The Fungibility of Borders

Mary Pat Brady

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2000, pp. 171-190 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23871

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 The Fungibility of Borders

Mary Pat Brady

South American cocaine cartels have transformed this desert town

[Nogales, Arizona] and other seemingly bucolic points along the
cactus-dotted Mexican border into international drug passageways that
now rival those of South Florida.
—“Drug Rings Turn Border into a Vast Route to U.S.:
Drug Rings Reopen Ancient Lanes,” New York Times,
27 August 1989, A1

A 62-year-old federal-agent-turned-rancher, who, like the others in the

room, refused to be identified for fear of reprisals, summed up the
desperation. After months of digging surveillance bunkers, plotting
aerial maps and patrolling his property by pickup, he concluded: “It’s
we private citizens who have upheld the integrity of the border . . . and
we can’t do it anymore. We’re losing America.”
—“Texas Border Ranchers Decry Drug Smugglers,”
Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1996, A11

W
hile anyone familiar with Chicano/a
history might stop to wonder where the New York Times got the notion
that border towns could ever be characterized as “bucolic,” they might
also realize that this characterization is just one example of a number of
ongoing efforts to recast the border within the national cultural imaginary.
This particular rendition claims that the “war on drugs” has brought the
border into modernity, a modernity framed by automatic weapons, x-ray
equipment, and the shrinking margins of legality. No longer the “bucolic”
frontier, no longer the threshold for the “advancing kingdom of God,” the
border signifies a locus of terror, the staging ground for contamination of
the pure inner reaches of “America.” The nostalgia for a “bucolic” border,
cut by “ancient” footpaths, similarly suggests a nostalgia for an earlier period
of nation building.1 But more importantly, it implies that it is necessary to

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construct a notion of the border as formerly nonviolent, as formerly content,

whose former “integrity” is only marginally upheld by “private citizens.”
Such a construction not only stabilizes the idea of the nation by invoking
a crisis, but also heightens the reliability of the current narrative which
suggests that now the border, and by extension, the nation, is under siege:
“We’re losing America.”
While describing Texas ranchers’ anger over the transformation
of land management along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Los Angeles Times
quotes a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who compares the bor-
der to the Maginot Line and a U.S. special agent who compares the ranchers
to “the last Americans in Vietnam on the embassy roof.” The ranchers are
angry not simply because the border zone has become in their eyes some-
thing of a free-trade zone for the narcotics industry, but also because that
industry has been rapidly buying property on both sides of the border. And
hence the border has been transformed into a “dark zone,” an America
“lost,” as one Border Patrol agent puts it, to the “doggone dopers” (A11).
If the Mexico-U.S. border has become a popular focal point for
journalists and the publishers of coffee-table books, the concept of bor-
ders has similarly gained a currency that enables it to perform a variety of
theoretical labors; it functions, for example, as a term to describe a personal-
ity disorder (“borderline”), the effects of navigating multiple subjectivities,
the liminal space between binary categories, or the potential complexities
of relationships where difference is central to the narrative of those rela-
tionships. 2 As Claire Fox (1999, 119) notes, the border in much cultural
theory “is rarely site-specific. Rather, it is invoked as a marker of hybrid or
liminal subjectivities, such as those that would be experienced by persons
who negotiate among multiple cultural, linguistic, racial, or sexual systems
throughout their lives. When the border is spatialized in these theories, the
space is almost always universal.”
Although despatialization and universalization are frequently the
fate of spatial metaphors (Smith and Katz 1993), analyzing the theoretical
uses of border can be revealing, less because of a pretense to universalism
than for how they allow us to see what borders “do.” That is to say, the
deployment of borders reveals the usefulness of terms that seemingly en-
velop without disclosing the limits of discursivity and materiality. Second, it
suggests the manner by which uses of borders allow violence to be invoked
but prevent the argument itself from being contaminated by that violence.
Third, it suggests that borders do erotic and other kinds of work that goes
largely unnoticed. Fourth, it reveals how borders utilize the modernist
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time-space dialectic to produce abjection. Fifth, it shows how border crises

