borders and bridges: exploring a new conceptual architecture for (u.s.–mexico) border studies

Borders and Bridges: Exploring a NewConceptual Architecture for (U.S.–Mexico)Border Studies

By

Robert AlvarezUniversity of California, San Diego

R e s u m e n

La esencia de los estudios de frontera y su metodologıa circula alrededor de la ter-

minologıa de fronteras, lımites, tierras fronterizas y su metafora. El entendimiento y

estudio sobre el comportamiento social-ya sea de grupos etnicos, individuos, o de es-

tructuras sociales mas amplias como el Estado-nacion- son muchas veces enmarcados

dentro de estos marcos analıticos. El presente artıculo analiza crıticamente la episte-

mologıa actual que trata el tema de la frontera Mexico-Estado Unidos para plantear

nuevas preguntas metodologicas. Propongo que necesitamos una nueva arquitectura

que se enriquezca de los estudios y epistemologıas del pasado, pero que ayude a romper

con la cartografıa que hemos creado, para ası producir nuevas percepciones de analisis

y entendimiento. El enfoque del artıculo es de cruces de fronteras, y utilizo la metafora

de Fronteras y Puentes para cuestionar y trastornar la nocion de frontera centrada en el

Estado – una lınea horizontal que atraviesa los Estados-nacion. Este enfoque enfatiza

los procesos de conectividad y contrastes, asi como profundidad y alcance tanto del

pensamiento como delanalisis empırico de las fronteras. [Estados Unidos, frontera,

Mexico, teorıa]

A b s t r a c t

The essence of border studies and its related methodology revolves around the ter-

minology of boundaries, borders, frontiers, borderlands, and their metaphors. The

understanding and study of social behavior—of ethnic groups, individuals, or broader

social structures, such as the nation state—are often framed by these analytics. This

article addresses the entrenched epistemology of the Mexico–U.S. border to address

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 24–40. ISSN 1935-4932, online

ISSN 1935-4940. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1935-

4940.2012.01191.x

24 J o u r n a l o f L a t i n A m e r i c a n a n d C a r i b b e a n A n t h r o p o l o g y

new and nuanced methodological questions. It argues that we are in need of a new

architecture that builds on the studies and epistemology of the past, but that helps

break the cartography created in order to produce new perceptions of analysis and un-

derstanding. The focus here is on border crossings, and the following work utilizes the

metaphors of “borders” and “bridges” to query and disrupt a notion of the state-centric

border—a horizontal line that crosscuts nation states; it emphasizes the processes of

connectivity and contrasts, of depth and range, in both border thinking and empirical

study. [geography, Mexico, theory, United States]

The anthropology of borderlands, and the Mexico–U.S. border in particular,has made considerable advances over the last decade. New research on interna-tional borders that had been less studied than the Mexico–U.S. border area is nowbeing published (see Alper and Brunet-Jailly 2008). This is especially true of Euro-pean and African scholarship (Anderson et al. 2003a, 2003b; Feyissa 2010; Lentz2003; Mbembe 2006; Nugent 2002). Profound changes to the global system havealtered processes along international borders, and these changes have triggered anincrease in the study of border areas. Border crossings—human as well as com-mercial and technological—have multiplied, and border complexity has increasedalongside these new movements. The anthropology of borderlands, as with otherdisciplinary and interdisciplinary foci, has become global. This continuing interest,however, raises important questions about how border scholars define and frameinvestigations and incorporate new imaginaries of borders.

One issue pursued in this article is the question of how Border Studies mightdescribe and enact new methodological inquiries, in particular utilizing ethnog-raphy. Another section of this work looks at how the ethnographic can encompassthe broad realization of global processes and the contemporary lives of transbor-der people while maintaining a local, ground-up perspective. It examines how thescholarly conceptualization of the border both enacts and forges studies in thearea. Rather than review the current state of the anthropology of borderlands, thefollowing work focuses on the Mexico–U.S. border and reviews the ways in whichthis geopolitical marker has been studied and defined. The goal of this obviouslypreliminary gesture is to disrupt border thinking and garner discussion that fo-cuses on the Mexico–U.S. border, but the intention is also to relate this thinking towork on other borders.

Two important interrelated arguments underlie this discussion. The first is thatthe geopolitical focus on the Mexico–U.S. border frames scholarly investigation,and has also reproduced the border as state-centric. This is particularly relevantgiven the vast changes of borders in Europe. While the European Union, forexample, exhibits a changing flexibility, cooperation, and connectivity of borders,

Borders and Bridges 25

the Mexico–U.S. border maintains a strong geopolitical separation of the twonation states. The second argument applies to all borders. Although representationsof border crossings include connection, this connectivity is often unidimensionaland does not incorporate multidimensional sociological process, meaning, andunderstanding. It will be suggested here that current border studies depend on aspecific epistemology that conditions a particular way of seeing.

