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    Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border
    Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border
    Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border
    Ebook481 pages13 hours

    Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border

    By Ieva Jusionyte

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    "Jusionyte explores the sister towns bisected by the border from many angles in this illuminating and poignant exploration of a place and situation that are little discussed yet have significant implications for larger political discourse."—Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review

    Emergency responders on the US-Mexico border operate at the edges of two states. They rush patients to hospitals across country lines, tend to the broken bones of migrants who jump over the wall, and put out fires that know no national boundaries. Paramedics and firefighters on both sides of the border are tasked with saving lives and preventing disasters in the harsh terrain at the center of divisive national debates.
     
    Ieva Jusionyte’s firsthand experience as an emergency responder provides the background for her gripping examination of the politics of injury and rescue in the militarized region surrounding the US-Mexico border. Operating in this area, firefighters and paramedics are torn between their mandate as frontline state actors and their responsibility as professional rescuers, between the limits of law and pull of ethics. From this vantage they witness what unfolds when territorial sovereignty, tactical infrastructure, and the natural environment collide. Jusionyte reveals the binational brotherhood that forms in this crucible to stand in the way of catastrophe. Through beautiful ethnography and a uniquely personal perspective, Threshold provides a new way to understand politicized issues ranging from border security and undocumented migration to public access to healthcare today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateNov 9, 2018
    ISBN9780520969643
    Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border
    Author

    Ieva Jusionyte

    Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic and Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border.

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      Book preview

      Threshold - Ieva Jusionyte

      Threshold

      CALIFORNIA SERIES IN PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

      The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debate—transforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings.

      Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University)

      Contributing Editors: Philippe Bourgois (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Farmer (Partners In Health), Alex Hinton (Rutgers University), Carolyn Nordstrom (University of Notre Dame), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (UC Berkeley)

      University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider

      Threshold

      EMERGENCY RESPONDERS ON THE US-MEXICO BORDER

      Ieva Jusionyte

      UC Logo

      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

      University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

      University of California Press

      Oakland, California

      © 2018 by Ieva Jusionyte

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Jusionyte, Ieva, 1983–

      Title: Threshold : emergency responders on the US-Mexico border / Ieva Jusionyte.

      Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018008950 (print) | LCCN 2018014229 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969643 (epub and ePDF) | ISBN 9780520297173 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520297180 (pbk. : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Emergency medical services—Mexican-American Border Region. Rescue work—Mexican-American Border Region. | Mexican-American Border Region—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects.

      Classification: LCC RA645.7.M58 (ebook) | LCC RA645.7.M58 J87 2018 (print) | DDC 362.180972/1—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008950

      Manufactured in Canada

      27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18

      10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      To Bojo, Alex, Capt. Lopez, and all fellow firefighters who save lives on both sides of the line

      CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      Dead End

      Treacherous Terrain

      First Due to the Border

      Binational Security

      Toxic Statecraft

      Politics of Wounding and of Rescue

      PLATES

      PART ONE: ANKLE ALLEY

      Nogales, Arizona, Mexico

      Fence Jumpers

      Tactical Infrastructure

      Por Otro Lado

      Overpaid Tomato Pickers

      Accidental Violence

      PART TWO: DOWNWIND, DOWNHILL, DOWNSTREAM

      Brotherhood

      Red Tape

      Maquiladora

      Acid Rain

      Road to Rocky Point

      Staging

      Security of the Future

      PART THREE: WILDLAND

      Load Vehicles

      The Man in Black Dress Pants

      Bound by Law

      Watchouts

      Aid Is Not a Crime

      Land of Many Uses

      Some Pill to Help Us Walk

      EPILOGUE: THE GREAT NEW WALL

      About This Project

      Acknowledgments

      Abbreviations

      Notes

      References

      Index

      California Series in Public Anthropology

      Introduction

      The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.

