| Abstract | Migration shapes the US-Mexico border, which leads to an oversaturated presence of US Border Patrol. At the interior border checkpoint, Border Patrol agents stop vehicles, interrogate drivers and passengers on citizenship status, and inspect these vehicles and occupants. I frame the interior border checkpoint as a metonym of warfare at the border via immigration enforcement to investigate the contentious yet symbiotic relationship between citizenship and enemyship. During rhetorical exchanges at the checkpoint, Border Patrol agents base their assessments of citizenship and enemyship on markers of race, language, class, and gender. To investigate the border checkpoint, I define rhetoric as a force that captures to account for the mechanisms at this site that lead to an imaginative, legal, and material capture. I examine the textual, physical, and metaphysical activity that animates and disrupts the checkpoint: Supreme Court cases, author-captured photographs, and archives of la Llorona subverting immigration enforcement. |
