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This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders—from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' testimonies point to the ways that US and Mexican discourses are mobilized in different—but complementary—ways that shape them as racialized subjects with differential life chances. This is clearest through a crude mapping of people onto nationalities for deportation based on hair, language, and tattoos. Beyond legal violence, deported migrants describe their vulnerability as constructed within tacit networks of collaboration between actors in the US and Mexico, both licit and illicit, in an effort to extort migrants and their families. While race is a key signifier in border securitization, the differences between these racial states have material consequences in the differential state violence in immigration enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through analysis of a Guatemalan ecotourism project, this paper examines how tourism development is driving the militarization of conservation through a modality of violence I identify as counterinsurgency ecotourism. I look at four manifestations of counterinsurgency ecotourism: the repurposing of the army to enforce conservation law; the creation of an environmental 'predator' discourse; the eviction of peasants from protected areas; and the construction of military outposts. These practices illustrate that ecotourism development has become a means by which the Guatemalan state is militarizing conservation spaces in ways that revive and repurpose tactics of counterinsurgency warfare from the country's civil war (1960-96). Furthermore, this militarized approach to ecotourism development obscures the structural production of poverty, insecurity, and deforestation in northern Guatemala and undermines environmental conservation and social justice efforts. The counterinsurgency ecotourism practices identified in Guatemala resonate with many other conservation and ecotourism spaces found across the world, such as UNESCO Biospheres, as well places across the Global South with histories of counterinsurgency warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates claim that market-assisted land reform (MALR) promotes economic development and reduces poverty by improving the security of private property rights and the efficiency of land markets. However, scholars argue that MALR often benefits elites at the expense of the disadvantaged and forces intended beneficiaries to resist or make difficult compromises. Nevertheless, this critical literature largely glosses everyday processes of implementation that help this policy get traction in particular locations. This paper examines the work of regularizing (titling) land in the context of a World-Bank-funded MALR project in northern Guatemala. Specifically, the focus is on the meaning-making work of field technicians who seek to convince campesinos (peasants) to participate in this regularization project. In their recruiting efforts, these technicians creatively link neoliberal slogans, human rights narratives, and exclusionary visions of nation, race, and property. By examining how technicians elaborate knowledge in the field and on the fly, this study reveals spheres of politics where regularization could be modestly contested or transformed. Such politics are worth attending to because in northern Guatemala and elsewhere, regularization contributes to conditions for land grabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how rural communities on a clandestine road crossing the Mexico-Guatemala border stake claim over this route while delegitimizing state control. Each community delimits its control by erecting a cadena, or chain, across its section of the road, from which it levies tolls on cross-border contraband. The cadenas shape political, economic, and cultural geography by instituting a local sovereign system of morality, economy, and legality. As border residents reimagine and rematerialize the border by displacing it from the geopolitical line to their cadenas, they mark their claims to this space. In a region where the majority of border flows occur through clandestine routes, residents contest the power of the nation-state to determine the border, sovereignty, belonging, and transregional development. Simultaneously, however, residents' border practices mimetically reproduce the relation between territory, power, and identity. I argue that the margins of the state can be critical junctures for examining how everyday people and state actors continuously negotiate and reconfigure the shifting materializations and meanings of territory, state power, and (trans)national space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]