      GLORIA ANZALDÚA,

      Borderlands/La Frontera

      DEAD END

      Vámonos? Alex was waiting for me in the truck, ready to start the engine.¹

      The fire was in Mexico. We were a few miles north of the border, in the United States, wearing navy blue T-shirts with logos of the Nogales Suburban Fire District. Concerned that the blaze could jump the line into our jurisdiction, the chief instructed us to go and check it out.²

      We didn’t need to hurry. Heading south, we passed an area known as the Buena Vista Ranch: a handful of houses cradled in the desert, its pale skin barely covered by a stubble of mesquite trees. I could see why back in the day John Wayne made movies here: the scenery was an ideal stage for a Hollywood Western. Several hydrants, their red paint beginning to fade, pointed to another story, one about plans to develop the area. But the ranch happened to be on a route of intense drug and human trafficking. Locals say that fear of violence associated with illicit trade scared potential homebuyers away, squelching their dreams of building a community. We passed a yellow Dead End sign perforated by bullets (target practice, Alex reassured me), unhitched a gate with a barely legible sign warning no trespassing, and after a few turns found ourselves on a dirt road running parallel to the border wall.

      From afar, the wall is but a squiggly dark line following the contour of the hilly landscape; close up, it resembles the spiky spine of a stegosaurus, low curves giving shape to menace and fear. Stretching as far as the eye could see, to the east and to the west, the road next to the wall served as the US Border Patrol highway: federal agents, in search of unauthorized border crossers, steer a fleet of white trucks with green stripes up and down these slopes, expecting spectacular, newsworthy captures of marijuana, cocaine, or methamphetamine loads, but more often encountering tired migrants with tattered clothes and blistered feet.

      The fire department could use the road too, at least in emergency situations. Driving along the wall, we continued scanning the sky for smoke. Only a few days had passed since I chased fires with the crew of Mexican firefighters—the bomberos—in Nogales, Sonora. It was May, more than a month until the summer rains would arrive, and fires were so abundant that the bomberos might go from one call to the next without taking a break. On this side, in Arizona, fires were less frequent, but once they started, they could expand rapidly, fiercely devouring the dry vegetation and often requiring the US Forest Service to bring in helicopters and elite firefighter crews—the hotshots—to battle them for days or even weeks in remote canyons. The average temperature in Arizona has increased by over 2°F since the 1970s, making wildland fires in the region both bigger and more severe.³ Down by the wall looking for smoke that morning, Alex and I didn’t yet know that later in the afternoon La Sierra Fire would start in Sonora and cross the border about 17 miles west of us, on the opposite side of Nogales, burning thousands of acres and requiring joint efforts of Mexican and American firefighters to contain it. Binational cooperation in such situations was common—emergency managers and frontline responders recognized that the border did not stop fire. Nor, for that matter, did it halt flash floods, toxic fumes, or any other natural or manmade disaster.

      We reached a place where the metal wall abruptly ends and gives way to several strings of barbed wire and a low-lying steel beam construction, known as a Normandy barrier. Even though it may not be obvious during the dry season, when all you see are lush green trees and occasional puddles of water, this is the bed of the Santa Cruz River, which crosses the border perpendicularly, running south to north. It is an important path for migratory wildlife—deer, javelina, mountain lions, ocelots, and the only known wild jaguar in the United States, El Jefe, who lives in the Santa Rita Mountains. The engineers didn’t build a wall here since a solid barrier would threaten endangered species and cause damaging floods.⁴ Unauthorized pedestrian traffic, involving migrants and drug mules, know about this gap, too. Dry arroyos are convenient paths across the undulating desert terrain: capillaries circulating life without regard to who is legally entitled to it.

      We still didn’t see any smoke. Nor, surprisingly, did we see any Border Patrol.

      Alex was not fond of the Border Patrol. Though he meets them regularly on the job, when he goes through the checkpoint on I-19 they often look at him with suspicion. These guys, they come to Nogales from somewhere over there, say Montana—the ‘Holy See’ of white people—and at the checkpoint they see Hispanic people, Mexican people, driving up and down all day long. Alex has been pulled over regardless of whether he drove his personal vehicle with firefighter union decals and his bunker gear thrown on the backseat or an official city truck with government license plates. They would still ask him: Is this your vehicle? Do you have anybody in the trunk? Short and stocky, with black hair and a thick mustache, he knows he looks like a stereotypical Mexican. He orders chilaquiles with a side of tortillas, making young Sonoran waitresses smile. He is also stubborn. I just laugh. I never answer, he says, referring to the questions by federal agents. I believe him, for I saw how it played out at the station, where Alex’s blunt remarks were habitually taken as offenses. He had no intention to change. One time, after a joint exercise held in the tunnels under Nogales, he even had the guts to tell the Border Patrol that had it been a real emergency, he would not have stayed to rescue an injured federal agent; he would have grabbed his partner and they would have run for their lives. I’m an honest asshole, he admits. The agents at the checkpoint must sense his defiance: they send Alex into secondary inspection, again and again. A price he’s willing to pay for feeling righteous.

