Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier

Examines how the US-Mexico border is seen through visual codes of surveillance

When Donald Trump promised to “build a wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border, both supporters and opponents visualized a snaking barrier of concrete cleaving through nearly two thousand miles of arid desert. Though only 4 percent of the US population lives in proximity to the border, imagining what the wall would look like came easily to most Americans, in part because of how images of the border are reproduced and cir...