are crucial to U.S. national self-definition. In short, borders are fungible.
As such, border deserves additional and sustained critique.
Some critics credit Chicana theorists for bringing (the) border to na-
tional critical prominence; nevertheless, Chicana considerations of the bor-
der go largely unnoticed in the current flurry of border activity (Michaelsen
and Johnson 1997).3 This lack of attention to Chicana meditations on the
border could be the result of the pernicious tendency to erase or forget
Mexican America within the greater U.S. imaginary (Saldívar 1997), or it
could be because Chicana considerations of the border render the border
much more ambivalent and complex than the simple, alluring metaphor
cultural theory imagines, and more revealing than the national political
imaginary might wish. For Chicana considerations of the border provide
a highly charged political critique of border mechanics that runs the relay
between border as trope and the border as troper.
If the border’s status as crisis-ridden and its potential to function
as a kind of free-range trope make it appealing to public policy makers and
North American critical theorists alike, Chicana writers, in contrast, turn
and return to the textured maze that living with and against the grain of
the border entails. Through its attention to the banal aspects of the border
system and the contradictions the border requires and promotes, as well
as its analysis of the border’s dependence upon a “clash and disarticulation
of people” to function as an abjection machine, Chicana fiction offers a
richly detailed and multiscalar border theoretics (Coronil 1995, xiii). For
this fiction necessarily takes into account the slide between the material
and the metaphoric and between the spatial and the temporal, revealing
a complexity and range that both unpack the structure of the border and
show how violence, conflict, and pleasure coalesce to mask that structure.
Chicana fiction considers the border precisely because it is interested in
imagining the possibilities of “losing America.”
In the discussion to follow, I outline some of the deployments of
border in critical and political imaginaries and then turn to examples of
Chicana fiction that explore the quotidian border. These two pieces, one
a parody, the other a sort of archive, do not so much write against critical
theory as they complicate its invocation of borders; but they do, however,
write vehemently against the dominant political deployment of borders
within nation building. Taken together, this conversation about borders
compels us to take the term, in all its productivity, less as a critical cliché, or
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a mere emblem of cultural contests, and more as a producer and mediator

of power and influence.

The Edge of the Post

Where margin and marginality have disappeared from academic focus, bor-
der and borderlands have appeared, flourishing alongside the proliferation
of post (postcontemporary, postmodern, posturban, postfeminist). Post is al-
ways a temporal term, even though it also has a spatial valence (consider its
homonym post). This preference for its temporal dimension over its spatial
in contemporary usage hints as to why border has come to appeal so thor-
oughly to many critics: it is from the vantage point of a (universal) border
that theorists of the temporal “post” may wish to operate.
Naomi Schor (1995, 29) writes, “To suggest that universalism is in
need of rethinking at this time is to cross at least two borders, one a sort
of glass barrier that separates generations of feminist thinkers, the other a
crumbling but still standing border between disciplines.” Schor’s invoca-
tion of borders and border crossing establishes a visual link between her
theoretical construction of barriers and the material images that concretize
the epistemological problems she wishes to explore. So here the trope of the
border serves to locate her argument by appearing to materialize it, while
also dislocating it since the glass barriers and crumbling wall have no readily
identifiable or specific referents. Schor’s gesture then illuminates the extent
to which border can serve as both discursive and material trope replete with
a portfolio of visual images that do not have to be invoked to still circulate
within an argument’s structure.
Diana Fuss (1995, 49) names “the space of the borderlander” as
the condition where “multiple identifications within the same subject can
compete with each other, producing conflicts to be managed; identifica-
tions that once appeared permanent or unassailable can be dislodged.” The
border appears here to be an appealing choice not because of its slipper-
iness, but rather because of something else: borders are very frequently
the sites of violence both massive and minor, both reported and unknown,
both bloody and epistemic. Fuss’s invocation seems to draw upon a kind of
amnesia where the spectacle of the border evokes a fetishized but simulta-
neously disavowed danger. The border serves then as a practical image of
the conflicts Fuss understands as inherent to subjectivity.
In the only article to specifically address national borders in a two-
volume special issue of Critical Inquiry called “Frontlines/Border Posts,”
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Mary Ellen Wolf (1997) discusses her photographs of transvestite prosti-

