As of lately, crime in the border cities of Mexico have come to an all time high, especially in Juarez, which has recently become the new murder capital of the world. The biggest cause of the increase in crime in border cities is due to drug selling and usage. Though many of the drugs that come into the United States are smuggled through these border cities, and are then distributed throughout the U.S, many people feel distanced from the problem. In this paper I will investigate the effects distance has on the perception of border crime by interviewing various people of different backgrounds, culture, and heritage as well as distance from the United States-Mexican border. In doing so we found that there is a direct correlation in how far a person is from the border and how much they pay attention to the news on border crimes because many seem to believe the distance makes it effect them less.
Savage Minds is dead! Long live anthro{dendum}!
7 years ago
Wow, this sounds really interesting and important. How will you talk to people at different distances? Will you drive to various communities? How many people will you interview at each place? Do you think geographic distance or cultural background or even socioeconomic class has more to do with people's perception of the monumental violence associated with the drug trade.
ReplyDeleteI think that these border issues are really compelling topics and not a great deal of contemporary anthropological studies have been done on them I don't think - so it's definitely timely and important! The UT professor you mentioned earlier, Santiago Guerra, would be a great resource I bet - he seems really nice and knowledgeable. I also wonder how people's perceptions of these border crimes and violence changes - due to location, background, class, etc. - who do they blame? Why do they think these issues are going on and how much responsibility do they put on the respective countries to solve and remedy these issues? (That might be way too many questions to fit but yeah...)
ReplyDeleteHi Victoria--
ReplyDeletewe can talk about this more in person; just a few observations:
--just to simplify the language, you are probably referring to geographical language; there is some interesting research (not in anthro, but in soc, and comm studies I think) on the effects of distance (geographical combined with social) on perceptions of crime, and the relationship actually goes the opposite way. Middle class people living in isolated, comfortable neighborhoods imagine the poor neighborhoods as riddled with crime, with these perceptions being fed by the media and sustained by ignorance, lack of contact, and class/ethnic/racial differences.
oh, I had another observation: you should be careful with trying to prove causal relationships; methodologically, that is an impossibility; we are more interested in understanding processes, placing these processes in cultural and social context and documenting them
ReplyDelete