Original Research

Before and After: Dogs’ Biographies Along and Across the Mexico-US Border

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
ivan.sandoval-cervantes@unlv.edu

Abstract

In the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, numerous animal protection organizations seek to rescue street dogs that have been abandoned or abused. Many of these organizations seek to place previously abused dogs in “forever homes” in the United States. To accomplish this, the dogs often go through a transformation that transforms them into objects of care, making them adoptable. In this article, I analyze how narratives and photos used in social media enable this transformation by creating individual animal biographies. These animal biographies are not innocent stories; rather, they show how care is constructed in specific contexts. The construction of these biographies is presented as a non-political attempt to make the lives of abandoned dogs better; these biographies are, in fact, filled with political implications of what the Mexico- US border is like. Thus, I argue that animal biographies have a significant social role, particularly through social media, and have to be understood as political devices that can create, challenge, or strengthen ideas about life, care, and ethics.

Resumen

En la ciudad fronteriza de Ciudad Juárez, México, las organizaciones protectoras de animales buscan rescatar perros abandonados, víctimas de abuso, o en situación de calle. Muchas de estas organizaciones intentan que los perros rescatados sean adoptados de manera permanente en los Estados Unidos. Con esta finalidad, los perros generalmente son transformados en “objetos de cuidado”, haciéndolos adoptables. En este artículo analizo cómo las narrativas y las fotos que se usan en las redes sociales permiten llevar a cabo esta transformación al crear biografías animales individuales. Estas biografías animales no son historias inocentes, más bien demuestran cómo el cuidado se construye en contextos específicos. La construcción de dichas biografías que intenta transformar, para bien, las vidas de los perros, aparenta ser un acto apolítico. Sin embargo, estas biografías están repletas de implicaciones políticas sobre la vida fronteriza entre México y los EEUU. Por lo tanto argumento que las biografías animales tienen un significado social, particularmente en las redes sociales, y que tienen que ser entendidas como artífices políticos que pueden crear, desafiar y fortalecer concepciones sobre la vida, el cuidado, y la ética.

Keywords

dogs, biography, animal protection, Mexico, border, care

Introduction

One Facebook post: two pictures, side by side, of a dog rescued in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez. The picture on the left, the before, the past. The picture on the right, the after, the now, the future. On the left, a dog’s face is just barely hidden, outside of the frame. Yet we can still see a neck, red with bruises, a ribcage showing. On the right, the dog lays on a gray couch. His eyes are shinning. Now that you can see “Bill’s” face, you could even say he is smiling, no longer feeling the need to hide outside the frame. A handkerchief around his neck, this dog looks comfortable. Both are pictures of the same dog, a rescued white mixed dog that looks like a poodle mix, but, in a way, they are also pictures of two different dogs.¹ The dog on the left, a body without a face, without a name, and without a voice. Another anonymous street dog that barely exists as an individual. The only reason to photograph him is to show that his pain is the pain of many, and that his existence is reigned by uncertainty. The dog on the right shows a dog with a face, a name, a story of overcoming great adversity. You photograph this dog to document his life, his happiness, and his relationship with his present and future human caretakers.

These two pictures can only be understood in this way when they exist next to each other, and only next to each other can they signal the possibility of a “before” and an “after.” Both of these pictures might share the same space in the “before and after” collage, but the role they play in the potential biographies of those dogs is in no way symmetrical. This collage, however, is not only about this particular dog, but also about the construction of dogs’ biographies as objects of care and, thus, about the effects of that care directed towards rescued dogs. These photo collages are used by dog rescuers who circulate them as an attempt to get people, mostly from the United States, to adopt street dogs from Ciudad Juárez. That is, these images are, in part, intentional, in the sense that they show the potential of a dog as an object of care. These photo collages, I argue, are also an attempt at creating incipient animal biographies, as they seek to capture dogs’ particular personalities, thus, making them visible as individuals. This visibilization creates paradoxical results that go beyond the individual animals themselves. The use of technology to document changes in the lives of dogs emphasizes the idea that these dogs are individuals, and becomes a precondition for recognizing subjectivity, thus allowing the one-family/one-dog relationship that adoption requires. The process of producing individuality through digital storytelling and photo collages also sets in motion the possibility of specific dogs becoming objects of care—only if they can become objects of care will someone care enough about them to adopt them. Additionally, the photo collages almost always exclude images of the people who rescued these dogs. This exclusion might be an attempt to separate the dog “as an object of care” from previous caretakers, usually women (often working-class women), thus erasing previous relationships and making some women invisible.

