Rev Left Radio - US-Mexico Borderlands: War, Colonialism, and Imperial Formation

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

Professor Alex Avina returns to the show, this time to discuss the US-Mexico borderlands, its fascinating history, its deep relationship to colonialism and imperialist formation, the current Mexican president AMLO, the spectre of the border in american's minds, and much more.  Find more of Alex's work here: https://alexanderavina.com/ The American Maginot Line parts 1 and 2: https://fx.substack.com/p/the-american-maginot-line?r=12vpd&s=r https://fx.substack.com/p/the-american-maginot-line-part-2?s=r Outro music: Ramon Casiano by Drive-By Truckers Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on a multi-time guest, Alexander Avina, the professor of history from ASU. He's on to talk about his recent spat of articles, a part one and part two, in foreign exchanges, a substack called the American Maginot Line. And it's really an investigation and an analysis of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the role that the border and the borderlands around it have played in American history, and how the maintenance and policing of that border was part and parcel with broader processes of settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism. So this is a really fascinating, interesting, and genuinely unique dive into this topic, and I'm really happy to be able to share this conversation with you today. So without further ado, here is my wonderful conversation with Professor Alexander Avina on his article, The American Maginal Line, and U.S.-Mexico borderland. Enjoy. My name is Alex Savinia. I'm a history professor at Arizona State University, and thank you for having me back on. Brett, this is, I don't know, fourth or fifth episode. I can't even keep tracking anymore, yeah. But it's great. So I love coming back and conversing with you.

Absolutely. It's an honor to have you back on. And this topic is a very interesting one. I'm glad we're going to be able to dive into it. You wrote a series of articles titled the American Maginot Line, part one and part two, over which, or through which you kind of discuss and analyze and critique the history of the borderland between the U.S. and Mexico and how that border was really in so many ways the training grounds for the broader imperialist and collect. colonialist endeavors that the U.S. would, you know, fall into as they became an empire. And so I found these articles very interesting. They analyzed aspects of the border that I had not really come across, and so I'm excited to get into it. I think the first question to kind of talk about, and it might seem obvious, but I think it is interesting, is what exactly is a borderland, you know, like what makes something a borderland other than just the border is in that area?

And then how did the Mexico-U.S. border as it exists today, you know, know, come to be established. Yeah, so that's a, I think that it's not that simplistic of a question, Brian. I think a lot of academics, we tend to kind of bypass the most simple questions because in many ways are the most difficult. But I would say that a borderlands region, it depends on your positionality from which you're trying to define that concept, right? So if you are a person who's living in Nogales on the Mexican side of the U.S.

Mexico border, right? your definition of the borderline is going to be different than an American living on the American version of Nogales on the U.S. side of the border. But roughly speaking, like the borderlands is a broader region that extends beyond a demarcated international boundary or border between different national nation states. But, you know, some of the most interesting stuff that I've read about borderlands will focus on communities that have managed to create shared cultural, political, and economic ties across and decided. despite ways of separation that nation states have managed to create. And in particular, in regards to the U.S.-Mexico border, that region has been a borderlands region for a long time, in which communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico borders

have managed to create meaningful transnational communities because people travel across borders to work, to shop, to visit families, to get accessible forms of health care, as many Americans do going crossing over to the Mexican side of the border today. So there's a, to think about borderlands, to think about this area from a communal or an individual, like, humanistic perspective. Whereas the border is something that is an artificial construct created by different nation states to separate, to separate, you know, one nation state from another. The idea of a border for me, and this year I'm really influenced by, I think, the very first, theorist that I was influenced by as a son of undocumented Mexican migrants was this

Norteo band called Los Degas in Northe, which is, you know, these guys were kind of like the balladeers of the Mexican migrant experience in the U.S. And I remember growing up and listening to their songs, and, you know, they used that one line that's become kind of a staple of migrant rights, which is we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. And growing up in a household, you know, led by parents who lived without papers and undocumented status in the U.S. for decades, like that kind of kind of shape my idea of what the border was. And in that sense, the border, by its very existence, represents or signifies both the

violence that it took to create it, right, imperial colonial violence in this instance that I'll get into an aside, but also the violence that it requires to maintain the border. And this is really what by two articles for the foreign exchanges substack of tried to address both like these foundational moments in which the U.S.-Mexico border was created through imperial violence through colonialism, through particularly settler colonialism, but then the constant types of violence that it was required to maintain it, right, especially against an array of perceived outsiders that American elites viewed as somehow threatening to the national sovereignty and to the racial body politic of the United States. So the idea, and then I guess

another way to answer this question is to kind of just think about my own personal political and intellectual development engaging with this idea, right? So growing up in the, and in this household with my undocumented parents, listening to these Los Dillas and Norte songs, whose constant message was about transcending borders and this idea that, you know, what used to be large swaths in the United States used to belong to Mexico and this idea of we didn't cross the border

of the borderstrike. So I was like that was a very like a binary nationalistic consumption of what the border and the borderlands are and represented historically. And then it was really maybe five, six, seven years ago when I started to dive in some of the literature on, on settler colonialism and American Indian studies and histories, where I started to really question that, right, and to think about or interrogate, you know, what does it mean when someone says

we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us? I mean, there was folks who were living there before. Borders were created and borders were transcended and crossed, right? So, you know, thinking about how settler colonialism on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border have created, you know, despite national differences, despite differences between the United States and Mexico historically today, they still share this mutual shared interest that historically goes back to particular forms of settler colonialism that were in practice in the late 19th century in which Native American groups and polities were displaced from land that was originally theirs. So I think that's an interesting question to think about.

And it's just shaped my entire view of what U.S. empire is and how it came to be and how we can define it to begin with. And I think that really went into writing these two articles. And it was also within the broader context of, like, the, what, it was a 20th year commemoration of 9-11 and also this idea of what a forever war is and was and continues to be also went into shape, you know, my thinking on this. The short little, I'll try to make the short little history of how the U.S.-Mexico border came to be. You know, there's various points where we can start, but the easiest one is to talk about

what is now usually taught in the U.S. is the Mexican-American war, the U.S.-Mexico war that broke out in the mid-19th century. There's long historical antecedents to this war that broke out. A lot of it has to do with Texas. It's always Texas's fault. But the separation of

Texas from Mexico in the 1830s and the inability of Mexico to bring it back into its nation state, and we get this this nine-year period in Texas where it's the lone star republic until it's annexed into the U.S. in 1845 against the explicit warnings of the Mexican government, saying that if the U.S. had ever annexed it, it would be tantamount to a declaration of war on Mexico. And the war breaks out in 1846, precisely over the question of where the internationally recognized boundary of the U.S. and Mexico was. the U.S. claim that the border was marked in tech, between Texas and Mexico, was marked by the Noes River, which is a bit north of what is now.

The internationally recognized border, which is the Rio Grande or the Rio Bravo, and the U.S. troops who were sent to the border, not recognizing Mexican claims to what the border was, crossed it, set up a series of forts, and Mexican soldiers attacked them, and that was enough of a pretext for the U.S. to declare war under President James Pope, and we get the Mexican. American War in which the U.S. will invade Mexico on two fronts from 1846 until 1847. You have a group that crosses from what is now southwestern United States into northern Mexico. And then eventually due to the difficulties that that U.S. military expedition faced for a variety of reasons, Polk sends another expedition that will take off from New Orleans land in Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, eastern Gulf Coast of Mexico. and this force will more or less follow the route that Hernan Cortez followed, you know, hundreds of years before when him and eventually hundreds of thousands of indigenous allies would overthrow the mighty Mexica or arastic empire.

And then by September of 1847, after a series of famous battles in Mexico City, the U.S. raises the American flag over in the Sokalo in the main city plaza of Mexico City. And in that moment becomes, you know, really important for a variety of reasons, a bunch of U.S. Civil War officers who will later become famous participated in this operation. If you know the U.S. Marine Corps song, it includes the line, the halls of Montezuma, because it's a reference to this military operation. When the Americans finally take over Mexico City, they couldn't really find any Mexican government officials to negotiate with.

And it took them a couple months to finally find some that would negotiate to an end, because the longer the Americans stayed, the more popular resistance that they were generating in Mexico City. There was increased street violence. And eventually this leads to in February of 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe, Delgo, which more or less establishes the border that we know today, this almost 2,000 mile-long border between the Mexico and United States. There was a brief, there was a change in 1853, sorry, with the Gatson purchase with Southern Arizona, south of the Gila River, or close to where I am today, will be taken for Mexico will cede to the United States

for an amount of money. One more thing I'll mention, and this is something that goes back to my earlier point about indigenous histories and settler colonialism and how my perspective has changed. It's a great historian at Berkeley by the name of Brian DeLay, who has this great book called War of a Thousand Deserts. And he really made a huge impact in the kind of forcing historians to rethink

the Mexican-American War from an indigenous perspective. And he makes his argument that what really, you know, the indigenous polities who lived in the borderlands, so the Kiowas, the different Apache groups, they actually played a decisive role in a variety of ways weakening northern Mexico beginning in the 1830s was a series of devastating, like, yearly raids that they would launch deep into central Mexico. And essentially, in the words of an American who crossed through northern Mexico during the war, you know, it was, they were crossing through lands that were, you know, it looked like a thousand deserts. They were completely

depopulated. So delay makes this really fascinating argument that it was indigenous policies who fundamentally shaped both the outbreak of war and also the resolution of the war between Mexico and the United States. And that's really fascinating to think about, right? Because in 1848

and then after 1853 with the gas and purchase, even though you have the setting of an internationally recognized border on maps, that didn't translate into actual political and geographic control on the ground. Like the border that we think of today will remain in the hands of different powerful indigenous policies throughout the

the 19th century. So one of the articles I mentioned this, you know, when the U.S., both the U.S. and Mexican government sent out these mapping and survey expeditions in the 1850s to kind of precise where the line the border is going to go, in some instances that these groups had to like ask local indigenous policies for permission and for safe haven in order to be able to do their work. So if we're, you know, And in parts of Arizona and New Mexico, the border will be effectively controlled by different Apache groups well into the 1880s. So again, this idea that, and this will have an impact on how the U.S. government in particular would think about the border to this day, the idea of what constitutes a secure border, what constitutes an insecure border, and then how does that shape questions about national sovereignty, particularly during moments of imperial anxiety or in moments where U.S. elites feel a bit insecure about. about the robustness of national borders. Yeah, and we'll definitely get into that part about the imperial anxiety and whatnot.