tutes in Juárez, Mexico. Homi Bhabha (1997, 455) underscores that Wolf’s
photos “push the problematic of cultural translation and the complexity
of taking the lives of friends as subjects in order to understand the para-
dox of identity.” Left in play but unexplained by both writer and editor
is the assumption that the border may enable gender transgression; thus
her argument gives way to another aspect of the border’s own appeal: the
potential for to-be-discovered exotic genders and sexualities, disguised but
visible, available but hidden, free and for sale. The implied relay is one that
moves between gender borders and visual expectations, between a profes-
sor’s academic and personal interests and the sex workers’ personal and
professional narratives as ethnographic subjects, and between the United
States and Mexico. The border’s function is nowhere described but is ev-
erywhere necessary for the logic of the photo-essay. The desire that the
border produces emerges visually but goes unaccounted for by Wolf, just as
she presumes the circulating desire she understands the border to enable.
Wolf’s project reveals another function of borders—their ability to do work
without identifying themselves as productive. That is, their seemingly non-
productive status (as static object: wall, fence, riverbed) disguises a plethora
of productivity, both erotic and otherwise.
Not surprisingly, the growing popularity of borders accompanies
the continuing transition of capitalism from its base in the material resources
of the nation-state to its dependence on worldwide flexible accumulation.
This transition has increased the focus on national borders as sites of violent
conflict. The appearance of borders in academic journals echoes their ap-
pearance on the nightly news, where border skirmishes provide compelling
footage whether they take place in Tijuana, Korea, or Bosnia.
Yet scholars and journalists are not alone in finding borders attrac-
tive. For example, throughout 1996 Taco Bell ran an ad campaign with the
slogan “Make a Run for the Border.”4 As part of the campaign, Taco Bell
also published an employee newsletter called “The Border,” which included
headlines such as “Keep on Taking Back the Border!”, “Re-Energizing the
Border: U.S. Invasion,” and “Strengthening the Border.” One issue of the
newsletter encouraged employees to cut production time, offered profiles
of newly promoted managers, and, under the category “Expanding the
Border,” described the merger of Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
For Taco Bell, the U.S.-Mexico border symbolizes not only the
fast-food chain’s seemingly enticing food, but also its market share. Yet
the newsletter’s militaristic allusions also point toward the fortressing of
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the border taking place alongside its capitalist dismantlement. In one easy
and almost parodic gesture, Taco Bell captures both the contemporary
nationalist anxiety about what borders signify within a national image
repertoire and their seeming irrelevance but utter importance to capitalism.
In many respects the interest in borders at the end of the twentieth
century echoes the interest in borders at the century’s beginning. A number
of adventure novels written for boys, for example, were set on the U.S.-
Mexico border and made border crossing a significant part of the plot.
Freemont B. Deering’s The Border Boys Across the Frontier (1911), G. Harvey
Ralphson’s Boy Scouts in Mexico; or, On Guard with Uncle Sam (1911), and
Gerald Breckrenridge’s The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border (1922) utilize
the border as a buffer zone between an idealized, masculinized United
States and a demonized, turbulent Mexico. In each of the novels, young
teenage boys foil sophisticated schemes involving communist insurgent
plans to embroil the United States in revolution. The young white boys serve
as the allegorical embodiment of the nation; while the border is the place
to prove masculinity, it is also the place to prove the nation. Proving both
nation and man requires the anxiety of border penetration and its violent
refusal, creating a tense homoerotic exchange where potential penetration
is desirable so that it may be repulsed. By midcentury the border boys had
grown up and new novels appeared featuring hypermasculinized border
patrolmen (Meek 1951). These adventure stories weave together a queerly
erotic desire with a commercial vengeance and, at least in the case of the
latter two novels, rely upon these to reinforce an American imperial vision.
During the same period these adventure novels appeared, debates
in Congress continually surfaced over policing and sealing the border. If
during its first century the United States defined itself in part through its
insistence that as a nation it could pick and choose its own border in what-
ever manner proved necessary, then by the turn into the twentieth century
that means to national self-definition was largely defunct. Put differently,
in the nineteenth century, as Luis Zorrilla (1977, 377) explains, the United
States continually threatened Mexico with a version of extinction if it did
not cede new territory: “En otras palabras: para que hubiera armonía en-
tre los dos vecinos era necesario que uno estuviera alimentando cada vez
durante espacios más cortos, con parte de su propio organismo, el apetito
insaciable del otro” [In other words, for harmony to exist between the two
neighbors, over shorter and shorter periods, one had to nourish the insa-
tiable appetite of the other with part of its own organism]. The United
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States ate its way across the continent. By the 1920s, the hunger for land was
transformed into an anxiety that the newly won lands might be vulnerable
along national borders.
Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Congress
repeatedly conducted hearings inquiring into the “status” of the border.
Senators and representatives used words and phrases sounding very much
like Ronald Reagan’s anxious and famous 1984 comment, “The simple
truth is that we’ve lost control of our own borders and no nation can do
that and survive” (Morganthau 1984, 18). Reagan’s comment, however,
merely echoed the sentiments expressed by Prohibition-era customs agents
charged by Congress with “sealing our borders.”5 They too claimed the bor-
der’s “wide gaps of unguarded stretches” endangered the “general morals”
of the nation and “menace[d] the health of counties,” making the nation
vulnerable to “public charges,” “criminals,” and “political agitators.” The
current unrest over the meaning of the Mexico-U.S. border is obviously
not new, but the passion with which it is debated and the language of loss
that permeates the political imaginary (“We’re losing America”) are surely
a result of a century spent mourning the absence of this linchpin of U.S.
self-definition. If worrying over the national border this century has taken
the place of ever expanding borders in the last, anxiety has proven less sa-
tiating. Furthermore, the racialized uses of the border suggested by Taco
Bell, adventure stories, and congressional witnesses underscore the ongo-
ing national anxiety that swirls around the U.S. southern border. For if the
“white” nation is under siege, then the cause is easily racialized through
spatial metaphors—and in racialization, crisis results.
Undoubtedly these Prohibition-era charges are more than vague-
ly familiar to contemporary readers, because one of the standard jobs of
national borders remains unchanged. As Joan DeJean (1987, 177–9) notes
in connection to the fortressing of Louis XIV’s France, borders refine “the
concept of enmity.” Thus the U.S.-Mexico border works quite effectively
as an “abjection machine”—turning people into “aliens,” “illegals,” “wet-
backs,” or “undocumented” and thereby rendering them unintelligible (and
unintelligent), ontologically impossible, outside of the real and the human.
At stake here in the ongoing refining of enmity, then, is a new effort at
national self-definition—one that at century’s end looks very much like
the effort inaugurated in popular culture and public policy at the century’s
beginning. Churning away as an abjection machine, the border produces
national identity by pulverizing people into metaphors.
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Contemporary theorists have found the border a particularly at-

