Spotlight: Diana Flores Ruíz

Abstract

Spotlight:Diana Flores Ruíz Juan Llamas-Rodriguez Diana Flores Ruíz is an assistant professor in cinema and media studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, where her writing and teaching focus on race and media in the United States. She is at work on "Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the US-Mexico Border," which analyzes the historical role of optical border technologies in projects of anti-immigrant violence. The project focuses on how militarized visual regimes play out in popular visual culture and the ways in which Latinx, Indigenous, Black, and Asian American moving image artists mobilize representation to create experiences and blueprints of borderless worlds. She received her PhD in film and media and was a Mellon Mays Dissertation Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Juan Llamas-Rodriguez: Your current book project analyzes a variety of media forms (photography, cinema, and surveillance technology) about the US-Mexico border to investigate how visual cultures constitute differential racial regimes of mobility and political subjectivities. What do you see as the promise and pitfalls of focusing on this site to ground discussions of visual sovereignty, surveillance, and the mediation of citizenship and race in the North American context? Diana Flores Ruíz: I've asked myself this question because the US-Mexico border has become a privileged site of border analysis across the globe, but it is one of many sites that crystallizes how racialized visual regimes displace and immobilize people. In my work, I study how the machinery of the US-Mexico border conveys itself as the border par excellence according to different sociohistorical rubrics. I came to this research topic because of my own experiences with the militarized visuality of the US-Mexico border—popular political fantasies of the wall informed how my family and [End Page 5] I navigated institutions and social life even though we were living thousands of miles away from the border. Once I learned frameworks that accounted for the political capacities of the image, I began to see my experiences as textbook symptoms of militarized border visuality and how structurally ingrained this phenomenon is throughout many contested zones of exclusion and expulsion. A key driver in the techno-utopian fascination with the US-Mexico border has to do with how vast and varied its topography is. Anduril Industries, Inc. cites this in the development of their surveillance technologies invented specifically for the US-Mexico border and deployed elsewhere. The racialized social histories and cultural mythologies of the southwestern frontier also impact the very quantification and qualitative impression of how vast and varied its lands and waters are. So even though this border works in concert with larger systems and other borders, I still think that studies of its visual construction yield unique, practical insights about racially discriminatory design and the complicity of popular visual culture. Llamas-Rodriguez: That centrality of the US-Mexico border in popular culture also means that there are endless amounts of media produced about it. How do you select and build the archive of media objects to focus on in your research? Ruíz: I always used to feel a certain responsibility to incorporate media from current events. That kind of urgency became unsustainable in practice, especially during the ongoing border media spectacles of the Trump administration. These days I'm better equipped to showcase through my media archaeological approach how, say, the latest viral image coming out of the borderlands is part of an enduring architecture of militarized visuality. I have an upcoming article in Critical Ethnic Studies, titled "Object Lessons: Imaging Migrants' Belongings along the US-Mexico Border," that examines close-ups of migrants' objects found along the border and the ways in which both anti- and pro-immigration groups have mobilized this visual trope to define, defend, and recruit for their polarized border interventions. Some of the latest QAnon conspiracies hinge on this visual trope, but I wanted to track this further back and focus on how non-state actors have fought over symbolic meaning in shaping visual regimes. The article considers this within a post-9/11 security paradigm shift and the concurrent emergence of social media platforms such as YouTube. In my...