Childrens Geographies

Vol. 8, No. 4, November 2010, 391 399

Border rootedness as transformative

resistance: youth overcoming violence
and inspection in a US Mexico border
region
Cynthia Bejarano
Department of Criminal Justice, New Mexico State University, New Mexico, USA
This essay addresses Mexican immigrant and children of immigrants border citizenship as they negotiate
space, post-secondary education, national citizenship/s and immigration status, and the transgressive aspects
of their transnational and transitional identities. As they travel to and from college, these young adults
confront surveillance and racism by border reinforcers within an institutional setting and when crossing
border inspection points, while learning strategies of transformative resistance. This essay examines
how young people manage their cross-border lived experiences, and their daily survival of rights
infringements at the Border and within academic settings.
Keywords: border; immigrant youth; inspection; violence; post-secondary education

This essay centers on Mexican immigrant youth ages 18 21 that have come of age in a small
rural area on a remote stretch of the US Mexico border in Columbus, New Mexico and
Puerto Palomas de Villa, Mexico.1 The regional landscape is a dusty throwback to the turn of
the twentieth century and is best known for Mexican revolutionary, Francisco Pancho
Villas raid on Columbus from Palomas in 1916. Vestiges of this early era remain in the railroad
house turned museum and its accompanying barracks that resemble an old western movie
facade. Contemporary local landmarks include the Pancho Villa State Park whose abundance
of prickly pear cacti and mesquite trees offer respite to RV owners and in recent history the vigilante group, the Minutemen.2 Nearby is the discount store, Family Dollar, which sits just a few
feet from the steel bar fencing that marks the international boundary. One two-lane highway
joins these landmarks as the only road directly leading to Palomas, Mexico.
As children, some of the young people discussed in this essay traversed the border daily from
Palomas as US born children and permanent residents in order to attend a local K-12 public
school. Their experiences crossing the border reflects their transnational and transitional
status as border citizens (Meeks 2007), which Eric Meeks describes historically as people
whose rights of belonging were in question, leaving them on the margins of the national territory and of American society and culture (2007, p. 11).3 Whether US born, permanent residents, or immigrants beginning the naturalization process, their narratives as border

Email: cbejaran@nmsu.edu

ISSN 1473-3285 print/ISSN 1473-3277 online

# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2010.511004
http://www.informaworld.com

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C. Bejarano

citizens reveal the transnational and transitional nature of youth seeking an education to better
themselves and their families. As many of these youth oscillate across transnational spaces,
they are simultaneously transitioning from the childhood experiences of public school to the
adulthood experiences of college. In essence, they are straddling the literal borderlands
spaces of competing nation-states while they cross over psychological and developmental
spaces of youth and adulthood.
As children, many of the individuals discussed in this essay crossed the border from Palomas,
Mexico (population 7500) to board bright yellow buses to attend school in the US Although
nervous parents may watch them cross the border and hope for the best as they enter a
foreign country, their children undoubtedly return at the end of the day. In contrast, as
college students their transnational border-crossings are reduced to occasional weekend visits
to family and friends in Palomas, Mexico or neighboring villages, or to Columbus (population
2000) or nearby Deming, NM. Markedly different from their experiences as children, these
respites are critical for their sense of rootedness within their communities. Moreover, their transition to college involves new border-crossings as they return to the University and endure a
grueling two-hour process that includes inspections at an international port of entry and at
federal highway check points. Their desire to improve themselves through attainment of a
post-secondary degree comes at the cost of repeated inspections and interrogations as they
trek across multiple borders.
This essay explores the experiences of young adult immigrants (or children of immigrants)
and their numerous border-crossings (international, legal, socio-cultural, and academic)
through demographic data, participant observation and informal conversations with students participating in a first-generation University program. It also explores the infringement of their
human and civil rights through border inspections4 as these young people are surveilled,
inspected, harassed, and transformed into policed border citizens (Meeks 2007). Inspections
criminalize immigrants-in this case-youth seeking an education simply because of their proximity to and navigation of the US Mexico border. As they endure these inspections, young adults
learn strategies of transformative resistance that allow them to survive the daily infringement of
their rights at the border and in the university, where boundary reinforcers (law enforcement
agents, University professors, other students, administrators, and staff) judge, assess, surveil,
and inspect them as aliens or who have illegally crossed into college territory.5
Often lacking in border discourse is a dialogue on the impact geopolitics and laws have on
transnational and transitional young people as they commence a new chapter of their lives
(e.g. finding employment after high school to help with familys expenses, continuing to
serve as cultural brokers and translators for parents, attending trade schools or seeking scholarships for college, or tackling other responsibilities like marriage or parenthood). Literature on
immigrant childrens experiences in the US (Portes and Rumbaut 1996, Zhou 1997, Gonzalez
2001, Suarez-Orozco and Paez 2002), the global geographies of young people (Skeleton and
Valentine, 1998; Aitken 2001, Bosco et al. forthcoming), and transnational and border studies
focusing on the bi-focality of place for youth, rarely intersect with each other (Nayak 2003,
Menjivar and Bejarano 2004, Vertovec 2004). Elenes (2001); Bejarano (2005); and Delgado
Bernal et al. (2009) use the borderlands as a theoretical tool to underscore the marginal educational experiences of immigrant youth, but scholars have not examined the transitional
spaces and transnational locations of young people moving from one educational setting to
another, while simultaneously negotiating civil and human rights violations by nation-state policies and border enforcers. No longer the responsibility of public schools or under the watchful
eye of parents and home communities, these youth inhabit liminal spaces characterized by
minimal resources, ephemeral work opportunities outside of agricultural labor, and the increasingly ubiquitous drug trafficking economy of the borderlands. An archetypal example of this
uncertainty is the youth who excels in high school yet faces financial and legal obstacles