However, here I analyze how these practices and discourses of care are not fully transparent but opaque with politics that extend beyond the images and beyond the dogs themselves. Following Aryn Martin, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu, I understand care as “a selective mode of attention [that] cherishes some things, lives, or phenomena as its objects” while excluding others (2015, 627). In other words, care is not “an innocent activity”; rather, it has to be understood within specific and localized predicaments (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 164). Thus, the fact that the practice of care that emerges in the Mexico-US border is not trivial but fundamental in understanding how care relations are created between human individuals and individual dogs. I am interested in the simultaneous creation of animal biographies, through social media and photo collages, and the creation of individual animals as objects of care, and in analyzing what this simultaneous creation says about the Mexico-US border, dogs’ lives, and social media. A feminist lens that emphasizes the relationship between women and care work (see Haraway 2008) can help us analyze how certain dogs become “objects of care,” excluding other dogs and the women who rescued them. This work is particularly fundamental in the examples highlighted here because it erases what María Puig de la Bellacasa refers to as “the sharp acknowledgement of interdependency” of interspecies love (2017, 82–83).

I have conducted fieldwork in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso since 2017. I have accompanied animal welfare associations as they perform rescues and sterilization campaigns, engage in public communications, and attend official events. I have also talked with and interviewed people in public veterinary hospitals, the state prosecutor’s office, and the local agency for animal well-being. Throughout my work, I have engaged in participant observation and interviews. I have also looked closely at social media in Ciudad Juárez and across Mexico. I draw on this work to contextualise the analysis presented in this article.

This article is structured in the following way: In the first section, I provide specific context for this case study. That is, I discuss Ciudad Juárez-El Paso and the animal protection organizations that I am analyzing. In the second section, I analyze the way images, like the one discussed in the opening vignette, create the possibility of conceptualizing individual animals biographically (see Krebber and Roscher 2018a), and how specificity and individuality operate in this context (including the act of naming specific animals [see Borkfelt 2011, 2022]). In the third section, I look at how care is constructed and how it organizes bodies and narratives that are attached to individual bodies and to borderland territories and beyond. In the fourth section, I argue that, even though this article is based on a small sample, the case of the rescued dogs of Ciudad Juárez can tell us important things about the role of animal biographies, care, and social media (particularly Facebook) that could be applied in other contexts. I conclude that animal lives and bodies are politically important to think with as we try to understand the relationship between animals and specific historical contexts. In this regard, I propose that we continue to engage with human-animal research that emphasizes the connections between animals and sociohistorical contexts, and that pays special attention to how practices of care, indifference, and activism emerge in specific localities (e.g., Candea 2010; Davé 2023; García 2023; González-Duarte 2021; Pedraza 2023; Ruiz- Serna 2021; Parreñas 2018).

Ciudad Juárez and Its Dogs

In Ciudad Juárez, right across the Mexico-US border from El Paso, Texas, stray dogs abound. In the early 2010s, a few years after Felipe Calderón initiated his failed “war on drugs,” turning the city into one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the number of stray dogs skyrocketed, multiplying exponentially. Throughout these years of unleashed violence, the point of contrast was always with El Paso, Texas, the so-called sister city. In a not-so-distant moment in history, before the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande became the “natural border,” El Paso and Ciudad Juárez were the same city: El Paso del Norte. Since El Paso del Norte split into two, various narratives have explored these border cities, including the concept of “sister cities,” that suggest there is a kinship-like relationship between both urban centers.

