The Changing Face of Border Culture Studies
Zúñiga, Victor
In the 1980s, the U.S.-Mexico border was seen alternatively as a zone of U.S. cultural imperialism and as a privileged site of the assertion of Mexican culture and values. Today, some argue it is...
...Therefore, the border cannot be described from only one side and at the service of only one side...
...The closeness, in this case, has the opposite effect to that asserted in previous studies...
...7-15...
...Eduardo Barrera, Discursos emergentes, pp...
...Mono Serigraph, 1997...
...This essay, which is based on a reading of over 50 publications produced by more than three dozen researchers, focuses exclusively on Mexican sources...
...6 (1992), pp...
...Victor Zutiiga, ed., Voces de la frontera: Estudios sobre la dispersion cultural en la frontera Mbxico-Estados Unidos (Monterrey: Universidad Aut6noma de Nuevo Le6n, 1998...
...presuppose the existence of both unity and exclusion...
...3. Margarita Nolasco and Maria Luisa Acevedo, Los nihos de la frontera (QEspejismos de una nueva generaci6n...
...In the eyes of the academic, this totality of heterogeneous facts-these facts that "are not in their place"-lend themselves to the singular metaphor of blending...
...First, "national identity" is presented as something already completed and uniform in space and time as if it were a ready-towear suit...
...29-41...
...Leon-Portilla's insights did not have much of an echo in Mexican academia...
...the angelino is in Los Angeles or comes from Los Angeles, and so on...
...Jorge Bustamante, "Frontera M6xico-Estados Unidos, reflexiones para un marco te6rico," in Jose Manuel Valenzuela, ed., Decadencia y auge de las identidades (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1992), pp...
...Actually, the border inhabitants, as sociologist Pablo Vila contends, describe themselves in multiple and contradictory ways...
...Both are notable for being social and historical conditions that other regions of Mexico do not share...
...its story can only be told from and through the diffusion of these various points of view...
...15-27...
...In its short existence it has passed through at least five stages, which I would like to sketch here...
...Pablo Vila, "Sistemas clasificatorios y narrativas identitarias en Ciudad Juarez y El Paso," in Z0figa, ed., Voces, pp...
...1 4 In fact, no culture is closed and unitary, least of all border cultures...
...That," he said, "is because almost everything now is the same...
...A conversation I had with nine-year-old Jaime in Ciudad Juirez illustrates this point...
...Roger Rouse, Mexicano, chicano, pocho, la migraci6n mexicana y el espacio social del posmodernismo (Mexico City: Paginauno, Unomasuno, 1988...
...This approach is preoccupied with "losses": Mexicans living on the border are seen as obliged to speak English, use dollars, listen to North American radio programs, watch U.S...
...Jos6 Manuel Valenzuela, "Identidades culturales: Comunidades imaginarias y contingentes," in Valenzuela, ed., Decadencia, pp...
...Laura Velasco, "Voces indigenas: La rearticulaci6n del territorio y tiempo en las comunidades de migrantes," in ZO6iga, Voces, pp...
...Thus, to the degree that globalization, and communications have expanded greatly in recent decades, the border--a producer of new identities where almost everything fits-presages what is going to happen in many other regions of a postmodern world characterized by deterritorialization, multiple identities and blending...
...6 But later, the idea that border communities were best suited to defend Mexican culture began to take on nationalist overtones...
...There is a new unity: the unity that produces the mixture...
...It almost seems to be a game of action and reaction in a divided arena where the "other" is always different and always found on "the other side...
...The "insider" perspective and the program established by Miguel Leon-Portilla thus share the same ethnographic approach: to study the "border variants of Mexican culture" without a political or institutional agenda...
...1 2 And third, it was recognized that the border cannot be defined from only one side, but must be understood as a space of multiple interactions, as diffusion, as dispersion and emptying out.' 3 The critiques of previous approaches to border culture studies first recognized that the notions that have been used to construct descriptions of border life (tradition, otherness, identity, territory, etc...
...Since the "other" is inevitably the "North American," it follows, according to this logic, that Mexicans on the border-who are in daily contact with the "true concrete others"-will necessarily seek to differentiate themselves...
