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    Johannes 1

    Daniela Johannes

    Spanish and Portuguese

    The University of Arizona

    Cartographic imaginaries: Border and borderless politics of transborderism in the Sonoran Desert.

    The present paper offers a comparative analysis of two objectual sources of cartography

    coming from different auto-declared pro-migrant agencies. They have been designed in different

    political and poetico-rhetorical instances but both appear as forms of interpellation of Border

    sovereignty discourses, independently of their actual interlocutors. Two maps of the Sonoran

    Border made by the non-profit organization Humane Borderswill be put in contrast with the

    Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT), a device developed by anartist-based group led by Micha

    Crdenas. The formers have been shaped out to estimate the rate of death by causes of the natural

    elements in the desert, despite the sources of hydration distributed throughout the northern

    border of the Desert by the same organization. These maps are to be seen as the perpetuation of

    the denigrated migrants image and itspresumable constitution as virus and contagion, in other

    words, as disposable and excludable. On the other hand, TIT claims to be a safety-net device that

    enables a GPS system in old cellphones and intends to navigate immigrants to the US side of the

    border. This form of cartography resource takes the border map out of its discursive, bi-

    dimensional fixation and embodies it into a tool-at-hand and into a body as tool, as counter-fixity

    weapon, initiating instead a viral politics.

    The crossing of the border will be considered through the two representations mentioned

    above as the transgression of a biopolitical development of society as a whole, its territory and

    the regulation principles of its population. This form of penetration as invasion on the part of the

    migrant serves to an anti-immigration consciousness to actually promote death of other races

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    and others in a broader context, as a means of defense of life. In this sense, militarized, as well as

    civil patrols that secure the border are imagined to do a favor to the rest of the citizenship. In

    Foucauldian (2003) terms, they spread out thebelief that society must be defended against the

    biological threats posed by the other racethat we as society are despite ourselves. This essay

    thus interrogates the hegemonic representational status of the migrant (that non-subjective horde-

    like entity that crosses the territorial Southern border of the US by foot) in relation to a

    biopolitical State racism and to the governmentality of a population, which correspondingly

    reproduces it and pushes to purge Otherness in order to conserve the imaginary integrity of

    society.

    Both maps emitted by Humane Borders (fig. 1 and fig. 2) are interrelated and can be seen

    as complementary to each other.Water and death, obvious oxymoron, are a figure of speech on

    these maps. The socio-spatial arrangement in which these two elements are combined shows a

    cultural landscape, which is at the same time a producer and a product of a culture in which

    human agency is enacted. Water and death in all their naturalconception are seen indeed as

    artifacts, acculturated through human action and used to invoke meaning in an image.

    First, referring water, the maps express a contradiction in its rhetoric use: its scarcity

    implies indeed its abundance. Blue flags representing points of hydration are as spread out and

    abundant as death, represented by red dots. The resource of water, as found in the desert

    environment depicted, can only be conceived through the means of control, a copyright owned

    by the organizations of humanitarian aid. The right to supply water in a landscape primarily

    exempt from it turns the distribution of water into an act of power and knowledge. In this

    context, a certain population is appealed through this map knowledge; it is spatially moved as if

    it were human cattle, herded towards the source, to calm the instinct of thirst. While the Border

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    Patrol adjudicates itself the title of migrants rescue (Cornellius, 2001) they work in alliance

    to save the life of border crossers presumably minimizing their general risk. Maps of death and

    water evidently make them visible and accountable through their location. It not only makes

    them mappable, but tacitly punishable, deportable and ultimately killable. This knowledge,

    shared by the two institutions makes the migrant population a legible text, thus, controllable in

    their most human conditions, life and death. If water is popularly known as life, the control

    of water, from the images to the material instinct, inevitably becomes the control of life and

    livelihood. It is in this way that the maps evidence how the control of the most vital resource is a

    powerful political position, which mirrors the deadly condition of the human to control the lives

    of the population.

