Search for a command to run...
The Border Reader (TBR) is a collected volume of 26 interdisciplinary scholarly articles, chapters, and essays originally published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that grapple with the US-Mexico border/borderlands as a geographical and economic region, a tool of governance, a power structure, an experience, a theoretical concept, and a site of contestation. The editors propose TBR as an ‘alternative canon’ (5) for border studies and offer the US-Mexico border as an exemplary case for global borders. Hence, what it loses in geographical diversity it gains in specificity and depth. One can identify a Foucauldian argument running through much of the volume: borders are sites of power that produce subjectivities at the social margins and, with them, resistance. Some essays, like Néstor Rodríguez's Marxist analysis of autonomous worker action and the wide-ranging section on ‘New Border Imaginaries’, resist that classification. Still, TBR's most consistent conceptual themes are related to identities created or revealed by the border, especially concerning gender, sexuality, Latino/x, Chicano/x, and migrant identities, but also Indigenous, disabled, working class, masculine, and, yes, white identities. Contributions include the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literature, gender and sexuality, and ethnic/American studies. It broadly reflects the field's evolution from the early years of ethnic studies in the 1970s and 1980s, including Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa, seminal articles from the 1990s, and contemporary studies. Several essays feel more dated, which may be considered a virtue inasmuch as it recovers seminal writings from different historical moments. Chapters are divided into six sections. ‘Part I: Locating the Border’ emphasises the structures of domination that create subjectivities, including informal empire, immigration law, asylum, necro-politics, cultural hegemony, and masculinity/machismo. While this process creates subjects who contest domination—asylees, queer, and borderland subjects—the focus is the top-down theoretical foundations of borders. ‘Part II: Documenting Identities’ recovers or articulates identities existing at the margins of the borderlands. Américo Paredes's genealogy of machismo in popular culture feels dated in style but uncannily contemporary, ranging from masculinity and guns to borderland violence and corridos. Other essays centre the self-fashioning of migrant identities, including Indigenous inhabitants and socially mobile Black settlers in colonial Texas (Martha Menchaca), gay migrants' formation of social networks (Lionel Cantú), and migrants' changing gender roles at the border (Patricia Zavella). ‘Part III: En/gendering Borders’ presents a cross-section of the border's evolving gender politics. Renato Rosaldo traces Chicano narratives' evolution from Paredes's idyllic patriarchy to Sandra Cisneros' embattled female hero, while Sonia Saldívar-Hull rescues Chicana ‘border feminism’ from the stranglehold of white feminisms dominating academia. In two memorable essays, Martha Balaguera discusses how border crossings of chicas trans reveal the dispersion of power through the carceral landscape, and José Limón analyses working-class Mexican-American men's sexualised banter and meat consumption as a critique of late capitalism. ‘Part IV: Othering Space/Othering Bodies’ considers how the border and immigration law constitute non-normative bodies and subjects: ‘dirty’ Mexicans' imagined threat to Anglo-American middle-class sexual ethics (Ramón Gutiérrez), changing imaginaries of Mexicans as able-bodied or disabled according to US laws and labour demands (Natalia Molina), how immigration law and discourses constituting lesbian identity intersected to exclude migrants (Eithne Luibhéld), and how border enforcement constitutes ‘melancholy migrants’ by indefinitely separating them from home. ‘Part V: Border Crossings’ balances accounts of migrants as marginalised subjects and creative agents of transnational life, including the undocumented adolescents constituted by biopower as abject and discardable ‘bare life’ (Roberto González, Leo Chávez) and the semi-colonised ‘regions of refuge’ formed by Mexican migrants, which satisfy the US's demand for cheap labour, but also concentrate physical, mental, and economic hardship (Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez). Other essays highlight migrant agency: their autonomous creation of transnational communities challenges nation-states' control over borders, capital, and labour (Néstor Rodríguez), and braceros' assertion of their Indigenous identities defied the Mexican state's ideology of mestizaje (Mireya Loza). ‘Part VI: New Border Imaginaries’ explores emergent theories and praxis: how violence and sociopolitical disintegration are transforming cultural hybridity in Ciudad Juárez (Fiamma Montezemolo), women's collectives' insistent and public witness to femicide (Rosa-Linda Fregoso), the convergence of undocumented immigrants and criminals into a socially and politically excluded caste under US law (Kelly Lytle Hernández), the defiant affirmation of the irreducibly rich variation of Chicano/x language (Gloria Anzaldúa), and the traumatic rending of mestizo and Indigenous difference at the heart of Chicano identity, an essay which also adeptly encapsulates many of TBR's themes (María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo). Omissions are inevitable for this vast subject. Some overlooked areas include recent scholarship on blackness and Indigenous communities at the border (excepting Menchaca's essay). Nonetheless, TBR is both coherent and capacious. It attests to the inexhaustibility of experience and life that is interpellated at the border and that recreates that same border for its own purposes. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.