to contain, control and surveil people continue.
[00:20:26] Speaker F: I think you've mentioned a couple of things that are quite interesting. On the one side is this idea of the deals that are signed with the Global south, almost with the.
With the attempt to construct a narrative as if these deals were down the line, beneficial for both countries.
While there's significant amounts of literature that argue that this is just throwing cash at Northern Africa to outsource the management of the violent management of borders for Europe.
But then there's another thing that you said earlier of this idea that this sort of, like, stopping practices.
[00:21:15] Speaker C: Prevent the.
[00:21:17] Speaker F: Management the existence of safe routes, as if people are just going to stop moving because that doesn't exist, because that route doesn't exist, or because that route is violent. Actually, what we see increasingly is that people just keep being on the move but find even more dangerous routes.
[00:21:35] Speaker E: What I've been thinking over the last few weeks, and this has been, once again, in the context of the executive orders that were signed by Trump that de facto eliminated the possibility of applying for asylum along the US Mexico border, but that also terminated most of the provision of humanitarian support throughout the Americas, is how evocative it was of the pandemic, because there was this perception the pandemic was one of the best things that could have ever happened to states because it gave them an excuse to control population movement.
I see a lot of similarities because at this point in time, we have noticed that this steep decline in the number of arrivals of apprehensions of people at the US Mexico border, for example. But that doesn't mean that people have stopped moving.
It means that for many, the executive orders and the inability to apply for asylum once they arrived at the border meant that they had to remain in the places where they were at, because they cannot return to their countries of origin, because they don't want to return to them, because of the conditions, and also because they cannot move forward.
That, again, does not and will not contain the movement of people. We know that there's different dynamics that people rely on, and this is primarily through the facilitators of migrant smuggling that they are able to cross borders.
But even before we go into smuggling, we have to keep in mind the fact that these locations where people are, these places where people are waiting for the ability to move, are dangerous or have been made dangerous. Going back to this notion that we were talking about on the creation of dangerous spaces.
And they are made dangerous by preventing people from working legally, from the ability to get work permits that are going to allow them to make a living, by governments not providing people with reliable medical assistance for those who need it, by widespread xenophobia and racism.
So there are different mechanisms that put people at risk. It's not just the border. It's this expansion of the border enforcement powers that we're seeing at play. The ability of countries on the global north to. To implement the controls that they originally had at the border, further down, many times very far away from their own borders.
[00:24:23] Speaker C: This process of manufacturing dangerous spaces really stuck with me.
Hearing Gabriela speak about how places where people are stranded have been made dangerous is yet another example of how borderlands can be and are being manufactured.
In Europe, externalization is often described as wicked.
How is it possible that we are not even reflecting on the fact that our borders keep being pushed further beyond where they were geographically drawn?
In a context of mass polarization and fast media, there's very little room to unpack and understand how these policies actually play out in practice and how they are affecting people on the ground.
In the next part of the conversation, I asked Gabriela and a few other experts about the implications of European migration policies. The first one of these experts was Ahlam Chemlali.
[00:25:18] Speaker I: When we talk about the EU's migration policies, especially the externalization of its borders, we're really talking about how Europe is pushing its borders southward, often beyond the Mediterranean, into North Africa, into countries like Tunisia, Libya, Morocco and Egypt. And this approach is quite different from the US Mexico border strategy, which is physically and politically often centered at the border itself.
In contrast, the EU outsources much of its border control to partner countries, offering financial aid and political cooperation in exchange for those governments efforts to stop migration even before they reach Europe.
If we take Tunisia as a case in point, Tunisia has become a key strategic partner in the EU's externalization strategy. The EU has provided significant funding and equipment and training to Tunisian authorities, patrol borders and coast guards to prevent departures and to deter migrants. But on the ground, this has had troubling and deadly consequences.
Migrants, many from Sub Saharan Africa, face increased violence, arbitrary detention and mass deportation and expulsions into deserts or unsafe regions. These practices often violate international law and they're happening with European support, directly or indirectly. So this policy not only endangers lives, but also destabilizes Tunisia. It incentivizes repressive tactics and undermines Tunisia's own fragile democracy.