    Figure 1 localizes the recorded migrant deaths in the region of the Sonoran Desert drawn

    as an accumulation of red dots that seem to advance in the figure from the geographical border

    upwards in the map and disappear right before urban regions. Merged with such multitude, blue

    flags depict water stations set up by Humane Borders Organization in collaboration with Border

    Patrol. Read in conjunction with the former, the other map (Figure 2) adds to this complexity a

    written text that names the territory in a timely way: Un da caminando, Dos das

    caminando, Tres das caminando. Each denomination corresponds to a circular radio, drawn

    one over the other, north of the border line, like a time clock that announces in a delimited length

    of terrain the quick pass of a short life time. The cartographic imaginary transforms time in space

    and gives it a limited trend. The blocks of space are imbued with what Foucault (1986) sensed as

    the time in heterotopies, a time that differs from our temporal conception, for they are most

    often linked to slices in time-which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the

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    sake of symmetry, heterochronies (5)1. The limited space given to a final countdown in the

    maps denotes the capacity of heterochronies to accumulate time in history. Crossing the border is

    a process that never ends in that it is never really crossed for the accounts of the map. This time

    clock functions as a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place

    (26), as in a painted landscape, in which time never stops building up in history, but space never

    stops topping its own summit.

    At the footnote of the page it is underlined: Informacin para migrantes and then it

    offers the hegemonic reading of the text map: Pasar la frontera caminando por el desierto es

    peligroso y puede terminar en la muerte, To cross the border is dangerous and can end up in

    death(my translation). The legend in Spanish, but spread throughout US governmental

    organizations is fast in assuming in its message an implicit reader: the explicit embodiment of

    the red points of death in the map, namely, the migrant, who ironically does not have direct

    access to it. It is clear though that one can only identify the migrants life with the fatal destiny.

    The ubiquity of the migrants presence in the map aesthetics its own inadequacy to the context it

    depicts, and its subjectivity and capacity of agency is practically nulled, as it is equaled to its

    death. As a result, a human crossing the desert becomes matter out of place.

    In these maps the desert location is found a priori defined by dangerousness of landscape,

    a life threatening power, which eliminates the possibility of co-habitance with human life. The

    transgression of the border in this sense, becomes the transgression of nature, and moreover, the

    natural, human instinct of life. This way, death is the result of migrants stubbornness, the

    failed attempt to cross the most ethical boundaries, materialized in the US territorial border.

    1Foucault in his essay Of other spaces talks about cemeteries as the heterotopic spaces, orspaces that are understood only in relation to other spaces, but at the same time subvert the

    latters. The heterotopia, he says, is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces,

    several sites that are themselves incompatible (25).

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    Matter out of place, on the other hand, has been related to culturally specific meanings of dirt

    (Mary Douglas, 1966) and thus it always depends on a perspective of things (North-South), a

    social and political ordering. The demarcation of boundaries as desert-specific, delimits the

    boundary between the appropriate and the inappropriate. If the presence of undocumented

    migrants in the US is seen as inappropriate, the mortal features of such landscape give the

    appropriateness of its death. Sara Hill (2006) notes how the image of the migrant is gradually

    shown by the media as the human pollution penetrating the borders of the nation: . . . in short

    the border environment implicitly threatened to expand its elastic boundaries northward and in so

    doing transport its inherently tainted, degraded conditions deep into mainstream and mainland

    America (780).

    Besides the widely spread image of the immigrant as dirty and contaminating

    referred by Hill, there is an interesting correlation appeared in the maps that connotes the border

    as cemetery, an infectious and contagious focus of death for the living. Cemeteries were indeed

    installed with hygiene intentions, as a metaphor of the borderline between the known and

    unknown, a heterotopia where the mysteries of life coincide with the mysteries of death

    (Foucault, 1979). On the images analyzed what comes forth is an erupted border, a map that

    becomes a rash with red dots of death, a diagnosed infected body. Breaking the order of city

    living with the meaning of death, the Sonora Desert border, depicted as a cemetery, is the

    inversion of the power of sovereignty; it neutralizes state power, colluding it with the power of

    life nature. In other respect, Foucault explains that cemeteries actually started to be localized at

    the border of the cities in the nineteenth century, considering death as infectious: in correlation

    with individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an

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    obsession with death as an illness. The death, it is supposed, brings illness to the living, and it

    is the presence and proximity of the death . . .that propagates death itself (25).

