Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border

by Edward S. Casey, Mary Watkins

Winner, National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) Outstanding Book Award, 2017 As increasing global economic disparities, violence, and climate change provoke a rising tide of forced migration, many countries and local communities are responding by building walls—literal and metaphorical—between citizens and newcomers. Up Against the Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border examines the temptation to construct such walls through a penetrating analysis of the U.S. wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as investigating the walling out of Mexicans in local communities. Calling into question the building of a wall against a friendly neighboring nation, Up Against the Wall offers an analysis of the differences between borders and boundaries. This analysis opens the way to envisioning alternatives to the stark and policed divisions that are imposed by walls of all kinds. Tracing the consequences of imperialism and colonization as citizens grapple with new migrant neighbors, the book paints compelling examples from key locales affected by the wall—Nogales, Arizona vs. Nogales, Sonora; Tijuana/San Diego; and the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. An extended case study of Santa Barbara describes the creation of an internal colony in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of Mexican land, a history that is relevant to many U.S. cities and towns. Ranging from human rights issues in the wake of massive global migration to the role of national restorative shame in the United States for the treatment of Mexicans since 1848, the authors delve into the broad repercussions of the unjust and often tragic consequences of excluding others through walled structures along with the withholding of citizenship and full societal inclusion. Through the lens of a detailed examination of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, this transdisciplinary text, drawing on philosophy, psychology, and political theory, opens up multiple insights into how nations and communities can coexist with more justice and more compassion.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2014

About the author

Professor Edward Casey was the president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) from 2009-10, and he was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for a decade. He works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

His recent research includes investigations into place and space; landscape painting and maps as modes of representation; ethics and the other; feeling and emotion; philosophy of perception (with special attention to the role of the glance); the nature of edges.

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[Mills College Library]

305.86872 C3384 2014