ABSTRACT
Despite tendencies in the U.S. and other industrialized nations to render invisible power relations in the access and delivery of water through large-scale technological systems, the politics of water are literally made concrete by the border wall on the U.S.–Mexico border (specifically between San Diego in southern California and Tijuana, Mexico). As supporters of the U.S. border patrol describe the wall on a website (emphasis added):
It lays there in the dark like a sinuous black python. … It crawls from the surf of the azure blue Pacific Ocean, up the glistening white beach and then on to the east—over the rolling hills and toward the high mountain peaks at the southern extremity of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. It is all that stands between the health, beauty and wealth of America and the drug inspired violence of Mexico. 1
