Articles about "biographical mutilation"

Realidades socioculturales

Bureaucracy as a Border: Higher Education, Deportation, and the Liminal Citizenship of the "Homies" in Mexico

  • Ricardo Alfonso Zepeda Orozco

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.