And much like the US Mexico border, where enforcement heavy approaches often ignore the root causes, the EU strategy in North Africa treats migration as a security problem rather than a human reality shaped by contemporary conflicts, inequality and climate change.
So in short, while the EU keeps migrants out of sight, the. The human cost of that policy is very visible in places like Tunisia.
[00:27:42] Speaker C: Ahlam Chemlali is a PhD fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies in the Department of Migration and Global Order at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. Her research focuses on migration and the human consequences of European border politics in North Africa, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of violence, smuggling and gender.
Now let's go back to the conversation with Gabriela.
[00:28:07] Speaker F: Let's talk now about a concept that keeps popping up when we look at migration policies and management. The politics of letting die. What are your thoughts on this? How will you define this concept?
[00:28:21] Speaker E: It's very difficult for me to talk about death.
And I think this is also very much connected to my own experiences living on the border. Because I don't want to think about. I refuse to. To think about the border as a place where people go to die.
At the same time, I am very much aware of how borders and border architecture kills the very way in which governments have systematically Come up with policies to kill people, to effectively kill people, also leads us into thinking that it's not everybody. It's not everybody who is being allowed to die, or who has to engage or secure the services of a smuggling facilitator, or who has to travel clandestinely because he or she is unavailable to cover the costs of smuggling journeys or the ones that are associated with visas salvo conductos, documents that allow you to cross borders here in the Americas.
But it is clear that policies are targeting specific groups. They are targeting non Europeans, they are targeting non white people. They are targeting those that do not fit the perception of what is fair, what is safe, what is clean.
There's a lot of literature in cultural studies and migration that examines these elements on how border and migration control policies are inherently racist and in fact, aim to exclude people. Who does not or is not part of this, Parts of nation building that many times, the EU and the Global north in general, not just the EU or the United States, have in mind. Right. All of these practices that we have seen on exclusion, labeling, of keeping others away, of trying to keep others away.
[00:30:34] Speaker C: I was glad that Gabriela brought up this idea of those who don't fit and the racism embedded in these management policies, because it gives me a chance to bring in a very fitting statement from Lighthouse Reports director Klaas Van Dyken. Let's hear him speak.
[00:30:48] Speaker J: For more than a decade, European Union has built a system, created a system to keep refugees and migrants out of Europe.
And they are not doing this by just sealing Europe's borders. No, they go beyond that.
And one of the most striking examples we found last year in an investigation that we did was called Desert Dumps. So we discovered that Europe supports, finances and is directly involved in clandestine operations in northern African countries to dump thousands of black people in the desert or in remote area each year to prevent them from coming to the eu.
So how this works in practice is that in countries like Tunisia, in Morocco, in Mauritania, police, in collaboration, often with European forces and European equipment, they round up black people from the street, they arrest them, they put them in detention centers, and then they bus them out to the desert or remote areas and leave them for that or just by themselves.
[00:31:54] Speaker C: Desert dumps. The investigation Klaas mentions in the statement is one of Lighthouse Report's latest research projects on on border management in the European Union.
It was produced in collaboration with the Washington Post, Ennas der Spiegel, el Pais, IRPIMedia, RDA, Inquifada and Le Monde. Lighthouse has a newsworm on migration and one on borders and continuously carries out groundbreaking work exposing the flaws and human rights violations on borders worldwide.
I then asked Gabriela about the role of these types of investigations.
How do they help us understand how border policies play out in practice on the ground?
[00:32:34] Speaker E: I am particularly encouraged by this kind of reports and the work that Lighthouse Reports has been conducting on the ground. And this is because they have relied on journalists from the communities where many of these challenges and many of these pressures practices are taking place.
It is also very important that we have this level of communication, this level of collaboration at identifying what is happening on the ground, not only from the perspective of again, people who are within Europe or people who are within the US but also those who are directly impacted by many of the policies.
