Straight out of El Paso:

Borders, as sites of robust crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how  21st century US presidential regimes have amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by regular and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides—and, it could become that once again.

Gilberto Rosas has long been working with the ways state borders shape, distort and fragment lives.  His first award-winning book, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals focuses on the lives border residents carved in and through the tunnels connecting Ambos Nogales.  His second book, Unsettling: the El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism and the U.S. Mexico Border build out from his work on detention and deportation process in the United States, and the many overlapping circuits that connect public policy, far right mobilization and lives of people and families crossing border.  In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States.

Book Description
On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of a border crisis with currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States.

Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration—and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers.

Honorable Mention Senior Book Award American Ethnological Society.

Gilberto Rosas, an El Paso native, is chair of the department of Latina/Latino studies and a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

With interests in “the state,” racism and its broad complexities, critical ethnography, activist anthropology, and experimental writing, Rosas is author of the  award-winning Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Duke University Press, 2012) and the recently published and also award-winning Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and other well received work. He is also the editor of The Border Reader along with Mireya Loza (Duke University Press, 2023). Professor Rosas is active in the Immigrant Rights movements both locally and nationally, and has given expert testimony on behalf of people in asylum and related legal proceedings, and has been active in an innovative scholarship collaboration, addressing health inequities.