Gilberto Rosas's "Unsettling"

Gilberto Rosas is an associate professor of anthropology and Latina/o studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the 2023 recipient of the AAHHE Sylvia Hurtado University Faculty Award. He is the author of the award winning Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier.

Rosas applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the U.S.-Mexico Border does give readers an accurate idea of the content of the book which is a meditation on how the hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border has produced conflict, trauma, and violence. The page describes a scene of what I call “necrosubjection,” how migrants who cross the border irregularly must be made dead in order to live, or, even more complexly, how they make themselves dead by experiencing brutal conditions. There is a paragraph describing a scene from a videotape. The videotape is from the Nogales police department and it shows a group of migrants making their way to Nogales, NM from Nogales, Mexico in a concrete sewer tunnel. Among them is a “chúntaro” – basically someone who is uninitiated to the ordeal of border crossing and therefore a target for victimization. He is accosted by a gang of rough youths and has a gold chain ripped off his neck by them. Nearby, another youth wields a metal pipe and strikes a migrant on the legs with it. A child screams. These migrants, by their very actions, make themselves subject to possible death. Necrosubjection. Beaten and brutalized but alive, they escape into the United States.

In the next paragraph, I quote from the 1994 Border Patrol Strategic Action Plan, “The border is where thousands of those have died; social violence will increase." The border is a site of injustice, pain, and sometimes death. It was not always this way. As I describe in my book, I grew up in El Paso, Texas and my mother’s family has deep roots there. We moved back and forth, and forth and back, over the Rio Grande, across the international boundary. We were a few of the hundreds, if not thousands, who crossed the international boundary every day at all hours. It was the way.

Today borders and their crossers provoke. They instigate. Borders—and what they portend—unsettle

Learn more about Unsettling at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue