The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture

3. The Poetics of Trash: Immigrant Bodies in the Borderland Wilderness

139 3 The Poetics of Trash Immigrant Bodies in the Borderland Wilderness The relationships between spatial and corporeal violence, as well as between access and exclusion, that I describe in the previous two chapters is perhaps most clearly at stake in a contemporary case study of the US–Mexico border. Discourses of national purity and pollution infuse debates about national security and dictate how to manage the border, as popular media treat the border as hermetically sealing the United States from the “tides” of racial others— so-called economic immigrants, environmental refugees, and other “ecologically incorrect third worlders” (Adamson, “Encounter” 169)—threatening to corrupt the nation. Contemporary border narratives extend the spatial tropes of colonial expansion in the US West. As Razack contends, since the 1990s a new national story, an extension of previous colonialist versions, has emerged: “The land, once empty and later populated by hardy settlers, is now besieged and crowded by Third World refugees and migrants.” This chapter examines the most current expression of the national story—the US–Mexico border as a barrier protecting nature’s nation. Following Razack, I argue that the current dominant geographical imagination is “clearly traceable in the story of the ecological other 140 origins told in anti-immigration rhetoric, operating as metaphor but also enabling material practices such as the increased policing of the border and of bodies of colour” (75). As Razack suggests, then, antiimmigration rhetoric evinces the spatial stories of the nation and has material geographical and corporeal impacts. In this chapter I draw on Razack’s insight to examine antiimmigration rhetoric for its spatial tropes of the nation. But I add to Razack’s thesis an analysis of the way the environment is invoked to make anti-immigration not just a national security imperative, but an ecological one. That is, immigrants are trespassing protected ecosystems and wildernesses, not just national boundaries. They are thereby not just threats to the nation and to American “blood and soil,” but threats to a very modern view of the “nation-asecosystem ” (Wald 23). I argue that it is because popular discourse about immigration frames the nation as ecosystem that immigrants can become ecological others. The notion of the ecological other that I am forwarding in this book allows us to recognize how discourses of nature, nation, security, and ecology continue to form a “culture of US imperialism,” as Amy Kaplan succinctly described in “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” The environmental debate surrounding immigration in Organ Pipe contributes to the ongoing formation of this culture of US imperialism. Taking as a premise Kaplan’s argument that “the borderlands link the study of ethnicity and immigration inextricably to the study of international relations and empire” (16– 17), understanding immigrants as ecologically other highlights the role of environmentalism in this ongoing colonial project. I also want to add that the dominant anti-immigration discourse draws on the kinds of wilderness adventure sensibilities of exclusion and elitism I describe in chapter 1. That is, the perception that the wilderness along the US–Mexico border must be preserved as both a safety valve for the nation and a playground for its able-bodied elite informs immigration policy there, so much so that the price of access to the United States is risk of death or disablement. These questions of access, exclusion, and corporeal risk are central to humanitarian efforts along the border but are rarely raised in public or scholarly debates about environmental protection and immigration policy. The Poetics of Trash 141 The Environmental Impact of Immigration in Organ Pipe Monument With more immigrants seeking entry into the United States than since the first decade of the twentieth century, it is no surprise that undocumented immigration has increasingly dominated public debate.1 Recently, though, concerns about the ecological impacts of immigration on the borderland environment have become part of these debates. In 2004, for instance, the National Parks Conservation Association ranked Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one of Arizona’s treasured borderland natural areas, in “America’s top ten endangered parks,” due to the “more than 200,000 undocumented border crossings each year [that] cause serious damage to the park’s plants, animals, and historic artifacts” (Himot 32). Eighty-five percent of Arizona’s border with Mexico is protected as parks, refuges, monuments, and natural areas. Nestled within a military range and Tohono O’odham tribal...