    No wonder how National Security language has adopted medical-like language to refer

    the militarization of the border contention. The border is created as a body to be operated in its

    double sense: to be conducted tactic activities on and to be performed a surgical work in

    circumscribing otherness. Accordingly, Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the line

    by Border Patrol intelligence have been key points in the background of the actual map of the

    border. In Humane Border maps in particular, as well as a trajectory for the ascension of the

    desert landscape as border, it may be useful for the understanding of how the iconography of

    such representations has become a natural architecture of enmity at these venues. The US

    Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had initiated the Southwest Border Enforcement

    Strategy back in the 1994, aiming for the prevention through deterrence, a strategy that

    attempted to make it so difficult and so costly to enter the USA illegally that fewer individuals

    even try (INS 1996, 3). Both operative projects above mentioned were intended to shift traffic

    away from traditional urban routes to areas that according to INS are more remote and

    difficult to cross (3). In this policy context and as a consequence of the extreme environmental

    conditions in these isolated areas is that the organization of Humane Borders has depicted the

    rate of death in the Sonoran Desert border as an ascendant curve since 2001 (the year that war on

    terror became a relevant issue for obvious reasons). The INS efforts to restrict the entry of

    unauthorized migrants have created, from the late 90s and throughout the years, a landscape of

    fear, an unmistakable landscape of death. Besides the fences, walls, spotlights, Border Patrol

    forces, INS checkpoints etc. (second border for Mike Davis2000) this landscape becomes

    significantly perilous when plastered with maps that caution migrant interlocutors not to risk a

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    potentially life-threatening journey across such an arduous landscape. They simply summarize a

    visual double discourse that INS operations have stark as the juxtaposition of two levels of

    signification when talking about danger: the danger of the exterior, a natural gatekeeper of the

    border and the dangerfromthe exterior, embodied in the figure of immigration as a north wide

    beast-like horde in the wilderness. In other terms, these images represent the ability of the state

    to manage and mold a national landscape as a constant state of exception. Exceptional or

    marginal for the nation wholeness and susceptible to law exceptions. As the border radiates

    infection, as a virus, it must be kept at bay. The remoteness, inhabitation of the Sonoran desert

    functions as the perfect scenario for the spread out of the viral terror.

    The obvious militarization of immigration policies has blurred the line between what

    belongs to internal security and what belongs to external security of defense. This is how the

    reading/seeing of victimization of the border crossing subjects goes back to the attacks of 9/11, a

    second prologue in territorial security. Migrants deaths are put to collapse with the suicidal

    feature of terrorism. If the previous suicidal criminal risks the own life for the sake of inflicting

    damage to others, the crossing of the border as a life risk-taking act also participates on the same

    group of connotation. As the attackers body of the 9/11 is literally read as weapon, its bodys

    disintegration is inseparable from that of the victims bodies. If read figuratively (as in figures

    and in metaphor), death of the suicidal bomber, as well as the migrants death, comes to signify

    the disintegration of another bodily integrity, that of the nation. The image of the migrant has

    been reconstructed in the 2000s as an odd correlate of the terror imagination, an image that

    stems from State racism. The migrant subject transgressing the human instinct of life performs to

    the eyes of population an attack to the body ofus. It is an image that has a mediatic

    background (Hill, 2005) and that produces a feared life threat to those who witness it. It is not

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    fortuitous that 2001s events enforced the relevance of the border as territory, even though the

    attacks didnt actually cross any territorial boundary. What is highlighted instead is a kind of

    danger that signifies the idea of illegal migrants crossing-and dying by own will- in the national

    desert. (McDorman) If attempting against the own life is an unnatural drive derived from the

    crossing of the border, nature would be put to fight on the side of the biopolitical intent of the

    state to keep the natural order on national territory. The generation of risk at the border is a

    double-edged weapon that, through risking life of others, produces internal risks as means of

    security. If crossing the geopolitical border-without the required documentation- is a life-in

    itself-threatening attempt, it means as well a threat to the ability of the State to manage life. For

