Deportation does not end the U.S. “school-to-prison pipeline”; rather, it shifts it to the Mexican bureaucracy. This article argues that the administrative procedures for accessing higher education function as a punitive technology that fragments and delegitimizes educational trajectories built outside the national documentation framework. Drawing on critical ethnographic research with deported men in western Mexico, the article demonstrates how the school registration office functions as an internal border that perpetuates the logic of punishment by demanding unattainable documents and invalidating prior academic achievements. The article proposes understanding bureaucracy as a central mechanism of the transnational punitive regime in debates on migration, punishment, and citizenship.

The interview "Intellectual challenges for the political imagination" presents a dialogue with Alejandro Grimson, a prominent Argentine anthropologist known for his analysis of identities and borders in Latin America. Alina Peña Iguarán highlights his contributions on cultural configurations and the concept of frontier as a dynamic space of interaction and conflict. The conversation addresses three moments: the Latin American debates of the 1990s, the genesis of his book "The Limits of Culture", and the analysis of the rise of the extreme right. Grimson reflects on nationalism, crisis of representation, and the urgency of building alternatives to the current political "mess" that weakens democracy.

This photographic essay intends to show some of the results of the ground research carried out within the context of a doctoral dissertation, during the months of July through September of 2014 in Ceuta, as well as Melilla and locations near the Spanish-Moroccan border. As the text shows, the maritime enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla have once had a crucial geostrategic position in the Mediterranean. Currently, its purpose as an external European border in the African continent has been reinforced with the securitization of the border region to contain the threats related to criminal activities and “undesired” trans-Mediterranean migration, although it has also ended up affecting “atypical” trade or trafficking with Morocco.