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when entering college because their transitional status excludes them from scholarships and aid
available to citizens.6 Yet, most young adults are resilient and resourceful enough to manage
these obstacles. As border citizens they see few options but to live day-to-day with the difficulties of balancing home, family, work, culture/cultural production, self-identity, life experiences,
memories, and their overall, border rootedness and struggle for justice. As Stuart Aitken
observes, Wincott notes that transitional spaces reside somewhere between our interior
selves and the exterior world, and it may be argued that as a space of justice, this third space
cannot be challenged (2001, p. 121).
Local place, globalized practices and security performances
In Columbus, New Mexico, low-income apartments sit behind the discount store whose parking
lot abuts the actual borderline. The relatively new Family Dollar store conveniently accommodates Mexican national shoppers and low-income US resident families,7 while several dentist
offices, pharmacies, and liquor stores strategically crowd the opposite side of the line in
Palomas, Mexico. These Mexican stores are located within one street block from the US international port of entry for tourists and US citizens seeking inexpensive prescription medicine,
dental work, and other goods and services. Although ostensibly improbable, the international
business ventures in this small, isolated desert landscape represent a bustling microcosm of
the larger economic practices that mark global transnational exchanges.
The processes at work here loosely resemble those taking place in the nearby urban setting of
Ciudad Juarez, which is characterized by complex international business relations, economic
progress through maquiladoras, and the exploitation of abject poor and working class people
(Staudt and Coronado 2002, Salzinger 2003, Lugo 2008). Prominent writings on global capitalism and the restructuring of an urban border area as a site for goods production and assemblyline maquiladoras-especially in Ciudad Juarez-offer salient analyses of local places infused with
global practices. Despite the insights provided by such work, scholars need to investigate the
nexus of youth, transnational movement, education, and surveillance within the communities
at the margins of these large border regions.
The isolated and poor Palomas-Columbus area is seemingly the antithesis to Ciudad Juarez/El
Paso, which is only one hundred and thirty four miles directly east. In Palomas-Columbus, there
are few resources and job opportunities, no urban development and little infrastructure, and a
lack of industrialization except a few family farms and ranching endeavors. Although heavily
impacted by poverty, Palomas-Columbus offers the imaginary of two ostensibly sleepy and
serene border communities. Until recently, few scholars questioned how the global underground
economy (drug and arms trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, and the trafficking of
other goods-exotic animals or highly taxed cigarettes) (Andreas 2000, Sadowski-Smith
2002), along with the exceedingly technologized equipment and weapons manufacturing
reinforced nation-state responses from both countries, thus negatively impacts international
neighbors and border citizens, especially young people.
At the twin towns borderline, the twenty foot tall steel post fencing serves as the wall separating nation-states. Mexican and US customs agents sit opposite each other, one on the Northern
side of the line inspecting people coming into the US, and the other sitting across the street on the
South side of the line with a blinking pase (green pass light) or no pase (red no pass light)
flashing behind a Mexican customs agent. Together, the two-lane highway and US Mexican
agents correspondingly dress in navy blue uniforms, demarcating the two nation-states.
Despite the stark financial differences between the countries, the customs offices reflect the
mutual goals of each nation-state: surveillance and exclusion. High-tech digitized video
camera capabilities with reinforced cement vehicle barriers guide cars through two checkpoint
lanes into the US as border crossers obediently offer passports, laser visas, permanent residency

