Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives by Kristy L. Ulibarri (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives by Kristy L. Ulibarri
• David Lerner

Kristy L. Ulibarri, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies: Living Death in Latinx Narratives. Austin: U of Texas P, 2022. 260 pp. Paper, $34.95; e-book, $34.95.

The paradox of free trade is that the invisible, unrestricted flow of capital, labor, and goods is maintained by divisive anti-immigration rhetoric, increasingly militarized national borders, and the violent policing of undocumented migrants. In Visible Borders, Invisible Economies (2022), Kristy L. Ulibarri takes aim at neoliberalism's "strategic interplay between a free-market economy and a hyper-fortified nation-state that orders the social world and makes some populations more disposable than others" (3). Ulibarri convincingly argues that the spectacle of border security shores up a national identity rooted in the fantasy of racial homogeneity. Duly stripped [End Page 191] of citizenship's legal protections, the undocumented are reduced to mere economic actors. The book's subtitle, Living Death in Latinx Narratives, refers to the ways in which those "caught between the institutions of citizenship and economy" undergo various forms of death-in-life, ranging from violence and actual death to physical and mental depletion—what Lauren Berlant called "slow death" (7). To tease out this "tension between biopolitics and necropolitics" (3), Ulibarri draws on a diverse archive of Latinx literature, photography, and film; her case studies render visible the exploitative, dehumanizing practices that prop up neoliberalism's "winners"—primarily white residents of the global north. Indeed, as Ulibarri reminds us, it is no small irony that decades of US imperialism and political meddling in Latin America produced the current migrant "crisis" and its attending racist discourse of "brown peril."

Refreshingly, the broadly materialist analysis in Visible Borders, Invisible Economies departs from traditional, subject-centered approaches to Chicanx and Latinx criticism. Although Ulibarri acknowledges a debt to pathbreaking theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa, who did so much to spotlight mezcla identities and resistant collectivities, she notes that "this recursive investment in subjectivity has generated some critical repetition where many of our conversations about borders, nations, and economics continually lead back to Latinx subject formation" (18). Likewise, Ulibarri eschews Aníbal Quijano's relevant if overly familiar framework of coloniality, which traces the racialized hierarchy of labor control in the Americás to the birth of the modern-world economy and European conquest of the New World. Instead, the author provides a genealogy of the Chicago school's proto-libertarian and neoliberal economic thought. Of particular concern is Friedrich Hayek's prediction that citizenship in wealthy nations would confer a claim to a standard of living only sustainable by a permanent domestic underclass and international plunder. Whereas Hayek viewed this as an undesirable check on unregulated capitalism, Ulibarri believes the bifurcation of the globe into haves and have-nots indexes a "collapse between national concerns and market economics" (6). Hence, violence, xenophobia, and racism serve structural functions; by dividing the world into us/them, the undocumented are dehumanized and criminalized while [End Page 192] still providing the cheap, invisible labor necessary to maintain a high standard of living for some.

The case studies in Visible Borders, Invisible Economies are grouped into two main sections. "Part I: Documenting the Living Dead" deals with novels, photographs, and films that seek to capture the reality of the migrant experience. Yet, as Ulibarri points out, many of these texts and images inadvertently "maintain a narrative of fear and anxiety around undocumented immigration" (25). On the other hand, the author cites the Border Film Project (2007), in which migrants were given disposable cameras to document their experiences, as a challenge to normative visual narratives. "Part II: Imagining the Living Dead" spotlights works of Latinx speculative and fantasy fiction that explore the metaphor of living death. Although these narratives do not always offer hope or strategies of resistance, Ulibarri points to Daniel José Older's collection Salsa Nocturna (2012), which blurs the line between the dead and the living to critique bureaucratic institutions, as a text that "opens a politics of possibility" (25).

Ulibarri's textured readings unpack how Latinx writers and artists imagine the lives of those who traverse neoliberalism's...