On the Border: From the Abstract to the Specific

On The Border Guest Editor: Charles Tatum Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime and Mario. Chelo's Burden. The Compkte Love and Rockets. Vol. 2. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1989. 116. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 On the Border: From the Abstract to the Specific Dr. Charks Tatum (Ph.D. University of New Mexico) L· Professor of Spanish and Dean ofthe Colkge of Humanities at The University of Arizona. He was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico. His mother, EloÃ-sa AÃ-nsa, a Mexican-American , was front an old El Paso family. Tatum is the author of a monographic study Chicano Literature (1982)—published in transUtion in Mexico in 1986—and co-author of Not Just for Children: The Mexican Comic Book in the Late 1960s and 1970s (1992). He is co-founder and co-editor of the jour- «a/Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. He is editor of three volumes of New Chicana/Chicano Writing (1991-1993) for The University of Arizona Press and co-editor of a volume of essays, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II. Many contemporary critics have theorized about borders—psychological, sexual, gen der-inflected, class, racial, and ethnic—as well as about a specfic border, most commonly (at least for U.S. and Mexican critics) the U.S.-Mexico border. Some critics have defined the term as an abstract or metaphorical concept whereas others have considered it as a site-specific location between nations. As Claire Fox points out in her recent book, The Fence and the River. Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexican Border, the former approach "has gained widespread currency in academic writing, particularly in cultural studies" (1-2). Numerous conferences have been held and many books and special journal issues (including the current one) have been published that reflect both approaches. My purpose in this introduction is to briefly review some important theorizations of the border that are representative of both of them. As Paul Jay has pointed out in his excellent review essay, "The Myth of America,'" the politics of location "has brought with it a proliferating set of terms to designate spaces that exist between, on the margins of, or within traditional borders" (169). The critics who have originated and developed these terms have in common their attempts to grapple with how identities , cultures, and nations [...] are produced, fractured, and continually reproduced within spaces or locations where there are no fixed borders or absolutes, where previously conArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 94 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies structed 'essences' are deployed, transformed , and reconstructed into cultural spaces whose very nature is defined by their contingency and constructed -ness. 0ay 169) For example, Homi Bhabha has identified the "Third Space" between national borders. Edouard Glissant has developed the concept of "cultural zones" and has speculated about some of the links between novels written in various parts of the Americas. Cultural zones are spaces where historical, political, social, and religious experiences overlap national boundaries in ways that inform the literature of these zones (Jay 172-73). Each cultural zone has a particular cultural genealogy that is historical in terms of different colonial origins and the different concerns that grow out ofthem (Glissant, quoted by Jay 173). Glissant maintains that the literature of the U.S. can be divided into different zones that have more in common with zones found elsewhere in the hemisphere than they do with geographically contiguous but culturally distant zones. For example, the literature of the American West and Southwest has more in common with the literature of Mexico, Spain, and the Caribbean than it does with the literature of New England. Glissant 's formulations on cultural zones definitely fall within the non-site-specific category of borders between nations. Mary Louise Pratt's idea of "contact zones" is similarly non-specific. In her book on travel writing, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, contact zone [...] refer[s] to the space of colonial encounters , the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion , radical inequality, and intractable...