      With the rescue truck obediently tracing the difficult topography of the desert terrain, we reached the easternmost limit of our jurisdiction and stopped to consider the rusted bollard fence spanning far into the horizon. They used to smuggle chicken into Mexico through here, Alex told me. Chicken in Spanish is pollo. I dwelt on the cruel irony: the only pollos crossing the border these days pay several thousand dollars to polleros (the chicken wranglers) for a chance to work long shifts in poultry-processing plants in Ohio, Missouri, or the Carolinas.

      Though it had been a full year since I arrived at the borderlands, I was still eager to hear Alex’s stories about life on the frontlines. On what we call slow days, between station duties and vehicle check-offs, we would spend hours talking without being interrupted by dispatch. This rhythm—alternating between action and boredom—was familiar to me. Trained as an EMT, paramedic, and wildland firefighter, before I came to Arizona I had spent several years volunteering as an emergency responder in Florida. As far as fire departments go, Nogales Suburban was on the quieter end of the spectrum. The number 74 written on the board in the day room meant that, about five months in, we were only waiting for the seventy-fifth call of the year. Unlike during my time as a rookie, I was no longer anxious to run with lights and siren to structure fires, rollovers, or cardiac arrests—I had learned to appreciate the absence of emergencies. Slow days were good for ethnography.

      It looked like we would have another one of those: there was still no sign of the brushfire.

      Once we started heading back, we spotted a Border Patrol vehicle. The agent did not notice us immediately. We must have tripped off one of their sensors when we got off the road making a turn, Alex reasoned. We drove slowly and watched the agent head toward the area where the fence cut across the dry riverbed, then pause and inspect it. He probably heard our engine because suddenly he made a U-turn to face us. As the fire truck approached him, Alex raised a hand to greet the agent, but neither of us saw whether he waved back. Sometimes they do.

      In the vocabulary of the Border Patrol, the Sonoran Desert is known as hostile terrain. It is an obstacle course that migrants have to complete in order to enter the United States. Those crossing near Nogales or Sasabe will walk for three days until they reach Green Valley or Three Points, the first semi-urban settlements north of the checkpoints; Tucson is about five days away. But that’s only if they go straight. Abandoned by their guides, thirsty and disoriented, people get lost and walk in circles. It’s a cruel and prolonged game at wilderness survival, where improperly equipped human beings try to avoid being lethally wounded by the sun and the ecosystem. Ever since the government constructed the new taller fence (hypothetically a more effective barrier against unauthorized crossing) and adopted cutting-edge technologies of surveillance, human traffic has rerouted from border towns to the desert—a grueling terrain that precludes taking life for granted. Since 2001, nearly 2,500 human remains have been recovered in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector alone.⁵ Most of them were unauthorized migrants from Mexico and Central America. But nobody knows how many more have died, their corpses yet to be found and identified. And nobody knows how many have survived, but must deal with debilitating effects of traumatic injury or illness caused by the journey.

      The killing fields, a neoliberal oven, and a massive open grave are phrases that capture the cruelty and tragedy of this desolate stretch of the earth.⁶ Gorgeous despair rattles the land like a great serpent’s tail, warning of the deadly bite behind the greeting-card sunrises, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote of the treacherous beauty of the desert landscape.⁷ This is the homeland of thorny plants—jumping chollas, nopales, saguaros. Rattlesnakes and scorpions, javelinas and wildcats inhabit the rocks and ravines, invisible at night. I know a paramedic who once treated a migrant attacked by a mountain lion—he had deep lacerations on his neck left by the animal’s claws. But it is the weather—temperatures that rise to over 110°F during summer days and fall to below freezing on winter nights—that hurt most border crossers taking the route through the desert.⁸ Security strategies, from fences to checkpoints, superimposed on the perilous landscape have turned terrain into a weapon that maims or murders those who commit the civil offense of entering the territory of the United States without proper documents.

