Purity and danger on the U.S-Mexico border, 1991-1994

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 777-799

  Hill, Sarah ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 45849146629     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2006-010     Document Type: Review

References (109)

1. John Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade: NAFTA and the Future of Environmental Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997);
2. Michael Dreiling, Solidarity and Conflict: The Politics of Sustainability in the NAFTA Conflict (New York: Garland, 2001);
3. Barbara Hogenboom, Mexico and the NAFTA Environment Debate (Utrecht: International Books, 1998);
4. Arturo Zárate-Ruiz, A Rhetorical Analysis of the NAFTA Debate (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000).
5. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
6. Steven W. Bender, Greasers and Gringos: Latinos, Law and the American Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2003);
7. Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821-1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983);
8. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
9. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, "Which Face, Whose Nation?: Immigration, Public Health and the Construction of Disease at America's Ports and Borders, 1891-1928," American Behavioral Scientist 42.9 (1999): 1314-31;
10. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);
11. Charles Ramírez-Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2002);
12. Rolando Romero, "Border of Fear, Border of Desire," Borderlines 1 (1993): 36-70;
13. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
14. See especially the debate over immigration within the Sierra Club that ensued, in 1996, in numerous online fora and on the Sierra Club's on Web site. T. M. Maher, "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population-Environment Connection," Population and the Environment 18.4 (1997): 339-72. Also: www.cis.org/articles/1998/IR33/sierra-club.html (accessed December 14, 2005).
15. Leo R. Chávez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001);
16. Leo R. Chávez, "Immigration Reform and Nativism: The Nationalist Response to the Transnationalist Challenge," in Immigrants Out!: The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, ed. Juan Perea, 61-77 (New York: New York University Press, 1997);
17. Nicholas De Genova, "Migrant 'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life," Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419-47;
18. Nicholas De Genova, "The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant 'Illegality,'" Latino Studies 2.2 (2004): 160-85;
19. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
20. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 35.
21. It should be noted that the research conducted for this essay can no longer be exactly replicated as I undertook the bulk of it in the fall of 1998, when my two primary tools, Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and Lexis-Nexis Academic were quite different than what they are now. At that time the Readers Guide was only available in a nonsearchable print edition and Lexis-Nexis contained full-text articles of a number of newspapers and magazines that now have their own, subscriber-only, databases. In 1998, to find articles on the border in the Readers Guide, I was restricted to subject terms, while in Lexis-Nexis, I could search under a variety of key-word terms, such as "NAFTA," and "border" and "environment" and so forth. (My recent effort to reproduce these searches yielded significantly different data sets than when I first conducted the research.) I also reviewed the transcripts of several hundred broadcast news programs, indexed on Lexis-Nexis. Although electronic media no doubt played a significant role in what Americans consumed by way of images during NAFTA, methodologically it was (in 1998) and still is difficult to track thematic coverage of a topic through the electronic media. (For an argument on the relation between electronic media and contemporary subjectivity, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996].)
22. Nonetheless, because of the enormous overlap between print and electronic media, print media serves as a valuable barometer of overall media coverage, especially the prestige and mainstream periodicals which often provide source material and set the standards for stories that warrant coverage for other media outlets. See John Bailey, "Mexico in the U.S. Media, 1979-1988," in Images of Mexico in the United States, ed. John H. Coatsworth and Carlos Rico, 55-90 (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1989).
23. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (1936; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1968).
24. I am borrowing from Butler here. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
25. Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada's West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
26. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford, 1973).
27. See also David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996);
28. Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
29. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (New York: Blackwell, 1984);
30. Bruce Willems-Braun, "Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)Colonial British Columbia," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87.1 (1997): 3-31.
31. Frederick H. Buttel, "Environmentalism: Origins, Processes, and Implications for Rural Sociology," Rural Sociology 57.1 (1992): 1-27;
32. Arturo Escobar, Uneven Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
33. Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Books, 1993).
34. Buttel, "Environmentalism";
35. James McCarthy, "Environmentalism, Wise Use and the Nature of Accumulation in the Rural West," in Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium, ed. Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, 126-49 (London: Routledge, 1998).
