Border Games: A Response to Palafox.

• Date: 22 June 2001
• Author: Andreas, Peter
• Published date: 22 June 2001
• Author: Andreas, Peter

JOSE PALAFOX'S THOUGHTFUL CRITIQUE OF MY BOOK, BORDER GAMES: POLICING THE U.S.-Mexico Divide, is mostly about what is not included in the book and what he would have liked to have seen in it. I have often regretted that I did not add a paragraph up front in the preface clarifying what the book is not about, and this response gives me an opportunity to do so.

Border Games was not meant to be a comprehensive examination of the U.S.-Mexico border or of the unauthorized border crossing experience of migrants. To do this would have required hundreds of additional pages, and would have ended up as a very different kind of book. Instead, my more modest and focused aim in this slim volume was to unpack the logic of...