Some excellent research has provided new insights into the complexity of theMexico–U.S. border. The work of Heyman, for example, has focused specificallyon the border in diverse ways and includes mobility, ports of entry, consumption,the border wall, entrapment, and resistance—all of which are ethnographicallyinformed (e.g., Campbell and Heyman 2004, 2009; Heyman 2004, 2009, 2008).His early studies of the U.S. Border Patrol, have been particularly germane (Heyman1991, 1995, 2000, 2002).

Similarly, the stereotype of the border and its cities has been challenged byrecent border research. Tijuana, for example, is no longer tied exclusively to the“black legend” (see work on El Paso, below)—the notion that it was a center ofsin—of prostitution, gambling, drugs; and the peripheral hybrid that depicted itas being betwixt and between Mexico and the United States. That is the Tijuanaand border city of the past. Today, Tijuana is a vast, cosmopolitan metropolis—very much a part of the Mexican nation. However, new stereotypes have arisen:Murıa (2010) refers to the “Border Panopticon”—a controlling gaze that focuseson the zones and peoples of Tijuana. I would suggest that there is yet another“Border Panopticon”—the bounded gaze with which scholars define and see theMexico–U.S. border region.

Border scholarship has constructed a specific discourse that speaks to and ofthe border. Where once border studies were lone investigations, the field nowdefines specific genres. Maquiladoras provide a good example of this: FernandezKelly’s influential book, For We are Sold (1983), formed a watershed and wasfollowed by the work of Pena (1997) and Salzinger (2003a, 2003b), and Lugo’srecent Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts (2008) (see also Biemann 2002; Navarro2002; Wright 2003), illustrate a deepening and wide-ranging discourse on borderindustrialization, economy, labor, and the changing face of late capitalism. Thestudy of militarization and border control (Andreas 2002; Dunn 1996, 2010; Nevins2002; Palafox 2000) has also produced important research that has deepened theunderstanding of the Mexico–U.S. border. Border literature has produced a richlytextured canvas of border life that illustrates the diversity of the Mexico–U.S. borderrange.

Yet, even with these positive developments, a strange conclusion remains possi-ble: our rendition of the border—the Mexico–U.S. border—itself produces specificframeworks that have inhibited interpretation and understanding of current bor-der society, culture, and people. Over 15 years ago I argued that the Mexico–U.S.


border was the icon of the anthropological study of borders (Alvarez 1995). Today,I would say it has been the template for how most U.S.-based scholars study andinterpret this border. There is a difference. The iconic border revealed and ques-tioned the complexities of borders; the template becomes the manner in which westudy and reproduce the border.

In the quest for understanding, border epistemology has produced a mappingof the geopolitical line that focuses on crossings. The Mexico–U.S. border is viewedas a horizontal line and zone between nations. It is a geopolitical boundary, a “10thdistrict precinct” (like the film of the same name), created by war and conquest.The Mexico–U.S. border, like all borders, exhibits mobility; but it must also beemphasized that this border creates separation and closure (see Heyman andCunningham 2004).

From this perspective, the 2000-mile demarcation divides and creates conflictsand contradictions for the people who live here. Just as the studies of the early 20thcentury defined the border as irrelevant (it did not appear in the ethnographicrecord), the current scholarly emphasis on division, on the significant boundaryand barrier, continues to characterize the people and places of the border.

The Mexico–U.S. border exhibits a diverse range of geography, cities, towns,and populations and is bounded by Mexican and U.S. national states. The emphasishas been on how the Mexico–U.S. border defines the nation state, yet often omittedis the realization that many boundaries frame this expanse. The state of California,for example, where I make my home, is, like other regions and U.S. states, boundedand defined by numerous types of borders. It is not solely the Mexico–U.S. borderthat defines the boundaries of the state. The Mexico–U.S. geopolitical boundaryframes the south, but California is also bordered and bounded by the Pacific andby other U.S. states—Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. California’s border to thesouth is defined as a national border that abuts Mexico, yet it also represents aglobal condition. The global here refers not only to the intense processes andhuman mobility of the current period, but also to a deeper identification with theAmericas. The global border connects the United States to the global south. Thisis a crucial aspect of the lives of people in Mexico and the southern hemisphere, aswell as of those communities that stretch across the borderline.

