Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border by Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins (review)

Central to President-Elect Donald Trump's platform is building a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border and holding Mexico responsible for the expenses. Although a wall already exists on many parts of the border due to the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the wall was never completed due to a lack of funding. Nevertheless, people crossing from Mexico into the U.S. are still policed by border patrol and drone surveillance. In addition, during the Obama administration over two million people were deported, more than ever in the history of the U.S. Reflecting nativist anxieties across the nation, the prospect of fortifying the wall clearly appealed to many voters. Edward S. Casey's and Mary Watkins' book Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border intervenes in the current debate over immigration and offers a timely meditation on the significance of the wall for both sides of the border.

Up Against the Wall argues that building walls between nations erodes our humanity and environment. Casey and Watkins assert that the U.S.-Mexico wall is self-defeating because "walls beget walls" (252). In other words, the presence of the wall stands in stark contrast to people, animals, and botany that reside on the borderlands and for whom crossing the border is a matter of survival. On a material level, the U.S. constantly needs to add more policing and surveillance as migrants find new ways to cross borders. On a symbolic level, the wall also engages in "walling out others" (252). A wall is the ultimate symbol of exclusion. Casey and Watkins urge us all to pause before building the wall. They implore us to reflect on the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, consider the consequences of colonization, and imagine new possibilities for living in relation to one another.

The book offers an interdisciplinary perspective guided by Casey's training as a philosopher and Watkins as a psychologist. This interdisciplinary contribution should not be overlooked. Philosophy and psychology are fields that are currently not very prominent in border studies, especially in work on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Most of the work in this area is situated in history, anthropology, sociology, English, Spanish, Chicana/o Studies, and Latina/o Studies. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is written by Casey and illustrates how the wall divides communities (sometimes literally people's backyards), animals, plants and water. This part of the book offers case studies of three border cities: Nogales, Tijuana, and Brownsville in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Watkins penned the second part of the book, which offers a historical and sociological overview of Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest. This section also includes a chapter on border art (on the Mexican side of the border) and a chapter that offers concrete ways ordinary people can foster "hospitality" across borders. Part I, which makes important distinctions between walls, borders and boundaries, is notably much more theoretical than Part II which is more historical and engages in praxis.

The book's strength lies in its treatment of the wall as both a material and symbolic border and boundary. In regards to the wall's material function, Casey and Watkins demonstrate that the wall not only serves to enclose people on opposite sides of the border, but also it disrupts an eco-system that spans across and in between the border. Thus, there are grave ecological effects of the wall on animal migration, plant life, and water supplies. This ecological perspective is rare, but much needed, in studies of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Up Against the Wall also seriously considers the symbolic weight of the wall, that is, it serves to exclude and dehumanize poor and working class Mexicans. Fortifying the wall to keep out unwanted immigrants also erases the history of colonization in the U.S. In these ways, the...