Suchergebnisse

Passage/prohibition -- Overview -- The line -- Inés's "I" -- The assembly plant -- The place where anything can happen -- "They say" in the country club -- Prohibition/passage -- Overview -- Clase media and pueblo before the law -- The visa interview -- Passes -- The street is a river -- The stone.

Tijuana is the largest of Mexico's northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States' dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it nonetheless remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In 'Passing', Rihan Yeh probes the border's role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana's communal sense of 'we' and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.

AbstractIn 2018, amid US president Donald Trump's ongoing calls to "build the wall" along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump's campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump's call to "build the wall," I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the "we" it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the border exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.

AbstractIn Tijuana, Mexico, middle‐class desires for an open border with neighboring San Diego, California, are riddled with tensions and contradictions that derive from the way in which local ideals of citizenship are entangled with securitized US entry protocols: legal access to the US is basic for local belonging. This article examines the limitations that haunt both these tijuanenses' nostalgic memories of free passage in the past and their projects to reestablish it in the future. The most glaring contradiction, I argue, lies in the forgetting of the predicament of those without authorization to cross the border, even as expedited legal passage is invested with political hopes for a more just future. The article focuses on young, highly binational professionals, whose socioeconomic and legal privilege puts them in the vanguard of the tensions of an emerging global regime of citizenship to which "flexible" borders are key.

AbstractThis article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico–U.S. border through jokes told about and around checkpoint encounters—most centrally, those staged at the main port of entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California. In Tijuana, I argue, U.S. state recognition validates the proper, middle-class citizenship of Mexicans resident in Mexico. Attitudes towards the United States, however, remain ambivalent. I begin by exploring the checkpoint jokes of drug-traffickers as represented in severalnarcocorridos(popular ballads about drug-trafficking). Though this music is disapproved of by most people invested in U.S. state recognition, I show next how middle-class jokes build on the trope of the trickster-trafficker to parry state interpellation. The jokes work as performative arguments where people begin to articulate the tensions that constitute citizenship and sovereignty at the border. Finally, I examine the consular interview for the U.S. Border Crossing Card, a key site knitting together U.S. and Mexican regimes of citizenship. Folk theories of how the interview works anticipate the jokes' bald thematization of duplicity, explaining why middle-class people would turn to jokes that frame them as traffickers. Understood in the context of the BCC interview, middle-class checkpoint jokes reveal Mexican citizenship as embedded in an international system organized not by principles of authentic identity, but by ambivalence, contradiction, and undecidability.

In Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, dollars and pesos, English and Spanish, US and Mexican commodities circulate apace. Moving beyond both the old fascination with transnational flows and the emphasis on enforcement and prohibition in current research on international borders, this article examines the everyday pragmatics involved in engaging these disparate forms. In multiple contexts and for varied reasons, actors draw them together as sets of commensurables, attempting to claim equivalence between two national regimes of value and thus consolidate their own standing with respect to a range of interlocutors. But even as they do so, their forceful assertions of commensurability feather apart in the face of a persistent remainder which they themselves evoke: the excess value that may attach to US forms, a qualitative difference that seems to fly in the face of comparability. As this inequality emerges in moments of circulation (display, exchange, ascription of possession to others, and so on), it disrupts even the most quotidian attempts at arithmetic conversion, literal translation, or the seemingly straightforward practicalities of purchase. Not all, however, are equally positioned to reap the interactive benefits of either commensuration or the sense of disproportion that interrupts it. By tracking how different subjects move between those two possibilities, the article opens a novel perspective on the complex interweaving of social difference across the border and within Mexico.

A series of ethnographic examples, all related to a demonstration at the International Port of Entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego, California, show the importance for Tijuana's public sphere of the distinction between documented and undocumented status vis-à-vis the United States. They also show how Tijuana's documented public reproduces itself across a range of communicative genres and sites, from a newspaper poll, to face-to-face dialogue, to the local baseball stadium, to the port of entry itself.

This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of a concept of commensuration that goes beyond issues of metrics per se, but without diffusing itself into a general metaphor for cultural difference. Commensuration, we argue, is not just a basic psychosocial process, but has also emerged, in the context of "globalization" with its multifarious and wide-ranging flows, as an ideological value in its own right. Explicit negotiations of commensuration, then, have become increasingly fraught, increasingly pivotal practices as group boundaries of all sorts—separating ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, nations, or "civilizations"—are relentlessly re-erected and re-arranged on the miniscule ethnographic scale of everyday engagements with semiotic forms marked as coming from beyond those boundaries. After laying out the nuts and bolts of our approach, we explore commensuration (and introduce the subsequent collection of essays) via three topical foci: commensuration's role in securing movement as a semiotic effect; how sovereign power authorizes commensuration and thus comes to be at stake in it; and, finally, the destabilizing and yet productive ways in which failure haunts commensurative projects.