Geographies of friendship and embodiments of radical violence, collective rage, and radical love at the U.S.–Mexico border’s Paso del Norte region

Abstract

In this article, we develop a praxis to interpret violence against migrants and border communities in the U.S.–Mexico Paso del Norte borderlands, that is applicable to other global border regions in crisis. We reframe the violence that occurs daily on both sides of the border as a form of ‘radical violence’ that cuts across racial, gendered, class, interpersonal, and institutional lines, which is also physical, representational, epistemic, and spiritual. We argue that together, these forms of violence are radical because they strike at the roots of social relationships, families, and communities, as well as the larger collection of rights all human beings deserve. We articulate a notion of ‘radical love’ in contrast to radical violence as a transformational counterweight to the brutality that blankets people, institutions, and the land itself in border regions. We propose a strategy that anchors and transforms our collective rage to confront this violence by people seeking to build friendships, community, and coalitions. We call this framework a transborder friendship praxis (TFP), which embodies collective rage and radical love as interventions to violence against migrants and border communities and the embodied violence of militarizing and securitizing border regions, and as a model for building solidarity across international boundaries. Our framework is rooted in the tenets of autoethnography, everyday geographies, and geographies of friendship, and draw upon the scholarship of ‘witnessing’ as a subversive act and relational resistance as a methodology of witnessing in action.

Keywords:

• Autoethnography
• borderlands
• everyday geographies
• geographies of friendship
• intersectionalities
• methodology of witnessing in action
• transborder friendship praxis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleague, Jeff Shepherd, for his careful read of our work and Fatima Oliveros and Zaira Martin for their research assistance. We would also like to thank the blind reviewers that offered us insightful feedback. We dedicate this essay to the countless migrant and immigrant families that inspire us.

Disclosure statement

No foreseen conflict of interest to be reported.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cynthia Bejarano

Cynthia Bejarano is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at New Mexico State University, USA. Her research and teaching focus on intersectionality, borderlands studies and border violence, immigration and migration issues and advocacy, and gender violence and feminicides at the U.S.–Mexico border.

María Eugenia Hernández Sánchez

Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez is Professor of Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, México. Her research and teaching focus on borderlands studies, Chicana feminisms, children’s migration, social justice education, borderlands art theory and visual art methods, storytelling and testimonio praxis.