...The border, as seen through the eyes of these researchers, is a zone of high cultural risk...
...Mexico City: Ediciones Octano, 1985), p. 177...
...The external character of the observer is not a function of place of birth or residence, but rather of the position that the observer occupies and the public to whom s/he directs her/his work...
...N6stor Garcia Canclini, one of the leading writers within this school, says: "We find intercultural blending also in another group from Tijuana and the border, like the rockeros, cholos and punks, who edit magazines and produce records and cassettes with information and music from various continents...
...Jorge Bustamante, "La aceptaci6n de valores tradicionales es mayor en las ciudades nortehas," Cultura Norte, No...
...Now the geographic proximity distinguishes, differentiates, separates, clarifies...
...Jose Carlos Lozano, "Identidad nacional en la frontera norte," in Historia y Cultura, Vol...
...N6stor Garcia Canclini, "Escenas sin territorio," in Valenzuela, Decadencia, p. 128 11...
...Today, some argue it is a crucible of new, hybrid identities, while others suggest that it is a site of multiple and contradictory action not easily characterized by a single metaphor...
...59-80...
...The external nature of observation comes from an academic ritual in which the researcher gives name to those who have not been named...
...It is, in other words, a "deMexicanization," as it is defined from the center of power...
...Jos6 Manuel Valenzuela, "Las identidades nacionales frente al TLC," Sociol6gica, Vol...
...This new approach was, at first, timidly presented...
...1 6 Authors such as Laura Velasco have also brought to light the fact that border inhabitants of indigenous descent are building transborder images of their own communities in the south.17 At the same time, in contrast to the earlier approaches described in this essay, writers of this school do not stress the confrontation with the "other" or reproduce binary oppositions, but rather express multiple subjectivities that interact in very dynamic spaces.' 8 The other distinguishing feature of the "insider" perspective is that it does not consider the state or ruling elites as its public...
...9 (1998), pp...
...The criticism invites the recognition that the notions that we academics use make it impossible to represent a border society that does not define itself as unitary or exclusionary...
...1 5 The important thing is to recognize those narratives in all their contradiction, in their positive and negative facets, in their fluidity and construction.16 This school, which can be called the "insider perspective," tries to take seriously the fact that all inhabited borders include diffusion and exchange...
...Alicia Castellanos y Gilberto L6pez, "La influencia norteamericana en la cultura de la frontera norte de M6xico," in Roque Gonzalez Salazar, ed., La frontera norte (Mexico City: El Colegio de M4xico, 1981), pp...
...9 Researchers within this school of thought directed their attention to the production of new identities that they defined as such...
...51-75...
...In this approach, the border appears as a North American "Sise puede," ("Yes You Can"), by Malaquias Montoya...
...It was, rather, the focus that he adopted...
...Often, the "others" are Mexicans from the south, Mexican-Americans, "Tex-Mexes" and indigenous Mexicans...
...131 Jorge Arditi, "Dispersi6n, poder e identidad," in Z0Oiga, ed., Voces, pp...
...All Jn the late 1980s and early 1990s, some academics began to portray the border as the crucible of new identities, a kind of postmodern laboratory...
...What was so groundbreaking about LeonPortilla's work was not so much his conclusions, or even his historical and anthropological descriptions of the border region...
...zone of cultural influence...
...Guillermina Valdez, "La demistificaci6n de la frontera," in Jos4 Manuel Valenzuela, ed., Entre la magia y la historia (Mexico City: Programa Cultural de las Fronteras, 1992), pp...
...This school argued that Mexicans on the border are, culturally speaking, very Mexican...
...National identity is not the opposite of international identity," asserts Carlos Monsiviis, one proponent of this view, "but the method to internalize an international condition (life under savage capitalism...
...7 In this perspective, cultural and national identity emerges in the process of differentiating between "us" and "them...
...6. Amelia Malagamba, La television y su impacto en la poblaci6n infantil de Tijuana (Tijuana: CEFNOMEX, 1986...
...21 (1993), pp...
...119-142...
