Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier by Gilberto Rosas (review)

Gilberto Rosas’s decade-long ethnographic study of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona offers a detailed examination of an often-overlooked community of youth. Weaving together ethnography with analysis, Rosas captures the pulse and serrated edges of what he calls the ‘new frontier.’ He sensitively presents the realities of a subset of border citizens, often mischaracterized as dangerous delinquents, who survive in the subterranean depths of sewage tunnels joining two nations: Barrio Libre.

Barrio Libre according to Rosas represents, “freedom from the displacement of the neoliberal economy, the manifest violence of homelessness, and particularly the warlike exercises of sovereignty that anchor the new frontier” (p. 131). Rosas crafts a complex depiction of youths ranging in age from 9 to 16, and others slightly older, who have forged an existence within and between the underground and aboveground economies of “Ambos Nogales.” Seven members of Barrio Libre were at the core of his interactions and illustrations. Many are sons or daughters of maquiladora workers, while others have migrated to the border from other regions of Mexico, or even Central America. Often, they supplement their incomes from legitimate work by mugging those Rosas calls the “new migrants of post NAFTA Mexico” as they attempt to cross the underground sewer system passageway into the U.S.

Through his work, Rosas challenges the conventional scholarship on youth victimhood at the border, and offers instead an astute counter-narrative of the violent and “pathological” ends of youth inhabiting or working in the tunnels of Barrio Libre. Youth are often referred to as “ratas,” “delincuentes,” “cholos,” or “tunnel kids,” and they embrace ‘cholo wear’ and urban street styles of clothing, thereby falling outside of the common discourses of victimhood. Youth exhibit a “complex, circumscribed, delinquent agency and a vexing political discourse” (p. 131); their lives are emblematic of their violent surroundings, shaped as they are by globalization, militarized policing and power, and sovereignty-making.

Rosas’s ethnographic work joins field notes with analysis but leaves ethnographic descriptions largely untouched and open to interpretation. The strength of his work is in his ability to analyze with authority and depth both sides of the border politic that historically gave birth to the intense violence that exists today. He deftly articulates the dehumanizing practices of both Mexican and U.S. economies and powers that practice neoliberalism, which has led to the new low-intensity warfare and militarized policing prevalent at this cross-border region. Rosas writes, “Barrio Libre flowed under the low-intensity warfare that border policing has become, a kind of warfare that dramatizes the necessarily incomplete nature of sovereignty in the age of late neoliberal globalization. It is a kind of warfare that collapses the distinctions between the police and the military, between regulating life and killing it” (p. 7). The crux of this work interrogates how state powers and neoliberal economies incite violence that is absorbed by youth, who forge new criminal subjectivities for self-preservation and survival. The juxtaposition of these young people living and working in the exploitative economies of border industries and the illegitimate economies that have emerged to supplement their poor wages speaks of their abandonment and exclusion from society. In response, they have immersed themselves in the depths of Barrio Libre, where they have discovered a sense of freedom and power, albeit through criminal means and, at times, drug consumption.

Before concluding his book, Rosas offers an unhindered glimpse into the everyday in Nogales, Sonora. The example of one man proudly boasting of his valued fighting cocks echoes in its ephemerality and desperation the valiant daily iterations of life in Barrio Libre. It symbolizes the routine sparrings at the New Frontier, and as Rosas repeatedly states, “the nightmarish realities” that exist at the Border. He reserves his concluding chapter for the voices of people who are fighting state violence on the ground in southern Arizona and who...