Escaping Identity Border Zones As Places of Evasion and Cultural Reinvention

Escaping identity: border zones as places of evasion and cultural reinvention
Author(s): Howard Campbell

Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 21, No. 2 (June 2015), pp.
296-312
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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Escaping identity: border zones
as places of evasion and cultural
reinvention
Howard Campbell University of Texas at El Paso
The article, based on in-depth ethnographic research in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juarez area, is
concerned with the ways in which liminal border zones become places of cultural transformation in
which groups of individuals, rather than synthetically blending two or more identities, may attempt to
downplay potentially harmful or restrictive uni-dimensional identities, evade past lives, and re-create
themselves anew. The argument is twofold: the relative separation and distance of borderlands from
national structures allows for a degree of cultural agency that may be less available to individuals closer
to centres of cultural and political power; and border zones provide possibilities for reinvention, new
relationalities, and other cultural creations and constructions that I call 'escaping identity'.
Within an hour, Julian Nance Carsey - low-key, dependable Uncle Jay - was gone.
Coleman 1989: 2
[M]y object in coming here was to leave certain things . . .
Bellow 2012 [1959]: 42
I am running away from myself.
Joey, resident of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
International border lines, and specifically the US-Mexico border region, are considered
primary sites of cultural hybridity. Since the 1980s and influential theorizing and artistic
representations by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Renato Rosaldo (1989), and Guillermo
Gómez-Peña (1991), US-Mexico border studies have been enamoured with the idea of
border-crossing, code- switching, and mestizaje ; although some other scholars (Donnan
& Wilson 1994; Dunn 1996) have reaffirmed the enduring power of the state to limit
border-crossing (Alvarez 1995). In any case, much of the recent research on the US-
Mexico border, instead of essentializing the ethnic/national groups which oppose each
other on the border, and rigidly delineating separate identities, has emphasized the
ways in which linguistic and cultural blending has created unique syntheses of identities
that are binary rather than monolingual or monocultural (Rosaldo 1989; cf. Gupta 8c
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2015
Escaping identity 297
Ferguson 1992). This, often unduly celebratory, paradigmatic shift resonated with the
emergence of globalization and transnationalism as international social phenomena
and academic obsessions (Alvarez 1995; Gupta & Ferguson 1997). Left out of the new
academic literature on the US-Mexico border, as well as the critiques which followed it
(Wilson & Donnan 1998), was a phenomenon, examined here, that has occurred since
the rise of mapping and the creation of sturdy international boundaries (Sack 1986):
the ways in which liminal border zones create spaces for cultural transformation in
which individuals, rather than synthetically blending two or more identities, attempt
to shed, downplay, or redefine unwanted or potentially harmful essentialized identities,
hide from past lives, and re-create themselves anew (Malkki 1995; Tuan 2000).
Recent research beyond the US-Mexico border has paid more attention to the ways
borders allow for spaces of improvisation, concealment, redefinition, and evasion
(Das 8c Poole 2004; Flynn 1997; Galemba 2013; Green 2005; Malkki 1993; Megoran
2012). Berdahl (1999) and Green (2005) in several European contexts have shown
how ambiguity, gaps, and marginality shape border practices that reconfigure received
modernist distinctions concerning place and identity (see also Gupta 8c Ferguson 1992;
1997). In such border settings, emerging cultural reconstitutions are possible because
existing registers of identification and classification and related structures of power
may function differently on either side of the border, which allows for new survival
strategies and cultural expressions and creations (Jansen 2013; Obeid 2010; Pelkmans
2006; Reeves 2008; Vila 2003: 110). Theoretically this means that studies of identity need
to be more attentive to the ways in which particular individuals and groups may desire
to suppress or shed pre-existing identities (or at least fantasize and imagine that they
have) through mobility, experimentation, and cultural transformation, even though
fully escaping such identities is seldom achievable.
Such movement is especially compelling or appealing along borders as part of a
quotidian transnationalism in which a person can live, to a degree, in two countries
simultaneously, with the benefits and limitations that provides. Border settings in which
there are substantial differences in wealth and status between each side - in this sense the
US-Mexico border is paradigmatic (Alvarez 1995: 451) - create the possibility for marked
improvements in power, prestige, and lifestyle (or at least become safe havens) through
border crossing, 'cosmobility' (Salazar 2011), deterritorialization, reterritorialization,
'subversion of identification (Malkki 1995: 4), and associated adjustments to and
negotiations of cultural identities (Glick Schiller 2012).
Much recent literature has emphasized how borders and their defenders concentrate
state power, persecute border- crossers, and create situations of 'states of exception
(Doty 2007; Rosas 2012). However, such spatialities of the state also may allow those
individuals with particular rights and privileges (citizenship status, and relative ease in
crossing borders) to develop new, experimental modi vivendi and 'utopias of escape'
(Salazar 2011: 584) that maximize their conditions of existence in the shadow of two
states. Thus, militarization of the US-Mexico border may, in fact, empower certain
border-crossing groups, such as working-class African-Americans, who are often
discriminated against in the US (a more powerful state), but treated with greater
respect and allowed more freedom in Mexico (a weaker state with weaker law and
immigration enforcement). Likewise, working-class or middle-class white Americans
suffering social, legal, or economic crises may improve their quality of life or social
status by crossing the Mexican border and attempting to reinvent themselves on its
southern side.

