An examination of how time is used as a policing tactic in border and migrant policy.
Time is seldom on the migrant’s side. Migrants crossing the US southern border are “immediate threats,” according to the government agencies and politicians hell-bent on their capture and deportation, and those caught in the US are forced to endure grueling months in detention centers and in queues for judicial hearings.
On Border Time examines temporal dimensions of violence and associated ideological conditioning in an increasingly privatized and militarized immigration system. Visiting the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, Cristina Jo Pérez shows how state-supported histories of national “progress” and migrant “backwardness” manufacture political subjects. Meanwhile, the media and political narratives of imminent threat criminalize Brown men and boys, justifying Border Patrol shootings as preemptive national defense. Dramatically widening her lens, Pérez further considers how the anti-immigrant agenda bleeds into the future, through aggressive state intervention into migrants’ reproductive lives. From a heat-of-the-moment police encounter to a Houston gynecologist’s waiting room, On Border Time is a profound meditation on policies and discourses that put migrants out of sync and, by extension, out of the nation.