Version originale américaine de art105, rub22
1. Borders and Trade Routes
Old (pre-Colombian) economic and political forces, along with the physical geography of the Chihuahuan desert channel the flow of water, goods and people through a pass in the mountains where the sprawling city of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez now stands. Today, the river (the Rio Grande or Rio Bravo depending on which of its sides you live) sustains a population of nearly three million people as it dribbles through our city along a series of concrete troughs. From El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, the river also marks the political border between the United States and Mexico. Consequently, the concrete troughs that “regularize” the river and the border around El Paso-Ciudad Juárez also serve as a kind of high-tech moat between the two countries, permanently illuminated, monitored and militarized by the administrative agencies of the United States government.
Reflections on life in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez are inevitably informed by the peculiar ontological status of maps and borders. Perhaps at first, in the spirit of globalization, one may be tempted to dismiss the border dividing our city as a shallow theatrical play of symbols. The vestige of an age when states were more than they are today. From this perspective, the border is a mere line on the map, whose significance consists of nothing but a series of eyesores along the river and the repeated rituals residents of this city endure on the bridges. With the exception of those intoxicated by nationalist or racist delusions, most El Pasoans and Juárences realize that the ritual and heavy-handed posturing which marks the crossings here and in the other border cities is primarily for show. The illusion of a controlled and orderly system around the border cities acts as a way of calming American fears of a flood of poor brown bodies without actually interrupting the flexible supply of cheap labor that fuels large parts of the US economy. The smuggling of drugs and people into the United States is barely interrupted by any of the measures which grab the attention of visitors to the border. Everyone who lives in these cities is aware that a few miles outside of town there is little, if any, real barrier to crossing between the United States and Mexico.
Live here long enough and the border with its layers of razor wire, dogs, surveillance and armed guards, is likely to slip into banality. Soon, long lines of traffic or pedestrians and the arbitrariness of border guards becomes part of life. Drivers eat their breakfasts, study or apply their make-up as they sit in cars waiting to cross into the United States. For most of us in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez there is nothing especially sexy or scary about the border. It has slipped into the background of the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who cross the bridges in this city every year.
Despite its banality for people who deal with it on a regular basis, the border is an ever-present feature of our conversations and practical dealings. Residents of this city feel, in a more pronounced manner than most, the consequences of the forces at play in international politics and capital. The attack on New York and DC, for example, meant three-hour delays at the border, more than the usual harassment of the city’s population and imposing symbolic displays of military power. While the effects of the current arrangements of capital and power are magnified along the post-NAFTA border, we find it just as difficult to recognize or understand these forces as anyone else interested in contemporary politics. We have no privileged access to the truth about globalization.
In the absence of an effective theoretical framework for understanding what happens on the border, our attention tends towards the facts of daily life. One cannot help but be keenly aware of the genuine human suffering which exists along the border. For us, any attempt at theoretical reflection takes place in the shadow of exploitation, drudgery and murder. And while a border is an essentially fictional kind of entity, this border plays a very real part in the dozens of deaths of migrants travelling through the deserts of the Southwest each year. Many die confused or lost, abandoned or abused by unscrupulous smugglers, their cars failing in the desert, or by some other misfortune. These are some of the obvious casualties of a system which conveys large numbers of migrant laborers to the hotels of Las Vegas, the fields of California, the kitchens of Chicago or New York, and the slaughterhouses of the American South and mid-West. Like poor people everywhere, migrants from Mexico and Central America are subject to serious risks as they’re pushed and pulled by the forces of the labor market. This plight was horrifyingly illustrated by the discovery this October of eleven dead migrants in a railcar that had traveled from Matamoros to Iowa. The migrants’ ill-fated journey began four months earlier when they smuggled themselves into that railcar in early June. Their bodies were discovered at a grain silo a thousand slow miles later. Our anger and outrage at the injustice which subjects people to such conditions is not soothed by theoretical reflection or by economic/political explanations or analysis.
The disgusting events which regularly unfold along the US-Mexico border are only intermittently covered by US or Mexican media and seldom reach the attention of the broader international media. In part, perhaps, this is due to their depressing frequency and systematicity. You should know, for example, of the ritual serial killings of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez. This has become a feature of life here. Black crosses on rectangular pink backgrounds are painted on walls and lampposts throughout the city in memory of the women who have been mutilated, raped and killed in the deserts at the edge of Ciudad Juárez. These are crimes which have gone unsolved and in which, according to many, the police are directly involved. It is difficult, given the seriousness of our situation, to write about life here in a philosophical tone. And yet our proximity to the perversities and wonders of the border makes it just as difficult to avoid political and philosophical reflection.
