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THE MEXICAN SIDE DISCOURSES OF REGION Chapter 1 Introduction As I mentioned in the Introduction (and develop at length in the Appendix ), I think that people on the border use extensively social categories and interpellations to understand who they are and who the “others” are. Regarding the use of social categories, we have to remember that Mexicans and Americans belong to national societies that share some aspects of each other’s classification systems—both in terms of positions and their attributes. However, they differ greatly in other aspects that also impinge on the everyday attitudes and behaviors of their inhabitants. On the border, these similarities and differences meet, and the result is an unusually complex common sense, in which people are forced to move from one classification system to another, sometimes on a daily basis. Not only do people move from one system to another, but the proliferation of classification systems within which a single person can be placed means that people constantly mix different systems of classification to make sense of the perceived “other.” On the Mexican side of the border the main classificatory system relies on region, while the American system stresses race and ethnicity. Consequently, on the one hand it is very difficult to separate the different identities that continually overlap in the accounts of Juarenses and El Pasoans, where gender, class, religion, age, race and ethnicity, and region endlessly intersect with each other. On the other hand a regional logic on the Mexican side and a racial and ethnic one on the American side somehow overdetermine the ways in which the complex mix of the different identities are accounted for by the inhabitants of the region. The border offers a unique opportunity to look at the complex process of identity construction and its constant use of arbitrary classi fication systems to make sense of people’s social identities. In the present chapter I will discuss the highly developed regional system of classification that many Fronterizos use to make sense of their own attitudes and behaviors and those of the “others.” In the Juárez interviews, two discourses are predominantly used to make sense of “us” and “them”: one referring to regional and the other to national identity. The oft-repeated phrases “nosotros, los de la 22 CROSSING BORDERS, REINFORCING BORDERS frontera” [we, the people of the border] and “nosotros, los de Juárez” [we, the people from Juárez] (or even more affectionately, “nosotros, los de Juaritos”1 [we, the people from dear Juárez]), as well as the labels Juarenses , Norteños [Northerners], and Fronterizos [frontiersmen or borderites ], are used to explain attitudes and behaviors Juarenses consider a particular feature of their region.2 In this classification system, Mexicans are divided by city, state, and region and characterized accordingly . Yet “region” in this context does not coincide with a fixed geographical area. Instead, it marks a symbolically understood space that can be as large or as small as the speaker requires. Hence, for some of our interviewees, “the South” starts only fifteen miles from Juárez, and a Chilango is anyone who lives from that point southward!3 Employing this geographic differentiating mechanism, Juárez residents contrast Norteños and Sureños [Southerners] mainly to distinguish themselves from the Chilangos of Mexico City and from the inhabitants of Central and Southern Mexico (they do this because Sureños supposedly have more Indian ancestry than Norteños). Secondarily, Juárez residents distinguish between Fronterizo and non-Fronterizo Norteños, in part to differentiate themselves from the people who live in Chihuahua City (the capital of the state). It is important to point out that different actors use the above labels in different ways. On the one hand the self-reference “nosotros, los de Juárez” was more prominent than “Juarenses” among most of the interviewees from poorer neighborhoods; and they always used “nosotros, los de la frontera” instead of “Fronterizos.” In contrast, middle-class people in Juárez used all the above labels alternatively. Regardless of class, age, gender, or religion, though, the interviewees all preferred the reference to the city instead of the region. “Fronterizo” was used almost exclusively by middle-class people. When it comes to labels, most interviewees, regardless of social class, preferred the “de . . .” Spanish construction instead of the regional adjectives “Juarense,” “Norteño,” and the like to identify the “others.” It was thus much more common for interviewees to talk about “ellos, los...

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