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5 Crossing Divisions and Social Borders ROSCAs as Transborder Practices and Their Functions This work so far has focused on broad theoretical assumptions that provide insights into how rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) have emerged as important practices among many Mexican-origin populations . It has shown that ROSCAs are highly movable and cross the political borders of the Southwest North American Region. It has also developed the idea that Mexican-origin populations, like the practices themselves, have long crossed those borders, most recently because of this area’s development as a central regional site. This centrality consists of a transborder economy, culture, social relations, and a multiple psychocultural identity, as described below. In part, the practice’s capacity to endure, and the population’s capacity to engage in the megascripts of the region, daily using “slanted” measures in their social and political lives, speak to the many functions ROSCAs fulfill. The ability of this population to skirt racialized statuses of gender and culture is due in part to the major ways in which ROSCAs fulfill a host of functions that have less to do with economic gain, although this is a most important function. Rotating savings and credit associations often crosscut divisions of class, cultural identity, and gender expectations. They crosscut and counter the social borders created by class and occupation and the insidious differentiation of racialized statuses, such as the commodity identity too often associated with Mexican-origin populations. They illustrate, in very specific ways, that Mexican-origin people are not mere “commodities.” Instead, they are innovators and creators of a variety of means for reducing the uncertainty and indeterminacy of their daily lives. In a very specific manner, ROSCAs are functionally transborder in their ability to crosscut the differentiations that define Mexican-origin people as “the other,” and they are counterpoints to this definition. The Transborder Functional Dynamic One of the most important functions of ROSCAs is that they help reinforce underlying cultural constructs within the Mexican population, 156 Chapter 5 both in and beyond the Southwest North American Region, and they are truly transnational and transborder. When I use the word “transnational ” and “transborder,” at one level I include only activities, events, behaviors, transactions, networks, and relationships in which people on both sides of the border participate in mutual fields and arenas in the Southwest North American Region and beyond. However, I also mean, as previously discussed, those very useful practices and unseen ideas carried over from their points of origin and introduced into a new national setting, whether this involves people already accustomed to their use and ideational analogs, or people who encounter them as new knowledge learned in the new setting. As I have also stated, there is a spatiality that is not located in a single space, because many people live out “transnational and transborder lives” in which their “citizenship” is not the main locater for their existential sense of self; rather, it is tied to myriad points of cultural and physical places, emotional spaces, and cultural references on either side of the “border.” For Mexican-origin populations living in and of the United States and those migrating to Mexico’s northern border, “transnational living” has been an increasingly important phenomenon. This is especially true with the great demographic transitions between Mexico and the United States that have taken place from 1980 to the present, much of them an aftermath of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).1 Culturally and historically, Mexican-origin populations have lived transborder lives. Most of these individuals cannot be reduced to a category of citizenship or to their engagement in the transnational networks described above. In Ramón Saldívar’s fine book (2006) on MexicanAmerican author Américo Paredes, who wrote texts focusing on border life, he quotes Paredes as saying he regards himself to be “a sociological phenomenon” because of his double cultural presence in both nations. Saldívar, extending Paredes’s position, expands this as “a preposterous oddity existing both inside and outside of two discrete national realities” (161).2 But I think it not as preposterous as either Saldívar or Paredes wouldsuggest.Simply,eventsandhistoryhavepreventedasingle-tracked, citizenship-based personality development, in which our beings are tied only to an American civil life. The recognition that cultural personalities have multiple dimensions that cannot be reduced to simple unilineal identities has helped devastate the acculturation model. Mexican-origin populations in the United States live American civil...

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