ABSTRACT
There are few places on earth where a country has a boundary with a neighbor that is five times poorer than itself, let alone one that separates the richest country on the planet from a historically weak region. That is, however, precisely the central dynamic of the United States–Mexico border, one with such power differential that human rights violations have been part and parcel of the area from its creation to the present day. Indeed, much of the history of the borderlands is one where the experienced reality and the expectations of its denizens clash with the institutions and control of the state on both sides of the border, but especially the one emanating from Washington – an authority at once distant and ever present. This chapter proposes to explore this dynamic to shed light on how and why human rights abuses have occurred and how they differ in intensity and frequency across time. It does so by focusing the narrative on three particular periods of the United States–Mexico border: 1) the creation of the border and the subsequent conquest and subjugation of its inhabitants; 2) the establishment of the border patrol and the ways it developed additional forms of control; and 3) the transformation of regulation at the actual boundary between the two countries to one that has enlarged the border to encompass the United States as a whole with the installation of internal checks and detention centers across the country. Further, the work looks to connect seemingly disparate situations into an overarching theoretical account that considers insights from the literature in international relations and human rights.