298 Howard Campbell
This process frequently entails, via mobility, the attempt to separate from, reject,
or transcend limiting previous cultural selves, as well as ways of living or personal
baggage related to one s family, hometown, or career (Benson 8c O'Reilly 2009; Hoey
2010 ).* It may also be a deliberate strategy to evade legal prosecution or persecution,
escape oppressive sexual ideologies or conditions, or improve one s quality of life while
blending in on the margins of society (Goffman 2009; Lucht 2011; Miles 2004). The
often anonymous, transitory places and spaces of international borders provide an
ideal setting in which people may try to disappear, and discard aspects of their past and
start over, even though they may also be geopolitical spaces fraught with pockets of
violence perpetrated by states and bandits (Campbell 2009; de León 2011; Doty 2007).
There is another sociological reason why borders are an optimum socio-geography for
this cultural process, as exemplified along the Mexican/ American boundary: Ciudad
Juárez, El Paso, and other border cities are long distances, spatially and culturally,
from mainstream society (e.g. 'Middle America or 'Deep Mexico') and the dynamic
metropolises such as New York and Mexico City that shape much of the popular culture
and nationalist visions of each country. In these border areas, the power of mass, middle-
class American consumer culture, and the naturalized racial and class hierarchies
associated with it, is less potent. Far from the spotlight of major mass media and
isolated to a degree from the full power of dominant nationalistic cultural institutions,
individuals may feel freer to engage in particular kinds of cultural improvisations and
multiplicities that transcend binary alterities or familiar forms of hybridity, in ways that
are less possible in the 'heartland' of each nation/state (Glick Schiller 2012). Moreover,
processes of transnational migration, flight, disappearance, and reinvention - which I
call 'escaping identity' - may indeed be interwoven with the history, community, and
lifestyle of border residents in places like Juárez/El Paso (Romo 2005; Vila 2000: 231-2;
2005: 238).
Escaping identity may entail elements of cultural blending, as discussed in
mainstream US-Mexican literature, but rather than overtly expressing such an identity,
the subjects of this study more frequently try to suppress or diminish certain elements of
their identity while displaying others. However, I am not claiming that border zones are
the only place where such escape occurs; other remote regions or dense cosmopolitan
centres may also, in some cases, allow individuals the freedom to dodge pre-existing
identities and reinvent themselves. None the less, border areas may allow an extra
possibility for autonomy and reinvention through daily traversing of international
boundaries. Finally, people may never fully escape or transcend their past identities and
lives, although that may be their intention or fantasy.
Construction and deconstruction of identities

This research has benefited from the previous work of Vila (2000: 6), who analyses
the 'multiple mirrors' and 'multiple borders' within which El Paso/Juárez residents
construct racial, gender, ethnic, class, religious, national, and regional identities.
Vila argues that these border identities are created through (often reality-distorting)
narratives vis-à-vis other social groups and worldviews. He notes that this process is an
ongoing project involving stories, emplotment, and the building of narrative identities.
My article builds on Vila's work but gives it a twist since my work focuses on how the
particular border population I studied attempts to downplay or deconstruct as well as
construct specific identities and narrative plots. The border people discussed here, like
the Don Draper character in the popular US television series Mad Meny create a 'future

story' (Vila 2000: 239) through exclusion, omission, denial, disguise, or chicanery.
Whereas Vila illustrates how 'many people feel threatened by the idea of abandoning
the kinds of national, racial, and ethnic names (and the cultures those names involve)
that have identified them for generations: Americans, Mexicans, and the like' (2000:
7), the aim of this study is to show how past identities are perceived as threatening
or limiting by some border residents, who attempt strategically to hide, downplay, or
discard them. However, there is some diversity within this range of phenomena, from
those who deliberately attempt to dissolve their past identity to those who emphasize a
newly adopted one, while occluding or discreetly maintaining aspects of the old identity.
In this regard, this article does not emphasize the expression, assertion, and
defence of an ethnic group identity in the face of racism, structural violence, or
transnational migration, although such phenomena are undoubtedly important.2
I am not denying the significance of such ethno-racial-cultural struggles for self-
determination, liberation, and so on. Instead I attempt to illustrate how 'potentiality'
- in Trondman, Taha, and Lund's terms, 'a narrated form of self-understanding [that]
can be mobilized . . . within unequally distributed multifaceted conditions of existence'
(2012: 334) - may entail negation, exclusion, and reinvention across international
and cultural borders. Following Amit (2012), I emphasize how culture and identity
rupture and disjuncture as a result of mobility and transnational movement may be
a desirable outcome compared to synchrony with existing group identities, previous
lives, and cultural routines. Too often the influential literature on cosmopolitanism (e.g.
Werbner 2009) has neglected this dimension of transnational mobility while privileging
continuity and transnational ties or reified distinctions between essentialized selves and
different 'others' to whom the cosmopolitan is culturally open (Amit 2012 and Glick
Schiller 2012: 526-7 provide valuable critiques). By transcending binary oppositions and
identities, and being aware of multiple relationalities and potentialities, as well as the
interruptions and disjunctures of identities, we can better understand emerging identity
issues across international borders (Amit 2012; Hall 2013; Skey 2013: 249).
Field research focus and methodology

In what follows I will present ethnographic descriptions and cultural analysis of
individuals who have escaped identity in this way in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad luárez
region. This article will illustrate the myriad ways in which particular groups of people
manoeuvre and exert agency in the shadows and margins of powerful state apparatuses
and dominant cultural archetypes (de Certeau 2011 [1980]). Through reinvention and
culturally constructed imaginings of travel and migration (Salazar 2011), they strive to
create satisfactory lives or improved circumstances by bypassing or eluding what was
expected of them in their places of origin and self-fashioning a new existence within
the cultural chimera of the borderlands.
The article is not focused on those groups that have typically attracted attention
in recent US-Mexico border studies. Nor are the subjects studied representative of
all borderlanders. Thus, this article will not be focused on unauthorized economic
migrants, victims of structural violence from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America,
who also must disguise their identity, and feign being part of a similar ethno-cultural
group, namely US Latinos, in order to prevent capture by US immigration authorities.3
Nor will it emphasize political refugees and those fleeing 'drug war' violence or other
forms of criminality (whether by state or non-state actors) who come to or cross the
border, although similarities and differences between political refugees and the study