    Foucault (2003) this is how a biopolitical State operates, with racism as its main mechanism of

    power. Biopolitics is a politics that is organized by and for the control and regulation of life. It

    is informed by a discourse on life that is about life as much as it appears, strategically, to belong

    to life itself, as if it were a natural sacred, invulnerable value, the power can be exercised in

    such a way that it is capable of suppressing life itself. And therefore, to suppress life itself

    insofar as it is the power that guarantees life (253). This is to say that a biopolitical crossing or

    damaging invasion on the part of the migrant serves the state in its anti-immigration policies to

    actually promote life as a means of defense. The Other in this sense will be killed in a way that is

    allowed to die to promote the health and well being of the nationhood. In order to decide

    which lives to save (make live) and which ones to dispose (let to die) racism is introduced as

    a sort of tool for arbitrary selection (which is thought to be a kind of natural selection). Racism

    would allow the power of killing as the justification for preserving life, racism makes it possible

    to establish a relationship between my life and the death of other that is not military . . . but a

    biological-type relationship (255)

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    On the other hand, life of national population has to be in risk to enable that sovereign

    power to be adjudicated the right over life. When people choose a sovereign power they are

    choosing it to control their own death, forced by threat or need (241). According to Foucault,

    the sovereign power -enabled by the will of population- is simply and crudely the power to kill.

    He puts it this way: Sovereign powers effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can

    kill . . . it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life (240).

    The expansion of security agents, walls, technologies of vigilance-financed by the largest budget

    for border security ever contemplated by the Congress- retake a disciplinary mechanism of the

    sovereign that conclude on a mechanism of controlling population. In this power transition, the

    territorial logic of the 90s acts in a terror-driven logic.

    Horror in this case then is constructed by metaphors of the vital, which are metaphors of

    the viral; it is bound up with everyday vitality, from the conservancy of the population as human

    species (control of life itself) to the inviolability of the nations skin. The sovereigns prerogative

    to revoke life of its subjects in order to guarantee them to live (or live well) conforms an efficient

    economy of health as economy of death, in which life is understood as default. Life on this side

    of the border is lived as the reverse of others death, thus, life is there to be taken and death of

    others is a latent presence that guaranties it. Foucault explains: The fact that the other dies does

    not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the

    other, the death of the bad race, or the inferior race (or the degenerate or the abnormal) is

    something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer (255). This way, the

    migrant as the transgressor and a threat to the power of the sovereign, as viral and synonym of

    unhealthy is not a specific subject or subjectivity, but it is considered as a factor for the bad

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    race, within many other marginalities at stake. I will retake this point further with TITin

    relation to the concept of transborder as transreal.

    Gradual border enforcement shifts in securitization from the early 2000s have

    transformed the perception of cartographies of the US nation, in which the mentality of

    homeland has demanded the imperative for borderland security. Considering cartographies

    as imaginary imagery is recognizing that territory is not only out there as a neutral text, but

    instead is made up by shapes imposed over it. Moreover, these shapes are ideated by power

    discourses and given the ideological and institutional practices, which inform each other, through

    which spatio-temporal models of identity-difference are created. The expansive outdoors held in

    map discourse is not innocent or inoffensive as in the word nature. Contrarily, it comes from

    the construction of sovereignty, which is built upon the base of violence. It is in this way that

    cartographies are in fact violent cartographies (Shapiro, 1997), historically developed,

    socially embedded interpretations of identity and space that constitute the frames within which

    enmities give rise to war-as-policy (ix). This way, the pieces of cartography made by Humane

    Borders and TIT are part of a bigger picture in these geographies of enmities of the US. The

    desert area and its consequences, considered natural for the human is part of a sovereign

    mapping discourse of securitization, one that has involved forces, institutions and agencies that

    move bodies into violent encounters and that it has implied the identification of foreign bodies to

    be dangerous in the association with historical antagonisms or, according to Pratt (1992), with

    contact zones2. On the other hand, the Border Patrol efforts of border operations to extirpate

    2A contact zone understood as combat zone. Pratt defines it as The space of colonialencounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into

    contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion,

    radical inequality, and intricable conflict (6)

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    focuses of exterior penetration have succeeded to move points of entrance desert-ward, intending

    to make the Other more territorializable, as well as terrorizable.

