Making biosecurity, making Mexico : an ethnography of biological invasion

Abstract

This dissertation tracks what happens when biology, that is, both life forms and knowledge about them, becomes the object of security. While increasing global traffic has led to a greater degree of movement of people, animals, plants, and microbes, biosecurity measures are concerned with regulating circulation and seek to work against such possibly homogenizing forces by both documenting and maintaining the distinctiveness of life forms in different places. Through ethnographic research in Mexico, I track the social logics, scientific practices, and institutional forms that underwrite biosecurity in three areas: invasive species control, emerging infectious disease research, and the use of transgenic organisms. I examine how conservationists working in Mexican settings - particularly on islands - alternately protect or exterminate the various life forms they encounter; how microbiologists and immunologists studying infectious diseases in Mexico make claims about the relationships between environments, bodies, and viral ecologies; and how ecologists regulate the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and turn them into bureaucratic objects. All these projects entail defining "native" life forms and establishing what is unique and valuable about Mexican biology. By bringing together this assortment of interlocutors and research sites I map how biosecurity projects establish the ways that a shared biological substantiality connects the nation and how human and non-human life forms are incorporated into political identities. Through these projects scientists produce knowledge about Mexican biology (including who or what is included or excluded in these populations). As this knowledge in turn informs political efforts to improve human and ecological health, biosecurity projects become ways in which science and the nation in Mexico are coconstituted. I address the production of biosecurity in two canonical places of science, the lab and the field, and I argue for the importance of a third scientific space, the office, a space where scientists engaged with bureaucratic processes and shaped the administration of Mexican ecosystems. Further, I argue that in Mexico biopolitics and biosecurity are no longer only about the regulation of human life, but have been extended beyond the human to encompass animal, plant, and microbial worlds. Mexican biopolitics have become multispecies projects.