The home front: citizens behind the camera

In the context of intense debate over immigration into the United States, the television show Border Wars offers a distinctive way for anxious citizens to participate in reinforcing the border. In the program, viewers are invited to share the lines of site of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents as they conduct surveillance of unauthorized border crossers. Because Latino bodies are repeatedly displayed as the subjects of surveillance, the positions of viewer/citizen and viewed-non-citizen encourage racial alignments with the border. In the face of these alignments, the Latino CBP agents are made readable as bodies in transition toward citizenship due to their performance of surveillance practices against other Latinos. The article comments on the soldier citizen as positioned at the panoptic center of watching without being watched, which is less available to Latinos because their bodies circulate as signs of suspicion, which casts them disproportionately onto the surveillance screen. Practices of surveillance should be understood as performances because they reaffirm Americans of their citizenship status at a time of heightened paranoia over the loss of a stable identity.