“La Migra” in the Classroom: Transfronterizx Students Exploring Mobility in Transnational Higher Education on the US-Mexico Border

摘要

Based on an ethnographic study of a pre-engineering freshman course at a large university on the US-Mexico border, I explore how 4 Latinx undergraduate students, 2 of whom crossed the border on a daily basis to pursue higher education (HE), built a Lego robot that they named La Migra (a colloquial term for US Border Patrol). In particular, I demonstrate that the students drew from local authorized border crossing activities to design the robot to accelerate cross border mobility. In using the new mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006 Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 207–226. doi:10.1068/a37268[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Urry, 2007 Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]) and borderwork (Rumford, 2008 Rumford, C. (2008). Citizens and borderwork in Europe. Space and Polity, 12(1), 1–12. doi:10.1080/13562570801969333[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), I also show that the design of the La Migra robot, rather than a public good, was actually symbolic of the uneven distribution of mobility. In total, findings contribute a particularistic account of the understudied significance of physical border crossing to mobility in the context of transnational HE.