Right. Hello, and welcome to reverb everybody. I'm Ben Williams, and I'm joined today by Juan Yamas Rodriguez. He is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he researches and teaches global and media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media. Won, it's wonderful to have you on the show today,
Wonderful to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Thanks so much. So we'll, we'll jump right into some conversation, I think I wanted to start with just a sense of what brought you to Film and Media Studies, and what aspects of that discipline have really informed some of your previous and current work?
Yeah, so I think, um, this was college, I think it was, I was always really interested in film, generally, as a hobby. And as a subject of interest, when I was deciding what to major in my big lofty ideals was to do like film studies, international relations, double major and make internationally renowned films, or better no become some like big diplomat, somewhere. Neither of those came to fruition. But I think the more that I moved in those spaces and learn more about those two disciplines, I thought, you know, I'm interested in cinema, an institution that has global implications. So for awhile, I was thinking of getting into sort of international film festivals, you know, into programming, or things like that. And I worked a couple of them as an intern, and well, that was doing my BA and MA. But then I discovered scholarship and the learn about, you know, you can pursue this as an academic and do sort of the research part full time. And that became very appealing. So I pursue a PhD in Film and Media Studies. And that was changing too, because I think for the longest time I my interest was, and in film, it was exclusively almost in film. And I think my PhD work really got me to think about media more broadly. And the connections between film and television and film and Video Games, film and newscasts. So that became a lot, a lot more broadening. And in that sense, I think I mean, looking back on it, I would say, what got me into these fields is still the same concerns, still interested in the value of media, and the power of media for understanding the world for understanding our relationship to the world, and how it is structured. So a lot of those concerns and questions are still there. And I think I found in media studies, a very helpful set of approaches and theories for thinking about those relationships that I think I've always been interested in.
So based on some of those different kinds of media objects, whether it's television, video games, film, what are some of the approaches that you as a scholar of Media Studies more broadly, rely on in your work?
Yeah, I would say the two main approaches I most of my work, deals with is close reading textual analysis of media, texts, so interested there, and how different media convey ideas, convey messages, and how they do that. So what are the different formal strategies? What are what are aesthetics doing? What are the different techniques that different media have for for conveying their ideas and the affordances that each specific media form has as opposed to others? What can cinema do, that television cannot work in television do that other media are not as well equipped to do as well. So I think close close reading is very much at the center of a lot of my analysis. And I will say the other one is approaches derived from political economy. So not only understanding the texts themselves, but what are the infrastructures? What are the industries that are shaping the media texts that we get to consume? What are the sort of labor relations and economic relations behind them? And how does understanding those relationships also help? was better understand what it is that we're watching or listening to or playing with, and so forth. So I think those two approaches in tandem help a lot of my work,
those approaches, when you're thinking both about close reading and industry, political economy that's behind these different media forums, it really comes through in your forthcoming book. And that's where I wanted to turn our conversation. So border tunnels immediate theory of the US Mexico underground, I've had an opportunity to read through the text, and it is fantastic. I wanted to start there. It's innovative, it's compelling. And I see those close readings all throughout. But I see a lot of attention to the political economy that your work, as I've been engaging with it, is deeply invested and thinks about in a compelling novel, way that shows us the value more broadly of Media Studies.
It's interesting, because actually came to this project, and to thinking specifically about media representations of borders on us from kind of like a side angle. So my dissertation work was not on board, border channels per se, but it was more interested in media figures and media constructions of narco trafficking, in particular drug trafficking media across Latin America. And it was focused on different types of media figures. So how does the you know the character of the drug mule become mobilized in different media? How does the sort of cartel leader Narco trafficker become an important figure and things like music or TV shows, and one of those was the tunnel, the narco tunnel, as a very specific figure that comes when a lot of the distribution of drugs across the American continent gets funneled very much through Mexico. And the land connection between Mexico and the US, helps the or leads to the construction of a lot of tunnels to sort of circumvent the the above ground border. So that's what I was looking at originally, I think I became a lot more fascinated as I looked more and more at these specific tunnels. And how different media, let's say media contacts and media stakeholders were positioning, the importance or the relevance of these tunnels beyond just the focus on the drug trafficking itself. So one of the key aspects and I think eventually this became most of the focus on the book is media representations coming from the US and focused on the US on the border channels. And that's when I guess that's when I moved into thinking about border tunnels specifically, rather than seeing Narco tunnels or drug trafficking tunnels, because a lot of the interest and attention was on the potentials and the threads of these tunnels undermining this sort of very carefully constructed and enforced national boundary, undermining the idea of the border itself, and questions around, you know, violating national sovereignty, conflating the passage of drugs through these tunnels versus the passage of people, all of those kinds of things became concerns around the media representations of these, you know, largely inaccessible constructions. So it really became, I think, a lot more about thinking about border studies. And what is media studies can bring to the study of the border, especially when we can critically analyze the role that media plays in in these ideas and policies as well.
One thing that might be helpful is to think a little bit more about why you've chosen to focus on us representations in media of the border tunnel. And if you could provide us a little more insight in what you've talked about in the book, which is, even for those who live in the border lands, even for those who are proximate to where these border tunnels might be, as you noted earlier, it's nearly inaccessible. So I'd like to know a little bit more about why focus on us representations, and how the inaccessibility of those tunnels to a public matters to your book.
