The México-United States border is a political and cultural reality. It shapes populations, not through a wall or fence, but by a social and economic precarity shaped through dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in civic life. These collateral populations, which have emerged from the border, have long been considered transparent and transient. This assumed transparency and transience is a form of marginalization that produces a lack of collective conscience within these immigrant and mixed-status communities, limiting their ability to find solidarity in others and in themselves. This essay explores how the México-United States border forms human subjects through territorial mechanisms that filter, shape, and leverage populations, regardless of race, nationality, or legal status. This reframing of the border expands the México-United States border into a trans-scalar region—one that spans across a range of political entities at multiple scales. This region is traced by networks of labor and policy, each of which helps to identify new sites of intervention for the architectural and planning disciplines.

The United States border with México is not a static barrier. Along its 1,954-mile stretch, 48 ports of entry manage an annual total of 372 million travelers and 12.1 million cargo trucks, transporting 616 billion dollars in traded goods.¹ Within the transborder population living along the border, approximately 1.6 million crossings occur without authorization or permission from either country, suggesting that the rest of the approximately 370.5 million people crossing the border are not scaling walls or fences, traversing rivers, or evading patrol agents.² The transborder crossings and high volumes of commercial traffic make the México-United States border region one of the most active international boundaries in the world, veering away from the illusion that borders are static barriers. This raises the question: Just how much of a barrier is the border meant to be, anyway?

The various transborder economic and labor flows (those that can be traced) reveal that the border is a contested region, because it operates as a codified system that filters capital, material, and labor flows—creating collateral groups.³ Through this lens, we can establish the border as a distributed network of sites, spaces, and experiences, rather than as a solid line. Historically, the México-United States border sorts people through the walls and other barriers that materialize it. This essay centers on the notion that the border shapes bodies, identities, and values, well beyond the boundary it marks. 

The Border Migrated First

The México-United States border began to shape cultural and racial identities at the end of the Mexican-American War, when, in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, agreements related to citizenship remained unfulfilled. The treaty compelled México to relinquish territories to the United States that would later become Arizona, California, and New Mexico, thereby establishing the border as we know it today. This geopolitical shift imposed a new racial hierarchy on the nearly 100,000 Mexicans, and Indigenous Mexicans and Americans, who opted to stay in the region.⁴ While the treaty guaranteed Mexican citizens, regardless of race, “the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States,” the newly formed state legislators eventually ratified state constitutions that denied full citizenship to anyone of “Indian descent,” leaving Indigenous Mexican and American groups exposed to prejudices and segregation.⁵ Given that the United States had already refused to grant African Americans full constitutional rights, it seems reasonable to believe that state legislators, through their use of the enticing prospect of US citizenship, may have created a situation intended to be attractive to potentially resistant Mexican citizens—those who remained in the area during the establishment of state and local governance—despite likely having little intention of fulfilling that promise.

Ironically, it was the border that migrated first. Although the border was established in 1848, it was not until the twentieth century that the migration of people from México into the United States began to accelerate, driven by labor policies that continually both attracted and repelled immigrant workers across the border for political and economic gain. A prime example was the 1942 Bracero Program, which welcomed Mexican laborers across the border to ease labor shortages during World War II, offering legal status con-tingent on short-term labor contracts. However, decades later, when the war ended and the American workforce recovered, anti-immigrant sentiments began to surface, and it became politically expedient for United States lawmakers to end the program and deport the laborers they had once celebrated.⁶

The culture of doubt and unease about immigrant labor that emerged from these programs persists today, through retaliatory policies, mass deportations, and nationalist movements in the United States. It has given rise to misconceptions and anxieties about the role of immigration workers in the United States. Conflicting myths, such as Mexican immigrants being described as “lazy” and accused of “stealing American jobs” provide clear evidence of these misperceptions. The nativist and underlying racial undertones of this messaging blur the lines between Mexican immigrants and Mexican-American communities, regardless of their legal status. I briefly retrace these events in the México-United States border history with the goal of highlighting—through the implementation of shifts in their legal status— the selective recognition of the legitimacy of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as an illustration of the border’s impact on identity.

