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Chapter 3 REGIONALIZED GENDER NARRATIVES ON THE MEXICAN SIDE OF THE BORDER Introduction Any discussion about gender is always crisscrossed by other dimensions of identity. As Avtar Brah points out for the specific case of women: Within . . . structures of social relations we do not exist simply as women but as differentiated categories such as working-class women, peasant women, migrant women. Each description references a specificity of social condition. And real lives are forged out of a complex articulation of these dimensions . . . in different womanhoods the noun is only meaningful—indeed only exists—with reference to a fusion of adjectives which symbolize particular historical trajectories, material circumstances, and cultural experiences. (Brah 1992, p. 131) This statement is plainly acknowledged by women of color theorists in general and Chicanas in particular. As a matter of fact, it is the cornerstone of their debate with what they call white, middle-class, Western feminism. As Patricia Zavella (1991, p. 312) points out: “Women-of-color theorists have argued that race, class, and gender are experienced concurrently, and any attempt to disaggregate this lived experience into separate analytic categories seems reductionist , even impossible.” In the particular case of Mexican gender identities, the new scholarship on the issue clearly works with the same premise. As Hirsch (1999, p. 1345) points out, “There is not, and never will be, just one answer to the question of how migration affects gender. A simplistic focus on how migration affects gender takes us back two decades in gender theory, to the idea of ‘woman’ as a unified category . . . gender may not even be the defining axis of women’s lives; we need to look at race and class as well.” To complicate matters further, theoretically we cannot really claim that any given subcategory (in our case, e.g., Southern Mexican women, Chicana women, working-class Southern Mexican women, or middle-class Fronterizo women) is internally homogeneous either . Besides, gender was not a clear-cut category in the narratives of most of the people I interviewed. On the contrary, it was crisscrossed most of the time with issues that would be classified as belonging to the sexual orientation of the people, not to their gender. BORDER IDENTIFICATIONS 112 Regardless of all this complexity, most of the people I interviewed claimed they have a particular gender identity and, not by chance, that identity followed a very consistent pattern in which the “others”—the Southern Mexicans, the Mexican Americans, the Juarenses, and the Americans (i.e., the “others” organized by the articulatory power of the most important nodal points of the area: region, ethnicity, race, and nationality)—were the backdrop against which most of the discussion about gender developed in the region. In this sense, what Brah proposes about the “racialization of gender” (Brah 1992, p. 132) could very well be extended to the “regionalization of gender” on the Mexican side of the border, and “ethnicization” and/ or “nationalization of gender” on the American side. According to Brah (1992, p. 133), “historically specific and different groups have been racialized differently under varying circumstances, and on the basis of different signifiers of ‘difference.’” Thus, my point here is that in a region (Northern Mexico and specifically Ciudad Juárez) where racial discussions are somehow absent in public discourses and people tend to mediate ethnic categorizations through the use of regional discourses to make sense of attitudes and behaviors, those regional discourses work like Brah’s racialized discourses in the construction of identity. Therefore , any analysis of the interconnections between racism, regionalism, class, gender, and sexuality must take into account the positionality of different racisms with respect to each other (Brah 1992). This applies, for instance, as we will discuss below, to the positionality of Southern Mexican women in relation to Fronterizo women, or the positionality of Anglo women regarding Mexican American ones. The Mexican Side: Regionalizing Gender Narratives On the Mexican side of the border, most of the time gender is framed in regional and national terms. Thus, many Southern Mexicans and Fronterizas/os believe that there are particular gender behaviors and attitudes that characterize Fronterizos/as, as distinct from Southern Mexicans on the one hand and Americans on the other. That particular gender behavior revolves around several specific discursive formations well developed in the region. First and most important in my sample is the figure of the libertine Fronteriza/o, which easily becomes the libertine prostitute (female or male) associated with the “city...

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