La luna siempre será un amor difícil: Bordering on Consuming (and) Nationalizing Narratives

La luna siempre será un amor difÃ-cil: Bordering on Consuming (and) Nationalizing Narratives Paul Fallon is Assistant Professor of Spanish at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. His areas of interest include the contemporary narratives of greater Mexico, border studies, and critical theory. He is revising his dissertation , "Borderline Tactics: Negotiations of Community, Subjectivity, Nation, and Agency in Temporal Representations in Northern Mexican Border Narratives, " into a book manuscript. He is aho currently investigating the representations of youth and the devehpment of electronic media in Mexico. The spare, static certainty of the aphorisms "Time is money" and "History is progress" obscures the unstable , abstract concepts that constitute them. Along the Mexico-U.S. border, the last thirty-five years have brought rapidly increasing industrialization, urbanization, and transnational investment, often promoted as modernizing progress for Mexico. Yet those living in the region negotiate the variables of the aphoristic equations on a personal (and, occasionally, a collective) level. They barter their time at unfavorable exchange rates, and assess their histories by the satisfaction of subjective desires and basic necessities. Perhaps no border residents struggle more directly with how versions of modernity and progress are cast in terms of time and money than maquifadoraworkets. Personal accounts of these workers have been collected in several recent works. In the testimonial collection, La for más bella de la maquiladora, Angela, one such worker, tells a story of a daily struggle to control her time and improve her economic situation . After moving to Tijuana from the town of Cómala in West-central Mexico, she gets a factory job. At work, she faces constant pressure to produce rapidly: "si no lo hago rápido no saco el estándar, me pongo nerviosa y me regañan" {FMB 35).1 Yet rather than submit, she negotiates the temporal demands on her own terms: Ayer por ejemplo, me pusieron a hacer un trabajo que yo no hago. [...] La supervisora me puso ahÃ- porque no me quise cambiar unos dÃ-as al turno de la noche. [...] Mi trabajo ahÃ- es muy lento, aunque a la máquina se le puede controlar la velocidad, yo la paraba porque Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 42 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies no me daba abasto [...]. Entonces [a la supervisora] se le ocurrió ponerme junto a una señora bien carrilluda y ella prendÃ-a la máquina cada vez que yo la apagaba. (34) Angela frames her time at work as a battle of wills, contested almost always indirectly and mediated dirough co-workers and work tools. Yet the stability of this work-struggle has afforded her a sense of security and progress, which she links to her ownership of consumer goods: "Mi vida es otra cosa, tengo mi casa y mis cosas que poco a poco he comprado" (FMB 104). A simple identification of commodities with progress has its cutting side, however . In Tijuana writer Luis Humberto Crosthwaite's 1994 novel La luna siempre será un amor dificil, exploitative attitudes toward commercial goods mediate, then interfere with, the time of the protagonists' relationships.2 The novel underlines this interference by mixing aspects of the colonial era with those of the present. Toward the beginning conquistador Balboa and indigenous woman Florinda meet in Tenochtitlan . As the two are walking together, Florinda feels a sharp pain in her bare foot and sees her blood on the ground because "algún descuidado dejó botellas quebradas de Cocacola y Carta Blanca" (16). The wound caused by the shards of anachronistic brand-name products brings the two together, for when Balboa fights to have the hospital staff attend to her and seems to care only about her well-being, Florinda decides she loves the conquistador. Balboa himself has already fallen in love, but a discourse of conquest underlies his vision of her. For him, she is: "un terreno libre en este mundo frÃ-o de tierras conquistadas y gobernantes corruptos. Su Ã-nsula, su continente, su circunnavegación" (15). She represents unclaimed territory he desires to be his own, and in time, such consuming desires threaten to become all-consuming, separating the couple. As the text mixes references to...