SOAN September 2017 Colloquium: Caught between two borders: Articulations of Security between Mexico’s frontera norte and frontera sur

Speaker: Dr. Lisa C Breglia

Wednesday, September 20, 2017 10:30 AM to 11:30 PM EDT
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Virulent rhetorics of “wall building” focusing on Mexico’s border with the US are causing undue fear, anxiety, and increased consternation to both the north and south. Meanwhile, similar complexities involving the current state and future course of migration, trade, and security indeed exist and are perhaps heightening around Mexico’s southern border region. Caught in the flux of these unstable rhetorics and shifting geographies is southeastern Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  The Peninsula’s three states are known for things ranging from lavish tourism destinations to the nation’s oil fields and are regularly cited as the “most secure” in the country, making the peninsula a curious outlier to the business-as-usual security discourses focusing on cartel violence and instability. But residents do not necessarily agree. Drawing upon fieldwork in the state of Campeche, I will discuss how migration (the Programa Frontera Sur), trade and investment (through the establishment of new special economic zones), and the state’s renewed focus on infrastructural development show the fractured reality of what it means to feel secure in this “in between” lived and rhetorical space.

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