Border Subjects

Today, many whose lives continue to be impacted by the border have inherited the precarity of economic inclusion and political exclusion. Some have even learned to leverage their predicament. Transborder scholar Norma Iglesias-Prieto alludes to the border as a complex social construct of opportunities and challenges presented to the daily life of populations crossing the border.⁷ This notion of a border dynamic is critical in identifying those who experience the political alterity it produces and the space where it occurs. In what follows, I will identify three ways in which the border forms collateral groups of people through filtering, shaping, and leveraging.

Groups who are subject to filtering by the border are undoubtedly among the most widely recognized and politicized, especially when pro- and anti-immigrant rhetoric escalates during election cycles in the United States. Those filtered by the border include legal or non-status migrants who are said to come to the United States in search of greater economic prospects and a safer environment for themselves or their families. However, it is also fair to say that these groups are drawn by labor programs that primarily benefit the United States economy. This group also includes those displaced by deportation from the United States back to their countries of origin when it becomes politically opportune.

In his book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, economist Guy Standing discusses the complex mix of political, social, and economic instability that global immigrants face, and that forces them to remain silent and unseen in order to survive. They are often overlooked and denied the fundamental rights that others around them exercise freely.⁸ A focus on survival has also caused these immigrants to stifle their cultural expressions in order to avoid drawing attention to themselves, primarily in spaces and situations where they may feel at risk of exposure. In this context, the México-United States border becomes a social boundary that follows these border subjects and continues to regulate them based on shifts in their legal status.

It’s essential to recognize that time has a subtle but important significance for filtered border subjects, one that is reflected in a broad spectrum of individual experiences. While national news media in the United States often portray this filtered group as seasonal and always on the move, the reality is that many undocumented immigrants in the United States have spent their entire lives there, which makes deportation a harsh form of displacement for this group. In a map titled The Border Region Traced by Migration and Deportation (Figure 1), I contextualize the México-United States legal boundary through depicting migration destinations and deportation landing sites, and framing the expansion of the border as a region traced by the filtering of subjects.

The México-United States border’s filtering practices originate from the Bracero Program and were refined through subsequent guest worker programs that persisted for years—or decades, gradually softening the border. These programs were designed to stabilize industries that had become dependent on low-wage immigrant labor, after these industries failed to persuade domestic workers to accept the same wages and exploitative conditions imposed on immigrants. The labor shortages in the agricultural industry, in particular, were so severe that they led to the creation of the Special Agricultural Workers (SAW) program as part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This program aimed to sustain the existing immigrant workforce by providing immigrants with permanent residency and pathways to naturalized citizenship, and encouraging their involvement in public life.⁹ However, the minimum wages and working conditions set by IRCA failed to reduce the flow of immigrant labor, resulting in competition between undocumented immigrants and newly naturalized citizens, as well as resentment from American workers and labor unions, who blamed both groups for undermining collective bargaining. This situation reminds us that the border’s capacity to expand by following and constraining immigrants, as they live their daily lives, enables it to draw social boundaries between the groups it impacts.

A second way that the border forms human subjects is by shaping—that is, the process by which immigrant groups feel and are shaped by impacts of border policies, despite not being in the border region. For instance, in the United States, many have lost their jobs due to shifts in labor markets caused by the role of the border in globalizing the manufacturing sector, particularly in communities in states with staunch anti-immigrant laws—including Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, and Georgia.¹⁰ The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which began to loosen the border in 1994 by eliminating trade barriers between the United States and México, cost the Detroit manufacturing economy over 700,000 jobs, while 4,000 maquiladoras—factories that are duty free and tariff-free—opened up in México. In these factories, laborers are paid significantly lower wages than the Detroit workers who lost their jobs.¹¹

The Border Region Traced by Auto Assembly (Figure 2) outlines the production of auto parts in North America, from sorting raw materials, manufacturing, and assembly—which occur primarily in rural areas of México—to testing, inspection, and delivery in the industrial Rust Belt regions of the United States. Over time, this process has accumulated a labor force of nearly 10,000,000 individuals of various nationalities and statuses, across fourteen intensive geographies. Despite the numerous groups and sites involved, all of which are spatially distant from one another, the process itself ultimately blurs the border by functioning more as a tether than as a separator. The result of this transborder network of labor is an economic precarity that is not limited to just one side of the border. Industrial outsourcing of jobs to México replaced farmlands, Indigenous lands, and rural communities, with manufacturing industries that offer long hours and low wages, transforming previously independently employed populations into a labor class.¹²

Both filtered and shaped border subjects (human beings) share marginalization processes that result from border trade policies meant to assist them. The Border Industrialization Program (BIP), established in the 1960s, aimed to address the underemployment of Mexican laborers deported after the Bracero Program. When the BIP evolved into NAFTA decades later, manufacturing workers in the United States were promised that export-oriented manufacturing would yield more jobs and higher wages.¹³ However, workers on both sides of the border ultimately faced wage stagnation and growing poverty as they competed for affordable manufacturing jobs.

