Performing the State's Desire: The Border Industrial Complex and the Murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas

Abstract

Abstract:This paper considers the 2010 murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas at the hands of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in order to unsettle the dominant narrative that migrant desire is responsible for the state violence against undocumented migrants at the border. Instead, I argue that we might read encounters between the state and migrants as performances in which the state and its agents reveal their own desires to enact the force of the border industrial complex, the increasingly privatized and militarized policing behemoth that targets racialized migrant threats for violence while increasing profits for US-owned corporations. This paper examines the state's performance of violence in three scenes—Hernández Rojas's detection in the desert, his processing at the detention center, and his brutal beating at the scene of deportation. In each scene, agents perform the state's entangled desires: the desire for and construction of a threatening enemy and the desire for total domination of this enemy at the border.