    If the events of 2001 established a landmark on anti-terrorist measures, the answer that

    the state gave to the unexpected terrorist threat-that of the volatile suicide attack- was to

    rapidly force terror down to earth. A clear delineation of the border in the map means an effort to

    concrete and delimitate the vastness of danger, gain knowledge over it, overpower it. The

    urgency to territorialize the terror that threatens from outside is intimately bound up with the

    anxieties of the viral unpredictable agency. Likewise, the inability to localize and predict viruses

    creates a viral affect, a feeling of impotency; not knowing where the threat comes from as

    terrorism, creates a viral affect, which urges the massive population of the nation to reactivate

    the racist biopolitical Sovereign as a means of security. As Clough and Puar (2012) define it If

    the virus can invoke anxieties about trespassing borders, the containment of contagion or failure

    thereof, the viral can instigate a panic around measure or measuring that takes us beyond human

    perception, consciousness, and cognition to the incalculable or the yet-to-be-calculated (15).

    This mysterious threat, which hides in the great outdoors is itself a mythical mystery and

    incommensurability of death. Death itself, in contrast with life itself, cannot be managed by

    power because death exceeds its reachability. Foucault sees it beyond the reach of power, the

    moment when individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into

    his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death (248) Beyond

    the threat of death and the ability to kill, the biopolitic State loses its power. If the danger is not

    territorizable (knowledgable and to the reach of the sovereign) it is not terrorizable and thus it is

    out of reach of control. The outdoors where the US Border has landed and been mapped defines

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    the separation of the Global North from the Global South and is a creation that reifies a

    landscape of fear in service of such power. It is defined by a social relationship that conceives it

    as a foreign, desolated other space.

    In contrast with this discourse, though, the naturalness of any specific outdoors can be

    seen- from the perspective of a post-metaphysical theory- as speculative. Object-Oriented

    Philosophy (OOP) has tried to develop comprehension of reality in a dehumanized way, where

    human and non-human actors create relations and new realities and must be treated

    symmetrically or democratically (Latour, 1999). Objects, in this way, exceed our knowledge and

    further, causes are not any more understood as physical causes, as they are in the maps. A split

    of nature from culture, they argue, has served a modern western ethnocentric narrative to expose

    nature as natural and laws as lawful, even if they deploy a constant state of exception. On the

    contrary, the possibilities of relationship are so ample that nature no longer needs to be thought-

    or governed- by human power. Quentin Meillasoux inAfter Finitude (2006) announces that it is

    possible to recover a Great outdoors, as she refers to the utterly foreign territory that exists

    and subsists by itself independently of the relation of the human to it. As she puts it, there is no

    reason for anything to be or remain thus and so rather than otherwise . . . Everything could

    actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and

    this not be by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue

    of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what from

    perishing (53) The Great Outdoors reconsiders death as the same type of non-apprehendable as

    any other thing, thus it disclaims the power over death that the State takes up and that population

    permits. On the other hand, by rising everything, including nature and culture, human and non-

    human things, material and ethereal to the same level of agency, the Great Outdoors where

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    everything is held, redeems the anxiety of unexpectedness. There is no necessity of events or

    laws to be governed, everything is just chaotic becoming-that is to say, a becoming governed by

    no necessity whatsoever (226).

    If OOP brakes with ethnocentrism there is still one obstacle to sort about the democracy

    of objects and avoidance of the human: it lacks political investment. It risks to seeing everything

    in an a-cultural way, which can easily unaware the inequalities that already inhabit the World.

    Issues of gender, race and class can pass unnoticed. In the context of object-approach to reality,

    Micha Crdenas has proposed the transreal, a concept that stems from philosophical interest in

    realism in that it is speculative and avoids ethnocentrism, but installs a politics of being. For her

    reality is opened through creative political imagination. As Zach Blas says in the introduction to

    her book, if we want to think and live reality, change reality, embody it, fight exploitation and

    violence and discover its astounding, incredible multiple dimensions, then participating in the

    aesthetic and political construction of making realities that are human and beyond is a promising

    and empowering practice that can make life livable (16) Crdenas with the Transreal contests

    the biopolitical violence concerning all the bad race, starting from her own body, to the body

    of all racialized, genderized and classified otherness of that society that must be defended,

    within which the migrant is one. It intends to multiple and mixed realities through three main

    operations: reality construction, transreal performativity and transreal technologies, which I will

    attempt to analyze in reference to the Transborder Immigrant Tool.

