The article titled, "War on the Border" that appeared on the New York Times' Opinion section, is a timely critique of the the increased militarization on the U.S.-Mexico border which recreates a war zone. Or is it? For a border-native, what the author Todd Miller is describing and criticizing in this article is not new. For
fronteriza/os like myself, the strong divide between the police and the policed, surveillance and surveilled, legal and illegal is not something novel. If you live at the "other side", that is the southern part of the border, you know you are watched, observed, creeped at night by Border Patrol agents surveilling around your neighborhood in their helicopters at night, or
Jeeps rushing through the buffs of the Tijuana ocean hills. The border divide encrusted on the sandy beach is unnatural, no wonder it is constantly corroding. Nature consumes dislocated man-made insertions on its land, no wonder the steel barriers are rusty and have to be constantly updated. What is also unnatural is the Panopticon (borrowing from Michel Foucault) which oversees Tijuana's residents and is a falic-like structure reminding "us" that we are unruly and must be put under scrutiny.
My concern here is not so much what is talked about, but when it is talked about. Do "we", as the American citizenry become alarmed when increased policing and militarization of the border affects White Anglo Saxon Protestant men (excuse me, humble innocent farmers in their pajamas) and their families? Like Miller ethnocentrically concludes in his article, "
the militarization of the border and the disturbance it causes people like Stewart Loew suggest it is time to look seriously into how we might better police the agencies that police the border."
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