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ON THE BAD EDGE OF LA FRONTERA 14 José David Saldívar Where the transmission of “national” traditions was once the major theme of world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees— these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature. —Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home” (1992) IN AN in®uential manifesto published in La Línea Quebrada / The Broken Line (1986), Guillermo Gómez-Peña theorized the transfrontera urban galaxy of San Diego and Tijuana as a new social space ¤lled with multicultural symbologies—sent out in polyglot codes (Spanish, English, caló, and Spanglish).1 Though perhaps too steeped in poststructuralist playfulness (at the expense of critical multicultural work), Gómez-Peña nevertheless hit upon one of the central truths of our extended U.S.-Mexico Border culture: the Frontera culture stretching from the shanty barrios of Tijuana and San Diego to the rich surf and turf of Santa Barbara (dominated by the megaspace of Los Angeles in the middle) is an enormous “desiring machine.”2 Starting from Deleuze and Guattari’s famous concept of the machine in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977), Gómez-Peña envisioned a radical re-reading of the U.S.-Mexico border as a conjunction of desiring machines brought together. Such a notion of the Frontera as a real machine with ®ows and interruptions, crossings and deportations , liminal transitions and reaggregations, is fundamental to my reading of the extended U.S.-Mexico Borderland cultural texts of Los Angeles , for it will permit us to travel along different routes and paths other than the “Sunshine or Noir” and “Black or White” master dialectics thematized in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990). The two-thousand-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, without doubt, produces millions of undocumented workers from Central America and Mexico who are essential to North American agriculture’s, tourism’s, and maquiladora ’s economic machines. The U.S.-Mexico border thus not only produces masses of agricultural farmworkers, low-tech laborers (mostly women), dishwashers, gardeners, and maids, but a military-like machine of low-intensity con®ict (Dunn 1996)—INS helicopters, Border patrol agents 262 with infrared camera equipment used to track and capture the border crossers from the South, and detention centers and jails designed to protect the Anglocentric minority in California who fear and even loathe these scores of indocumentados. Moreover, this desiring machine also comprises an enormous bureaucratic, political, cultural, and legal machine of coyotes (border crossing guides for hire), pollos (pursued undocumented border crossers), fayuqueros (peddlers of food), sacadineros (border swindlers ), cholos/as (Chicano/a urban youth), notary publics, public interest lawyers, public health workers, a huge “juridical-administrative-therapeutic state apparatus” (JAT) [1989, 154]—to use Nancy Fraser’s unruly coinage.3 The only thing that matters here for our purposes is that the U.S.Mexico border machine constructs the subject-positions exclusively for the bene¤ts of the North American JAT machine: juridically, it positions the migrant border crossers vis-à-vis the U.S. legal system by denying them their human rights and by designating them as “illegal aliens”; administratively , the migrant border crossers who desire amnesty must petition a bureaucratic institution created under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to receive identi¤cation papers (including a social security card); and, ¤nally, therapeutically, migrant border crossers in their shantytowns in canyons throughout California have to grapple with various county Health Departments and the Environmental Health Services of¤ces. For instance, at one shantytown called El Valle Verde (Green Valley) in San Diego County, the Environmental Health Services’ director shut down the migrant border crossers’ camp “for violations dealing with lack of potable water for drinking, building-code violations, [and] fecal material on the ground” (quoted in Chávez 1992, 108). This analysis of the U.S.-Mexico border as a “juridical-administrativetherapeutic state apparatus” can allow us to see that migrant border crossers from the South into the North are largely disempowered by the denial of cultural and legal citizenship.4 The JAT border machine, moreover , positions its subjects in ways that do not humanize them. It often personalizes them as “illegal aliens,” “cases,” “dirty,” “amoral,” and “disease -ridden,” and so militates against their collective identity. As Nancy Fraser says about the JAT welfare system, the JAT border machine “imposes monological, administrative de¤nitions of situation and need...

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