'Trash-talk' and the production of quotidian geopolitical boundaries in the USA-Mexico borderlands

摘要

This paper draws attention to the intimate frontiers of geopolitics to analyze how quotidian political boundaries are delineated and disputed through mundane discursive practices. My empirical focus is the USA-Mexico borderlands wherein US citizens frequently encounter material evidence of undocumented immigrants and their (unauthorized) border crossings. The materials encountered include identity documents and personal mementos as well as objects needed for survival like water bottles, backpacks, medication, shoes, and clothes. Close encounters with these intimate objects, I argue, have become primary sites wherein everyday framings of belonging are constituted in the borderlands. Drawing on field research in Arizona, I illustrate how cultural prescriptions for bodily comportment in relation to these objects are enlisted in the production and disruption of quotidian framings of 'American' or 'those who don't belong in America.'