The distinguishing feature of the shaping of border subjects is that one does not need to physically cross the México-United States border to be shaped by it. Those who share this experience are likely the people who are most unaware of the effect of the border’s shaping process on their livelihoods. However, if they are aware of the border’s impacts, they’ve projected resentment toward the filtered groups, rather than toward those policies that transformed the economy. This dynamic clearly illustrates how the politics of the border are often disconnected from the physical fortification of the border. Understanding this dynamic is crucial for comprehensively analyzing the border’s effects on other populations, beyond the non- and mixed-status groups from México and other countries.

The last group of border subjects reverses the exploitations of the border by leveraging (taking advantage of) the disparities it creates. This group possesses more self-determination than the previous two because the group’s individuals overcome the struggles of being border subjects by living, working, and spending time and money on whichever side of the border benefits them the most. In their case, the inequalities marked by the border—such as wages, housing prices, and the cost of groceries—are opportune. For instance, in the borderlands, the proximity of a border city (Ciudad Juárez and El Paso are good examples) to the border itself causes the border to be a central aspect of life, since many who are able to cross the border daily without legal issues stitch together a bi-national existence.

In a 2005–2006 Labor Market Assessment Report from the Wadley Donovan Group (a consultant to the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation), the “transborder plex” is described as “the largest bilingual workforce in the Western Hemisphere,” contributing to an economic reliance on the differences in wages and cost of living highlighted by the border.¹⁴ As illustrated in Figure 3, The Border Region Traced by Transborder, a measure of this effect can be seen in the amount of daily transborder foot, vehicular, and bus traffic that occurs along the border crossings in Ciudad Juárez/El Paso, Calexico/Mexicali, and San Ysidro/Tijuana and the border states. 6.9 million commuters cross the border in both directions for various reasons, such as work, school, shopping, or tourism.

While it may seem liberating to cross and to continue living on either side of the border, it’s important to note that this kind of life may also be riddled with social hardship. As Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, those whose identities are associated with the border must navigate both physical and non-physical barriers, and they are relegated to a secondary status by race, class, education level, and the language they speak—or by how well they speak it.¹⁵

This suggests that being a transborder subject can be isolating, because these people may be regarded as being not enough of the nationality of one side, and too much of a nationality of the other. In this case, the situation can be cut both ways. While part of this third group is found along the México-United States border, it’s crucial to acknowledge that the group also exists globally—as consumers of markets that exploit labor markets across other borders. To this end, nearly everyone can be considered an actor in border dynamics, regardless of our race, geography, or politics.

Towards a Border Conscience

The groups affected by the México-United States border through filtering, shaping, and leveraging are only three of many. There are certainly more variations, as the border can be proven to touch all our lives somehow. And yet, México-United States border subjects are marginalized because we’ve assigned to them a broad and reductive collective identity, which describes them as transparent, transient, or without permanence in American society. This unique form of social and spatial exclusion complicates their ability to find common ground with a growing general population affected by border policies and dynamics. The divisiveness of border politics has made the drawn lines on maps more physically visible, and it has created invisible borders between individuals and groups of border subjects. This has led to internal conflicts within populations that could otherwise find solidarity and unity among one another.

Consider, for example, those non-immigrant populations whose economic stability has been impacted by border policies. They often propagate the misconception that immigrants are the root of economic woes, thereby fueling the nationalist movements we are witnessing today.¹⁶ The move from understanding the border as a strict formatting of geography, towards understanding it instead as groups of subjects, can house varying experiences, values, and politics. Immigrant rights advocacy groups such as the Border Angels, and the Alt-Right Militia, who patrol illegal crossings, can, from this more people-oriented perspective, themselves be considered border subjects.