tractive term because of its fungibility—its ability to slip outside of the
material and the metaphoric and also to lay hold to both. But border fun-
gibility is appealing within the political imaginary because of its peculiar
relationship to modernity’s separation of space and time. The dialectic of
space and time encourages a linear narrative of national development: na-
tions emerge along a linear, temporal scale that begins with feudalism and
ends with cosmopolitan modernity. Borders serve in this narrative as the
container for the territorial-temporal state. Nation-states can thus be un-
derstood, according to Neil Brenner (1997, 136), as “the politico-geographic
blocks in terms of which the temporal dynamic of modernity [is] widely
understood.” According to this logic, each nation occupies its own spatial-
temporal field, and thus each understands itself according to its own tempo-
ral scale as it anxiously, repetitively strives toward a slippery modernization,
ambiguously understood as the fulcrum of progress.6 In this logic, crossing
the border entails crossing from one temporality to another. Put differently,
built into the loose term border is a static, modernist concept of difference
that depends upon the veiled separation of time and space.
National borders utilize the fantasy that on one side of the border a
nation exists in one phase of temporal development while the nation on the
other side functions in a different stage of temporality. Moreover, borders
simultaneously produce and elide this difference between nations, implicitly
suggesting that a person can be formed in one temporality so that when he
or she crosses a border that person transmogrifies, as it were, into someone
who is either more or less advanced, or more or less modern, or more or less
sophisticated. Hence borders’ effective work as abjection machines. The
simultaneous transparency and solidity of this disjuncture between space
and time must be grasped if we are to understand the ontology of the
Mexico-U.S. border, if we are to trace what labor the border performs, if
we are to interrupt its alchemy.
Seemingly static, a grounded, even banal metaphor, the border
is better understood not as a floating signifier—though that might be
the temptation—but as a whirlpool churning up false dialectics between
space and time, the real and the discursive. The border evokes and uti-
lizes these categories and throws them in on themselves, materializes them
and metaphorizes them through the repetition of its presence. Its labor is
subsumed as it is naturalized as wound, line, gap. These intricacies of the
border come alive in Chicana/o literary accounts of border crossings.
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Aguacates and Viejos Cabrones

There Are No Madmen Here, Gina Valdes’s 1981 novel, closes with a border-
crossing scene that illuminates the border’s significance to the juridical
production of identity and its value to the regulation of commerce and
labor. The collection traces the experiences of a family that obtains extra
cash by illegally importing tequila and selling it at a profit in order to
pay for college tuition, weddings, and rent. Their trans-frontera import
business exemplifies their ambivalent relationship to the discourse of nation
and citizen that would seek to construct them as aspiring members of a U.S.
middle class, just as Madmen traces the various experiences of discrimination
that mark the contradictions of the U.S. offer to provide a clear path to such
a status.
The family circulates throughout the borderlands, and Madmen
stages their multiple crossings as largely prosaic. At one point, the central
figure, María, goes so far as to claim that “in a way the border is invisi-
ble” (Valdes 1981, 85). In “disappearing” the border, María rejects national
claims to figure identity and, to the degree that the border can be made
“invisible,” temporarily and partially constructs her own sense of identity as
apart from the monolingual, nationalist model of identity formation. María
invokes the border’s metaphoric significance, an invocation that parodies,
while it denies, the border’s materiality. Her declaration of the border as
“invisible” is also, in part, a declaration of independence from the historical
legacy that the border implies, including the history of cultural degrada-
tion and asymmetrical labor practices; it is also in keeping with Chicano
cultural politics. As one movimiento newspaper, Sin Fronteras, prophesied,
the political border between the two nations would eventually be seen as
an “artificial creation that in time would be destroyed by the struggles of
Mexicans on both sides of the border” (García 1985, 105–6). Yet if María’s
declaration is similarly utopian, her desire to negate the border disavows
its importance, for it is precisely the maintenance of the border that makes
possible the family’s chamba (easy job).7
María’s erasure of the border might hope to threaten the discursive
underpinnings of the nation-state, but the final border-crossing scene in
There Are No Madmen Here exemplifies how the containment mechanism
of the border system jerks into action when its juridical apparatus actually
registers such defiance. On the eve of his retirement from the smuggling
business, María’s brother Ramón makes one final trip to obtain tequila.
Before he returns he buys for sixty dollars six parrots that he plans to resell
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in the United States for over twelve hundred dollars. Ramón’s sister Emilia
gives the birds tequila so that they will be quiet during the border-crossing
check:

The parrots were silent. “Dead to the world,” thought Ramón.

