“The border,” comment the editors in their introduction to The U.S.-Mexico Border, “now represents a global crossroads in which the forces of world historical change” make themselves known in people’s “lives and ways of life.” The word “represents” is key here. The border, the two collections argue, has come to represent not simply a line separating two countries, but a place at which a wide variety of differences meet. These writers ask “the border” to stand in for moments of social encounter and resistance, areas of hybrid culture, and barriers to social mobility.
Both books, for example, couch their discussions of the competing claims of ethnic and interest groups and the social consequences of class in terms of “borders.” This is not altogether unreasonable. Ethnicity has always been a handy way to differentiate populations into various categories, and in this age of global-scale labor mobility, these divisions are very often superimposed on borders. On the other hand, porous borders have a long history and neither book is altogether convincing on the novelty of “internal borders.”
The presence of “Turkey in Germany, Morocco in France, Mexico in the U.S.,” comments Victor Zúñiga, a contributor to the The U.S.-Mexico Border, “has surprised societies and given rise to a questioning of the reality and fiction of borders.” But the surprise has come only to societies with short memories. (In the same book, Julie Murphy-Erfani’s perceptive discussion of the “internal borders” of Los Angeles refreshes our memories of ancient internal borders with its opening epigraph from Eduardo Galeano called “Mexico City, 1650: The Conquerors and the Conquered.”)
Nor do we have to go back to Tenochtitlán. Modern liberalism has long encouraged the segmentation of opportunity, typically along lines of race, ethnicity and gender. Observers of U.S. labor markets, for example, have long written about the barriers to opportunity reinforced by well-guarded “ports of entry” into “internal labor markets.”
Novel or not, the conceptual removal of the border from its geographical location is a very effective organizing theme for Borderless Borders. The book argues for cross-border (interdisciplinary) research and for cross-border politics. Manuel Pastor convinces us in an essay called “Interdependence, Inequality and Identity,” that an understanding of Latin American development, the dynamics of the U.S. economy and the economic status of U.S. Latinos must all go together. And for the U.S. Latino population, he argues, as a group “sent north” by Latin American poverty and marginalized by its heavy non-citizen status, the most useful bridge to democratic participation is an internal cross-border “affirmation by identity.” That seems to be the overarching political message of these two books.