36. Eeva Berglund, Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: An Ethnography of Local Environmental Knowledge (Cambridge, England: White Horse Press, 1997)
37. Dorothee Schneider, "'I Know All About Emma Lazarus': Nationalism and Its Contradictions in Congressional Rhetoric of Immigration," Cultural Anthropology 13.1 (1998): 82-99.
38. Audley, Green Politics and Global Trade, 46.
39. Phyllis Pease Chock, "'Illegal Aliens' And 'Opportunity': Myth Making in Congressional Testimony," American Ethnologist 18.2 (1991): 280.
40. De Genova, "Migrant 'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life";
41. De Genova, "The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant 'Illegality.'"
42. Guy Gugliotta, "North American Free Trade Pact Could Shorten Clinton Honeymoon," Washington Post, November 14, 1992.
43. Dreiling, Solidarity and Conflict, 77.
44. See, for example, Steve Charnovitz, "The NAFTA Environmental Side Agreement: Implications for Environmental Cooperation, Trade Policy and American Treatymaking," Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, no. 257 (1994): 3-62.
45. Of more significance has been the Border Environmental Cooperation and the North American Development Bank, which together address specifically infrastructure deficits in border cities and towns.
46. Chávez, Covering Immigration; De Genova, "Migrant 'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life," 436-39.
47. Carl J. Migdail, "Invasion from Mexico: It Just Keeps Coming," U.S. News and World Report, March 7, 1983;
48. "Troubled Neighbor," MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, July 11, 1986.
49. Wayne King. "Mexican Money Crisis Impels New Surge of Aliens to Texas," New York Times, March 10, 1983.
50. Joel Brinkley, "U.S. Set to Act on Mexico Border Drug Flow," New York Times, June 26, 1986;
51. George Russell, "Trying to Stem the Illegal Tide," Time, July 8, 1985, p. 54.
52. Lawrences Coates, "Crossover Dreams: Impoverished Mexicans Find It Still Pays to Enter the U.S. Illegally, Risk or No Risk," Chicago Tribune Magazine, April 3, 1988, p. 12.
53. Brinkley, "U.S. Set to Act on Mexico Border Drug Flow."
54. Bailey, "Mexico in the U.S. Media, 1979-1988";
55. Christine Contee, "U.S. Perceptions of United States-Mexico Relations," in Coatsworth and Rico, Images of Mexico in the United States, 17-54;
56. Dunn. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992;
57. Frank D. Bean, Barry Edmonston, and Jeffrey S. Passel, "Perceptions and Estimates of Undocumented Migration to the United States," in Undocumented Migration to the United Stales: IRCA and the Experience of the 1980s, ed. Bean, Edmonston, and Passel, 11-31 (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1990).
58. Bean, Edmonston, and Passel, "Perceptions and Estimates of Undocumented Migration to the United States," 16.
59. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors.
60. Chávez, Covering Immigration;
61. Daniel B. German, "The Role of the Media in Political Socialization and Attitude Formation toward Racial/Ethnic Minorities in the U.S.," in Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Identity, ed. Russell F. Farnen, 285-94 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994);
62. Rita Simon and Susan Alexander, The Ambivalent Welcome: Print Media, Public Opinion and Immigration (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).
63. John Borrell, "Journey Along the Border," Time, October 24, 1988;
64. Coates, "Crossover Dreams: Impoverished Mexicans Find It Still Pays to Enter the U.S. Illegally, Risk or No Risk," 11.
65. De León, They Called Them Greasers.
66. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace" (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);
67. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, "The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease," Milbank Quarterly 80.4 (2002): 757-88.
68. Alexandra Minna Stern, "Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930," Hispanic American Historical Review 79.1 (1999): 41-81.
69. Alurista, "Myth, Identity and Struggle in Three Chicano Novels: Aztlán, Anaya, Méndez and Acosta," in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco Lomelí, 41-81 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989);
70. Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994);
71. Sergio D. Elizondo, "ABC: Aztlán, the Borderlands and Chicago," in Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.-Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture, ed. Renate Schmidt-Von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister, and Bruce-Novoa, 13-24 (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Center for Chicano Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986).
