Mexican Border Crossers: The Mexican Body in Immigration Discourse

Abstract

THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO SHARE A BORDER THAT EXTENDS NEARLY 2,000 miles along southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. In most areas, border is located in remote and sparsely populated areas of vast desert and rugged mountain terrain. Historically, U.S. side of border has served as a staging arena for U.S. military forays into Mexico. For example, after Pancho Villa's excursion into Columbus, New Mexico, on evening of March 9, 1916, General John Black Jack Pershing launched a military invasion into Mexico (Welsome, 2006). border has also served as a burying ground for Mexicans crossing into United States who get lost in desert and die of thirst. likelihood of finding dead Mexican bodies along border joining Arizona and Mexico is so high that area is known as The Devil's Highway among Mexicans crossing into United States (Urrea, 2004: 20): You'd be hard pressed to meet a Border Patrol agent in either southern Arizona sector who had not encountered death. It would be safe to say that every one of except for rankest probie just out of academy, had handled at least one dead body. And they all knew locations of unidentified skeletons and skulls. Bones peppered entire region. border shared by United States and Mexico, however, is more than just a line on a map demarcating geographical separation between two countries. It identifies a sharing of geographical, cultural, and social space between two neighbors (Weisman, 1986). two neighbors are joined together by border, almost like a seam between two pieces of cloth on a quilt. U.S.-Mexico border engenders a discourse that encompasses social, economic, political, and physical confines of social and geographical space. Regarding cultural and political complexities of border separating United States and Mexico, Fox (1999: 122) has noted that the border was always much more than a line demarcating national space. Emphasizing social and cultural dimensions of U.S.-Mexico border over topographical ones immediately gave 'border consciousness' a certain mobility. As a result, U.S.-Mexico border, la frontera, is synergistic--it fuels social and cultural representations of border. shared social and physical space that characterizes U.S.-Mexico border has generated numerous social and public policy concerns in United States, from immigration issues to terrorist threats (House Committee on Homeland Security, 2006; Doty, 2007). These concerns reflect border's elasticity and vulnerability regarding level of criminalization United States imposes on Mexicans crossing border into United States. However, these concerns focus on only one aspect of border: its use as a line separating us from them. As a result, little attention is given to representativeness of U.S.-Mexico border for a discourse on meaning and belonging, in particular, situating Mexican body in border discourses. We borrow from critical theory to construct a discussion regarding social and cultural representations of U.S.-Mexico border and movement of Mexican bodies into United States (see Beltran, 2004). Contrary to conventional perceptions that border is a fixed concept that demarcates us from them, we argue that border is constantly changing in form and meaning. movement of Mexican bodies into U.S. social spaces illustrates this synergism. An implicit argument here is that border has potential to merge land and people together into a shared body of social and cultural representations. A Critical View of Border Sociologically, borders are partitions that divide social and geographical space, as well as cultural forms and their representations. Within this perspective border shifts in form and meaning from a physical notion of geographical and social space to a discursive notion of border as fluid. …

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