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Chapter 5 THE PROBLEMATIC CLASS DISCOURSE ON THE BORDER: THE MEXICAN SIDE Introduction As I have pointed out in previous chapters, the regional, ethnic, and national logics we have found that are used in the process of classifying , creating metaphors, and narrating identities are so strong in the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso area that they overdetermine other ways of understanding the process of identity construction. In the chapter on Catholicism we saw how what is considered for many people to be a characteristic that most Mexicans share—that is, the practice of the Catholic faith—can become instead a site for stressing the difference many Mexicans believe separates them, in terms of region, from other Mexicans in Mexico and, in terms of nationality, from Mexican Americans. In the chapters on gender we saw how this issue is also framed and made meaningful in terms of region, nation, and ethnicity. In this sense, if the process of identity construction is that complex overlapping of diverse logics of making sense of difference, it is because, as Stuart Hall (1996, p. 3) points out: “Identification is . . . a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption . . . Like all signifying practices, it is subject to the ‘play’ of différance. It obeys the logic of more-than-one. And since as a process it operates across difference, it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic boundaries, the production of ‘frontier-effects.’ It requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside , to consolidate the process.” I will discuss in the following chapters how the peculiarities of the border situation overdetermine the discussions (and lack of discussion ) about another possible (and potentially powerful) identity anchor: class. The first thing that becomes obvious in the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border region is the relative absence of class discourses.1 This absence may seem natural on the American side of the border, due to the rejection of class discourses that seems to characterize American common sense. As Martha Giménez (1992, p. 7) points out: “Unlike most countries, which recognize the existence of social classes and class struggles in both commonsense understandings of social reality and legitimate political discourse, the United States is silent about class and obsessed with racial/ethnic politics. While BORDER IDENTIFICATIONS 170 other dimensions of stratification such as, for example, gender and age also enjoy political legitimacy, the politics of race/ethnicity has displaced class politics on the American political scene.” According to Giménez, possible causes for this absence of class discourse are the heterogeneous origins of the population, the heritage of slavery, the presence of “colonized minorities” (Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans), and “the lasting political effects of McCarthyism, which eradicated the left from American politics and defined class politics as un-American” (Giménez 1992, p. 7). What is really remarkable is that the same absence of class discourses is widespread on the Mexican side of the border, where class was addressed for many years, not only by the state and the ruling party (internally organized along class lines), but also by left parties and in public discourse in general. The absence of popular discussions about social inequalities in class terms in our interviews cannot be attributed to a sample bias, because that lack was prominent in instances where it should have been present, for instance, in our interviews in the Centro de Orientación de la Mujer Obrera [Working Women’s Orientation Center], the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros y Campesinos [Confederation of Revolutionary Workers and Peasants], the Destacamento del Pueblo [“People’s Garrison”], and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática [Democratic Revolutionary Party]. The hypothesis I propose is that the absence of class discourses in the region is linked to a metaphorical displacement through which moving up the social scale is equated by many people to moving from one country (Mexico) to the other (United States). In this case, as discussed in earlier chapters concerning religion and gender characteristics (Catholic practices and “liberal” gender behavior) that were assessed in terms of their change in meaning due to the geographical move from south to north, many of our interviewees believed that poverty decreases (and sometimes totally disappears) once one moves from Southern to Northern Mexico, and particularly when one crosses the U.S.-Mexico border . In this kind of narrative, the explanation of poverty (and its opposite , the lack of poverty) is detached from any reference to...

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