Translating our understanding of the border from a physical barrier to a social condition emphasizes the idea that the México-United States border wall is only a symbol of the boundary, and that the actual boundary edge itself emerges through the inclusions and exclusions experienced by the people affected and influenced by the border. The argument here is that, because modern architecture poised the built environment with an ability to enact bio-political agendas, we must identify the spatial devices that expand the experience of the border beyond the border as a physical barrier.

The spatial project for architects and all makers of the built environment is to frame and empower border subjects. The key is to stop reducing the border to a wall and, instead, to manipulate the invisible borders within which border subjects are already living—the civic, domestic, working, infrastructural, and commercial typologies they already comfortably populate. As I’ve established, regardless of legal status or geography, border subjects experience a form of social and political precarity that dissuades them from participating in civic life. Therefore, we must leverage latent opportunities in the daily environments of these people, in order for them to make themselves visible to each other and to facilitate the emergence of a new border conscience. Through this exposure, communities at the border can recognize their shared vulnerabilities, which can help to alleviate some of the fears—instigated by nationalism—which many have associated with diversity.

In an essay featured in Ron Rael’s Borderwall as Architecture, Norma Iglesias-Prieto frames coexisting practices as a potent practice of de-powering the border wall’s politics. She writes, “if fears and mistrust build up walls, they are torn down by the co-existence, interrelationships, and human-ization of neighbors.”¹⁷

The practices Iglesias-Prieto describes in this essay are not so dissimilar from the production of civic space. Her suggestions could point to a new paradigm for notions of what constitutes the citizenry. This term is commonly entangled with nativism, while at the same time immigration laws conflate citizenry with legal status. And yet, its most basic definition refers to the people who participate in civic life. This understanding could instigate a new typological imagination as a way to address the latent collectivity among border subjects.

When Gloria Anzaldúa explores the idea of collective consciousness among the various Mexican, Indigenous, and border identities, she emphasizes the need for tolerance, explaining that “border walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behaviors.”¹⁸ Such an ethos must be central to a collective border conscience that can recognize shared experiences and common ground regardless of race, nationality, the language(s) spoken, or what people have overcome. A built environment that empowers border subjects requires a revolutionary project of people empowering themselves.

Case Study: Border Call Centers

Call centers could not be more benign; they are large, boxed, muted buildings scattered around business or industrial parks. The recent emergence of the call center industry along the México-United States border is an emblematic example of how border policies and dynamics—and not the physical barriers—form subjects.¹⁹ This topic was the subject of a graduate research studio co-taught by the author, with Marcel Sanchez-Prieto and Adrianna Cuellar of the Collaborative Research Office at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, in the Spring of 2020. My aim in sharing this academic case study is to suggest that expanding our disciplinary perspective to include borders—both tangible and intangible—might best start by focusing on border subjects within our academic environment.

In 1996, when the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act” was enacted by the United States—allowing a blind approach to determining how severe a crime has to be to qualify for deportation—a study performed by Human Rights Watch (an international non-governmental advocacy organization), which collected deportation data from 1997 to 2007, showed that the federal government had taken an overzealous approach. Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch, Alison Parker, quipped, “In twelve years of enforcing the 1996 deportation laws, no one bothered to ask whether ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] focused on the target group—undocumented immigrants convicted of serious, violent crimes.” The Human Rights Watch report “Forced Apart (By the Numbers): Non-Citizens Deported Mostly for Nonviolent Offenses” emphasized that many people with a criminal record being deported from the United States since 1996 were convicted of non-violent crimes.²⁰ Despite a campaign promise to make a more just immigration system, the Obama administration continued this practice. However, a series of analyses conducted by Human Rights Watch in 2009, 2013, and 2015 found that many undocumented people with minor, nonviolent convictions were deported, despite being in the United States for many years, having legal status families, and having established roots in their communities.²¹ 

Over the years, these filtered groups of people continued to reside in northern Mexican cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez to stay close to their families in the United States. Living in these regions often comes with a unique form of precarity. Since the 1960s, Northern Mexican cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez symbolized the significant effect that transborder economies and global industries can have on communities in the borderland. Despite having access to work in the industrial markets, many people living in these communities still earn low wages while working long hours. This has led to wide-spread poverty and economic inequality.²² The global industrial footprint in this border region has continued to grow over the decades, with United States immigration policies and deportations reliably providing the region with displaced populations desperate for work.

