Refoulement as Biopolitical Praxis: Subalternity, Ethnography, and Ethics at the Mexico-Guatemala Border

This article analyzes the Mexico-Guatemala border through the lens of the author's sensory ethnographic engagement there. It also uses oral history interviews and collaboration undertaken with refugees, migrants, and deportees. It argues for the contravention of human rights and refugee rights under the Trump Administration as an aspect of a longer history of biopolitics enacted in border regions and beyond them. It draws on border studies and notions of immunity in biopolitics to develop this argument, and its uses collaborative visual ethnographic practices as a way to consider the border.