The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

the u.s.-mexican border region 337
substantiated charges that many police forces routinely use racial profiling to target
Latinos and African Americans (Cole 1999). 14 All of these activities give the
Border Patrol a benign visibility that is explicitly intended to draw in civilians, including
children, as participants in the state’s fight against the enemy within.
Consensus about hierarchies and “enemies” also is expressed in television, films,
theater, music, newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and more, as Lowe (1996)
has demonstrated. These depict the degree to which “minorities” can deviate from
the “norm” and are class specific. For example, Spanish-speakers cannot with impunity
paint their house bright colors in middle-class neighborhoods. I have some
Latino colleagues in California who live in a predominately Anglo neighborhood
close to the university where they both work. When they painted their formerly
beige house pink and started to lay out their gardens in a fashion found throughout
Mexico and the Caribbean, their neighbors marched on them, demanding that
their house be returned to “neighborhood standards.” 15
The hegemony of “our” cultural practices and the denigration of what is represented
as the less valuable parts of the social body are so strong that, according to
an ABC poll several years ago, 66 percent of those surveyed favored random searches
of houses, cars, and personal belongings, even if the police had no suspicion of any
wrongdoing. These searches would presumably not be in middle-class neighborhoods,
but in barrios and poor working-class areas. Virtually all Americans seem
willing to submit to the many Border Patrol checkpoints on north-south highways
throughout the Southwest, many miles from the border itself. People have been so
inoculated with the fear of “the enemy within” and with the myth about the relationship
of repression to the cure of society, that they are willing to give up their own
rights for what they have become convinced is the good of “their” society.
Although Border Patrol agents have never been renowned for their gentleness,
as the Immigration and Naturalization Service adopts and successfully implements
low-intensity conflict tactics throughout the Southwest, there are new opportunities
for human rights violations. These may be directed toward suspected drug
smugglers and terrorists, as well as toward illegal migrants whose labor power contributes
so much to the success of neoliberal capitalism, but it could also be more
often turned upon legal residents or citizens who “look like” migrants or who object
to the treatment of migrants, or who are simply poor, brown skinned, and Spanish-speaking,
or who live in a Latino neighborhood.
POLITICAL AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AGAIN
Political violence, a subset of violence in general, is state-sponsored or tolerated
“action taken or not taken by the state or its agents with the express intent of realizing
certain social, ethnic, economic, and political goals in the realm of public
affairs, especially affairs of the state or social life in general” (Nagengast 1994:114).
Political violence subsumes war, terrorism, torture, and genocide. Genocide as a