ABSTRACT
Using questions raised by historical and ontological studies of materials, this chapter describes efforts by President Donald Trump beginning in 2016 to erect new segments of barrier wall along the US border with Mexico. This federal initiative was accompanied by racist and sexist rhetoric from the administration regarding non-US communities. Ascriptions of criminal character to immigrants from Central and South America—including, in Trump’s discourse, the threat of US women being raped by incoming Latinx men—were manifest in the government’s 2018 solicitation for new wall designs from US engineering firms, and in the material nature of the resulting wall prototypes. Imposing conformations of steel and concrete, and border officials’ efforts to test how impervious each proposed wall design would be to those seeking illegally to enter the country, posited the physical strength and aggressive nature of migrants and attendant risks to legitimate US residents. Through the supposedly apolitical epistemics of engineering, the wall prototyping initiative imputed a malicious muscularity to the male Mexican or Honduran traveller and a delicacy to the white American women, projecting for concerned audiences the enduring white tragedy of miscegenation.
