Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juárez border region

Abstract

As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This paper will argue that official and criminal checkpoints designed for border-crossing, have had a transformative spatial role when considered across the dimensions of infrastructure and stigma, triggering a material/symbolic tension. We argue that their location and accessibility determine the exposure of nearby communities to economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship – the illegal crossing of goods and people still remains a constant characteristic of the region, not only as part of a criminal enterprise but as a viable livelihood. The ways in which the region of Juárez develops and grows also determines how trafficking and illegal practices are established; rules and regulations that provide territorial parameters for what is open and transparent are equally referential to what is clandestine and devious. The tensions brought by the border’s geopolitical value have amplified the value of infrastructure and its practical ownership. The international border operates as a line that is barrier, social divider, landmark, policy-bridge, filtering mechanism and trafficking obstacle. Under this permanent state of tension, the checkpoints provide a physical structure to the transit flows and a sovereign interruption. Across this urbanism, the checkpoint surroundings acquire a magnetic significance, due to the resulting transit dynamics and the surveillance deterrents at the core of their function. Furthermore, their dual nature – official and criminal – has branded the region as a criminal outpost, stigmatising the people inhabiting it, and perpetuating the idea that Juárez is defined by its violent infrastructures.

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…Using the case of São Paulo, Garmany and Galdeano (2018) illustrate how private security companies operate in complicated networks between the state, private capital and organised crime, problematising assumptions about the state’s monopoly on violence. Non-state armed actors, as Martén and Boano (2022) illustrate in Ciudad Juárez, shape border-crossing practices, enacting violent entrepreneurship. These contributions shed light on the inadequacy of the binaries of legality–illegality to depict the complexities of disputes around territorial control involving non-state armed actors in the city.…”

Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability

“…The authors contextualise Jua´rez's spatial taint within the local infrastructures that define the border, both criminal and formal checkpoints, whose extreme securitisation reflects the geopolitical importance of the border. Developing the concept of 'checkpoint urbanism' allows the authors 'to rethink the border and its territorial impact beyond its administrative confines' (Marte´n and Boano, 2021). By reading the border nodes as essential to 'economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship' (Marte´n and Boano, 2021), the article troubles commonly-made distinctions between infrastructural issues in the Global North and the Global South, including the formal/informal divide.…”

“…Developing the concept of 'checkpoint urbanism' allows the authors 'to rethink the border and its territorial impact beyond its administrative confines' (Marte´n and Boano, 2021). By reading the border nodes as essential to 'economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship' (Marte´n and Boano, 2021), the article troubles commonly-made distinctions between infrastructural issues in the Global North and the Global South, including the formal/informal divide.…”

Afterword: Citizenship and the politics of (im)material stigma and infrastructure

“…This demonstrates how the spatiality of stigma is inherently connected to stigmatised perceptions of occupants' social identities. For example, Baumann and Massalha (2021) reveal how the spatial stigma of Jerusalem's refugee camps is indivisible from the socio-political status of Palestinian occupants; while residents of Mexico's Juarez border region are tainted by narratives that the place and its people are inherently violent (Marte´n and Boano, 2021). These imagined societal binaries and hierarchies (e.g.…”