      I can’t even begin to count how many people we picked up in the desert, Alex tells me.

      One time he hiked for six hours looking for a toddler who wandered off when his exhausted mother fell asleep under a tree. Desperate, the woman gave herself up to the Border Patrol, pleading them to help find her son. Border Patrol brought in a signcutter—an agent who specializes in detecting and interpreting disturbances in natural terrain that indicate the passage of people, animals, or vehicles, and after hours of arduous hiking in the hills following footprints, they were able to locate the child.⁹ They found him without a scratch. Six hours alone in the desert and nothing was wrong with him, no medical need, Alex said. Rare luck. Migrants who get lost may never be heard of again or, if they are, they may be in grave condition. Alex saw people so severely dehydrated that their bodies shut down. Once we found a woman over here and, when we were helping her out, we noticed ants inside her mouth. The ants got inside the mouth because it was still moist. They were looking for water. It was bad.

      Alex has collected men’s fingers and limbs either cut off by the wheels of the freight train that undocumented migrants caught for a ride north to Tucson or amputated by the sharp edges of the border fence. He has participated in rescue and (more often) body recovery attempts when people across the line got swept away by the turbulent waters of the Nogales Wash. Tossed around with such force, they hit their heads on the rocks or heavy debris floating downstream, and by the time they reach this side of the border, they are either unconscious or dead. Most of them, they were coming to work, Alex said, and we rode in silence for a while.

      Firefighters along the Arizona-Sonora border are routinely dispatched to save people in the life-threatening situations that Alex describes, often with the coordinates of out there in the middle of nowhere. But they have also performed other tasks that are unusual elsewhere. The presence of the border adds peculiar dimensions to the work of emergency responders, already equipped to manage the most extraordinary of scenarios. For example, customs officers habitually asked Nogales firefighters to use powerful rescue saws to open gasoline tanks, rims of vehicles, or tires stacked with marijuana. Sometimes, as the saw cut into the metal, sparks ignited the pot. They wouldn’t be wearing airpacks and, back in the day, nobody cared about filling out exposure forms. We laughed our heads off, a captain later told me about one such incident. We had the munchies. Not everything was funny, however. When Alex started working at the Nogales Fire Department in the mid-1990s, he found bulletproof vests strapped to the seats of the ambulance and was told to wear a Kevlar helmet on calls to the border. We used to get shot at, thrown rocks at. Incidents related to drug trafficking posed danger to emergency responders, who, when providing care on scene, were easily mistaken for law enforcement. They didn’t care much who was who. Government is government.

      Back at the station, Alex called our chief to report that we did not spot any fire on either side of the border. We finished the morning routine: inspected and washed the trucks, checked the equipment. The rest of the time passed slowly in this isolated building on the edge of the desert, beige like its surroundings, with a flagpole in the front and a basketball hoop in the back. When they blasted the solid rock to make room for the construction of the station, the soil was not pressed hard enough and now cracks were appearing on the floor: the firehouse was slowly sinking. We were not allowed to stay inside overnight.

      Later in the afternoon, as the day was winding down and the heat was more bearable, we stood at the open bay and watched an occasional vehicle pass by on Highway 82. The place was so serene, the webs linking it to state violence and the criminal economies south and north of the border imperceptible to the naked eye. But we knew better. Smugglers, migrants, and federal agents have all dropped by the fire station: smugglers requesting to make phone calls to arrange pickups; migrants seeking water and directions; agents passing time while monitoring the road. On our last shift, a DPS-led task force used the station to stage an operation. They stopped and arrested a suspect right in front of where we were now standing, and I was relieved when the lead officer changed his mind about questioning the man inside the firehouse. They left, nine unmarked vehicles in single file. Alex, whose brother worked in a similar interagency task force, was not surprised by what we witnessed. Nothing on the border seemed to surprise him.

