Abstract
The Mexican-US border has some resemblance with the Palestinian-Israeli Separation Wall. While the logic of territorial annexation underlines the histories of both barriers, the emergence of militarized surveillance is a shared tactic that the US and Israel openly and jointly exercise. The collaboration of the US Border Patrol with Israeli security firms, such as Elta North America, and president Trump’s invocation of Israel’s “wall as a model” for the barrier he has vowed to build along the US-Mexico border exemplify this tactic. Designed to control the movement of Mexicans and Palestinians in their respective lands, these walls also construct them as dangerous racialized Others. With an attempt to dismantle these walls, this paper aims at building a bridge between Mexico and Palestine by exploring similarities and differences between forms of resistance to colonial borders and neocolonial barriers.
While the US-Mexico stretches along the Southwest, I will focus on the perspective from Tijuana, a border-city that embodies the old history of borderlands and the recent reality of walls. Questions that I will address include: What does it mean to see Palestine from Tijuana? What do the hybridity and in-betweenness that characterize Tijuana tell us about everyday resistance in border cities? How does the human geography of border-crossing undermine colonial territorial separation? How can we identify Palestinian sister-cities of Tijuana? To answer these questions, I will examine recent ethnography about border-crossing in Tijuana alongside maps and geopolitical analysis of the Wall between Tijuana and California. I will also engage with Palestinian research on the Separation Wall in order to illuminate my analysis of the difference between borders and walls. Through a comparative critical analysis of the border/wall my goal is to offer some critical remarks on the trajectories of crossings and resistance in Mexican and Palestinian border-cities sealed by walls.
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