Given this trajectory, it is indisputable that the populations of both cities share a rich history and numerous connections. However, it is essential to question what lies beyond this narrative of sisterhood, and in what ways these narratives that imply care are built on inequality. Thus, without denying the real and historical connections between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, it is a fact that the international border has created significant differences between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. For example, El Paso is often considered as one of the safest cities in the US, while Ciudad Juárez is continually listed as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. This context has created what Howard Campbell (2009) calls “the drug war zone,” where victims of violence become ambiguous symbols of the state and the measures taken to control such violence (see Wright 2011).

However, violence was also present in the city before the war on drugs failed experiment erupted. Ciudad Juárez is well known for the ongoing feminicides that became national and international news in the 1990s. The so-called muertas de Juárez became a symbol of the oppression and resistance of encroaching labor practices that considered working-class women disposable. In this sense, Ciudad Juárez became a “sacrifice zone” (see Juskus 2023), in which the state showed a lack of intentionality to stop the violence that was occurring since it would also mean reviewing labor practices that were especially beneficial to transnational companies and maquiladoras, sweatshops (see Boyd and Orellana 2021). After violence in 2008 intensified, Ciudad Juárez became fundamental in the war on drugs and gave way to a more generalized violence produced by criminal organizations and opportunistic criminals. As the violence spread throughout Mexico, Ciudad Juárez was also engulfed by what Rossana Reguillo (2021) calls the “necro-machine” (la necromáquina). The necro-machine highlights the transformation from violence directed towards the benefit of criminal activities (the narco-machine) to violence that becomes the end in itself, when killing and dying is not enough to “feed the machine.” Rather, it is about destroying and dissolving the potential of a life without violence.

However, even in this context, dog rescue and animal protection organizations have emerged all throughout the city, and with a significant presence in social media. According to a chronicle by Al Jazeera America, precisely during this period, from 2008 to 2011, the number of stray dogs increased from 20,000 to 200,000 (Garcia and Alvarez 2013). Michelle García and Ignacio Alvarado Álvarez (2013) explained how this surge was attributed to the number of people forced to leave the city during those years when Ciudad Juárez was considered the most dangerous city in the world. Those who could migrated to El Paso, Texas; others returned to their hometowns throughout Mexico. In addition, the economic recession of 2008 further pushed people out of the city. As people left Ciudad Juárez, they also left their homes and their pets behind.

The emergence of animal protection organizations and activism in Ciudad Juárez has to be understood in relation to an increasing “animalista movement” that is taking place across the entire country (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2023b). Yet the border location of Ciudad Juárez is significant because it informs the biographies of the rescued dogs. The rescued dogs that I discuss in this article are not only passive bystanders of the border condition of the city; their stories and their representations are actively informing the narratives about the El Paso del Norte region and the border. As I will discuss later in the article, the fact that dogs from Ciudad Juárez cross the border into the US is materially and symbolically different from dogs that are adopted within Mexico. There is a dynamic relationship between the border and the photo collages as elements in the before and after.

I focus here on the stories of dogs that appear to exist solely as generic dogs on one side of the border and as individual dogs with proper names on the other. I also examine how their images are transformed and the implications of their past experiences in Ciudad Juárez. Therefore, the border, as a physical space, becomes a narrative resource, a turning point that transforms the collective into the individual in one direction and, in the other, the specimens into species. Although, this turning point applies to individual dogs, it must also be understood within larger narratives that seek to generalize experiences and to open new possibilities for the future. These narratives emphasize life changes reflected not only in the quality of life but also in how those lives are perceived. In other words, it is an aesthetic change captured in photographs circulating on social media.

Beyond the physical, material space occupied by the border, the border also marks a before and after. When people cross the border, they sometimes magically transform into different individuals: they do not exceed the speed limit, they do not litter. Of course, this applies when people cross from south to north because when they cross from north to south, the transformation is reversed. In both cases, there is a before and after. Thus, I also use the border to imagine how dogs, as a species and as individuals, change and seem to travel through time. They extend their life expectations, sometimes in radical ways, sometimes in unexpected ways. The transformation that the dogs experience from left to right, and from Mexico to the US, combines three factors: individualization, the possibility of the future, and aesthetic changes. The act of rescue itself is a turning point, a before and after, marking the dog's history. Sometimes, the rescuers themselves rename the dog, giving it a new name to signal that specific change, as was made clear during my fieldwork in Ciudad Juárez (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2023a).