      They have asked me to hide drugs in the truck, he confided. Some years ago, a man came to the station to recruit Alex. The plan was to set a brushfire in the Buena Vista Ranch and, when Alex came to put it out, they would load the fire truck with drugs. Alex said no. But not everyone could resist. The appeal of the drug economy, at an arm’s length, was strong and the use of official insignia as a disguise for trafficking seemed clever. In fact, it was common practice.¹⁰ Police officers and firefighters from the local communities were logical targets for recruitment. Even Border Patrol agents have been charged with taking part in such camouflage operations.¹¹ Formal duties tangled up with side hustles; law meshed with crime.

      The border put some lines into focus and blurred others.

      TREACHEROUS TERRAIN

      In the US-Mexico border region, sovereignties are anything but settled. Here, political topography competes with other claims on the landscape: indigenous forms of governance, neoliberal networks of profit-making, criminal economies, desert ecosystems. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US-Mexican War in 1848, the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission spent more than seven years trying to survey and map the new jurisdictional divide. The borderline not only cut through territory that was previously claimed by Mexico, but also split the homelands of the Tohono O’odham, Pima, and other peoples who had lived there before the Europeans arrived and took over.¹² Even the environment rigorously resisted the commission’s attempts to inscribe one nation’s victory and another’s defeat onto the surface of the earth. The survey report mentions the bleached barrenness of the region, where both Mexican and American teams endured temperatures of over 100°F, shortages of food and water, and rough terrain.¹³ Imposing state definitions on the ground was no easy task.¹⁴

      More than 150 years later, national territories carved out of the contiguous physical landscape remain a fragile achievement. In recent attempts to strengthen their titles against rival uses of this space, the US and Mexican governments declared it a zone of two militarized conflicts—the war on terror and the drug war (narcoguerra)—justifying legal exceptions and the deployment of lethal weapons that ended up targeting migrants and refugees. As if that wasn’t enough, this vicious cycle of security buildup and accumulating atrocities unfolds under volatile environmental conditions. With temperatures in the area steadily rising, extreme weather events have become more frequent.¹⁵ Even when reinforced with steel and concrete, the arbitrary boundary cutting across the desert does not prevent intensified wildfires or flash floods, nor does it stop toxic chemical spills. These are the times of multiple emergencies; yet they are all subordinate to the primacy of homeland security. To speed up the construction of the wall in the aftermath of 9/11, DHS was authorized to waive thirty-seven federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as well as regulations preserving clean air, migratory birds, national forests, and rivers.¹⁶

      Such an inauspicious misalignment of politics and ecology, compounded by warfare and lawfare, keeps the border in a perpetual state of alert. Emergency can result from any combination of potential threats: a migrant may suffer a heatstroke while taking a remote route through the desert in hopes of avoiding checkpoints; a train carrying hazardous materials to the copper mines may derail, polluting the washes that supply water to communities on both sides of the border. Or a security barrier put in place to prevent trespassing may exacerbate the destructive effects of summer rains. In 2008, without notifying the International Boundary and Water Commission, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) installed a 5-foot barrier inside the underground tunnel that runs perpendicular to the border and connects Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona. When the monsoon arrived that July, and the runoff from the heavy rain rushed downstream from Mexico toward the United States, the concrete barrier formed a bottleneck. Water pressure kept rising until a thousand feet of the tunnel collapsed, inundating the streets in Nogales, Sonora. Mexican authorities declared flooded part of the city a disaster zone, and cited damage to 578 homes and forty-five cars.¹⁷ Two days after the flooding, US officials recovered two bodies from the wash, suspecting the dead were unauthorized migrants who were trying to get through the tunnel when the flood began. Despite calls for investigations and reparations, the federal government’s only concession to the mayors of the split city was to grant permission to lower the concrete barrier by a foot and a half. Accidents like this reveal that topographical forms have political implications. We see how the materiality of terrain—its texture and volume—is weaponized to serve the ends of security.¹⁸ We can discern the physics of terrain underlying the politics of wounding.

