Intensity and uncertainty: Performing border conflicts at the US–Mexico borderlands

Abstract

This article draws on border studies that recognise rebordering practices as ongoing performances of conflict between various actors including state authorities, border security agents, migrants, migrant supporters, smugglers, international organisations, lawyers, advocates and others. We draw attention to variable levels of intensity with which these conflicts are performed and the impact they have on migrants' ability to exercise their agency. We understand intensity to mean not merely the emotional discursive environment in which these conflicts unfold, and the pressure tactics used by at least some parties, but, more importantly, the speed of the responses by all actors involved in this border performance. Focusing on rebordering practices at the US-Mexico borderlands in 2018 and 2019 adopted in response to new forms of mobility, we characterise these years as a period of high intensity, when rapidly changing policies provoked immediate responses by migrants, and equally speedy counter-responses by other actors, particularly the US and Mexican administration.We suggest that the volatile architecture of border control in the US-Mexico borders has rendered many strategies employed by Central American migrants to overcome obstacles and create innovative solutions virtually ineffective. The article is based on an ethnographic study carried out between early May and mid-August 2019 in Mexico.

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