He thought about his retirement from the tequila and about the
extra money. “A thousand extra . . . no, twelve hundred . . . for
each parrot . . . ” He smiled at the police officer and the officer
smiled back.
“Bringing anything from México?”
“Just this hat for my wife.”
(Viejo cabrón)
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
(Viejo cabrón)
“It sounds like a woman’s voice.”
(Viejo cabrón)
“It sounds like it’s coming from the back of your camper,”
said the officer as he walked toward the back of Ramón’s car.
(Viejo cabrón)
The officer stood in front of Ramón and asked him
to unlock the back of the camper. Five of the parrots were com-
pletely passed out, but one of them was pacing his cage, drunk,
repeating what was apparently his favorite curse. (Valdes 1981,
150–51)

The parrot double-crosses Ramón, unmasks his smuggling operation, and

his words result in Ramón’s temporary incarceration, not in a romantic re-
configuration of power structures. Yet the parrot’s curse is more than simply
the humorous fury of those in powerless positions forced to conform to the
terms set out by those in power. And it is more than an anguished moment
of frustration at the representative of bureaucracy or the local machinery
that power uses to legitimize itself. For while the parrot’s curse does not
actually transform power relations, it does serve to remind readers, and
even the Border Patrol guard, of the degree to which the border functions
not simply as the line between two nations but also as the producer of a
constant reenactment of historical divisions, conquest, and control. And
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this historical reenactment continues to reproduce and further stratify all