      The Border Patrol uses the concept of tactical infrastructure to refer to the assemblage of materials and technologies that both impede and facilitate movement. It aims to stop trespassers while creating a smooth surface for enforcement operations. The agency calls it a force multiplier. Infrastructure is tactical in both senses of the term: as relating to small-scale actions serving a larger purpose (in this case, national security), and as being weapons or forces employed at the battlefront.¹⁹ The question is therefore how space and law enmesh on the border to produce injury. Achille Mbembe suggests seeing space as the raw material of sovereignty and a vehicle of violence, underlying the terror formation.²⁰ It is operationalized and molded into the practices of the security apparatus.²¹ This move requires stripping off any competing discourses of territory and place, leaving its physical qualities exclusively meaningful for national politics. Writing about the sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman noted how attempts to transform the material fabric of the social order took the form of topographic violence because space in Belfast functioned as a mnemonic artifact for storing historical narratives.²² Urban terrain was not merely the stage where violence was performed. Rather than a passive setting or the location, it was fundamental to the very performance of violence—the source precipitating action, the condition of its possibility, and its ultimate target. Technical language, commonly associated with war operations, allows the Border Patrol to detach terrain from additional layers of signification: if it is tactical, then it is not ecological or historical. Binational trajectories and communal practices sedimented into the built environment are irrelevant. The border does not even mark the perimeter of the tactical field—it is enclosed within it. Despite the government’s attempts to portray the area as a zone of reversible violence, where the Border Patrol tries to outmaneuver the enemy—drug traffickers and human smugglers—it is almost exclusively unilateral. Tactical space does not have an interface outside of the state’s imaginary.

      Terrain acts as a mechanism of injury. Its form underlies the kinematics of trauma. When a human body collides with an object, such as when a border crosser falls off the wall—the transfer of energy upon contact produces injury that varies in severity depending on the height of the fall, the part of the body struck first, and the type of surface on which it lands.²³ Kinetic energy is a function of an object’s mass and velocity (Ek=1/2 mv²). But this is more than physics. To understand how terrain is made tactical and deployed as a weapon I will use the frame of field causality. Eyal Weizman proposed this term as a counterforensic technique, a method for interrogating the built environment to uncover state violence. Field causality traces linkages that he describes as multidirectional and distributed over extended spaces and time durations.²⁴ Therefore, it can capture indirect, slow, and diffuse forms of violence, prescribed by policy, operating through laws, and carried out by human and nonhuman agents.²⁵ Field causality expands the ecological milieu to bring into focus the threads and relations that formal parameters of legal investigations preclude. It shows how built environments actively—sometimes violently—shape incidents and events.²⁶ This approach requires abandoning the linear path between cause and effect: federal agents did not build the barrier inside the tunnel to flood the town and drown the border crossers. These emergencies resulted from a juncture of security policies, urban infrastructure, and natural forces. The field, Weizman writes, is a thick fabric of lateral relations, associations, and chains of actions that connects different physical scales and scales of action.²⁷ Establishing field causalities entails acknowledging multiple agencies and feedback loops, including those factors that are ordinarily absent from public discussions of violence, such as kinetic energy, Newton’s second law of motion (F=ma), and the force of gravity mobilized as instruments of extralegal punishment for trespass. Kinematics of trauma reveal political tactics disguised in the form of the material.

      FIRST DUE TO THE BORDER

      The task of mitigating threats to human life, whether accidental or deliberate, falls to emergency responders. Firefighters, also trained as EMTs or paramedics, have a pragmatic, hazard-oriented disposition toward the border region that many people know only from sensational and politicized media coverage.²⁸ Previously called smoke eaters and associated with untamed bravery, by the beginning of the twenty-first century firefighters had evolved into a highly skilled, all-hazards response task force—the embodiment of what Mark Tebeau described as the melding of men and technology into an efficient, lifesaving machine.²⁹ Their performance hinges on competence—practical types of knowledge, an understanding of the city and the country, acquired through repeated encounters with the dangers presented by urban and natural landscape.³⁰ Rescuers are uniquely attuned to the characteristics of physical space and to the temporality of uncertainty.