Connections have been instrumental in descriptions of the Mexico–U.S. border,yet it is not the border that connects. These connections and crossings are whatmuch of border work is about. But studies of the Mexico–U.S. border continueto be tied, even when discussing crossings, to the horizontal line—that particularcartography, that edge, periphery, and limit—that extends west to east for 2,000miles from the Playas of Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico.

This bounded-horizontalness, this gaze, is emphasized by particular texts thathave defined border studies—a field guided by a fundamental sociological andhistorical interpretation that might be viewed as a border trope. For example, Gloria


Anzaldua’s (1987) La Frontera continues to be the most referenced imagination ofthe border. Indeed, it is rare to find a border study without reference to Anzaldua’swork, the repercussions of which Anzaldua reverberate in even the most empiricalof studies.

In a recent article, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008) introduces an interesting con-cept that, although aimed at political activism, is applicable here. Gilmore exploresthe concept of desakota, a Malay word meaning “town-country” in which settle-ment, economic activity, politics, demographics and culture “ . . . belie catego-rization as “either/or”—ambiguous places in the dominant typology of settlementand sector.” The goal of this kind of thinking is to compare “political, economic,territorial and ideological valences that distinguish and might unite disparate placesshaped by external control or located outside particular developmental pathways”(Gilmore 2008:35). Desakota becomes a “mix, a region composed of places linkedthrough coordinated as well as apparently uncoordinated forces of habitation andchange” (Gilmore 2008:36).

When once “the border” was written about as undifferentiated, where towns,people, life, culture, and society shared “border” attributes, now a great varietyand diverse processes of border life and society are illustrated. However, there is acertain desakota, an ambiguity about the border in our metaphor that is missing.What are the political, economic, territorial, and ideological valences that bothdistinguish process and understanding, and unite (bridge) these disparate placesoutside of the border framework? When once the usefulness of border metaphorwas debated, alongside the need for empirical reality (Heyman 1994; Vila 2003),today there is an agreement that the border is real, but that it is also symbolicand metaphorical (Vila 2003). This embodiment, however, has constructed adifferent type of barrier, which constricts the imagination, the interpretation, andthe understanding of social process.

Importantly, the border has broken out of the realms of the folkloric andisolated national community studies. Border sites and displaced “Mexican” andNative communities and the social problems they faced were viewed as cross-cultural misunderstandings. There is now a realization that the borderlands arecomplex networks of social, cultural, and political-economic behavior. People live,die, and create cultural and social forms along this border.

Studies of musical genres are exemplary of the new reach and bridging acrossthe border and illustrate the creative connections of cultural production and socialactivity. Simonett (2001), Hutchinson (2007), Ragland (2009), Lipsitz (2007), andMadrid (2008) focus on important cultural expressions that connect not only theborder but the cities of the north—Los Angeles, Chicago, and other U.S. sites—tothe south.

Alejandro Madrid’s (2008) Nortec Collectiva: Electronic Dance Music from Ti-juana to the World is an excellent example of this new genre. Madrid provides a


Mexicanist border perspective of a hybrid musical form that was produced in Ti-juana, and subsequently crossed the U.S. boundary but also the Atlantic Ocean toEuropean audiences. The nature of this process goes beyond the Mexico–U.S. bor-der, connecting vast regions and peoples but also bridging disparate social–culturalgeographies. Youth throughout Europe, Mexico, and Latin America, as well as inCalifornia, dance to the fused hip-rhythms of electronic and Mexican sounds.Here, the mix of “traditional” music (that is, authentic musical forms of mariachitrumpets, conjunto accordion, the big bass sound of the tuba and other rifts frombanda, corrido, and ranchera) addresses identity but also a depth and range thatis part of a new border age and process. Mexican authenticity in this genre isboth redefined and rediscovered as a border repertoire. Madrid’s ethnography isfresh and nuanced, multisited, transborder, transnational, and global. Nortec asa musical genre reaches across the border but also has a span that connects to abroader range outside of the northern hemisphere.

In a study of the life and work of Americo Paredes, Ramon Saldıvar (2006) inThe Borderlands of Culture bridges the transnational border between the Southwest,Texas, “Greater Mexico,” and the maritime border with Asia. Although focused onTexas and the Southwest, Paredes’ early career as a war correspondent in Japan, andhis marriage to Amelia Sidzu Nagamine (a Japanese-Mexican), evoke a broadermapping of both American and borderland studies, as well as of the meaning andinfluence of border experience. It is no secret that border studies are generatingnew interpretations and sound, empirically grounded work.

