Paper Short Abstract:

The Mexican descent population of South Texas thread border security both at checkpoints and in everyday life. The citizenship of border residents is unwound by state surveillance and diminished rights. Under these circumstances what does it mean to explore alternative citizenship practices?

Paper Abstract:

Social movement scholarship has focused on alternative expressions of citizenship as a means for understanding and generating social change. This search for alternatives, as a mode of ethnographic research, has led to an overemphasis on novel grassroots practices while overlooking ordinary expressions of citizenship and power. In this paper, we explore how state agents constantly question the citizenship of residents on the U.S. Mexican border and how legislators have limited the rights of border citizens. For one, electronic surveillance in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands link data that drones, ground sensors, automated license plate readers, and video surveillance gather along the international border with data collected at the interior checkpoints to create a surveillance net extending up to 100 miles inside the United States. For another, this surveillance net materializes at checkpoints through the presence of surveillance technologies and armed agents. In recent years, personnel and technology at interior border patrol checkpoints (well within the United States) have mushroomed while the rights of U.S. citizens living on the border, especially with regard to search and seizure, have been curtailed. We theorize this tense process of passing through checkpoints and security technology as threading and interpret threading with multiple meanings: to make one’s way cautiously and something that suggests the process of being forged, as in the threading of a bolt or a nut. This winding and unwinding of citizenship practices forms a part of the ordinary experiences of border residents and forms a basis, we argue, for reimagining the relationships between citizens and the state.