ABSTRACT
The US/Mexico border has a long history of vigilantism and racialised and gendered violence, which has been constructed in the US national imaginary through myths of heroism to spectacles of nativist nationalism (like the Minutemen in the mid-2000s). Contemporary vigilante groups draw from tropes of Mexican male criminality and aggression and Mexican female hypersexualisation and victimhood to justify their actions as patriotic and noble, and to efface their own violent actions. From the Minutemen to more recent vigilante border groups, media representations of their identities and activities characterise them as spectacular, out-of-the-ordinary, as outliers and as localised and small. But are these groups really outside of the norm, deviants from dominant imaginaries of the US/Mexico border and its policing? Official US state media share key themes with vigilante groups, including depictions of agents as patriarchal protectors (brave heroes and noble saviours), Mexican and Central American men as dangerous criminals (particularly in the figure of the savage other) and migrant women and children as abject victims (through human trafficking and/or sexual violence). This triangle of interlocking representations operates to justify militarised borders, co-opting violence against migrants in order to mobilise enhanced border securitisation and obscure state violence enacted by the United States. These myths and narratives make it clear that nativism is pervasive, rather than marginal, in national imaginaries of the US/Mexico border.
