Stanford University Press Blog

Smuggling in the Borderlands

Smuggling is a form of livelihood on the Mexico-Guatemala border, where economic opportunities are scarce.

by REBECCA BERKE GALEMBA

Photo by Rebecca Berke Galemba.

Tito was born on the Mexican side of an unmonitored road crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border to a poor family with little farmland. He grew up crossing the border to visit family and exchange goods. Now, Tito has two houses: an old cement block one and a new, two-story house with pillars, tiled porches and floors, and an indoor bathroom with a hot-water shower. Tito sees himself first as a farmer and second as a businessman.

At the Mexico-Guatemala border, Tito makes a living by transporting goods like corn and coffee across the border. In this region, smuggling basic goods has flourished as a form of legitimate livelihood as alternative economic options have evaporated. The border’s recent integration into a hemispheric security and trade agenda has disrupted and displaced the traditional means of livelihood for many border residents. That agenda, which emerged in the 1990s and 2000s in coordination with the United States, focuses on curtailing unauthorized flows of goods, capital, and people. As the security and trade nexus between North and Central America, policies governing the border were increasingly positioned in line with geopolitical security interests emanating from the United States. In effect, Mexico has been a partner in the extension of the U.S. southern border to the Mexico-Guatemala border.

Those living near the boundary have felt the consequences, as residents there have historically traded, married, and migrated across the Mexico-Guatemala border. Even in the face of tightening controls, residents remain savvy in using border knowledge and networks to navigate politics, social dynamics, and currency and trade differentials to make a living where there are few opportunities.

“Free trade is just for the academics and the corporations. The people will become poorer.”

America’s Wars and Refugees’ Lives

Arab refugees in the US face immense hurdles, including inadequate access to reproductive care.

by MARCIA C. INHORN

CC0 via Pixabay.

We are living in a world where 65.6 million people have been displaced from their homes—the highest number of displaced persons on record. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 22.5 million displaced persons are refugees, and the majority of these refugees are children under the age of 18.

By the end of 2015, Europe had taken in 1.8 million refugees, mostly from the Middle Eastern countries of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. By comparison, Oxfam International reported that the United States had taken a mere 10 percent of its “fair share” of refugees, particularly from the war-ravaged country of Syria.

The inconvenient truth—one that few Americans seem to ponder—is that our country has done more to produce the current Middle Eastern refugee crisis than to relieve it. Consider some startling statistics. Although the US-led war in Iraq had presumably ended by 2011, the escalating crisis in Syria and the rise of ISIS drew in more than 5,000 US troops by 2016. By then, the US-led war in Afghanistan had become the longest and most “permanent” in US history. In 2016 alone, the US military dropped 12,192 bombs on Syria, 12,095 on Iraq, and 1,337 on Afghanistan, according to US Defense Department data.

Our country has done more to produce the current Middle Eastern refugee crisis than to relieve it.

These devastating wars in the Middle East have led to a refugee crisis of monumental proportions. According to the United Nations, 13.5 million Syrians, 11 million Iraqis, and one-third of the Afghan population are in need of humanitarian assistance. This includes 5 million Syrian refugees and more than 220,000 “new” Iraqi refugees who have fled since 2014.

The Stories We Tell

Depictions of Latinx experiences in the US grapple with upward mobility and linked fate.

by ELDA MARÍA ROMÁN

CC0 via Pixabay.

As morality tales, stories about upward mobility disseminate values and offer critiques of our socioeconomic hierarchies. Films about organized crime and the finance industry like The Godfather II and Wall Street convey that you might rise financially, but you can descend ethically. In contrast, a film like The Pursuit of Happyness, with its honest protagonist who leaves behind homelessness through perseverance and education, emphasizes that moral strength leads to success. Meanwhile, Cinderella, Pretty Woman, and Maid in Manhattan suggest that love can transcend class divisions and anyone can rise up through a generous partner or marriage.

Yet stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity. Even when they’re about individuals, narratives involving Latinx and African Americans often engage with the economic barriers that particularly affect these groups—barriers like not having the level of intergenerational wealth and resources that white families have (which determine schooling, residential, and employment options) and also criminalizing discourses that impact rates of incarceration and deportation. Despite differences in class and ideology within ethnic groups, ethnic upward mobility narratives try to impart a sense of collective identity for social action. How do they do so?

Stock stories about upward mobility vary depending on genre and method of distribution, as well as on race and ethnicity.

Rapprochement in the Ruins

An enchanted Islamic ruinscape in Delhi sheds light on the Indian past and future.

by ANAND VIVEK TANEJA

The ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla (in Delhi) on a Thursday afternoon. Photo by Anand Vivek Taneja.

Monuments built by India’s pre-modern Muslim rulers are increasingly the target of Hindu nationalist ire. Even one of India’s biggest tourist attractions, the Taj Mahal, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and long considered one of the wonders of the world, has recently been excoriated as a “blot on Indian culture” by a Minister of the Union Cabinet. Hindu nationalist groups affiliated with the fascist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that currently controls the central government—have a long history of antagonism towards medieval Islamic architecture. In 1992, a mob egged on by RSS and BJP leaders destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which they claimed was built over the birthplace of the Hindu god-king Rama.

Jinnealogy » provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history.

However, as I show in my book, antagonism is not the only relationship that Hindus in contemporary India have with the built remains of the pre-modern Muslim past. In Delhi, Firoz Shah Kotla, the ruins of a fourteenth-century medieval palace built by Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq have become famous as a dargah, or Muslim saint shrine, to which Hindus and Muslims flock in the thousands every Thursday. The common sense here, among both Hindus and Muslims, is that more Hindus come here than Muslims do. Unusually, the saints here are not human, but jinns or genies.

