This dissertation examines the role of affect and emotion in contemporary citizenship practices along the US-Mexico border. Drawing from mixed qualitative methods, this dissertation employs inter-subjective research practice to understand the entanglement between the state, objects, citizen, and non-citizen along the border. This study presents two interrelated findings: 1) state security objects "impress" and mediate citizen movements, and 2) a dual masculinity of offensive and defensive emerges around compassionate actions toward or distancing actions from migrants in need of aid or assistance. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek, this dissertation explores the border-as-parallax-object to reveal the ways that the border is inscribed beyond the material fence. In this way, this dissertation connects disparate literature within human geography concerning materiality and psychoanalytic theory. By psychoanalytically reading and coding research interviews, this dissertation also develops the concepts of the face-of-the-state and ambivalent citizenship to elucidate the impact of security objects on citizen practices. The findings build toward a new subfield in political geography: emotional border studies.

The farm workers who diligently tend and harvest the US fields and produce is a major component of the agriculture industry. This research explores the current issues and challenges that domestic, seasonal farm workers face through the lenses of embodiment and habitus theory. Narratives and insights from interviews were integrated with current literature to present a complete picture of the cyclical life of the domestic farm worker in San Luis, Arizona. This thesis argues that farm work is a unique profession which has left its mark on the body and the behavior. Those in the border region have added agency due to the opportunities the border presents. As this research highlights, additional attention and research is needed to redesign policies and initiatives to adequately assist and provide for a population that provides so much.

Background: Historically, US immigration policy, including border enforcement, has served to define national belonging and through this process, has constructed particular groups as undesirable or threatening to the nation. Such political-economic strategies contribute to oppression through gender, ethnic, and class discrimination and economic and political exclusion. This dissertation is based on three studies that collectivity explored these issues as structural determinants of health (SDH) and forms of structural and everyday violence. Objectives: These studies aimed to (1) examine the relations between immigration related mistreatment and practices of ethno-racial profiling by immigration officials on health of Mexican immigrants of the Arizona border (2) contextualize the structural and everyday violence of such institutional practices through mistreatment narratives and (3) evaluate the impact of an intensive Border Health Service Learning Institute (BHSLI) on public health students' ability to locate such forms of violence and identify the role of public health advocacy. Methods: Study one and two are a secondary analysis of quantitative and qualitative data drawn from a random household sample of 299 Mexican-origin farmworkers. Study three is a qualitative analysis of 25 BHSLI student reflection journals from 2010-2012. Results: Farmworkers were US permanent residents and citizens, employed in US agriculture for 20 years. Approximately 25% reported immigration related mistreatment, more than 50% were personally victimized and 75% of mistreatment episodes occurred in a community location while residents engaged in routine activities. Immigration mistreatment was associated with a 2.3-increased risk for stress in adjusted models (OR 2.3, CI 1.2, 4.1). After a week at the US-Mexico border, BHSLI students articulated aspects of immigration and economic policy impacting health. Students framed economic and immigration policies as health policy and found the role of public health to convene stakeholders toward multi-institutional policy solutions. Conclusion: Immigration related mistreatment and ethno-racial profiling are historically embedded at institutional and individual levels and reproduce inequality overtime. Such institutional practices of discrimination are SDH and forms of structural and everyday violence. Academic public health programs, engaged in service learning strengthen students' abilities to learn and act on such SDH and contribute to campus-community engagement on related ethno-racial health disparities.

Residents of the region just north of the U.S.-Mexico border experience migration and smuggling activities through constantly changing found objects on the desert landscape--a pair of shoes neatly arranged on a trail; a cross hung in a tree; a can of food balanced on a rock. Consideration of some found objects as placed objects, set down with apparent care by travelers unseen and unmet, demonstrates how the objects uniquely inform the perceptions and practices of residents who find them. Such finders speculate about the lives and movements of others by utilizing the objects as metaphoric figures of practice, tools that uniquely but only partially help them bridge knowledge gaps among multiple constantly changing variables in their everyday lives. The finding-speculating dynamic confounds a direct and easy association of found items with trash, of migrants with threat, and of a border wall with hopelessness. Residents instead craft a sophisticated and practical cultural memory of place in a region that is inhabited differently by day than by night, where tragedy, grace, danger, and hope fuse in unexpected ways. The objects and events that erupt into rural border life inspire a poetics that matches the territory. In a landscape of uncertainty, placed objects secure and extend situational understandings beyond common conceptual frames of epidemic, normalized patterns of violence and collateral damage that are often considered necessary conditions of life in the region.

