Unequal Neighbors joins recent and emerging accounts of the US-Mexican borderlands that complicate simple narratives about borders. Kristen Hill Maher and David Carruthers decenter and disaggregate the state: they are attentive not only to government entities and interests but also to the role of business interests, cross-border trade, tourism industries, news organizations, and border crossers. Unlike approaches concerned with the physical manifestation of borders, the authors are interested in mental images of borders and the implications of those images for communities on either side. They ask: What are the processes by which people attach meaning to places and to what effect?
The authors integrate frameworks from across various interdisciplinary literatures, including research on borders, territorial stigma, and geographies of inequality. Although the book is not about the politics of immigration, the analytical approaches in Unequal Neighbors resonate with recent and emerging research regarding immigration policy and enforcement. By examining the processes that produce racialized stereotypes of “good neighborhoods” and “bad neighborhoods,” Unequal Neighbors joins recently published articles and books that challenge binary understandings of borders, migration, and citizenship. For example, Rebecca Hamlin’s book Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (2021) examines the production and maintenance of the migrant/refugee binary and hierarchical categorizations of people. Both Unequal Neighbors and Crossing explicitly interrogate who stands to gain from binary and stigma production.
The book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the book’s central arguments. First, Unequal Neighbors argues that stigmas are produced through relational processes. Second, stigmas have spatial manifestations or what the authors term “place stigma.” In the context of borders, place stigma plays a role in producing and maintaining asymmetric borders. Third, asymmetric bordering occurs whenever people construct spatial lines demarcating distinction and inequality. Finally, even transborder crossings and collaboration can serve to reinforce inequalities across borders.
Unequal Neighbors examines the San Diego and Tijuana border region, which is a politically salient location for both the United States and Mexico. The two countries also have a unique bilateral relationship, especially with respect to historical conflict, economic interdependencies, and, of course, migration (see chap. 2). Although the findings may be context specific, the theoretical frameworks, research design, multimethod data collection, and multipronged data analysis can be fruitfully used in other contexts.
The book draws on a variety of sources, including interviews with residents, organizations, and entrepreneurs in San Diego and Tijuana, as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses of news media content. The data collected also extend across time, allowing the authors to trace the development, contestation, and persistence of place stigma. For example, scholars interested in public opinion formation or how the media shape understandings of place can turn to chapter 4 in which the authors draw on data from 45 qualitative interviews with San Diego residents. The authors analyze how people recounted their own experiences of Tijuana versus how they retold stories they heard from others. Those with limited personal experience were more likely to repeat and circulate negative accounts of Tijuana, whereas those with greater transborder experiences were more likely to question stories in circulation about Tijuana.
Political scientists from different subfields are interested in processes of reputation building and the political power of reputations. Where others have studied the reputations of countries, organizations, or firms, Maher and Carruthers ask about the reputations of two neighboring cities. For those interested in reputation-building enterprises, chapter 7 provides an analysis of “image work” and reputation entrepreneurs in Tijuana. Through interviews with the leaders of government and nongovernmental organizations, the authors find competing framings and visions of Tijuana. They provide a helpful framework for making visible the goals, incentives, and strategies of reputation makers competing to shape public imaginaries of Tijuana.
Political scientists regularly point to the media as key to explaining public opinion formation, and scholars of media politics have long noted that the media are not neutral. Unequal Neighbors shows how the media perpetuate bordered imaginaries and narratives. Chapter 6 presents findings from a systematic analysis of representations of Tijuana produced by one major local news organization in San Diego over a 10-year period. A clear pattern emerges: regardless of whether content is positive or negative about Tijuana, current events are filtered and communicated through narratives of “disorder.” News organizations, then, produce frequent and readily available content that stigmatizes Tijuana, Tijuana residents, and Mexico more generally. This stigma production happens even when stories contain otherwise positive content about the city. For media politics scholars, chapter 6 offers lessons for how to conduct data collection and careful analyses of both textual and visual news content.
In parallel literatures, migration and citizenship scholars are engaged in locating the movement of borders and state bordering practices. Some connections and tensions are worth noting. Where Unequal Neighbors draws attention to movements across borders, translocal asymmetries, and place stigma as it occurs across cities, other work points to the inequalities of mobility and racialized geographies within localities. For example, Carolina Valdivia’s (2019) work on the “geographies of deportability” examines the social, political, and physical sites produced by US law where immigration enforcement is localized, thereby heightening undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability to deportation. Valdivia’s work with mixed-status families in San Diego County demonstrates how immigrant families are forced to carefully navigate nontraditional sites of immigration enforcement there. “Place stigma” and “geographies of deportability” are examples of interdisciplinary frameworks that bring renewed attention to the study of the politics of geography.
At the heart of Unequal Neighbors is the question of how bordering and debordering happen at the local scale and in everyday practice. Although the authors find evidence of debordering practices and debordering imaginaries, they also write that “potentially debordering perspectives or content concurrently reinforced imaginaries of an asymmetric border” (p. 225). For example, coverage and framings of cross-border cooperation were coupled with stigmatized framings of Tijuana as dangerous, disorderly, and inferior. This suggests that greater cross-border ties and increased levels of interstate collaboration will not necessarily result in more equal relationships of power: cross-border trade, tourism, and migration are fundamentally shaped by asymmetrical power relationships. A fruitful next step is for the authors, and political scientists more generally, to further engage with research regarding indigenous sovereignties, settler colonialism, border making, and settler governance, which can guide analyses of bordering and debordering.
Ultimately, Unequal Neighbors is a step forward in mapping and making visible the actors, interests, and conditions that sustain and challenge hegemonic narratives, unequal relationships, and bordering projects. Its publication occurs during a pivotal political time when scholars are revisiting, challenging, and recentering understandings of interstate relations, borders, transnational connections, and more. It will prove a very useful tool in this endeavor.
