This essay explores how the policing, incarceration, and deportation of Salvadoran immigrant youth are reshaping the parameters of urban experience between Los Angeles and San Salvador. It argues that these disciplinary governmental practices have transformed the geographies of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship between the once putatively separate cultural and political spheres of the United States and Central America. These efforts to reassert national sovereignty through zero-tolerance policing strategies as they combine with the growing intersection between criminal and immigration law, only, and most ironically, induce and reproduce transnational flows. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with deported youth and young adults, the essay focuses on the crucial place of the city and of the local police beat in the production of their emergent transnational subjectivities. The experiences of these immigrant youth indicate that the complex flows and the multiple geopolitical scales of analysis at work in Los Angeles's urban barrios now make it impossible to engage with the cultural politics of one side of this social field without simultaneously accounting for those at play on the other side in San Salvador. These politics of simultaneity demonstrate the analytical power that both transnational and urban studies stand to gain from a mutual engagement with each other, and call for transnational urban studies as a new domain for research.

Doble cara (double/two-faced) is a key trope in Salvadoran political folklore. It is a folk theory of mimesis, which attempts to 'master the absent presence of the other' through a discourse of conspiracy. The term has a history in the US-funded Salvadoran civil war. In this article, I consider how doble cara has come to be deployed around a new and pivotal social subject -Salvadoran immigrant gang youth deported from the USA -and how these deported youth emerge as a packed and displaced sign for the trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements between the USA and El Salvador. The article is written in conversation with Begoña Aretxaga, who inspired many of the questions explored here.

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In seeking to balance the demands of social science research with complex ethical and political commitments, ethnographers often find themselves caught in a series of double binds. This is particularly true when we are asked to testify in court on behalf of subjects criminalized by the state. I explore how these tensions play out in settings where right and wrong cannot be clearly distinguished in anthropological terms but are demanded in legal or political terms. I consider the narrative strategies that anthropologists employ in an effort to produce social-legal knowledge from our ethnographic research that would satisfy the demands of the court, while simultaneously deploying analytical strategies that can account for multiple realities and conflicting truths. I consider my own participation in these overlapping and often incommensurate projects through a particular ethnographic and legal case in which I was implicated as researcher and as a witness for the defense.