Closing America's "back door"

GLQ

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 403-422

  Chapin, Jessica ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749819969     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-4-3-403     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. "Crime Drops, Reasons Still Unclear," El Paso Times, 24 September 1994, 1A.
2. Letter to the editor, "Thanks to Border Patrol," El Paso Times, 27 September 1994, 6A.
3. The events described took place shortly after I had completed fifteen months of fieldwork on the contradictory constructions of identity and community that surround transnational production in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. The opening section of this article is based on my reading of local news articles, as well as on an interview with two vestidas (Rocio Beatrice and Neli) that was set up for me by the staff of FEMAP, a Mexican family-planning agency that has provided safe sex education, job training, and a space for self-organization for Ciudad Juárez vestidas.
4. For a more extended description of the daily life of transvestite prostitutes in Ciudad Juárez, see "The Border of Desire: Life and Death among Juárez Transvestite Prostitutes," El Paso Times, 15 December 1991, 1F, 4F, 5F.
5. See Philip Abrams, "Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State," Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 58-89;
6. Ana María Alonso, "The Politics of Space, Time, and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 379-405;
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);
8. Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, "Tradition, Genuine or Spurious?" Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984): 273-90;
9. Liisa Malkki, "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees," Cultural Anthropology 1 (1992): 24-44;
10. and Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992).
11. For more in-depth discussion of the border as a site of cultural hybridity and bifocality, see Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989);
12. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987);
13. Guillermo Gǒmez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1993);
14. and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, New World Border (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996).
15. On the role of history in the construction of national identity, see Ana María Alonso, "The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community," Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988): 33-57,
16. and Richard Johnson et al., Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
17. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 299.
18. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration, 1990, 299. Ibid.
19. Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 26.
20. Oscar J. Martínez, Troublesome Border Ibid., 29.
21. A cardinal rule of the discipline of demography is that there are only three ways to enter or leave a "population": birth, death, and migration. While the first two are relatively easy to monitor, the third, notoriously, is not.
22. The phrase is from Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121.
23. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3.
24. Ann Laura Stoller, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 85.
25. "Border City Plagued by 'Tunnel Rats' from Mexico," New York Times, 27 March 1994, 13.
26. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 143.
27. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 35.
28. Malkki ("National Geographic," 33) likewise observes a "discursive externalization of the refugee from the national (and natural) order of things."
29. Sarah Hill, "Transnationalism in the Mind," paper presented at the American Ethnological Society, 117th annual spring meeting, Austin, Tex., 28 April 1995.
30. Stoller, Race and the Education of Desire, 127.
31. Such stereotypes are alive and well in U.S. popular culture. The recent film Fools Rush In tells the story of a twenty-something WASP from the Northeast who travels on business to Las Vegas. There he meets and weds a "hot-blooded" Mexican-American woman. She is creative, attracted to bright colors, and a transgressor of bodily taboos (she drags him into the bathroom to talk while she is on the toilet) but is nonetheless deeply religious, family oriented, and willing to give up her career for his.
32. "Letter from Mexicali: Hoping to Lure U.S. Jobs across the Border," Business Week (Industrial Edition), 20 November 1978, 30D.
33. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 72.
34. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 144.
35. Venson C. Davis, Blood on the Border: Criminal Behavior and Illegal Immigration along the Southern U.S. Border (New York: Vantage, 1993), 10, 13.
36. Similarly, in François Rabelais's fictional description of the pregnant Gargamelle's womb, Bakhtin finds a collapsing of boundaries and an inversion of anatomical hierarchies that is subversive of social hierarchies (Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984], 226). In discussions of undocumented immigration in El Paso, a great deal of attention is paid to Mexican women who cross the border illegally to give birth in the United States. The recent proposal by Governor Pete Wilson of California to change the law notwithstanding, birth in the United States still guarantees citizenship for a baby. After the start of Operation Hold the Line, the number of births at Thomason, El Paso's large public hospital, was monitored carefully. Although this figure showed no sign of dropping, the pregnant woman, like the thief and the transvestite, was the object of much popular preoccupation. Birth is, of course, an exemplary case of the loss of control over ones bodily boundaries, a confusion of inside and outside, and, in the case of a Mexican woman giving birth to a U.S. citizen, a confusion of self and other. Like the microbe, the fetus hidden within the body of the pregnant woman threatens to compromise the integrity of the national body. This breaching of boundaries, one which is preceded by the woman's "water breaking," resonates in a particularly potent way with a discourse of national sovereignty in which immigration is often metaphorized in terms of streams, flows, waves, and floods.
37. Davis, Blood on the Border, 53, 103, 54, 102.
38. Davis, Blood on the Border, Ibid., 104.
39. Lee Edelman, "Tearooms and Sympathy, or The Epistemology of the Water Closet," in his Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).
40. Lee Edelman, "Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory Ibid., 7.
41. Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (spring 1991): 8-23.
42. Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 118.
43. The phrase "true nationals" is from Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 284.
44. I am borrowing here from Fredric Jameson, who argues that in the postmodern/ late-capitalist era individuals have lost the capacity to place themselves accurately in space and time and that new forms of political consciousness will require the development of new cognitive maps ("Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 [1984]: 53-92).
45. See also Kristin Koptiuch, "Third-Worlding at Home: Transforming New Frontiers in the Urban U.S.," paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C., 15-19 November 1989;
46. Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism";
47. and Saskia Sassen-Koob, "Recomposition and Peripheralization at the Core," Contemporary Marxism 5 (summer 1982): 88-100.
48. Interestingly, on 1 July 1986, the news that, in a reassertion of state control over bodily boundaries, the Supreme Court had, in deciding Bowers v. Hardwick, upheld Georgia's antisodomy law shared the front page of the New York Times with the results of a nationwide poll showing increased public support for restrictions on immigration - a movement that led to the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act later that year.
49. "Proponen crear comisión para investigar abusos de la migra," El diario de Juárez, 14 May 1993, 8B; the term estadounidense ("unitedstatesian") was used.
50. For an excellent discussion of the semiology of "American-ness" on the border, see Debbie Nathan, Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border (Houston: Arte Publico, 1991).
51. Ted Conover, Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens (New York: Vintage, 1987).
52. Ramón "Tianguis" Pérez, Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, trans. Dick J. Reavis (Houston: Arte Publico, 1991).
53. Nathan, Women and Other Aliens, 30.
54. The concept of being "read" comes from the transvestile community. It refers to a failure of self-presentation in an encounter with an onlooker who is able to see through the illusion that one is trying to create. See Anne Bolin, In Search of Eve: Transsexual Rites of Passage (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 152.
55. Nathan, Women and Other Aliens, 29.
56. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 175.
57. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet Ibid., 225.
58. See the National Council of La Raza, "Advocate's 'Quick Reference' Guide to Immigration Research," ed. Claudia Jansin (Washington, D.C.: Policy Analysis Center Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, National Council of La Raza, 1993), 8. However, FAIR's citation of figures representing the number of entries is deceptive, as these figures are calculated by taking the number of apprehensions made by the border patrol and then multiplying it based on an estimate of what percentage of entries border patrol agents miss. Because most undocumented immigrants try and fail several times before successfully entering the United States and the vast majority return to Mexico after a short period of time, such figures tend to present an enormously inflated estimate of the number that are actually residing in the country and using its infrastructure and social services.