anthropologist, geographer, social theorist, social critic
Nicholas De Genova
The Borders of America:
Migration, Control, and Resistance
Across Latin America and the Caribbean
(Duke University Press, 2026)
co-edited with Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Gustavo Dias, and Eduardo Domenech
“The Borders of America stares past the icy violence of border enforcement to reveal how migrants traverse and live beyond America’s manifold boundaries. With hemispheric sweep from Canada through Latin America, this collection shows how migrant mobilities shape border regimes, creating conflicted political spaces where power and authority are always at stake. The volume’s crucial insight: no border stands alone —America’s borders enact and configure a wider global architecture of movement, resistance, and control.”
-- Brett Neilson,
author of
Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor
and
The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism
“This insightful collection is conceptually sharp and geographically ambitious, exploring broad migration patterns and policing trends while shifting attention to the lives of people working in and migrating across the Americas. Authors based throughout the region critically engage with colonial histories and imperial geographies wending their way through border externalization.”
-- Alison Mountz,
author of
The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago
and
Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States
Read the Editors' Introduction
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The Borders of America examines the tension between human migration and the diverse formations of border control and immigration and asylum policy that have arisen across the Americas since the start of the twenty-first century. The collection develops a single analytical framework that is hemispheric in scope, encompassing the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and the full extent of Latin America. The contributors offer the concept of a “border regime” as an epistemological and methodological approach that comprehends borders not merely as physical demarcations between state territories and jurisdictions but rather as expansive, uneven, and heterogeneous spaces of constant encounter, exchange, dispute, tension, conflict, and contestation. Presenting detailed empirical research into contemporary intra-regional and transcontinental mobilities across the hemisphere, The Borders of America scrutinizes an array of critical nodes in the larger configuration of the trans-American border regime.
Contents
Soledad Ávarez Velasco, Nicholas De Genova,
Eduardo Domenech, and Gustavo Dias
Chapter 1
Latin American Refugeeship in Canada and the Hemispheric Border Regime
Patricia Landolt and Luin Goldring
Chapter 2
Mobility Control Regime and Clandestine Practices in the US-Mexico Border
Laura Velasco Ortiz
Chapter 3
Subverting International Bordering Practices:
“Illegal Legality” in Southern Mexico
Tanya Basok and Martha Luz Rojas Wiesner
Chapter 4
Migrant Caravans and the Border Control Regime in Mexico: The Case of the Fifty-Day Caravan During the COVID Pandemic
Margarita Núñez Chaim, Amarela Varela Huerta, and
Valentina Glockner Fagetti
Chapter 5
The Indeterminacy of Transit Through Latin America as Seen from the Colombia-Panama Border
Juan Thomas Oróñez and Jonathan Echeverri Zuluaga
Chapter 6
Illegalized in the Country of “Universal Citizenship”
Soledad Ávarez Velasco
Chapter 7
Border Control, COVID-19, and the Criminalization of Irregularized Migration in Chile
Daniel Quinteros, Romina Ramos, and Roberto Dufraix-Tapia
Chapter 8
The Politics of Hostility in Argentina:
Detention, Expulsion, and Border Rejection
Eduardo Domenech
Chapter 9
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing:
Transformation of Refuge Through the Protection-Control Relationship in the South American Space
Janneth Clavijo
Chapter 10
Logistical Lives, Humanitarian Borders:
Managing Populations in South-South Circulations
Carolina Moulin
Chapter 11
“Europe" in ”Latin America":
Illegalized Mobilities, Deportable Bodies, and Contested Sovereignties in the French-Brazilian Borderland
Fabio Santos
Chapter 12
The Trans-American Border Regime:
Toward a Genealogy
Nicholas De Genova, Soledad Ávarez Velasco,
Eduardo Domenech, and Gustavo Dias