Migrant flows and necro-sovereignty: the itineraries of bodies, samples, and data across the US-Mexico borderlands
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Migrant flows and necro‑sovereignty: the itineraries of bodies, samples, and data across the US‑Mexico borderlands Vivette García‑Deister1,2 · Lindsay A. Smith3
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract Through an ethnographic examination of the tension between the practice and politics of mobility, this article examines the movement of bodies as scientific objects and sociopolitical signposts for both sovereignty and identity. In particular, we explore the following paradox: living migrants are seen as dangerous bodies and political threats while dead bodies, specifically, the objects and data generated from their remains make multiple, socially valued migrations across the political space of the border. We argue that scientific objects flow because these objects, not the people, become the currency of necro-sovereignty, a nationalistic currency premised on death and exercised via appeals to human identification as a form of family reunification and the return of bodies-out-of-place to their ‘correct’ locations. Exploration of this paradox also shows that although individuation is the key goal of forensic science, collective identities, including race, class, gender, and nationality, become obligatory passage points in the path toward individuation. Keywords Bilateral cooperation · Forensic science · Justice · Migration · Nation · Sovereignty
* Vivette García‑Deister [email protected] Lindsay A. Smith [email protected] 1
Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico, Mexico
2
Circuito Exterior, Ciudad Universitaria, Coyoacán, 04510 Mexico, Mexico
3
Arizona State University, Tempe, USA
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V. García‑Deister, L. A. Smith
Introduction In 2018, Pueblo Sin Fronteras held its third annual Caravana de Refugiados (refugees march). Organized during holy week, the public procession across Mexico of hundreds of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the US, drew on a long history of successful activism of this kind. Subverting traditional tropes of the migrant as clandestine, criminal, and other, the Caravana highlighted migrant mobility, both to ensure a safer passage of what is one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, and to lay bare the artificial and punitive barriers of both Mexican and US border policies. An otherwise routine form of organizing quickly went viral when the US president, Donald Trump began to tweet daily about “caravans” approaching the border to justify a regressive and dangerous border policy (Trump 2018). In the following year, this same drama played out multiple times: migrant mobility and strategizing for safety fueled nationalistic fear in the US and justified a presidential order to send active duty military to the US border to address what was framed as an invasion (Shear and Gibbons-Neff 2018). In this period where the US government has experienced its longest shutdown in its history over a proposed wall at the border, who can cross, how they cross, and the extent to which migrants risk their lives in remo
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