And the point that you're making about the Apaches and indigenous communities along in this borderland all the way up, you know, 18, let's say, 53 after the Gadsden purchased, technically this is now U.S. dominated territory, but in practice, de facto, it's still politically dominated by these indigenous groups. I think that's, you know, fascinating is something we don't. really think about and then how those indigenous groups like the apaches and the kamanshees went on to shape um the culture and the border and all of those things in that area even you know lasting until today legacy wise and we'll get into that in a second i just wanted to touch on an

aspect of of borderlands that i find interesting and that you're you're touching on there which is even as the technical border shifts you know in the wake of conflict and wars the the interesting aspect of a borderland is that the linguistic and cultural overlap remains. The people remain. So the border can shift all at once on paper, but the communities that are established in these areas continue

to go on and influence the cultures. And so we have in the southern U.S., especially in the southwest, very heavy representation of Mexicans in particular Central Americans broadly. And that goes on to radically shape, you know, even down to like the aesthetics of New Mexico

shaped by Mexican culture. And this other side of the border in northern Mexico, it is in many ways much more American-fied, right, than southern Mexico. And so you have this two-way, yeah, this two-way bleeding over into one another. And on the ground, it's almost impossible to really see with your own eyes where, you know, this cultural mixing starts and ends. All you really have is this technical border to, you know, also wanted to mention that we also, you know, borderlands exist around the world obviously and there's hundreds of them some very fraught some more or less very mild and tame but the russia ukraine borderland is very much in the news right now because the dombas is this borderland area where

technically it's inside the borders of ukraine but culturally you know linguistically ethnically they're very much aligned with and come out of russia um and so you see you see that how that complication can lead to, you know, all the tumult and conflict going on over in Eastern Europe right now. So those are just some things I wanted to say about the borderland. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. And I probably should have mentioned quite, you know, a couple of obvious things that resulted from this short history that I just mentioned that I think you touched the bomb, is that, you know, as a result of 1848, Mexico loses, you know, between a third and a half of its national territory. So much of what is now the U.S. West and

U.S. Southwest used to belong to Mexico because it used to be, they used to be colonial possessions of Spain, and we'll shift over to United States. And I think one of the interesting things that think about within just like the long deray of U.S. history is that the U.S. history is like the part of it is the acquisition, it's a settler colonial history, the acquisition of lands, right, on paper, on maps, whether it's the Louisiana purchased or all these lands that were acquired as a consequence of the Mexican-American War, or the War of Northern aggression as as they call it in Mexico. But then how to actually implement

power and sovereignty on their ground is something different, right? And it requires massive amounts of violence and bloodshed. And the people who will suffer that in particularly in the 19th century, beginning in the late 18th century or the 19th century, are the people who lived there originally, right?

Indigenous policies, indigenous communities. So I think it's maps are one thing. Maps are, you kind of display kind of like the aspirational hopes of a nation state, but then translating those aspirations into like physical reality, it requires a massive amount of settler colonialism and violence.

And I think that's something really important to keep in mind. One other thing I'll mention really quickly about the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Dalgo and the Gadsden purchase is that one of the articles that was included in the treaty in 1848 held

the U.S. responsible for cross-border indigenous raids. So, So if Apaches and Comanches and Kiowas and other groups continue to do cross-border raids, the U.S. was responsible for stopping those raids. And if any Mexican citizens were taken hostage or suffering any sort of economic damages, the U.S. government was responsible for that. So obviously, like, people who, Americans who knew the terrain,

when they saw that article, they knew that, especially military officials, they knew that was going to be an impossibility. So one of the interesting things about the Gadsden purchase that will occur in 1853, just a couple years later, is that the U.S. U.S. put in an article, they got rid of the previous article that held the U.S. responsible for

stopping cross-border indigenous raids and the kidnapping of Mexican citizens. Because it took them five short years to realize that that was an impossibility and it was going to remain an impossibility for much of the 19th century. You know, different Apache groups, particularly those led by like the famous Geronimo.

He hated Mexicans almost more than he hated Americans, right? So they weren't going to stop their cross-border raids. and they weren't going to let a map and a treaty signed between the U.S. and Mexico preventing them from doing what they had been doing since the early 1830s. Yeah, incredibly interesting. And just one more thing to add to this before we move on to the next question, which just kind of came to my mind as we're talking about borderlands

and the culture and the history of those lands being changing hands over and over again. And the recent tragedy a few years ago of the El Paso shooting by the white supremacist, the motivation there was like there's too many. Mexicans in Texas. Like there's too many Mexicans coming into America. They were here so much fucking longer than you, you know, the lack of

knowledge of this history plus the settler colonial white supremacist mentality results in this fucking tragedy where people who have been there much longer than probably even the European immigrants that gave birth to this mass shooter are victimized, targeted, attacked because

they are seen as encroaching on land that isn't theirs. I mean, it's it would be laughable if it wasn't so fucking tragic you know yeah i mean and you see this like in where i grew up in central california they had um they still around right these franciscan missions that were established in the late um 1700s it was kind of like a dad last ditch effort by the spanish empire to kind of populate what is now california the spanish and the mexican government's always had a problem populated these lands that that later um with settlers that later became uh the west and the south of the united states

And one of the things that happened throughout the late 19th century after the Mexican-American War and into the early 20th century is that some of these mission towns, like the one I grew up in in San Luis Obispo, they would organize these fiesta days where they all they, it was these weird like celebrations of like a Spanish past and Spanish heritage while completely subsuming Mexicanness or Mexican markers of cultural identity. And a lot of that has to do with race, right? Like tagging Spanishness and the Spanish colonial past. as somehow white, and Mexican, and we can get into this as well, becomes racialized in very particular ways throughout the long scope of U.S. history,

particularly since the resolution of the Mexican-American War, right? So, you know, it's this weird dynamic of completely erasing, like, the California's, like, Mexican past and the actual Mexicans who were living in California when I was there witnessing these festivals in the 80s and 90s, by hearkening to this bygone, like, highly racialized past. And that's the kind of mentality that, in a way, is not too disconnected from the fantasies that drove this shooter to, like, drive, what, seven hours from where he was living to El Paso,

because he identified El Paso as a quote-called Mexican space where he decided to wage his white genocidal violence, right? So this has a long history to it. And a lot of it has to do with the consequences of 1848 and the consequences of establishing this rigid border that it's not just a physical infrastructure, right, but in many ways it's a racial border, it's a political border, it's a cultural border as well. Exactly. And the recent quote-unquote crisis with the Haitian refugees and their treatment is another stark example of how that racialized world order is very much at play,

even when Mexicans themselves are more or less absent from the border conflict in that one instance. yeah man like anytime you hear crisis at the border like your bullshit meter should like go off exactly and there is no crisis at the border the border itself is the crisis like the border this this idea and this infrastructure that has killed thousands of people since the 1990s when the they started to build massive walls along this long stretch of this border that's the crisis not you know poor people displaced by by capitalism and u.s empire abroad trying to find trying to escape and find a better life here now with that i had to go on that rant. No, that's important. And it generated another question, which is the construction of border wall starting in the 90 seems to coincide, you know, pretty well with the establishment of NAFTA, which among other things allowed for capital to have no borders in effect, but for labor needed stronger borders, right? So if you're going to go over as an owner of capital to Mexico to exploit their cheap labor, you're going to need to militarize that border to keep that pool of labor, the cheaper pool of labor. And that's going to

require a hard break at that border for the interest, ultimately, of capital, at least in that instance. There's no doubt. And if you read the papers and especially the U.S. negotiators of NAFTA and some of the policymakers involved in it, they knew, they damn well knew that this free trade agreement was going to devastate large segments of the smallholder, Campesino agriculture economy in Mexico. And what do people do when they're devastated economically, they're going to move? And they're going to move to Mexican cities or are going to try to move into United States.

So it's no accident that we get NAFTA on the one hand, right, unfettered movement for capital across national borders. And at the same time, we're getting the building of walls. In many instances, as I mentioned in the article, some of these walls were built out of helicopter landing pads that were used in Vietnam, right? So there's so many like imperial connections that are condensed in the actual space that is now the U.S.-Mexico border. Yeah, and that leads perfectly to this next question, which is, you know, in your article, the American Maginotline line, you argue, quote, The U.S. Mexico border now and historically is a primary site of U.S. imperial formation where settler colonialism and imperialist aggression converged as mutually constituting projects. Now, you've definitely alluded to some of those arguments and the answer you've already given, but I was hoping that you can kind of lay out that basic argument. We're going to get into the details of it, but the umbrella bird's eye view of that basic argument before we go deeper.

