This workshop will examine the cultures of technological surveillance and the discursive configuration of threats to “national security” at the U.S.-Mexico border. The irruption of technologies such as drones, virtual walls, surveillance towers, cameras, motion sensors, and tunnel detectors will be studied as part of the construction of what journalist Todd Miller calls the “border-industrial complex,” the lucrative military security infrastructure of transnational violence criminalizing racialized bodies. We will analyze the cultural implications of technologies of the global military-industrial complex in the media and audiovisual productions of the last two decades between Mexico and the United States. Our conceptual framework will examine three key debates about the border-industrial complex with the assigned readings: 1) The rise of the neoliberal border infrastructure (Thomas Nail); 2) The imbrication of transnational militarism and border security (Todd Miller); and 3) the weaponizing of drones (Camilla Fojas). We will consider the film Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008) as the main cultural object of discussion and counterpoint.

Oswaldo Zavala is Professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of La modernidad insufrible. Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (2015), Volver a la modernidad. Genealogías de la literatura mexicana de fin de siglo (2017), Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (2018), and La guerra en las palabras. Una historia intelectual del “narco” (1975-2020) (2022). He co-edited, with Viviane Mahieux, Tierras de nadie: el norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (2012); with José Ramón Ruisánchez, Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (2011); and with Magdalena Perkowska, Tiranas ficciones. Poética y política de la escritura en la obra de Horacio Castellanos Moya (2018). He has published more than fifty articles on contemporary Latin American narrative, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the link between violence, culture and late capitalism.