Josiah McC. Heyman

States and illegal practices

States and illegal practices - an overview, Josiah McC. Heyman and Alan Smart brigandage, piracy, capitalism, and state-formation - transnational crime from a historical world-systems perspective, Thomas W. Gallant state and shadow state in Northern Peru circa 1900 - illegal political networks and the problem of state boundaries, David Nugent predatory rule and illegal economic practices, Alan Smart requiem for a drug lord - state and commodity in the career of Khun Sa, Alfred W. McCoy is transparency possible? - the political-economic and epistemological implications of Cold War conspiracies and subterfuge in Italy, Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider Russian protection rackets and the appropriation of law and order, Caroline Humphrey neoliberalism, environmentalism, and scientific knowledge - redefining use rights in the Gulf of California fisheries, Marcela Vasquez-Leon adolescent violence, state processes, and the local context of moral panic, Mercer L. Sullivan and Barbara Miller state escalation of force - a Vietnam/US-Mexico border analogy, Josiah McC. Heyman.

Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders

Our central agenda is to rethink the concept of movement in anthropology and other social sciences. We do this through two themes-mobilities and enclosures-both of which draw our attention to power and its diverse outcomes, especially at borders. Enclosure addresses processes that delimit and restrict the movement of specific goods, people, and ideas, while mobilities concern processes that enable and induce such movements. Consideration of these themes breaks with theoretical tendencies that celebrate unbounded movement, and instead focuses us on the political-economic processes by which people, nature, commodities, and knowledge are bounded, emplaced, and allowed or forced to move. Mobilities and enclosures are plural, favoring close-grained ethnographic studies. They involve unequal rights and powers, demanding precision about the political implications of movements of various sorts. This introduction situates these themes in recent border studies and social theory more generally and summarizes how the authors in this special issue advance scholarship on these matters.

Healthcare access and barriers for unauthorized immigrants in El Paso County, Texas.

This article presents a large body of qualitative material on healthcare access and barriers for unauthorized immigrants living in the US-Mexico borderlands. The focus is on active sequences of health-seeking behavior and barriers encountered in them. Barriers include direct legal mandates, fear of authorities, obstacles to movement by immigration law enforcement, interaction of unauthorized legal status with workplace and household relations, and hierarchical social interactions in healthcare and wider social settings. At the same time, important resilience factors include community-oriented healthcare services and the learning/confidence-building process that enable the unauthorized to connect to such services. An important finding is that barriers are not discrete factors but rather occur as webs that make solution of challenges more difficult than individual barriers alone. Outcomes include incomplete sequences of care, especially breakdowns in complex diagnoses, long-term treatment, and monitoring of chronic conditions.

Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System

Ports of entry are viewed as nodes in the world system where people and commodities step up and down in value as they move across borders. To understand how this happens, this article examines, in an ethnographic fashion, the interplay of inspectors and crossing populations in United States land ports with Mexico. It focuses on the categorization of commodities as legitimate or illegitimate and the movements of people in class, nationality, and gender-differentiated roles as laborers, shoppers, tourists, managers, and smugglers. It briefly surveys the Mexican-side ports with the United States and then explores new objects of regulation and systems of surveillance, such as intellectual property and national security. The ethnography not only reveals trends in the governance of international flows, but also helps us to understand the social-political construction of value and the continuing role of borders in demarcating and enforcing global inequalities in an era supposedly marked by free trade and transnational movement. Differential access to mobility and incomplete but forceful efforts at enclosure are thus shown to be crucial to the reproduction and remaking of combined and unequal spatial (world systemic) relations.

Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border

Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to census enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonias, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slant-wise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them.Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to census enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonias, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slantwise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them.

Bilingual call centers at the US-Mexico border: Location and linguistic markers of exploitability

Bilingual call centers in El Paso, Texas, an extensively bilingual US-Mexico border setting, provide a valuable opportunity to examine empirically what occurs with respect to language shift reversal of Spanish in the context of new information economy. Interviews were conducted with thirty-nine call center operators and managers, and twelve translators and interpreters. Call centers provide an important occupational performance of and recognition to the Spanish language. Nevertheless, bilingual call centers mainly rely on uncompensated, socially provided language skills in Spanish, a freely available “heritage language” in the border setting. Spanish is not valued as a technical competency, worth specific attention to training, management of language features, and extra compensation. Bilingualism is used in the labor market as a sign of cheap and flexible labor, rather than as economically and socially valued “skill,” even though in the new information workplace it serves the latter role. (Call centers, new economy, language and workplace, bilingualism, Spanish, borders) *

Recent Research on the U.S.-Mexico Border

GLOBAL FACTORIES. By Leslie Salzinger. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 217.

The Homeless and Occupy El Paso: Creating Community among the 99%

55.00 cloth,

Barriers to care and comorbidities along the U.S.-Mexico border

21.95 paper.) FRONTERAS NO MAS: TOWARD SOCIAL JUSTICE AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER. By Kathleen Staudt and Irasema Coronado. (New York and Basingstoke, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. 204.

Insurance status is a greater barrier than income or acculturation to chronic disease screening in the Mexican origin population in El Paso, Texas

69.95 cloth,