Because that also gives you a sense of and provides angles that we're probably not widely aware of. It also showcases other elements of that of the violence. I think that many times when we are looking at the violence of migration policies, we get distracted.
And this is why earlier in the podcast I was talking about why I don't like to talk about death. And that is because most representation supporters are associated, are connected with death and people do not migrate to die.
They are moving and they are carrying out all of these actions and tasks because they want to live and they want to live their lives the best they can.
This kind of reports actually show that those efforts, those attempts for people to live are being stopped or contained by all of these policies.
These reports are also important because they are talking about dimensions and spaces and places where people don't usually think there's life or where we have been talking so much about borders and security and surveillance that we don't see that people are trying to survive and trying to live.
Examining life and the efforts to contain life I think is an essential contribution of these kinds of reports.
[00:34:58] Speaker F: I completely agree with you. And you're actually making me think of something that I thought of when I had a conversation precisely with Klaas and the results of the Desert Dumps investigation, investigation on the need for these types of investigations precisely to shed light on things that we don't usually see. And also the reaction that that provokes in, in this case, European taxpayers and Europeans at large, that most of the times they think that something has to be done about migration, that there has to be some sort of management and planning and policy making on the topic, but that they would not support these types of violences on borderlands. And this actually brings me to another one of the speakers, Luigi Aquili, a social anthropologist specialized on irregular migration, transnational crime and refugee studies, who is a professor at the Migration Policy center of the European University Institute.
[00:35:57] Speaker G: Migration has become a proxy, a proxy for broader political anxieties such as identity, security, sovereignty.
However, what we are seeing is not an evidence based policy making.
It's rather reactive and punitive strategies designed to meet the favor of domestic electorate.
So the result is a growing reliance on externalization, which translates with deals with third countries, deterrence of migration and overall criminalization of migration, especially irregular migration.
But the real question is, do these strategies work well if the goal is to contain stem migration and at the same time protect migrants? Well, clearly not. It fails in both sense.
People are still on the move and often with fewer options and greater protection risks. So what these policies produce at the end of the day is not controlled, but it's precarity, forcing people into increasingly dangerous journeys into the hands of intermediaries, and sometimes leading them to smuggling, to getting involved into smuggling them human smuggling themselves as a way to survive or simply help others to move.
So instead of reducing mobility, these policies just push it elsewhere, out of the public eye, into a more dangerous route, into more dangerous routes and into informal criminalized networks.
What Europe is managing in the end is not migration itself, it's rather visibility.
It's about creating distance, geographical, legal and moral, so that responsibility can be outsourced and accountability avoided.
[00:37:44] Speaker F: In this statement, actually he brought up two things that we could maybe stop on right now.
Firstly, there's this idea of the west outsourcing responsibility and avoiding accountability through practices like externalization, which we did touch on a little bit. And Desert Dumps is precisely about this. But what are your thoughts on this practice of externalizing responsibility and this idea of being non accountable for the violence in borderland?
[00:38:13] Speaker E: Having carried out research along the US Mexico border and North Africa, an element of this redistribution of responsibility that comes to mind, most of what we hear about tends to be along the vilification of border agents, but not within Europe and not within the United States.
There's this recognition that authorities in other countries are abusing migrants or that are engaging in some level and multiple levels of violence against them.
However, that takes away the attention from those who actually create those measures. By focusing on local law enforcement and their actions, or my favorite topic to go into, by focusing on migrant smuggling, we take away the attention from the public.
When it comes to enforcement. We are not accusing, and we're not only accusing, but we're not examining, we're not taking a close look at the actions that are leading to those practices on the ground.
It's a lot easier for governments throughout the global north to blame others for the consequences of measures, of practices, of ideas that were crafted within Europe, within the U.S. within Australia, within Canada. It's easier to talk about that as something that is being carried out by others. There's also an othering process that takes place that is very much connected to local enforcement that I think we need to take a closer look at.