kinds of relationships, including those understood in terms of labor and
ethnicity.8
The parrot’s curse mocks the self-importance of the border and
its bureaucratically determined rituals for crossing (and producing) it. If
the parrot speaks Ramón’s secret thoughts, it also voices the desire the
system itself produces: defiance guarantees the crossing guards’ jobs and
ensures systemic permanence. The bureaucratic and technical apparatuses
surrounding customs stations create the very border they serve to guard.
They exist with a melancholic faith that the border, their border, actually
exists somehow outside of and apart from the control techniques neatly
delineated in manuals or signaled by border patrol uniforms and guns.
Ramón’s encounter with the customs agent also indicates how the
Catholic confessional model influences border-crossing rituals. With a set
of questions that always include “What is your citizenship?” and “What
have you purchased?” (as well as, perhaps, “Where are you going?”), the
performance of the crossing sanctioned as “legal” depends upon a known
set of priestly-parishioner relationships. Secrecy and revelation structure
one’s confession as citizen-consumer (or not-citizen-laborer-tourist), and
the anxiety of secrecy, of revelations withheld, of secrets uncovered, struc-
tures each encounter just as the terror of secrets left undiscovered produces
the crossing-repetition effect. That is to say, secrecy helps to structure the
border and border crossing and, through the repetition of secrecy, it natu-
ralizes the border. The narrative reinforces this slide between secrecy and
revelation because on first reading one might assume that “Viejo cabrón” is
merely Ramón’s thought: only in the moment of revelation do we discover
who actually “says” the words “Viejo cabrón.” By delineating the curse not
with quotation marks, but with parentheses, Valdes places the words out-
side of “normal” speech but within the audible. The pacing, drunk bird
produces the abjection the border desires.
Valdes’s portrait of an officious border guard and a bungling smug-
gler parodies the circulating images of borders within the national imag-
inary. At the same time, this parody reveals the productive mechanisms
of the border—not just its work as an abjection machine in which people
are disarticulated because they are “behind the times,” but also its work
to control the circulation of commodities and capital. The border, then, is
hardly a naturalized edifice in Valdes’s text. Indeed, as María’s comment
registers, the border here slides between its status as metaphor and material
site. At the same time, in portraying Ramón’s plan to take advantage of a
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Mexicana and augment his chamba at her expense, Madmen also shows that
the border’s temporal ideology is not limited to the political imaginary. In
all these senses, There Are No Madmen Here reveals the plethora of work
done by the border.
In the fictional memoir Canícula (1995), Norma Cantú rebukes
border amnesia through the recollection of earlier moments when the ab-
jection machine wrought havoc on the narrator’s family. Here the dangers
and violence of the border are neither fetishized nor disavowed, nor is the
desire it produces ignored. Canícula works partly as an archeology of the
border as it engages its history. Through a series of vignettes and discussions
of photographs, some reprinted, others only described, Cantú recounts a fic-
tionalized biography of a woman growing up on the border in Laredo. One
of the first vignettes, “Crossings,” describes Canícula’s protagonist, Azu-
cena, and her family as they cross from Mexico to the United States. This
particular crossing invokes the stories of a different type of crossing—the
forced deportations and repatriation of Chicanos throughout the Southwest
during the Depression.9 Azucena describes how her grandparents, “cross-
ing from one Laredo to the other,” lost all they possessed to corrupt border
guards: “Tía Nicha still talks of how weeks later she saw a little girl wear-
ing her dress—a mint green dress she’d hemmed herself with pastel blue
thread” (Cantú 1995, 5). The theft of the dress neatly mirrors the theft of
their status as U.S. citizens. For the young child the dress worn by another
symbolized her own displacement; for the elderly aunt recalling that loss,
discussing the dress reinforces the materiality of her memory. And the mint
green of the dress recalls the economic motives behind their deportation,
providing a powerful image of the U.S. effort to create a class of surplus
labor for which neither the state nor capital would feel any obligation to
bear the costs of reproduction. That is to say, the circulating mint green
dress neatly anticipates and mirrors the mobile capital of the contempo-
rary post-Fordist era even as it recalls a crisis in the process of solidifying a
Fordist economy.
The deportations and disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of
U.S. citizens have largely been kept from canonical U.S. histories, but they
reveal the extent to which borders serve to establish stratified networks of
laborers. The Depression-era deportations solidified the largely informal
systems of apartheid labor already in place throughout the Southwest. By
emblematizing the state’s and capital’s need to control who can cross, when,
and how, who can be “sent back” and why, the U.S.-Mexico border serves
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not simply to highlight inclusion and exclusion but also to regulate the
uneven development of wealth and labor.
In “Crossings” the narrator deploys a “local history” to make the
broader point that such state-sponsored crossings remake the border, just
as the border reconstituted her family. Their move back across the line,
thirteen years later, appears bittersweet: “Crossing meant coming home,
but not quite” (Cantú 1995, 5). The border implies the distinction between
home and exile; it embodies loss. “Crossings” closes by putting pressure
on “home” and leaves the reader with an underexplained interrogation of
home. The family cannot afford to believe in a stable concept of home or
nation; to feel that they “belong” is to heighten their own vulnerability. The
border signals their exile on either side of the line.
The next cuento, “On the Bridge,” describes walking the bridge
over the river that splits the city of Laredo (Mexico–United States). A de-
scription of a particular photograph of the narrator with her sister and
mother frames the story of their multiple crossings. In this narrative, cross-
ing is both celebrated as an opportunity for adventure and marked as pro-
saic. The narrator describes shopping at the mercado, moving from stall to
stall picking out meat, sweets, fruit, avocados (“he extracts the pits so we can
legally cross them to the United States”), stopping to go to the bathroom,
to get shoes shined, and then “we walk, cross the bridge, resting every half
block or so, resting our arms, sore from carrying the heavy redes. We take the
bus home” (Cantú 1995, 8). Their shopping is marked by the agricultural
restrictions established to protect U.S. avocado farmers. But more impor-
tantly, the description of the merchant’s treatment of the aguacates, “which
he carefully cuts in half . . . and closes them again, like fine carved wood
boxes” (8) alludes to the children’s own sense of fractured identity.
In this narrative, the border, here marked by a river and navigated
on foot over a bridge, separates economic regions and emerges through the
consumption of various commodities. The narrative further intensifies the
link between the border and the economy through attention to the labor
of the narrator’s father, as she explains that in this particular photograph
her mother is anxious because her father is away, working construction.
He will return to obtain a job at a nearby smeltery. That work, which may
pay fairly well, carries the risks of periodic layoffs, and “during those times,
the trips to Laredo, Mexico, are put on hold; only for emergencies do we
cross—to see the doctor, to visit an ill relative, or to pay a manda at Santo
Niño de Atocha Church. Tino and I miss our adventures, our sojourns
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al otro lado” (Cantú 1995, 8). Once again, the linguistic switch to Spanish
serves to emphasize and mark the discursive effects of the border.
The border becomes a marker between the shifting periods of
poverty and plenty. Crossing the border takes on additional significations:
the “other side” figures early in the narrative as a space for familiar and
repetitive adventures. But at the narrative’s close, la frontera becomes a gen-
dered zone navigated only with parental mediation. Not simply the source
for pleasant food, the site of religious and familial obligations, the bor-
der zone offers the commodities necessary to reinforce patriarchy. Having
almost joyfully recounted her and her brother’s joint adventures al otro
lado, the narrator gives a new and even more gendered distinction to their
crossings:

