ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an overview of the US-Mexico border, and sketches the major ways in which the US interior is linked to various illegal and ambiguous flows across this boundary. It looks more locally at the agencies of the US state, the kinds of laws they do and do not actually enforce at the border, and the interactions of the national state with local society in the US borderlands. The chapter takes particular note of the way that "mysterious" financial and interpersonal transactions are constitutive of this region. It offers several case studies, partly ethnographic and partly journalistic, to demonstrate two points: that corruption on the US side of the border is systematic rather than a matter of a few "bad apples", and that individual patterns of corruption are linked to regional and national/binational processes. The chapter concludes by returning to main analytical themes considering the paradoxical relationship of strong states/societies with their frayed outer edges.
