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225 thirteen Some Borders Are More Easily Crossed Than Others” Negotiating Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas Maureen Kincaid Speller Where and what exactly is the border? Is it this line in the dirt, stretching for 3,000 kilometres? Is the border more accurately described as a zone which includes the towns of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez? Or is the border—is the border the whole country, the whole continent? (Verdecchia 21) VERDECCHIA” POSES THIS QUESTION in the opening scene of Guillermo Verdecchia ’s Fronteras Americanas/American Borders (1997). “Verdecchia” is “lost and trying to figure out where I took that wrong turn … I suspect we got lost while crossing the border” (20). At this stage, “Verdecchia” is no clearer than his audience as to which border he has got lost on; and although he has “hired a translator who will meet us on the other side” (21), he likewise seems to have little idea of what the “other side” will look like, or indeed what one actually crosses in order to reach the other side. As he muses about the border, it rapidly expands from a line in the dirt to something far more abstract. In asking how a whole country—a whole continent, even—can be a border, “Verdecchia” the character and the playwright,Verdecchia, point toward a concept of a border as something more than a physical division between two countries. Yet the “line in the dirt” is how most people first experience the border. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, national borders represent perhaps the greatest anxiety in contemporary life, for governments and for individuals alike. On the one hand, and particularly in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many governments are increasingly concerned about monitoring who precisely is entering their country. On the other hand, for many individuals, crossing a border has become a necessity in order to gain political asylum or to achieve economic stability, and they are willing to place themselves in extraordinary danger to make that crossing, often with the assistance of human traffickers. Moreover, tourists and other supposedly legitimate travellers are increasingly subject to levels of regulation that are little more “ “ 226 Maureen Kincaid Speller than “security theatre,”1 or they are treated as suspects for no better reason than that they happen to share a name with an alleged terrorist or because their superficial appearance matches an equally superficial profile of what an unacceptable border crosser might look like. Thus a physical border generates a complex set of relationships between those who seek to cross it and those who seek to maintain its integrity. The nature of the physical border between two countries is often obscure. When I fly to the United States from England, as I leave the ground I am transported from English to international airspace, but it is not clear when I actually enter the United States. The passage through Canadian airspace and the transfer into US airspace are not formally acknowledged. Unless I happen to be looking out the window, I do not see the plane cross into Canadian airspace, and if I am not familiar with the geography of the US–Canada border, I do not recognize when the plane has moved into US airspace.When I land at Chicago O’Hare airport and leave the plane, I am on US soil, but my formal entry into the country does not occur until I enter the immigration hall and cross a coloured line marked on the floor. Each immigration booth has its own coloured line: does each of those lines constitute a separate border, or should they be viewed as the visible fragments of a contiguous whole running through the hall? No charted national border runs through O’Hare Airport, so to all intents and purposes I queue at an imagined fragment of border until I am invited to step into the United States of America by an immigration official, and I only formally enter the country when my passport is stamped. The journey from the plane to acquiring the passport stamp, while it leads the passenger through an entrance ritual, also demonstrates that even a clearly delineated “border” is really only a scuffed line on a floor until someone invests it with territorial significance. With the border transformed from an actual line in the dirt to a conceptual marker in a building physically detached from any territorial border , its nature becomes more mysterious...

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