Introduction Excerpt for Building Walls, Constructing Identities
INTRODUCTION
A Wall Building (a) Nation
Over the last two decades, we have become accustomed to the sight of the wall at the border between the United States and Mexico. Following the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006, hundreds of miles of border walls were added to the few border fences built in the 1990s, south of San Diego and in El Paso. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump made the expansion of the border wall the central theme of his presidency. During his term as president, media reports abounded about the enhancement or construction of a new section of the wall, tensions between the Trump administration and Congress concerning the funding of the wall, as well as its effects on citizens and migrants. It was with great fanfare that the then president unveiled eight steel and concrete border wall prototypes in 2017, each measuring an imposing thirty feet in height. Images of these striking concrete blocks along with pictures of the actual border wall have travelled the world.
The wall’s length is impressive too. As of 2023, it ran along approximately seven hundred miles of the border’s length, covering roughly one-third of the 1,954-mile divide between the United States and Mexico.1 Although the publicity surrounding this contemporary wall has been deafening, we know little about early American walling projects.
The construction of fences and barriers between the two countries is not new—far from it. As I was exploring the US National Archives, I was surprised to discover that Congress had already adopted legislation authorizing the erection of barriers along a substantial length of the southern border during the first half of the twentieth century. As I dug deeper into the records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, I was struck by how similar the arguments in support of such fences in the early 1900s were to those deployed today. Immigration, disease, and crime have appeared as recurring justifications for the wall, both then and now. Yet, over the span of a century, the sociopolitical and legal contexts surrounding the demands for border walls have changed. Proposals to fence the border during the first half of the twentieth century were made against a backdrop of territorial consolidation following the not-so-distant Mexican-American War. Contemporary walls are erected along a settled territorial border—at least from a formal legal perspective. This made me rethink the function of the wall between these two countries. Could the wall perform a more fundamental function than its often-stated role as an instrument for the governance of movement in an era of globalization?
To be sure, walls have been used for centuries as a form of protection against a variety of threats, both real and perceived. As historian Claude Quétel notes in his Histoire des murs, walls have been present throughout human history.2 They are built to defend against theft, invasions, and threats to cultural identity. An early example is the Great Wall of China, built by a succession of dynasties between the seventh century BCE and the seventeenth century CE. Walls may appear as a rational strategy for structuring space and movement in these historical contexts. Today, however, in an era of sophisticated border control technologies, the erection of walls to prevent movement between spaces appears anachronistic. Nevertheless, despite states increasingly relying on biometric systems, e-passports, and virtual detection assemblages at the border and beyond to monitor and control the flows of people and goods, walls remain a popular instrument of spatial division. This is so even for a country like the United States, with access to some of the most advanced surveillance technologies.
The United States is not alone in erecting physical walls at its borders. As of 2020, at least seventy-two fences and walls edged national borders worldwide.3 Nearly all continents have them. Walls divide Israel and Palestine, Serbia and Hungary, and Iran and Pakistan, to name only a few.4 Surely, something unites these various structures. In fact, a rich body of literature on border walls has emerged over the last two decades that seeks to understand what motivates countries to build these physical partitions. This is an interesting question, and this book contributes to that debate. However, this is not the book’s main objective. Instead, Building Walls, Constructing Identities focuses on the US-Mexico border wall, tracing its genealogy and the legal discourses surrounding its erection to identify its function as a marker not only of territory but also of identity.
Relying on an interdisciplinary approach that brings sociolegal studies into dialogue with critical race theory, history, geography, and philosophy, this book contends that past and present walls and fences between the United States and Mexico have participated in cementing an American national identity.5 In doing so, it provides an alternative understanding of the relationship between the law and wall building by demonstrating how the law provides a unique site for communicating meanings about space and national identities. Informed by two episodes of wall building in American history—the Act of August 19, 1935, and the adoption of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, both authorizing the erection of walls at the US-Mexico border—the book identifies two discursive processes by which the law and the wall come together to communicate legal knowledge about the territorial limits of the state and questions of national identity and belonging: legal words and legal matter.