In Islamic cosmology, the jinn are mortal, but they live much longer than human beings. Stories are told in Delhi, for instance, about a jinn who had met both Moses and Jesus and brought their greetings to Prophet Muhammad when he encountered him. The ability of the jinn to supersede human chains of memory and genealogy through their sheer longevity is what I call jinnealogy. These jinnealogical narratives are often told and retold at Firoz Shah Kotla, a site where jinns—in a theologically novel fashion—are considered saints. This sanctification of the long-lived jinn happens in a city where human chains of memory and belonging—and the geography of Muslim saint shrines—has been violently disrupted by the violence of Partition in 1947, and by post-colonial politics, which have sought to remake the city anew, and disconnected it from its pre-modern Muslim past.

Israel’s Expanding Permit Regime

How racial hierarchy and bureaucracy are reshaping Jerusalem.

by YAEL BERDA

Separation wall between Israel and Palestine, 2005. Photo by Dafna Kaplan. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

For Palestinians living outside Israel’s 1948 borders, life is precarious and heavily regulated by a persistent procedural violence that limits their freedom of movement and shapes daily life. In the West Bank, impediments on the freedom of movement take the form of physical checkpoints, roadblocks, and a massive network of walls and fences manned by heavily armed guards and state-of-the-art surveillance technology. For Jerusalemites who are not Israeli citizens but hold identity cards distributed to them when Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967, mobility has been somewhat easier. And though maintaining life in Jerusalem presents a financial and political burden to many Palestinian families, it’s a hardship many take on, as they understand that living in Jerusalem protects them from the draconian permit regime that restricts the mobility of neighboring Palestinians in the West Bank. At least, such was the case until recently.

Today, Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement in the form of new legal and bureaucratic plans to reshape the city through the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of residents from its jurisdiction.

Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement.

The new plan is yet another instance in which the Israeli government has attempted to move Palestinians from East Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank. For decades, the policy of the Israeli Ministry of Interior was called the “silent transfer,” which consisted of ever-mounting procedural demands to prove one’s center of life was in Jerusalem, or have one's residency status revoked. The building of the separation wall in the early 2000s caused thousands of families who had lived in East Jerusalem, beyond the wall encircling the West Bank, to seek housing, work, and education within the wall. This put extreme pressure on education, sewage, and welfare infrastructure—systems that were underfunded and underdeveloped compared to their counterparts in Jewish Jerusalem.

Four Fishes, One Whale

How China diverges from the other economically emergent BRICS nations.

by SALVATORE BABONES

The leaders of the BRICS countries. Left to right: President Michel Temer of Brazil, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and President Jacob Zuma of South Africa. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In early September, 2017, the leaders of the five BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—met for their ninth annual summit in the old port city of Xiamen. The BRICS began life as the BRICs (minus South Africa), an investment category cooked up by emerging markets analyst Jim O'Neill in 2001. As it evolved into an actual political bloc, China insisted on the inclusion of South Africa to provide geographical balance. Since 2010 the leaders of the BRICs, and since 2012 the BRICS, have met every year to celebrate their economic success and growing power in the world.

BRICS or Bust? » makes the case for the implementation of government policies as a key means for jump-starting the economies of the BRICS countries.

And irony. "Keenly aware of the negative impact of corruption on sustainable development, we support the efforts to enhance BRICS anti-corruption cooperation," the five opined in their closing declaration at Xiamen. But to be fair, BRICS statements on feel-good topics like corruption, environmental protection, and the like are just platitudes, and everyone knows that. The real issue is economic development.

When it comes to economics, corruption is not the only thing that the BRICS have in common. All five are middle-income countries with declining poverty rates but persistently high levels of income inequality. They are all making big investments to modernize their physical and human infrastructure and have the government capacity to follow through on these investments. And each of the BRICS is the dominant economic power in its respective region.

Of course, they differ dramatically in size. China is the whale, South Africa the minnow of the BRICS. China's economy is more than twice as large as those of the other four countries put together. But as in biology, size really isn't that important in economics. Look beneath the surface, and the big difference is structure.

Transparency on the Grassy Knoll

Government disclosures, like the release of the Kennedy files, do not improve public trust.

by MARK FENSTER

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Surprisingly soon after the Warren Commission Report concluded that Lee Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy, a significant and growing segment of the American public began to speculate about alternative perpetrators whose actions the Warren Commission had covered up. In 1992, facing the persistence of that speculation, Congress enacted the statute that prompted the recent disclosures (and non-disclosures) of secret documents relating to the assassination. It hoped to assure the public that the government was not complicit in the assassination, and nor was it withholding evidence of a conspiracy, a hope that President Trump reiterated upon the documents’ release.

#JFKFiles pic.twitter.com/AnPBSJFh3J

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2017

The effort was a noble one. Congress designed a timed disclosure mandate that would allow the public to know more and theorize less. In the predominant telling of history from the 1960s on, the assassination had initiated the public’s radical doubt about the government’s actions and willingness to tell the truth. In its wake, various cottage industries have circulated theories about government conspiracies to cover up, among other things, all of the major assassinations of the 1960s (including those of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as that of President Kennedy), its relationship with alien visitors, the rise of a globalist “new world order,” the truth behind the 9/11 attacks, and the place of President Obama’s birth. Perhaps by cleaning out its archives, the federal government could reset the public’s view of government and rid us of this persistent tendency to find conspiracy everywhere.