One important development in the understanding of specific sites on theMexico–U.S. border is the continued focus on specific links and connectionsin processes and places. This is especially true for Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.Beginning with Oscar Martinez (1978), Juarez–El Paso has been the focus ofsignificant scholarly attention. Sadowski-Smith (2002), Pablo Vila (2000, 2003),Victor Ortiz (2004), and most recently Alejandro Lugo (2008) and Timothy Dunn(2010), among others, provide deep and varied descriptions and understandingsof life at El Paso–Juarez. This focus on El Paso–Juarez not only emphasizes thevariety of border life in the places once masked simply as border towns, as sistercities, but the deep contrasts and connections in their history. In this depth ofaccount is perceptible the variegated nature and complexity of the border site.

In comparison to the range of ethnographic work on Juarez–El Paso there ismuch less ethnographic depth in studies of the San Diego–Tijuana border. TheCalifornia–Baja California border boasts two of the largest cities on the border—Tijuana and Mexicali. Until recently, John Price’s (1973) Tijuana: Urbanization ina Border City was considered the only ethnographic work on the area. However,Murıa (2010) reinterprets the border region of the Californias as well as that ofMexico itself. She inserts a specific Mexicaness into the border and illustrates howTijuanenses were in part formed by their relationship to the city of San Diego


across the line. The context of her study revolves around consumerism in the twonation states and the centrifugal forces of national belonging in which, she asserts,Mexico reclaims this border city. This is not solely about crossing between SanDiego and Tijuana, but about the connections and bridging across the border; italso goes to the core of the Mexican nation.

Two decades ago the Mexico–U.S. border was a different place, as was the wholeregion and hemisphere. Events post 9/11, border enforcement, and the changingnature of not only the United States and Mexico but also of Latin America havecompounded the complexity, realization, and understanding of what the border isand represents. It is clear that the Mexican–U.S. border is not only a barrier but aconduit, not solely to Mexico but to the Americas, to Asia and “the global south,”through commerce, investment, ports of entry, immigration (Asian, African, andMexican and indigenous immigration), and industrial transfer (maquiladoras).These and other current processes have altered the border and “bridge” untappedsources and processes that include both land and maritime borders.

The role of the nation state beyond its borders raises important questionsabout the function and utility of “the border” as a concept. Recently, scholars havetouted the demise of the nation state, yet the events of the last decade illustratethe rise, not the demise, of the nation state. As the Mexico–U.S. border becamemore prevalent and inflexible, a nascent nativism (aimed at migrants as well asat the power of the state) reared its ugly head. Terrorism, increased immigration,border control, and the emergence of the state’s offshore activity in agriculture,immigration, commerce, as well as the everyday activities of the south, alert usto a connectivity and influence that traverses the border itself. On one hand,for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) increased thedramatic and geometric growth of import/export exchange between Mexico, theUnited States, and Canada (Chambers and Smith 2002); on the other, it closed andrestricted human mobility along the geopolitical line, and within the U.S. nation(Nevins 2002). This is evident not only in the northern range of the Mexico–U.S.border, but also in the activity of the Mexican nation on the Mexico–GuatemalaBorder (Galemba 2009).

Yet, the border is interpreted as a principal mechanism of nation-state control.This simple perception raises a variety of questions asked by border scholarsconcerning the role of the nation state, in particular Donnan and Wilson (1999).Is the border synonymous with the nation state? Is the border solely representativeof the nation state? Does the border define the nation state? And if so, in whatways does the geopolitical border delineate the nation state? This reproduces thestate-centric focus on security and the maintenance of boundaries. There is aninadvertent recreation at work here, of the boundary that emphasizes the state andits control.


There is a need to think not only beyond the Mexico–U.S. border, but alsoto recognize the various borders that relate to the larger questions of the nationstate, its influence, and power. How, for example, do the Canadian border, thePacific, and other maritime connections, such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulfof California, alert us to the workings of the bounded state, or the definition of thenation state? The challenge lies in how to imagine the border(s)—the line in thesand—and how we define what borders are. The epistemology of the border framesthe methodology with which we query and ultimately interpret and represent theborder. How should the deeper range of border process be encompassed? In whatways do border studies shed light on the broader economic and social processesthat are now part of the hemisphere? How do border studies engage the dramaticchanges of the new millennium that have altered the globe, changed social andcultural expression, and instilled new forms of hierarchy and structure in whichthe nation state is central?