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C. Bejarano

cards, and birth certificates. Massive X-ray machines scan vehicles entering Columbus, NM,
while the dated yet just as efficient pase or no pase light flashes across the line. Past the
Mexican customs agents are Mexican soldiers with AK-47s in army issued uniforms, leaning
against weathered Hummers, a recent development since last years drug cartel wars engulfed
the area.8 Both nation-states have argued for further military and policing reinforcements to
curb the narco-killings that plague Palomas, and that allegedly threaten to spill over into the US.
One recent claim is that drug traffickers have fled to Columbus from Palomas for safety since
the arrival of the Mexican army after drug dealers overwhelmed Mexican municipal police.
Both sides of the line are now riddled with high police turn-over, abandonment of police
posts, and lack of police training and accusations of corruption. In Columbus, the four person
police force has turned over seven times in three years (Caldwell 2009). While concerned
with economic progress and the struggle for survival, both communities are now overshadowed
by the drug wars, and the concomitant militarized and surveillance strategies widely justifying
federal agents optional application of human rights.
This backdrop of violence and the hypermilitaristic reaction it incited begs for an interrogation
of the multiple manifestations of violence that border people confront in this region, as border
image management responses (Andreas 2000) by nation-states becomes more militarily and
law enforcement fortified, further trampling peoples rights in the name of public safety and
border security. To outsiders this small international port of entry may appear as void of any
culture, nuance, or even significance, yet historically and contemporarily, it has undergone
radical changes in its surveillance tactics and marks a trend of increased militarization and policing across the 2000 mile borderline. It is as if the border imaginary demands a vindication of
Pancho Villas 1916 raid through heavy border patrol presence, National Guard troops,
additional customs enforcement officials, and the Minutemen of New Mexico who combed
the area looking for aliens. These combined and varied policing responses connote one of
the most powerful examples of recent human and civil rights violations to be institutionalized
on US soil, all of which come close to resembling martial law. With the emergence of drug
wars in this area, the border patrol and customs agents have new license to inspect vehicles
and pull them to secondary inspection, and to question and harass border crossers with few to
no restrictions. Ultimately, these are the new tactics of globalization-surveillance through
digital and human technologies-marking a shift in meaning and policing reinforcements under
the guise of border security, terrorism, and drug war fighting.
Young people, therefore, confront institutional and discretionary violence by federal agents in
locations they consider sacred. Their homelands, which are now marred by heightened policing
and the infringement of rights and questions of legitimacy, nonetheless retain childhood and adolescent memories. The youthful politics of cultural production that create a sense of belonging
(Bejarano 2005) and overall border rootedness helps them survive the transformation of the
landscapes of their childhood. During casual conversations, students have shared their checkpoint inspection stories with frustration.9 The impact of these changes is noticeable to the
youth in college. One young man shared that every weekend when he returns home to Columbus
to visit family, he is stopped at the Interstate 10 highway checkpoint and is asked a barrage of
questions about where he is going. Despite four years of hearing the same questions from
customs agents he physically recognizes, he continues to work on his college degree. He suspects that his darker skin plays a significant role in his questioning.
Despite the increasingly frustrating harassment and difficulty in going back home, these borderlands provide a sense of belonging and a connection to local place. Aitken asserts It is
during childhood and adolescence that the principles of society are mapped onto the consciousness and unconsciousness of embodied subjects. It is also when some part of social reproduction
is contested and negotiated, and this resistance is most often embedded in local geographies
(2001, p. 131). Part of the learned knowledge and resistance in this region includes anticipating

