Policing Life and Thickening Delinquency at the New Frontier

This article grapples with what I term the "thickening delinquency" of a group of homeless youths in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, who called themselves "Barrio Libre." Their transformation from public nuisances to a threatening menace of a transnational gang, particularly their practices of mugging would be undocumented migrants, proves inextricably tied to questions of policing and sovereignty at the new frontier between the United States and Mexico, the concomitant blurring of licit and illicit economies in this region, and intertwined technologies of racialization and criminalization.