I : A Portrait of the Border…
Every year for the past few summers, the line to leave the Moroccan town of Fnideq and enter the Spanish city of Ceuta, an enclave eight miles south of Spain on the North African coast, has grown longer and longer. Arriving in the morning, those who hope to cross the border into the European Union by car wait for hours in a line that winds through Fnideq until it reaches the intersection of a parking-lot which also serves as an informal taxi-stand. Every few blocks, young Moroccan men would hawk photocopied versions of the formally requisite Moroccan entry/exit forms one must fill out before leaving the kingdom alongside nuts and sweets wrapped in discarded Spanish newspapers and container-ship inventories. Waiting to enter Morocco from Spanish Ceuta looks very similar, especially as many of these same hawkers vend their wares across the border as the shops and sites of Ceuta close around dusk and the line begins to clog the only official road in or out of this 7.1 square mile (18.5 square kilometer) enclave.
This automobile traffic only comprises one dimension of the vast numbers of people who attempt to use this border each day, a number that some officials estimate reaches 20,000 per day in the high season (Ferrer- Gallardo 2008). Such a number can only be an estimate, however, for several reasons. While border-crossing by car is a highly visible form of traffic, many of these 20,000 are Moroccan residents of Fnideq or Belyounech, towns which border the enclave. Residency in these towns entitles residents to a special identification card which allows them free passage to and from Ceuta, though technically prohibits them from spending the night as a temporary resident or guest. These Moroccan ID-holders cross on foot via a special entrance next to the outdoor walking terminal designated for everyone else, including Moroccans, EU-passport holders, and anyone else with a visa to enter the European Union. In cars, Moroccans residing abroad arrive on ferries from mainland Spain (Marocains Résidant à l’Ètranger, or MRE), before waiting in Spanish traffic to continue voyages along a new system of highways connecting Ceuta to Tangier, and then on to major interior cities such as Fez, Rabat, and Casablanca.
In the other direction, they wait to continue the journey “ home ” to Europe, even if the Moroccan government legally and politically considers them Moroccans, albeit Moroccans who simply reside abroad.
Waiting in this line, one might not notice the commercial-industrial zone built just above around the bridge of Biutz. Here, at the 1916 Battle of Biutz, then-Second Lieutenant Francisco Franco Bahamonde first earned the admiration of the Christian and Muslim militiamen who later enabled him to launch his military coup in Spain.
At Biutz, he surprisingly survived an apparently fatal wound to the pelvic region and became known as blessed son of Ceuta (Ellwood 2014). Remnants of Franco still adorn the streets of Ceuta, where fascist sympathizers unabashedly recall the Spanish protectorate that stretched across northern Morocco. It is a site key to both Spanish and Moroccan national imaginaries, one that stands as a reminder for the Moroccan monarchy of the challenges to its territorial sovereignty it faces in Ceuta and in the Sahara. Today, the Bridge of Biutz hosts a cross-border commercial zone that includes both Morocco and Spain in a trans- national infrastructure of exchange. Symbolically, politically, and legally re-territorializing this zone allows both the Moroccan and Spanish merchants access to a depot of warehouses where commodities imported duty-free from the mainland European Union are sold and carried, bag by bag, into Morocco for redistribution across the country (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2013; Ferrer-Gallardo 2011).
It is at Biutz that the peculiar workings of this border become most evident. Indeed, much of the 20,000 people per-day referenced above cross the border over and over again within this zone, some without even leaving it. With the aforementioned regional ID card, Moroccans from Fnideq and Belyounech enter directly into this zone through a separate line on the hilltop, make the rounds to different warehouses and then return to Morocco with bundles that are sorted and then directly passed along en masse to larger distributors. The Unidad de Intervención Policial (UIP), a special Spanish police force trained in anti-riot tactics, coordinates this flow with Moroccan Gendarme (royal military police). While the Gendarme are responsible for nearly all aspects of Moroccan border control, on the Spanish side the UIP handle the commercial depot, Guardia Civil (state police) coordinate regular passage in and out of Ceuta, and the “ Municipal Police ” are left managing tra ic. The division of labor between these dimensions of state surveillance, control, and border management has begun to collapse recently, however, leading to the kilometers-long lines with which we began.
This is, in part, due to increasingly large groups attempting to climb the fence from Morocco into Ceuta just next to Biutz. Though this practice dates back nearly two decades (Gold 2000), dozens, and more recently hundreds, of im/migrants from across West African nations such as Cameroon, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal are increasingly disrupting the long-standing operations of this border (BBC News 2017; Bilefsky 2017). These would be migrants force Moroccan and Spanish police to scramble from their official stations in attempts to repel, and then detain, migrants who become official asylum-seek- ers from the moment they land on Spanish territory. Summer on the sunny North African coast now means bigger and bigger bottle- necks, and longer lines, on all sides of this border. Just as migrants such as these do not suddenly appear in boats in the Mediterranean, they do not suddenly appear atop Spanish fences.
