Resisting Legibility on the Borders: Opposition to the Violent Intersections of Race, Nationality, and Sexuality

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BIBI BARAJAS Little to no information exists about the life, and subsequent death, of Bibi Barajas. Born Hugo Cesar Barajas, Bibi was a transgender sex worker, making a living in Houston, Texas after crossing the border from Mexico. (1) Her body was found nearby a local nightclub in Houston exhibiting evidence of multiple gunshot wounds. (2) She died January 26, 2002. However, even these vague details are purely speculative. No one has come forward with any concrete information other than these "facts" and no suspects have been indicted in the murder, although it has been further speculated that there was more than one attacker and that the individuals were Barajas's customers. (3) While this explanation is plausible, there exists no concrete proof to make sense of her brutalized body. The murder received no attention in the national media and was only briefly reported by local news, rendering Barajas virtually unworthy of grief by the American public. With the media's overwhelming omission and the lack of public outrage, her body was sanctioned as an acceptable site for violence. By interrogating the violent space that both produced and justified the death (in the eyes of the nation) of Bibi Barajas--the space that marks her as impossible to imagine--we will be able to identify oppositional strategies that resist pulling marginalized subjects into legibility. At the same time, we will be able to discover increasingly powerful ways to challenge, even perhaps disassemble, the current systems of domination and oppression at work on those bodies deemed acceptable sites for violence. Barajas is the physical embodiment of the cultural work that borders set out to do. Gloria Anzaldua, in her pioneering study of the violence inherent in borders, Borderlands/LaFrontera, has asserted that "borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them... A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition." (4) Barajas personifies that state of transition, representing the slippage of identity of the American nation and existing in blatant opposition to what has been defined as a respectable citizen: white male heteronormative subjects. As transgender she blurs clearly defined gender lines; as a sex worker and person of color she exposes capital's production of nonheteronormative nonwhite subjects; (5) as a border crosser she confuses the category of human as it is defined through legality based on national identity; as a memory, she confuses the psychic temporal space between the living and the dead; finally, her physical death marks a rupture in the very formulation of borders, exposing their inability to function as they were intended. This rupture is also evidenced in our current moment of increased militarization around physical borders, a futile attempt to save fictitious boundaries that were doomed to fail from their inception. Robert Chang has looked to the inadequacy of borders in terms of their intended function, naming them imperfect. "It [the border] does not operate perfectly in excluding that which does not belong. Some people slip through, managing to escape detection. Mistakes are made. As a result, the geopolitical border is supplemented by internal policing mechanisms, formal and informal." (6) Eithne Luibheid further investigates Chang's theory by interrogating the way women's sexuality is policed at national borders, and then again, continuously, within the nation if allowed entry. She argues that this imperfection in borders is utilized for surveillance by the nation in terms of reinforcing heteronormativity through the regulation of immigrant female bodies. (7) It is my contention that this alleged imperfection is actually the intended function of borders. The border serves as a prohibition that doubles as an invitation to cross. The function of borders, then, becomes rehabilitation. …