...The north [of Mexico] is almost the same as the United States, and the south is different...
...Otherwise, it would be impossible to talk about "penetrations...
...For him, that proximity is a historical fact that highlights the region's distinctiveness, but is no more or less important a piece of information than the extensive presence of the Jesuits during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...
...This discourse, like that of the "penetration" theorists, was directed at ruling elites, but not to indicate that border societies were culturally in jeopardy or valiantly defending national culture...
...Jorge Bustamante, "Identidad nacional en la frontera norte: Hallazgos preliminares," in Alfonso Corona Renterfa, ed., Impactos regionales de las relaciones econdmicas Mbxico-Estados Unidos (Mexico City: El Colegio de M4xico, 1984), pp...
...The vision of a "culturally invaded" border, it seems to me, is based on a naYve reification of national cultures...
...For LeonPortilla, the nortefia societies displayed characteristics that were a sui generis variant of Mexican culture...
...When asked why the north and south were different, Jaime explained that in northern Mexico, "America and Mexico are very close...
...3 According to this perspective, the authentic Mexico, located in central Mexico, is impervious to foreign "penetration...
...Socorro Tabuenca, Mujeres y fronteras, una perspectiva de g4nero (Chihuahua: Instituto Chihuahense de Cultura, 1998...
...Advocates of this perspective, which is rooted in nineteenth-century Mexican romantic nationalism, see their audience as the national government and its institutions...
...To the extent that they see themselves as different from the "North American," they will more easily recognize their own identity...
...On the contrary, the works that followed in the 1980s adopted a completely different approach, in which both methodology and analysis were rooted in a metaphor: the cultural "invasion...
...15-27...
...Observers are also external when they talk to border inhabitants from a position of academic power in order to fit them in one or more categories...
...Their specificity did not give rise to any political or cultural judgments...
...and Victor Z0figa, "Fronteras inter6tnicas," Revista Fronteras, No...
...Because of its distance from the center, the northern border is a zone that is particularly vulnerable to cultural invasion...
...289-310...
...This school, examined by Eduardo Barrera, conceives of the border as a unique territory where identities are transformed as a result of encounters and acts of resistance, mixtures and migrations, bonds and ruptures, giving way to new identities, new oppositions and "curious" symbolic co-existences...
...12-14...
...7. N~stor Garcia Canclini, Culturas Hibridas (Mexico City: GrijalboConaculta, 1989...
...9. Carlos MonsivAis, "La identidad nacional ante el espejo," in Valenzuela, ed., Decadencia, p. 72...
...Writing in the mid-1970s, Miguel Leon-Portilla was the first Mexican researcher to examine the nature of the culture in northern Mexico, what he called "nortefia society...
...19 The Changing Face of Border Studies 1. Miguel Leon-Portilla, Culturas en peligro (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1976...
...In other words, for Mexican border inhabitants, the "others" are not exclusively or principally Anglo-Saxon...
...49-66...
...Alicia Castellano, Ciudad Juarez, la vida fronteriza (Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1981...
...For academics writing from this perspective, the essential goal of describing this regional culture is precisely-often exclusively-the cultural subjugation of Mexico to North American influence...
...2. Jos4 Isabel Candelaria, "La americanizaci6n de la frontera Tamaulipeca," Revista Momento (Nuevo Laredo: 1987), pp...
...Tabuenca, Mujeres y fronteras...
...11-32...
...Carlos Monsivdis, "La cultura de la frontera," in Estudios fronterizos (Mexico City: Asociaci6n Nacional de Universidades e Instituciones de Educaci6n Superior, 1981), pp...
...27-46...
...As a result, they argue, the local media, schools, parents, neighborhood associations and other institutional actors should support the battle that Mexicans on the border wage "to avert the systematic destruction of ways of life, the system of values, and way of thinking of Mexicans as a whole who live there...
...In fact, as a methodological principle, it ignores the claims, goals and agendas of cultural policy...
...Jose Carlos Lozano, "Enfoques te6ricos para el estudio de la cultura en la frontera Mexico con Estados Unidos," Rio Bravo, a Journal of Borderlands, No...