Yeah. So one of the fascinating things when you look at the figure of the quarter tunnel and I think of it as figure because it can be both thinking of media representations of actually existing tunnels and then media representations of you know, imagine generi border tunnels is that it comes to mean different things at different historical moments. So my book focuses very exclusively on the border tunnels at the US Mexico border, and the last 20 plus years, essentially the 21st century in itself, but they're not the first and not the only focus of border channels, right, we have a longer history of that there's, of course, the very famous tunnels under the Berlin Wall, sort of mid 20th century, and what those meant for people at the time, and the kind of media construction around them, as well. So I think as I was trying to define and focus the project itself, it became very important to situate it in a specific geographic and historical moment, and tease out the implications of that. So even looking at the contemporary moment, they're also very famous border channels in the sort of Israel occupied territories in Palestine, right. And those become sites of resistance in a different way. But the kind of rhetorics and Media Productions around them vary quite differently from from those of the US Mexico border, so very much helped to to situate it in one specific site. And then from there, tease out general implications and general conclusions for what does this mean about the relationship between media borders, and the tunnels themselves. And I think the decision to move to focus mostly on us sourced Media Productions, was precisely because of where I, where I started, which was a lot of the Mexican media that I had been analyzing for the dissertation, noted or thought through these tunnels specifically under the context of the war on drugs and the context of narco trafficking specifically, and that's because that's where they came from. These border tunnels became popularized by being affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel. And the Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, and very much became a sort of batch for for that cartel and cartel leader. And that's what the tunnels meant, necessarily, right. And that's because a lot of the illicit flows through the tunnels, where south and north were basically taking drugs up into the US. And then eventually, it also became about bringing guns back into into Mexico. But the media work around those tunnels in from the southern side of the border is focused on what does this mean for for narco trafficking? What does this mean for the drug wars, per se. And as the arguments and the focus of my work became a lot more thinking about media constructions of the border, it became clear that it was on the US side that that's where the concerns were emerging, because the tunnels represented a South North flow that was unsanctioned that was illicit and the implications for how to maintain this idea of the border that needs to be closed off to unwanted illicit flows. Right?
Yeah, thank you so much for, for offering so much of that. And I feel there's a moment in your book when you're talking about the theoretical wager, of thinking through the border tunnel. And I'd like to just read a few of those sentences related to that, because I feel it distills so much of what you're saying. And I was hoping you could maybe offer a little bit more elaboration on what the quote is trying to get to here. So you write the theoretical wager of this book, is that border tunnels offer a parallax perspective on how mediation shapes, issues concerning nation state borders, by offering a limit case, a border figure nearly impossible to comprehend. Without the assistance of media. This parallax perspective emerges from both the intrinsic mediated nature of border tunnels and their structural capacity to reorganize spaces and ideas about the border. So can you tell us a little bit more about one? What a parallax perspective in this context means and how that shapes the theoretical framework of your book?
Sure. I think so the departure point was, if I'm writing a book about media and the border, especially media and the US Mexico border, it somehow seemed like it's been overdetermined and it's also been overdone right. There are a lot of great focus on media arts and culture about the US Mexico border media technologies at the US Mexico border and is both from media studies scholars thinking of like Camila folhas work on border optics, for example, but also a lot of focus from other disciplines, like geography or international relations or political science, that are interested in how the media quote unquote, which usually becomes mostly just focusing on news is covering the border or talking about the border. The wager here about using border tunnels as a parallax perspective is that it essentially changes the starting ground, it isn't about how does the media covering the wall, or how is the media covering the stories of the people living on the border or migrants, you know, presenting themselves at the border and asking for asylum. It is essentially a figure that is very prominent in media, but has been not as focused on in terms in terms of scholarship. And so that allows, I think, the tunnel becomes very generative for two reasons. One, as you mentioned, is the accessibility of it. And two is that because of that, in accessibility, it allows for any number of creative practices, both from those that are producing, quote, unquote, realistic representations, whether that's news or reality TV, but also from those creating unrealistic representations, right, when there's in video games, or special effects in films or speculative design, the fact that there is very little for public's to attach to physical reference for the tunnels allows media creators to, you know, run amok with the representations. And so that has a potential for reimagining what we think about the space of the border itself. So the border tunnel becomes this limit case, because whereas we can say, you know, also how media represents the border wall is very important for how we think about the wall. That's definitely true how media represents migrants is very important for how we think about migrants, rights and so forth. People can have different publics will have very different relationships to that aspect, and the physical manifestation of the aspect versus the media representation, right? But borderless percent is useful limit case where it's like most people just do not have an actual relationship to the physical representation of them, unless you work for the cartels that build them. Or unless you work for the tunnel task forces that go in and try and close them, you probably have never been inside a tunnel or have seen one up close. And so most public's relationship to them come through media. So it presents a very helpful, let's say, a case study, and to really think about the intrinsic, that actually necessary relationship of media productions, to understanding this border figure for for all sorts of publics. And once we take that as the ground to begin with, then the conclusions that we can draw from that is actually that applies to even the things that we do have a physical relationship to, even if we have been to the wall and seen it up close, everything that we've seen of media around, it already comes with us, and shapes how we're seeing that perception, let's say face to face as well.
Yeah, that's a really helpful description of the framing of the book on the tunnel. And I feel one thing that's central and works its way through each of the chapters has to do with the the physical, the material and the infrastructural right, both in the ways that we emotionally engage with these mediations, how they're inaccessible, often invisible lies, but also their real material lives. So one thing I'd like you to tell us a little bit about is how infrastructures studies and attention to what might be thought of as the every day as the mundane to draw makes a parks write the stuff you can kick? How is some of that really broadening your perspective and helping us understand mediations of border tunnels?