Creating Dog Biographies: From the Generic to Individuality

To provide some context, it is important to point out that the animalista and the rescue efforts in Ciudad Juárez are varied, addressing a multitude of causes. Organizations and individuals are involved in education efforts at schools, ongoing negotiations with the local government, protesting bull fighting, taking cases of animal abuse to the legal realm, among other things. Although organizations tend to have a specific focus, their members are often involved in several of these efforts and often interact with other organizations and other animalistas.

In this article, I will focus on the specific efforts of dog rescuers involved in sheltering and placing dogs for adoption. These organizations also focus on affordable public sterilization campaigns that take place during the weekends in neighborhoods considered “low-income.” Besides this work, some organizations devote significant portions of their time and energy to rescuing stray dogs, providing them with temporary shelter with local and independent rescuers, and the promoting the rescued dogs as adoptable in the United States. As part of this process, and to achieve their purpose, these organizations post photos on their Facebook websites. These photos portray malnourished, unhealthy, visibly sick stray dogs found on the streets of Ciudad Juárez. Sometimes accompanied by text describing how these dogs were found, these photos serve as an initial way to promote their work.

In one post, one organization discusses a small terrier living “a wretched life,” destined to spend the remainder of her miserable life on the streets of Juárez. The text reads, “When V [the rescuer] saw her, the impossible turned into a miracle.” After several months of rehabilitation, the one-eyed dog, now named Alvie, was photographed in a vehicle and, the post continued, was “heading to her new temporary home and will soon be available for adoption with our sister organization in the United States.”

The before/after transition, and the beginning of a biography, are made clear in the case of Looky, a small gray and black dog. In one of the pictures, Looky looks up to the camera, directly staring at the viewer. In the picture next to Looky, we observe a desert landscape peppered with scraps and a cardboard makeshift house. The text says, “Looky has a new haircut and will soon be ready for adoption. He was saved from a remote area along the Mexico/US border by an amazing person who helps lost dogs in the desert. Soon, he will be sleeping on sofas and being pampered in Arizona.”

Little Music, a female schnauzer-looking dog, appears in the “before” photo laying on a concrete floor, her fur coat showing patches with almost no fur. Her face, pressed against the floor, hides her expression. Looking at the “before” photo, one could easily assume that the Little Music was sick, dehydrated, even dead. In the “after” photo, Little Music’s fur looks shiny and smooth; she also looks bigger, almost as if she had grown. She has a serious look as she stares at the camera. The text reads, “Little Music on her way to our sister organization, it won’t be long before she’s adopted. She had a loooooooooooong road to recovery, and now that she’s healthy she’ll be adopted soon.”

In these examples, we can see how rescuing a dog marks the beginning of their new life. The rescue is the turning point, but what happened before the rescue allows for the construction of dogs as subjects, something similar to “quasisubjects” (Dicenta 2020) or “neoliberal subjects” (Velasco Santos and González Nava 2023). According to Mara Dicenta (2020), specific nonhuman animals can become a “quasi-subject” and mobilize “attentions” even if they never achieve “full subjecthood.” In a similar way, Paola Velasco Santos and Alejandra González Nava (2023) discuss how fireflies have become “neoliberal subjects” through their direct participation in the local conservation tourism efforts in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The act of the rescue is the first step in the construction of rescued dogs as subjects, placing them at the center of socioeconomic relationships that construct them as potential subjects while incorporating them, as individuals, into a web of transnational relationships. In other words, to make dogs adoptable, their adoption has to be seen as part of a narrative, an individual narrative that justifies the adoption of a specific dog and allows for the individual dog the possibility of escaping a violent context. The hardships that these dogs faced while in Ciudad Juárez and their ability to endure them are highlighted throughout the posts. These dogs survived in impossible conditions and escaped death in the urban desert of Ciudad Juárez; their lives are exceptional and thus merit some form of biographical retelling (Krebber and Roscher 2018b, 1).

