ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the hielera and the Huixtla bar exist within a continuous field of forms of spatial unfreedom achieved by political and economic means. In political economy 'social unfreedom' charts how people may be juridically free but socially unfree to choose their courses of action - such as juridically free not to work but bound socially to the wage. In asserting the interconnectivity of forms of detention and state-bordering practices, the first contribution of the chapter is to propose that the external detention regime in Mexico represents an activation of power, rather than a refusal to manage a given territory. The chapter explains J. K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economies framework to ground more firmly economic arguments. Diverging from economistic accounts that posit a global capitalism determining the social, Gibson-Graham argue that any given capitalist practice is overdetermined by processes, events, situations, institutions, relations of power and so forth that are exterior to it.
