I shall be spending the coming year in another border region, this time the overlap of soverereign spaces named the United States and Canada. There are other sovereign nations in this place, including the six nations comprising the Haudenosaunee, the Onondaga, Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. These are the many official boundaries that I can pass. Some require a passport; some police their space and movement through it. Some, like the United States, apply the idea of border expansively, and use it to justify policing movement within a long range (typically 100 miles) of the international border with Canada. This means that people who are not crossing an international boundary are treated as if they are. As I reported years ago, the Border Patrol routinely stops train and bus traffic in upstate New York stops of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.
Nina Bernstein reports in the 8/30/10 New York Times that this practice continues. One of the persons interviewed in the piece likens the policing to the SB 1070, concluding, “At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped." This conclusion relies on the presumption that troutine police stops rest on "doing something wrong," rather than reflect the poling of status, a combination of racial-ethnic-national profiling. "Doing something wrong" is essentially being the wrong sort of person in the wrong sort of place, a determination simultaneously arbitrary and cumulative in its categorizing/categorical effects.
The question of how people in one border region can relate to people in another - take what's known as upstate New York and southern Arizona - is part of what drove this trip and this blog. Now that I'll be inhabiting this region again, the project is to figure out what this looks like on the ground.
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