Drone Technopolitics: A History of Race and Intrusion on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1948-2016

Abstract

This dissertation introduces unmanned aerial systems (UASs) as key instruments in the matter of governing the United States-Mexico border from 1948 to 2016. While many scholars and activists have scrutinized U.S. military drone operations outside the United States, this project examines the little known past and ongoing usage of UASs within U.S. territory. It studies how drones enacted associations to the U.S. frontier, nation-making, and racial politics. The dissertation does so by interrogating discourses across a variety of sources that include military and technical reports, governmental and corporate memoranda, popular culture, user manuals, activist and artistic interventions, oral history interviews and newspaper coverage. Drones on the borderlands, I argue, were first scripted to perform the role of an enemy and later on they were designed to target those populations imagined as enemy intruders. UASs were media infrastructures that sought to establish and govern racial differences within and beyond the territorial confines of the U.S. nation. Drones were, in short, an imperial formation.

Because drones combine air power with information technologies, my project begins by exploring the emergence of the aviation industry in San Diego and its associations with frontier politics in the early-twentieth century. The first chapter tells the story of this industry and how it grew invested in drones during the Cold War—UASs shaped how racialized border “intruders” were imagined and engaged by the U.S. military. The second chapter follows the idea of “intruders” in the 1970s when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, informed by the science of cybernetics, installed intrusion detection systems on the southern border and treated the border as an information system. The third chapter studies how, in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, drones became the strategic system through which to target the racialized “enemies” of the nation. The final chapter engages contemporary activist and artistic interventions that opened possibilities for a different way of relating in the securitized borderlands.

In short, this dissertation examines the social construction of drones and intrusion detection systems as technologies of border control. Across the fields of U.S. immigration history and Latinx Studies, scholars have shown how ideas about race, citizenship and the nation shaped the establishment of a restrictive immigration regime since the turn of the nineteenth-century. Meanwhile, scholars of Science, Technology, and Society have been critical in understanding how political rationalities, such as national imaginaries, both shape the development of and are embedded in technological artifacts. And yet, a gap exists in these two literatures as to how racial formation, U.S. immigration, and these artifacts were co-constructed. An analysis of technopolitics, or the political objectives coded into objects, allows for a nuanced understanding of how immigration policy was articulated through infrastructures. This project remedies this gap by tracing how differential relations between human and nonhuman entities were articulated in/through electronic and digital technologies such as drones and intrusion detection systems. To study relations of difference, it mobilizes archival research and actor-network-theory to redraw the ideas, objectives and relationships of historical actors producing drones. Through discourse analysis of the thoughts and practices of actors such as engineers, technicians, military officials, journalists, and artists, among others, I assemble an image of how these individuals imagined drones and how their politics informed the creation of these machines.