abstract: Environmental change and natural hazards represent a challenge for sustainable development. By disrupting livelihoods and causing billions of dollars in damages, disasters can undo many decades of development. Development, on the other hand, can actually increase vulnerability to disasters by depleting environmental resources and marginalizing the poorest. Big disasters and big cities get the most attention from the media and academia. The vulnerabilities and capabilities of small cities have not been explored adequately in academic research, and while some cities in developed countries have begun to initiate mitigation and adaptation responses to environmental change, most cities in developing countries have not. In this thesis I explore the vulnerability to flooding of the US-Mexico border by using the cities of Nogales, Arizona, USA and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico as a case study. I ask the following questions: What is the spatial distribution of vulnerability, and what is the role of the border in increasing or decreasing vulnerability? What kind of coordination should occur among local institutions to address flooding in the cities? I use a Geographic Information System to analyze the spatial distribution of flood events and the socio-economic characteristics of both cities. The result is an index that estimates flood vulnerability using a set of indicators that are comparable between cities on both sides of the border. I interviewed planners and local government officials to validate the vulnerability model and to assess collaboration efforts between the cities. This research contributes to our understanding of vulnerability and sustainability in two ways: (1) it provides a framework for assessing and comparing vulnerabilities at the city level between nations, overcoming issues of data incompatibility, and (2) it highlights the institutional arrangements of border cities and how they affect vulnerability. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Sustainability 2010

Nearly two decades have passed since the strategic border security paradigm known as “prevention through deterrence” (PTD) took root in the landscape of Southern Arizona. The aim of PTD was to deter illicit migration by strategically amassing border security forces to funnel migrants into increasingly remote and treacherous territory where they would face increased risk. Indeed, risk was to be the prime factor of deterrence. Thousands of undocumented migrants died attempting to overcome those risks in an outcome known as the “funnel effect,” wherein migration patterns shifted to overcome bypass and overcome border security. When speaking about PTD taking root in southern Arizona, I mean that this geography is the locus of the funnel effect and has been since 2001. Southern Arizona represents the longest stretch of border walling in the United States and the highest concentrations of border security personnel and undocumented migration activity since the early 2000s. In this sense, this region is a useful point of focus for evaluating the outcomes and efficacy of the border security apparatus. Here, the PTD strategy has been physically tethered to the landscape as border security infrastructure has literally been dug into the ground. With the hundreds of border security infrastructure and wall projects have also come the hundreds of clandestine trails routed around them used by undocumented migrants, and hundreds of tons of left behind migrant survival materials like backpacks, water bottles, blankets, and rosaries. Over the years while border security has expanded, the evidence associated with migration has shifted in turn reflecting a dialectical engagement between the formal border security apparatus and the informal politics of migrants. While many scholars have studied either border security or the risks faced by migrants, few have looked at their mutual influence over time. This dissertation incorporated a multidisciplinary methodological approach, including ethnography, archival research, archaeology, and GIS technology. These methods allowed me to answer the following questions: What are the social and material effects of border enforcement policy on the ground? How have these changed over the 15 years of concentrated border enforcement in this area, both geographically and in terms of their volume and constitution? What are the stories, the experiences, and the tangible points on the landscape that mark these processes? I viewed the material signature of migration as a form of ruins both literally and metaphorically as they mark the scars of abandonment, loss, and failure. Following Walter Benjamin, I conceived of such ruins as an indictment of the political conditions that led to their formation. In the spirit of Benjamin, I also prioritized this form of marginalized material evidence. Questions of memory and materiality were also entwined with realities of absence and a search for fragmentary traces. I encountered this reality constantly in fieldwork, as when a place known to have been a major clandestine travel corridor for migration was often found completely cleared of all evidence of use. I also routinely walked past coordinates where migrant bodies were recovered, and where no evidence of that tragedy was left. A dialectical approach also highlighted how much more accessible and visible the actions related to the implementation of the United States border security were in relation to those of migrants. Further, the material evidence associated with migration was actively being removed, often as an environmental hazard. Thus, this project also came to encompass questions about the process of historical creation and heritage. Among those who live and work in the borderlands, this contemporary situation was already largely conceptualized in terms of its heritage potential. Will we remember this episode in history as we remember the Berlin Wall, or Japanese internment camps in the United States, as many of the border residents who participated in my project speculated? Certain public land managers along the border anticipated that their heritage future may well be as lands associated with the migration experience, circa the turn of the 21st century. It is acknowledged that this is a dark chapter of history. But, how does one curate history in the making? All of this inextricably links to issues of power. This is the power to decide what is culturally valuable or relevant, as well as the power to define historical narratives as they are made. Border security itself is about maintaining U.S. sovereignty, while defining the value of migrant lives and deaths as the border is secured. This is also a set of values that prioritizes border security over reform to the system that could facilitate labor migration. There is also a hierarchy to what survives between the monumental architecture of border security and the ephemeral tools and structures of clandestine migration. The latter are hidden and actively decaying while the former will stand the test of time. This dissertation analyzes the informal and the fragmentary side by side with the formal and monumental. What do decaying survival materials dropped by undocumented migrants, decaying migrant bodies in the wilderness, and hundreds of miles of clandestine smuggler trails in one of the most highly secured borderlands in one of the most powerful countries in the world say about power here? On a practical level, the accumulated evidence are read as an indictment of border security, revealing that the building of walls and surveillance structures have not stopped migration, though they have led to increasingly imperiled migrant journeys.