300 Howard Campbell
population will be discussed. Lastly, it will not focus on the much-studied population of
internal migrants from the interior of Mexico who work in the maquiladora industry on
the Mexican side of the border (Fernandez-Kelly 1984). Instead, the emphasis will be on
those who come to the US-Mexican border as a way of getting away from their previous
(iAmerican>) cultural life, or at least fantasizing that they are doing so (Appadurai 1996;
Benson & O'Reilly 2009: 609; Salazar 2011). 4 However, some border groups in similar
circumstances and with whom the subject populations interact will also be briefly
discussed. Owing to space limitations, the primary focus of the article will be 'identity
escapees' to Juarez, although those seeking escape in El Paso will also be discussed and
the two circumstances often overlap.
Research for this article took place during the years 2012 and 2013 in El Paso,
Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Thirty individuals were interviewed about their
lives prior to arriving to the border and their experiences in a border setting. Formal
and semi-structured interviews were combined with participant observation conducted
in numerous venues (homes, streets, neighbourhoods, restaurants, bars, hotels, plazas,
etc.). In addition to this focused ethnographic research, I have frequented many of the
settings where research has taken place since 1991 and have consistently interacted with
and conducted informal interviews with identity escapees in the El Paso/Juárez area in
this time period. Consequently, the research draws on a backlog of knowledge gleaned
from previous research projects I have undertaken in the region, as well as a wide social
network of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, in-laws, and other local individuals.
No women were primary informants for this paper as I encountered few women who
escape identity in this way, perhaps because US women historically have had less freedom
to leave past lives behind and travel across borders. Furthermore, 'traditional' cultural
constructions of gender have made it especially hard for women to escape when such
movement entails abandoning children or other relatives (not that such abandonment
is easy emotionally for men; however, it is more available as a possibility). Additionally,
such travel, particularly to a place like Juárez, may simply be more dangerous for women.
Lastly, it should be noted that Juárez and other border towns are often, unfortunately,
conflated with drugs, violence, and vice in the US imagination. This is not my intention
in this article; however, such imaginings influence 'cultural escapists' and may even
attract them to the border.
Escaping identity in the border interzone

Jay Carsey was a model citizen; well liked and accomplished, he was even an overachiever.
From humble origins in rural East Texas, Carsey went on to become the president of a
college in Maryland. He enjoyed a twenty-three-room southern colonial mansion and
an apparently idyllic marriage and busy social life. Yet one day in 1982, Carsey dropped
the 'American Dream' and disappeared. He simply ran away, leaving an enigmatic note
saying 'Exit the Rainmaker', the title of a richly detailed book about his life published
in 1989 (and a reference to the Broadway play and movie The Rainmaker). When I
encountered him at a University of Texas cocktail party in 1991, 1 had never heard of
him. I eventually learned that his wife was a student in my department. It seems that
when Carsey fled his prosperous East Coast life he chose to adopt a new presentation
of self and hide in the remote desert border town of El Paso, an 'Interzone' (Burroughs
1990; Campbell 2009), or international crossroads, where illegal or mysterious activity,
especially drug trafficking, immigrant smuggling, or various other forms of contraband

dealing, is commonplace, and ordinary citizens ask few questions (Campbell 2005).
Coleman describes Carsey 's transition:
As it happens, El Paso wasn't so random a choice; it was actually perfect for what Jay wanted to do
... [in his] journey into a world that was as far removed from the one he had left ... as he could ever
have imagined ... As he quickly discovered, El Paso was perfect for more than just a good and easy
way into Mexico. It was perfect because Jay had landed in a place where he could be whatever - and
whoever - he wanted to be, where he could begin, once again, to seek and search (1989: 23).
Historically, for many African slaves during the American colonial period,
Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, the San Patricios (a battalion of German-
American and Irish- American soldiers who deserted to Mexico during the 1840s),
various categories of political dissidents (especially American communists or victims
of McCarthyism during the Cold War), nonconformists and castaways such as Ambrose
Bierce, other artists, writers, or musicians like William Burroughs, Langston Hughes,
and Long John Hunter, and political refugees, for example B. Traven, Mexico has
represented an appealing haven from the confines or oppressions of US or European
life (Anhalt 2001; Delpar 1995). Yet for Carsey, and other cultural refugees, such as
punk rock legend Al Jourgensen (who relocated to El Paso) or Chester Seltzer, an
Anglo-American journalist from Cleveland who transmogrified into Amado Muro, a
well-known 'Chicano' writer in El Paso, permanently leaving the US was not necessary.
El Paso and other border towns were so far removed physically and culturally from east
and west centres, and the fronterizo population was sufficiently mobile, anonymous,
and tight-lipped, that they could immerse themselves in a new social world without
exiting the country; yet if necessary they could simply slip into Mexico if conditions so
required.
Like Walter Mitty, James Thurber's archetypal frustrated dreamer, Jay Carsey found
conventional Anglo-Saxon American life to be mundane, stifling, and enervating. He
longed for the freedom and obscurity of a place like the far west Texas/northern
borderlands that had once harboured Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa, John Wesley Hardin,
and countless bootleggers, drug traffickers, and others on the margins of or outside the
law. Unlike Mitty, he consummated his fantasy and fled to isolated, but urban, El Paso
with frequent excursions into the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, especially Ciudad Juárez,
where no passport was required for entry. This was a blessing since Carsey had left his
identifying documents and other belongings in Maryland. Bad marriages, dysfunctional
families, job stresses, the hectic pace of American life, mistreatment, abuse, or racial
discrimination, psychological problems, a sense of being a cultural misfit, or the desire
to reject American (or Mexican) culture are common components of the cultural escape
or flight to the border. This move may also be motivated by the need to evade legal
problems.
A typical cultural escapist I interviewed extensively is Rob,5 a graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania, who worked on major aerospace projects throughout the
US. Yet once he got an extreme taste of Mexico during a drunken brothel tour of Juarez,
he soon left the US behind. In 1990 Rob visited the tropical state of Veracruz and
became thoroughly inebriated at a fiesta. He woke up the next morning in bed with
a much younger female who he (then 50 years old) was compelled to marry. Perhaps
surprisingly, this bacchanalian misadventure only furthered his desire to live in Mexico.
Soon he rented a cheap apartment in one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Juárez,
began associating primarily with Mexicans, and his life in the US was largely over.