In 2009, I participated in a workshop at a conference in Australia on foodand the postcolonial city. The conference focused on Asian sites and provideda forum to exchange and compare divergent and parallel interests in the topicsof food, agriculture, eating, and of course, borders. The ensuing conversationsturned to thinking about how Australian and Asian epistemologies contrastedwith Western (that is, United States, and particularly Californian) interpretationsand experience. A number of themes were covered—immigration, ethnic diversity,agriculture, food justice, culture—that provoked discussion about possible newareas of research. These intellectual bridges connected similar areas of discourseand interest, and they also provided valuable contrasts and comparisons. Thediscussion turned specifically on the notion of borders and bridges.

The metaphor of borders and bridges provides a refreshing cartogra-phy/architecture for border studies. Bridging and connection have been promi-nent in border studies yet the focus has been one-dimensional in terms of studiesof immigration, transborder communities, and commodity chains. Rather thanmaintaining the horizontal line that dissects and crosses the nation state(s), thenotion of borders and bridges provides a specific verticality and a new dimension.It is not solely the crossings that are important, but the connections, the nodes, andthe intervening process involved in the possible focus of study. Connections arenot necessarily harmonious (see Grimson and Vila 2002.), and bridges span tur-bulence and the underbelly, including the figure of the subaltern. Bridges connectcontrasting venues and control crossings in various ways. What I am suggestingis a different analytic to disrupt (not replace) the entrenched epistemology of theborder. We are in need of a new architecture that builds on the studies and epis-temology of the past, but one that helps break the cartography created to producenew perceptions of analysis and understanding. The actuality and the metaphor ofborders and bridges helps query both the current restricted notion of the border


and the study of specific processes that include entrance and closure, connectivityand contrasts, construction, and depth and range in border thinking and em-pirical study. Rather than be restricted to the horizontal line in the sand, workin this area should be attentive to the broader spans of borderlands, spaces, andplaces.

The primary interest of the present work in terms of borders and bridges iswith the ethnographic—not solely as a method to study local human behavior butalso as a conceptual parameter to address broad and complex spans of activity.The ethnographic is often synonymous with the local, the qualitative, and theconstruction of everyday life. But the ethnographic lens also provides insight, andqueries broader institutional and structural influences that condition human be-havior and societal process. Take, for example, Lugo’s (2008) study of maquildoras.Lugo begins by illustrating the deep place and connection of Juarez–El Paso withMexico’s colonial past while illustrating the constructed border and its generativecontrol through inspections in the entire Juarez–El Paso range. Utilizing a bordernarrative, Lugo exposes the racial, gendered, and class connections among Mex-icanos and Mexicanas of Juarez; these people live along the border, labor in itsindustry, and maneuver in the stronghold of the state and economy. The maquilasare structural entities constructed by economic, commercial processes; but theyhave dramatically conditioned social forms, local relations, and communities, aswell as the role of the nation state and society on both sides of the Mexico–U.S.border. In the end, people’s lives have changed dramatically not only along theborder but also in the broader range and depth of the borderlands and mobilefrontiers of the nation state.

When I began this article it was instructive to look first at the reality of bridgeson the border. In California there are no actual bridges that span the geopoliticalline. In fact, where there is land on the border, no bridges exist. Yet all the bordercrossings from El Paso–Juarez to Brownsville–Matamoros are bridges. Like allbridges they are built over obstacles and are by design constructed to carry trafficof one sort or another. They all cross the “border,” the Rio Bravo. They differ notonly in construction, but also in the flows of goods, histories, and people. There area total of 27 bridges that span and connect Texas to Mexico. The bridges themselvesprovoke important questions. In a recent study, Scott Cook (2011) describes therichness of the bridges in Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron County, Texas and the peoplewho use them. The historical rendition of changing commerce—as bricks, theirproducers, transporters, and others cross the Pharr–Reynosa International Bridgeand the Camargo–Rio Grande City Bridge—illustrates a profound humanity andprocess in these connections. These are rich renditions of crossing strategies andof the obstacles faced on both sides of the Rio Bravo. They contain stories ofTejanos and Mexicanos that utilize, strategize, and mobilize on these bridges. Thisis a far different perception to that of the desert crossers who risk their lives in


Arizona or the Juarez Range of Baja California, or to those who line up at the SanYsidro crossing to drive into San Diego. However, the mobilization, strategies, andobstacles entailed in these land bridges are no less dramatic.

The actual transport bridges are also interesting in terms of comparisons ofdifferent types. In a paper (Alvarez 2008) in which I focused on truck crossingsat the Mexico–U.S. border, an attempt was made to make sense of the currentnegation of the NAFTA agreement that was to allow Mexican trucks into the UnitedStates. The inquiry began into the perception highlighted by the U.S. congress, theU.S. Teamsters’ Union, and the environmentalist organization, Sierra Club, thatMexican trucks were unsafe and would be dangerous on the roads in the UnitedStates. Rather than focus on the trucks that cross the border, my investigationspanned the border and queried the transportation infrastructure in Mexico. Ittranspired that there was a deep tie of border trucking to an infrastructure thatcontains the longest privatized toll road system in the world, funded by the WorldBank; it leads, as did the railroads in the early 20th century, from the heart ofMexico to the border with the U.S. roads and highways.