Many spend years, if not decades, in Morocco working, waiting, and making multiple attempts to cross this border. While working in construction, many West Africans build the apartment units of Moroccans residing abroad (MRE) pay monthly rent to Moroccan construction project managers in order to live in the buildings as they are under construction. The vast infrastructural development projects taking place along the coast from Tangier to Ceuta, a distance of roughly 50 kilometers, means that there is no short- age of these sorts of labor opportunities. The construction of new commercial mari- time ports, condominiums, malls, and beach resort communities designed to serve cross-border visitors to the Moroccan Mediterranean coast actively depends on this labor force, as do the sales and distribution of the commodities that are brought from Ceuta to Morocco. These migrants do not comprise the reserve labor force of Europe, as some have postulated (Feldman 2011; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), as much as they are the living labor force on which all of the other flows undergirding the operations of the Moroccan-Spanish border depend.
II. (A Portrait of the Border)… as a Method
In his essay “ What is a Border? ” Étienne Balibar cautions that “ the theorist who attempts to define what a border is in danger of going round in circle, as the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition ” (Balibar 2002). Responding to this warning, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson outline a theory of the border both as method and as epistemology (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). By this they mean to propose that any investigation of “ the border ” as an object must also take care to under- stand the border as the device by which both subject and object of analysis is produced.
This necessitates an analytical perspective on the process by which subjects and objects are constituted vis-à-vis borders while nonetheless maintaining an open relationship between empirical research and the concepts deployed to describe it (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 17). In her review of recent anthropological scholarship on Europe and its borders, Sarah Green advocates for a similarly expansive notion of border studies; “ The way the ground underneath people’s feet can be shifted turns out to be as import- ant as the way people themselves move from one place to another, or the way people form politically inflected identities in relation to territories ” (Green 2013). Although Green is writing more specifically about the re-bordering of territories in post-socialist central and eastern Europe such as the former Yugoslavia, the point maintains its weight more broadly in the Mediterranean.
In anthropology, the US-Mexico border has been a key site for ethnographic work on borderlands. Through critical engagement with the work of Robert Alvarez on this border, Green outlines how contemporary border studies began by challenging notions of fixed cultural units on either side of the Mexican-US border, before scaling it to the level of a global template, and then subsequently abandoning the model in favor of an interrogation of what constitutes a border to begin (Alvarez 1995; 1999; 2012). Border studies in northern Morocco have followed a similar trajectory, struggling to maintain a balance between locally grounded research and globally salient analyses (Andersson 2014; Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles 2013; Driessen 1992; Ferrer- Gallardo 2008; Gold 2000; Mcmurray 2000; Rosander 1991). Reading through Green’s review, one gets that sense that border studies is caught between pointing to some urgently important object in the world and not quite knowing what to do about it. Put another way, scholars of the border sometimes seem to have trouble looking past the anxiety it is causing a hegemonic power, whether the United States or the European Union, to see the social, material, and discursive transformations occurring on all sides of the border. Other studies have attempted to shift the focus from borders to (im)migration, outlining the workings of a “ migration apparatus ” that works chiefly though exclusion.
The Foucauldian notion of the “ apparatus ” (the French dispositif, as opposed to Althusser’s appareil, which is also translated into English as “ apparatus ”) has been taken up by anthropologists to discuss migration, particularly between Europe and its former colonies. Such studies have produced a significant body of literature on European governmentality and the production of so-called “ Fortress Europe ” (Agier 2011; Fassin 2011; Feldman 2011). As these scholars show, the institutions of the EU deploy the language of human rights, economic equality, and foreign development to justify neocolonial foreign direct investment and capital expansion, all the while securing a reserve labor force that can be allowed in Europe when needed but kept at bay until such time. However, as Brenda Chalfin notes in her ethnography of international customs regimes and the officials who do and do not enforce them in Ghana, regulating migration is just one of many border operations (Chalfin 2010). It coexistent with day-to-day practices of bordering, and border negotiation, that occur from checkpoints and ports to banks, o ice buildings, and distribution depots, and it is hardly determinative of any of these operations. It is worth remembering at this moment that the vast majority of migratory flow occurs within Africa, long before the borders of Europe come into the picture.
It is against the collapsing of border studies to discussions of Fortress Europe, and migration to event of crossing a European border, that Mezzadra and Neilson propose their intervention, suggesting that borders a) work by inclusion as well as exclusion (2013, 159); b) produce both subjects and objects that circulate according to “ asynchronous rhythms of transit, prolongation, and acceleration ” (2013, 148); and c) should be conceptualized across polysemic and heterogeneous borderscapes that may appear most prominently in the image of the camp or the wall, but in fact operate far beyond these representative dimensions (2013, 4). Green also critiques this focus on migration in border studies, noting that such studies often leave the borders themselves unexamined as borders (Green 2013, 349). Attending to these to critiques requires mapping the infrastructural systems at work in border operations, including the forms of productive breakdown by which they are characterized.