302 Howard Campbell
A recurring theme in my interviews with Rob and others was the expanded sexual
options the Anglo- and African-American escapees experienced on the Mexican side of
the border. Moreover, many of my informants held heavily romanticized, exoticized, and
hyper-eroticized views of Mexican women, and almost all lived with or were married to
Mexican women. I have analysed the (gender) exploitative, but also at times mutually
satisfying, dimensions of such cross-border, inter-ethnic unions elsewhere (Campbell
2007). Undoubtedly, a key reason why many of the escapees crossed the border was that
they felt a relative increase in their social status and power in a setting in which they
were minorities but ones with a comparative status advantage vis-à-vis local people,
especially women, because of racial/ethnic hierarchies, although this increase was less
available to African-Americans. None the less, none of the escapees I interviewed were
wealthy, and all, including Rob, lived in poor neighbourhoods of Juarez with incomes
comparable to those of their neighbours.
Eventually Rob quit his engineering job, became an alcoholic, and began doing
charity work for a US religious organization in Mexico. He combined this income with
money he made on smuggling runs into the US and management of brothels and hotels
in the Juarez tourist/vice zone. He gave up US life because he said, 'It is the system.
There is too much system over there'. Unlike in the US, Rob said he had numerous
friends, both Mexicans and expatriates, who watched out for his well-being. He said
that in Mexico one will be fine if one minds ones own business and does not ask too
many questions. Tt is all in how you carry yourself. Rob played the part of a local
(non-American) resident so well that it took me years of exploring downtown Juarez
to realize that the man whom I had seen often in cheap hotels, or for a while managing
a brothel, was actually an American. In conversation, Rob constantly belittled the US
and bragged that he would never return there. He stated unequivocally that the US cops
would like to get him for various things he had done but that they ťwould have to come
over here [Juárez] to get me'.
Juarez has served this safety-valve function for American escapees for decades. As a
Boston newspaper noted, in colourful terms, in the early twentieth century: '[Juarez] is
a typical Mexican frontier town of squat, one-story adobe houses . . . , of tiendas, plazas,
casinos, bullrings, Chinese restaurants, curio stores, and often a few lurking American
derelicts waiting here till the sheriffs in their home towns are deaď (cited in Martinez
1978: 59). Elsewhere, Martinez also notes that, historically, border towns 'represent an
escape hatch for displaced people from Mexico's interior' (1978: 154). The crowded
business sections of Mexican border cities, through which steady streams of shoppers,
tourists, and cross-border migrants pass, are ideal places to mingle and disappear, but
so also may be the newly founded colonias and other outlying neighbourhoods whose
residents are recent immigrants or transitory dwellers, and where the Mexican state or
other institutions and services of the national society are barely present. The outskirts
of Mexican border cities may even be visible with the naked eye from US soil, yet they
are largely ignored by the Mexican government except during election periods, and
sheltered to a degree from US law enforcement.
Entire hotels or apartments in Juarez, such as the Hotel Los Olvidados in the central
area, where African-Americans, white Americans, Chicanos, and Mexicans interact
with relatively few conflicts, are key places of socializing for identity escapees, whom
the businesses may deliberately accommodate. At Los Olvidados one can rent a simple
room for $i5o/month within ten blocks of an international bridge that connects El Paso
and Juárez (other nearby rooms rent for as little as $5o/month). The place, typical of

the dwellings of my informants, offers meagre comforts by common US standards and

has the shabby appearance of cracked, old paint and chipped plaster, bare light bulbs,
and occasionally large cockroaches crawling on the floor. Despite the dark walls bereft
of decorations other than a cheap business calendar, a dirty image of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, and a dusty wreath of garlic to ward off evil spirits, a lively camaraderie
exists. The identity expatriates daily come together to joke, often in a kind of pidgin
Spanish or crude Spanglish, exchange practical information, and exult in their freedom.
Seldom are questions asked about the past, and what little personal information is
revealed by the congregants seems murky, ambiguous, slightly exaggerated, or infused
with mystery. No secrets are revealed and a general outlaw code of live and let live and
a reluctance to co-operate with authorities prevail. Residents stay for years, months,
weeks, or only a few days, but the cast of characters, while gradually changing, maintains
a constant atmosphere of occlusion and concealment.
Escaping to Juárez
Today, however, one might reasonably ask, who would attempt to hide out in Juárez
(the most dangerous city in the world in 2010 according to many accounts, e.g. Bowden
2010)? For years thousands of unauthorized immigrants captured throughout the US
have been deported en masse by US immigration officials to Mexican border towns.6
While most of these involuntary deportees return to their places of origin, others simply
survive under the radar in Juarez until they contract another coyote to help them re-cross
the border or find a way to do it on their own. Still others, in much smaller numbers,
Take advantage' of opportunities to work for drug smuggling cartels or other criminal
gangs who exploit the border environment. Though not the subject of this article, these
new arrivals to the border, who did not flee to the border but were forcibly put there,
interact with the identity escapees discussed here, and often survive in similar ways.
Another trajectory of people fleeing to the border is that of convicted or wanted
criminals in the US who exit the country to the nearest safe location, in this case the
relative security of Mexican border towns located just scant feet or miles from US soil.
Philip Johnson, responsible for the then (1997) biggest cash theft in US history, and the
brilliant Dutch counterfeiter Newton Peter Van Drunen, who relocated to a poor barrio
of Juarez in the 1980s, are two prominent examples.7 Border cities like Ciudad Juárez
are excellent in this regard because of their fragmented, ephemeral nature, a product
of constant national and international migration. Moreover, the location of Mexican
border cities may allow one to have close contact with the US as well as with people
who constantly cross back and forth between the US and Mexico. The proximity of the
border to the US territory allows many such 'refugees' to open or maintain businesses
(legal and illegal) or employment activities, social ties, and countless other involvements
to sustain themselves.
The extent to which border people can leave behind an old identity and adopt a
new one8 is complex because in places like the Juárez/El Paso area, individuals who
are culturally and phenotypically 'Mexican' are the vast majority on both sides of
the border. Blacks and whites often stand out and may be given special status in
Juárez as quintessential Americans (Campbell 8c Lachica 2013), and often a higher
social status than they held in the US. In contrast, Mexicans escaping identity, or,
as Vollman (2010: 62) eloquently puts it, the status of 'identity criminals', experience
an especially complicated process because although people of Mexican descent are the
majority in El Paso, if they are 'unauthorized' immigrants they are subject to deportation

