System avoidance refers to the tendency of individuals who are concerned about formal social control (e.g., incarceration, immigration enforcement, or the removal of children from their families) to avoid surveilling institutions that engage in recordkeeping. While this research locates concerns about formal social control in an individual’s sanctionable status, the laws, policies, and practices that generate the threat of formal social control vary across space and time. Drawing on theories of legal consciousness, this article posits that spatial and temporal variation in the threat of formal social control has differential associations with whether and to what degree individuals with a sanctionable status report involvement in surveilling institutions. Our empirical case is U.S. immigration policing, which burdens Latinos across citizenship statuses. We link individual-level data on institutional involvement from the American Time Use Survey with administrative data on immigration policing across state-years. Results from double-hurdle models show that Latinos in state-years with higher rates of immigration policing (1) are less likely to report involvement in surveilling institutions but, (2) conditional on any involvement, do not vary in the time reported involved. We evaluate variations by nativity, citizenship status, institution, and the presence of sanctuary policies that circumscribe immigration policing. We conclude that the threat of formal social control across space and time implicates the situational meanings of institutional involvement for subordinated populations.

This article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms of everyday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico.