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  • Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier by Gilberto Rosas
  • Margaret Wilder
Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier. Gilberto Rosas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. 211 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. $84.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-5225-9) and $23.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0-8223-5237-2).

In this eye-popping 2012 volume, anthropologist Gilberto Rosas evokes a nightmarish landscape of fear, brutality, and violence at the Mexico-U.S. border among the “tunnel rat” youths who comprise a free-floating gang-like community called Barrio Libre (Free ‘Hood’). Rosas paints a ghastly picture of the lives and circumscribed life choices of these young men and women driven by disenfranchisement from Mexico’s neoliberal economy and U.S. border securitization practices into the transboundary sewer tunnels between Nogales, Sonora, (Mexico) and Nogales, Arizona (U.S.). Viscerally characterized as “moist” and “fetid,” the tunnel openings are the “orifices” to the dark passageways used by the Barrio Libre youth as they “ooze” and “seep” across what Rosas calls the “new frontier.”

The Barrio Libre youth survive by preying on even more desperate people, migrants from southern and central Mexico or Central America, arriving in the tight jeans and sombreros that immediately mark them as chúntaros (or rural hicks) in the sharp and practiced eyes of the Barrio Libre youths, ripe for the picking. They arrive at the border with full pockets, ready to pay the polleros (human smugglers) whom they will trust to guide them across the border into the U.S., ready to be mugged. The Barrio Libre youths move between legal [End Page 230] activities (e.g., windshield washing) and illegal activities (e.g., robbing undocumented crossers, smuggling drugs on their person) to sustain themselves.

The book contains an introduction and conclusion, five chapters, and two “interludes.” In the introduction, Rosas lays out his theoretical framework and methodology for understanding how Barrio Libre is constituted by the advance of Mexico’s neoliberal modernization that systematically dispossessed the rural poor from their lands and livelihoods and disenfranchised the urban poor from jobs and a decent life in the emerging economy. Barrio Libre youths were structurally shunted into the “low intensity warfare” of the “new” border, marked, on the Sonora side, by increases in policing and agencies of immigration enforcement, notably Grupo Beta, and on the Arizona side, by massive investment in “securing” the border via surveillance, drones, and an extended border wall and huge increases in manpower coupled with increasing militarization of border strategies, particularly in the post-9/11 period. Barrio Libre’s positioning, Rosas argues, is a stance of “refusal” of the “nightmarish” realities and choices offered to them in conditions of low-intensity warfare.

The first chapter gives a history of the development of immigration and border policy over the last century, arguing that the racialized biopolitics of today had their origins in equally discriminatory practices from their inception. The second chapter details the role of the Mexican state in fostering and structuring contemporary policy towards migrants and border policing practices, as the remittance-hungry government strove to create a border discourse of modernization, cleanliness, and control to facilitate trade and tourism in the post-NAFTA years. The third chapter excavates the diversity of social subjects distinctly positioned at the border. In the book’s strongest and freshest empirical work, Rosas provides a rich lens into the inner lives and logics of the cholos—the Barrio Libre youths—contrasting them with the chúntaros upon whom they prey. The fourth chapter describes the United States’ role in the “thickening” of the new frontier, and the fifth, “Oozing Barrio Libre,” evokes the “pathological space” in which Barrio Libre lives. He writes: “It is a radically circumscribed agency, a delinquent refusal of young men and women who face imminent death as nightmarish human waste at the new frontier” (p. 130). In his conclusion, Rosas details further thickening of this “new” border through the spread of drug trafficking and attempts at interception and enforcement, the increasing reign of violence exercised by the drug cartels, and the U.S. government’s obsession with securing the...

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