First, I argue that oral and textual legal discourses about the construction of a US-Mexico border wall—including legislation, US Congress deliberations, and administrative reports—have provided sites for the deployment of narratives that have contributed to constructing the Mexican neighbor in opposition to a selectively white American identity. Building on the work of critical legal scholars and race theorists attentive to the role of rhetoric and discourse in law’s formation and its communication,6 I argue that legislation authorizing the construction of walls at the US-Mexico border is the outcome of a legislative process that feeds on colonial discourses to justify wall building. Once adopted, the text of these laws become discourses that authoritatively suggest meanings about how the world ought to be interpreted and how we should conduct ourselves within it. I focus on the legal discourses that were deployed during legislative debates concerning the authorization to build a wall at the southern US border. I analyze the justifications that were developed in favor of or against the border wall in oral debates and the policy documents that informed them. I also question the discourses found within the text of the law itself and reflect on the messages they communicate. This review demonstrates how Mexican identity was transformed into a threat to be curtailed through the language of racial and cultural difference, which relied on generalizations, stereotypes, and metaphors around themes such as criminality, licentiousness, dirt, and disease. This repertoire for understanding Mexican identity was regularly contrasted with an idealized expression of American character portrayed as industrious, law abiding, and virtuous. What is more, the review of these two episodes of wall building highlights the persistence of these discourses today.
As such, this book questions the epistemological distinction found in the literature between walls built before the end of the Cold War and those built after. Most authors acknowledge that old and new walls have a similar defensive function, but new walls, they argue, are erected to stop nonstate threats—crime, terrorism, unregulated migration—while older walls were erected against threats from other states.7 New dynamics of globalization that favor the mobility of people, goods, and ideas are perceived as facilitating these new and potentially dangerous cross-border flows, which can undermine a state’s sovereign control over its territory. Consequently, the scholarship on border walls often conceives of its object as an answer to the tensions arising in an increasingly interconnected world. In this respect, the US-Mexico border wall is no exception. Yet, this approach risks missing parallels between older and contemporary walls at this border. To be clear, I am not suggesting that globalization has played no part in boosting the popularity of border walls. It has certainly raised the level of anxiety about the permeability of state borders to the mass arrival of foreigners, ideologies, and other perceived threats to the nation. These anxieties—exacerbated by the media’s sustained attention on the US southern border since the 1970s—help explain why, as this book demonstrates, border wall proponents in the twenty-first century succeeded in obtaining substantial funding for the construction of a wall, whereas their predecessors mostly failed. But, at least in the context of the southern US border, we are forced to recognize that the appeal of both old and modern walls is founded on similar grounds.
