Many make their living by crawling through the sewers beneath the border cities of Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Ariz., and mugging migrants seeking new lives in the United States. Some of these young men and women, who call themselves Barrio Libre (“Free Hood”), traffic in drugs in the desolate deserts where more than 5,000 people trying to enter the U.S. have died.
“Prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement, prior to the vast militarization of the border, these young people would have just been street people, on the streets of Nogales, asking for money,” says UI anthropology and Latina/Latino studies professor Gilberto Rosas, the author of “Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier,” published by Duke University Press.
Barrio Libre members are “written off by both the Mexican state and the U.S. state,” Rosas said. “They’re disposable, basically. And that sense of being so alienated returns in a way when they act out their own lives.
“They become criminals, they become delinquents, they become the delinquent refusal of the new frontier.”
Rosas’ book examines how the elimination of obstructions to trade and free markets has contributed to the genesis of this delinquent group. After the North American Free Trade Agreement among the U.S., Canada and Mexico went into effect in 1994, factories in border cities were able to import and export goods without tariffs being imposed on them. The increase in the flow of goods led to a militarization of the border, Rosas said.
“Given the depths of poverty that certain economies of the contemporary world produce, it creates the conditions for these kinds of ways of life to emerge,” Rosas said. “That is amplified by the police power that heretofore had never been used before at the border.”
The author’s firsthand accounts of the lives and beliefs of the members of Barrio Libre who choose not to “face imminent death as nightmarish human waste at the new frontier” shows the humanity of the group that outsiders see only as delinquents or gangsters.
“In writing about a population who becomes delinquent, who becomes criminals, I’m trying to avoid demonizing them,” Rosas said. “I’m really trying to capture them. In other words, what I’m trying to say is that criminals are made socially.”
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