Description
U.S. immigration and border enforcement have intensified militarization and surveillance throughout the United States-México transborder region. The Baja California-San Diego borderlands is one of the most crossed border regions in the world where transborder people frequently commute and interact with U.S. agents at militarized ports of entry. Limited research has demonstrated transborder commuters experience stress from long border wait times and border policing. However, research has not been conducted to understand how transborder workers live with the associated stress in their everyday lives. This study explored the lived experience of transborder workers navigating from México through U.S. ports of entry in the Baja California-San Diego borderlands and the embodiment of structural violence through perceived stress. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological design, the study centered the testimonios (lived experiences) of nine participants to understand the relational meaning of their experiences and the phenomenon of perceived stress. Purposeful and snowball sampling methods were used to recruit participants and semi-structured one-on-one phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. van Manen’s six-stage approach (1990) guided the iterative explicitation of the data to highlight salient themes. The findings revealed four themes: 1) Positionality, 2) Environment, 3) Situations, and 4) Adaptation and Coping Strategies. The participants had between two to 35 years of experience crossing to San Diego from México and crossed between two to six times a week. Participants’ perceived stress were expressed through feelings of anger, anxiety, fear, or relief when experiencing unpredictable interactions with U.S. agents, personal questioning, fragility of documentation, loss of time from long wait times, traffic congestion, and direct exposure to weather conditions. Also, participants reported experiencing mental and physical exhaustion and chronic stress as long-term health outcomes of commuting. The findings illustrate U.S. immigration and border enforcement (re)produce mobility inequalities that sustain time poverty across the different processing lanes and participants constantly adapt their strategies to cope. The study highlights the importance of addressing the experience of perceived stress among transborder workers and monitoring the health impacts of chronic stress to inform policy change on border policing practices.