304 Howard Campbell
or incarceration (and Mexican-Americans face lingering discrimination) to Juarez or

elsewhere. Escaping 'Mexican' identity in El Paso could entail passing as a Mexican-
American (i.e. a US citizen) or simply hiding below the radar of US immigration
authorities. For Mexican immigrants to the US or Mexican- Americans, escaping to
Juarez may involve pretending that one has always lived in Mexico and never left. Space
limitations prevent a full discussion of all ethnic groups that engage in escaping identity
on the border, hence the focus is on African-Americans and Anglo-Americans, the most
visibly distinctive and contrastive of such groups. Mexican and Mexican- Americans who
escape identity will be studied in greater detail in future research.
African-Americans and Anglo-Americans escaping identity in the border zone

African-Americans
For African- Americans, who are intensively racially marked in both the US and Mexico,
it may be harder or impossible completely to escape their identity through border-
crossing, but they may still advantageously move beyond uni- dimensional identities, if
not partially escape them, in a border setting. Since I began living in El Paso in 1991, 1
have interviewed numerous elderly African- American men who preferred life in Mexico
to that of the US. For them, Juarez was a kind of sanctuary where they could get away
from the most oppressive features of their home country. They told me that was the case
because Mexicans were less racist and discriminatory (than white Americans) towards
them, they preferred Mexican lifestyles, they were attracted to Mexican women, and the
cost of living was lower. Many of these African-American residents attempted to melt
into the general population of Juarez, or at least kept a low profile, except when they
socialized with other Americans in bars near the international border.
Jerome, a Vietnam veteran and sanitation worker from Georgia, first came to Juarez
in 1965, when there was still some residue of US-influenced racial segregation in the
bars and restaurants of the American- orientated tourist district of the city. (Blacks were
initially allowed only in the 77 Club and later the Don Félix Club.) These conditions have
gradually withered away, and he has essentially lived in Juarez, with a few interruptions,
ever since. At one time he and Rob, described above, rented an apartment in central
Juarez. Jerome s Mexican wife wanted the family to move to El Paso, which he did, but he
soon left his wife and returned to Juarez, where, for him, life was simply better, in spite
of the danger. When corrupt Mexican cops planted drugs in his apartment, beat him
severely, stole his belongings, and imprisoned him, he had to leave Juarez for a year. But
once it became safer, Jerome immediately returned to the city, where his powder-blue
Cadillac is regularly parked downtown near a bar frequented by African-Americans.
Like Nolan Richardson, the legendary Black basketball coach who grew up in a Mexican
barrio of El Paso, the beauty of Juarez for him and other African-American men of the
era was 'the freedom . . . you could go anywhere, do anything over there'.9 A primary
aspect of that freedom for the African-Americans I interviewed, from their perspective,
was to be more easily accepted and to mix more smoothly into a crowd of other also
dark-skinned (Mexican) people - that is, to be less racially branded as 'different' than
was possible in the still white- dominated US. Others, however, went beyond simply
leaving the US and adopting a Mexican lifestyle, and actively attempted to not display
their US identity and pass as a native Juarez resident.
Hubert, an elderly working-class African-American man from Chicago, also first
came to live in Juarez in the 1960s. He avoided legal problems in the US and flourished
in the Juarez underworld, where he sold marijuana at inflated prices to GIs and other

American tourists in bars near the border. His common-law wife Lencha brought him
high-quality cheap pot from her native Durango. Hubert was so in love with Lencha
that he tattooed her name in blue on his wrist; the name is barely visible fifty years
later. Though he seldom left Mexico, if necessity required it he would return to El Paso
for a while. Returning to the US, he could tell immigration and customs authorities
that he was just a tourist, even though he maintained a full-time residence in Mexico.
After living in this fashion for more than fifty years and becoming fluent in Spanish
and local customs, Hubert, who is relatively light-skinned, short in stature, and dresses
and behaves in the style of an elderly Juarense , is almost indistinguishable from most of
the Mexican people around him. He does not draw attention to himself or emphasize
that he is an African-American by birth.
In a sense Hubert has partially left behind his old identity through osmosis (living
so long in Mexico that Mexican life has become his habitus). This was also the case for
Desmond, an African- American factory worker (of 'mulatto', multiracial phenotype)
married to a woman from Juarez, who, remarkably, opened a bar in the heart of the
most dangerous neighbourhood in the city in 2010 at the peak of drug-related violence.
Desmond had to pay a weekly extortion 'quota' to the vicious La Linea cartel in order
to stay in business, but he said that this was a 'cheap, safe and efficient' system because
after that he did not have to pay taxes to municipal authorities (who were cowed by
cartels and their gang and police allies). He said his neighbours treated him as they
would anyone else and he lived just like them in most ways. He made no effort to express
his US Black identity and considers Mexico his homeland.
George, originally from East Texas, was another African-American man who lived
practically his whole life in Juarez and who used both sides of the border as a resource,
adjusting his identity while straddling the border almost as skilfully as Maradona could
handle a soccer ball. George worked at the ASARCO copper refinery in El Paso but
actually resided in Juarez. He never obtained a tourist permit or permanent visa to live
in Mexico, which would have cost money, but instead posed as an American visitor
if necessary when confronted by Mexican authorities; in every other way possible he
obtained whatever benefit he could in terms of social services or avoiding taxes or
expenses in each country by claiming either country as his home as necessary. For
example, when he crossed from Juarez into El Paso, he would simply announce that
he was an American citizen while speaking in a vivid Black English argot without
brandishing any form of identification (passport, driver's licence, etc.), which would
have cost money to obtain. I never saw the US immigration authorities ask for his
citizenship papers. After all, it was 'obvious' that he was an American, and, besides, they
had seen him for so many years his identity for them was not in doubt.
Yet on the streets and in the bars and brothels of Juarez, George's idiomatic Spanish,
perfected though marriage to a Mexican woman and long-time residence, was so good
that he kept friends and onlookers entertained with a vast repertoire of dirty jokes
and witty remarks. In downtown Juarez and the poor neighbourhoods surrounding
it, common people viewed him as an integral part of local society and treated him as
such. George, like some other African-Americans of Juarez, was sometimes considered
a 'street celebrity' at bars during weekend partying, but during the working week his
presence in the city was barely noticeable and he did not generally stand out as an
American. Like the other Black men I interviewed, he no longer saw himself as the same
as African -Americans who resided strictly in the US. Instead he fancied himself as part
of Mexico or, as one interviewee put it, 'a Blaxican'.

