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10. Borders without Bodies: Affect, Proximity, and Utopian Imaginaries through "Lines in the Sand"
- The University of Alabama Press
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10 Borders without Bodies Affect, Proximity, and Utopian imaginaries through “Lines in the Sand” Dustin Bradley Goltz and Kimberlee Pérez Mainstream discourses circulate to construct images of the Mexican-American border and Mexican Americans: as perpetual immigrants (flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders” 363) outside of belonging to the nation (Carrillo Rowe, “Whose ‘America’?” 122), economic and criminal threats to the nation (ono and Sloop 28), and a complex and changing group (Calafell and Delgado 2). in this volume, ono theorizes the relation between borders and bodies, demonstrating the ways immigrants (and people whose phenotypes signify Latino/a and are therefore rhetorically conflated with immigrants) move with borders. following Anzaldúa’s theorizing of border as psychic and embodied, ono explains how immigrants who cross the geographically legislated border between the US and Mexico continue to “carry” it with them. Therefore, as a discursive construction, the border is constantly redone through and around the bodies of immigrants; the border is as much in the Southwest as in the Midwest and north. As we demonstrate in this chapter, the performativity of the border mediates relational and spatial meanings and interactions. Although we certainly confront the pervasiveness of border rhetorics (alongside critical resistance to them), quite simply, we need not confront them. Spatially and discursively distanced from our daily lives, we can and do occupy a privileged removal from the border, as intersecting discourses of nation and whiteness certainly produce our bodies as non-immigrants (citizen, white, Mexican American) and apart from immigrants (flores and villarreal, this volume). it is only when we deliberately confront and reflect upon the intentional and circumstantial, the mundane and spectacular moments of our daily lives that place us in direct bodily contact with immigrants , that we get at the meaning of living that discursive production on individual and relational levels. How does the story of my understanding of immigrants and border rhetoric change in relation to us? How does it change the meaning of a relation, of difference, of distance? Does it bring us closer together in identification or pull us apart? Do the contours of us take on a different shape, texture, tone, and feeling? The spatial and discur- 164 / Goltz and Pérez sive issues surrounding US/Mexican immigration complicate, rupture, and pry apart our relations, emphasizing our differences along the lines of identity politics. The tension of distance and daily interanimation of the border in our lives lies at the heart of this chapter. What does it mean to confront these constructed illusions of distance, the deliberate binary production of border rhetorics that separate us from them? What can/might/ought this look like? Through a performative methodology,1 we enact a self-reflective process in order (or in an attempt) to understand our complicity with, and the challenge of, border rhetorics. Discourses of the border produce relations between and among difference:Mexican, Mexican American, and other nonwhite bodies are lumped into a homogeneous body of others who negotiate tense dynamics with whiteness.2 The effect is a circulating border that has an effect on, but is discursively without, bodies and their lived experiences . our efforts here are to follow critical race scholars who theorize white privilege alongside its damaging consequences (Segrest; nakayama and Krizek).We consider how border rhetorics produce non-immigrant and white signifying bodies through reflecting on how border rhetorics produce bodies, namely ours. Border discourses work to produce and sustain many parts of us—as scholars , as white signifying bodies, as teachers, as citizens, as hypocrites. What we write on the page, discuss in classrooms, or present at conferences is not divorced from the bars we drink at, the stores we shop in, the daily movement of our bodies through the world. in each of these moments, we are doing border work.We are working the border. Grounded in the awareness that our point of entry as a self-reflexive examination of this choice is riddled with complications and potentials—the risk/charge of recentering whiteness through calling attention to it without nuanced criticism of it (Projansky and ono 156)—we mindfully intertwine our embodied knowing with cultural critique (Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography”). Working from tradition of performative engagement, both outlined and enacted by Calafell in the previous chapter, we call upon the affective connections forged through our embodied experience.We offer this process as a complement to, rather than a replacement of, other activist and scholarly work featured in this volume and elsewhere that directly relates to the lives of...