Yet this “before” narrative is almost always impossible to understand or even to imagine. Before the rescue, we can only understand these dogs as part of a collective, and we must assume how miserable their lives were, only guessing how much violence they have endured. Although it is never articulated, those dogs who die while on the streets will remain anonymous, dogs without a name, without a story to tell, no biographies or photo collages to represent them. If biographies give animals their full agency back (Pouillard 2022, 177), then the lack of a biography suggests that street dogs have no agency and no subjectivity.

The stories that these biographies are telling are about movement, about moving from the streets into a home and, implicit in these particular posts, moving from Mexico to the United States. So the lives of these rescued dogs are described in terms of successful journeys. See, for example, this excerpt for one of the rescued dogs: “What a long, long journey this little boy has had. And NOW after all he’s been through, the end of the journey is the beginning of the next journey, that journey is called, being part of a lucky, loving family. Today is a new journey for this little and lucky guy. Juárez to Colorado a long way for such a little guy.” The biography of this particular dog is a set of interconnected journeys: the journey from the streets to being rescued, the journey after being rescued to becoming adoptable, the journey from Ciudad Juárez (imagined as a barren landscape of suffering) to a loving home in the United States. Biographies, according to André Krebber and Mieke Roscher (2018b), attempt to capture animals as individuals and to make them visible as individuals. Almost by definition, they seek to attribute a self to their subjects, tying the knot between the biography’s subject and the reader. The reader, and potential adoptive human, will be interested in becoming part of a dog’s journey.

In these examples, we can see different aspects of how the rescue and, then, the border become turning points, discrete events that become foundational in creating an individual narrative for a specific dog. Before these turning points, the dogs in question are seen only as part of a collective (street dogs), and their previous experience is only important in how it helps shape a narrative of overcoming obstacles and, then, opening up the possibility of a human helping them overcome the border. Before these dogs were rescued, they could not be recognized as individuals, and it is only as individuals that they can be adopted. Before these dogs were rescued, they lived in precarious and difficult conditions, and here it is assumed that dogs cannot live a good life where they were born, and without humans naming them. When they are rescued, they are named, and they are seen as starting a new, better life.

Naming is an important part of these biographies. As Sune Borkfelt argues, “names are representations; irrespective of whether they are connected directly to characteristics of those named…they always have the power of representations” (2022, 155–56). In the case of the dogs in Ciudad Juárez, the process of naming can represent several things. It can represent a specific humorous situation linked to the dog while the dog was still a street dog, or a quality of the dog that is meant to erase his previous situation (like Little Music because of the way the dog barks, or Looky because the dog is nice to “look at”). In other cases, names can be purely aspirational. For example, a rescued dog was name Justice after an extremely violent attack, and two of the puppies that survived that attack were named after regional authorities in hopes they would get adopted (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2023b).

Adoption becomes a way to move in the direction of a “good life.” Although there is the incorporation of narratives that emphasize the dogs’ past, the biographies that reshape the public image of animals can also “[deny] them of their lived experience and identity” (see Pouillard 2022, 173) by seeking to present humananimal relationships as harmonious after the adoption has taken place. The photo collages seek to create rescued dogs as objects of care, but what does it mean to think about care in a critical way, “beyond the conflation of care with affection, happiness, attachment, and positive feeling” (Murphy 2015, 719)?

Caring as Erasure

The act of rescuing and adopting street dogs from Ciudad Juárez appears to be an evident act of care. Yet, rather than assuming that care is always a selfless act that defies politics and transforms inequalities, we should consider care’s “darker side”—that is, how these “acts of care are always embroiled in complex politics,” and how acts of care often rely (consciously and/or inadvertently) on a discourse of “innocence” as a way to obscure “the violence committed in its name” (Martin et al. 2015, 627).

