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Reviewed by:
  • Ethnography at the Border
  • Jamie Winders
Ethnography at the Border. Pablo Vila , ed. Cultural Studies of Americas. Volume 13. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. xxxv and 345 pp., notes and index. $22.95 paper (ISBN 0-8166-4034-3).

Ethnography at the Border brings together a rich collection of ethnographic research by scholars from various disciplinary and theoretical perspectives on the twin cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Júarez, Chihuahua. Contributing authors, all of whom worked in the area during the early 1990s, consider how this portion of the U.S.-Mexican border, in all its manifestations, matters for people living along, within, and against it. As editor Pablo Vila makes clear in his concluding chapter, Ethnography at the Border attempts to rework border studies through its insistence on the materiality and place specificity of borders. Its chapters, however, also powerfully illustrate the inseparability of the border's material and discursive operations, and this refusal to decouple discourse and materiality is one of the collection's strengths.

In his introductory chapter, Vila lays the book's theoretical groundwork and offers his own assessment of ethnography as method and theory. This opening chapter also interrogates identity construction, a theme found across the book, examining the blurriness of "insider" and "outsider" status for border scholars. Although Vila's introduction offers a cogent critique of contemporary approaches to ethnography, it does not discuss the book's overall trajectory, leaving readers to move through subsequent chapters with few road signs.

Jessica Chapin's "Reflections from the Bridge" begins the book's thematic chapters with a rich ethnography of the everyday lives and work experiences of border dwellers. Delving into the complexities of border living, she draws out the distinct epistemologies produced on each side of the border and highlights the constant dialogue between them. Melissa Wright's "The Politics of Relocation" and Leslie Salzinger's "Re-forming the 'Traditional [End Page 144] Mexican Woman'" both provide fascinating workplace ethnographies that highlight the operations of gender in maquiladoras. Analyzing one factory's efforts to erase the signs of female Mexican labor in its products, Wright interrogates the connections among gender, national identity, labor, and value on the production line. Salzinger pushes these connections deeper into Mexico, in her study of a plant hundreds of miles south of the border. In an analysis of the plant's management, she shows how gender becomes a way to distinguish between supervisors and workers even as non-traditional management strategies claim to de-emphasize gender.

In addition to authoring the book's introduction and conclusion, Vila contributes two of the collection's twelve empirical chapters. His first chapter, "Gender and the Overlapping of Region, Nation, and Ethnicity on the U.S.-Mexico Border," illustrates intra-national differences in discourses of gender, sexuality, and nation along the border. This chapter makes a provocative argument about the different border imaginaries of northern and southern Mexicans, although its methodological construction is not discussed until Vila's later chapter, "The Polysemy of the Label 'Mexican' on the Border." To grasp his important points about the place of region in imaginative geographies of the border and the place of the border itself in identity construction for Mexican Americans, his chapters should be read in reverse order.

Sarah Hill's "Metaphoric Enrichment and Material Poverty" queries the debate over El Paso's colonias in the late 1980s and 1990s. Examining how discourses of cleanliness, nation, and hygiene were drawn into these discussions, she illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between images of colonias and colonia residents and the materiality of colonias themselves. Eduardo Barrera's "Aliens in Heterotopia" continues a focus on border discourses, analyzing the Border Patrol Museum and its images of border crossers. Barrera's chapter roves across multiple representations of undocumented migrants from various sources, but ultimately returns to the need for greater attention to the materiality of undocumented migrants in border writings, a point made across chapters in this book.

David Spener's "Controlling the Border in El Paso del Norte" carries on the discussion of undocumented border crossings in his assessment of the mid-1990s Operation Blockade. Offering an alternative interpretation of the large...

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