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Introduction Thus far I have been interested in showing the mechanisms of identity construction in a very special setting like the border, where different countries, economies, cultures, religions, and ethnicities come together. Because my interest has been in mechanisms, I relied on an ethnographic technique; that is, I traded extension in my knowledge of reality for profundity in its analysis. In other words, I know a lot about the ways some people narrate their identities to make sense of themselves and others on the border, but I do not know how many people use the mechanisms I have described so far. Of course, discourse analysis about commonsense narratives is of great help in knowing that the discourse you are analyzing is not just individual, but social, shared by many people, because common sense, by definition , is collective, never individual. But still you do not know how many people share that particular version of common sense. However, from time to time reality comes to the aid of fiction, and something happens in society that confirms that the types of commonsense discourses the researcher has gathered in his sample (254 interviews constitutes a large sample for an ethnographic study, but still not enough to generalize) are very widespread in the community . Fortunately, this is what happened in my research when “Operation Blockade” was launched in September 1993. In the following pages, I want to show the reaction of many Juarenses and El Pasoans (Anglos, Mexican Americans, and African Americans alike) to Operation Blockade. In this way, I will present other types of data, that were not generated by me, and that still support my interpretation of the basic plots that make up many people’s identities on the border. El Pasoans’ Support of Operation Blockade On Sunday morning, September 19, 1993, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez woke up to a new border patrol strategy to deter illegal immigration into the United States. A surprise border patrol action— “Operation Blockade”—placed four hundred agents and dozens of government vehicles and helicopters on the twenty-mile stretch of OPERATION BLOCKADE, OR WHEN PRIVATE NARRATIVES WENT PUBLIC Chapter 5 border dividing El Paso from Ciudad Juárez. This strategy ended decades of laissez-faire attitudes held by the border patrol toward undocumented people, an attitude that had fed a utopian image of El Paso and Juárez as a model of brotherhood along the border. This image was so strong that I had problems convincing people outside the area that there was a profound resentment underlying the relationships between many Juarenses and El Pasoans (both Anglos and Mexican Americans alike). As a matter of fact, some local people were also unaware of the amount of resentment underlying the supposedly “smooth relationship between sister cities.” As Salvador Balcorta, director of South El Paso’s La Fe Clinic, stressed, however: “The thing we have to overcome now is the hatred . . . For the longest time we have blinded ourselves to the feelings that may be out there” (El Paso Times, October 3, 1993).1 As Howard, Carrillo, and Peregrino (1994, p. 6) point out: “The hostility and pent-up frustration that had been unleashed by the blockade was astonishing. These feelings had obviously been submerged by the official rhetoric of oneness, by the unspoken assumption that Mexicans and Mexican Americans would naturally sympathize with each other . . . that blood was thicker than the water flowing in a river with two names.” At first there were thumbs-up signs, passing cars with their headlights on and green ribbons (the color of the border patrol) tied to their antennas, people honking their car horns, and the like. Then, neighbors near the border brought coffee and doughnuts to the border patrol agents parked facing the river, within sight of each other and would-be crossers. Immediately many El Pasoans started calling radio programs, sending letters to the local newspapers, and painting their walls supporting the blockade. What some people had thought was something impossible to achieve, to unite El Paso behind a common goal, suddenly happened. For years, politicians and business and religious leaders had desperately sought some issue that would bring El Pasoans together. Then, in only one movement, border patrol agents lined up along the river were able to get what leaders could not. Different polls showed overwhelming public support for the strategy (80 percent to 95 percent, depending on the source).2 As one El Pasoan wrote: If Border Patrol Chief Reyes didn’t do...

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