Yeah, I think infrastructure studies is, I mean, it's one of the fields that I focus on a lot. And it really informs a lot of my thinking of how to theorize the the border tunnel from, from the media perspective, infrastructure studies asked us to, to look critically at, you know, cortical, whatever stands under, right, the both physical and conceptual networks that sustain the social, political, technological systems that we usually take for granted. And it's sort of a one on maximum infrastructure studies that, you know, we as regular folks don't focus on infrastructure on a day to day basis because if it's working, we can go about our lives. We start to notice when it breaks down, right when There's potholes in the streets, when the electricity gets shut down when the Internet doesn't work. But it is important to also be critically attentive when everything is is sort of working. And so my initial interest in bringing infrastructure studies to bear on border studies in particular, is to think about what are those things that stand under what are those networks that allow the border to work as it does right now. And those go from the like literal stuff, you can kick the wall, the census, even the surveillance cameras, and drones are now becoming even more and more prevalent to the sort of more amorphous, but still very real things like bureaucratic bureaucracy, and all the paperwork for allowing certain people to move through the border and others not to. And so thinking about the border infrastructure really is very crucial to understanding how its politics play out on a day to day basis, how the boring mundane parts of you have to show a passport to go through are actually implicated in sort of long histories of violence, long histories of dispossession, and, and so forth. And so all of those were things that I wanted to bring to the fore, as I'm thinking through the different examples of border tunnel mediations, then, again, thinking about the border tunnel as this limit case, once you start being paying close attention to all of the things that undergird and shape, everyday practices and media productions. You also notice how especially in those productions that are using footage from actual borders, the physicality of the border tunnel itself is also very important to think about how those media productions and media texts come to be. So I became really interested in specifically how news, for example, was depicting border tunnels, and contending with the fact that they're usually pretty narrow and very constrained. They don't allow for the sort of sweeping representations that you could have and say, a drone shot or, or anything of that sort, they're also very sort of poorly lit, as well. So then you have to deal with those kinds of things. So all of those creative decisions are actually coming out of the structure itself, or the physical limitations that, that it imposes. And my favorite example of this was the Anderson Cooper report that I that I write about in the book where they literally use the railway system that exists in the tunnel that normally was used to transport drugs in a little cart, they use that to position the camera on top of the rail, and actually depict the movement across the tunnel through through that camera. So in some way, the terminal itself becomes an infrastructure to allow for its own mediation, it becomes basically the thing that allows it to, to to be portrayed in this media report.
Yeah, I watched that example, from Anderson Cooper, three 360 degrees. And it really is such a strange reflection, one on the infrastructure of the tunnel, both and how a lot of this, as you say, is done through the features of production, the positioning of the camera. And one thing that that infrastructure builds, especially in that kind of media that affords it that you talk about is some of the constructions of anxiety, but also in the ways that it centers a reporter and the whiteness of the reporter in this context of Anderson Cooper. And so can you talk to us a little bit about how you comment on those features in the book?
Yeah, for sure. I think one of the things that becomes very central in that report, but others that I looked at as well as also because the the tunnel is largely inaccessible, you have to get permission from the town task forces and border protection to go in there. It also tends to privilege a kind of, especially in the news, let's say in the news, a kind of representation of the sort of bare devil reporter that is going into this very unsafe, clandestine space to to report from there and Anderson Cooper is a great example of this, because he was doing this back, like even before the 2010s I think 2008 2006 early early on, when he was also sort of building that reputation for going into dangerous places and putting his physical body at at risk in order to get you the the report. So that report in particular really foregrounds the the reporter as the person that will get us to understand this disfigure the structure of of the tunnel. And since then other reports have done similar things. So I know there's also a very famous Matt Gutman report where he keeps emphasizing that, you know, they're telling us to be really, like, safe and there's different risk, and I almost got my head injured when I was going into it. So always, part of the thrill of reporting on border tunnels is the sort of illicit Enos of we're going into this thing that used to be used for all these clandestine activities as well. But whiteness plays a key aspect to that most of these reporters are white, most of these reporters are men, as well. And that once I started noticing that in the different reports that actually became a through line to moving into other types of representations as well, because this very much feeds into things like reality TV, and things like border wars and border live, once again, it becomes the sort of white man who's putting themselves at risk by engaging with this dangerous structure of the border tunnel. And it's all about their own physicality and their own ability to to navigate these spaces. And it reframes not only the border tunnel, but then the border as this dangerous space that needs to be contended with. And when you put that together, this sort of border is a dangerous space that needs to be contended with. And the sort of white man that is the only one that can take on this risk. you're importing centuries long ideals about you know taming the frontier, it's only the you know, white savior there is going to come in and be able to do that. So without actually them having to acknowledge this and probably not even being fully conscious. They are already importing all of these discourses and ideas that have gone back decades, if not centuries as well.
Thank you so much. That's definitely what I was attending to and reading through your work. I was thinking so much and you cite her as well about Kelly Hernandez, her [book] Migra!, talking through the history of the Border Patrol, the ways that it's a masculine, alized, settler colonialist enterprise. With these histories of racialized violence, they're very much embedded in the enforcement agency. Yeah. So in your attention to the border tunnel, you give us so much insight into that. And you mentioned earlier, that these reporters or with reality television, there's a focus on the tunnel task force. So that might be unfamiliar to our listeners, it has the ring of a bureaucracy, right with with the naming of task force, but it's entangled within this very violent system of customs and border protection of the Department of Homeland Security. Can you tell us a little bit about the ways that the tunnel Task Force emerged, and then we can start talking a bit more about how this is represented in a reality television series that focuses so much on those enforcement and agencies that you brought already to our attention, right, border wars, and border live.
