¿Algo Que Declarar? Student Surveillance, Policing, and Belonging at the México-U.S. Border
Photo by Estefanía Castañeda Pérez.
Editor’s Note: The following essay is part of a politics dossier featuring presenters from The Latinx Project’s recent conference, “Latinx Politics — Resistance, Disruption & Power.” To download the PDF, click here.
The U.S.-Mexico border is often framed as an impenetrable fortress not meant to be crossed. For generations, the border “wall” has been at the center of immigration debates, while the livelihoods of communities in the borderlands have remained in the shadows. This myopic perspective posits the border as a natural material structure and blurs the fact that the borderlands stand on occupied Indigenous land. Furthermore, the actual lived experiences of crossing the border and how borders are embodied at the individual level (through processes of inequality and internalization of violence) and at a societal level (interior checkpoints, interior enforcement and policing) often remain invisible.
Our research examines how multiple institutions in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, specifically in the Tijuana and the Ciudad Juarez regions, impact transborder students’ sense of belonging. One of the themes we have identified in our work is that, regardless of how deeply they may (or may not feel) attached to their communities, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and educators play an important role in transborder students’ notions of belonging. Across multiple spaces, students are confronted by authority figures such as CBP officers, educators, and school administrator, who put into question their crossing and residential legitimacy, identity, and allegiance. It is within these multiple spaces of policing where students first begin to question their membership to the nation(s), schools, and communities.
Why Do Transborder Students and Their Families Undergo This Commute?
For the transborder community, home is here, there, and sometimes nowhere. Their livelihoods are characterized by constant mobility in the physical, social, and economic sense. There are 50 land ports of entry along the Mexico-U.S. border where thousands of commuters engage in transborder mobility on a regular basis. At the San Ysidro Port of Entry alone, 90,000 individuals cross on a daily basis. Among this population are transborder students, who are overwhelmingly U.S. citizens, residing in Mexico that regularly cross the border to attend school in neighboring U.S. cities. While there are no statistics on exactly how many students cross the border from Mexico, many are descendants of families that have been rooted in the borderlands for generations.
There is no one single answer as to why transborder students and their families undergo a transborder commute—after all, the experiences vary. Nonetheless, a common misconception surrounding transborder students is that crossing the border for education represents a “choice” when in reality there are many conditions of economic hardship and displacement that force many youth to reside on the Mexican side of the border and cross on a daily basis to attain or continue an education in the U.S. One common example is that a parent (or both parents) were deported from the U.S., forcing displaced students to regain some kind of normalcy by continuing their education in the U.S. For others, crossing represents access to opportunities that their parents never had during their lifetimes, such as learning English and going to college. In the majority of the cases, their transborder mobility was decided by their parents even before they were born. Many families view U.S. citizenship as a way to remain rooted in two different countries and cultures. As such, the educational experience for transborder students often represents the gateway into opportunity.
Over-Policing Through Multiple Institutions
Ports of entry often represent zones of legal exception, where CBP officers are given ample discretionary powers to determine an individual's admissibility based on behavioral and physical attributes. Over the decades, ports of entry have been consistently militarized, particularly after the attacks of 9/11. Since then, biometric technology has been required and used to police ports of entry. The War on Terror was not just fought overseas—it served as an ideological framework to pass some of the most draconian immigration enforcement policies, criminalizing migrants and treating the border as a perpetual warzone.
The border infrastructure is designed to make transborder commuters feel as if they are entering a war zone or even a prison, particularly due to the presence of biometric and surveillance technology, which includes facial recognition and cameras, x-ray machines, and metal detectors. Since 9/11, wait times at the border have fluctuated and have primarily depended on the sociopolitical climate in the region. As such, many students have to wake up sometimes as early as 3:00am in order to cross the border and get to school on time.
For many transborder youth, crossing the border produces uncertainty, which can lead to stress and trauma. These interactions with CBP are the main contact students have with the U.S. government. As such, students go through militarized spaces and, in some cases, are detained or held for more questioning even before they arrive at school. Student participants in the Tijuana-San Diego border region shared how CBP officers question them more during “peak” morning traffic hours. Students also shared how others at the border (e.g. pedestrians, transborder commuters, and adults) partake in the policing of transborder youth. For instance, adults will notify and alert CBP officers regulating pedestrian lanes whenever a group of transborder youth “skip the line” to ensure that they arrive at school on time. In these instances, transborder youth shared that they have been publicly reprimanded by CBP officials and even forced to return to the very beginning of the line, while other transborder commuters cheer on CBP for punishing the students.
En route to school, transborder students also endure microaggressive comments from adults deeming transborder students as “deviant” for trying to “cheat the [U.S. education] system” by attending U.S. schools while residing in Tijuana. Thus, this demonstrates how transborder students are policed by multiple sources, including border officials and fellow transborder commuters. Despite these challenges, transborder students find ways of reclaiming agency of this cross-border process by creating a community with other commuters or repurposing their waiting time with other leisure activities.
