Unwanted walls | Part 1: Divided twin cities

Maquiladoras. Monotype by Luis Gutierrez.

Border walls as ecological
disturbance and structural violence

PART 1 | A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF DISASTER CAPITALISM?

Devon G.
Peña | Seattle, WA | December 5, 2013

Posse existere potentia est. The
power is to be able to exist.

- Baruch Spinoza

It was 1992 and a mere two years to go before NAFTA
activation and the opening of Zapatismo on the global stage. I was back on the
border, field tripping – and I do mean ‘tripping’ in the sense of returning to
a familiar but always transforming region ten years after completing my 2½ year
dissertation residence in the Twin City of El Paso- Ciudad Juárez.

I was in serendipity mode trying to convert my dissertation
into The
Terror of the Machine and gathering new stories of shop floor politics
and community struggles from maquila workers, managers, and organizers. There
were plenty of continuing signs of the upwelling of multitudes-in-resistance on
the border and elsewhere. Environmental justice activism was a core part of the
grassroots struggles that came to prominence between the inaugurations of
Reagan and Clinton. For us, this is even more profoundly bracketed as a
trajectory from the apotheosis of neoliberalism to the rise of Zapatismo
(1980-94) and this continues to define the current moment of social movements
in the multiplicity of organizational forms and terrains of struggle against
the state of economic exception.

Let me start with a word we used a lot back then to describe
border towns. I remember sitting in a Juarez café with maquiladora workers in
1992 and how conversation turned around to the idea of ‘Twin City’ – of how the
border towns, in this case El Paso and Juárez were like conjoined twins.
Despite the socioeconomic and political differences, the two seemed forever
joined at the hip, each one shaping the future of the other.

It is two decades later and I never would have thought then
that the term ‘Twin-city’ could sound so odd, inappropriate, and even
fantastic; as if it were an imaginary place or state-of-being that could never
have existed, except perhaps in a borderlander’s flights of fancy. Now, we have
to live with reinforced physical and virtual walls separating the twins.

Unwanted
walls gave rise to divided cities.

The border buildup involves what conservation biologists
call the “ecology of disturbance”.  By 1997, the anti-toxic movement was
describing the border as a 2000 mile-long Love Canal. I was also concerned with
toxic maquiladoras but felt there was a broader process at work in bioregional
and geopolitical effects at large scales. So I likened the border to a
“disturbance regime” perpetrating ecocide
and ethnocide as political
ecologically produced disasters leading to the erasure of biological and
cultural diversity (The Terror of the
Machine, pp. 284ff):

Conservation biologists…view disturbance
regimes as events and processes that introduce “uncertainty” into ecosystems.
This includes genetic, demographic, environmental, and catastrophic
uncertainty. In turn, this uncertainty can lead to disruptions and imbalances
that over time—in the context of conservation biology — produce fragmented habitats
and reduce the viability and diversity of species populations. The land
organism as a whole becomes “sick,” as Aldo Leopold might say. There is a
qualitative difference between naturally occurring and human induced
disturbance regimes. The results of natural disturbances — for example, fires,
floods, volcanic eruptions, and the like — contribute to the evolution of a
multiply layered and patchy landscape mosaic…But human disturbance regimes,
cities and industrial zones among them, not only introduce higher rates of
habitat fragmentation, but they can also permanently interrupt the natural
evolution of ecosystemic complexity, that is, the essential qualities of
natural habitat…There are several ways to consider maquilas as serious factors
in human induced disturbance regimes. They can contribute to the threatened or
endangered status of wildlife species. They can contribute to the pollution of
surface and groundwater aquifers and watersheds with startling consequences for
the long-term health and viability of both nonhuman and human populations.
Maquilas can also contribute to the degradation of air and soil quality, with
long-term consequences for the health of all life forms and the ability of
adjoining landforms and air and water basins to support diverse populations or
agricultural activities. The establishment of maquila industrial parks involves
vast investments in infrastructure. These industrial parks and their associated
infrastructures can fragment wildlife habitats and impinge on biological corridors.
They can also degrade rural built environments that are often more compatible
with ecosystemic integrity (such as farmsteads and orchards)…

The militarized technocratic
political border or fortress-border
as I wish to call it produces similar maquiladora-like effects but at even
larger spatial and temporal scales.  The fortress-border – for all its technological savvy – is really and
perhaps in a bitterly ironic sense a truly medieval
policy: Border control through the most ancient and brusque form of
police-aggression involving use of physical barriers (think: castle moats) at
the boundary threatened by unruly hordes.