...Clearly, border inhabitants want to participate in the definition of their own society...
...Despite its young age, border culture studies has emerged as a passionate field of study...
...The emerging border identities, according to these researchers, bring together dissimilar elements, forging new identities in the process...
...the rural is in the countryside or originates in the countryside...
...BY ViCTOR ZjNIGA hough research on the U.S.-Mexico border has a short history, the history of cultural studies of the border is even shorter...
...5. Nolasco and Acevedo, Los ninos de la frontera, p. 167...
...7-42...
...Instead, it aims to put its research at the service of the same actors that it claims to describe in an attempt to undermine the academic pretense of seeking, in Olympian fashion, to replace the voices of the producers of societies...
...36-49...
...1 0 By the late 1990s, a different focus emerged that sought to define the border culture starting from what Mexicans on the border say about themselves...
...Because they do not reproduce conceptual dichotomies, they create confusion among state actors whose function is to create borders and invent dichotomies...
...Alejandra Salas-Porras, "La frontera: una larga lucha por la independencia," in Alejandra Salas-Porras, ed., Nuestra frontera norte (Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1989), pp...
...These narratives do not fit into the canons of state concerns...
...3 (1991), pp...
...People go to El Paso to buy clothes," he said, "and here in Juirez, they are making clothes, just like in El Paso...
...Rather, the point was to show that the mixing of culture is the common fate of all open societies...
...If this is so, it is not possible to continue studying border societies "from the Mexican point of view" while ignoring the other points of view...
...There is no scientific rationale for this focus on "the culturally invaded" or "the risky" zone...
...4. Victor ZOriga, "Nations and Borders: Romantic Nationalism and the Project of Modernity," in David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, eds., The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities (Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), pp...
...Finally, the definition of national identity that underlies this perspective assumes that the "other" is in its place, like in scholastic maps, and, therefore, the "we" is like the national territory-united, contiguous, indivisible...
...Silkscreen, 1989...
...249-259...
...Everything is presented as if individuals have only to spontaneously select the identity that suited them and best represented their interests...
...8, No...
...At the moment when an individual migrates-changes places-and comes together with other individuals from other places, the space or place of this intermingling ushers in new identities...
...ery of the multiplicity of the "others" found on the border...
...This change is the likely result of the confluence of three factors...
...91-118...
...They then concluded that Mexicans on the border not only better resisted North American cultural "penetration," but also that they are more deeply attached to national traditions and values in natural reaction to the proximity of the "other...
...Victor Zfiiga, "Les Fonctions S64paratrices des Cat6gories de I'Espace: Enfants de la Frontibre Mexique/ltats-Unis," Revue Geographie et Culture (forthcoming in 1999...
...the North American is in the United States or comes from the United States...
...variant," are particularly guilty of such reification...
...Secondly, the inhabitants of the border demanded to define themselves, not be defined by outside observers...
...Pablo Vila, Angela Escajeda and Yvonne Montejano, "The Social Construction of Homogeneity and Heterogeneity on the U.S.Mexico Border," in Fernando Rodriguez, ed., Understanding Sociology through Multicultural Issues (Dubuque: Eddie Bowers Publishing, 1996) pp...
...My Relations," by Adriana Y. Gallego...
...The border contains many points of view...
...It emerges from a political and ethical framework that considers the "North Americanization" of Mexicans to be dangerous...
...Referring to the culture of this region as "a northern variant of Mexican culture," he introduced a notion that has considerable heuristic power...
...83-136...
...Margarita Nolasco and Marfa Luisa Acevedo, who assert that the border is a "long imaginary line" that divides "Latin culture in its Mexican variant" from "Anglo-Saxon culture in its U.S...
...Proponents of this view may not expect that state powers are going to welcome the new identities and cultural hybrids, but they hope to at least make them recognize that they are inevitable...
...Cultural exchange in the border region is viewed as surrender, loss and risk...
...68-84...
...Jorge Carrera, "Ciudad Juarez: Punta de lanza de las transnacionales," in Salas-Porras, ed., Nuestra frontera norte, pp...