Now Papi takes Tino to get haircuts and shoes shined while
Mami and I buy Confidencias, a women’s magazine I’ll read a
escondidas, during siesta time. Hiding in the backyard, under
the pirul, I’ll read “cartas que se extraviaron,” and pretend
the love letters are for me, or that I wrote them, making the
tragic stories mine. I pretend I’m a leading star—María Félix,
Miroslava, Silvia Pinal. During recess, I retell the stories to
Sanjuana and Anamaría, embellishing to fit my plots. (Cantú
1995, 8–9)

The frontera becomes a distant and public space, reinforcing the heterosex-
ualized production of spatiality. Crossing it entails a certain normalization.
The border subsequently functions as a signifier of gendering, of the two
children’s emplotment in heterosexual cultural scripts. Tino and Papi per-
form rituals of “manhood” together. Azucena and her mother purchase the
cultural commodities that offer instructions and examples for the gender-
ing process that will try to interpolate her as a proper Chicana wife and
mother. Yet as the narrative concludes, Azucena suggests that she still re-
tains agency—she takes the Confidencias and remakes their stories. She does
not simply memorize and internalize them; she transforms them, “embel-
lishes” them to fit her own plots. Nonetheless, such efforts at subversion
must take place privately, hidden away “under the pirul.”
Cantú’s border triptych concludes with “The Flood,” a description
of a massive flood that wiped out the border bridge. The flood forces Azu-
cena’s family to evacuate their home and destroys the homes of many of
her relatives across the river. Crossing subsequently becomes possible only
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Brady . The Fungibility of Borders

when they “brave a bridge that swings, made of wood and rope” (Cantú
1995, 9). This experience of crossing the “toy bridge” is frightening and
dangerous, and Azucena recounts her grandmother’s chanting prayers and
calls to the child, “te quedas,” and her response, “ay voy” [“Stay with me,”
“I’m coming”]. The flood brings typhoid, polio, and other diseases. The
photo (again, not reprinted) that accompanies the narrative is of the family
visiting a shrine in gratitude for their safety. The destruction of the bridge
reminds them of what they could have lost.
Cantú’s triptych takes apart the commonplace notion that borders
simply binarize.10 For as the portraits suggest, the multiple crossings create
not pairs but systems. Cantú does not provide a single photograph of “the
border” itself. Constituted through text, constituted through the text of the
multiple narratives that make up Canícula, the border emerges not as a
stable line, river, bridge, but as a shifting locus of identity and displacement.
Put differently, in Canícula it is not just text that makes up the border, and
it is not even just text and photos; it is text, photos, and photos displaced
into narrative. The border is constantly evoked and elided, its referents
everywhere and nowhere.
The pacing parrot and the split and pitted aguacate offer helpful
avenues into considering the ongoing problematics of the border. The dis-
placed and angry parrot offers only the rudest of responses to its treatment.
The aguacate, stripped of its capacity to reproduce and split for the sake of
commercial policy, suggests not just the hybridity produced through bor-
ders but also the ruses and tricks necessary to counter the abjection machine.
Placed beside cultural theory and federal policy and national newspapers,
these images might indeed suggest the prosaic rather than the dramatic;
here hybridity, if funny or sweet, seems hardly stunning. But that perhaps is
precisely the point, for if border is to continue to do useful analytical work
within North American cultural theory, then it will need to be more densely
studied in terms of the rich analysis offered by Chicana fiction. Similarly, if
the dangerous, dehumanizing work of the border management policy de-
ployed by the United States is to be substantively questioned, then it might
well be through the circulation of alternate narratives to the Border Boys
and their ilk.
The danger borders pose to North American critical theory is
that through that theory’s use of borders as natural, inert, and transpar-
ent, the work border actually does within discourse goes unnoticed. But
border is no benign term sitting flatly, descriptively, within the economy of
an argument. If that were the case, border would not be so crucial to the
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still-under-negotiation concept of U.S. national citizenship. Chicana narra-

tives obviously take the Mexico-U.S. border seriously, seeing it as a process,
not a static place, and they take border gravely, understanding the plethora
of conditions it amplifies. As such, these fictional narratives work like some-
thing Diamela Eltit (1997, 6) might call “negatives, photographically speak-
ing” because they allow us to “see everything that people do not want to see.”
By putting the photograph alongside its negative, so to speak, I have tried
to perform an autopsy of the border, to inspect its internal structure and
understand its structuring effects. To contemplate the border as productive
and produced is, as Gina Valdes (1986, 23) notes in her poem, “Where You
From?,” to enter an interminable struggle with why “the word fron / tera
splits / on my tongue.” It is to stumble between the torsion of metaphors
and the fences so sharp they sever the fingers of those forced to climb them.