    The Transborder Immigrant toolby the Electronic Disturbance Theatre Collective,

    leaded by Micha Crdenas, is an attempt to unbalance the subjacent metaphysics that underlies

    the division map-human. Its political drive lies in the capacity of the tool to revert hierarchies of

    power over knowledge. From the bi-dimensional nature of the map to the multidimensional

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    access to a virtual GPS, the migrant is confronted with the materiality of its own

    subjectivity/objectivity, as the transborder tool is designed to interact with the body in all stages

    of territorial border crossing. First, it puts in play the relation of the body with territory as Great

    Outdoors and contests the geopolitical imaginaries of landscape, which has drawn migrants (or

    any marginality) as already dead to society. Second, it creates a relation to the representation in

    GPS format, which also depicts the points of hydration and Border Patrols rescue,but doesnt

    assume a pre-design path to follow. It doesnt assume that the migrant walks towards its

    supposed salvation, but instead it just equips the person with cartographic information. It is in

    sum a tool that puts the person who crosses on awareness of what has been created, knowing that

    points of water are also points of patrolling and are also points of death. Finally, it connects the

    walking creative human to an object to walk with; the relation to the object itself sensitizes the

    correlation between human and human-made. It reinforces the fact that the human body is

    disarticulable, as well as the hand can disregard any object. If other maps, including Humane

    Borders ones, recreateconditioned reflects of racist force to a cartographic imaginary, the

    Transbordercontests it by allowing contesting reflects on the part of the migrant subject. The

    migrant relates to the TIT as a tool of cartography that can be or not be necessary to a vernacular

    human action, walking in the desert, but also relates to a tool that has deliberately kept from its

    original function, being a phone, to become something else and that generates incommensurable

    relations in the world. Besides the navigational utility of TIT, it has also been installed on a

    module that throws poetry along the way. Verses of encouragement would appear after certain

    amount of hours, days, or weeks. In Crdenas words, it is a gesture that provides poetic

    sustenance, to enact a space of hospitality and to welcome the traveler into a new space (2). In

    the measure that the traveler walks into hostile environment of the desert, the tool counteracts the

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    countdown clock of death with the addition of new realities. The heterochrony of the desert calls

    for a temporally triggered poetic intervention that reflects on the time of crossing as a time of re-

    creating, of becoming durational performance, where tool and hand and will conflate.The tool

    or equipment functions or executes its specific being in a way that escapes full apprehension by

    the human, even had been created by human, even serving humanity. The projection of utility

    and even the projection of inutility (an outdated cellphone is projected as trash) are dis-attached

    from the object itself and instead it becomes plain speculation, a tool being (Harman, 2002). In

    the same way, the person crossing the border becomes something else to the extent that walks

    with the tool that new space of being.

    Crossing the border is an attempt of a body, in relation with the Great Outdoors to

    transit to a new space, a transnational space. Addressing transgender phenomena, Stryker,

    Currah and Moore in their introduction to a WQS issue (2008) open up the transit or transition

    action to crossing of all types of borders, a call not to identify, consolidate, or stabilize a

    category or class of people, things, or phenomena that could be denominated trans, as if certain

    concrete somethings could be characterized as crossers, while everything else could be

    characterized by boundedness and fixity (11). Following this precept, Micha Crdenas

    conceives the transin the word transborderas well as in transgender, as a crossing imbued in

    hope and bravery to find a better life that cannot be otherwise, in spite of the violence inflicted

    over this sole process, but also in political resistance to this violence. In a way, as she says, this

    hope is a hope of the unknown. The premise revitalizes a viral politics in regard to the

    foreigner subject, whose unknowledge is not its foreign capacity but a stage of recreating of

    the self and also a call to un-know the hegemonic Knowledges, which have fixed unequal reality

    as the one and only attainable category. The migrant in its travel is faced with the unknown for it

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    is inevitable faced with the Great Outdoors; for what the resistant body of the migrant is going to

    be is a speculation that doesnt have other option that recreate itself over and over to live in

    eternal transition; for there is no more real governance over the life or death of his or her persona

    in the unlawful terrain that emerges from illegal crossing; and because the day the migrant dies,

    in the border or having crossed it is itself a crude response to biopolitics of racism. Calling

    attention to the migrant as a trans-defined subject repositions subjectivity in the violent

    cartographies. A given for dead mass is this way a given for transformed.

    Fig 1.

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    Johannes 17

    Figure 2

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    Johannes 18

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