The border is as much as performance staging national boundaries and state authority, as it is a material boundary.i The anti-immigration groups that I collectively refer to as the Minutemen (MM) have also publicly described their sensationalist monitoring of the border and labor sites as a form of political theater. When the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, led by Chris Simcox, constructs a border fence on private land, or the San Diego Minutemen inspired by director Jim GilChrist “observe” labor sites, they claim that they are “shocking” us into attention about the illegal immigration “state of emergency”ii and the inadequacies of national policy.iii This paper examines how these groups use a sensational, theatrical repertoire of tactics to update abstracted ideals of citizenship with more emotional and political purchase.

As an undergraduate I became fascinated with the relationships between performance and protest. One production I collaborated upon used spoken word, skits, interviews, and archival footage to explore contemporary collisions between gender, race, and sexuality at my small, privileged college in New England. It sparked some thoughtful discussions among the student body about how varying degrees of disprivilege condition values and standpoints.

In the days leading up to the 2008 election, the airwaves were peppered with commercials about Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriages and amend the state constitution to limit the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. An unprecedented fundraising campaign, second only to that of Barack Obama, generated over $74 million. Proponents associated “traditional” heterosexual marriage with the well-being of children, tradition, and the moral content of earlychildhood family education. Their opponents countered that marriage confers dignity, equal protections, and full citizenship rights upon gays, and is a core part of the equality movement. As an institution that is legally and culturally associated with the private spheres of love and family, the debate over government definitions of marriage restages its emphatically public, state-centered parameters.