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Signs of Law

A common discursive framework unites the now-iconic American road signs addressing cross-border immigration from Mexico. First installed in 1990, these signs featured an iconic silhouette of a family, with hands locked, in flight. The sign's original "Caution" was addressed toward freeway drivers; when the addendum of "Prohibido" was added to address would-be pedestrians, it doubled the sign's intended audience. The linguistic demarcation of two addressee-populations, citizens and those demarcated as illegal, reveals the ambiguity in the sign's authority, which both seeks to care for the general welfare by keeping people from getting killed and fulfills a mandate to police the border. As the family's iconic silhouette has been adapted further to serve as a meme for long-standing debates about immigration to the United States and global controversies over refugees and asylum seekers, issues of place become inseparable from matters of identity.