So the task Task Force emerges as this interagency force, the agents that are at that are assigned to the tunnel Task Force come from different parts of all the different agencies that fall under Department of Homeland Security. So this could be Border Patrol, this could be ice, especially special investigations, ice, immigration, enforcement, ice, and they essentially recruit for our agents from these different agencies to be part of the task force whose entire purpose is finding and shutting down border tunnels during the Obama years actually was a special biannual report from the White House on all sorts of border matters. But he had a special section on what are we doing about the tunnels. And so we reported on what the tunnel taskforce has had had been doing, I sort of cut off the the research at 2020. But I did notice that as the Trump president kind of precedent comes in, there's no more reporting on the tunnels in the sort of White House of releases. So it is very much a part of a bureaucratic creation of we need to have a dedicated team, those that goes in and and 2014. DHS even creates a short series of videos explaining what this is of basically interviewing one of the main agents Kevin hacks and explaining what is the tunnel Taskforce? What is it that we do? What are the tunnels, and he describes it as is this sort of like next level of participating in the border enforcement apparatus of you know, not everyone is cut out for this work. And again, it's reinforcing the you know, the physicality, right? He emphasizes that, you know, tunnels can be really cramped, and people can become claustrophobic and so you really have to be able to manage the psychological toward moving into these very constrained spaces, and managing all of that, and coming out the other side unscathed. But then the construction of the town taskforce as having to deal with this very specific problem gives the problem this enormous importance and this idea of quote, unquote, border security, right, it becomes this thing that, well, we need a specialized Task Force force, then it must be a huge problem that, you know, it's undoing all the work of the border. And even by DEA reports, the amount of drugs that would come through any of those one tunnels would never would pale in comparison to the amount of drugs to just come through regular ports of entry, right, it's a lot cheaper and a lot easier to just bribe a customs officer to allow a trailer or two trucks to just come in with tons and tons of drugs than it is to construct these very elaborate pieces of engineering that usually cost upwards of a million dollars in order to be able to do it on the ground. But you dedicate us a task force to it, you give this x sort of expanded importance to the border tunnel. And suddenly you use it looks like you're doing some very important things for for the construction of border security. But in doing so you're also perpetuating the idea. You're also flattening a lot of the discourses around border security. So one of the things they noticed that whenever they interviewed on Task Force agents about what they're doing, they they seamlessly move back and forward to just being everyone that we find on those tunnels is probably a criminal. So flattening people who may be using those to transport, let's say illegal drugs to potential border crossers, we're just trying to move through through these other avenues. And although those are criminalized in the same way, so it becomes yet another side where where those distinctions are flattening anyone who doesn't respect the imposition of of the violent imposition of the border, is immediately criminalized as well.
And what is some of the work that these reality television series do to not just flattened how we're thinking about criminalization of the people inhabiting border spaces or moving through border spaces. But I also want to hear a little more about the spectacle that they construct and maintaining themselves as police procedurals, do as these professionalized knowledge workers, but also at the same time relying on the conventions of drama to make those moments of bureaucracy, the infrastructures that very much guide enforcement practices, appealing through reality television, you do a lot of work in thinking about border wars. And in addition to being the kind of border Vaillant media media that Camila fo has talks about you hone in on what this show does with the border tunnel. And can you tell us a bit about some of those instances and maybe how they differ from these television news representations?
So border wars, hugely popular series on National Geographic? It's something that I think a lot of border studies scholars, even those who are not media scholars have written about or thought about, because it was so popular because it was such a overt tendentious representation, intended to intentionally from the side of border patrol or from the side of the border enforcement agencies. And because it spawned so many, so many replicas in the years since. Increasingly, I think a lot of the so it's no, let's say it's no real insight to say, you know, this is propaganda and is being laundered as popular entertainment. I think that's definitely true. And others have pointed out that that out, I think my interest was in, in given that, given that it is popular entertainment, that it is pushing a very narrow and specific perspective on the boardroom and enforcement apparatus. I was interested in thinking about it. as precisely as that how does this work with some media production? And given that, how is it effective or not in basically selling the the idea of border enforcement? And I think of that from two from two sides, I guess, again, from the political economy and the and close reading perspectives. It's very interesting that border Wars is actually very carefully constructed on the back end of thinking about who what are the stories that we're going to put on screen? How are we going to tell them there, they would have these pre production meetings with the different units under DHS to say, well, this is what we're doing. This is what we're doing right now. Would this make for good television without, you know, undermining the kind of work that we're trying to do? And then they would choose those specific stories for whatever many episodes they needed, that the, the agents that will be shown on screen, and then go out and record those and then construct drama from those recordings right. As with other police procedurals, a lot of that drama is, you know, very careful editing, to make sure that it's there's always some action happening, kind of trying to edit out all the mundane, repetitive aspects of the job, really positioning the agents as these very organized Labor's and very specifically focused on the task at hand, as a way to also distract from the ideological implications of that work. The tunnel here allows them even more freedom to do those kinds of things. So one of the sequences that are analyzed from border Wars is specifically focuses on a tunnel, you get to see a variety of angles inside the tunnel, a sort of shot reverse shot perspective, which they presented as, like we are going, we just found this tunnel, we're going in with the agents to see what's happening. And yet, suddenly, you have a 180 shift in where the camera is, and you're seeing the agents coming in from the front. And there's just there's no possible way they could have done that if they just literally gone into the border tunnel to film them. So it's very clearly, they already know there's no one else or nothing else in that tunnels. It's a very staged recreation, which they can do, because the only characters in that sequence are the tunnel taskforce agents themselves. It's not when they're apprehending anyone crossing the border, or when they're doing routine inspections, that they need people to keep moving. The tunnel in this case presents an excellent, you know, real life film stage where they can go in and replicate the thing that they simplicity that before in order to secure, secure the tunnel, but again, going into the close reading than that, which once you are able to close read, the sequence that betray is the sort of construction of it, how they're building the drama, from, from the structure itself, and from using the border agents, as actors, essentially, in these sequences.