[00:40:00] Speaker F: Thank you for bringing this idea up of the otherness and the othering process.
I find that very, very necessary in the same way that we've been deconstructing some of the buzzwords around migration. This is certainly another one.
And another one which you are very savvy on. And that actually, Luigi, also brought up is the concept of smuggling.
And the concept of smuggling next to human trafficking, which is how it's often brought up as well.
Let's stop for a second on this topic and the difference between, and I'm quoting you here, dismantling smuggling, often mentioned as the ultimate goal of border management and dismantling racism, which is something that you were already hinting at earlier, which also relates to this idea of, oh, the bad border guards who most times are actually also non white.
What are your thoughts on this?
[00:41:02] Speaker E: I am not excusing border guards for the violence that they actually carry out against migrants.
What I really want us to think about, once again is that all of this rhetoric of organized crime, of border agents in distant and remote countries being the ones that are carrying out all of this violence, distract us from looking more closely into what are the motivations and the spaces where many of these policies are created.
That's why when I talk about migrant smuggling, I like to talk about it as a radical form of care that emerges when people do not have access to visas, to passports, to mechanisms that are going to allow them to travel safely.
In the case of Ukraine, we were able to see firsthand how, if the political will existed, there would be effective ways to facilitate the transit, the safe transits of people who are fleeing from conditions of abuse, of conflict of violence.
That's why I think it's important to look more closely at, as you mentioned, all of this construction, all of this linguistic display with the words.
In the specific case of migrant smuggling, we hear quite often all of these phrases about smashing the gangs, dismantling smuggling, containing the smuggling threat.
It's so neutral and it's intended to appear neutral. But again, when we see who tends to be prosecuted for migrant smuggling around the world, we see a very distinctive policing of people from the Global south and racialized people from the Global South.
The numbers that are available, which are very limited, show us that the vast majority of the people who face prosecution for migrant smuggling, and this is throughout the world, tend to be people from communities along borders, people who profit from their knowledge of the land.
And that happened historically, marginalized here. I'm talking about tribes in desert areas in North Africa. I'm talking about Native American communities along the U.S. mexico border, communities of African descent throughout Central and South America that tend to be then constructed or assembled as transnational organized crime.
When we talk about dismantling migrant smuggling, what we actually have to take a closer look at is at how all of these notions of race have been pulled into the conversation that facilitate the criminalization of people of color throughout the Global south under the premise that we are keeping migrants safe, that we are protecting borders, and that ultimately only work in favor of the states, allowing them to strengthen their mechanisms of border control and migration enforcement.
[00:44:14] Speaker F: What can we do? How do we get to a safe border? Are there any examples of good migration policies out there in the world?
[00:44:22] Speaker E: I would say by design, migration policy is developed, is designed to keep people out and specific groups of people out. I think that it's not just about rethinking migration, because I think that that's becoming a thing that everybody wants. Oh, how can we make migration more manageable or safer when by design, migration policy intends to keep people out?
I don't believe that there's effective practices, at least when it comes to border crossings, arrivals, as long as they are still limited to surveillance and control.
At the same time, I think we can talk about some of the local policies that have been implemented and that aim at fostering community.
Many times we hear about integration and mechanisms for integration that sound more like assimilation than integration.
But mechanisms that effectively provide employment and health services and education to people who have just arrived to community, can foster some of that sense of community that we would aspire for people to have. But again, for people to get to these places, to arrive to these locations, they already went through all of these challenges while crossing the border.
So sometimes it's ironic to think that for people to be able to reach safety, they have to go through all of these other hurdles that compromise their ability to live as if it was some sort of reward for having suffered. Which kind of takes us back to what I was saying earlier, why the conversation needs to move away from death in pain, and more into the desire of people to live and to experience life to the fullest.
[00:46:21] Speaker F: So let's go back to the US Mexico border, your border. Tu frontera. Okay. Actually, we're hearing some sounds here underneath us that are bringing us there. Slowly, slowly. You often use the sentence to describe borderlands that you told me a while ago and I love, and I actually used at the start, the border. Border as possibility.
