Review by Choice Review
The timely interrogation of US-Mexico borderlands holds particular currency where the racialized rhetoric and sexualized violence of the current body politic of the US government is concerned. What with caged Mexican children, privatized US Immigration detention centers, migrant detainee deaths and human rights abuses, and associated patterns of political graft and corruption, the paroxysm of racialized forms of state-sanctioned social violence in the borderlands has morphed into something largely unforeseen a few years ago. Hernández (San Diego State) has produced a stunningly brilliant call to action and an intellectually vibrant interdisciplinary interrogation of the origins, nature, and extent of borderlands violence. Drawing on an interpretive schema centered on coloniality as opposed to colonialism, Hernández dissects and deconstructs the colonial and frontier origins of that deeply ingrained corpus of dehumanizing violence(s) born of an epistemic of racialized and sexualized cultural and sociopolitical constructs. This he contends is the product of "the cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality" born of those colonial systems of racialized/sexualized violence that persist, sans the institutions that originally spawned and propagated their proliferation within the contemporary interstate system of racialized Indigenous oppression and surveillance. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Rubén G. Mendoza, California State University, Monterey Bay
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
