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Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to ceusus enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonias, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slantwise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I draw from ethnographic research in the Mexico—US borderlands, the immigrant social struggle in the United States, and interviews with organizations invested in the immigrant social struggle in Arizona, to explore the historically specific expansion of what I am calling the ‘borderlands condition’, or the coupling of ‘exceptionality’ with political imaginaries. The former term represents an iteration of the diffused governance of race. The article charts the plasticity of the exceptionality of the borderlands, its shift from militarized policing in the southwestern borderlands to the naturalization of a vigilantism in concert with the transnationally inflected immigrant social struggle, as representative of the borderlands condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes the prevalence of alcohol and drug use, abuse, and dependence among adults on the Texas-Mexico border in 2002-2003. The findings are based on survey responses from a random sample of 1,200 adults living in households in three communities: El Paso, a densely populated city in west Texas; the less dense urbanized areas of the lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas; and rural or semirural colonias—unregulated settlements characterized by lack of basic public services—in south Texas. The findings revealed similarity in drug use across the three sites but higher rates of binge drinking and alcohol dependence in the colonias. Border alcohol and drug use appeared similar or lower than use among residents of Texas as a whole or Hispanics nationwide; however, problems of abuse and dependence appeared somewhat higher on the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic and population growth in the U.S.-Mexico border region has had a negative impact on the region's water resources. Although water-related problems along the border are binational in nature, the presence of interdependence alone might not be sufficient to overcome the considerable obstacles to binational collaboration. This study seeks to explain the presence and absence of binational civil society collaboration to address water-related problems in the U.S.-Mexico border region. To do so, the research compares levels of binational civil society collaboration in the Tijuana-San Diego, Ambos Nogales, Paso del Norte, and Los Dos Laredos areas. The study finds that while interdependence is a powerful concept, domestic political institutions create opportunities to pursue policy concerns through domestic channels. While transnational institutions exist, only the Border 2012 program currently produces binational civil society collaboration. Successful cooperation is dependent on key network actors that can bridge differences across the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]