‘Emigrantes, Palestinos, Estamos Unidos’: anticolonial connectivity and resistance along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border

Abstract

ABSTRACT Borders, barriers, and walls separate and divide. The construction of walls, militarization of borders, and confiscation of land can be observed throughout the histories of settler colonialism with violent material and bodily effects, especially as it has been inflected through the logic and structures of racial capitalism. And yet, as borders, barriers, and walls ‘harden’ through new security practices, local struggles emerge that transgress, cross boundaries, and express anticolonial connectivities. This article examines one case of this along the ‘Palestine-Mexico’ border, where we observe both the coordination between the U.S., Israel and global business in the ‘hardening’ of border regimes, and struggles against that border violence seen with protesters in Los Angeles demanding human rights for Latin American migrants and Palestinians or campaigns for a ‘World Without Walls’. It argues that these anticolonial connectivities are examples of boundary-crossing work that bridge gaps and separations maintained by colonial domination and become powerful acts of resistance against those regimes.