1. Introduction
1.2 The U.S.-Mexico Wall
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1.2 The U.S.-Mexico Wall
In North America, there is another wall. One built by the United States of America to delimit its border with Mexico. The abysmal differences in wages between both countries when the minimum salary in Mexico is the equivalent to US$0.48 dollar cent per working hour and US$5.15 or 7.25 dollar per working hour in the U.S., makes the immigrants flow coming from the South difficult to stop. Therefore, due the high proportion of illegal cross-border stream in this frontier, in 1993 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced the construction of a wall along 698 miles of American-Mexican border which is still under construction and as of January 2010 had completed 643.3 miles of fencing.
The U.S.-Mexico border wall not only includes the physical barrier, but also aerial vehicles and a virtual fence together with infrared equipment, cameras, electronic ground/fence sensors, thermal imaging and video cameras, radars and the deployment of more than 18,000 Border Patrol agents. The American CBP’s Secure Border Initiative (SBI) Program Management Office (PMO) had supervised the deployment of technology and tactical infrastructure construction at the border since it was authorized by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This approval
“incensed public opinion in Latin America like no other issue in recent years” (Morley, 2006a).
Comparing the border between Mexico and the U.S. to the old situation between East and West Berlin is “rather more precise. With billions of dollars’ worth of technology, the presence of some 10,000 Border Patrol agents –in addition to Customs, Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal officers- we are finally indeed what restrictionist politicians have envisioned with their rhetoric: Fortress America”(Martinez, 2004:52).
In addition, discussing the extent and costs of the Secure Fence, Philip Caputo writes:
Close the border with walls both virtual and real? Well, the physical wall proposed by the Secure Fence Act, which President Bush reluctantly signed last year, will cover just 700 of the Line’s 1,950 miles. Count on it, ways will
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be found to get around it, or over it, or under it. True, the gaps in Fortress America’s fence are supposed to be covered by sensors, cameras, and other high-tech surveillance equipment, but some legislators have begun to shy away from appropriating the funds after the inspector general of Homeland Security warned that costs, first estimated at $8 billion, could soar as high as
$30 billion (Caputo 2007: 25).
In this concern, La Jornada, a Mexican newspaper, wrote “The walls have served as sources of intense and bloody friction between armored countries. Its erection and operation are extremely costly in political and economic terms, and very inefficient, though some of its toll has to be paid with the blood and pain of those who have tried to cross them. Thus, they are historically unsuccessful, disgraceful and degrading” (Carrillo, 2005). The Mexico City daily Excelsior denounced the push for a border wall as a sign of “The new Apartheid” in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another.
The American SBI program was established by the department in early 2007 to carry out the Congressional mandate and had determined the goal to build roughly 670 miles of fencing by 2013. The diverse consequences about this barrier construction diverge from land loss to economic and environmental effects as for example, announced in September 2007 by the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, 60 to 75% of the protected lands and refuges in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas would be affected by the border wall because it would block river access preventing animals from reaching water, disturb animal migration patterns and destroy essential vegetation for many native and migratory species.
However, without a doubt, one of the most serious effects has been the increase of deaths in the Mexican-American border. According to Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights, from 1994 to 2007, about 4,745 migrants died trying to cross the U.S. border. In December 2009, when the promoter of the U.S. immigrant cause through the foundation “Border Angels”, Enrique Morones Careaga was awarded the National Prize for Human Rights, he declared that
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before the U.S. - Mexico wall construction, one or two people were dying per month across the border but after the wall, one or two people die on a daily basis.
That wall has caused deaths more than anything else. It's incredible that since 1994 when they built the fence between San Diego and Tijuana, the north migration flow has decreased 20% but even that fewer people are crossing, more are dying because the Border Patrol and the wall forced them to cross in more dangerous areas (Hernandez, S. 2009).
In addition, the construction of the U.S. – Mexico border wall has also increased the business of human trafficking and spread a new phenomenon: the rising of migrants’ abduction done by the same traffickers to ask the migrants’ families for ransom.