Can you tell us how that contrasts a little bit with what was a failed series border live? And how of that attention or even the artifice of immediacy through that what they did with tunnels and representations of border tunnels, but but also about probably a little known series less so than border wars? Border live?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I would say, I'm excited by limit cases or exceptions. So I think that's why I end with in that chapter to thinking about border live, because it's such a contrast to what border wars and others after it was trying to do. So I will say two things. One is the liveness itself is always immediate construction, right? The media scholars have written about this how the idea of watching something live is not just an unmediated access to the world, if you turn on the callin it's happening right there. Right television, US has perfected the idea of what liveness does, and how that creates the idea of crisis and how that, you know, gives a different kind of urgency to the stories being told. And I guess the the simplest and the most crude way is how cable news is obsessed with breaking news. And there's always a banner and everything is breaking all of the time. liveness itself is immediate construction, border Live, which was Aaron Discovery Channel was trying to bring liveness which news reports about tunnels just can't do into the border security reality TV show like border wars. And that was going to be its its difference. It wasn't going to be another border wars, this one was going to be live when you tuned in, they were going to be there's going to be a host in the studio with a panel of experts, and they were going to connect live to agents in the field. And so when you pitch that, that seems like it's going to be a different experience. The thing that did not account for is most of the interesting drama of border wars, comes from editing after the fact cutting out all of the boring, mundane parts, building a protagonist and you know, creating an actual narrative arc with a climax and some sort of resolution, which you can't really do as much on the fly, especially when most of border patrol work as just broke mundane, roving around the border trying to find something to do so that show really, really struggled to try and keep that tension up. So reveal the artifice behind the sort of editing the the drama of the border security series. It also revealed the artifice of the sort of expert worker and border security because it had its panel of excerpts experts in the end onset. Amen. And the host. I mean, the host was actually very competent and trying to, you know, create conversation as they were trying to connect the different feeds. But they were not giving him much. The show lasted for only three episodes before it was unceremoniously cancelled. And if you watch all three episodes, you know that the circle x panel of experts don't really have a lot of, like non insights to bring, other than just saying, yeah, no, this is routine. And yeah, this is they're doing all by the book. And yeah, that's what sometimes when you find and, and it's all very banal conversation, for lack of a lack of a better word. So borderline was really instructive. And also revealing that artifice of you know, these expert experts that have to deal with these extraordinary circumstances. And mostly, it was just, you know, these are regular policing, kind of tactics, and they didn't really have much to go on beyond beyond that. So it became a, again, a really instructive, limited case to show when all these things break down.
Yeah, and it was so helpful reading those two, paired with one another, to think critically about the nature of mediation as it relates to border enforcement. And also, as you're noting, attends to the intricacies of, of the banal of the mundane, but how these enforce those racialized infrastructures of the border, I wanted to turn our attention from what she talked about in the book is sometimes more restrictive representations in media, to others that you refer to as being a bit more open. And you talk about action films that you you take us through Fast and Furious to think about the plastic infrastructures of the border. And I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how that does the work to not just reinforce, reaffirm, enforce undo. It's a very complex media dynamic that we see in it. But I want to understand a bit more about why you focused on an action film like Fast and the Furious. And moving across these different media types, I think gives so much value to your book. But I just wanted to get some insight into the the shift here that we see into a very popular film, right?
I would say two reasons. So one, I focused on Fast and Furious, because I had been obsessed with the Fast and Furious series for a very long time. I will say peaks and around five, six, and then seven, of course with its dramatic implications, but then it kind of goes a little bit downhill from there. But so I think my own personal love for the series helped in the decision of which case study to bring in. But in terms of the book, The so this is the third chapter, and what looking at the action film with special effects that does is becomes a turning point in thinking beyond the physical restrictions of the material restrictions. So the physical border channel and how that affects its media representation. So in fast and furious, which is the fourth film in the series. They include border tunnels as part of the of the narrative. And so the protagonists are joining up to join this drug trafficking gang that uses border tunnels to drive drugs across the border, which is completely preposterous, and there's no way that cars that big would ever fit through any of these tunnels. But that's part of the artifice in and of itself. And one of the fascinating things that I that I noticed as I was researching more about the film is they actually tried to see if they could find tunnels where they could film that they could film them moving through and found that, you know, found exactly the limitations that TV news and reality TV have, which is it's impossible to have this many angles on something within the tunnel. And so they that's when they move into digital special effects and basically using green screens to to try and construct a very, essentially an animated version of, of the town. So that was a very helpful way of thinking about how you move from one type of representation to another. It also gets us to think about different forms of engaging with media because what I'm trying to argue there in thinking about the sort of plastic infrastructure of the border channel is that even though these are not realistic tunnels anymore, these are not actually physical tunnels that are being filmed and and presented to us. We as audiences have been trained by cinema for so long to still be impacted by the essentially things that rationally we know are not true, quote unquote, were never really there. But they have very real effect in how we think about its reference to whatever we connect it to in the real world, right? Anything that is exists in fiction film cannot we can't say that it has a one to one relationship with our own sense of the world. But yet we import so much of that value and resonance into our everyday interactions to right. I mean, this is the whole premise of ideology in and of itself. So then that's what I'm trying to argue that it still matters to look at these representations of border tunnels that are preposterous, because they're still providing that sense of thrill and possibility when you're looking at these drivers going through an underground and basically changing the geography of what we imagined the underground of the border can look like. It opens up new avenues for thinking about well, what if the border wasn't as this closed off, and firm thing that we we imagined it to be? What are the new avenues that that can be opened from there, and I do about being cautious of not, you know, veering too much into utopian optimism of like, now, you have this one popular Hollywood film that reimagines everything. So we've have done undone violence of the borders, and suddenly everything is fine, because it isn't that even within the film itself, it contains contradictions. It uses its Mexican characters in very stereotypical ways. The sort of villain is very much a caricature of the of the cartel leader. So it's still building on those very real stereotypes and ideologies about who are the villains in the border setting, even as visually, it is also giving us other ways of thinking about the border space through through these tunnels as well,
in thinking through some of these affordances of animation, but also the contradictions that exist within those different media types. Your book also turns to video games, like called coladas and specifically the third part in the series, the cartel. And you talk quite a bit about what interactive media affords? And what limits interactive media has. And with this kind of new media with video games, what are some of the ways that that even pushes further, or limits how we think through the border security apparatus? How we think through border enforcement? And how we think through border tunnels?
