Reviews
The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities edited by David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, Lynne Reinner, 1999, 264 pp., $55.00 (cloth). Borderless Borders: U.S....
...economy and the economic status of U.S...
...The result is impeccably researched history made current and more meaningful by first-rate reporting...
...Nor do we have to go back to Tenochtitlin...
...The presence of "Turkey in Germany, Morocco in France, Mexico in the U.S.," comments Victor Ziifiiga, a contributor to the The U.S.-Mexico Border, "has surprised societies and given rise to a questioning of the reality and fiction of borders...
...In the same book, Julie Murphy-Erfani's perceptive discussion of the "internal borders" of Los Angeles refreshes our memories of ancient internal borders with its opening epigraph from Eduardo Galeano called "Mexico City, 1650: The Conquerors and the Conquered...
...This is not altogether unreasonable...
...There may be no better way to explain the troubled territoriality, the competitiveness, the political manipulations, the machismo and the violence inherent in the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
...The book argues for cross-border (interdisciplinary) research and for crossborder politics...
...The border," comment the editors in their introduction to The U.S.Mexico Border, "now represents a global crossroads in which the forces of world historical change" make themselves known in people's "lives and ways of life...
...Observers of U.S...
...Novel or not, the conceptual removal of the border from its geographical location is a very effective organizing theme for Borderless Borders...
...That seems to be the overarching political message of these two books...
...The book is lush with detail and analysis...
...labor markets, for example, have long written about the barriers to opportunity reinforced by well-guarded "ports of entry" into "internal labor markets...
...To do both is a complicated task involving two political morasses, three or four languages and various forms of Vodou...
...Latino population, he argues, as a group "sent north" by Latin American poverty and marginalized by its heavy non-citizen status, the most useful bridge to democratic participation is an internal crossborder "affirmation by identity...
...The uncertainty of the cockfight is a telling way to show this turn of fortune, a history Wucker ably underscores with smaller, more subtle scenes which serve as striking reminders of the shift...
...Wucker also skillfully demonstrates the loss of balance and the identity crises that arise when two societies with different cultures share not only an island but a history in which the past's winner is today's loser...
...Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola by Michele Wucker, Hill and Wang, 1999, 281 pp., $27.50 (cloth) Most foreign journalists in Hispaniola report on either the Dominican Republic or Haiti...
...On the other hand, porous borders have a long history and neither book is altogether convincing on the novelty of "internal borders...
...Latinos, Latin Americans and the Paradox of Interdependence edited by Frank Bonilla, Edwin Meldndez, Rebecca Morales and Maria de los Angeles Torres, Temple University Press, 1998, 290 pp., $69.95 (cloth), $22.95 (paper...
...And for the U.S...
...The situation was never a comfortable one and to this day Dominican Independence Day celebrates freedom from Haiti, not Spain...
...There is the resonance of Rafael Trujillo's 1939 massacre of Haitians, the eerie similarities between the Dominican and Haitian leftist reformers Juan Bosch and Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the curious staying power of the ancient Joaquin Balaguer and the horrific conditions on plantation-like bateys...
...These writers ask "the border" to stand in for moments of social encounter and resistance, areas of hybrid culture, and barriers to social mobility...
...The border, the two collections argue, has come to represent not simply a line separating two countries, but a place at which a wide variety of differences meet...
...Today Haitians-once the occupiers and aggressors-live in the Dominican Republic as an immigrant underclass...
...But the surprise has come only to societies with short memories...
...Ethnicity has always been a handy way to differentiate populations into various categories, and in this age of globalscale labor mobility, these divisions are very often superimposed on borders...
...Latinos must all go together...
...writer Michele Wucker was armed as well as anyone could be for such a task...
...Modern liberalism has long encouraged the segmentation of opportunity, typically along lines of race, ethnicity and gender...
...In 1793, Haitian slaves revolted and, in the tangled events of the decades that followed, Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic from 1822 until 1844...
...Both books, for example, couch their discussions of the competing claims of ethnic and interest groups and the social consequences of class in terms of "borders...
...She speaks Spanish, Kreyol and French, and plunged in with a useful cultural perspective: She has relatives in Belgium, another small place with its own divisions...
...This is then rendered lyrical by the use of an apt metaphor: the cockfight...
...The word "represents" is key here...
...Manuel Pastor convinces us in an essay called "Interdependence, Inequality and Identity," that an understanding of Latin American development, the dynamics of the U.S...
Vol. 33 • November 1999 • No. 3