This research into “border truck crossings” and U.S. policy banning Mexi-can trucks on “the border” led to a comparison with the northern border, whichencompasses Canadian truck crossings. In 2006, 6,650,000 trucks crossed theCanadian–U.S. border, around two million more than crossed the Mexico–U.S.border (which saw 4,750,000 such crossings). However, it is notable that onlyMexico and its trucks are seen as placing the United States in danger (Bureau ofTransportation Statistics 2007). This suggests a nativist and racialized sentimenttowards the Mexicaness of trucks, which was also evident in a number of blogsdiscussing Mexican trucks in terms of ethnic and race constructions (CBS 2007).These “bridges” of comparison connecting the Canadian border to the Mexicanfrontier reveal insightful and important contradictions that also bridge commerce,nativism, ethnic identity, a neoliberal structure, and the broad and deep contra-diction of the nation state in the north and the south. These are connections of adifferent sort that reveal disparate but actual links and relations.

Applying the notion of borders and bridges to my own border repertoire—family migration, commerce, commodity chains, trucking, the nation state, andcomparative borders (U.S.–Mexico, Southern Mexico, Canada)—may help to il-lustrate how borders and bridges can add depth and understanding to currentborder and nation-state social process. Curiously, much of this work is consideredpart of the border genre, yet it does not actually engage with the border. It doesfocus on specific social processes and peoples on both sides of the nation-statedemarcation, but this is not about crossing the border: the geopolitical border is anatural part of larger contexts. These were queries that went “beyond the border”(see, for example, Alvarez 2006) and included my personal history and experienceas a “Californio.” This includes Baja California, Baja California Sur, and the West-


ern Pacific Mexican states; it is a specific cojoining (bridging) of California andMexico that relates to a certain—desakota—history, a specific political economy,and a regional memory. It is a personal cartography of the border and borderlands.The “border” here is not about the fixed barrier and inspection site(s) that arecrossed between nations (see Lugo 2008). Events and experiences on the “line”are just that—isolated events. In my repertoire, “the border” means specific placesin Baja California: Tijuana, Tecate, Ensenada, Mexicali, the Valle de la Trinidad,the company mines of the southern peninsula—they are the places from whichmy family emerged. It conjures up the deep sentiment and meaning that is place,alongside embedded memory (see Basso 1996). It equates to my grandmotherwho was PaiPai from El Real del Castillo, my grandfather who was a “Smith” fromComondu; it is the Coahuila (Tijuana) of my youth and the Mexican packingsheds of chile and the markets of my “frutero” market life along the Rio de Tijuana(Alvarez 2005). It is Mexico, Lemon Grove, and Logan Heights in San Diego, andthe array of parientes and friends who make up this cartography of life. It is thedeepened territory, a desakota of personal history, and a belonging that connectsand bridges—not crosses—the border range.

These genres are often classified as border studies because of the crossings,and the immediacy, of the U.S.–Mexico border. Yet a central aspect of this workhas not been the “border,” the geopolitical line, or the metaphorical hybrid of theborderlands. It is not about territory, territorialization (as in control), reterrito-rialization (reclaiming land and identity), or deterritorialization (losing them).This is about the deep belonging and identification with place—a bridging andcontinuous connection of everyday life, of social and cultural activity. I am re-minded here of Flynn (1997), where the people along the Nigeria–Benin bordercontrolled and captivated the meaning, practicality, and everyday use and life of theborder.

Similarly, the sociohistoric tracing of mangos across the Mexico–U.S. borderlinks deep social-cultural dimensions of cross-border hierarchy. Mangos illustratethe enactment of current trade policy in global/transnational processes, with the20th-century initiation of nation-state power, as well as the institutional connec-tion to current trade relations and control. The cross-border mango commoditychain exposes a complex array of people who are linked between and across so-cial networks, power, and history. Mangos reveal a larger scenario that extendsbeyond the global fruit and vegetable market. This research was started in 1987when the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) enforced an Envi-ronmental Protection Agency (EPA) change in the processing and distributionof export mangos to the United States (Alvarez 2005). It focused on Mexicanentrepreneurs—Mangueros—and their adaptive strategies in production, distri-bution, and compliance with USDA initiatives. My initial concern was not withthe border, but with broader connections: market control and participation. The