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prying questions, knowing inspection procedures, practicing compliance and obedience, preparing oneself psychologically and physically for inspection, and surviving getting through the
line (e.g. highway and international checkpoints) to get home. Alejandro Lugo claims, In concrete border inspection stations-he or she is most likely to be inspected: literally, not just metaphorically or theoretically (2008, p. 121).
Unlike visiting home for most college students, crossing borders for these young adults at or
near the US Mexico border brings daily checkpoint interrogations, citizenship probing questions, vehicle and document inspections, merchandise checks by federal agents, and ID background checks by scanning passports and processing drivers licenses. These standardized,
routine procedures form a process of ritualized violence. Both parties agent and bordercrosser recognize the standard Q&A script of crossing the line. The process then forms part
of a symbolic ritual of oppression and rights violations that are repeated a thousand times
daily. This ritualized violence is also institutionalized, and is amplified when an agent
chooses to use her/his discretionary violence to probe further if an individual attempts to
assert their rights by refusing to respond to excessive questioning. A common example is
going through highway checkpoints where questions should be more limited in asking a
persons nationality rather than their destination or line of work, unlike the unrestricted questioning that can legally take place at international ports of entry.10
Varying manifestations of violence and border rootedness symbolize the local place and
local knowledge of this region, and the persecution that often accompanies going home.
Place is, of course, constituted by sedimented social structures and cultural practices . . . the
lived body is the result of habitual cultural and social processes. . . This means that recognizing
that place, body, and environment integrate with each other; that places gather things, thoughts,
and memories in particular configurations; and that place, more an event than a thing, is characterized by openness rather than by a unitary self-identity (Escobar 2001, p. 143). A key event in
this region then is the security performance and script of crossing borders to go home. The
event signals a performance of power, authority and overbearing control of place and people
which in effect is the disciplining of transitional and transnational bodies. Youth were better protected from these probes when they were more sedentary back home, although they were geographically still confined by highway checkpoints or the international border south, and
permanent and temporary checkpoints east, north, and west.11 In their new transitional identities
and within new spaces as immigrant college students, they become more open bodies to scrutiny
and policing by boundary enforcers attempting to discipline their immigrant bodies. The openness and widespread routine, ritualized violence permitted during inspections (e.g. bodily
inspection, verbal interrogations, and gazing surveillance of individual behavior or nervousness)
is part of the border security performance and script that comes to form an element of the local
knowledge cultivated from years of cross-border inspection and (un)subtle forms of violence.
Consequently, the forms of violence witnessed metamorphose into the openness of this region
(open to inquiry, open to interrogation, open to violation).
Border inspection as ritualized violence
In his analysis of border crossings, Lugo works to strengthen the concept as an analytical tool
by recognizing that most border crossings are more often than not accompanied by inspection
stations that inspect, monitor, and surveil what goes in and out in the name of class, gender,
race, and nation (2008, p. 115). He pointedly states what many overlook: most poor people
do not have the privilege to cross the border even as day shoppers. The young people discussed
within this essay do have some sense of privilege in that they are US citizens, naturalized US
citizens or permanent legal US residents, and can go through inspection checkpoints. People
confined in local places are undocumented people or those who live on the other side of the