Reproducing Border Surveillance in the Classroom
Surveillance doesn’t end once a person has crossed the México-U.S. border. As institutions proximal to the border itself, schools reproduce policing and surveillance. Often, students must adhere to the institutional and social policies outlined by their school districts. Though not limited to just the transborder student population, residential policies are often the root cause of anxiety and stress. Students across the United States navigate school district policies to attend schools in communities that are better funded and offer more resources. Students who find themselves in these precarious situations are often at risk of being expelled from their school, fined by their district to cover tuition (the cost of educating the student at the school), and face legal consequences depending on their legal guardian. Considering the demographics typically found in the border region, this would mean that predominantly low-income families would be required to face the consequences of “being caught” (i.e. paying tuition to ensure their child receives a public education that would otherwise be free with a residential address). With this context in mind, we can begin to understand how transborder students navigate the obstacles that arise due to educational policies aiming to regulate residency and citizenship.
This is not a homogeneous process. After all, there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer to how transborder students interact with educational policies and at-school regulations. Generally, this navigation can be thought about in two parts: social behaviors in school and academic performance. The former describes the behaviors that students deploy to minimize suspicion of their transborder experiences. For some students, this means avoiding interactions with school administrators to deflect attention. In other cases, students modify their behaviors in the classroom so that their teachers do not raise suspicions of their commute across the border.
For example, students will ensure that they do not fall asleep in their classrooms despite being tired from their border commute. Transborder students will also actively participate and complete all their assignments to further comply with classroom and school expectations. Thus, they overcompensate in their school performance to avoid consequences that could negatively affect their school standing.
In the examples outlined above, institutional agents (i.e. teacher, administrator, counselor, etc.) are not directly policing student behavior; rather, students self-regulate their performance in school. This may raise questions as to why we argue that schools reproduce policing and surveillance onto transborder students. However, we would like to highlight the policies set in place by schools and school districts. While agents at the school may not actively enforce these policies on a daily basis, these policies remain unchallenged. Moreover, certain regulatory actions by institutional agents may be perceived as repressive by transborder students due to their daily encounters with violence as well as with microaggressions inherent within the education systems against marginalized students.
Structural Violence in Schools and in the Borderlands
Transborder students are exposed to institutional violence embedded in the classroom curriculum that further exacerbates alienation and vulnerability they experience. Some of the actions enacted by the school involve deficit social and academic perceptions of non-English languages and cultures — which are regulated and enforced through the learning environment and institutional agents. Transborder students (along with their peers of color from immigrant and multilingual backgrounds) are taught to follow curricula set forth by their school and school districts. This curriculum is primarily taught in English and references (white) U.S. History and culture, references that are not always accessible or relevant to transborder students and their non-transborder peers of color. Even in cases where bilingual and multilingual curricula are offered, the broader goal of schools and school districts are to assimilate students into the “standard” (dominant) curriculum. This is part of the larger systemic violence and racism that takes place within the U.S. education system which inherently reproduces flawed nationalistic values that promote assimilation and patriotism via the production of “good” U.S. citizens.
Supportive teachers typically do not mark students tardy for arriving late. However, for the most part, students have expressed that they navigate schooling by primarily hiding the fact that they cross. It often feels like their relationship-building with their teachers and other school agents is contingent upon not speaking openly about crossing the border. Being unable to trust faculty and peers impedes many transborder students from developing a sense of full membership in educational settings. This generates a constant anxiety of being “outed” by a peer or faculty member, causing transborder students to keep their guard up from the moment they leave their home until the moment they return. However, this is not to say that transborder students do not exercise agency within these experiences. In fact, some students shared that they eventually learn which teachers and institutional agents they are able to trust. Particularly, they emphasize that teachers who open up to students and listen to students without judgment are often the teachers that transborder students trust to disclose their experiences and challenges crossing their border. As such, this insight can provide educators with reassurance that relationship building with students can often open a line of communication that can lead to the mediation of challenges facing respective students. While this does not solve structural challenges, we believe that it is one of many steps in the right direction.
The Borderlands as the Future for Global Solidarity
Transborder individuals are characterized by constant exhaustion, instability, stress, and anxiety. However, their livelihoods and experiences demonstrate the necessity to reimagine notions of inclusion and membership beyond the definitions imposed by the nation. The violence occurring at the border and in their educational experiences are not necessarily unique to the borderlands. Rather, they represent a continuum of broader systemic oppression and policing of minoritized and low-income communities at the national level and at the global scale. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that despite experiencing these everyday oppressions, being able to cross a border for educational purposes represents a huge privilege that many undocumented and displaced communities in the borderlands do not have. As such, it is important to envision the borderlands as a space beyond the local communities that inhabit them. Instead, the borderlands have the potential of disrupting the long history of settler colonialism that has forced many to think of themselves primarily as members of nation-states, instead of global communities.
Estefanía Castañeda Pérez is a Ph.D. Candidate at the UCLA Department of Political Science. Her dissertation examines the impacts of state violence at the Mexico-U.S. Border on the lives of transborder commuters in Tijuana, Nogales, and Ciudad Juárez. Her educational aspirations and research projects have been motivated by her experience commuting daily from Tijuana to San Diego as a transborder student for a borderless pursuit of education.
Isaac Félix is a first year Ph.D. student in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. His research aims to understand the educational experiences of transborder youth in the Tijuana-San Diego border region. Currently, Isaac is a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship recipient at UC Berkeley.