Yeah. So I think the move to interactive media is important, because even though the examples that I'm looking at are all fiction, again, they're becoming the logics, the technologies, the formal strategies are becoming part and parcel of how the border is being enforced nowadays, too. Because once you move away from the BUILD THE WALL rhetoric, there's still very much a lot of construction of maintaining the border through virtual technologies, right through cameras, and drones, and so forth. And so the ways of seeing the border through the computer generated imagery, understanding the implications of those becomes even more important, this sort of mixed reality of using computer technologies to relate to a physical space, on and of itself. And so video games are very helpful, and that both is a case study. But also, I think, because there's so much important critical scholarship on video games that has already done the work of teasing out what is the importance of these virtual representations of the world, when we think about the relationship to the physical world, in and of itself, and this goes from folks like terrifical and Trammell, Christopher Patterson. were arguing that there it isn't, it's not productive to think about, oh, well, video games are the separate sphere, and all the sexism and racism that happens in the real world. You can't really import that into into games, because there's a sort of magic circle that inoculates it from the real world. Actually, those two are very permeable, and those dynamics do impact. But at the same time, it's not the old fashioned like video game violence produces violence in the real world, right? The production of these virtual narratives is very much implicated in the the physical world ideologies and practices and so forth. And video games have this from a very long time colonial ideologies about the frontier, about this sort of untamed space that you can go in, explore, take over, and to make it productive is part and parcel of so many different video games. And it's again, the same sort of settler colonial or the wilderness is just there for the frontier is just wild and it's just there for us to take over. It's something that video games now promise because it's this virtual space that quote unquote no one has gone to. So now you can do that, as well. So it helps us trace how this idea keeps being replicated over and over. And when I was looking at video games about the border, the Coronavirus series does that, historically in its first few games, and then it gets to the cartel and it uses some sort of modern setting. It completely just imports though, the worst stereotypes you can think about in terms of the border, from you know, the main protagonists are these rope, law enforcement agents will have to track down a cartel leader. And in the process, you know, figure out engage all these like bad drug traffickers who all need to be it's a first person shooter, so they all need to be shot and killed, basically, for you to move through the different different levels. The cartel, again, as limit case is extremely racist, even on the pure superficial level, I mentioned the what a lot of critics pointed out, which is the there are levels where you're moving through this like fictional version of Los Angeles, and you have to kill a bunch of drug gang members, quote, unquote, but they're all all the avatars are black men. So you're essentially just gaining points, and even a reward for killing a number of black men under this premise. And then you get to the border crossing. So these are all bought us law enforcement agents that are moving into Mexico, and they're crossing the border, the sort of untameable frontier underground, they have to go into the tunnel into a series of tunnels in order to get into into Mexico. And that also proved really interesting to think about virtual representations of border tunnels, because here you have a medium that essentially, is not beholden to any of the physical restrictions of border towns, you essentially could program these tunnels to look in any sort of way. And yeah, it's by importing both the ideologies of, you know, the untameable frontier of the border, the lawlessness of in the fact that it's a first person shooter. So the logics of the first person shooter is creating spaces that facilitate that, that create restrictions on how you can shoot and not be shot on, basically turn the tunnels or the entire border underground into a series of tunnels, repetitive sort of forks in the road kind of tunnels, where you run through, sometimes it's a very narrow space, so you just have to shoot everyone in order to move through. Sometimes they're wider spaces. So you can actually crouch and hide and run around and use the computational aspects of video game programming to make these repetitive. So if you move through the entire tunnel level, it takes a long, long time. And it imagines again, like with the action film tunnels, it reimagines the underground into this huge space, of possibility. And yet, it ends up being extremely restricted when all of this extra space that you have just becomes a site for conflict and a site for literally just shooting your way through it in order to get to the other side. So it becomes, in some ways, a very concise but very helpful example of this racial infrastructure. So the border, the way of constructing spaces of the border, are already importing all of these different racial ideologies, of who is able to move across them, and who is not supposed to be there and therefore needs to be eliminated in some way.
Yeah. And I found a really succinct phrasing helpful in both this chapter and the lateral journal article that this is based on. You note, if we understand racialization as a logic logic as a series of rules that encode hierarchies by limiting what subjects can do, and what others cannot, then first person shooter video games pointedly illuminate the racial infrastructures of the border. So again, I found that just a really helpful distillation of how this interactive media does the work that borders are always already doing, especially the case of the US Mexican border, through this specific face a space in this context of the border tunnel.