306 Howard Campbell
Bobby, a former infantry man from southern Mississippi, is the informal social
and spiritual leader of African-Americans residing intermittently in Juarez since the
1960s. He echoed the sentiments of many of his ethnic 'brothers' (his term) when he
proclaimed to me: 'Juárez is my home . . . the best thing I ever did was to become a
Mexican . . . when I became a Mexican my world opened up'.
Anglo-Americans
For Joey, a lower-class Anglo-American from California, Juárez provided salvation
from a gambling addiction and from a dreary existence at the bottom of the US socio-
economic hierarchy, although it also became the locale for his heroin addiction:
I had a gambling problem so I had to escape Vegas and Reno. In Nevada, I didn't want to be that Joey
no more. So I went to the Greyhound station and said, 'Give me a ticket to El Paso'. I met this Mexican
on the bus and [as we reached the outskirts of El Paso and Juárez] he [gestured and] said, 'All of that
is Mexico'. From the El Paso Greyhound station we rented a van for $40. The driver said, 'I am going
to show you all over. I'll take you into Juárez and show you around'. We went to the Hotel Impala and
then he dropped me off and drove away and I was stuck.
I ended up at the Juarez Cathedral [in July 2001] . It was the most beautiful structure I had ever seen.
There was all this garbage in the streets. There was an election going on. People were honking horns.
I met a guy and he said, 'Do you like to party?' We drank beer. I got a girl for 100 pesos. I couldn't
believe how much I could do with $50. Got another girl. Smoked some weed. Gave him some money.
Got a hotel room for both of us. And two packs of cigarettes. Next morning I woke up with no money
in my pocket and I was drunk with a hangover.
I met this guy at the mercado [market]. He showed me the rooms for rent in downtown Juarez. I
got a room for $150 per month, with shower and everything, the room was pimped, it had a stereo.
And I worked at the brick factory [in El Paso]. Within a month I started making money. I was only 23.
I had four women at one time; they were checking me out and knocking on my door . . . Then I
went back to Colorado. In 2006 to 2010 I was in prison in Colorado.
When I was locked up I would fantasize about Juarez. I would get letters from my future wife and
her mother talking about the two kids. Her mother said, 'She is going to be your wife'. It was one of
the best feelings in the world. So I came back. I got a $500 inheritance and bought a plane ticket and
ring and came back to Juarez.
In prison you think about how the life of Juarez is . . . Juarez is a good place to party. But I liked
the life because I got a great opportunity here [the border area]. Here I saw the possibilities of getting
the things I wanted out of life. It was totally possible to get everything I wanted - to get all the food I
want, a place to live, to drink, live in Juarez and work in El Paso. I saw it as a very good lifestyle. Even
in El Paso I could do it.
I feel like I am part-Mexican now. I feel attached to the raza [Mexican people] . My heart is attached
to the raza. I fell in love with the area. It is like Mexico was a good fallback. If I fell down a little bit
Mexico was there for me. In Mexico you can always get a house, food cheap. But in the US, there is
no excuse [or help for poor people].
The Mexicans - some of them see me as part of the community. They like it. They see me as a
sacrificing [to live in Juárez] but I didn't give up my rights as a US citizen.
I just like it better [in Mexico]. It's cheap. I fell in love here. I love it. I have been here most of my
adult life. I love that brown sugar. More appealing than a white woman.
As this account illustrates, together with others below, fantasies or imaginings of border
culture and people (especially sexualized women) are a primary reason why the border
becomes a destination for those seeking a personal and cultural hegira. The role of
romanticized mental images of the border is well illustrated in the following interview
with Freddy, a bohemian, college-educated, Anglo-Saxon American male from Chicago:
I remember when I first started dreaming of coming back to El Paso - 1 was needing to leave Philly -
and had been reading a cheesy Billy the Kid biography - and I started fantasizing about leaving it all
behind and coming back out here and being Billy the Kid or something. Just start over and be free of

all the crap ... [so] I packed all my stuff in a UH AUL and drove straight to El Paso. I was ready. I
wanted to be a different person in a very different place. It is hard to put your finger on just why El
Paso pulled me. Maybe it was because I knew there was lots of drugs on the border? Could be a big
reason, but I don't think it was the only one. I wanted to get away.
Though the allure of cheap drugs and alcohol, sex tourism, inexpensive cost of living,
disgust with the US political system or culture, and perceived Mexican cultural exoticism
is a powerful draw to the border for anti- establishment nonconformist oddballs like
Freddy, and many others running away from the US, there is also a movement of
common middle- and working-class people to the US-Mexico border who want to
start anew culturally. Such people come to the area because of border-related job
opportunities (the Border Patrol, military service at Fort Bliss, employment in the
maquiladora/ twin-plant industry, etc.), better weather, but also for some of the same
reasons that attract the cultural misfits described above. Nancy, a white, female, lower-
middle class, long-time El Paso resident, who moved here in 1977 from Delaware with
her military husband, asked aloud: 'What makes a young couple with small children
pack up all their things and drive to faraway El Paso? To a place they know nothing
about. Part of it must be adventure? I think it was adventure'. Furthermore, she noted
that many other middle- class individuals long to do the same, but they just cannot
muster the courage to do so. In relation to the ones who actually escape to the border,
she added, 'It must be the personality. The fringe people. They are the ones who actually
do it. And on the border they find more fringe people like themselves'.
Analysis and conclusions

