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This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and “technified” along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico’s Southern Border Program ( Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy’s goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two inter-related arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.

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In this paper I argue for the necessity and value o f using critical theory to review tripartite politics across North and South America in the war on drugs. In particular, Herbert Marcuse's concept o f one-dimensionality-a description o f social structures and behaviors incapable o f perceiving alternatives to existing realities-is elaborated. Using a Marcusian lens, I unpack key policy documents within the Merida II Initiative, and the United States Northern Command and the United States Southern Command. The paper examines the mechanisms through which particular 'realities' emerge as prominent. In doing so, discursive and material tactics, embedded in political strategies which construct tangible problems to be solved, are highlighted. In the course of prescriptive policy measures, three regulating fictions materialize. First, Merida II is cast in terms o f a paradigm shift. Second, unilateral policies become bilateral agreements. And third, the hemispheric scale unfolds into regional divisions. All are tied in with a historical legacy o f enacting symbolic illusion and a pattern o f thought and behavior reduced to the given system. There are at least two significant outcomes. The first is the rendering of oppositional alternatives as utopian or illusory. The second is the deployment of difference which continuously reproduces North-South divisions and upholds the status quo.

The production of culture in urban image-making has received much attention within geography. This paper intervenes in the culture -economy debates in a slightly different way-namely, through the lens of an understudied city of the global South. It examines the structure and discourses embedded in the Tijuana (Mexico) Municipal Plan 2005 -07 to interrogate the work that culture performs with an eye to the impacts (both material and discursive) of official strategies across time and space. In so doing, two propositions are suggested. First, post-colonial spaces offer important sites from which to critique the conflation of cultural practice and policy. Secondly, the complex imbrication of culture and economy can be further distilled in grounding examples in ordinary cities.