72. "Border Clashes," Macneil/Lehrer Newshour, July 8, 1985.
73. John M. Crewdson, "Border Region Is Almost a Country Unto Itself, Neither Mexican Nor American," New York Times, February 14, 1979;
74. Anthony Parisi, "Economic and Political Concerns Could Slow Tide of Mexican Oil," New York Times, February 13, 1979; Alan Riding, "Mexico Angry at U.S. As Carter Visit Nears," New York Times, February 11, 1979;
75. William K. Stevens, "Millions of Mexicans View Illegal Entry to U.S. As Door to Opportunity," New York Times, February 12, 1979; "Troubled Neighbor."
76. Howard LaFranchi, "On Rio Grande, Pollution Knows No Borders," Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 1988;
77. Lisa Belkin, "Separated by Border, 2 Cities Are United by Needs," New York Times, December 17, 1988;
78. William Branigan, "Pollution under Scrutiny at U.S.-Mexico Border," Washington Post, October 24, 1989;
79. Sonia Nazario, "Boom and Despair," Wall Street Journal, September 22, 1989.
80. J. Michael Kennedy, "Border Has the Worst of Both Worlds," Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1989;
81. John Dillin, "Mexico's Pollution Threatens Free Trade," Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1991;
82. Anne Reiley Dowd, "Viva Free Trade with Mexico!" Fortune, June 17, 1991;
83. Nazario, "Boom and Despair."
84. "Overpopulation in Mexico's Cities Causes Problems," 60 Minutes, November 3, 1991.
85. Dillin, "Mexico's Pollution Threats Free Trade."
86. Joe Old, "How Do You Clean up a 2,000 Mile Garbage Dump?" Business Week, July 6, 1992.
87. "A Permanent U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission," Journal of the American Medical Association 263.4 (1990): 3319-21.
88. Almost immediately references to the "AMA report" and the border as a cesspool began to appear in the press: Ana Arana, "The Waste," San Francisco Chronicle, Image section, August 30, 1992;
89. Phillip Elmer-DeWitt, "Love Canals in the Making," Time, May 20, 1991;
90. Linda Roach Moore, "AMA Urges Action on Severe Pollution along U.S.-Mexican Border," Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1990;
91. "NAFTA and the Environment," New York Times, September 27, 1993;
92. Old, "How Do You Clean up a 2,000 Mile Garbage Dump?";
93. Satchell, "Poisoning the Border";
94. "U.S. Companies Move to Mexico Because of Cheap Labor," CBS Evening News (1992);
95. Larry Williams, "Fears of a Trade Deal 'Cesspool,'" Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1992.
96. The media also continued to refer to the border as an "open sewer": Branigan, "Pollution under Scrutiny at U.S.-Mexico Border";
97. Dillin, "Mexico's Pollution Threatens Free Trade";
98. see Donald Reid, Paris Sewers and Sewermen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). But "cesspool" during this time became nearly synonymous with that corner of the third world that was the U.S.-Mexico border.
99. Belkin, "Separated by Border, 2 Cities Are United by Needs."
100. "The Mexican-American Border: Hi Amigo," The Economist, December 12, 1992.
101. "California Border Towns Pay High Price for Low-Wage Immigrants," CBS Morning News,November 26, 1990.
102. Craig E. Colton and Peter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Wastes before the EPA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
103. In comparison to "cesspool," Love Canal, a potentially powerful trope, appeared far less frequently: Elmer-DeWitt, "Love Canals in the Making";
104. S. C. Gwynne, "From Yukon to Yucatán," Time, June 3, 1991;
105. William Langewiesche, "The Border," The Atlantic, June 1992.
106. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
107. Anna S. Meigs, "A Papuan Perspective on Pollution," Man 13.2 (1978): 304-18.
108. At this point most of these characterizations appear not in the "old" media, but rather on blogs and Web sites devoted to nativism. Some of the characteristic language can be found on www.limitstogrowth.org (accessed December 14, 2005), or on many of the Web sites of local chapters of the Minuteman Project, a growing nativist organization.
109. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy, no. 141 (2004).