Yeah, so that argument has to do with, and again, it goes. A lot of it has to do with my own personal change, evolving thinking on this issue. But so thinking about the, the U.S. Mexico border, both as the result of U.S. imperial expansion, right? It's the first instance in which the U.S. invades a sovereign Latin American nation and ends up taking, like, large swaths of its land, right? That's like the more traditional story. And if you're a Latin Americanist historian, that becomes like the gateway to, you know, dozens of U.S. military interventions into Latin America, for the rest of the 19th and early 20th century. But what I was really also interested in is how the process of actually, again, going back to the map,

actually making or translating U.S. sovereign control over this physical territory into an actual physical material reality. And one of the ways that I got at this history was to think about where I live today, Arizona, and what it took to make Arizona what it is today. And what it took was the longest war in U.S. military. military history, right, which is, or a series of wars, which are the so-called Apache wars. So depending on when you, how do you periodize it, from the late 1850s to early 1860s up until the final capture of Geronimo, 1885, 1886 around that time, the U.S. military and different U.S. military units are going into Arizona and trying to establish

control over this physical territory through the creation of almost 50 different military outposts and bases, the stationing of cavalry units to cavalry units to chase down and to capture or kill these rebel Apache groups who are refusing to submit themselves to U.S. political authority. And thinking about then how that becomes that so this war and eventual defeat of Geronimo in combination with the earlier violence that it took

to take half of Mexico's national territory and create this national border, how that becomes kind of like a spring board, both imperial violence and settlement violence, becomes a springboard for the U.S. becoming a transcontinental empire beginning with the 1898 Spanish-American War, which the U.S. goes to war with Spain and acquires its colonies in Puerto Rico, in Guam, in the Philippines, and a semi-colonity in Cuba. And so the idea is then in this border space, the history of the U.S. military and settler experience in this space and what is now Arizona, how that then, and the people who are involved,

these individuals, how that influence and shape them, this group of military officers that historian Catherine Bjork refers to as prairie imperialists, will then go on to lead U.S. military imperial adventures abroad in the Caribbean and in Asia in the late 19th and the early 20th century. So that's like one part of the argument. The other part is to think of it more domestically, and here I've been really influenced by, I have this brilliant colleague here at ASU, Julian Lamb, who's a historian of U.S. Immigration and U.S. Empire.

And she has a paper where she talks about how much of U.S. immigration law and the creation of a U.S. immigration regime really doesn't start to emerge until the 1890s. And in many ways, it's spurred by these new acquisitions of these new American acquisitions of

Caribbean and Asian colonies. But she also makes another really interesting argument in which she connects both the the nativist anti-Asian, particularly anti-Chinese immigration laws that start to be passed in the 1880s, restricting Chinese people from actually entering the United States, with legislation at that same moment in the 1880s that essentially plundered and took away the territorial sovereignty of Native American policies throughout the United States.

So on the one hand, you have like this U.S. Empire expanding south into the Caribbean, and west into Asia and the Pacific world. But then they're also matching that by creating an immigration regime that is fundamentally based on the exclusion of Chinese labors, but that is also based on legislation in federal law that treated Native Americans as internal foreigners or stateless foreigners that could then be legally deprived of political economic and, and essentially cultural sovereignty at the same time.

So again, it's another way for me to kind of think through both, you know, more traditional concepts of like U.S. Empire and how it's fundamentally connected to these, these legacies and these practices of settler colonialism abroad. And I think that's like the broader argument that I'm trying to make is that when we try to understand U.S. Empire, not thinking about it necessarily as blowback or not necessarily thinking about it, oh, we went abroad, the U.S. government went abroad and an empire comes home, but more in like the A. M.A. Césaire way of thinking about it in terms of a colonial boomerang, right? Like the boomerang was launched from the borderlands, from the U.S.-Mexico border,

that boomerang then went through the Caribbean, went through the Pacific world in Asia, but then we'll come back home to the border in this generative, like, circulation of technology, of knowledge, of individuals who helped create what we now think about the U.S. and think about as U.S. empire. Yeah, that colonial, you know, boomerang image and concept is very interesting, very helpful on Red Menace. We did a, we did a whole episode on discourses on colonialism by Cicere. If folks are interested in his work on this topic in general, because it's very, very lighty. I love that. I love that book. Totally. It's crucial. Oh, man. The first time I read that book, I wanted to get up and, like, start making Molotov cocktails. I don't know. That book, like, blew my mind. Like,

the first time I read it, I was just, I, I, it's so, everyone, read it. It's so short, and I promise, once you dive into it, you can't put it down. Because it's a quick read, and it's just for me, at least, it was so powerful and compelling. I was like, all right, what do we do now? For sure. Anyway, so that's my plug for discourse on colonialism. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a

he's also a poet, wasn't he? So there's this poetic, linguistic structure and language that is eminently readable and just, yeah, engaging in every way. But basically, yeah, so this argument is very interesting. It's a new way of looking at the formation of

or how the establishment and maintenance of the border was the part of this broader processe of settler colonialism and then eventually imperialism. And a lot of this revolves around, or at least one of the things that you really highlight is, I think I'm saying this right, Fort Huachuca? Yeah, Wachuka, yeah. Okay, so the U.S. Army installation known as Fort Hachuka looms large in your article. So can you talk about its history and its relevance to this conversation, including the role of heliographs, which I found particularly interesting? Yes. So again, grounding this history in Arizona, and specifically grounding it in this fort, Fort Huachuca, which is southeast Arizona. It's pretty close, you know, maybe, I can't remember the 15, 20 miles from the U.S. what is now the U.S.-Mexico border.

allow me to kind of trace how this boomerang travels through technology and through individuals, particularly military officers, right? So someone like General Nelson Miles, who led the final operations against Geronimo in the 1880s, stationed, you know, using Fort Huachuca as like his main base to launch attacks against and to chase this list by the 1880, mid-1880s, this small band of Geronimo's followers. And then, so he will, so if he represents the boomerang then, so he will then, and this is another interesting aspect of this, you'll find him in like 1894, putting down, using federal troops to pull down, put down the Pullman strike, right? Which is, I think up to that point, the biggest labor strike, I can't remember the biggest or most violent labor strike in U.S. history up to that point. And then this guy will find himself in Cuba.

He will find himself, and I think he's the one who led the invasion of Puerto Rico during the, the 1898 Spanish-American War, and eventually he'll find his way to Asia and the Philippines, right? Because, you know, the U.S. technically acquires the Philippine Islands as a resolution of the 1898 Spanish-American War. But it's going to take the U.S. more than a bloody decade of horrific counterinsurgency and violence to, quote-unquote, pacify this archipelago of islands and to bring it under some sort of U.S. political control. Another guy that's really interesting is, and this is another way to track the boomerang is General John J. Pershing or General Blackjack Pershing, he was intimately involved also in waging these Apache wars in Arizona, New Mexico, in the 1880s. He then also participated in the suppression of the ghost dance campaign in Los Angeles in 1891, and then he too will find his way. He participated in Cuba, participated in the Philippine Islands. who will become colonial governor of a region of the Philippine Islands.

And then his boomerang will come back, and we can talk about this more, to the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1910 as a consequence of the 1910 Mexican revolution that you and I have talked about. I think that was our very first conversation like years ago. Yeah, for sure. And he ends up leading what is called the punitive expedition, thousands of U.S. troops, some of whom were bombed the 10th cavalry, the Buffalo Soldier unit.

a number of Apache and other indigenous scouts that he leads this force into Mexico in 1916 to chase the great revolutionary leader Pancho Villa because Pancho Villa had earlier crossed the border in March of 1916 and he attacked the city of Columbus, New Mexico. And this punitive expedition, it's all in the name. They were there to punish Pancho Villa for that invasion that had killed, the result in the deaths of a small number of Americans in Columbus, New Mexico. And even while, you know, even before he led this expedition in 1916, Pershing had been sent to El Paso, Texas, in

1914, where he used a lot of his colonial governorship experience in the Philippines, and he applied it to, like, working class Mexican-American communities in El Paso. So what I talk about in the article, you know, basing my work on really good historians who have done

research into this, is that using kind of like medical counterinsurgency or sanitary counterinsurgency that he had practiced in the Philippine Islands, and then applying it, to segregated working class Mexican American communities in El Paso and he's at the head of a force of like 60,000 troops

or some massive amounts of troops. It was the biggest buildup of U.S. troops since the Civil War on U.S. soil. Ostensibly, they were there to prevent spillover from the Mexican Revolution that had begun in 1910 and by 1916 he's at the head of this force that actually

invades Mexico with the purpose of trying to find and punish Pancho Villa and he, as I talk about in the article, he has, you know, young military officers with him that included Eisenhower and Patton, and Patton in particular really, really despise Mexican. So, I mean, unsurprising that the guy was a racist. But so, but his, one thing that I find really interesting is it just who constituted the punitive expedition. So it's this guy, General Pershing, who has this long, again, boomerang, colonial experience. But then

in his force, he includes members of the 10th Cavalry, the Buffalo soldiers, right? These black soldiers, and then also indigenous scouts, right? So in many ways, they condense in a history of settler colonial violence and

the establishment of U.S. sovereignty on the ground in places like Arizona, and it's now being sent into Mexico to punish a revolutionary that had the gall of invading the, as Pancho he has that he invaded the United States. The punitive expedition fails, and it gives rise to one of my favorite quotes that I

mentioned in the article where a bunch of E.S. supposedly is watching the punitive expedition leaving Mexico, and he says something like, they came like proud eagles and they're leaving like wet hands, which is like such a perfect quote. I really hope he said that, like it's attributed to him. But, yeah. So that's the way I'm kind of tracing out the boomerang, right? So through individuals. Now, the technology part is really interesting. So you asked me about the hithographs. So that stuff, when I, when I discovered this, I found it really interesting. So heliographs are kind of like these mirrors that are being used on top of mountains to signal messages across long distances, right? And it was a

counterinsurgent technology that the U.S. had adopted from the British. The British were using it in the 1800s in places like India and certain parts of Africa. And of course, and this is something else interesting. You know, these settler colonial nations, are borrowing technologies from one another and using it, and they're exchanging knowledge is, right? That's why I end the article, we can talk about this later, in terms of how the U.S.-Mexical border now,

in the words of one journalist, it's kind of like a Palestine-Mexical border because so much of the surveillance technologies now on the border were adopted from Israel, what it's doing in the occupied Palestinian territories. So the heather graphs, there's a lot of debate whether they actually did much in terms of how effective they were. A lot of the, if you read the diaries of officials

who were on the ground, They said that they did help the rapid transmission of information. They could see that Apache movements, and they could rapidly relay that information to another heliagraph station that was miles away, and then that one could relay it to a commander in another post. But it's all about surveillance. It's all about counterinsurgency. It's all about trying to, as I mentioned in the article, render legible both terrain that is inhospitable and unknown to these military officers. but also for the express purpose of putting down indigenous rebellion and resistance to U.S. settler colonialism.