      But this focus on accidents, as unexpected events, and practical engagement with material surroundings obscures the politics and law that enable the use of the environment to perpetrate violence. Many emergencies along the US-Mexico border result from the state’s attempt to impose a legal grid over the region’s rebellious topography. Dispatched to correct the deleterious consequences of the narcoguerra in Mexico and immigration policies in the United States, Alex and his peers witness and experience the most palpable effects of border militarization. They rescue injured border crossers who fall off the fence and those who are hurt in the desert; they discover drug loads hidden in containers carrying hazardous materials; they fight wildland fires started by migrants in distress as well as those that are used as a diversion for smuggling.³¹ More times than any of them would have liked, they were called to the overcrowded Nogales Border Patrol station to take undocumented minors with seizures, fever, or heat illness to the local hospital. But it is not only migrants and refugees that they are called to rescue. Though it happens less often, paramedics also help federal agents—when they get shot, bitten by a service dog, or crash an all-terrain vehicle. Last year, an off-duty Border Patrol agent engaged in recreational target practice started a wildfire that burned over 46,000 acres and required a crew of over six hundred firefighters to contain.³²

      Rescue operations—corrective practices that hide injurious consequences of violent state actions—reveal contradictions inherent in statecraft. Rather than being accidents—unanticipated occurrences that happen unintentionally and result in damage—emergencies on the border are deliberately caused by government policies. The adoption by the Border Patrol of the infamous prevention through deterrence strategy in 1994—which involved increasing the length and the height of the border fence in urban areas—significantly expanded the number of wounded migrants, while providing the government with a moral alibi.³³ Along the US southern fringe, border-related trauma became so common that it no longer surprised anyone or made it to the news. It was evident that the shifting design of the border fence produced particular forms of injuries. The sharp edges on the top of the previous fence, made of corrugated sheet metal leftover from the Vietnam War, amputated limbs; the tall slatted steel wall we have today fractures legs and ankles. In Douglas, Arizona, fire department personnel have been dispatched to care for patients with orthopedic injuries—they call them fence jumpers—with such frequency that they began referring to the cement ledge abutting the international wall as ankle alley.

      The Border Patrol’s plan correctly predicted that, as a direct consequence of border security buildup in Nogales, Douglas, and other border towns, illegal traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.³⁴ Prevention through deterrence purposefully pushed migrants further away from populated areas, rerouting them through remote rural corridors, where border crossers often need medical treatment for dehydration, kidney failure, or heatstroke. To bypass checkpoints permanently installed on all northbound roads, they walk across the vast expanse of the Sonoran Desert, where they become exposed to extreme environments. Firefighters and paramedics in southern Arizona have also responded to multiple deadly accidents involving pickup trucks and vans, sometimes carrying over a dozen unauthorized migrants, when these rolled over during pursuits by the Border Patrol on roads with dangerous curves, often at night. Migrants who walk along the Nogales Wash through the tunnels still get swept away by turbulent waters; every year somebody drowns. Joint Mexican and American rescue teams walk the entire length of the wash to search for their bodies. In 2015, they recovered five corpses.

      These injuries do not work the same way as wounds linked to other histories and geographies of violence. When trauma happens abroad, especially in places governed by regimes accused of having a dubious human rights record, scars of torture and other bodily imprints of force become evidence of victimhood and vulnerability—a corporeal marker of persecution that entitles the individual to asylum.³⁵ But border wounds—whether a leg fracture or kidney failure—caused by policies of the same state that the injured was trying to reach, without permission, do not warrant mercy. On the contrary, their wounds, rather than making border crossers qualified to receive care and protection, are read as proof of crime. A broken ankle or an amputated finger serves as evidence of an illegal entry into the country, which US law classifies as a civil offense. In the court of public opinion, it alone may not be enough to justify condemning unauthorized migrants to harsh treatment. But in the popular imaginary this rather mild violation of the law—crossing the border through a clandestine passage—precedes and substitutes for a possibly more serious one: suspected trafficking, which would be a criminal offense. An injured border crosser is recast as a drug mule or a gang member, a violent subject and a security threat. When an accident, such as a fall from the fence or drowning in a flooded arroyo, is treated as a potential crime, the state assumes the right to exercise force against the survivor.³⁶ Therefore, instead of exposing their wounds the way asylum seekers do, border crossers must hide them. In the global economy of wounds, their injuries lack legitimacy and political value. In the eyes of the government, unauthorized migrants are always already implicated as criminals. They stand in for the narcos and the murderers and rapists

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