Border Identifications: Narratives of Religion, Gender, and Class on the U.S.-Mexico Border (review)

Border Identifications is Pablo Vila's follow up to Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders, also published by the Inter-America Series, University of Texas-Austin Press, 2000. Vila, Professor of Sociology at Temple University, has done ethnographic work at the Ciudad Juarez El Paso border for approximately ten years. It is his ethnographic approach that makes his work invaluable for understanding past and present U.S.-Mexico border dynamics. While Vila's previous book shed light on regional, ethnic/racial, and national logics used by those at the border to address themselves and others, the present study concentrates on narratives, metaphors, and interpellations used during interviews in order to show how religion, gender, and class are intertwined with the aforementioned logics.

The book is divided into seven chapters, two per identity category (religion, gender, and class respectively), with a final discussion on the theoretical approaches forwarded by Holstein and Gubrium, and Laclau, Mouffe, and Zizek. These authors contribute to the understanding of discursive practices used to make meaning of self, others, and power. Vila's contribution to the discussion is particularly interesting as he is able to point to blind spots in their theoretical postulations by grounding his observations on the extensive fieldwork he has done. The results of his work have also led him to point out a continuing Border Studies conundrum: how do we address the common sense processes and quotidian experiences of border dwellers on both sides of the border? Vila comments that thus far the theoretical enunciations centered on the border have relied heavily on literary criticism frameworks, managing to create a vocabulary that has become its own referent (hybridity, border crossing, third country, etc.); these have often essentialized border culture, losing sight of the social actors and their continually changing environment.

Vila's ethnographic work steps away from the analysis of cultural products (including the self-referring performative act) and situates the social actors on center stage, drawing out meaning from the metaphors and narratives they use during interviews. Here is where Vila's theoretical contribution is made explicit as he shifts the importance "of the nodal point as the articulatory master of a particular discursive formation" to the narrative plot. In order to have access to the narrative plots used by social actors to make meaning of self and others, the ethnographer uses photographs of living spaces on both sides of the border. This stimulus provides participants with narrative agency, as they choose the image they will engage during their narration.

Due to the changing religious landscape throughout Latin America, the two chapters dedicated to the narratives of religion were particularly interesting to this reader. Vila's discussion illuminates the complexity and the non-homogeneous uses of religion as an identity anchor throughout the narratives. Although, as Vila points out, various scholars conflate Mexican tradition, Catholicism, and Mexican identity, treating them as synonymous, the narrative plots demonstrate differently. Not only does the border dweller construct the other in terms of Catholicism vs. Protestantism, but also in terms of regional and class practices of Catholicism. Popular Catholicism would infer class, for example, and southern style Catholicism refers to the growing number of migrants from southern Mexico. Vila's thoroughness shines through as his discussions underscore that the narrative plots that use religion as an identity anchor, as well as a means to accentuate difference (a Fronterizo/a Catholic from a Southern Catholic; a Mexican-American Protestant from a Mexican-American Catholic, for example) simultaneously locate the interviewee in relation to a national logic, thereby engaging the hegemonic discourses generated by each Nation.

Throughout his work, and in spite of some awkward passages, Vila manages to avoid the pitfalls he identifies as prevalent in Border Studies:

the confusion of the American side of the border with the border itself […], the essentialization of the cultures that meet in the border encounter, the failure to pursue the theoretical possibility that fragmentation of experience can...