Subordinating Space: Immigration Enforcement, Hierarchy, and the Politics of Scale in Mexico and Central America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, security and immigration enforcement has expanded rapidly throughout Mexico. From checkpoints and patrols to a vast system of detention and deportation, Mexican officials have implemented far-reaching measures to curtail international migration from Central America. Many of these efforts have been concentrated along the Mexico–Guatemala border and deep within southern Mexico, culminating in Programa Frontera Sur, a militarized approach to border security implemented in 2014. In this article, we explore how security and immigration enforcement in Mexico rely on spatial hierarchies that divide north and south. The practice of security and immigration enforcement has received significant attention across many disciplines. The notion of spatial hierarchies and the ways in which scalar differentiation impinges upon well-being has been less covered. As we show, these hierarchies partition North and Central America according to colonial modes, subordinating the latter as inferior while working across global, national, and local scales. Crucially, the linkages between securitization and the spatialization of hierarchies provide insights into nation-building and regional identity, where Mexico and the United States are increasingly designated as separate from South and Central America.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".