'Escaping identity', as analysed here, is a classic example of what Heyman and Campbell
(2009) refer to as 'slantwise' behaviour, which is behaviour that involves neither abject
submission to authority nor direct resistance. Instead, individuals manoeuvre in an
indirect, oblique manner in relation to social structures, narrow social identities, legal
norms, cultural value systems, and other forces that would restrict or oppress them.
There is an against-the-grain, reverse logic at work in which people try to discard, hide,
or unmake pre-existing identities and lifestyles rather than dwell on them, and they
gravitate to the geographical/cultural periphery rather than the centre. They choose
invisibility over expression, or construct a new cultural identity that they choose to
display. There is 'something quintessential^ "American" about such a move, in a go
west, start all over again, kind of way'. Hence 'the border - as the paradoxical space it is -
serves as a defacto "last frontier'" (Benita Heiskanen, pers. comm., February 2012). Such
re-inventing, self- fashioning movement dates to European migration to the New World
and westward expansion and is re-created in the 'American' imaginary through popular
television shows such as Star Trek , as well as countless Hollywood movies concerned
with hobos, drifters, and other wanderers and rebels. The specifically 'American' trope
of escape and beginning again with a new identity and life informs and is embodied in
the lives of my subjects.
Beyond an 'American' context, the desire to slip away from binding ties has a long
history in Western societies, whether in the form of Benjamin's flaneurs , European
gypsies, nomadism à la Deleuze and Guattari (1986), or, more recently, the seductive
escapism made possible by the Internet (Wertheim 2000). While Mexico has been a
common destination for those who would slide away from or evade existing structures,
so too have been Morocco, Thailand, Costa Rica, Australia, India, and many other places.
For example, in Central Africa, Roitman (2004) studied how a 'floating population'

308 Howard Campbell
along the Chad border emerged as a result of structural changes during the period of
French colonial rule.
Such slantwise behaviour is also a common strategy employed by ordinary people

on the US-Mexico border and other marginal, ambiguous, and in-between spaces. In
this case, rather than confronting the people, cultural system, or circumstances that
oppress them in their place of origin, the individuals concerned, in a sense, run away
from their problems and former identities and create a new or displaced cultural self
while abandoning to a degree what they left behind (cf. Benson 8c O'Reilly 2009).
The border is an 'idyllic place' (Benson 8c O'Reilly 2009: 611) for such activity, or a
'personally meaningful geographic place' (Hoey 2010: 238), though not because it is a
tropical paradise. Instead it is generally considered (by outsiders and many locals) to
be a potentially dangerous or mysterious place, but one where, in Mexican barrios and
villages, it is easy for individuals to get away from the confines of aspects of bourgeois
American mass culture as well as the restrictive dimensions of communal/corporatist
life. Identity escapees can be considered border-crossers and hybrids in common
anthropological usage; however, they generally stay on one side of the border in order to
avoid problems on the other, and often suppress or occlude elements of their multiple
identities.
In this sense, 'escaping identity' falls in between the two poles of analysis
that have dominated recent US-Mexico border studies: (1) reinforcement of
borders/securitization and (2) border-crossing/ hybridity.
The subjects of this study may be limited, if not harmed, by the militarization and
securitization of the US-Mexico border, although in most cases their US citizenship
allowed them to cross the border without major problems. Moreover, since many of
them appeared phenotypically to be quintessential 'Americans', they may even be given
preference by hyper- vigilant US border agents, who more carefully monitor, scrutinize,
or interrogate phenotypical 'Mexicans'. However, most of my informants were not
interested in reinforcing a bounded cultural identity; essentialist ethnic or cultural
identities are a straitjacket for them. Similar to some Hutu refugees studied by Malkki:
'to "lose" one's identity and to move through categories was for many a form of social
freedom and even security' (1995: 16).
Hence, my informants generally eschew the vibrant cultural hybridity that has been
so highly valued in recent border and Chicano studies. Rather, they seek to transcend the
controlling dimensions of their original identity (and life) while adopting a new identity
and encouraging those around them to accept it as well. These 'narrative identities' (Vila
2000: 243) or 'imaginaries about border-crossing human mobilities' (Salazar 2011: 593)
are not centred and they have their location not in an individual's beginnings or origins
but in who he or she 'is' today within the contradictory, overlapping, and ambiguous
'border identifications' (Vila 2000) along the line between the US and Mexico. Nor are
they rooted in the ubiquitous border discourse about class, so ably analysed by Vila
(2005: 169-228), in which to move north and/or to move from Mexico to the US is
to move up in the social class hierarchy. For my informants, whose movements tend
to go in a 'slantwise' direction, whether a move is south or north is less important
to them than that it allows them to exercise a degree of agency vis-à-vis international
boundary lines and bounded cultural identities (Wilson 8c Donnan 1998: 21-30). In
fact, for many of the African-Americans studied, their social status increased when
they came to Mexico (and 'escaped' US racism). Such people try to decentre narratives
about themselves in ways that confound existing class, race, or national discourses and

