NACLA Report on the Americas

ISSN: 1071-4839 (Print) 2471-2620 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnac20

Beyond Borders

Laura Weiss & Joseph Nevins

To cite this article: Laura Weiss & Joseph Nevins (2019) Beyond Borders, NACLA Report on the
Americas, 51:1, 1-2, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2019.1593678

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1593678

Published online: 29 Mar 2019.

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 E D I TO R S’ NOT E

Laura Weiss and Joseph Nevins

B eyon d Bo rders

I
n May 1988, Chicano border artist Richard Lou walked
across the U.S.-Mexico border to Tijuana, where he’d
grown up. He held in tow a free-standing, workable
door, which he then fixed on the border. At the time,
there was some chain-link fencing, much of it in very poor
shape, along the border, but only in the most urbanized
stretches, and there were no walls as we see today.
That changed just a few years later, in 1990, when U.S.
authorities constructed several miles of steel wall along
the international boundary in the San Diego area, where
the majority of unsanctioned border crossings were taking
place at the time.
Yet the vision of the door, standing still in the desert
sun, evokes a sense of the arbitrary lines that cleave
nations, environments, and people from one another. The
symbolism of Lou’s project went a step further. The artist
wandered the streets of Tijuana with 250 keys, which he
gave to residents of La Colonia Roma and Altamira so
they could use the door, moving from one nation-state to
another. As Latinx feminist art historian Guisela Maria
Latorre has written, Lou’s political work “questions the
very existence of this border and the extreme inequities
that it has ushered in, yet it underscores and celebrates the
cultural hybridity that emanates from it.”
An issue about borders couldn’t be more timely, when
the Trump administration has posed the U.S.-Mexico
border and the people who cross it as the central threat to
U.S. Americanism. Yet this focus displaces the longer-term
history of violent border exclusion across the Americas—
the brutality, inequality, and cultural hybridity they
embody, as Latorre suggests—in various conceptions.
That’s why this issue focuses on a variety of borders
across the Americas, literal and symbolic. In fact, our
back cover depicts the Muro de la Vergüenza, or the
Wall of Shame, in Lima, Peru, which divides the wealthy
Casuarinas neighborhood from an informal housing
development long neglected by the Peruvian government.
As Leigh Campoamor writes in the issue, this internal
border embodies both the physical inequities borders
draw, as well as the way borders serve to separate people,
differentiating them, whether by nationality, ethnicity,
class, or socioeconomic status. These mirror the less literal
but just as real walls that privilege the flow of commerce
over the flow of people, that give the wealthy the right to
move while caging in the poor.
The Report includes an excerpt from Reece Jones’ book,
Violent Borders, which lays the stage for the framing of the
issue as a whole. Rather than seeing nation-state borders
as a response to violence, Jones understands them to be
not only a product of overt violence, but also of structural
forms and the well-being of people and nature—from the
land itself to the climate system.
What are borders, how have they been made, and who
controls them? Pablo Mansilla’s piece interrogates the very
definition of borders in his discussion on the Indigenous
Mapuche and their concept of Xawümen. Unlike nation-
state borders, Xawümen both delimit space and also serve
as connections that link people and places rather than
separating them. This directly contests the state’s violent
creation and enforcement of borders, a process that has
resulted in devastation for the Mapuche community.
Joe Bryan’s article on Nicaragua similarly focuses on
Indigenous territorial claims. It illustrates the profound
limitations of embracing “modern” territorial practices
and their associated boundaries to protect land holdings
in a world shaped by colonialism and capitalism. In telling
the story of ongoing and intensifying threats to the lands
of Black and Indigenous peoples in Nicaragua’s Atlantic
coastal region, Bryan’s article forces us to reconsider binary
approaches to territory and to think in more complex

