Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier

NOTES

Introduction 1. “Operation Blockade” is a metaphor that itself deserves to be analyzed . Its military references (you “blockade” an enemy, not a country you are going to engage in a process of free trade) did not escape the border patrol , which about a month after launching the operation changed its name to “Operation Hold the Line.” 2. An El Paso Times poll conducted in October 1994 showed that 85 percent of El Pasoans favored the border blockade. Among them 78 percent of the Hispanics and 91 percent of the non-Hispanics favored the blockade (El Paso Times, October 30, 1994). Reading an early version of the book, Duncan Earle (personal communication, September 6, 1998) correctly noted that the blockade’s popularity among Mexican Americans was largely due to the fact that stopping the illegal crossers at the border dramatically reduced border patrol harassment of Mexican American El Pasoans, who before were very often “confused” as being undocumented immigrants. 3. Nearly 70 percent of El Paso’s population is of Mexican origin, and a significant number of these residents have arrived in the United States within the last twenty years. 4. I will discuss religion in two different chapters in my future book, Border Identities: Narratives of Class, Gender, and Religion on the U.S.–Mexico Border; see also Vila (1996). 5. For a full analysis about the relationship between photography, narrative , and the construction of identity, see Vila (1997a). 6. There is a small population of Korean Americans in El Paso that was not mentioned prominently in most of my interviews. It would be interesting to conduct research about social perceptions among them and regarding them in El Paso and Juárez. 7. Reading an early version of this manuscript, Dennis Bixler-Márquez noted that small rural crossings along the border (Palomas was his example) also have a very different dynamic than the large cities I mentioned (BixlerM árquez, personal communication, July 18, 1997). 8. Initially, the chapters on religion, gender, and class were intended to appear at this point in the book, but finally had to be cut and transformed into a second volume, Border Identities: Narratives of Class, Gender, and Religion on the U.S.–Mexico Border. In the religion chapter I deal with the interesting way religious identities intertwine with region, nation, ethnicity, and race, in a process where a couple of thematic plots work as nodal points that “center ” some narrative identities on the border. In this chapter I show how the “Juarenses are less Catholic than Southern Mexicans” and “Mexican AmeriNOTES cans are less Catholic than Mexican nationals” discourses on the border function as narrative plots around which many border inhabitants construct their “coherent” identities. In the chapter on gender I address the particular ways gender identities overlap with region, nation, race, and ethnicity on the border. In the first part of the chapter I analyze how gender narratives are regionalized and nationalized on the Mexican side of the border, where many Southern Mexicans and Fronterizos believe that there are particular gender behaviors and attitudes that characterize Fronterizos as distinct from Southern Mexicans on the one hand, and Americans on the other. Those particular gender behaviors are thematized around several specific narratives well developed in the region. The two most important in my sample are (1) the figure of the libertine Fronterizo, which easily becomes the libertine prostitute (female or male) associated with the “city of vice” discourse I analyze in Chapter 1 of this book and (2) the figure of the bossy American woman. In the American section of the chapter, analyzing two groups of Mexican immigrants that migrated to the United States in very similar circumstances, but that still show very different gender discourses, I point out the importance of the narrative plots those immigrants brought from Mexico and the subsequent modification of those plots due to their experience in the United States in the construction of their commonsense discourses about gender relations among Mexicans living on the U.S.–Mexico border. In the chapter about class I show how class discourses are mostly absent from the area, proposing that this absence is linked to a metaphorical displacement through which to go up in the social scale is equated by many people with moving from one country (Mexico) to the other (the United States). In this kind of narrative the explanation of poverty (or its lack) is detached from any reference to class exploitation and is framed in regional...