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Unruly Waters, Unsanitary Bodies - Abject Terrains, Rehabilitation, and Infrastructures of Dispossession on the US–Mexico Border

Carlos Martinez
In recent years the Tijuana riverbed has been inhabited by homeless and drug using communities, many  deported from the U.S. In response, rehabilitation of the canal and forced drug rehabilitation have been conjoined. In this paper Martinez takes the deployment of the term ‘rehabilitation’ targeting both homeless deportees and the canal as an opportunity to consider how the concurrent disciplining of landscapes and human populations has been a central and evolving feature of the Anthropocene.
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Carlos Martinez is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and core faculty in the university’s Global & Community Health programme. Trained in public health and medical anthropology, his research focuses on the health consequences and sociocultural implications of the deportation regime, asylum deterrence policies, the global drug war, and migrant captivity in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.

Learning points

  • What is the role of massive infrastructure projects such as canals in disciplining ecologies and in what ways are they ‘modular simplifications’?
  • How do different forms of rehabilitation (forced drug and toxic landscapes) become entangled and serve as a tool of control by the state and/or capital accumulation?
  • How does the landscape of the Tijuana River Canal become a ‘Carceral Zone’?
  • What is the role of public health and urban sanitation in this process?

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