...Academics writing in this perspective conceive of national cultures as solid, unambiguous entities that are correctly distributed across human space...
...103-150...
...Observers are external if they position themselves as judge, arbitrator or evaluator of whether or not border societies respect or reproduce Mexican national values...
...Advocates of this new perspective gathered evidence that made it possible to show that the border is a place of differentiation vis-a-vis the foreign, the "other...
...In relating the many ways in which the border is experienced and described by the border inhabitants, one is relating the unthinkable from the perspective of the canons of cultural policy or academic orthodoxy...
...Drawing on those sources that in my judgment are the most illustrative of each stage of border studies, it attempts to outline the conceptual, political and ethical bases of each of the different perspectives...
...Given its geographic position, each element enjoys, according to this analysis, an original purity...
...When I asked him whether he thought northerners were most like Mexicans in the south or those in El Paso, he chose the latter...
...32-36...
...Maya Lorena Perez, "Las identidades entre fronteras," in Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, ed., Nuevas identidades culturales en M4xico (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1993), pp...
...126-153...
...Observers are external if their discourses are directed at the centers of power or if they attempt to explain the cultural characteristics of border societies to those who produce institutional controls...
...7-15...
...television, support the spread of Anglo-Saxon religious institutions and make their purchases on the "other side...
...Victoria Novelo, "Fronteras imaginadas," in Z0higa, ed., Voces, pp...
...n reaction to the focus on "invasion," a wave of new studies emerged that sought to demonstrate the exact opposite of the "invasion" approach...
...35-55...
...2 (1980), pp...
...When I asked him how he viewed North Americans, Jaime responded: "Like us...
...This approach, I think, suffers from three sorts of theoretical na'fvet6...
...For that reason, these notions are incapable of accommodating what happens in regions where cultural dispersion is the most striking fact and where, as Jorge Arditi suggests, "cultures are not closed or unitary...
...NCstor Garcia Canclini, "Escenas sin territorio: Cultura de los migrantes e identidades en transici6n," in Valenzuela, ed., Decadencia, pp...
...Each of these elements is classified by its place of origin on the most simple scholastic map: the Brazilian is in Brazil or comes from Brazil...
...20-27...
...Luis Garcia Abusaid, Oferta cultural y audiencias (Saltillo: Instituto Coahuilense de Cultura, 1998...
...2 The emphasis on "invasion" produced a political and cultural rhetoric that insisted on safeguarding national traditions and values from the powerful North American penetration...
...His intent was simply to recognize the region's uniqueness, just as the uniqueness of the societies of Mexico's southeast, Centro-Occidente and Altiplano, were recognized...
...4 Their goal is to alert those responsible for the country's educational, cultural and communication policies to the dangers of U.S...
...Jorge Arditi, "Dispersi6n, poder e identidad," in ZOLriga, ed., Voces, pp...
...in the outskirts-the northern border-national culture is thinner...
...he simply recognized the uniqueness of northern culture, which had not been studied much and, as a result, was not widely known...
...cultural penetration...
...Leon-Portilla was not concerned about the fact that Mexico's northern region shares a border with the United States...
...The difference is that now national identity is not constructed from the center, but from the margins...
...8. Eduardo Barrera, Discursos emergentes de (desde/sobre) la frontera norte (Ciudad Juarez: ENTORNO, 1995), pp...
...5 With these conceptual dichotomies, it is very easy to draw the borders and build military metaphors...
...First, there was the criticism and self-criticism of different researchers...
...This is the only possible way to understand how we academics talk about invasion, defense, emergence and hybrid identities when referring to social actors who do not see themselves as invaded or defenders or newly emerged or hybrids...
...137-220...
...Second, the rejection of foreign (North American) culture is conceived of as the "natural" result of geographic proximity...
...Borders are defined precisely as the contiguity of many spatial and historical sides in which many codes co-exist and come in conflict...
...In other words, the spotlight focused on the "new we's" that, at least on the surface, are characteristic of border society...
...8 This literature points to one main conclusion: The border is a zone where hybrid identities are produced by very diverse and heterogeneous cultural crosscutting...
Vol. 33 • November 1999 • No. 3
