The Feeling That Everything Is Falling Apart Has a Name

ICE is here. The inevitable is happening here in Starr County and all across the Rio Grande Valley.

Social media is filled with photos of people being detained. There is impotence. There is anger. There is fear. And sadness. That suffocating feeling in the air has a name: anomie.

South Texas is a border region. The people who live here know immigration enforcement. But this is different. Now people are being detained at gas stations, at stores, at churches. Now filming an arrest can get you charged with interfering with the law.

Anomie is what happens when the rules you thought governed your life stop working. French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term in 1893 to describe the breakdown of social order. When institutions fail. When norms collapse. When people can no longer predict what comes next.

The Valley is experiencing it right now.

This goes deeper than fear. It's watching everything fall apart in real time. The connections between people are breaking. The institutions that were supposed to protect us now threaten us. Even citizenship papers don't feel like protection when nobody knows what the rules are anymore.

Back then, researchers studying industrialization in Europe saw the same pattern. Villages emptied out. People moved to cities. Family structures broke down. Church didn't matter the same way. All the social bonds that used to tell people how to act just disappeared. Everyone was trying to figure out how to live without any guideposts.

They connected anomie to suicide. Not because people were depressed, but because sudden disruption took away any sense of direction. Economic crashes did it. Economic booms did it too. Both extremes made people lose their sense of what mattered and why.

Recent research shows what anomie does politically. When people feel like the world is collapsing, they want a strong leader to fix it. A study with over 2,300 people found the pattern: anomie makes you feel powerless, powerlessness makes everything feel uncertain, and uncertainty makes authoritarian promises sound good.

It's predictable. When you think society is falling apart, you feel like you can't do anything about it. That helplessness turns into confusion. And when nothing makes sense anymore, someone promising simple answers and control starts sounding appealing—even if it means giving up your freedom.

Anomie isn't weakness. It's what happens when enforcement becomes unpredictable. When protection disappears. When your papers don't matter. When recording what you see can get you arrested.

The Great Depression proved it. Mass unemployment didn't just make people poor. It destroyed the idea that work meant something. People couldn't make sense of their lives anymore. Depression and despair followed.

The Valley is watching that happen now. Not from economic collapse, but from enforcement that makes every normal thing risky. Work. School drop-off. The grocery store. Everything routine now comes with the possibility of detention.

Social media makes it worse. Every video of someone being detained. Every photo of agents at a door. Every story of a family ripped apart. It's too much, too fast. And everyone's feed shows them something different. One person sees necessary security. Another sees human rights violations. There's no shared reality anymore. No way to agree on what's even happening, let alone what to do about it.

Economic inequality feeds this too. Society promises that if you work hard and follow the rules, you'll be okay. Then it deports people who've worked here for decades. That promise becomes obviously fake. The idea that following rules protects you dies. That's what anomie looks like.

Fixing it takes more than new policies. You need to rebuild trust. Restore connections between people. Create actual protection, not just promises. But enforcement is destroying trust faster than anyone can rebuild it.

The research shows preventing anomie means having clear, fair rules that people believe in. Not rules enforced through fear, but rules people saw as legitimate. That requires stability. It requires treating people fairly. When treatment is wildly unequal, and everything keeps changing suddenly, the bonds holding society together break.

The Valley has survived worse than anomie. Colonization. Annexation. Decades of being treated like a border problem instead of home. But survival doesn't mean this is acceptable. It doesn't mean people should adjust to enforcement that operates like occupation.

Anomie thrives when people accept chaos as inevitable. Anomie depends on isolation. On people feeling too powerless to act, too uncertain to trust each other. But look at what's already happening.

This is what happens when the system breaks and expects you to keep functioning anyway. You're not crazy. The world actually did stop making sense.

People are already organizing. Neighbors are looking out for each other. Churches are mobilizing. Families are sharing information, resources, and lawyers' numbers. The Valley has everything it needs—people who care about each other.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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