Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA: Development, Politics, and Participation on the US-Mexico Border

2. Space and Place in the Borderlands

40 Chapter 2 Space and Place in the Borderlands The border between Mexico and the United States has often been referred to as the longest boundary in the world to separate the so-called first and third worlds (cf. Alvarez 1995, 451). Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous description of the border as an “open wound” where the “Third World grates up against the first and bleeds” (1987, 3) has often been summoned to drive home this empirically well-documented point. An­ zaldúa’s prescient words have, in recent years, been transformed from (rough) metaphor to visceral reality as border cities like Ciudad Juarez (Cd. Juarez), Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, and others have been transformed into bloody battlegrounds for drug cartel turf wars. Since the relative success of US anti-drug efforts in closing off Caribbean and waterborne trafficking routes in the late 1980s (Andreas 1998) and the unfortunate drug violence that has engulfed parts of Mexico since the launching of former President Felipe Calderón’s Drug War in 2006 (Castañeda 2010; Cockcroft 2010; Grayson 2010), the line has come to serve a different function. Now it helps to corral violence within Mexican border cities, as demonstrated by the especially horrific violence in Cd. Juarez since 2008 (Campbell 2011) or the massacre of seventy-two aspiring migrants just outside Matamoros in the spring of 2010. As a productive limit to state sovereignty and territoriality (Heyman 1999), the US-Mexico border has supported the clustering of off-shore assembly plants, with all their attendant conditions, on the southern side of the US-Mexico border. As a territorial limit, the border is productive because it has historically accommodated and reinforced postmodern production regimes of flexible production and accumulation (Har- Space and Place in the Borderlands  41 vey 1989). The territorial limits of modern nation-states are essential components of the globalized capitalism that took root from the early 1970s onward. They are not incidental to, but constitutive of, contemporary global capitalist production regimes. The borders of modern nation-states—and the discordant environmental, labor, and human rights protection regimes they preserve—make present-day flexible and transnational production processes both possible and highly productive. The Mexican side of the US-Mexico border is one of the most obvious and instructive examples of this global phenomenon. This chapter provides a sketch of borderlands history, with a focus on the lower Rio Bravo/Rio Grande region. As ethnographic setting, the border region is decidedly liminal and has been so since the first western advancing Anglo-Saxon populations encountered the northward moving Spanish conquistadores, and as each ran amuck over the indigenous populations that had previously inhabited American and Mexican territories (Truett 1999; Stern 1998; Worcester 1988). The first section briefly sketches out general borderlands history, with particular focus on the dynamics of the Lower Rio Grande/Rio Bravo region. It does not pretend to do justice to the extraordinarily rich historical literature devoted to this topic. The second portion is devoted to the border’s more recent history, in which the region has been produced and reproduced by the globalizing and spatializing forces of transnational capital. Neoliberalism and the maquila industry stand out as particularly important non-local forces that have produced both border populations and the conditions in which they live, even as these global forces intertwine and interact with local forces. Both have come together to produce the borderlands as a marginal zone vis-à-vis its respective nation-states (cf. Das and Poole 2004). The US-Mexico Borderlands The term borderlands was first used by historian Herbert Bolton in his 1921 book, The Spanish Borderlands (cited in Truett 1999). For Bolton, the American West was but one of two equally important moving frontiers shaping the region, and it was the meeting of these two frontiers that produced the borderlands as cultural contact zone (cf. Stern 1998; Worcester 1988). Bolton was a student of the famed frontier theorist, Frederick Jackson Turner, but he also turned Turner’s thesis on its head. Unlike Turner, who had theorized the American West through a largely 42   Sustaining the Borderlands in the Age of NAFTA Anglo-Saxon conquest lens (arguing that the act of taming the West built American democratic character), Bolton drew attention to the fact that the conquered regions had previously been Spanish territory, even as he also neglected the histories of the Native American populations (Truett 1999). For him and...