The dispossessed of necropolitics on the San Diego-Tijuana border

Abstract

This article presents results of a first-hand investigation that took a year of ethnographic work (methods of observation and interviews) during 2016-2017, with the post-structural theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze, on the United States-Mexico border, in the San Diego-Tijuana corridor. The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies of the University of California San Diego, PREVENCASA A. C., and Universidad Autonoma de San Luis Potosi supported this research. In this research, statistical data, observations, and synthesis of in-depth interviews were utilized about those defined as the 'dispossessed': users of hard drugs, and/or in homelessness conditions of discrimination in a highly contrasting border such as that of the United States and Mexico. Among the main results are the relations between mental and embodiment limits, necropolitics and territory, as well as the approach of post-structural political discourses about the body and mind that allow us to understand the subjectivities in question, proposing two types of homelessness.