Of course, this serves only to create a grave disturbance that
threatens to interrupt the flows of biological, cultural, social, and economic
qualities – the ongoing practices and life processes of transborder flows of
people, animals, plants, ideas, and pretty much everything else that makes for
culture and economy. This includes the flows of pollution, drugs, workers bound
for slave-like exploitation, and the ever-violent Border Patrol. This
disturbance is an act of structural violence against human and other-than-human
life. It must be challenged as such. 

Border walls are to twin cities what forced gender-assignment
surgery is to the beautifully amorphous body of a trans* newborn, which is to
say, a violent unethical attack on the autonomy of the body/land. This what
Gloria Anzaldúa had in mind when she described the “open wound of the border”.
This is what it means to think of the border as a by-product of what Naomi
Klein calls Disaster
Capitalism: In this case a human-wrought disaster at the scale of landscape
ecology and within each wrecked and exhausted body on the shop floor forced to
inhabit Dantesque polluted spaces at work, home, and play.

We often forget that in many ways those brief turbulent
years between the inauguration of Reagan and Clinton were really the heyday of
the autonomous phase of the environmental justice movement – that is right
after the first EJ Summit (1991) but before Clinton got his coy neoliberal
fingers all over the movement and in turn gave us the ironic defeat through
victory of Executive Order 12898.

That executive order remade environmental justice from a
grassroots social movement against toxic racism through the attainment of
ecological democracy into an equity-based civil rights argument that demanded
we would be happy to accept an equal piece of the same rotten carcinogenic
capitalist pie. After Clinton, the state made sure that the sustainable and
anti-capitalist values of the movement were cast aside or marginalized.

I witnessed this in 1994-95 with the first request for proposals from the EPA for EJ grants. Every last RFP used ‘enabling laws’ that channeled our energies into endless and largely ineffective pollution cleanup-styled mitigation politics. How quickly we forgot the EJ principles calling on us to detoxify production at the point of production and to thus make a transition to a preventative rather than a mitigation strategy, which accepts the inevitability of damage from the so-called ‘negative externalities’ of capitalist production and instead focuses on banal efforts trying to fix irreparable damage after it occurs.

This then is the story of how the U.S.-Mexico border became
a proving ground for the negative externalities of capitalism over the past
near quarter century (1980-2014). The EJ movement continues undeterred despite
the structural violence of financial capitalism since 2007 and under the
‘telluric spell’ of the immigrant-bashing beneficiaries who have an abiding
technocratic servant state to work with. Together they implement a state of
economic exception and seek to generalize the ‘bare life’ for the 99%.

Hill factory | Maquiladora.  Credit: AEQAI

Moira
Gatens reminds us how the Judeo-Hispano philosopher Baruch Spinoza saw the
human body as “a complex individual, made up of a number of other
bodies.”  In contrast to the dominant idea of the Cartesian automaton, for
Spinoza the human body “is in constant interchange with its environment.” Thus,
Spinoza understood the body as “a nexus of variable interconnections, a
multiplicity.”

I was trying to explain this idea to my students in my
political ecology seminar the day before yesterday and some appeared puzzled. I
used the example of the idea that each human body harbors several pounds and
many billions upon billions of bacterial species in our guts, our skin, mouth,
and elsewhere. We are never alone; we are never just the one; our bodies have
coevolved with billions of other organisms to the point of inextricable
interconnection.

This is an irrefutable biological fact, even if the social
significance and cultural meaning of being a walking ecosystem for bacteria is
something we can surely argue about. The fact remains: Without my gut bacteria
I cannot digest food. My life processes depend upon the work of billions of
others.

The same process of interconnectivity and interdependency
operates at all scales from micro- and meso- to macro- and even cosmological.
Without supernovas there can be no oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, or other
compositions of matter to make bacteria come alive or to eventually create a
human walking host and ecosystem for bacterial life forms.

Tragically, this is the exact principle – connectivity and
interdependency – disrupted by the imposition of the Wall. We will spend the
next few weeks and months examining this problem from a wide range of
perspectives from the natural, social sciences, and humanities. I wish to
challenge us all to rethink the border as ecological and cultural disturbance –
and to start re-imagining the struggles we need to engage if we are to reclaim
a landscape that unites and does not divide.