​​Freedom of Movement in Fear the Walking Dead: the U.S.-Mexican border, zombies, and the policing of life.

By Entertainment Editor Tess O’Regan

You would think, after the dead rise and society collapses, there would be no more borders. Afterall, there is no one left to police them, no one to oppose the freedom of movement. You would think this and yet, in the third season of Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2023), border control finds an afterlife in the apocalypse anyway.

  The first spin-off of The Walking Dead is set in Los Angeles as a virus that turns the dead into zombies begins to spread. As the show goes on, its cast of characters flee the city and head south, to Mexico. Here the ensemble is split up and, in an attempt to reunite, travel north again to the (former) United States of America.

This is where the third season picks up. As the characters attempt to cross back into California they come into contact with a Frankensteinian version of U.S. border patrol. Captured, separated and detained, they are questioned or tortured, depending on their race. Madison Clark and her daughter Alicia are taken to an office where they wait, as if in passport control, to be processed. Of course, they have no passports. No one does anymore. The only way they can convince their captors that they are American, and have a right to enter the country, is to satisfy criteria of what a ‘real’ American should be. White and English speaking, with Californian accents, they pass with flying colours.

 It’s a different story for Madison’s husband, Travis Manawa. Although an American citizen, Travis is also Mauri. This fact alone is reason enough for the militia to separate him from his family, without any preliminary questioning. He is taken to a bunker to be processed, where he finds his step-son, Nick, and Nick’s girlfriend, Luciana, who were travelling north with a group from Mexico when they were shot at and brought here.

Already, the ostensible freedom of movement the apocalypse seems to offer has been exposed as a mere myth. The U.S. might no longer exist but, for the militia running this camp, that is no reason to stop ‘undesirables’ from entering. Led by the strangely boyish Troy Otto—who slips eugenicist ideas into small talk—this militia walks around in Marine cosplay, reanimating the border and, with it, the violently racist colonial ideology of the U.S. With that ideology comes the usual American hypocrisy; promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…but only to a chosen few. Immigrants are treated like mindless livestock, shuttled through a dehumanising system that can alter or take their lives at any moment. 

As the episode progresses, we discover that the people in the bunker are being experimented on. Troy is measuring the length of time between the death of a person and their turning into a zombie. He does this by systematically killing his captives. He justifies this by referring to the killings as scientific inquiries into the new order of things in this post-apocalyptic world. In reality, he is running a death camp; killing people for the sake of inconsequential information.

Of course, that’s not how Troy sees it. For him he is doing the world a service, “only” killing “the sick and the wounded”, in the name of science. Ableist language like this should be enough of a warning. Valuing the lives of the sick and wounded below those of the healthy is evil, pure and simple, and is a hallmark of Nazism. This attitude sees Nick sentenced to death simply for having track marks on his arms. Similarly, Luciana, who has been shot, is considered as good as dead already and therefore perfect fodder for Troy’s experiments. But of course, this isn’t even the full picture.

Luciana is injured because Troy’s men shot her when she and Nick were approaching the camp. She is not going to die solely because she is injured. She is going to die because she is Mexican. Travis, too, disturbs Troy’s attempt to disguise his racist agenda. Travis is perfectly healthy. There is nothing physically ‘wrong’ with him, except the colour of his skin.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches in November, the U.S.-Mexican border is once again a big news story. In 2017, when this season was coming out, the border was making headlines weekly under the Trump administration. For as long as there’s been a border, families have been inhumanely separated in the name of national security. Closer to home, we see a similar refusal to welcome immigrants into the EU—which ironically allows its citizens to move freely between member states. In Britain, former PM Rishi Sunak’s immigration plan involved deporting people to Rwanda rather than simply housing them. Across the Western world, anti-immigration and xenophobic sentiments are gaining popularity rapidly.

Fear of shrinking resources. Fear of unemployment. Fear of homelessness. Fear that immigrants are coming to countries to ‘steal’ jobs and houses from ‘real’ citizens. All of these feed into an Othering of immigrants and fuel Xenophobic rhetoric that refuses to recognise their humanity. They become one amorphous homogenous blob, unidentifiable from one another, like a threatening hoard of zombies.

Zombies have long been read as an expression of anxiety over immigration.They shuffle anonymously through spaces they don’t belong in; dead amongst the living. Often moving in overwhelmingly large groups, zombies are the perfect figures to embody Western unease about immigration.

Season Three of Fear the Walking Dead plays with the association of immigrants as zombies on a visual as well as a thematic level. In the second episode, an establishing shot shows us a fence from overhead. Bodies swarm and shuffle as arms push through the chain link, reaching. Immediately, we think: zombies. On closer inspection, however, the group turns out to be living, trying to get aid from a doctor. Our expectations—set up by similar scenes with zombies—are undermined, exposing underlying biases. This is not a malicious swarming devouring mass of unidentifiable bodies. These are people, desperate people, grasping for life.

This relation between the zombified body and the immigrant’s body appears on a thematic level. Troy’s experiment literally turns immigrants into zombies. More than crossing a border into a country they ‘shouldn’t’ be in, they cross into a state of being they shouldn’t be in: un-death. Their freedom to move across land—a universal right, granted by the international fall of countries and therefore demarcations between nation states—has already been denied them. Now, their basic freedom, that of life, is taken too.

The border camp of Fear the Walking Dead is a nightmare vision of a future US-Mexico border. It is also a chilling echo of Nazi extermination camps. By reanimating the past, detention camps of the present and future take on a monstrous quality too. Because it is monstrous to curtail freedom of movement. Because to curtail freedom of movement is to curtail the freedom to live.