The Guatemalan indigenous leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchú, described as an offense the U.S. decision to build a fence along the Mexico border to stop immigration: “Putting fences I do not think they [Americans] can stop immigrants, whereas especially poverty, unemployment and inequality exists” (ABN, 2005). For Paterson (2008), in Mexico and Latin America, the wall is viewed as a symbol of racism, xenophobia, and militarism.
Critics such as New Mexico scholar Felipe Ortego y Gasca have compared the Bush administration’s wall to the historic failures of the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, and the Berlin Wall.
The comparison of the U.S. security fence with other borders around the world has been imminent. In his visit to Midland, Texas in 2006 no less than Mikhail Gorbachev compared the American barrier with the Berlin wall: “You remember President Reagan standing in Berlin and saying, ‘This wall should be torn down’. Now the United States seems to be building almost the Wall of China between itself and this other nation with which it has been associated for many decades and has had cooperation and interaction with” (Scott, 2006). In this concern, longtime CNN correspondent Charles Bierbauer stated: “I’ve seen walls around other countries, most
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notably East Germany and East Berlin, and they didn’t work. In fact, they became symbols of oppression rather than anything positive” (Noyes, 2008).
In 2009, Texas State Representative Aaron Peña called for the tearing down of the U.S.-Mexico border wall to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: “most Americans see it [Berlin Wall] as a symbolic end of tyranny. Here in the borderlands of this country, on the edges of my legislative district, Americans forget that a similar wall was constructed separating family members and a singular community” (Peña, 2009).
Discussing the U.S.-Mexico wall, border expert David Shirk, political science professor at the University of San Diego and director of the Trans-Border Institute, refers:
For me, the fence symbolizes the past. From the Mongols to the cold war, people have tried to contain their fears and enemies with walls. At the end of the last century, we thought all the walls were going to come down. Indeed, building walls and fortifying borders in the era of globalization and economic integration holds inherent contradictions and promises little in the way of effectiveness. Walls may be useful for blocking large, land-based armies, but are probably useless for combating terrorism. We’re in a new era with new problems, but we keep coming up with old solutions (Reno 2006).
Also, religious leaders have discussed the walled borders, such is the case of Renato Martino, head of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, who condemned the building of walls between countries to keep out immigrants: “Speaking of borders, I must unfortunately say that in a world that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall with joy, new walls are being built between neighborhood and neighborhood, city and city, nation and nation”. In reference to the U.S.-Mexican fence he qualified it as “an inhuman program, which is what the construction of that wall and all others is” (Reuters, 2006).
What other meanings can this wall have? What other messages is sending to society? For Tobar (2009) the fence is a symbol of the great social distance between Latin America and the
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United States being “just a few hours’ drive away” (Los Angeles Times, 2009). For vendor Jose de Jesus Hernandez in Eagle Pass, Texas: “This is a wall of shame. I can't look at it any other way” Schwartz (2010). U.S. Federal bureaucrats call it the “border fence.” Governor Humberto Moreira of the Mexican state of Coahuila has dubbed it a “wall of hate” and many activists as
“the wall of death” (Hylton, 2009; Paterson 2008).
Although border fences can be politically popular in the nations that build them, they are often viewed as a harsh and expensive symbol in neighboring countries. Constructing new fencing to keep out unauthorized migrants, cross-border terrorists, insurgents and smugglers has remained as a priority in various parts of the world. But walls are much similar to other symbols used by human beings. As symbols they represent something visible that by association or convention characterize something else that is invisible, they are open to interpretation by different people in accordance with their individual interests or ideologies.
The Mexican-American border wall thus offers a good example for analysis. The problem at hand can of course be approached from several perspectives. This thesis intends to focus on an examination of the U.S. – Mexico border wall as has been portrayed in editorial cartoons in the major newspapers of both countries.
Previous literature specifically linking editorial cartoons and the border walls seems little or non-existent. Other than a collection of the Berlin wall cartoons presented in the global television network TV5 in 2009 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the article “Cartoon Roundup: Walling Off Mexico” published in the Washington Post (2006b) by Jefferson Morley in which he presents four political cartoons made by renowned Mexican cartoonists. For the researcher’s knowledge, there is no other than the present study.
Therefore, the significance of this analysis is to be an original contribution for a better understanding of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the interests behind and towards it as seen by the North American neighbors and discussed by “cultural studies”, “framing” and “semiotics”
scholars.
