Transborder Immigration Tool

This mobile phone application garnered a lot of controversy in the press during the earlier parts of this year as a GPS-location tool that helps Mexican immigrants cross the US-Mexico border safely and more successfully. Created by Professor Ricardo Dominguez at UCSD's calit2lab, the tool is implemented on old smart phones distributed to families in key Mexican cities and allows its users to connect with their families and certain "safe points" along the way, as well as to locate water. Professor Dominguez is currently being threatened with criminal action and revocation of his tenure by both the UC Office of the President and UCSD.

I think the controversy is germane to our course on a number of levels. In our discussions surrounding globalization, diaspora, and citizenship, it is clear that movement and travel is not always a privilege, but is often a matter of survival, as Zygmunt Bauman's notion of the "vagabond" has taught us. I am also reminded of Marita Sturken's arguments concerning the post-9/11 anxiety surrounding the crossing of borders and the reactionary movement to solidify a more tightly bounded nation. Specifically with regards to this app, vigilante militias that have taken to policing the border themselves have even threatened to build their own smart phone application that users can implement to more efficiently track and report immigrants crossing the border.

Of course, I think that we can also perhaps draw some parallels with Nick Couldry's arguments about information technologies and the ways in which they can help to catalyze grassroots forms of networked citizenship and activism. While this app isn't exactly in accordance with Couldry's model of public discourse online, and doesn't necessarily invoke any connection to consumption, the affordances of mobile phone technology are definitely used to create what he would call localized forms of "public connection." For all of my pessimism surrounding fandom that I've unleashed on the class in the past couple weeks (apologies!), I'm definitely glad to report on a "social networking" application that doesn't involve banner ads and Farmville.

Home Page

More news on protests surrounding the tool
(You can also sign the petition here, if you so choose).