Yeah, for sure. The Video Game chapter is based on the latter article, as you mentioned, and then expanded into the chapter in the book. And one of the things that I added into the book is that thinking about reception or thinking about the the players themselves. So you can see that the game itself is doing this, but how do players respond? And one of the things that I found fascinating is how players would so easily just follow the design of the game itself, right. So the easiest way and the best way to succeed through that level, is to just shoot everyone that you find as an enemy shoot and move through the tunnels as fast as you can. And trying anything different is going to be increasingly complicated. And from all the videos that I saw of people playing it, no one seemed to get very far if they didn't just try this strategy, right. So really much became a way of thinking the ludic logic of the game is already not only perpetuating but almost enforcing that that ratio structure, right, I think I call it you know, the, the efficiency of playing White supremacy, it's like, the most efficient way to play the game, is to just be killer of all these slick avatars of color, as you move through the border space itself
to kind of turn our conversation to other examples that, you know, that are drawn from, from design and other kinds of media that, again, work with different kinds of creative forums to open up space for conversation. And to think through speculation that you talk about in the final chapter, I was hoping you could take us through maybe one or two examples of some of the different design projects that your book thinks through. And what that really powerful fifth chapter allows us to envision from the framework, not just of the media object, but from critical media studies as a field as well. So in the
last chapter, I was saying from the beginning, animation, and video game design have a sort of irreducible speculative aspect, right? Because you're producing these essentially virtual representations of physical spaces, you're speculating on their own dynamics and how they work and how they look, even if you may or may not have a physical reference to it. In the last chapter, I move fully into a medium that is, admits his own speculation, right speculative design projects that basically are saying we're imagining this thing differently, whether this is like a consumer object, whether this is space, or a world or, or so forth, we're, you know, foregrounding, that we're using all these multimedia affordances to create this thing otherwise, and again, it was fascinating to see how much of the speculative design projects about the border did very little to question the assumptions about what the border spatial look like, or how it should work for. So there were a lot there's a lot of speculative design projects than in their rhetoric claim to sort of reimagine, or resist the border wall. But still, although the project is very much focused on like, how what of the wall was on library, and what of the wall was the seesaw? Or why does the wall was so and so and never go as far as like, well, if you're already speculating, and reimagining what the world is, like, why did you imagine the dissolution of the wall? Why still be so attached to that structure as the defining element of the Borderlands? And you know, the lifeworlds, of, of the Borderlands? So I think there's been enough work on this from, you know, anywhere from activists to scientists to border residents of basically saying, the border wall is not only you know, this crass symbol for nationalism, but it actually is just a physical thing that is affecting our everyday lives that is affecting the ecosystems of the border that is affecting the life of border residents and the sustainability of that space in the future. Why do we keep imagining future worlds or different worlds that still just have it at its center. So I look at a number of speculative designs and how they deal or not deal with this, one of the ones that I found that was very fascinating was called beautifying the border. And this was around 2016, when the Trump administration was doing that call for like all these design and architectural studios to send them their version of what they would build the wall as. So we remember those images of the six different prototypes. For example, this one studio architectural studio decided to really be outside of the box, in terms of what the look of it was, and say, Well, you know, any one of these is going to look ugly, on the border, because it blocks it essentially, is a huge, huge wall that it just doesn't let you see on the other side. So they're beautifying the border project was to still create a division that prevented unauthorized crossing, but they would do it underground, they would essentially create this boundary long tunnel that you couldn't see if you're standing just on the ground, you could see all the way across the horizon. But as you approach it, it basically dips underground, and then you still have to go through the usual customs, offices and so forth before you come up on the other side. And that presented a fascinating example of this sort of problem this speculating different worlds that's still just imports this Same old ideas just in a slightly different way, the main concern for that project is just the wall is not the problem, the wall is only a problem because it doesn't look cute, because it doesn't allow for you to be able to see to the other side of the, of the desert, and, and so forth. So why don't we just put that underground. But all of the negative externalities of having a border wall would still be there in terms of, you know, the loss of human life and the disruption to to natural ecosystems and so forth. So I looked at that specific project and what it's assuming and doing, and then it turned to more abstract projects. And this particular project of practicing excavating and envisioning ambos Nogales takes the case of ambos Nogales, which is Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, as these two essentially one big metropolitan area that is divided by the by the border, but it's excavating and envisioning its practice is essentially to rethink of it, and re envisioning it from the underground. So it's very much focused on, you know, there's already all of these underground constructions. So what if we take that as a starting point to reimagine what the connection between these two novellas could look like? And so I found that particularly helpful and instructive and thinking about what is the potential of these underground constructions to get us to think differently. And what this project also does, like it doesn't become this magical utopian perspective, either, because it does acknowledge that so much of what the border looks like now, is essentially the physical remains of centuries long destruction and dispossession, right, it is, in some way already in ruins. A lot of the ecosystems are already in ruins because of what has been done for the past century or so to perpetuate the, the state boundary. So we can start from there start from the fact that we are in this moment of rumination. And how do you build from there? How do you imagine something different, acknowledging the very physical restrictions that that are happening. So I find that project to be extremely generative and thinking about it, and I think I end by saying, it's not just that it's just showing us possibilities. But it's actually pointing us to what we can do right now. Like, I think the throughout the book, I keep focusing on these big sophisticated tunnels that you know, a person can walk through a card can run through, and so forth. But there are already tons of tunnels that crossed the border, basically, because they were there before the division was created. And that is sewers, right, so much of the waste disposal across urban cross border urban areas like the two Nogales they share a lot of that waste disposal and underground sewer systems. And those are infrastructures that I'm that are in complete disrepair because of the problems with lack of cross border cooperation. And the fact that so much of the US budget goes into quote unquote, national security and not to to the mundane, simple things. So just maintaining the source, just maintaining proper waste disposal. In the 90s. It was easy to with NAFTA, it was easy to just put all the factories on the Mexican side of the border, because labor was cheaper. But then the rivers run northward. So all of the waste coming from those factories was running into the US. And without dealing as a cross border issue of how do you deal with all of that it just becomes even more damaging to the area itself. So here's an opportunity to actually deal with some border towns that that would actually help make the border more sustainable, fixing the basic infrastructure that deals with water and waste disposal at the border. And yet, all of the media focus in popular media, and mainstream rhetoric is about the sophisticated tunnels that are carting a couple kilograms of drugs across across the border. Thank you for
taking us through those those projects and thinking about them too. One of the things you note in your introduction is, and I'll quote an alternative conception of the Borderlands is necessary. critically analyzing the border underground, represents the first step toward formulating this alternative conception. And so I will say throughout your book, you really take us through with these projects through ideas like ruinous speculation, through attention to infrastructure, in ways that foreground maintenance and care to the lifeworlds of those who inhabit border spaces to those who cross border spaces or people on the move. And it's a fantastic book. I want to say that again. It's one that all of our listeners should definitely pre order or, or encourage your university libraries, your public libraries to order copies of this book? Is there anything that we should know about that process? It's through the University of Minnesota Press. Anything else you want to tell us about your book before we turn to some of your other projects?