However, since the 1996 immigration and deportation law, the deportees coming to the border region— which I would like to begin to re-frame as “returnees”—have been different from before, as many of them had spent years in the United States. Michael Cruz, in his Washington Post article “Offshore Migrant Workers: Return Migrants in México’s English-Speaking Call Centers,” points to this group’s ability to speak Spanish and English with a neutral accent.²³

Further, the ubiquity of technology that had emerged over recent years meant that they were savvy with computers and smartphones. Many have a public school education and are familiar with American customs. In Tijuana, specifically, their presence and unique binational identities and experiences began to attract new nonmanufacture industries, such as call centers, as a means of capitalizing on these skills.

The rise of border region call centers demonstrates the intersection between two types of border subjects. On the one hand, the employee population in the call centers has been filtered through the México-United States border, and employers are leveraging the border for the economic disparities that it marks. In this case, the call center employer and the worker are both border subjects, challenging the reductive narrative of border identities and actors.

In his study on call centers in Tijuana, Cruz conveys a sense of an identity crisis, one that evolves into solidarity over time through interviews with returned migrants. One remark that stood out was, “This is my country, and I don’t even know it,” which reflects the displacement people feel following deportation. Many eventually began to refer to the call center as a “Little United States” because they felt united by their shared experience of displacement.

This sense of belonging has expanded beyond the call center, as people describe hearing young Mexicans speaking fluent English at nearby bars during lunch hours, suggesting a latent political empowerment that border region call centers could provide to this displaced population.²⁴

Despite this, the architecture of the typical call center is not so different from the industrial shed of the maquiladora. They are both enclosed by a muted exterior and are primarily designed for the efficiency of labor while repressing social interactions. However, the maquiladora industry sought a cheap labor market, while call centers today require a cheap, cultured, bilingual labor market—which makes this particular industry’s boom more contingent on a specific population than its predecessors. It also reveals a latent opportunity for citing a dependency on empowerment for returnees.

To illustrate this point, The Call Center: A Border Typology (Figures 5 and 6), explores the spatial components of a typical call center interior, in which consolidated rows of workstations and secured data stack cores resemble the spatial barriers and protocols of a port of entry, and where security and sorting are prioritized over humanization of the border subject. Or, in this case, the call center worker. The drawing intends to dismantle the typology (or technical workspaces) and to represent it as a collection of spatial devices that could be reorganized to produce a space in which collective worker empowerment can emerge among the displaced—filtered—border population. This speculation purposefully ends with dismantling the call center, suggesting that developing a new model must follow the nuances of the border subjects who will work in it, and, thus, it cannot be generalized.

Conclusion: The Border’s Other Architecture

Our disciplinary action and interest in the México-United States border cannot continue using the border as a metaphor for the economic and social precarity riddling its collateral groups. Instead, by tracing the collateral groups whose economic and spatial precarity stem from the policies and dynamics of exclusion and inclusion of the México-United States border, we can identify the expanded geographies and the spaces hidden beneath established clichés. This is the “other architecture” of the border—the labor, commerce, and institutional spaces architects have ceded to typological protocols because they aren’t form- or aesthetic-driven design projects.

These spaces appear benign, but their politics are felt by border subjects in the edges and limits of enclosure, circulation, and interior, that conjure the borders beyond the border.

To clarify, I do suggest that border subjects experience space differently than everyone else. A central theoretical framework in ethnic studies known as “borderlands” indicates that people’s racial identities, or legal status, produce physical and nonphysical barriers that suppress a way of life beyond political and social determinants.²⁵ I draw from this thinking to propose a “borderlands lens,” a way of reimagining the world based on the precarity and boundaries that form border subjects. Such a perspective could not only reveal our discipline’s complicity with forming border subjects, but also inspire architects to disrupt our built environments so as to affirm the experiences and identities of multiple border subjects and to facilitate the emergence of their coalition.

While it’s difficult to imagine a way back from the robust border security and economic infrastructures that sort land and people, I advocate for expanding locations in which architects might still have an impact and might still promote citizenry, not as legal status, but as a participation in public space where the exposure and intersection of multiple border subjects will construct a new border conscience. A plural approach, in which, while each being themselves a border, subjects no longer belong to a particular race or ethnicity. Border subjects are not fixed to a specific geography and are exclusive to the immediate context and regions of the México-United States border. When we decouple these groups from the border, we not only see them as a globally conscious body—we may also see them as a powerful nation within themselves.

