Abstract
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) is located in southern Arizona just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The refuge is designated as a federal wilderness area. However, in spite of conservation efforts and as a direct result of immigration policies, Cabeza Prieta faces high levels of human traffic causing environmental degradation. Together, conservation and military/security efforts seek to control the border region. I analyze conservation and security efforts through the lens of Foucault’s concept of a “disciplined space.” Ultimately, studying nature conservation along the border illuminates ways which race and racial inequality are present in the politics of conservation and security. This chapter lays out the theoretical framework scaffolding the rest of the book and explains my ethnographic and mixed-method approach to data collection and analysis.
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- 1.
There is an interesting resurgence of interest in the work of Edward Abby that is relevant to this book. See, for example, “Dumping Grounds: Donald Trump, Edward Abbey and the Immigrant as Pollution” by Michael Potts (2017) and “Goodbye Abbey, Hello Intersectional Environmentalism” by Sarah Krakoff (2018) among others.
- 2.
While Border Patrol is a federal organization, not a state-managed one, it is worth pointing out that the State of Arizona has a well-documented history of using racial bias. The most well-known example is Senate Bill 1070. Passed in 2010, the law allows law enforcement officers ascertain immigration status when there is “reasonable suspicion” that someone is an undocumented immigrant. While officially law enforcement personnel are not supposed to use race in their determination of a “suspicious person,” in practice, it is a form of racial profiling.
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Meierotto, L. (2020). Introduction: Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. In: Immigration, Environment, and Security on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31814-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31814-7_1
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