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 terms that appreciate territory as inextricably tied to larger
constellations of power.
As Rebecca Galemba’s piece on the Mexico-Guatemala
border demonstrates, the lines that divide countries
from one another can also serve to blur identities and
help to produce dynamic relations that transcend and
complicate borders as well as the spaces they delimit.
Many Guatemalans settled in Chiapas, Mexico—once part
of Guatemala—during the Guatemalan Civil War. Today,
the largely Maya population negotiates space between two
countries, and where their own identities fit within them.
As the state hardens borders across the region, interactions
between individuals, through kin, friends, and commercial
connections challenge state efforts to separate them, as
Galemba’s piece demonstrates. So too in Dajabón, on the
border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where—as we
see in a photo essay by Aida Alami and Tatiana Fernández—
marketplaces serve as a point of connection and camaraderie
between Haitians and Dominicans, despite the Dominican
government’s dehumanizing actions to render Haitian-
descendant Dominicans a stateless people.
Another site of such contention can be found on the
triple border of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Fernando
Rabossi’s piece traces the history of this region, the people
who live in it, and its rich commercial history. His article
emphasizes the sometimes unexpected cultural and
commercial connections that occur in the area, where
a large share of the region’s Middle Eastern and Muslim
immigrants and their descendants reside. Fernando
Brancoli dives deeper into how in recent years, the state
has constructed an idea of the region as a terrorist threat,
in a policy directly influenced by the United States’ own
Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11.
Xenophobia, racism, and fear have also shaped U.S.
policy towards a sylum seekers from the Car ibbean,
p a r t ic u l a rl y f r om Ha it i a nd C ub a , i n t he 1 980 s .
Techniques aimed at stymieing their mobility developed
du r i ng t hat t i me , Jen na L oyd a nd A l i son Mou nt z
illustrate. This helped to lay the groundwork for today’s
system of policing and exclusion on the U.S.-Mexico
border, the Mexico-Guatemala border, and beyond. This
case study speaks to how we cannot think about borders
without considering their neocolonial, racialized roots,
as Lorgia García Peña reminds readers in her piece on
Colombia-born Afro-Swedish activist Tess Asplund.
This line of thinking brings us back to the center of
empire—the United States—where guest editor Joe Nevins
2  NACL A — REPORT ON THE AMERICAS | VOL. 51, NO. 1
NACLA_51-1.indd 2
and I have tried to bring new perspectives on a much
discussed division. Nidia Bautista provides a gendered
perspective of the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, where
thousands of asylum-seekers continue to arrive and attempt
to apply for refuge in the United States. And Nevins looks at
an aspect of inequality the border embodies, one defined by
dramatically unequal resource consumption, which renders
the poorest people on the move, who tend to travel on foot,
more vulnerable to detection and harm. This illuminates how
borders both reflect and produce nature—in terms of how
it is organized, controlled, delimited, and allocated. As the
concept of Xawümen evokes, the nature of borders can either
separate people, or they can bring them together. It is the
latter that we seek in our quest towards a more just world.
B eyond the Report, this issue also includes a special
s e c t i o n c o n t i n u i n g NA C L A’s c o v e r a ge o f t h e
connections between Latin America and the Middle East
in Sonja Wolf ’s article on a program that brings Syrian
refugees to Mexico to continue their higher education.
Our Feature Essay, by Brett Kyle and Andrew Reiter,
comprehensively traces the trend towards militarization
across the region, with dangerous implications for human
rights and democracy.
Plus, don’t miss updates on U.S. sanctions in Nicaragua,
an analysis of what Latinx political power means in the
wake of the U.S. midterms, and a discussion on the new
NAFTA and what it means for the new government of
Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. NAFTA is
also a central theme of Alyshia Gálvez’s book, Eating
NAFTA, reviewed in this issue by Gustavo Setrini. Joe
Nevins contributes again to the issue in his review of
Ieva Jusionyte’s Threshold: Emergency Responders on the
US-Mexico Border, bringing further analysis of an often
overlooked aspect of border politics. Finally, Luis Duno-
Gottberg offers a review of Naomi Schiller’s Channeling
the State, a study of community media in Venezuela, an
especially important reflection considering the growing
crisis on the country’s borders and beyond. n n
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