hegemonic practices that would imprison them (Rosas 2012; Wilson & Donnan 1998:
1-2), or else they manipulate them to their advantage.
The strategic advantages of escaping identity' are manifold for those who adopt this
mode, although they may leave behind a wake of abandoned families and obligations
(and may exploit women in Mexican border towns). But instead of continuing to feel
culturally stifled or repressed by systems of unequal power in their indigenous place of
reference, the subjects of this study move to another place, often across (international
and cultural) borders while still having access to aspects of their past life and resources of
various kinds from where they came. In their border lives, they are existential anarchists,
a floating population of independent, self-creating loners, though they often interact
with like-minded others in similar circumstances. Striving to minimize, negate, or
escape their past, they feel liberated to create a new life, an 'alternative cosmopolitanism'
(Glick Schiller 2012) in a frontier setting where their off-kilter attitudes seem not so
unusual or are simply ignored.
Perhaps this is an illusory quest because there is no way to be ultimately reborn
culturally and fully escape the social constraints of states, other systems of power,
and pre-existing cultural identities. Through movement across social and territorial
boundaries my informants at least partially change their identities, though in the
process they may also reproduce or rework existing social and gender hierarchies.
In this sense, ultimate escape from asymmetrical or naturalized power relations is
impossible. As Vollman (2013) eloquently puts it '[T]here is no off the grid [which he
defines as "authoritarian constraints"], not really. There is only the sinister anti-grid'.
For Vollman, the 'anti-grid' - that is, the alternative, constraint-free space sought by
people such as those interviewed for this article - may be ultimately as oppressive
as that which escapees flee (and as we have seen, identity escapees also may engage
in exploitative behaviour). Ultimately, my interlocutors may also feel oppressed in the
US-Mexico border context, where US state power is strikingly evident. Currently, the US
government is strengthening the southern border and increasing its control of human
mobility, with thousands more Border Patrol agents, hundreds more miles of border
walls and fences, numerous new surveillance technologies, and miscellaneous means
of monitoring and control. Despite these efforts, individuals such as my informants
will attempt to transcend or escape limiting identities and lives and the confining laws,
bureaucracies, and other social and cultural systems that would lessen their freedoms.
NOTES
1 This research differs from that of Benson and O'Reilly (2009), who are concerned with 'lifestyle migration'
of affluent people 'within the developed world'. The subjects of this study were mainly not wealthy (or had
given up or lost wealth) and to a degree attempted to get away from the developed world.
2 For debates about politicized ethnic identities in the modern world, see special issue of Identities ,
'Indigenous peoples/global terrains', 3: 1-2 (1996).
3 There is an extensive literature on economic migrants who cross the border, for example Castañeda
(2013), Massey, Alarcon, Durand & Gonzalez (1987), Massey, Durand & Malone (2002), Piore (1979).
4 This is not about more affluent, non-marginal Americans, historically, who have moved to Mexico for
economic and cultural reasons, such as various types of retirees, famous artists, actors, and others - although
such 'self-exile' may partake of similar impetuses and motivations.
5 Pseudonyms are used for the main informants discussed in this article.
6 In recent years, US and Mexican authorities have tried to steer deportees away from Juarez in order to
lessen the local crime wave (or impede renewed attempts at border-crossing), since a certain percentage of
the deportees have criminal records (though most have merely broken US immigration law). At the time of
this writing, a new programme has been created to fly unauthorized immigrants to Mexico City instead of
the border.

310 Howard Campbell
7 On bank robber Philip Johnson, see http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/31/us/man-seized-at-texas-border-

in-22-million-florida-theft.html (accessed 6 February 2015). On master counterfeiter Newton Peter Van
Drunen, see Cruz (2008).
8 Islas (1991) also describes the ways crossing borders can be used to allow and conceal 'deviant' or
stigmatized sexualities, such as homosexuality.
9 YouTube video 'Conversations with Coach: Nolan Richardson Part II', http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=lhD_A9Ível¡4 accessed 6 February 2015).
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Échapper à l'identité : les zones frontalières comme lieux d'évasion et de

réinvention culturelle
Résumé
Basé sur une recherche ethnographique approfondie dans la région d'El Paso au Texas et de Ciudad Juárez
au Mexique, l'article aborde les manières dont les zones frontalières liminales deviennent des lieux de
transformation culturelle, dans lesquels des groupes d'individus peuvent, au lieu de mélanger deux ou
plusieurs entités et d'en faire la synthèse, tenter de juguler des identités unidimensionnelles potentiellement
dangereuses ou restrictives, d'échapper à leurs vies passées et de se recréer une nouvelle identité. L'argument
est double : la séparation relative et l'éloignement des zones frontières par rapport aux structures nationales
rend possible une certaine agencéité culturelle, moins accessible aux individus plus proches des centres
de pouvoir culturel et politique. Les frontières créent ainsi des possibilités de réinvention, de nouvelles
relationalités, d'autres créations et constructions culturelles que j'appelle « échapper à l'identité ».
Howard Campbell is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He is
the author or editor of six academic volumes, including Drug war zone: frontline dispatches from the streets of
El Paso and Juárez (University of Texas Press, 2009).
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, TX 79968-0558, USA.

hcampbel@utep.edu


Escaping Identity Border Zones As Places of Evasion and Cultural Reinvention

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Escaping Identity Border Zones As Places of Evasion and Cultural Reinvention

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Escaping identity: border zones as places of evasion and cultural reinvention

Author(s): Howard Campbell

Howard Campbell University of Texas at El Paso

[M]y object in coming here was to leave certain things . . .

Bellow 2012 [1959]: 42

I am running away from myself.

Joey, resident of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Construction and deconstruction of identities

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Field research focus and methodology

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Escaping identity in the border interzone

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

the dwellings of my informants, offers meagre comforts by common US standards and

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

or incarceration (and Mexican-Americans face lingering discrimination) to Juarez or

African-Americans and Anglo-Americans escaping identity in the border zone

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Analysis and conclusions

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Such slantwise behaviour is also a common strategy employed by ordinary people

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

7 On bank robber Philip Johnson, see http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/31/us/man-seized-at-texas-border-

Bowden, C. 2010. Murder city. New York: Nation Books.

Anthropology 27, 261-83.

Borderlands Studies 28, 279-90.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

University of California Press.

Islas, A. 1991. The Rain God. New York: Harper Perennial.

economic integration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

105-40. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vollman, W.T. 2010. Imperial. New York: Penguin.

inprint/020_02 /11649, accessed 6 February 2015).

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

Échapper à l'identité : les zones frontalières comme lieux d'évasion et de

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, TX 79968-0558, USA.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 296-312

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