In this section, I analyze how the before and after photo collages used on Facebook construct dogs as objects of care, and what this might mean for the dogs. Following the lead of Martin, Myers, and Viseu (2015), I look at care as a complex, context-specific act that can involve good intentions and bad faith. That is, are there political implications when rescued dogs from Ciudad Juárez are constructed as objects of care? I argue that the construction of dogs as objects of care pushes narratives of care and the centrality of care in human-animal relationships in a way that can be interpreted as a double erasure. As I explain in this section, the process of rescue-adoption can produce the erasure of, first, the complex politics of Mexico and the US, and, second, the dogs’ lived experience prior to being rescued and adopted. These two erasures are central to the production of dogs’ biographies. This criticism, however, does not mean that the rescue-adoption efforts should be disregarded as ill-intended—the organizations and people involved in this work sacrifice their time and limited resources in an environment that is mostly indifferent and sometimes even hostile. Rather, this criticism is raised against the generalized depoliticization of human-animal relationships as a form of the “anti-politics” that is part of numerous, ongoing humanitarian efforts worldwide (see Ferguson 1994; Ticktin 2011). In the next section, I will elaborate on the specific role that social media has on the creation and perpetuation of anti-politics in human-animal relationships.

In order to discuss how caring can become a vehicle for erasure, I once again rely on Martin, Myers, and Viseu, who define care as “an affectively charged and selective mode of attention that directs action, affection, or concern at something, and in effect, it draws attention away from other things” (2015, 635). Using this definition helps establish how this mode of attention, often “full of romantic temptations that disconnect acts that feel good from their geopolitical implications” (Murphy 2015, 725), can be used to reframe certain sociopolitical contexts through the reshaping of individual stories. To put it differently, when acts of care are centered in individual stories (in this case, individual dog stories), the complex political relationships between those individual stories and the geopolitical location become secondary and are deemed unimportant. The act of care—the rescue, in this case—becomes the element that moves the story forward, shaping what we know, what we do not know, and we don’t want to know (see Martin et al. 2015, 634–35).

The erasure of the complex sociopolitical relationships obscured by individual acts of care can take many different forms. For example, during a fieldwork visit with one organization in Ciudad Juárez, we visited a temporary shelter run by an independent rescuer, Anabel. Anabel does not receive any governmental funding, and she was not affiliated with a formal rescue organization. Rather, she dedicated her free time and limited resources to rescuing dogs and taking care of them. As part of the “independent rescuers” of Ciudad Juárez, Anabel had seventy-four dogs under her care in a house on the periphery of the city. Anabel funded her efforts through donations from other organizations that helped her by funding food and medicine for specific dogs. Anabel is a working-class woman, who used to work in a maquiladora located on the Mexico-US border. Anabel did not have a visa and was unable to cross into El Paso.

Anabel had been working with a transnational organization directed by a US citizen name Grace. Grace, who did not live in Texas, visited the shelters in Ciudad Juárez frequently and provided funding for Anabel and other independent rescuers in the city. Grace was a middle-aged woman who was involved in numerous humanitarian organizations and had been working closely with Mexican citizens involved in animal protection efforts. Before arriving at the shelter, the group (composed of both Mexican and US citizens) had visited a family in Ciudad Juárez that was trying to get their dog adopted. They were a large family and couldn’t take care of a sickly dog. Acting as a translator, I told them that their dog would have a “good life,” and that he would probably end up in a “million-dollar house.”

On our way to the shelter, Grace said that dogs often help people avoid political discourses and act in compassionate ways. In 2017, when this visit took place, less than year into Trump’s first presidency, the political climate in the US was belligerent and still reeling from the 2016 elections. The relationship between Mexico and the US was not much better, and racist discourses around Mexicans and border populations still reigned during many of the conversations on the border. When I asked Grace about how this impacted donations coming from the US, she said that, in her opinion, when people donate to her organization, they are not often thinking about politics; rather, they are acting out of compassion. “Even Trump supporters donate to our cause,” she said. For Grace, it was important not to make their work political, because doing so could carry important consequences.

