COMMUNICATION STUDIES faculty member, Dr. Michael Lechuga will present “Border Checkpoint Assemblages: Interior Checkpoints as Multidimensional Strategic Whiteness” on Friday, September 28 from 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM in Ford Hall Room 115. For more information, see below.
This presentation focuses on the dozens of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) interior border checkpoints (IBCs) that are scattered throughout the US American Southwest. I argue that these assemblages of state control distribute nationalist state power discursively and materially near the México/US border, territorializing the region as an anti-migrant space of white US citizenship. I layer Latina/o/x Rhetorical Studies scholarship on bordering and exclusion over a materialist theory of assemblages to make sense of how interior checkpoints utilize multidimensional expressions of statehood to control the movements of Latina/o/x migrants and citizen communities inside the boundaries of the US. I describe the legal apparatuses that justify the use of IBCs and how CBP enforcement protocol is materialized at IBCs, including a brief discussion of border security technology and personnel. I focus specifically on the role the IBCs play in enforcing the US’s anti-migration laws that target Latina/o/x migrants, residents, and US citizens moving through and around the checkpoints. This talk ends with a discussion of the importance of adopting critical and complex rhetorical frameworks to study the multidimensional expressions of nationalist power over communities of color.
