National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.

In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.

Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.

Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—­national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.

 

Roberto D. Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, where he teaches comparative border studies and decolonial theory. He co-edited Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without.

“Hernández has produced a stunningly brilliant call to action and an intellectually vibrant interdisciplinary interrogation of the origins, nature, and extent of borderlands violence.”—Choice

“Hernández weaves together corridos, fiction, government documents, maps, and other sources to examine geographic, territorial, and historical burdens that have led to a complicit endorsement of border violence. His book is an exciting intervention into many fields of study.”—Emma Pérez, author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History

“Hernández’s theorization of the coloniality of power in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands gives scholars and other thinkers a new way to consider border violence. It is a must for any serious intellectual work on the border.”—Gilberto Rosas, author of Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier