Crossing Borders

The conflict between individuals and nation states enacted along the United States-Mexico border, and which has by now expanded into the very hearts of both nations and peoples, serves as a dramatization of the growing challenge of engaging the mass movement of people, their ideas, products, institutions, cultures, the arena for defining their values and allocating their resources. It destabilizes ideas of community, culture, nationality, and the territorial nation itself as being fixed and unitary.

This conflict can be seen beyond the border as both the United States of America as well as the United States of Mexico constructed narratives to position themselves in the nation-centered nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Americans and Mexicans looked towards the country of the "other" as both defined their history and traditions in direct opposition to each other. With the United States historically seeing Mexico as a cultural threat and a roadblock to the western expansion of the American Empire, and Mexico seeing the United States as an imperialist enemy, occupying over half of Mexican territory. After the Mexican Revolution, Mexico and the United States represented two very different national models which exist in dialectic opposition to each other, one of a nationalism based on the first twentieth century social revolution, and the other on the most resilient capitalist economy in the world. Yet with the Americanizing of culture, the introduction of consumerism to replace Mexican ideals, the sense of history becomes a tale of tragedy. A tragedy symbolized by the ascendance of Los Angeles over Mexico City as a new mecca for Mexican life, people, and culture for many. Transnationals have created a border that instead of being a line separating two distinct entities on a map, is a border in which national narratives are less important than the processes of intimate relationships. At the same time there are fears in the United states as the Mexican population in the country has tripled since 1970, and the border region has become heavily Mexicanized or Hispanicized as the growth of that population has been concentrated in the border states. An outcome of this fear includes the passing of California’s Proposition 187 and other similar anti-immigrant measures elsewhere in the country.