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Conclusion: How Do Borders Blur?
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Conclusion How Do Borders Blur? The concern with shifting borders and boundaries, rather than with the contents of such spaces, is a recurring theme in contemporary social thought. As Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999) write, this intellectual trend largely reflects political changes in the world since 1989, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the European Union. Numerous boundary disputes have accompanied such transformations, not just in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but also in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Furthermore, globalization has accelerated the movement of capital, goods, information, and people across international boundaries. In particular, the growth of migrant, refugee, and displaced populations has attracted increasing attention. Consequently, social scientists and humanists have reexamined their sedentary notions of nation-states as the sole containers of cultural identities. Among other scholars, the Mexican American anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1989) has contributed to refiguring the contours of culture, ideology, class, and power.1 His analysis of “culture in the borderlands,” based on the U.S.-Mexican experience, underlines migrants’ constant transgression of national , ethnic, racial, class, and gender divisions in their daily lives. Rosaldo proposes that “ethnographers look less for homogeneous communities than for the border zones within and between them” (217) as a point of departure for analyzing cultural identities, especially in the context of transnational migration. conclusion 228 Recent scholarship has reconceptualized migrants as part of extended webs of economic, political, and cultural exchange. Transnational practices cut across state boundaries in ways that are difficult to grasp from a nationcentered perspective. Current approaches to transnationalism discard the conventional image of immigration as a form of cultural stripping away and complete absorption into the host society, as Rosaldo observed. Rather, such approaches show that immigrants belong to multiple communities with fluid and hybrid identities, grounded in subjective affiliations more than geopolitical criteria. For example, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the United States often straddle U.S. and Latin American cultures. As Juan Flores (1993: 215) has underlined, the “Latino experience in the U.S. has been a continual crossover, not only across geopolitical borders but across all kinds of cultural and political boundaries.” Border crossing becomes an apt image not just for the act of moving to another country but also for the crossover between cultures, languages, and nations in which migrants participate. An intense process of cultural hybridization usually takes place as people relocate. Transnationalism therefore involves imagining communities beyond the nation-state, defying stationary models of physical and cultural space. The massive dispersal and resettlement of people away from their homelands unsettles customary linkages among territories, states, and citizenships. Among other changes, diasporas often call into question ethnic, racial, and national identities as defined in both their home and host countries. Throughout this book, I have argued that Hispanic Caribbean migrants blur the borders of their countries with the United States. In so doing, they create hybrid zones of contact between their places of origin and destination . Thus, they constantly shuttle along the social, cultural, political, and economic edges between two or more nations. In the Puerto Rican case, the border with the United States is more permeable than elsewhere because of the island’s nebulous definition as an unincorporated territory. However, migrants cannot obliterate altogether the entrenched legal and administrative divisions between their home countries and the United States. As many scholars have underscored, borders and boundaries still matter, and not just in a metaphorical sense (see, e.g., Donnan and Wilson 1999; Saldívar 1997). Despite the pressures of globalization, nation-states continue to frame the daily lives of most people, including those who live outside their country of birth. For instance, patrolling the boundaries of the United States has become a national security issue, especially after the terrorist attacks of [3.90.187.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:01 GMT) conclusion 229 September 11, 2001. Responding to “transnational threats” such as smuggling migrants, controlled substances, and weapons, the U.S. government has militarized its southern boundaries, not just with Mexico, but also with the Dominican Republic and Cuba. In the Cuban case, the boundary is even more ominous given the lack of official relations with the United States. Comparing the three cases presented in this book has broader implications for understanding the continuing significance of state boundaries in the contemporary world, despite their growing irrelevance for cultural practices and identities. Table C...