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Permeability is an essential characteristic of bordering. Despite the urgent state imperative to demarcate and territorialize, interstate borders have rarely functioned as hermetic barriers. Instead, they have more commonly served as selectively porous epidermises that mediate—through active administration and oversight—the transmission of people, goods, and more. While contemporary political discourse tends to accentuate their ostensive impermeability—typified by a language of inviolability and security, and buttressed by walls and partitions—the reality is that borders are designed to facilitate movement, just as they can be modulated to prevent it. As historian Paul Kramer puts it, “in this sense, modern state boundaries are best imagined not as walls but as filters, usually seeking less to block human movement entirely than to select, channel, and discipline it.”[1] Whether we consider literal boundaries—such as the one that Cléa Fortuné illustrates both enmeshes and divides Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora—or more figurative ones—such as the vivid border imaginary that Victor Konrad argues exemplifies the northern boundary—the essays in this volume reinforce that borders in all their forms are always more porous than we might assume.

[1] Paul A. Kramer, “The Geopolitics of Mobility: Immigration Policy and American Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” The American Historical Review 123, 2 (April 2018), 399.