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This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter outlines the background behind building the U.S.-Mexico border wall and research questions this study intends to answer. The second chapter covers the review of literature regarding cartoon studies, walls as barriers, cultural studies, semiotics and framing theory which serve as theoretical framework for this analysis. The third chapter describes the methodology, the search and data gathering process.
Chapter four presents the findings of analysis and interpretation. Discussions and propositions that can be explored in future research are presented in the final chapter.
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Chapter 2 Review of Literature
2.1 Walls as Barriers
Review of existing body of research about border walls, fences or barriers revealed an extensive amount of literature in the areas of sociology, psychology and political science such as the analysis of the representations and symbolism manifested on the Berlin Wall and their meanings before and after the fall of the Wall to measure the level of social distress (Rieber,1997), analysis of the main reasons for the closure of the East-West sectoral border in Berlin (Maddrell, 2006), patterns of remembrance relating to the Wall and the GDR border which emerged in Berlin after German unification (Saunders 2009) and life style confrontation in citizens from East and West Germany after the Berlin Wall fall (Achberger, Linden and Benkert,1999). Also, the development within the field of Israeli-Palestinian socio-politics and social movement studies, such as the analysis of activism around the building of the Wall dividing Israel and Palestine (Pallister-Wilkins, 2009) and the examination of land expropriation cases for the building of the Separation Wall among both neighbours (Falah, 2004); the conceptualization of material walls as artifacts of globalization to bring together a diversity of barriers that share similar attributes including the separation fence in Israel-Palestine, the fence at the U.S.-Mexico border, the fences surrounding immigration detention centres and the fences fortifying the temporary sites of global superpower gatherings (Feigenbaum 2008).
However, little has been done from the perspectives of communication and cultural studies. For instance, a visual study made by Semmerling (2004) presents the semiotics and discourse analysis of picture postcards in Israel and Palestine in order to expose their national self. He found a “sign war” in their struggle for “the power to produce reality” revealing another level of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that one over visual signs (p.7-8). Also dealing with
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semiotics is the research elaborated by Ladd (1998) in which he presents the picture of a postcard sold in Berlin in the 1980’s with the picture of the Great Wall of China simply reading “greetings from Berlin“. He argues how in semiotics, the wall is the signifier and Berlin the signified showing as an irony the relatively insignificance of the wall as a physical barrier.
In his research, Stratton (2007) is concerned with the semiotics of the Israeli wall, and how the wall fits into Israeli ways of thinking that we can identify as “modern”. He argues that the actual wall that is being built is overdetermined by the meanings associated with the wall in the Israeli cultural imaginary, including the impact of the Holocaust on the way Israeli-Jews think as he suggests, this wall “needs to be understood through this culturally-based Holocaust anxiety. It bears connotations not only of modern ghetto walls but of the walls of the ghettos the Nazis created, and of the fences of the concentration and death camps. It is no wonder, then, that Israeli-Jews would rather the wall went around the Palestinians than around themselves” (p.4).
Schürer, Jenkins and Keune (1996) covered the use of literary imagery referring to the wall by German authors in their poetry, stories, novels and plays in both the FRG and the GDR.
They concluded the Berlin Wall has been one of the most powerful phenomena, visible and decipherable text of the 20th century. Several essays concentrate on the representation of the wall in popular culture, in contemporary songs and ballads, in the cinema and even through the graffiti on the wall itself; however the wall symbolism in editorial cartoons as concerning to this study, was not included.
Also, taking the Berlin wall as a rhetorical resource, Bruner (1989) presented four examples from public discourses during the period 1961-1989 to reveal four symbolic uses of the Berlin Wall: (1) the Wall as a sign of the failure of the West; (2) the use the divisiveness of the Wall as a means for building identifications between West Berliners and the West; (3) use the Wall as a vehicle for challenging the Soviet system and (4) the Wall as the device of dismissing the Wall as something out-of-step with contemporary European life (p.326).