question was a simple one: how do mangueros, like other fruit exporters, get theirproduct to market? Because the market was in the United States (Los Angeles),the question included the issue of how mangueros maneuvered the border as acomplex process tied to production and distribution? Control and the border werelinks in a deeper matrix created by the institutions of the nation state. Eventuallythis query led to a focus on the power of the state—not on the border—and on thedeeper historical relevance of mango discovery, hybridization, and transfer. Themango commodity chain, like the Mexico–U.S. border itself, is not just linear andone-dimensional . There is both a deep and vertical structure here that exposessocial complexity, hierarchy, and dominance.

For example, the USDA, through the Office of Foreign Plant and Seed Intro-duction (Alvarez 2007), not only introduced mangos to the United States, but alsohybridized them in Coconut Grove, Florida, and ultimately introduced specificcommercial varieties of mangos to the global south. More than an interestingquirk in fruit history, this plant transfer illustrates the vast control of the U.S.nation as an offshore entity (a range that includes the exploration and introduc-tion of vegetable and fruit crops for economic purposes, and the responses ofMexican entrepreneurs and changes in rural Mexican ecology). The border comesinto play here because mangos like other Mexican export commodities must crossthe border. These “connections” entail a complex matrix of nation-state processesthat include plant transfer to the south as well as the import of the fruit backacross the border. A deep history of USDA plant exploration, introduction, andhybridization were fundamental in the creation of the Mexico–U.S. mango market.From the perspective of market control, the border was only a part of this largerprocess. Nation-state control has spanned the border and linked the economic,the territorial, and the ideological, uniting these places and processes. The pointhere is that this “border” process has historical antecedents, and is tied to the so-cietal changes incurred by strategic plans and policies of the nation state. There ishere a certain desakota that distinguishes this particular state process and connectsuniquely disparate places and events. The complex social construction of this spe-cific market activity—mangos—is lost if we concentrate on separation, difference,and the border crossing. This ethnographic work, then, aims to understand theconditions and power of the nation state and its representative institutions.

The nation state is a defining entity of border studies yet its nonlocal characterand complex nature has eluded much ethnographic research. Although the state isperceived as a marker of control and power, the nation state in its many dimensionshas not been seen as a border crosser and connector of social behavior. This maystrike the reader as an odd because borders themselves have been the definingparameters of the nation state. The conflicting and complex relationships causedby the abutment of the United States and Mexican nation states, cultures, politics,and commerce are measured and defined in relation to the border as a condition


of contrast and separation. Nation states are defined territorially by that boundary.Even when the border or borders are viewed as membranes and hybrid, it is theboundary that is utilized as the referent.

The Mexico–U.S. border is more than a geopolitical line. Border activitiesextend into the maritime borders of the Gulfs of Mexico and California, thePacific and Atlantic. However, “the border” as it is defined here represents aspecific geography as it cojoins, mixes, separates, and creates along that line. Thisframework has harnessed border studies and the interpretation of the borderlandsthemselves. More importantly, it narrows the broader reality of the social–political,economic, and social order enacted between the nations and the way in whichpeople live today. Transnational processes, the new intensity of global activityand engagement, are crucial for understanding and reinterpreting transbordersettlement, history, and border sites. The intention here is not to dismiss theseprocesses but to reconfigure and create new imaginations of the border itself thatencompass both a broader and a deeper cartographic and contemporary borderreality.

My research examines processes in which the border becomes meaningful, butthe border itself has not been a central focus. Familia (Alvarez 1987) focused onmigration and the settlement of Baja Californianos but aimed to salvage humansocial process and agency in the immigration debate, which at the time was capti-vated by a purely economic interpretation. It was not about the process of crossingborders. In the chile trade and among chileros (Alvarez 2005), the border waspart of the commercial activity influencing markets in Los Angeles and Mexico,as well as people on both sides of the border—it concerned the broader bridgingof the personnel and commercial systems that made up this trade, the processesof control, as well as an engagement with distributors in Los Angeles, and pro-ducers in the Mexican south. People at all social levels and on both sides of thegeopolitical line were paramount. The ethnohistorical research conducted on theLemon Grove Incident (Alvarez 1986), the first successful school desegregationcourt case in the United States is another example This case was contextualizedand framed by what might be called Border Studies because of the geographicallocale of Lemon Grove. The Lemon Grove incident concerns immigrant Mexi-cans, with strong ties to family and places across the border. These border settlersutilized their Mexicaness to challenge California law, yet the border itself was tan-gential to the process of their successful settlement and long-term association withMexico.