Scholarly accounts of the US-Mexico border usually identify the 1990s as the period when the first border walls were erected; however, as previously mentioned, Congress was already considering plans to fence large parts of the border during the first half of the twentieth century. The literature rarely considers these plans that, in the 1940s, sought to erect walls along close to 900 miles of the US-Mexico border. Only a few authors have studied fence-building projects that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, and their accounts remain partial. For instance, Deborah Kang’s interest lies not so much with fencing but with the broader history of the US Immigration and Nationalization Services, while Oscar Martínez’s focus is on the erection of two fences: one between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and one between San Ysidro and Tijuana, between 1978 and 1979.8
In this book, I pay attention to these early projects to provide a historical account of the US-Mexico border wall. In doing so, I argue that we need to redefine the timeline for its study. By considering the Act of August 19, 1935—an early federal legislative authorization to erect a wall between the United States and Mexico—I seek to demonstrate the longtime yearning for the physical severance of the two national territories. Based on thorough archival research conducted at the US National Archives on congressional debates, federal agency reports, bills, and individual submissions to members of Congress considering plans to erect fences at the US-Mexico border, this book illuminates the implications of the border wall in the formation and sustenance of a (white) American national identity.9
What appears from this book is how deeply entwined today’s border wall is with America’s settler-colonial history. To recognize the relevance of settler colonialism in the context of the US-Mexico border wall, it is important to understand that the object of settler colonialism is territorial gain.10 This is what distinguishes it from colonialism. Whereas colonialism consists of the domination of a people from the outside, the aim of settler colonialism is different: it seeks to remove the indigenous population to make space for the settler. Historian Lorenzo Veracini acknowledges that similarities exist between the two phenomena but insists on their distinctive structures and outcomes.11 The colonizer moves to establish a relationship of economic domination governed exogenously from the capital. The colonizer comes and goes; nonetheless, the exploitative relationship requires permanency, that is, the continuity of the colonizer-colonized configuration. By contrast, the settler colonizer moves to a foreign territory to stay.12 However, because the objective of settler colonialism is the displacement of indigenous people, unlike colonialism, its success depends on its very extinction. As Veracini remarks, “Colonialism reproduces itself. . . . Settler colonialism, by contrast, extinguishes itself.”13 Settler colonialism can thus be understood as a process of erasure. Indeed, most scholars of race accept Patrick Wolfe’s claim that settler colonialism is not an event but an ongoing structure that seeks to end indigenous presence through various practices, including physical elimination, forced territorial displacement, confinement, and assimilation.14 This is from that perspective that we can see the wall and the legal discourses that surround its erection as part of an ongoing process of colonial settlement.
Notes
1. US Government Accountability Office, Southwest Border: Additional Actions Needed to Address Cultural and Natural Resource Impacts from Barrier Construction (September 2023).
2. Claude Quétel, Histoire des murs (Paris: Perrin, 2012).
3. Andréanne Bissonette and Élisabeth Vallet, eds., Borders and Border Walls: In-security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021), 1.
4. Tim Marshall, The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World (New York: Scribner, 2018), 2; Samuel Granados et al., “Raising Barriers: A New Age of Walls,” Washington Post, October 12, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/border-barriers/global-il….
5. I recognize that the wall between the United States and Mexico affects various groups of people beyond Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and white Anglo-Americans. Some scholars have considered the effects of the wall crossing the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation on indigenous people. These are important contributions to which I refer; however, in this book, I emphasize the role of legal discourses surrounding the border wall in shaping American and Mexican national identities. See Kenneth D. Madsen, “A Basis for Bordering: Land, Migration, and Inter-Tohono O’odham Distinction Along the US-Mexico Line,” in Placing the Border in Everyday Life, ed. Reece Jones and Corey Johnson (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 93–116.
6. See James Boyd White, “Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life,” University of Chicago Law Review 52, no. 3 (1985); Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Desmond Manderson, Songs without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Marianne Constable, Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Heather Conway and John Stannard, eds., The Emotional Dynamics of Law and Legal Discourse (Oxford: Hart, 2016); E. Tendayi Achiume, “Racial Borders,” Georgetown Law Journal 110, no. 3 (2022).
7. See Ronen Shamir, “Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23, no. 2 (2005); Élisabeth Vallet and Charles-Philippe David, “Introduction: The (Re) Building of the Wall in International Relations,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 27, no. 2 (2012); Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 2 ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
8. S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Oscar J. Martínez, “Border Conflict, Border Fences, and the “Tortilla Curtain” Incident of 1978–1979,” Journal of the Southwest 50, no. 3 (2008).
9. The earliest record I found debating the construction of a fence is dated May 2, 1930, but records mention earlier plans including a bill for the construction of a fence at Cordova Island, El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928.
10. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006).
11. Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011).
12. Veracini, “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” 2–3.
13. In that sense, Veracini argues, the two are not only different, they contradict each other: “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies,” 3.
14. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 3; See also Veracini, “Settler Colonial Studies,” 2; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 55.