This depoliticization of the rescue-adoption efforts is clear in the before and after photo collages that continually refer to the streets of Ciudad Juárez simply as an isolated and impoverished desert. These posts do not seek to explain why there are so many dogs roaming the city streets, the role of the government in curbing streets dogs, or the role of the US in the creation of the destitute border city landscape. That is, although street dogs are produced in specific historical and political contexts, in order for them to be rescuable and adoptable, their lives need to be explained as emerging outside of politics. Introducing politics into the biographies of dogs risks politizicing acts of care that, as Grace put it, are conceived as acts of compassion. This erasure of the complex politics of place and of dogs as products of sociohistorical events also constricts how people can think about dogs and about the possible lives of dogs. In the previous section, I discussed how dogs’ stories are meant to show the possibility of going “from rags to riches.” This narrative emphasizes a dog’s transformations as part of multiple journeys that will eventually allow a specific dog to have a “good life.” These journeys are fundamental in the attempt to construct a biography that takes the rescue as “the point of inception” (Sandoval-Cervantes 2023b) that fundamentally transforms the dog by opening up the possibility of a new way to relate to humans. Implicit in this narrative, however, is the idea that before being rescued that particular dog did not live a life worth living; they did not live a good life.

This implication appears as an erasure of the dog’s previous lived experience and identity. It also assumes that there is a direct relationship between a human socioeconomic position and a dog’s quality of life (Sandoval-Cervantes 2016). That is, the “good life” mentioned by Grace earlier can only exist after the last “journey,” the one that will deliver the dog to a “loving family” in the US. Previously, dogs’ lives were not “good lives”; rather, they lived “bare lives,” reduced to merely attempting to survive (see Agamben 1988). This second erasure complements the first one in constructing an image of Ciudad Juárez (and, it could be argued, of Mexico in general) as a place that must be escaped in order to live a life worth living. It limits the possibilities of understanding humandog relationships in the city, and it proposes that dogs’ lives are only worthwhile if they are part of an owner-pet dyad.

A critical take on this interpretation might argue that the same could be said about rescued dogs adopted by Mexican families living in Mexico. However, it is not only the geographical location that matters but also the class location of the adoptive families. I argue here that the fact that these dogs cross an international border matters because it creates the impression that there is no turning point, no reversal for the dog. It is certainly true that a rescued dog can “move up” in terms of social class within Mexico, and this often happens (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2016). Thus, in some ways, for a dog to “move up” in terms of class within Mexico, it would also require the erasure of the dog’s previous lived experience and of the people doing the care work. Yet the possibility of ending up in the streets of the same city or of another city within Mexico is still latent. When a dog “moves north,” this possibility no longer exists.

The Facebook photo collages of rescued dogs looking for an adoptive “forever home” are visual devices that make rescued dogs attractive to potential adoptive families in the US. The photo collages construct street dogs as objects of care, but only after they have been rescued. The families that adopt rescued dogs have already chosen an object to care about; they are willing to be moved by this other (Martin et al. 2015, 636). The families that adopt these dogs do so mostly based on the information they gather from social media sites and the pictures posted there. That is, they care about dogs as they are represented in those pictures, and as I stated in this section, those pictures often erase local politics and the inherent inequality in human-dog relationships.

The Anti-Politics of Social Media

As illustrated in the opening paragraph of this article, organizations involved in rescuing dogs rely heavily on images that are meant to circulate on social media. These images have multiple purposes: They showcase the work that people in such organizations do, they highlight the importance of their mission, and, in the case described here, they seek to attract the attention of potential adoptive families for rescued dogs. In order to do all of this, organizations involved in the rescue-adoption process use photo collages that show the transformation of specific dogs as an indicator that they are ready to be adopted. Using social media and the photo collages, these organizations construct rescued dogs as objects of care. In this construction process, they also prevent the possibility of street dogs becoming political subjects by relying on their rescue-adoption efforts as a form of humanitarian intervention. Like practices of care, humanitarian interventions are regularly assumed to be “good” and outside of politics. Thus, I argue, following James Ferguson (1994) and Miriam Ticktin (2011), that generally animal protection organizations in Mexico, and rescue-adoption organizations in particular, often engage in the “anti-politics” machine employed by humanitarian agencies throughout the world.