III. (A Portrait of the Border)… as an Infrastructure
Varying scholarly definitions of infra- structure have appeared over the past decade, each of which theorizes the role of breakdown slightly differently. In his influential essay on studies of infrastructure in anthropology, Brian Larkin points to the need to incorporate the larger systems that facilitate flow and exchange through infrastructural systems, considering break- down but not only as the mode through infrastructure is made visible but imminent to its very operations (Larkin 2013).
Larkin argues that infrastructures are also concrete systems of signs and aesthetic vehicles oriented toward particular addressees. As such, they are concrete technical objects which also serve as conduits for relations between things, objects, subjects, and their ambient environments (2013, 335-337). In the case of the border, we may ask to whom is the border addressed?
We might also ask, where is the border? The border wall – or its many layers of fences, infra-red scanners, and watch towers – may appear to be addressing one group of migrants and not another. It may even address a public that doesn’t seem present at the border at all requesting it to keep its distance with, “ don’t even think about trying to cross this ” or “ don’t worry, this is all very humane while nonetheless moderately secure ”.
In another sense, infrastructures are networks that enable a certain way of being, organizing social life according to the material qualities of a sign system rather that its referent (Larkin 2013, 334). This poetic dimension of infrastructure helps explain the types of social life that come into existence around checkpoints in Palestine, for instance (Tawil-Souri 2011), or in a transport depot in Ivory Coast (Simone 2004). At Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, a site formerly used as an international airport now hosts a grue- some military checkpoint between the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem. Here, benches are more for hawking than for sitting. At least until tear gas or at worst bullets start flying, and then they are strategically located bunkers. In the Abidjan depot, as AbouMaliq Simone discusses, networks of young men constantly form and reform constellations of social relations as “ steerers, baggage loaders, ticket salespersons, hawkers, drivers, petrol pumpers, and mechanics ”, attempting to “ derive maximal outcomes from a minimal set of elements ” (Simone 2004, 410-411).
More broadly in the same essay, Simone draws on the example of Johannesburg’s inner city neighborhoods to outline a concept of “ people as infrastructure ”. The material needs, desires, and skill-sets that come together in these neighborhoods, as in the Abidjan transport depot, forge sets of habits and transactional exchanges that remain largely unseen in governmental and territo- rial schemata of belonging (419). Simone’s notion of people as infrastructure is more inclusive than other studies of infrastructure, which propose that through breakdown normally hidden infrastructures become visible (Graham and Thrift 2007; Star 1999). As Graham and Thrift propose, however, breakdown should not be considered atypical but rather imminent to infrastructural flow (2007, 5). Thus seen, hawking and vending, hustling travelers, and hassling police are endemic to border infrastructures from the wall to the end of the line, even if the line ends at a customs house in the center of downtown Ceuta or a construction site in Tangier.
In this sense, the border is a networked infrastructure which conditions subjects and objects in relation to the temporalities of its flow. Or rather, it is a network of relational infrastructures which entail the thickening of time and space around a set of exchanges which may or may not involve crossing an international border. Mezzadra and Neilson draw our attention to the heterogeneous ways in which techniques of border manage- ment such as biometrics, batons, blockages, “ fast-lanes ”, heat-detecting sirens, pre-in- spected containers, and duty-free zones are all designed in one way or another to speed up or slow down border flow. Displacing the privilege of space in border studies also unfolds discussions of how these tactics of time-management interact with “ subjective experiences and practices to create dissonance, interferences, and interruptions ” that echo beyond the time and place of border-crossing (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 133). Just as breakdown should not be written out of normal infrastructural operations, these interruptions are indeed instrumental within the disposition of the border itself.
Amongst the litany of definitions and terminologies, acronyms and buzzwords which populate discussions of migration and borders today, it is worth taking seriously the displacement of space in the discussion of migratory flow in the Mediterranean region, as with elsewhere, beyond academic discourse. It is, of course, analytically useful to study a phenomenon, the work scholars take upon themselves to do and the social field within which this piece is situated. However, it is even more imperative to move past this scalar approach to governing everyday life in borderlands which subjects denizens and residents of borders to the tyranny of terminologies that depend on from whence someone is coming and toward where they are going. This means reconstituting a vocabulary that builds from the habits, codewords, names, and actions that accumulate over time spent in a border, beyond its material infrastructure. This time spent waiting, like anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of liminality (Turner, 1969), is productive of what he called communitas. For Turner, these communal sentiments went part in parcel with liminal positions, whether in ritual or in eschatological millenarianism.
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