_{1. “The Border between the U.S. and Mexico,” Smart Border Coalition, Accessed January 19, 2023, https://web. archive.org/web/20230117134403/https:/smartbordercoalition.com/about-the-border.}

_{2. John Gramlich and Alissa Scheller, “What’s Happening at the U.S.-Mexico Border in 7 Charts,” Pew Research Center, November 9, 2021, https://www. pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/ 11/09/whats-happening-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/.}

_{3. David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation (Scholarly Resources Inc., 1999), 169–82.}

_{4. Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York University Press, 2018), 15–47.}

_{5. Martha Menchaca, “Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Re-pression in the United States,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 3 (1993): 583–603, http://www.jstor.org/stable/646643.}

_{6. Deborah Cohen, “Producing Transnational Subjects,” in Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 19–86.}

_{7. Norma Iglesias-Prieto, “The U.S.-Mexico Border and Children’s Social Imaginary: An Analysis of Wacha el Border and Beyond the Border,” American Studies Journal 57 (2012), http://www. asjournal.org/57-2012/the-us-mexico- border-and-childrens-social-imaginary/#.}

_{8. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2016), 90–114.}

_{9. Steven Alan Elberg, “Agriculture and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986: Reform or Relapse?” San Joaquin Agricultural Law Review 3 (1993): 197–220.}

_{10. Robert E. Scott, “NAFTA’s Impact on the States,” Economic Policy Institute, April 10, 2001, accessed July 17th, 2024, https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_nafta01_impactstates/ #:~:text=Other%20hard%2Dhit%20 states%20include, more%20than%2020%2C000%20jobs%20lost.}

_{11. Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket Books, 2021), 38–60.}

_{12. Walia, Border and Rule, 38–60.}

_{13. Walia, Border and Rule, 38–60.}

_{14. Chamberlain, Lisa, “2 Cities and 4 Bridges Where Commerce Flows,” The New York Times, March 28, 2007. https:/www. nytimes.com/2007/03/28/realestate/commercial/28juarez.html?unlocked_ article_code=1.ak8.hr9Z gku3Cb52 lgr2&smid=url-share.}

_{15. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 75–86.}

_{16. Monica de Bolle and Jeromin Zettelmeyer, “Measuring the Rise of Economic Nationalism,” Working Paper Series WP19-15, Peterson Institute for International Economics (2019), https://ideas.repec.org/p/iie/wpaper/wp19- html.}

_{17. Norma Iglesias-Prieto, “Transborderisms: Practices that Tear Down Walls,” in Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary, edited by Ron Rael (University of California Press, 2017), 22–25.}

_{18. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 99–161.}

_{19. Gustavo Solis, “Tijuana’s Call Centers Offer a Lifeline to Deportees Struggling to live in Mexico,” The
LA Times, September 28, 2019, accessed April 21, 2022, https://www.latimes. com/california/story/2019-09-28/tijuanas-call-centers-offer-a-lifeline- to-deportees-struggling-to-live-in-mexico.}

_{20. “Forced Apart (By the Numbers),” Human Rights Watch, 2009, accessed March 17, 2023, https://www.hrw.org report/2009/04/15/forced-apart-numbers/non-citizens-deported-mostly-nonviolent-offenses.}

_{21. “US: Deportation Splits Families,” Human Rights Watch, 2009, accessed March 17, 2023, https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/04/15/us-deportation- splits-families.}

_{22. Alfredo Hualde, “The Call Centers in Mexico: Employment and their Geography Distribution,” More Work Than Employment: Labor Trajectories and Precariousness in the Call Centers in Mexico (Mexico: The College of the Northern Border, 2017), 87–105.}

^{23. Michaël Da Cruz, “Offshore Migrant Workers: Return Migrants in Mexico’s English-Speaking Call Centers,” The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4, no. 1 (2018): 39–57, accessed January 20, 2020, https://doi. org/10.7758/RSF.2018.4.1.03.}

_{24. Cruz, “Offshore Migrant Workers.”}

_{25. Cati V. de los Ríos, “A Curriculum of the Borderlands: High School Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies as Sitios y Lengua,” The Urban Review 45, no. 1 (2013): 58–73, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-012-0224-3.}