I think I end in the very short conclusion by pointing to like, I think this is the sort of first step right, I don't think I want to conclude by saying that it's once we can critically analyze what all of these media about the border, how are the replicating these long violent histories, and we're able to note them that that's, that's it, I think that's actually just the first step towards repairing and changing those those long legacies and histories. But I think it's still, it's actually a thing that we still have to contend with. It's a very critical issue, too, for general publics for students, or any who is interested in the politics of the border to understand the sort of crucial role that media plays in articulating that not only in perpetuating these ideas, but then also as a space to rethink reimagine those those ideas for sure. So it's kind of ending with an invitation to like, let's think critically about these aspects, the value of critical media studies to border studies. And then but then also start to imagine, where do we go? Where do we go from here.
And I think Toward that end, some of your other publicly engaged work, and I imagine your your future projects or current projects as well, are continuing with the invitation that your book closes with
one of the things as I was finishing the book that I worked on, which is already out and was thinking precisely about this, this issue in the final chapter of sustainability. And that's a cross border cooperation problem. And I worked on this prototype for a board game that would essentially try and fix the sewer problem in the border, as a collaborative, a collaborative board game. So everyone has to work together in order to bring it together. And that was very helpful both as a knowledge production exercise, and I think that's also as a publicly or as a first step towards a more publicly engaged when you're engaging with these with these aspects. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot more of how to move forward in it. This was sort of it's a, it's a board game. But essentially, all the materials are online, because I published it through one shot, which is a journal for games and games designers. So you can download all the materials there. But I'm also starting to think about collaborations with artists and other designers to create a sort of digital version of that as well, that can have a different kind of reach, as well. And then, as I'm moving into a new project, thinking about, again, interactive media, more delving into the last few aspects of this first book, and thinking about interactive media, and its role in getting us to think about the politics of migration. I've also been working on this publicly engaged project with a colleague of mine tonight, now at the San Jose State. And we've been thinking about creating this platform where you engage with stories about migration, in your daily lives, in your everyday life, specifically, through the nexus of walking. So, so many narratives about migration, specifically, those who migrate across the American continent. So from South or Central America, up through Mexico and into the US, walking and running, and taking the train are central aspects of that process, very physical, Geo, situated aspects of that migration process. And so we're using that connection to the fact that so many of us are now extremely aware of our own practices of movements, right, because we have fitness trackers that are counting how many steps we did in a day, or they'll count the miles that we run, and so forth, and intervening in that very individualized perspective of like, all I care about are my own steps and how I did more than others, and so forth. And using that technology, instead to draw attention to look at all these other groups that are engaging in actually formidable feats of walking across an entire continent for a variety of reasons. So using that as an opening, to provide a portal to re encounter all of these narratives, or for many people in Canada for the first time if they never have. So we've been thinking we've been working on this project for a couple of years, and moving into creating a prototype of it, to really think about how do we move the critical work that we've been doing and thinking about both the individualizing aspects of something like fitness trackers, how do you move them to think more so and then on the other side thinking about the politics of migration, and how do you engage publics that normally would not do the effort to go and try and engage with these issues, to think about them more conscientiously and reflexively on their day to day lives for sure.
And we'll definitely link all of those projects in the podcast description for our listeners so they can download through one shot the collaborative board game you mentioned, as well as the migrant Steps project. I wanted to close with just again, an expression of gratitude, and a reminder to our listeners of the really wonderful border tunnels that does such important work and is a meaningful and rich contribution to border studies and media studies. So thank you so much wine for joining us today on reverb.
Thank you. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about this and thank you so much for your wonderful, wonderful questions.
Our show today was produced and edited by Ben Williams with minor editorial assistants from Alex Helberg reverbs co producers at large are Calvin Pollock, Sophie was Zack and Olivia Burnett. You can subscribe to reverb and leave us a review on Apple podcasts Stitcher, Android or wherever you listen to podcasts, check out our website at WWW dot reverb cast.com. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter where our handle is at reverb cast. That's R E ve R B underscore C A S T. If you've enjoyed our show and want to help amplify more of our public scholarship work, please consider leaving us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice and tell a friend about us. We sincerely appreciate the support of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in.