Although there are differences in how Ferguson (1994) and Tickin (2011) talk about “anti-politics,” both seem to agree that humanitarianism becomes a political discursive device that frames sociopolitical conflicts and problems as technical and individual issues. That is, humanitarianism removes those problems and conflicts from their political and structural contexts. This removal, states Ferguson, is not accidental or simply “ideological icing” (1994, xiv), but rather how development generates its own form of discourse, how it constructs its objects of knowledge, and how it creates a structure of knowledge around such objects. The animal protection movement in Mexico is already depoliticized as it fails to properly address structural and systemic issues in the relationships between humans and animals in the country (see Sandoval-Cervantes 2023a). Thus, the before and after photo collages are not, by themselves, the defining element of this anti-politics machine but are important elements in the ongoing entrenchment and discourse reproduction that depoliticizes animal lives in favor of individual cases that can be solved through apolitical acts of care. In other words, one does not need to care about the history or the political conditions that produce street dogs; one need only care about individual dogs.

In some ways, this depoliticization of animal abuse runs parallel to antiimmigration narratives that have also sought to construct potential refugees and migrants. Didier Fassin (2005) argues that, in France, the balance between compassion and repression has shifted to privilege the “suffering body” of migrants rather than their biographies. In other words, compassion and empathy are directed towards sick and suffering migrant bodies, erasing their personal biographies and complex transnational relationships. The before and after photo collages accomplish this move for rescued dogs.

The before and after photo collages that become objects of care for potential adoptive families engage in the double erasure mentioned in the previous section and thus become part of the anti-politics machine of animal protection in Mexico. The photo collages promote an understanding of street dogs as a problem that can be solved through technical medical procedures (i.e., sterilizations) and individual behaviors (such as taking care of pet dogs and adopting street dogs). This narrative is mostly based on the selective construction of some street dogs as individuals who have already overcome adversity. This individualization process, I argue, is central in the depoliticization of human-animal relations for several reasons. First, it centers individual suffering and the suffering body—reverting that suffering is proposed as the solution (Fassin 2005; Tickin 2011). Second, it recognizes street dogs only as suffering animals and does not recognize any possibility of a good life for street dogs in Ciudad Juárez—only through their journey to the US can they live a “good life.” A potential re-politicization movement would need to reinscribe human-animal relationships in specific territories, thus, in a way, re-territorializing the human-animal relationship in specific sociopolitical contexts.

Conclusion

Scholars who work on human-animal relations have sought to put animals at the center of their own narratives, not just to see what these narratives have to say about humans but as a way to reconceptualize animals as political subjects. Yet in this paper, I have tried to analyze how some of the ways in which biographies are constructed can also depoliticize animal lives by flattening the relationship between specific sociopolitical contexts and animals, and centering individual stories. I argue that this is part of an anti-politics machine that removes individual dogs from larger sociopolitical contexts. Anti-politics is mostly predicated on a romantic view of care that focuses on individual stories and individual solutions. Acts of care, thus, are active components in this process.

In some ways, this anti-politics machine also seeks to disconnect humans and dogs from their “co-history” (Haraway 2008, 12) by creating increasingly divergent narratives of violence. Rescued dogs are able to escape violence and, one could argue, even “forget” about it, while humans are forced to remain. Those who remain are unlikely to live a good life as the threat of violence and abandonment is always latent. Alternatively, the narratives of dogs’ suffering bodies turned into objects of care also runs parallel to narratives about migrants in some contexts: Those considered worthy of care are the suffering bodies.

Yet the work that rescuers perform is still important even if it is for the benefit of individual dogs. Thus, to what extent can we employ “a critical practice of care” (Martin et al. 2015, 636) that pays attention to unequal power relations and questions how we construct objects of care? How can animal biographies challenge simplistic interpretations of the lives of those animals that have lived ordinary lives? In other words, how can we politicize the lives of animals that do not become individuals? In the case of the Mexico-US border, where before and after photo collages rely on ideas about fundamental, irrevocable differences between El Paso on the US side and Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican side, the journey the dogs make from Mexico to the US is a reflection on how care can organize bodies, not just the bodies of those dogs that move but also the dogs that are left behind. These rescue-adopt efforts solidify narratives about the differences between Mexico and the US.

Note