So these heliographs, are they basically like mirrors put up on the tops of hills or mountains that are, you can move to reflect sunlight in like a Morris Code sort of way? That was my understanding. Yeah, and you would have them, I can't remember what the distance between each heliograph was. And if I remember correctly, they stretched from southern New Mexico all the way into Arizona. so it was it was like quite the undertaking to actually put these things up onto different mountain tops or hilltops a distance of a particular in a particular way but yeah it was it was a what they again there's a lot of discussion about how effective it was but in the sources but it was one of these what I found a really interesting attempt counterinsurgent attempt to kind of pass a quote unquote is using counterinsurgent language control pacify and surveil an area that was populated by by by rebels, by, by gorillas, by insurgents. And in that way, specifically, it is a sort of precursor to drones. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I make a very explicit connection. This was like the first drone, right? Because it's trying to accomplish a similar goal. And the similar goal is to surveil and to control and to rent and to make a region legible for the specific purpose of the social and political control. So whether it's a heliograph, right, which now to us is like this really antiquated technology of the late 19th century or what drones and these aerostat balloons are doing today, right? It's an attempt to control, to surveil, to restrict movements of people that are deemed enemies of the state, essentially, whether it was Apache guerrillas in the late 19th century to, you know, people who are seeking asylum in the U.S. because they left a country that was rendered unstable by, you know, U.S. back death squads and pretexts. so-called free trade agreements.

Yeah. I find that incredibly interesting, that heliographed drone sort of line that you trace, I think is really interesting. Let's go ahead and talk about the Indian wars, and I was hoping you could discuss the sort of legacy of these so-called Indian wars, specifically in the borderland region, and how basic concepts and terms and orientations forged in those wars continue to live on in U.S. imperialist ventures to this day, including and specifically the war on terror, which you talk about very fascinatingly in this article. Yeah, and this is one of the things that I've learned the most

from reading folks who work on settler colonialism or who work on tying directly the war on terror to, you know, U.S. settler violence against indigenous people. Because really, and this is something, I had this conversation with Nick Estes on his podcast last year, right? This is the first war on terror. The first war on terror is a U.S. settler war against indigenous peoples. which begins during the, in the midst of the American Revolution.

Or, well, if we go with Gerald Horn, it's the counter-revolution, right? So it's at the very core of U.S. political, social, cultural, and economic power is the subject gate, is this particular settler colonialist project, right? This is at its core, and it occupies a central place in a variety of different realms. and in many ways it becomes like common sense, like a ruling class common sense or a bureaucratic common sense. So one way to think about this is that some of the legal memorandums that were written up after the attack on 9-11, right, like the legal memorandums that will justify so-called enhanced interrogation or especially the ones that will deal with, you know, how to imprison. and how to like cage so-called enemy combatants

who are stateless who are not fighting who are fighting quote-unquote irregular warfare and the U.S. lawyers and legal experts who are writing these memorandums

are explicitly designed these memorandums and justifications based on things like the first seminal war. So there's a famous case in 2011 the U.S. government lawyers submitted a brief in U.S. versus al-Bahul that compared indigenous tactics used during the first seminal war to al-Qaeda.

And they used that as a basis to justify the indefinite detention of enemy combatants who were quote-unquote stateless and who were waging, quote-unquote, irregular warfare. So it's at the bit, you know, I referenced earlier that the very core of an immigration regime, restrictive regime that gets created at the end of the 19th century, that's based on laws that plundered, and took away and deprived Native American communities of their sovereignty in a variety of different ways. So one way to trace this really is to think about immigration law and to think about these legal memorandums

that 9-11 warrantederal legal memorandums that emerged. Another way is to think about like the military aspect of it, right? So in military culture, whether it's counterinsurgency doctrine or even to the naming of military hardware. Like you look at all the different military hardware that's named after indigenous indigenous groups or communities, right? The one I cited

in the article when I was talking about Vietnam, and we should probably talk about Vietnam at some point, is that some of the surveillance planes that were used by the U.S. in waging its colonial war against Vietnam were called Mohawks, or referring to territory being held by

Vietnamese enemies as quote-unquote Indian country. So, right, Michael Hur, this journalist, has this great I'm going to butcher it, so I'm going to paraphrase it. It's something about how Vietnam was where the trail of tears was leading all along. So even like in the mind of military policymakers, officers, theorists, their enemy is fundamentally always the indigenous rebel. Even though on a superficial level, it might be, you know, Iraqis, Vietnamese, et cetera, et cetera. Like the way that they design their policies, their ideas, what is the enemy other to them?

them, I would make the argument, it still remains this indigenous rebel that rebelled against a U.S. settler colonial project since the 1770s. And the most famous example of this is in the operation that led to the killing of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, like in that operation, his code name was Geronimo. Like there's a reason why they chose that codename, right? Like that Geronimo remains like that intransigent rebel that they were, you know, running after for years, and years and they couldn't capture them until they finally did. To me, that's really telling about the central place that these histories of settler violence against indigenous groups and communities occupies within U.S. bureaucracies, particularly

U.S. military bureaucracies. Yeah, absolutely. And it just goes to show that, you know, settler colonialism in ways both material and psychological is not a thing in the past, but an ongoing processy and an ongoing. lens through which the American Empire views all of its entanglements and that flies in the face of many arguments one of which is like this recent patriotic socialist line that you know settler colonialism and the lamb back movement need to be rejected because these things have happened so far in the past and that you know we have to accept the basic reality of what is here

so you see how these this settler colonial logic um and this apologia even infiltrates and seeps into ostensibly radical or so-called revolutionary left mindsets and formations in the U.S. and in settled or colonial societies, it's not an accident. And framing that, you know, the genocide of the indigenous people of North America, specifically the U.S. state's orientation towards it as the first war on terror, I think is a very helpful and very interesting way to frame it. And yeah, calling bin Laden by his code name Geron. I mean, speaks fucking volumes.

Yeah, to me, that says everything. I mean, I think I also mentioned in the article, this tweet that that Max Boot had, I don't know, a couple years ago now, where he was criticizing calls then for the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan. And he basically used, basically compared the U.S. role in Afghanistan is like the latest chapter in the Indian Wars. So sometimes these like motherfuckers, like can't help themselves. And like, they kind of say the silent part out loud. So at what, you know, the, the frontiers of U.S. Empire are, shifting, right? And at this point, they're global, but at one point, they were continental. And

those wars against the so-called Indian wars really established the logics that the mindsets and the practices of U.S. Empire as it expanded abroad. And that's really another one of these main ideas that I'm trying to convey in these articles. Yeah. And you convey it very, very well. You mentioned earlier the Spanish-American War, how that conflict in particular advanced the ball as it were for U.S. imperial acquisition and set the stage for, as you say in your article, quote, 30 invasions of Latin American and Caribbean countries during the first three decades of the 20th century.

So can you kind of talk about that war and what took place in the wake of it? Yeah, so one thing that you see after the Mexican-American war is this slow U.S. expansion, both into Asia, which represented in the 1850s by Comet by Perry sailing over to Japan and basically forcing Japan to open its economy. to Latin America. The only interruption is the interruption of this expansion is caused by the Civil War. But after the Civil War, particularly after 1867, you see this expansion both into the Pacific world,

particularly in forcing, trying to force open other Asian nations, like in Korea and then trying to develop a sphere of influence in China. But then you also start to see the U.S. movement, imperial movement, down into the Caribbean and into South America. So, you know, I think according to someone like Greg Brandon, the historian Greg Grandin, there's like thousands, you know, more than four or five thousand instances between 1867 and 1897 in which the U.S. will send gunships into a particular Latin American harbor and, like, threaten them if they don't agree to certain, you know, mutual trade agreements or political agreements. So that's even before we get this floor in 1898 between Spain and the United States that's essentially caused by, you know, there's a Cuban independence effort in 1895, led by the great Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo and Calisto Garcia. The Cubans are fighting for the third time in the 19th century, fighting for their independence. and in 1898, the U.S. sends in, sends down the U.S.'s main into Havana Harbor, and it mysteriously blows up in the harbor, and this becomes the excuse for the U.S. to declare war on Spain. We now know most likely that the U.S. main, something blew up within the ship, and that's what sunk

it. It wasn't Spanish sabotage or attack. And that essentially, it creates, turns the Caribbean into, you know, what U.S. policy makers would refer to as the American Lake. And if you, one of your previous episodes, you were talking about how important it is. Or maybe it was on on guerrilla history. You were talking about the importance of just looking at maps. I think it was your geopolitics episode.

But if you just look at, look at the map of like the Caribbean, and you'll see why the U.S. wanted semi-colonial control over Cuba, why, as a consequence of that 1898 war, the U.S. still holds a lease over Guantanamo Bay, right? To this day, the U.S. So every year, the U.S. sends something like a $4,000 or $5,000 check to the Cuban government to pay for its lease of Guantanamo. And then money goes into an account that the Cubans haven't touched, right, since 1961 for obvious reasons, right? I think that your audience will know why.