What does that mean in the context of your border of 2 Frontera? What does a safe border look like there?
[00:46:54] Speaker E: One of the reasons why I love being on the border is the fact that despite the architecture of fear, despite the levels of control and surveillance that we experience, and that particularly target people on the move, is the fact that people come to the border because they want to live.
People travel. And I think this is a point that I have raised throughout this conversation.
People come to the border because they have the hope to cross it and to reach a specific destination.
In that sense, I love talking about the border as possibility because I see the possibility every day. And, you know, when people's efforts and attempts to cross, when I hear that somebody actually made it safely, when somebody working at a local organization shares how they were able to defend somebody in court that allowed this person to remain in the country.
When I see the desert, when I see the crops, when I see the ocean, when I see the river, when I see the dunes on the border, I cannot think about death. I have to continue thinking about hope. I have to continue thinking about life, because I think that's the main reason behind people's desire to come and to cross borders around the world. It's because they want to live. It's not because they want to die.
[00:48:42] Speaker C: Experience, shape space.
Our senses shape space, smoothening its roughness or bleeding through its sharp edges.
Yet for those of us who do not know what borderline smell, look, feel, or sound like, how do we imagine them?
Where are our preconceptions of space coming from?
And how do we contest them? This is why Gabriela's statement of La Frontera como possibilidad, the border as possibility, is just so powerful to me. I find it groundbreaking as it pushes us towards hope. And she's not the only one that feels that way about, particularly the border she calls home Paso del Norte region on the U.S. mexico border.
[00:49:24] Speaker H: The border is a space of possibility because although it has historically been a place of containment, it is also a profoundly fertile territory for imagining and creating. Thinkers like Enrique Dussel invite us to look from the exteriority, from the margins, in order to build alternative knowledges. The the border, and especially the Paso del Norte region is a perfect example of this. It is a space where the binational, the intercultural and the multilingual are live out every day, where community practices resist and reconfigure imposed limits, generating their own languages that become inscribed in the urban landscape. Both cities reveal the tides at Bindas as expressions of fraternity through urban art, group graffiti murals, ephemeral interventions. There is a rich visual symbolism narrating what border policies have historically delegitimize or ignore in my work. Part of this process involved going into those urban spaces to listen deeply to identify which sonic elements recur most frequently. Thus, organically musical blends emerge from various vehicles and venues chops public spaces interweaving through their notes the acoustic ecology of the area. Through these sonic juxtapositions, a strong latent and unique identity of both spaces is shaded culturally uniting them.
[00:51:00] Speaker C: This was the voice of Jose Manuel Flores, who was born and raised on on the US Mexico border between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.
Jose Manuel is doctor in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Texas at El Paso and a Mellon Research Scholar working at the intersection of digital humanities, cultural research, and digital arts, focusing on Latino identities and cultural experiences. We spoke to Jose Manuel because he's the mind and hands behind Border Soundscapes, a project that emerges from the need to express how sound shapes cultural identity, memory, and resistance in border communities on the U.S. mexico border.
The project is a fantastic curation of recordings full of texture, documenting the soundscapes that shape Latinida, a sense of place and a sense of belonging in the Paso del Norte region.
Throughout this episode, we've woven Jose Manuel's sounds with Gabriela's recordings of the US Mexico border in a global context where displacement, violence, and death seem to be the only physical and mental characteristics of the borderland. It is our responsibility to keep thinking, imagining, and presenting different narratives about migration, pushing for a different system, one that does not kill or injure, that respects human dignity, and that does not use people.
We need to reimagine borderlands beyond violence and, like Gabriela says, make them spaces of possibility.
This podcast was written and narrated by me, Nuria Revas Costa. It featured the voices of Abrila Sanchez, Ahlam Chemlali Klaas, Van Dyken, Luigi Achilli, and Jose Manuel Flores. It was edited and produced by Charlie Clemos and published by Failed Architecture.
