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As I indicated in the Introduction, I have separated the theoretical reflections from the empirical material in order to be accessible to different audiences. I agree with Douglas Foley (1990, p. 159) that it is very difficult “to write an engaging popular ethnography full of real people and events that [is] also full of dense, technical . . . theory jargon .” For that reason, I have reserved discussion of the theoretical ideas I have developed during my six years of fieldwork on Ciudad Juárez–El Paso. First, I address the importance of social categories and interpellations in the construction of social and cultural identities. Second, I discuss how tropes in general and metaphors in particular help in that construction. Third and finally, I talk about the central role narratives play in any process of identity construction. Social Categories and Interpellations Why do I consider the peculiar ways Southern Mexicans, Juarenses, Norteños, Fronterizos, Paseños, Mexican Americans, Chicanos, African Americans, Anglos, and so on, address themselves and “others” to be so important to the process of identity construction on the border ? I do so because I agree with certain poststructuralists who suggest that experience lacks inherent essential meaning: “It may be given meaning in language through a range of discursive systems of meaning, which are often contradictory and constitute conflicting versions of social reality” (Weedon 1989, p. 34). Hence, I believe that experience is not something reflected by language. Insofar as it is a meaningful experience, it is constituted in language. If experience is discursively created, then there is an ongoing struggle among discourses to shape that experience, where the social recognition of truth is the strategic position to which most discourses aspire. To acquire the status of truth, discourses must discredit all alternative and oppositional versions of meaning and establish themselves as commonsensical . Here we meet Antonio Gramsci’s shadow behind the poststructuralist approach. According to this approach, the relationships social actors participate in are multiple: relationships of production , race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender, family, religion , age, and so on. All these relationships have the potential of CATEGORIES, INTERPELLATIONS, METAPHORS, AND NARRATIVES A BRIEF THEORETICAL DISCUSSION Appendix being, for the same individual, spaces of possible identities. In addition, each social position the individual occupies is the space of a struggle about the meaning of such a position. I believe that social identity is based on an ongoing discursive struggle about the meanings that define social relationships and positions in society. The goal of this discursive struggle is for the particular labels at stake to enter the realm of common sense (Gramsci 1975, p. 1396), with the connotation proposed by the winners of the battle for meaning. This is so because uni-accentuality involves a practice of closure : namely, the establishment of an achieved system of equivalence between language and reality (Volosinov 1973, p. 23). The social construction of identity involves a struggle over the ways in which meaning gets “fixed.” Nevertheless, this notion of closure is always a conditional stage in this kind of approach, because meanings that have been effectively coupled can also be uncoupled. Ergo, the political struggle over the meaning of a particular identity or subject position is never completely closed. The subjectivity of a given social agent, no matter how fixed it may appear, is always only precariously and provisionally fixed. In other words, social identity and subjectivity are always precarious , unstable, contradictory, and in process, and the individual is always the site of conflicting forms of subjectivity (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1991). Poststructuralism questions the idea of a unified, coherent subject, since a discursively produced self is experienced not as a single, completed identity but as multiple, incomplete, partial identities . As Pauline Rosenau (1992, p. 44) points out: Post-modern opposition to the subject is not entirely original. Two sources, Freud . . . and Nietzsche . . . are particularly important. . . . Nietzsche . . . disputed the validity of a “fixed, substantial, selfhood.” . . . Freud also questioned the status of a coherent, integrated, unified, modern subject. He eliminated the self-conscious subject and substituted a decentered, fragmented, and heterogeneous subject who was often unaware of his/her unconscious. Different poststructuralist authors such as Jacques Derrida (1978), Jean Baudrillard (1983), and Michel Foucault (1970) concur in this characterization of the postmodern subject. This idea of the multiple/ fractured self is also central to some feminist thought, most noticeably in the works of Donna Haraway (1985), Mary Hawkesworth (1989), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1990...

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