But so you see where Guantanamo Bay is situated. You see where Puerto Rico is situated. You see why a couple years later in 1903, 1904, the U.S. helps panifference. Manians achieve their own independence, and lo and behold, one of the first things that Panamanian government does is sign an agreement with the U.S. and Teddy Roosevelt to build the Panama Canal. So just look at the map, right? So what the 1898's managed American war accomplishes is the U.S. achieves a certain dominance

over the Caribbean, but also entrance in the Caribbean. And they're building on the writings of people like Alfred Thayer-Mayhan, who was talking about the importance of naval sea power and the rise of global empires, and he's telling the U.S. to build up the strength of its Navy because these maritime commercial routes are also military routes, and that's the route for American greatness. And then if you

follow, if you're looking at this map and you follow it and you go across the Pacific, you'll see why the Philippine Islands were also really important, situated, importantly situated for the perspective of the U.S. imperial policymakers. It gives them a foothold, really important physical foothold in Asia

that allows the U.S. then to become involved in China, which at that moment, you know, for decades had been divvied up between different European imperial powers. So the consequence of 1898 really set the moment, like set the foothold for like U.S. extracontinental imperial growth. Even though in like the way, I don't know how you learn U.S. history in like, you know, grade school up in high school, but usually the way that this history is treated in U.S. school is it that this was like the one time that the U.S. was an empire.

And in like an absence of mind, it acted like European empire. but then by the early 1900s it kind of like came to its senses and it listened to mark twain it didn't listen to teddy roosevelt and we stopped being an empire when in actuality in latin just in latin america in the caribbean alone uh the u.s will invade uh something like uh we'll have 34 invasions of latin america from 1900 up until 1933 33 34 when uh frank fdr frankin bell and Rosa will announce a so-called good neighbor policy. And it was almost always a U.S. Marine Corps being sent down there to invade, to take out some government that was seen as an adversary to U.S. political and economic interests

or a government that didn't manage to establish some sort of political stability, making things dangerous for U.S. business interests, and therefore, the U.S. had to send its Marines down. The one guy, if we want to think about the trajectory of the colonial boomerang, the one guy to follow through this history is a guy, one of the most highly decorated marine military officers, major general Smedley Butler.

Jonathan Katz just came out with a really excellent book about this guy's career. He, Smedley Butler lied about his age. He was 16, but said he was 18, so he could fight in the Spanish-American War. He had, and from then on out, he's going to be involved almost in every

single U.S. Imperial Adventure, whether it's in China or in Latin America. He got two Medal of Honors, one in the U.S. invasion, an occupation of the Mexican city of Veracruz in 1914, and he would receive a second Medal of Honor a year later after the U.S. invaded Haiti and would occupy Haiti from 1950 to 1934. But by the end of his time, Smedley Butler realizes that he essentially had been a handmaiden for like U.S. capital interests. And he has, you know, his famous pamphlets called Wars Iraq, when he talks about look like it is one of his best quotes from that is um where he says you know like i operate

he said i could have taught al capone something the best he could do was operate his racket in three districts in chicago i operated the racket on three continents um and he and his one of his last like public uh his public appearances or controversies was uh he was police commissioner of philadelphia and he started talking shit about mussulini in the early thirties and that got him removed from his post because it made international news. Yeah, this guy is fascinating. And when I teach my U.S. Empire history class here at ASU, I use him to kind of, I use him to kind of take my students through the first three decades of U.S. Empire in the Caribbean and Latin America. And it's just constant invasion after invasion. But, you know, the Mexican Revolution taught

the U.S. Empire the dangers of economic nationalism, right? If you overplayed your hand economically, you're going to arouse popular resistance. And the Mexican Revolution was one big instance of this. And then in the 1920s, Augusto Cesar Sandino's little crazy army in the words of one journalist and Nicaragua showed the U.S. the dangers of political nationalism and what U.S. interventions could do in arousing popular political nationalism and trying to kick out the invaders. And that combined with the Great Depression, as the argument goes, especially this is like Greg Grannon's argument, this led first.

Herbert Hoover and then FDR to rethink what U.S. Empire should look like and how it should operate. And eventually we'll somewhat accept the national sovereignty of Latin American countries for at least a decade, let's say that. That's incredibly fascinating stuff. All of it. I certainly agree about how I was taught the Spanish-American War and its implications. And I think even today, I listen to a lot of liberal geopolitical forecaster people lately. And they talk about, you know, they don't talk about American imperialism, some even outright deny that what we have is an empire. And there's like this colloquial sense that people have that the age of imperialism was like this, you know, pre-world war time that has now ended. And I think that's why like imperialism, the use of even that term sort of falls off and had to be brought back by, you know, the left insisting that America still has an empire and is very much still engaged in imperialism. But it's not at all surprising that many Americans, conditioned in the education system would come out not wanting or not willing to call America still an empire or an imperialist power and to think of the age of imperialism as something that is

in the past. I think one of the interesting ways that at least some academics have pushed back against the idea of U.S. Empire to really start to highlight almost exclusively so-called agency in places like Latin America and the Caribbean, right? So if we insist on calling the U.S. an empire in Latin America, that somehow negates or subsumes the agency of Latin Americans themselves. It's an interesting argument because we've seen it pop up a lot recently, I would say, at least online in some big pieces in the last two to three years as this idea has migrated from certain academic circles into like policymaking circles. Yeah, very nefarious line of logic.

I can see where that can lead to a straight up apology. Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about the psychology and the paranoia around the border and the borderland in the American mind. you talked earlier you mentioned imperial anxiety and how moments of imperial anxiety tend to exacerbate the the maintenance and militarization of the border we talked earlier about the el paso shooting and the settler colonial racist mentality that was behind it and even the the you know criminalization of marijuana was rooted in racism against mexicans in particular um so all that in mind and more can you kind of talk about how the american mind has has wrestled with the border and how there's, you know, what the specific threats and enemies were and how that's kind of evolved over time? Yeah, so I think this is something that I've been obsessed with for a long time, mostly for personal and now, I guess, for political and academic reasons.

But I think one way to think about this is to say the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border began in 1910 as a consequence of the Mexican Revolution. And as I mentioned in the article, you start to see the building, I mean, you start to see the building of a border fence between Mexico, in California in 1909 to keep out certain cattle-borne diseases. But there's a consequence of the Mexican Revolution. U.S. elites really started to fear the spillover of the Mexican Revolution. And also, the Mexican Revolution created the violence of it, this 10-year-long,

at least 10-year-long period of military violence, did create refugees and migrants who went north and who went north and who started to work. and to start to create communities in mostly in what is now the southwest United States or the west coast in places like California. And it was the influx, in many instances, the influx of newly arrived large numbers of newly arrived Mexicans of the consequence of the Mexican Revolution that then leads to the hardening of both an immigration regime that was already highly exclusivist, but also the hardening in terms of like building border fences,

which really takes off during the 1910s in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. And then it starts to generate conversations within U.S. Congress about what to do about immigration, how to restrict immigration. And this is also the era of eugenics and thinking about how Mexican peoples, people from southern Europe, people from other parts of the world, were racially inferior in eugenicist terms. And if you allowed them into the country, they're going to pollute, quote unquote, pollute, the racial body politic of the United States nation. And this is what leads to this period from 1924 up until 1965

of a really exclusivist, highly restrictive immigration regime that begins in 1924 as part of the National Origins Act, which severely restricted or prevented wholesale the migration of Asian peoples into United States. And especially the language is like swarthy Europeans, right? to like southern Europeans, eastern Europeans, discriminatory against Jewish communities as well. And from 1924 to 1965, this remains mostly in operation.

Alongside the National Origins Act, you have the official founding of the Border Patrol, right? La Pinchamiga, as some of us refer to it. So it's by no accident as well, that you have the creation of a highly restrictive, racist immigration policy regime created at the same time you create for the first time an official border patrol police force that will, for the next

several decades, will devote as much attention to keeping out undocumented migrants coming from Mexico as much as they will do to policing Mexican American communities living in the borderlands. It's a dual project that they're following beyond the parameters of what they're supposed to be

doing, which is so-called border enforcement and preventing illegal crime. as they see it. So it's part of this, so a lot of this has to do with this idea of, you know, these racialized others in what place they, they don't occupy or shouldn't be allowed to occupy

within the United States. Now, one of the interesting things of the National Origins Act, and this represents, I think, another facet of this, and it also represents or highlights the power of Southwest agribusiness capitalists, is that that, that highly restrictive immigration regime,

made an exception for Latin America because these southwestern agro-capitalists knew that they desperately needed cheap labor coming from Latin America, and particularly from Mexico. So there's all, you know, if you look at congressional discussions from like the 1910s and 1920s,

the congressman from like Texas will go to great pains to describe Mexican migrant laborers as homing pigeons. They'll come here to work, but like a homing pigeon, they'll always go back to their home in Mexico. And that's one of the ways that they would justify excluding them from this racist National Origins Act

that prevented people from other parts of the world that come into United States. There's another congressman, his quote, like I don't have it in front of me, but he has this quote where he says, look, these people are coming here to work, and then they're going to go back to Mexico. They're not coming here to establish communities,

and they're not going to produce the next generation of doctors, lawyers, and college professors. And every time I read that, I fucking laugh my ass off because he was wrong. Thankfully, he was wrong. And then, so, and then we get these interesting, this idea then, it's interesting. Once Mexican laborers cross that border, they're no longer Mexican nationals. They're racial, that the idea of a Mexican becomes racialized. And that comes as soon as you cross the border.

so the very idea of labor in the southwest becomes racialized right this idea that oh because someone's Mexican therefore they are working class and they are a certain type of laborer and actually I think it was in the 1930 census where Mexican actually gets included as like a racial identity and then they they took it out this brings us to you know so this brings us to you know we can talk about World War II you can talk about how you know some of the first first first border fencing that gets rebuilt on the, on the U.S., the California-Mexico border in the late 40s under Truman, we'll use a lot of this, a lot of the building materials that were used to intern Japanese Americans during World War II, which is, again, one of these, like, historical examples.

