Securing Manifest Destiny

Abstract

This article argues Mexico’s war on drugs was a tactic by elites in both the United States and Mexico to legitimate the Mexican neoliberal state’s political, economic, and ideological governance over Mexican society. Through tough on crime legislation and maintenance of free market policies, the war on drugs is a “morbid symptom” that obfuscates the crisis of global capitalism in the region. It is a way of managing a crisis of legitimacy of Mexico’s neoliberal state. Through arguments of Mexico as a potential “failed state” and a “narco-state,” the United States has played a leading role by investing in militarized policing in the drug war and securitization of Mexico’s borders to expand and maintain capitalist globalization. In the twenty-first century, the ideology of manifest destiny persists, but instead of westward expansion of the U.S. state, it serves as the maintenance and expansion of global capitalism.

Dirty care in the transfronterizo experience: Walking with Mexicali/Calexico teachers through their youth

“…Since then, the national project of the United States has been to expel Mexicans off its acquired territory (K. L. Hernández, 2010). Mexican border cities, beset by economic precarity since the economy crashed in the 1980s, have faced overcrowding, drug and human trafficking, corruption, and health and environmental concerns (Alvarez, 2020; Correa‐Cabrera, 2015; Gálvez, 2019; Gladstone et al, 2021; Osuna, 2021). In harsh response, the United States has legislated heightened militarization in the Borderlands through increased border security to diminish the entry of men, women, and children from Mexico seeking opportunities in the north (Mora Vázquez, Trejo Guzmán, and Crosnoe, 2020).…”

“…Using private cars or being given cars as a mode of defense in border crossing indicates a tenet of dirty care (Dorlin, 2017): the subjugated become experts in navigating the behaviors of the perpetrators of threatening acts to enrich their own power to act. In doing so, wealthy students closed themselves off not only to the “5 a.m.” masses and potential threats to their possessions but also to the systemic ills present in the Borderlands (Alvarez, 2020; Gladstone et al, 2021; Osuna, 2021). In learning to know and take on the values of the colonizer through dirty care, they thus re‐ensconced themselves as part of the very violence they were seeking to mitigate.…”

Las fantasmas del feminicidio: Narrating the War on Women

“…It gives the impression that there is an actual military campaign being waged by tightly organized armies, when, in reality, the war functions as a means of social control and terror aimed at aggrieved and racially oppressed communities, displaced peasants, and indigenous communities. 148 Similarly, the term "Narco State", which according to This entanglement should not be understood as a mere coincidence, but rather as the direct consequence of neoliberal capitalist market pressures and economic restructuring. The proliferation of surveillance and border control at the turn of the century has increased both the cost and demand "for gore's goods: drug-and human-trafficking, contract killings, private security run by mafias, etc."…”