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C. Bejarano

line and are prohibited from traveling into the US, since they lack the resources to pay for a laser
visa, or tourist and student visa. The criteria required for any of these applications includes at
minimum, a Mexican bank account and proof of ownership of home or rental agreement
with utilities. The abject poor of Mexico cannot afford these luxuries, and those who live in
the US as undocumented people cannot leave the US to travel to Mexico for fear of apprehension. Regardless, the inspection stations still resort to probing what Lugo calls legitimate citizens . . . who are always at risk of being discriminated against (2008, p. 116). Lugo argues that
Immigration Customs Enforcement and other types of work and day/night time inspections
point to a pervasive pattern of cultural surveillance that dehumanizes the Mexican working
classes in this border city (2008, p. 116).
Although Lugos examination addresses the border-crossings of maquiladora workers in
Juarez/El Paso, his analysis is applicable to youth living in rural border communities such
as Palomas-Columbus. As young legitimate citizens (18 year olds) who are venturing
away from home and the watchful eyes of their parents, border inspections are not only intrusive but frightening and extremely intimidating because they are no longer protected as children. Heightened xenophobia and the suspicion and scapegoating of immigrant or border
youth as perceived drug mule runners or human smugglers makes it difficult for immigrant
college students to state they are traveling alone from college. This makes these individuals
more susceptible for inspection and harassment: a reality punctuated by stereotypes that these
students are not college material because they came from rural and impoverished
backgrounds.
Their relative marginality from American mainstream culture makes them even more suspect
in the eyes of border patrol and customs agents, many of whom may not have a college education
themselves.12 One young man was taken to secondary inspection for two hours in the blistering
sun because he drove a late model luxury car. He was told that their law enforcement canine
smelled something strange as the car went through the checkpoint. The young man was asked
how he could be driving such a nice car even though he was from Columbus, NM, and was
attending college.
These harsh sentiments are oftentimes voiced by people in positions of power. Lugo (2008)
refers to them as power holders (i.e. border patrol officers and INS officers among others) as
we have seen with inspection stations. This is also true within the framework of a University
that like most institutions can practice institutional violence through power holders who
operate at all levels (privileged and experienced college students, staff, administrators, and
faculty).13 These power holders also serve as what I call boundary reinforcers who create
and solidify barriers between people, places, and accessibility to rights (educational, legal,
and cultural rights). People continue to construct some sort of boundaries around their
places, however, permeable, and to be grounded in local socio-natural practices, no matter
how changing and hybridized those grounds and practices might turn out to be (Escobar
2001, p. 147). Between border checkpoint inspections and university scrutiny of students questioned about their good fit within a University setting due to perceived language barriers or
challenging curriculum, these legitimate citizens (Lugo 2008) are inundated with surveillance
strategies which neglect their status as good students and law abiding border citizens. One university staff person even referred to the first generation college program these students attend as
the wetback program to a staff member working with these students. Thus, after students traverse the geo-political border and survive the invasive highway checkpoints, they must navigate
the equally daunting and perhaps byzantine array of regulations and check points in the
form of university advisors, staff, financial aid advisors, professors, and others who question
students right to attend college. It is as if they have illegally crossed the boundaries of the university and violated the sanctity of an institution of higher learning. Indeed, many are treated as
aliens once again.

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Border rootedness as transformative resistance

Surveillance tactics and border inspections, the further policing and militarization at the borderline and the exclusionary practices that are sometimes practiced at university settings, inadvertently create resilient and altered young border citizens that learn to incorporate these obstacles
into their everyday routine existence. Eventually, with each interrogation, these border youth are
transformed into academically and legally astute individuals who draw strength from these
experiences to form sites of resistance within themselves, at school and when going home.
Theirs is a heightened consciousness of rights because they typically have no rights in the
border region now called a constitution free zone (ACLU). These students have a keener understanding of their rights, the importance and practice of citizenship and how to survive getting
through the line (at school/at the Border).
They use transformative resistance by moving across policed locations refusing to be
limited across space and local place. They also transcend their rights infringements by
leaving the local and revolutionizing their experiences by going to college away from home,
and using their resilience and border rootedness to surpass the manifestations of violence
they confront. During a soccer match on-campus, one college student who was called a
stupid wetback by a white student from the opposing team reported the incident to a faculty
member overseeing the game and filed a grievance at the University. These young immigrant
students engage their border rootedness for their survival and resist by traversing social, cultural, legal, academic and linguistic borders. They learn what their rights are and begin to assert
the few rights they can practice.
Concluding thoughts for transcending violence and informing justice
This rural center of borderlands inspections and the stripping of human and civil rights from
immigrant youth reveals a trend that has gained momentum in recent years. It remains imperative to create legal, community and intellectual spaces to discuss these violations in efforts to
establish a dialogue around these pervasive and intrusive practices. Border zones are the geopolitical spaces where subaltern truths are spoken. . .These stolen and contested spaces serve as
an uninterrupted place to forge new perspectives and analyses (Bejarano 2005, p. 23). By confronting these forms of violence with organic and local knowledge bases through border rootedness and transformative resistance, youth learn to transcend concrete boundaries and meet
head-on boundary reinforcers forming empowering strategies that are subtle but imperative.
They learn to regain a sense of groundedness in their border crossing experiences. Escobar
argues that Boundaries and links to places are certainly neither natural nor fixed, and while
boundaries do not exist in a real sense, their construction is an important aspect of the
active material and cultural production of place by groups of people. . . (2006, p. 152). At
this particular borderline, boundaries are pushed and challenged defiantly by youth with
organic knowledge, their border rootedness, and resistance which are akin to Aitkens assertion
that . . .efforts at resistance are perhaps not far removed from a politics of survival (2001,
p. 135), and in this crossroads youth refuse to surrender their integrity and sense of justice for
disciplines sake.
Notes
1.
2.