It's just, like, says so much. You have the creation of the first migrant detention camps in the late 40s and early 50s in California and Central California. You have, you know, in the 90s, we talk about how the Border Patrol applied, and the U.S. government applied a policy called prevention through deterrence where they militarize major urban crossing zones, and they're trying to funnel migrants to cross through dangerous places like the Sonoran Desert, and it's so dangerous, they say, there's no way these migrants would risk their lives doing it, and of course, they don't understand, well,

they know that migrants are going to risk their lives in doing it. Some of the predecessors to that idea, you can find it in California, Mexico border in the 1950s, where people are being forced to cross through dangerous mountain routes or trying to swim through canals and they start to die. So again, this idea of borders, you know, borders imply not just like imperial conquest, this foundational moment of violence to create them, but massive amounts of violence are required to maintain them. And one way that we can track that violence is just the innumeral and the number of migrants

that have died trying to cross this horrific borders since, you know, at least since like the 1940s. 1950s. Yeah. The image that comes to my head, and I'm pretty sure this is the right one, it was that picture a few years ago of the father holding the toddler face down in the Rio Grande. I think that was right. Just absolutely fucking brutal, brutal images.

And that really is a flashpoint of the whole history of that border. And then just talking about it in imperial anxiety, you know, any enemy that the United States has abroad is almost always then used as an excuse to crack down on the border. So like with the Soviet Union, obviously there's the Cuban Missile Crisis, which America might have seen as in its backyard, and the threat of Soviet expansion to the border. Certainly during the war on terror time, there was constant talk about having to secure the border because that's the avenue through which Muslim jihadists could sneak through. Trump started his campaign, calling migrants, criminals, and rapists. And then, of course, the great replacement theory, which Anna made. huge swath of the far right

and now even the mainstream right is really premised on this idea that the southern border in particular with the vague Jewish control above and orchestrating it all is one of the avenues through which white people themselves are being displaced

and that of course was part of the driving ideology behind the El Paso shooter himself so even when the enemies are far across the world the border itself continues to be the flashpoint through which Americans will try to wrestle with that enemy and think about an enemy and then have the paranoia of assuming that enemy is going to use the southern border, not never the northern border, but the southern border to come in and attack us.

Totally. Well, at the same time, not recognizing that fundamentally like large swaths of the U.S. economy throughout the 20th century has depended on this type of migrant labor. Yeah. And it actually benefits these capitalist interests to have them be undocumented, right? not the migrant part that that leads to the exploitation of these workers per se, it's the undocumented part, right? Because if they are undocumented, that essentially forces into the bottom tier of a segmented labor market, where they have no rights, where they can't say

anything, where because of that condition, their wages are depressed, and then all workers' wages will be depressed as a result, right? But yeah, that could take us into a totally different avenue. But I will say, like, another important moment is when you get the Bracero agreement between the United States in Mexico from the 40s to the early 1960s, where you have essentially what we now refer to as like a guest worker program, where thousands of Mexican men were assigned labor contracts and were allowed to come into the U.S. seasonally or temporarily to work in a variety of different economic sectors, mostly agricultural, and then they would come back and they would go back to Mexico once their contracts were up. Actually, some years

ago, I remember when I was in college, I met for the first time. a great uncle of mine while I was visiting Mexico and I told him where my university was and you're like, oh yeah, I was, I used to work there near there in like the 1950s. I was like, or 1960s. I was like, man, that's crazy to think about that. And then it's once that labor agreement, it was a highly exploitative labor agreement, right? There's a, there was a CBS news report that came out in the early 60s where they interviewed a Florida sugar planter about how he, you know, contracted these laborers with the help of the U.S. government. and he has this really chilling quote where he says something like,

you know, we used to own our slaves and now we just rent them, which says, I think, a lot as well. And it's once the end of the Bracero program in the early 1960s, combined with in 1965, a reworking of the entire immigration system to get rid of the previous racist,

exclusivist version that essentially will create the quote-unquote problem of undocumented Mexican migration or undocumented migration in general in the late 60s and early 70s, right? And it's really not until the 1970s

where you start to get in U.S. media discourse and political discourse where the figure of the illegal alien really starts to play a prominent role. The illegal alien who's traversing the southern U.S.-Mexico border that's being described as a combat zone. And then by the 80s, you combine that

with a drug problem and that becomes the overriding principal concern in many instances for the U.S. political class. They're not concerned as much by the Soviet Union. What their concern is, according to some of them, is the bigger threat

are these these quote-unquote illegal aliens who are bringing drugs into the United States, which is like makes me like cry because we're still at the same spot today, right, in a way, with large segments of the U.S. political class. And this is a

it's a thoroughly bipartisan approach. So by the 80s, when you start to see really the institution of a sort of like low intensity, the institutionalization of low intensity warfare on the U.S. Mexico border using a lot of technology that actually had its origins in Vietnam. When Robert McNamara tried to create an electronic fence separated North Vietnam from South Vietnam, failed miserably there. It gets brought over to the U.S. Mexico border. It more or less fails here as well, But it is really good at eventually pushing migrants to try to cross through the most dangerous routes like the Sonoran Desert, leading to thousands and thousands of deaths. I think from 94 until today, we probably close to 9,000 migrant deaths that we know of and more that we don't know of.

God damn. Now, you mentioned Vietnam, and earlier you said that you wanted to come back and touch on that. Is there anything else you wanted to say about how the U.S. war in Vietnam was shaped by and then turned around in hell? shape the logics of the borderland and the maintenance of its of its border. Anything else you wanted to say about that? Yeah, it was interesting. So you have the, in the beginning in the 70s, a lot of the electronic surveillance technology that was developed in Arizona, a place like Fort Huachuca, will make its way over to Vietnam.

It will fail miserably. And it will nonetheless find its way back to the U.S.-Mexico border in the 70s and 80s, right? So you read newspaper articles from the late 70s and early 80s. there's a lot of descriptions of the U.S.-Mexico border that will compare it to, like, Vietnam. We'll compare, and we'll be very explicit about, you know, Marine sniper technology developed for Vietnam being brought over and given to a border patrol that by the 80s is starting to increase in numbers, and is also being outfitted with military-grade weaponry for the first time.

They'll start to say, you'll see comparisons of, like, you know, the Ho Chi-Men Trail is now in Mexico leading into United States. The idea of the American Maginot Line, I think I took that from a newspaper article, right? The Maginal Line being that ill-fated French attempt to prevent another German invasion by creating a string of forts, right? And then the Germans just outflanked them and invaded through the North. A lot of American commentators started to reference the U.S.-Mexico border as their own version of the Maginal Line, right? Like a failed feudal effort to keep out again the dangerous masses who are coming from what they would say the third world. and to completely, demographically, politically change the appearance of the United States.

And this is really similar in the 80s. A lot of what we start seeing in the 80s is very similar to what we're seeing today. It's just today, I think this idea of, like, the great replacement theory is it's being completely mainstreamed in a way that perhaps wasn't as mainstream in the 1980s, particularly with, like, the Republican Party. They tended to be a bit more, I don't know how to put it. They weren't as, I mean, they just weren't as, let's say they were less implicated. they were less explicit about the kind of stuff that we see today with today's republican party right a little more buttoned up a little more

yeah concerned about not saying the the quiet part out loud yeah and you know Reagan was really great about talking about uh okay let me rephrase that there's nothing great ever about Reagan uh let's say Reagan was really good at talking about the United States being a nation of immigrants but for immigrants who came quote unquote the right way right and in 1986 he actually passed uh the US Congress passed his policy that, like, naturalized millions of undocumented migrants, particularly those who were involved in the agricultural sector, which, you know, my parents weren't able to take advantage of that because they didn't work in the agricultural sector. But, and this is something that, like, Republicans will, so many Republicans today will criticize about Reagan, right?

He gave, like, so, quote-unquote, illegal's amnesty in 1986. But, yeah, so a lot of the, a lot of the crazy white supremacist's replacement theory stuff, like there's there's a lot of this stuff is really like out in the open it's beginning in the 1980s very interesting so now that we have you know this idea of the role that the borders played in the american mind and political history can you talk about mexico's view of the borderland and of the border and the ways in which mexicans historically and today have sort of perceived the u.s's approaches to the border oh that's a good one um well i mean the the quote that that historians of Mexico say that we're not allowed to say anymore, but I'll say it anyway, right?

It's a quote that's attributed to Porfirio Lias, which is the dictator of Mexico from the 1870s to 1910, which says poor Mexico so far from God so close to the United States. So it's kind of like a cliche quote at this point, but I think it says a lot, at least from how many Mexicans do view its close relation, you know, its physical proximity to the United States, right? It's been invaded by the U.S. I don't know, four or five times. You know, a lot of Mexican nationalism has been forged in relation to U.S. invasions and imperial arrogance. But I think, you know, one way to think about this is to ground it historically.

And in the late 70s, when the U.S. government tried to install border fencing in places like El Paso, the Mexican government was vigorously protested such efforts. Even earlier in the late 1960, when Nixon declared the war on drugs, they started to put up fencing in El Paso for the big walls

like recognizable to us today. And the U.S. and the Mexican government would vociferously protest that. They would say, why do good neighbors need walls to separate us? And in the late 1970s, when they tried to extend these walls in El Paso, local activists and the Mexican government

I think were pretty effective in deriding what they call the tortilla curtain right so instead of the iron curtain they said they call it the tortilla curtain and they railed against it as the numbers of undocumented migrants surged in the 70s the Mexican government you know tended to view any sort of

militarization of the border in a highly negative way but there was very little that they could do right there's a big asymmetry of power even so even as they complained in the 80s that the U.S. was militarized in the border they complained against U.S. drug interdiction policies that they were more or less

coerced at the following beginning in the 70s. But it was seen as this thing like again like if we're such good neighbors and if we're like the last good neighbors to paraphrase from a recent book you know why are you guys building

walls between us like that we should be building bridges not walls is a way that some government officials would put it. And I think people on the ground, they're definitely like activists on the ground on both sides of the border. Their lives have been severely disrupted since the late 60s when Wall started to go up even more

in places like El Paso, in Nogales, and in Tijuana and San Diego. Like their everyday lives have been completely disrupted, having to wait in long lines to go through these searches, you know, people who would cross the border to shop, to work, et cetera. It's really inconvenient. And culturally, it's had an impact as well, right?