Notes
My thanks to Norma Alarcón, Graciela Hernandez, Kate McCullough, Alberto Mor-
eiras, Laura Pérez, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, José Saldívar and audiences at the
University of California-Berkeley and Dartmouth University for helpful com-
ments and criticism.
1. The New York Times explains that the footpath is roughly 110 years old. This sug-
gestion indicates the relationship between temporality and identity, because
the Times would never characterize a footpath in Europe or New England
that only dated to the late nineteenth century as “ancient.” Additionally, the
language of primordial footpaths and smuggling alludes to the romance of
pirates and to romanticized (and ancient) “Indians” who supposedly trod the
land on foot.
2. For a critique of the prevalence of the term border, see Saldívar 1997. For examples
of coffee-table books featuring the border, see Bartletti 1992, Goin 1987, and
Light 1988.
3. Most recognizable among border theorists might possibly be Gloria Anzaldúa, and
especially her text Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Yet if this text is frequently
the source of pithy epigraphs, those theorists who have most carefully parsed
the text are rarely cited alongside those epigraphs. In other words, Border-
lands/La Frontera is often treated as transparent and Anzaldúa as merely a
native informant. For nuanced and fundamental discussions of this text, see
Alarcón 1990, 1996a, 1996b; Saldívar-Hull 1999; and Yarbro-Bejarano 1994.
4. See, for example, The Border 1, October 1996. Taco Bell’s campaign took on a life of
its own. In 1997, the local El Paso Border Patrolmen’s Union sponsored a 10K
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Brady . The Fungibility of Borders

run called “Run for the Border: Sobre el fuerte sobrevive!” The T-shirts with
the slogan proved popular enough that the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso
sold out the line.
5. See the debate “To Establish a Border Patrol” (U.S. House 1926). See also “Bor-
der Management Reorganization” (U.S. Senate 1988) for a detailed history
of congressional discussion of the border “crisis” throughout the twentieth
century.
6. That this concept has not disappeared is amply illustrated by Mexico City Mayor
Cuahutemoc Cárdenas’s own claim: “‘Esa rebelión mostró a todo el país que
el siglo XX mexicano se termina sin que se haya superado la situación de
exclusión y desamparo en que han vivido todo el siglo los pueblos indígenas,’
afirmó. ‘El siglo XXI hereda la cuestión indígena que cinco siglos anteriores
no resolvieron. No habrá democracia ni justicia ni modernidad en México si
el nuevo siglo no la resuelve desde sus primeros momentos.’ ” [“The Chiapas
rebellion demonstrates to the entire country that the twentieth century is
ending without our having overcome the conditions of abandonment and
exclusion that the indigenous peoples have experienced for the entire century,”
he stated. “The twenty-first century inherits the question that five previous
centuries have not resolved. Mexico will not have democracy or justice or
modernity if in the new century it does not resolve this issue from the very
first moments of the century”] (Brooks 1998).
7. For further discussions of Valdes’s novel and poetry see Sanchez 1985; Lizarraga 1984;
Thurston 1994; and Barcelo 1995.
8. See Ruiz 1998; Montejano 1987; Mellinger 1995; Foley 1997; and Tinker Salas 1997.
9. Balderrama and Rodríguez (1995) estimate that over one million people were repa-
triated during the Depression. While many were not forced at gunpoint to
leave behind their status as U.S. citizens and move to Mexico, the social
climate pressured them nonetheless. Articles in popular periodicals such as
the Saturday Evening Post urged Mexicans to repatriate and urged Anglos
to encourage such action. Balderrama and Rodríguez (84) cite, for example,
Detroit social workers who demanded that Mexican American citizens repa-
triate themselves because they were receiving some form of governmental
aid. As they note: “Threats of physical violence induced many Mexicans to
abandon jobs and long-established domiciles. More than two hundred Mex-
ican tenant farmers in Mississippi were forced to pull up stakes and solicit
repatriation assistance from the consulate in New Orleans. In Terra Haute,
Indiana, Mexican railroad workers were forced to ‘give up their jobs’ when
a mob of hundreds of men and women marched on their work camp and
demanded that they quit immediately” (99). David Gutiérrez (1995, 72) cites
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a Brawley, California, newspaper editorial which evinced similar sentiments:

“There seems plenty of relief work for the aliens—but for the American pio-
neer, who battled scorpions, sidewinders, rattlesnakes, the boiling sun of the
desert . . . there seems to be nothing but the scrap heap. The sooner the slogan
‘America for Americans’ is adopted, the sooner will Americans be given the
preference in all kinds of work—instead of aliens.”
10. For a wonderful critique of border binaries, see Chabram-Dernersesian 1994.

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