Border Confinement and Assistance Markets in Tijuana: Mexican Deportees’ Experiences of Labor and Violence Between Mexico and the United States

Author

Christian Pacheco-Gómez, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

Arthur Leigh Binford

Committee Members

Ida Susser

Kate Crehan

Joshua H. Heyman

Subject Categories

Political Economy | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Deportation, Mexico-U.S. border, Tijuana, international migration, urban development, non-profit assistance

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography of deportation and describes how Tijuana’s (Baja California, Mexico) border redevelopment and spatial redesign has impacted in Mexican job seekers’ mobilities, incorporation, and stigmatization after experiencing forced removals from the United States. The dissertation explores three processes interwoven in the deportees’ class experiences of migration and deportation.

First, I trace Mexican job seekers’ trajectories of labor and migratory movement before, during, and after deportation as well as their incorporation stories in Tijuana. Second, I reconstruct the political economy of reception immigrant subjects encounter after being deported from the United States and subjected by Tijuana’s border regimes of spatial regulation operating in the forms of public security and private assistance. Finally, I scrutinize the accumulation of punitive laws and programs that have crafted the U.S. state’s migratory apparatus designed both to strengthen its southern border enclosure project and deport in mass Mexican workforce. Overall, I particularly focus on situating deported job seekers’ class position squeezed by, on the one hand, the U.S. punitive structure of detection, confinement, and deportation and, on the other, Tijuana’s urban regime of market-based development designed to revitalize up-scale service and real state sectors strategically concentrated in border zones and accompanied by the public security agendas and private assistance endeavors following those investment projects.

Recommended Citation

Pacheco-Gómez, Christian, "Border Confinement and Assistance Markets in Tijuana: Mexican Deportees’ Experiences of Labor and Violence Between Mexico and the United States" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5657