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In education today, Latino populations are growing, but Telles and Ortiz (2013) claim they account for the lowest academic levels and the highest levels of dropouts. Latino transfronterizo (literally border crossing) students and their parents in this study have high academic aspirations in spite of challenges of poverty, second language acquisition, and other difficulties which arise from U.S.-Mexico border contexts. Through dissecting the events of the 1990s and early 2000s, the progression of northern migration from Mexico and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 influenced anti-immigrant sentiment along the border and enactment of laws and policies to limit circumnavigating the international line. Misidentification as illegal immigrants creates borderland perceptions that Latinos are suspects and often results in discriminatory treatment from postcolonial dominant culture. This culture is reflected and perpetuated in schools where home language surveys identify native Spanish speakers to segregate them into Structured English Immersion programs for students with Limited English Proficiency. Ethnographic research from January of 2013 to August of 2015 included over 300 observations and 14 semi-structured interviews with seven transfronterizo students and nine parents revealed language disconnects between school and home. Relationships between teachers and students/parents did not exist and trust was lacking. Latino parents wanted to help students with school, but English only requirements limited their assistance. Through the use of Furman's ethic of community and Yosso's community cultural wealth, educational leaders could create communal process at schools to build the capacity of teachers and parents to create relationships and shared cultural competencies.

The vitality of international transborder natural resources is important for the preservation of wildlife corridors, clean water, clean air, and working lands. In particular, not only does the Texas Rio Grande Valley Region in the United States (U.S.), on the U.S.-Mexico border, offer critical habitat important to North American migratory species, the area also provides substantial agricultural goods (i.e., sugarcane, sorghum, melons, onions, citrus, carrots, cabbage, and cattle). Hence, the dilemma between consumptive and non-consumptive uses of natural resources along a large geographic expanse separated by sociopolitical and sociocultural differences, is further complicated. Latinos of Mexican descent along the southwestern U.S. are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the U.S., yet their influence on U.S. natural resource allocation and management has been largely ignored. For this reason, the purpose of my study was threefold: (1) to determine public perceptions toward natural resources, the environment, and conservation; (2) to assess general environmental behaviors; and (3) to determine general recreational behaviors among three student population groups along the U.S.Mexico border region. The student groups were comprised of Texas students (Texas Latino and Texas non-Latino white), and Mexican students from three northern Mexico states, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. A survey was derived from three of the most frequently used environmental concern, behavior, and recreation indices used for research in the discipline. Predictors of environmental concern, behavior, and outdoor recreation participation for my sample varied across sociodemographic and sociopolitical variables for each student group. A review of environmental attitudes found Mexican students were more environmentally friendly (~ 2.35 odds; P < 0.05) than their U.S. counterparts. Among the three student groups, basic environmental behaviors (environmental conservation contribution; avoiding environmentally harmful products; changing car oil; and lawn responsibility) were influenced (P &lt; 0.05) by environmental orientation, political candidate's environmental position, father and mother's educational attainment, place of origin, sex, and combined parent income. Outdoor recreation participation and constraints to outdoor recreation participation among the student groups were influenced (P &lt; 0.05) by parent income, age, place of origin, and environmental orientation. Examples of constraints were: not enough money, personal health reasons, inadequate transportation, and personal safety reasons. Findings from my study benefit natural resource and environmental organizations pursuing collaborative program development and implementation along the U.S.-Mexico border and other transborder regions.

abstract: The border policies of the United States and Mexico that have evolved over the previous decades have pushed illegal immigration and drug smuggling to remote and often public lands. Valuable natural resources and tourist sites suffer an inordinate level of environmental impacts as a result of activities, from new roads and trash to cut fence lines and abandoned vehicles. Public land managers struggle to characterize impacts and plan for effective landscape level rehabilitation projects that are the most cost effective and environmentally beneficial for a region given resource limitations. A decision support tool is developed to facilitate public land management: Borderlands Environmental Rehabilitation Spatial Decision Support System (BERSDSS). The utility of the system is demonstrated using a case study of the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Arizona. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Geography 2013