Blood and Borders: Geographies of Social Reproduction in Ciudad Juárez–El Paso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each week, thousands of Mexican nationals living in northern Mexican border cities cross the border into the United States with nonimmigrant visas to “donate” blood plasma at commercial collection centers in exchange for a prepaid Visa gift card (valued at up to US$50). For these individuals, many of whom work on maquiladora assembly lines, a single donation can nearly double their weekly wages. If the ability to keep wages low remains a key means of leveraging the border’s competitiveness in the global economy, we argue that the devaluation of maquiladora labor in fact relies on the capacity of communities and households to increasingly absorb the hidden costs of social reproduction. Grounded in two years of ethnographic research in Ciudad Juárez–El Paso, this article argues that plasma donation is an increasingly vital strategy through which Mexican households meet the costs of social reproduction. Further, participation in the cross-border plasma economy is inseparable from institutions and frameworks that govern border crossing. By following the movement of Mexican blood plasma across the border, it becomes possible to understand how the border itself—as a material barrier and geopolitical project—shapes collective capacities for social reproduction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".