TY - JOUR
T1 - Policing Race and Performing State Power
T2 - Immigration Enforcement and Undocumented Latinx Immigrant Precarity in Central Florida
AU - Kline, Nolan
N1 - Funding Information:
Thank you to Christopher Furino and Sister Ann Kendrick at Hope Community Center and Jeannie Economos at the Farmworker Association of Florida for collaborating in the data collection activities in Orlando that informed this manuscript. Thank you to Mary Vickers for assisting with data collection. Research in this article was supported by two Critchfield research grants from Rollins College and a student‐faculty collaborative research grant. I owe a great deal of thanks to Brian Campbell and Christian Laheij for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and for their invitation to present this work at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. A special thanks to Emily Russell and Jana Matthews, whose pedagogy related to metonymy inspired me to think about metonyms and their meaning. Thank you to Agathe Menetrier, Nina Glick Schiller, Günther Schlee, and Ida Susser for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the American Anthropological Association
PY - 2021/8
Y1 - 2021/8
N2 - In the United States, undocumented Latinx immigrants’ precarious social positions are rooted in aggressive immigration enforcement practices that create a contestant threat of detection and deportation. This threat extends into the US interior, and in some US cities, immigrant policing practices rely on law enforcement officers racially profiling Latinx immigrants. Several social scientists have described the numerous consequences of racially-based immigrant policing, but insufficient scholarship examines the role urban and suburban spaces play in constructing the policing regimes that structure undocumented immigrants’ precarity. In this article, I examine the relationship between immigration enforcement regimes, automobiles, and the suburban roadways in a previously rural Central Florida exurb. Using frameworks of automobility, illegality, and necropolitics, I show how Central Florida’s expanding suburban infrastructure contributes to immigrant policing efforts. I further show how spectacles of immigration enforcement, such as parking border patrol vehicles along specific highways, are performances of state power to reinforce racial hierarchies. Overall, I argue that spatial and material conditions—such as driving vehicles that law enforcement officers associate with undocumented immigrants on specific roadways—serve to simultaneously underscore undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability and to signal to white residents how law enforcement officers maintain white supremacy by targeting undocumented Latinx drivers.
AB - In the United States, undocumented Latinx immigrants’ precarious social positions are rooted in aggressive immigration enforcement practices that create a contestant threat of detection and deportation. This threat extends into the US interior, and in some US cities, immigrant policing practices rely on law enforcement officers racially profiling Latinx immigrants. Several social scientists have described the numerous consequences of racially-based immigrant policing, but insufficient scholarship examines the role urban and suburban spaces play in constructing the policing regimes that structure undocumented immigrants’ precarity. In this article, I examine the relationship between immigration enforcement regimes, automobiles, and the suburban roadways in a previously rural Central Florida exurb. Using frameworks of automobility, illegality, and necropolitics, I show how Central Florida’s expanding suburban infrastructure contributes to immigrant policing efforts. I further show how spectacles of immigration enforcement, such as parking border patrol vehicles along specific highways, are performances of state power to reinforce racial hierarchies. Overall, I argue that spatial and material conditions—such as driving vehicles that law enforcement officers associate with undocumented immigrants on specific roadways—serve to simultaneously underscore undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability and to signal to white residents how law enforcement officers maintain white supremacy by targeting undocumented Latinx drivers.
KW - immigration enforcement
KW - Latinx
KW - necropolitics
KW - policing
KW - undocumented immigrants
KW - United States
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113260926&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ciso.12409
DO - 10.1111/ciso.12409
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113260926
SN - 0893-0465
VL - 33
SP - 364
EP - 381
JO - City and Society
JF - City and Society
IS - 2
ER -