These used to be transnational communities. You know, what happens to them when a regime of walls and surveillance, and militarized surveillance, like what happens to that transnational culture is a big deal? Yeah, I think I lost my train. I lost my turn to that where I was going with that. But I think another way to think about this is what's been happening more recently in Mexico, and particularly since the president. election and incoming of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

On the one hand, and I don't know if you want to get into this now, but we can't, we're talking about Arnold, but on the one hand, he's been, particularly in the area of drug interdiction, like he's essentially kicked out, you know, DEA agents, he recently kicked out a DEA plane. Like, he is seemingly forcing through a negotiated or a new relationship between both countries when it comes to the issue of drug trafficking and transnational criminal organizations. He seems to be, you know, sketching out a more nationalist posture. But then when it comes to the issue of Central American and other asylum seekers and refugees, he, like previous administration, seems to be towing the line, which is essentially using Mexico as Mexico itself has become the wall. The entire country has become the wall for Central American and other refugees coming from other parts of the world, essentially functioning as a sort of like colonial gendarme for U.S. immigration policy.

In a way, the U.S.-Mexico border has expanded beyond its physical location, and it's gone down to the Guatemala-Mexical border. It's acquired a maritime border, right? The U.S. has been training border patrol units in the Dominican Republic for decades now, teaching them on how to prevent Dominican, Haitian, and Cuban immigrants from reaching the U.S. by using the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico as a maritime border. And so it's interesting now to see kind of like mainstream political reporting on the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico and how Amros usually reported as being a fiery populist or leftist, asserting a nationalist stance vis-a-vis the United States, something that previous administrations did not do. But I think it's only half right.

And in many instances, he's just following the line that previous presidential administrations have followed for decades now. What's the motivation to continue to follow that line for a president that seems so willing to tackle other topics like poverty and corruption that have been a mainstays of the Mexican political environment for a while now? Why would he just continue on what are the interests of Mexico with regards to making that the de facto border or the buffer state with Central America? What benefits accrue to Mexico because of that? No, that's a great question. It's tough. I mean, it's a tough one as well. I think particularly since the late 80s, when the neoliberalization of the Mexican economy really took off and then that culminates with the negotiation of NAFTA in 1992, and then it goes into effect in 1994, the Mexican economy is so thoroughly integrated into the American economy that I think previous administrations viewed that they were in it, if they were in it, they were previously in an asymmetrical relationship with the United States, that economic,

integration, I think, made that asymmetry even wider. So if, you know, if the U.S., if the Mexico try to do some, if they try to do some sort of policy, reasserting a nationalist stance as it pertain to, I don't know, a policy of a specific policy, there's a fear that the U.S. will retaliate economically, and the U.S. economy fundamentally depends on the U.S. economy. It depends on migrant remittances. It depends on tourism, you know, manufacturing. et cetera, capital flows as well.

So I think at least my view since I think this is what the Amrera administration has also done, in particular in relation to your specific question about migration policy, is that they've I think they've looked at some of the polls that have been done domestically

in Mexico since 2018, and they see that their posture of not explicitly saying that they're following the U.S. line, but in practice they are following, in the U.S. line is not an unpopular one. That cracking down on Central

American refugees and asylum seekers may not be an unpopular one, which is, you know, for me, as the son of migrant parents from Mexico, seems, you know, it's difficult for me to, I understand it intellectually, but, like, politically and personally, it, like, just fucking

pisses me off. You know, millions of Mexicans have come to the United States. You are a nation that has produced millions of migrants, how they can you turn around and act as a colonial gendarme for U.S. immigration policy to keep out people who are not coming in as undocumented migrants. They're coming in to exercise both U.S. and international rights, which based on the seeking of political asylum, right? That is an international law, that is actually U.S. law that has been on the book since, like, 79, 80. Um, so I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, it's, I'm low, being tactical, and saying, okay, we'll cooperate with you on, on, on, our, are, our, are, our refugees and asylum seekers.

Absolutely. Yeah, the most vulnerable. And, you know, that's, that's, that's one of the, just pros and cons. geopolitically of bordering a hegemon or an empire is that your politics are going to be inexorably shaped by them. Now you have some benefits like the tourist industry, the integrated economies. Certainly the U.S. is not going to allow any other foreign country to invade and take over Mexico, for example. But you're also subordinated to the ultimate will of that hegemon in a million different other ways. And so all of your geopolitical maneuvering has to constantly. be in reference to the fact that you share a border with the hegemon, where, you know, countries that don't share that border are distant from large powers, have a little bit more wiggle room

in what they're able to do domestically and, you know, with regard to foreign policy. Yeah, and I think it cuts both ways. It also gives Mexico a certain level of leverage that other small countries facing the U.S. empire don't necessarily have, right? Like, you could use the border as leverage in a certain way, particularly because the U.S. for decades now has viewed the southern border it's kind of like it's weak spot it's poorest spot um and this is why we have you know since the 70s and 80s just billions of dollars being poured into the militarization of the border while politically all we hear is about how the border is out of control and and and it needs to be secured um so i think there's even it even though it's an it's an unequal relationship of power

i think you do Mexico does have a little bit of leverage that it can exercise should it choose to. And I think Amlo has. When it comes through drug interdiction efforts, it has. It's trying to force the U.S. to a different type of approach to the issue of drugs and drug production in Mexico. And then I think what we're seeing now is pretty interesting with the whole summit of the America is that Biden is trying to organize in LA and Los Angeles in June, where Amlo has really taken the lead and saying, look, if you don't invite all American nations, we're not going to go. And now you have Amlo saying that he's not going to go. President Arcea Bolivia said he's not going to go. President of Honduras is not going to go. The Caracom nations, I think the 14 or 15 Caribbean nation have also said they're not going to go if Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela aren't allowed to participate as well. And then domestically here, though, you have Republican and some Democrat politicians telling Biden that he needs to invite Juan Guaido to attend the Summit of the America.

So talk about like the dissonance, right? talk about the dissonance of approaches so it's interesting i think in the world amlo has an interesting like throwback look or approach to to uh like latin american internationalism right that i think is tactically on display here and i find it i think it's pretty interesting absolutely yeah i'm i'm very i've been watching that develop and i'm very happy to see that that development and that solidarity with those other countries. It's very cool. Where would you put for like Americans that don't know shit about other countries and stuff? Where would you put AMLO on the political spectrum? And what is your take on his domestic policies, like the trying to attempts to

wrestle with poverty and corruption, et cetera? No, your audience isn't on that, on that level there. It's a complicated, it's a complicated question. So I'm not the approach to domestic economic policy has been, I think you can rightly criticize it in a variety of ways. One, he talks about this idea of Republican austerity. This is this, this really like a late 19th century Mexican idea that goes back to like Benito Juarez, Mexico's first and only indigenous president. This idea that politicians in particular and government officials need to lead austere lives as a demonstration of republicanism and nationalism. And this is like how he's framed. his approach to battling corruption within the Mexican state.

Whether that's been successful or not, I think, is debatable, and there's all sorts of positions and arguments about it. The other one is his idea that under his presidency, the poor come first. But economists who track this kind of stuff show that his social spending, since he was elected president, is actually lower than his predecessor, or who Enrique, Enrique Pena Nieto, like, the total just, you know, anyway, I'll behave and not go off on him, which, you know, the guy is, like, remembered is, you know, pushing through the privatization of education and oil, etc.

He's, like, he's, like, the prime neoliberal. And yet his social spending gross totals is higher than what Amlo has spent. Also, his, like, approach to COVID has been highly criticized, right, in terms of not providing enough economic help to small businesses, to individuals. I think Mexico had some of the lowest spending, stimulus spending, particularly in Latin America. I think even someone like, if I remember correctly, like even someone like Bolsonaro and Brazil had like a higher stimulus spending,

which doesn't really say, I mean, you know, he had that guy, that dipshit probably had other motivations. But so there's also the question of the one that I've been following the most is some of his like approaches to energy and ecology. So he has, he's been a high enthusiastic promoter

of developing this train, the main train maya, the Mayan train, I guess, that will cut through the Yucatan Peninsula and other parts of Mexico that will be an attempt to bring,

I guess they would say, it's an attempt to bring economic development and infrastructure to one of the most, if not the most marginalized area of Mexico in southern.

Mexico and creating this like allegedly eco-friendly not just trained but like a infrastructure of tourism and economic development that will benefit local communities in a variety of ways and there's been a lot it's been hotly disputed local indigenous communities many local indigenous communities have have spoken against it they've resisted it you know environmental activists have critiqued his approach to energy independence in the form of, you know, buying up oil refineries and trying to expand oil production in Mexico and dumping more money into the state oil company. But it's super complicated, right?

How do you bring economic development into a region that's been marginalized for so long? It is an important question that needs to be addressed. I think local communities, many local communities, activist groups, and some politicians have criticized this particular approach to it. um there's also the you know the the question of effemicide in mexico the violence against women you know thousands of women this is something obviously that preceded amlo um some of it his response to to profile especially profile murders of women have been kind of tone deaf and and not particularly the most effective responses to it um the and the the the killing of journalists has been another

big issue that the people that the people have you know that that that type of violence and just the general violence in Mexico that has been that took off exponentially since 2006 like probably more than half a million people have died in a violent fashion of Mexico since 2006 since the so-called war on drugs was declared probably more than 100,000 people have been disappeared in the so-called war on drugs so obviously some of this stuff that's happened predates him by a long time and now because he's in power he's expected to deliver results and the results have not been uh forthcoming um and it's you know personally i one of my uncles was disappeared in 2007 so i like my family has a very direct stake in this question and

he hasn't he hasn't always had the best response to to this issue when when when talking to the you know to these uh organizations of people who have organized to to find uh the the remains of their loved ones but I think a lot of these critiques then maybe this is a function of social media or media in general a lot of these critiques are like legit critiques but they can be weaponized in a really unproductive way by bad faith political actors I'll put it that way

so yeah I'll leave it at that and I think the Mexican opposition to amno right now while they're loud and they have a lot of resources to me they're they're showing a lot of weaknesses and deficient season. And I'm not, to his credit, his popularity is still like above 60% after COVID,

after all this stuff, right? So, you know, there is something to why people in Mexico are still supporting him at such an overwhelming level. Yeah. Complicated, messy stuff, but I really appreciate that insight into the current politics of Mexico

and the Mexican president. Very interesting. I guess the last question I want to ask you is now that we've looked back over history and we've analyze at the present, kind of looking forward. I don't want to beat this drum too hard, but I've been reading a lot of like geopolitical forecasting lately. And a lot of the predictions for Mexico are very interesting that Mexico is going to have more or less a pretty damn good century. And it actually might bring Mexico and America to loggerheads at certain points as the

American, as the Mexican economy continues to develop. Interesting. You know, that's just prediction, so I can't say, you know, either here nor there, whether that's going to happen. But just kind of getting your sense of it, where do you see Mexico in general going over the course of this century and what role do you see the border lands in the border itself playing over the next several decades? I know it's an impossible question, but it's just your sense of it. Yeah, historians love getting asked about the future. And I'm glad you've been reading stuff that says that Mexico is going to reconquer its lower lands. White supremacists. are going to love this in the U.S.

It's not going to drive them crazy or anything. There was actually just really quickly. There was a funny incident in like 2005 or 2006 when we had the reemergence of these border vigilantes like the Minutemen. And a vodka company, I can't remember which vodka company it was, did an advertisement in Mexico where it showed the old map of Mexico prior to 1848. And like some white nationalist, white supremacist blogger

got his hands on the advertisement. and it went viral and they're like yeah see this is evidence that mexico is trying to reconquer its lands um i mean you know i like the other the other idea of a taco truck on every corner is it's pretty awesome i would take that look i think the i mean i i don't this is it's a really difficult question i think the big the one that i see is a big question that i've been thinking a lot because i live in a desert and i'm worried that we're going to turn into like mad max fury road sooner rather than later. The question of water because Mexico, northern

Mexico gets much of its water from like the same sources of water that New Mexico, well, that Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and parts of Southern California get it right, which is Colorado River Basin. So the question of water is going to be a huge one. And I think that's going to, and the broader issue of climate

change and how that develops is going to be you know, you're, I can't you're reading these things that give a lot of potential to Mexico, and that's great, but I think the question of water is going to be a huge one. I mean, Mexico City, large parts of Mexico City now today are consistently face water shortages, right? This massive metropolitan area more than like, I don't know, 25 million people. It's a great city. I love Mexico City, but it's how do you get water to people

in the city and in the broader metropolitan zone is a huge task. And in this era of catastrophic climate changes it's only going to get worse um so i i think that's like the one big thing to think about i think in terms of like uh latin american politics i want to you know i like what i'm real doing right now um and and he's not you know and he's if we're truly the america's then all american nations have to be invited to the summit what he's doing is calling the u.s on their bullshit exactly um and he's calling the u.s on a highly selective order that it's created in latin america since the beginning of the Cold War and the formation of the organization of American States. And they're saying, look, if we are really a summit of the Americas, all countries

have to be invited, regardless of whether you agree with them or not politically. Like, they live in this region and they should be stakeholders in what this region is doing. And if you don't, then, you know, there is no summit of the Americas and it's going to be just the U.S. Best Friends Club plus Juan Guaido, the president without a country. So I think thinking about like Mexico on a global level or a global stage, I think there's so much there that politically Mexico as a country could do.

As a big, important economy, as a country with a big population, there's so much it can be done. And I think some of it can be done continentally, like in the region, like what Amro is doing right now. The other one is to demonstrate solidarity at the grassroots. And instead of

persecuting refugee seekers and asylum seekers to actually work with them. And to work with them in a way where you're not sent, of course, Mexico has limited resources and they have difficulties in engaging this issue. But there's got to, there's, there's other alternatives to dealing with this in a humanitarian way that recognizes based on solidarity, based on internationalism, and not based on sending out the National Guard to like beat up asylum seekers and refugee seekers. It can be done. So I think that would really elevate, I think, Mexico to, in an era where we

see more and more, for a variety of reasons, high, you know, increasing numbers of displaced people throughout the globe. Like, what if Mexico became like an example for how to treat these people? I mean, that to me, and particularly considering its own history of migrants, considering its history of,

you know, during the 1930s, it accepted under President Nasoro Kavanaas, like 35 to 40,000 Spanish Republican exiles who fled Spain once Franco, Francisco Franco lost. Like, that should be the example that we emulate. So, that would be, that's what I hope to see. The reconquerer of the Southwest, I mean, I'm in Arizona, so,

you know, that'd be awesome. Let's not let that get out here, because I might, you know, some locals, some locals might hear that and say that I'm an advocate for that reconquista or whatever they want to call it. Successionist. Yeah, right. No, I really like that, that beautiful vision of Mexico leading by example with regards to the upcoming inevitable migrant crises and the intensification that we're going to see in the face of climate change and that's going to put a lot of stress on on both the mexican southern border as well as the united states is a southern border as the equatorial band becomes increasingly hostile to forms of human life and human economic flourishing it's really going to set the stage for mexico being pivotal in one way or another so it's something to

keep an eye on for sure and one thing i think about too as we're ending this conversation is American society, you know, all, for all of its flaws, all of its imperfections. I'm not talking about the American state or the American Empire. I'm talking about the society that we all live in is inexorably informed and shaped by the victims of America, specifically Native Americans and Africans, you know, Africans, now African Americans, Mexicans. It goes, it's all influencing and affecting the best parts of American culture. And, you know, this white nationalist, paranoid fever dream hate in your heart bullshit about these you know they're brown so fuck them or they're black so fuck them or whatever it's like the the biggest strength of american society is the fact

that is the the influence that you know mexicans and black people and indigenous people have had on the entire society and the entire culture um and so i just think that's worth saying there is no american society as we know it today without these people that american reactionaries and American Empire have always sought to put a boot on the throat of. And that's another tension that will continue to play out as long as American society in any way, shape, or form continues to exist. Yeah. I think we have an important role to push, you know, in a variety of ways, whether it's, you know, organizing politically or other methods to push back against projects that are bipartisan, right? So U.S. Empire is a bipartisan project. This horrific, murderous immigration

border regime on the U.S.-Mexico border is a bipartisan project. So, like, how can we explode that? And I think that for us living in the U.S., I think that's two of the most urgent tasks, right? Because dealing with those issues will lead us to deal with the other prime issues of our era, right? Climate change, environmental destruction, et cetera. But this is why I love teaching my U.S. Empire class, just getting students to think about how things like U.S. empire or border walls, These are bipartisan projects. There is no difference.

Just one says things out loud and the other one says the same thing, but they use nicer language. It's like the Malcolm Xing between the wolf and the fox. Like they're still both canines. It's like let's use that as a political foundation for pushing through like meaningful radical reform. In the immediate future, I mean, I think that should be part of the immediate horizon. Yeah, well said. Could not agree more. and yeah the i think many liberals would be quite surprised to realize that the

the first wall put up was not because of of trump like trump was nothing new trump was a continuation of that bipartisanship that implies that implicates them as well um so yeah yeah yeah no i totally agree and it's there's a reason why um when i go visit my in-laws and i start talking shit about obama as a deporter-in-chief i get really bad looks from my mother-in-law. But it's a bipartisan project. And we need, it's a murderous one that we need to work actively against. Absolutely.

All right, Alex, thank you so much for coming on. Another amazing episode I learned so much. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work and these articles online. Thank you so much, Brett. Anytime, you know, I love coming on and chatting with you. I always have a great time. You can find me shit posting and desperation on Twitter at Alexander.

underscore Avina. I have a website that I need to update soon, alexanderavina.com. And these articles are part of a substack called Foreign Exchanges. It's if you want really interesting heterodox foreign policy from the left, go to foreign exchanges and you'll find some really good stuff. It's created and led by the great Derek Davidson. So you can find my articles,

recent article on Biden talking about Latin America being in the front yard, not the backyard of the U.S., so if you're interested, please check that out. But thank you so much. This is always fun, man. Totally. Yeah, I'll link to all that in the show notes.

And we always talk about it, but one of these days I'm going to make a trip down to Arizona. Let's do it. Or I'm going to have to come to Omaha, so we got to be one way or the other. Absolutely. All right, man. Until next time.

Take care. Some were Pellarayor Pasiano And the killer got away Down by the sister city's river Two boys A flame more pride than sins

One would fall And one would prosper Never forced to make a man He became a border agent And supplemented what he made With creative deportation And miss an ammo by the case Since bullet ran the operation

there's hardly been a miniscence that ain't amassing at the border Chinese troops that tears He had to make in trouble Leader Of a certain kind of man Who need to feel the world's against them Have to get them if it can

Man whose triggers pull their fingers And who would rather fight them win United in a revolution Like a man and liking skin Oh Yeah, I'll start it with the border. And that's still where it is the day. Down by the sister

city's river But for sure No one can say But kill and spend The bullet's business Since back in 1931 Some luck in Ramo Cassiano

And Ramon still ain't dead enough Thank you. You know,