I would like to thank Jeff Shepherd and Sonia Flynn for their assistance with this article. I will refer to Puerto
Palomas de Villa as Palomas hereinafter.
In 2005, the Minutemen Project began as a vigilante group with origins in Tombstone, Arizona, whose members
include US citizens, retirees, retired and active duty military, including women; most individuals migrate to this
group from outside of Arizona and Border communities. Their claim is they act as a neighborhood watch

398

3.

4.
5.

6.

7.
8.

9.

10.

11.

12.
13.

C. Bejarano
group . . . protecting themselves and their families from criminal activity (Doty 2009, p. 26). There have been
consistent accounts of abuse against migrants by Minutemen members as they have apprehended and threatened
people crossing into the US desert.
Many of these children come from mixed-status families where a family member may not have documentation to
enter the US, yet the children are US born or are permanent residents and have every right to attend a US public
school. Some children lived in the US as US citizens but would cross the border to visit immediate family daily or
weekly in Mexico. Contrary to popular public opinion, many mixed-status families are forced to live this way and
do respect and abide by US laws which bar them from entering the US while their paperwork for permanent
residency is underway.
Alejandro Lugo (2008) develops this concept and I use it as an analytical tool within this article.
This article is based on eight years of working with young immigrant adults as the principal investigator of a
University program serving primarily first generation Latina/o college students with permanent residency or US
citizenship status. This article is based on student immigrants daily struggles navigating college and living
within border inspection perimeters.
Transitional within this context represents transitioning from high school to college and from adolescence to young
adulthood, or transitioning as a permanent resident to a US citizen and the shifting of identities and meaning within
fluid spaces like border communities and educational settings, and within local yet globalized spaces.
The median income in Columbus is less than $15,000 a year (Caldwell 2009).
Long before the arrival of Mexican soldiers to Palomas and the street shootouts that killed several people, along
with the recent narco fossa (mass grave) discovery of nineteen people near Palomas, US National Guards had
arrived in droves surveilling the Border only miles from the international port of entry with equipment under
the guise of border security and terrorism. In 2007, during visits to the area, my colleagues and I witnessed
throughout the small village of Columbus National Guard soldiers shopping, dining, and manning sophisticated
equipment on the outskirts of town along the Border.
Out of 200 students, approximately 98% of which are Latino, are served in a retention program at this land-grant
University. Forty-nine of these students come from the Columbus, NM region and make daily or weekend
excursions home.
Information on exact procedures is vague on the Department of Homeland Securitys homepage; for a robust
discussion on human and civil rights abuses at the Border, visit the American Civil Liberties Unions website:
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/gen/36491prs20080820.html.
Additionally, unmanned aircraft systems, sensors and cameras, and gamma ray and X-ray imaging systems, and
sophisticated computer databases comprise the surreptitious surveillance tactics by Customs and Border Patrol
policing in isolated regions of the Border, port of entries, and checkpoint stations. (Inspections and Surveillance
Technologies. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/newsroom/fact_sheets/port_security/fact_sheet_cbp_securing.xml).
A college degree in hand is not required for the border patrol application process.
Most people working and studying at the University have been receptive to immigrant students and several have
become avid advocates for them, however, students still retell intimidating stories about classroom experiences
with faculty, hostile experiences with staff, and even more problematic encounters with perceived racist students.

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