Each of these themes can be viewed as bridges with particular flows of personneland process. Like the movement across all bridges, such flows carry a certain typeof traffic. The questions that emerge are not about the border but concern therange of transborder connections and the depth of their influence, meaning, andreach. Rather than maintaining the tropes of the border, might it not be asked


what types of bridges do borders build and what do they connect? How can weexplore the complexity created by bridges and connections without relying on thecrosscutting, horizontal edge that separates and maintains that panopticon controlover how the nature of this research is examined and defined?

The Recurrent Themes of the Anthropology of the Borderlands

Over the last two decades the Mexico–U.S. border has continued to be the focusof ethnography and interdisciplinary research. Existing themes of immigration,commerce, militarization, and labor continue to be important in more recentborder studies. Gender, citizenship, and other themes have begun to reveal thecomplex relationships of people on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, anda growing trend toward engagement with the complexity of life and society inthe bordered zones along the geopolitical line. However, there remain a varietyof areas that have not been engaged. Although borders, as the world in general,appear closer because of media and technology (and through the trade pacts suchas NAFTA, CAFTA, Plan Panama, and others), there has been little comparisonof national borders, and the influence of connected processes (bridges) inherentin these areas. This is especially evident with the borders of the United States.Although Canada and Mexico define the limitations of U.S. geography, theseentities are rarely brought into debate about the role of the state, the contrasts ofsettlements, cities, communities, or the social and cultural behaviors that illustratesimilarities and linkages in border and social processes (see Sadowski-Smith 2002).Although there is increasing focus on the southern border of Mexico (BasailRodriguez 2005; Fabrigas-Puig 1996; Galemba 2009; Hernandez-Castillo 2001;Villafuentes Solis and Garcia Aguilar 2005), comparisons of the Mexican nationstate’s northern border with the United States and the Guatemalan border are rare.This is especially important considering the growing interest in Mexico’s southernborder. What might such comparison and bridging tell us about the Mexicannation? About the United States? About the people who live on and cross theseborders?

As stated above, the maritime borders of the nation as part of the “borderlands”have yet to be included in Mexico–U.S. Border Studies. On the Mexico–U.S. border,we appear to be stuck with the Boltonian notion that it is only in the landed rangeof the frontier with the Americas where the borderlands are realized. The exportfruit trade in Mexico, for example, is a venture that is not solely oriented towardsthe Mexico–U.S. borderlands; it is also realized through maritime borders. Limes,mangos, and other export product are shipped east in great quantity to Europeas well as west to Asian markets. Maritime borders and their ports of entry areutilized not only for commerce but also for human immigration and traffic. Border


scholars need to address these “vertical” borders that aim east and west and contrastthem with the north–south axis.

Curiously, although the border is marked as a principal gauge in the controllingparameters of the state, we have yet to determine where the border and controlend. The metaphorical use of boundaries and control are invoked for places andregions throughout the United States, yet this analytic is not applied outside of theU.S. nation state. Border mobility and place making, in sites on both sides of theborder cartography, warrant a broader query (that is, outside of the United States).Mobility, in addition, goes beyond the crossing of people. In a recent review oftransport in Dallas, Kemper et al. (2007) document not only the volume of humantraffic carried by mini-vans and motor carriers from Dallas into Mexico but asophisticated network of resources, complex transport, and human capital thathas evolved as a result of immigrant and place networks that span the geopoliticalline.

The focus on the border process replicated away from the border—as in Home-land Security raids in Iowa (Duara et al. 2008), or in immigration law, such as Ari-zona’s 1,070 explicitly expressed as “border control”—concerns the nation stateand state power. Much research on the nation state concerns issues of milita-rization, immigration policy, and neoliberal models of trade, but there is scantknowledge on how the nation state functions as a border (writ large) agencythat both crosses the geopolitical boundary and polices the interior range of thestate, while influencing offshore process and relationships, and exercising controlover human bodies throughout the hemisphere. The nation state is not tied to itsborders.

Thus, the notion of borders and bridges raises questions that might help dis-lodge the particularistic framework and reproduction of the Mexico–U.S. border.Rather than maintain the epistemology of a horizontal line and separation, thenotion of borders and bridges can emphasize the connections, links, and contrasts,the broad and deep range that is bridged by border processes, actors, and institu-tions that include the nation state. Bridges are meant to be crossed, and they arebuilt to span obstacles. They are connectors of the diverse and the disparate, aswell as of history and meaning, people and places.

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borders and bridges: exploring a new conceptual architecture for (u.s.–mexico) border studies

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