In his book “Image critique & the fall of the Berlin Wall”, Manghani (2008) presents the role of images in critical thought taking as case study images of the fall of the Berlin wall. He does not offer a hermeneutic or historical analysis of visual representations of the Berlin wall presenting
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what he calls “image critique”: “a double procedure of both a critique of images and their critical engagement” (p.31).
Plenty of previous research has studied the frontier between both countries from an anthropological perspective that literally describes Mexican-American border locales to explore the concepts of inequality, power, global economics, and connections among cultures and societies (Alvarez 1987; Alvarez & Collier 1994; Chávez 1992; Fernández-Kelly 1983;
Greenberg 1987; Heyman 1991; Kearney 1991) as well as theoretical works (Gupta & Ferguson 1992; Rosaldo 1988) concerning the relationships between Mexicans and the United States conceived broadly (Behar 1993; Rouse 1991). Also, the border wall has been previously studied as an evaluation of the enhanced U.S. border enforcement measures (Cornelius 2001; 2004; 2007;
Emmott 2007; Hinkes 2008). However, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is a phenomenon that warrants further academic research because of its current impact on relationships between the two countries.
2.2 Understanding and Conceptualizing about Cartoons
Cartoons are a specific media form which tends to use humor and satire to convey messages about the social world (Kris & Gombrich 1962). It can be racist and sexist and it can contribute to the promotion of stereotypes (Templin, 1999). Cartoons are capable of communicating “subtle, complex, multilayered messages about people and events in the details of how they are drawn messages that would be difficult or impossible to express verbally”. Moreover, a political cartoon allows the cartoonist to express views that would be too “extreme, mean-spirited”, or “politically incorrect” to express in an essay column (Gilmartin & Brunn, 1998: 536) and “to be most effective, a cartoon must have three characteristics: sparkling wit, a basic element of fact, and a didactic or editorial purpose” (Cuff, 1945: 87).
The word “cartoon” is derived from the Italian word Caricatura, meaning to charge or load. An early definition is found in Sir Thomas Browne’s “Christian Morals” published in 1716:
“When men faces are drawn with resemblance to some other animals, the Italians call it, to be
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drawn in Caricatura”; making inference to Caricatura as a “loaded portrait”. “Cartoon” as a term was first used in its current meaning in the mid-19th century, when the British satirical monthly Punch used it as a title for a series of humorous illustrations lambasting the government’s plans for a new lavish Parliament building and contrasting this lavishness with the extreme poverty of many ordinary people (Kleeman, 2006). The antecedents of the editorial cartoon were anonymously produced woodcuts, which typically depicted scenes of a political or religious nature and were hawked around the streets of 17th century Europe. Many of these woodcuts contained words as well as images and there is evidence that some artists even employed speed lines and word-balloons (Sabin, 1996). The invention of copperplate engraving and, in the mid-1800s, of facsimile reproduction facilitated the mass production of more detailed images, and the early cartoons became increasingly humorous and satirical.
At a time when the newspaper was still a predominantly verbal medium, cartoons created a visual sensation and many cartoonists of the late 19th century and early 20th century came to be regarded as influential and highly respected political commentators (Walker, 1978). In 1981 Horn stated that “any draw that encapsulates a complete thought can be called a cartoon” (p.15) while Dovifat (1960) claimed that cartoon is the satirical exaggeration of the own peoples’
particularities or circumstances shown in an accurate or impressive form and Geipel (1972) pointed out that any illustration which makes use of such conventions as physical distortions, exaggerated facial expressions, speech balloons or sequences of framed strip is likely to be called a cartoon, whether or not it is supposed to be defamatory or humorous.
In 1968, Dunn classified cartoons according to their purposes: comic cartoons are for amusement; social cartoons comment in the problems of everyday life and attempt to entertain while editorial cartoons attack a point of view or political figure. In the last classification, the editorial cartoons represent the newspaper’s views and provide readers with condensed information on complex issues. The tone is generally concerned with a political event or
In 1968, Dunn classified cartoons according to their purposes: comic cartoons are for amusement; social cartoons comment in the problems of everyday life and attempt to entertain while editorial cartoons attack a point of view or political figure. In the last classification, the editorial cartoons represent the newspaper’s views and provide readers with condensed information on complex issues. The tone is generally concerned with a political event or