2. Learning from El Paso
It’s likely that most of us come to know the city from the inside of a car. Both because of our reliance on our cars in this city that sprawls across unnecessarily large portions of the Chihuahuan desert and because of the strange ways that travel by car shapes our experience. It has been thirty years since Robert Venturi drew our attention to the effect that cars have on our perception of cities in his book Learning from Las Vegas. His general insight is amply confirmed on the border. Consider for instance, Interstate Highway 10 (I-10) which cuts through El Paso as it wends its way from Florida to California passing through the other new cities of the American Southwest. Meandering parallel to, but for the most part at a distance from, the Mexican border, I-10 moves cars and goods through the new political and economic center of the United States. Only in El Paso, does I-10 come close to touching the border that makes much of this new growth possible. Seconds after passing the towers and hotels of downtown, the eight lanes of highway skirt the border for a few moments before heading North to El Paso’s westside. At this point, drivers catch a glimpse of the fences, the trickle of river, and then, across the river to the Ciudad Juárez neighborhood of Anapra. Travelling at about 120kmh, steeped in racist and xenophobic attitudes towards Mexico, many Americans will report seeing something like the following:
“Driving south to El Paso you come over a rise and the first thing you see is a vast sprawling city choking the Rio Grande valley. If you were on vacation and had never been there before, you would think El Paso is a much larger city than what your map indicates. But as you descend further and draw nearer you notice the rat maze of shacks covering the hillside along the valley and realize it looks like no other American city you have ever seen before. Then you grasp the reality. The hillside is Mexico. The rat maze of shacks is a cardboard colonia.” (Scott Rogerson, The Weekly Alibi (2/3/99) Albuquerque, NM)
As I write this, I have just returned from the parking lot at the place where I work. This parking lot overlooks the stretch of highway described by this author and I can assure you that there are no cardboard shacks visible from I-10. While there certainly are neighborhoods in Ciudad Juárez (and El Paso) where people live in houses they build themselves, the neighborhood described by this author as a “rat maze”, at least the part visible from the highway, is certainly not among them. This author (who, later in the article, we learn believes himself to be a leftist) is simply hallucinating. At 120 kmh fantasy fills the gaps in perception and somehow drivers like Rogerson can confidently speak of having witnessed the third world in all its bestial degradation. He’s not alone in mistakenly thinking that he has “grasped the reality” of the border. Even many drivers who live in El Paso or commute from the suburbs will adopt an authoritative tone when they tell you that there are no paved roads in Anapra or that they’ve seen people living in shacks.
Anapra is an old, ad hoc community, which rather than flattening out the countless little hills and valleys for the sake of traffic, consists of houses and stores built around and between them. In the golden glow of an El Paso sunset someone less inclined to “rat maze” style rhetoric might even be charmed by the view from I-10, (if it were not for the enormous smokestacks of the 150 year old Asarco smelter on the US side of the river). If Rogerson had slowed his car down and had looked a little more closely, he might have noticed the interesting and often quite large houses, the expensive cars and the children playing football on the river- bank. From the comfort of his car, and feeling the protection and privilege of the border, he has replaced the football pitch, the modern supermarket, and the Sport Utility Vehicles in the driveways of brightly colored houses with a rat maze Mexico that justifies his combined sense of superiority and fear.
If he had actually visited Anapra, seen parts of the neighborhood away from the highway, he would certainly have seen some serious poverty mixed in with lower-middle class and middle class Mexican families. He might even have seen some cardboard houses. But from the highway, all he saw were his fantasies of American superiority.
3. Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future
Rogerson’s thoughtless comments are symptomatic of a failure of imagination in the American left. With respect to Mexico, and the so-called third-world more generally, this failure is exemplified by a book that appeared in 1998 entitled Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (Rogerson’s comments actually feature in a review of this book). From the book’s title one can guess its message and intended audience. Ciudad Juárez is the nightmare future for us North Americans unless we can control the evils of globalization. Understood properly, its content could be very valuable – the book is a collection of depressing photographs taken in Ciudad Juárez by Mexican journalists in the 90’s. As a catalogue of abuses and violence, it is an accurate and welcome document. However, while many of the images are moving and deeply disturbing, the overall effect of the selection and particularly the accompanying texts is to create the impression that “in Juárez,” as Bowden writes, “you cannot sustain hope.” This is a mistaken conclusion generated by showing the subjects of these photographs as though they are deprived of any trace of agency. To lose hope is to fail to see possibilities for change. And one can easily fail to see positive possibilities when one is in the thrall of apocalyptic models of globalization of the kind articulated by Noam Chomsky in the foreword of Bowden’s book. While it may serve certain laudable leftist goals to sensationalize the problems of the border, there is something profoundly offensive in the dehumanizing portrayal of Mexicans one finds in this book. Their condition as victims of the faceless metaphysical specter of global capitalism is emphasized to the point where, if one were to believe Bowden’s bleak vision, no agency and no hope would be possible for the population of Ciudad Juárez.
It is worth comparing a book like this with, for example, the approach taken by Dickens, Steinbeck and other reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who sought to help their readers identify with the poor by crafting believable and sympathetic characters. Perhaps the most telling contrast with Bowden’s book would be Walker Evans’ photographic portrayal of poverty in Appalachia. Evans’ portraits successfully helped Americans to recognize themselves in the faces of the people he portrayed. Bowden’s book, by contrast, reinforces well-entrenched fears and differences in the service of a simple-minded, anti-corporate agenda. American and European corporations are certainly complicit in the environmental and social destruction that has accompanied growth on the border. However, my advice to readers of political and social conditions on the border would be to leave their simple prepackaged Chomskian explanations at the airport. Observers should really let this city be the laboratory Bowden claims he finds. In this laboratory one can see a variety of ways of living with the current transnational order. Some are more successful than others, but then this is the nature of the complexity and adaptability of human life.
When historians record the history of Ciudad Juárez it is likely to be a very complicated and very Mexican story of class distinctions, of competing elites, of the overwhelming power of the drug cartels and the self-assertion of the Mexican middle-class. While transnational corporations are an unavoidable presence on the border, they are only part of the story. It is a gross distortion, born of the kind of American arrogance we see in writers like Rogerson to reduce a city like Ciudad Juárez to the simple status of corporate whore.
By appealing for an end to simplistic portrayals of the border I should not be read as accepting the equally illusory dreams of neo-liberal commentators like Thomas Friedman who see globalization as a kind of universal salve. The border is full of companies ready to exploit the conditions they find in Mexico. When corporations who wish to keep their employees from becoming pregnant, require women to show their supervisor a bloody tampon as proof that they are menstruating, this is the kind of humiliation that even Thomas Friedman would recognize. However, this frequently cited atrocity is also complicated by further investigation. The reason some corporations ask their female employees to undergo this humiliation is so that they can avoid having to comply with laws which entitle women to receive six weeks of paid maternity leave and other benefits. By US standards this is an extremely generous provision of Mexican law. More deeply, the humiliation and abuse of maquiladora workers is wrapped up with some distinctively Mexican problems. Workers in the maquilas are mostly women from darker, more indigenous regions of Southern Mexico and as such, autochthonous Mexican misogyny and racism make fertile ground for their abuse and neglect by American and European corporations. While we should hold executives of American and Europeans to account for their behavior, we should not elevate them to the status of metaphysical forces of nature sweeping through Mexico like locusts. The current state of the border results from a process of negotiation and a competition of interests which, while unjust, is neither inevitable nor impossible to change.
4. Border Games
It surprises many otherwise well-informed people in the United States that the vast majority of Mexicans who cross the border into cities like El Paso and San Diego do so legally and return to Mexico later the same day. The idea that millions of Mexicans are being held at bay by the border system is simply false. Of course, this is a highly convenient fantasy for those who are interested in getting votes or in increasing the resources devoted to border patrol, INS and other administrative agencies. Like so much of US public policy, the growing administrative infrastructure of the border (the workforce of the INS, border patrol and customs service on the border tripled in the 90’s) is fueled by a carefully cultivated fear in the American public. This fear manifests itself in the xenophobia of figures like Pat Buchanan on the right, but also in much of the anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the left. For an excellent book on the development of the current border regime under Bill Clinton, see Peter Andreas’ Border Games: Policing the U.S.- Mexico Divide. Andreas skillfully documents the political usefulness of the notion of an America besieged by Mexicans both for administrative agencies eager to fatten their budgets, and for figures like the former California governor Pete Wilson. He also shows how the illusion of a tightly controlled border co-exists with the growing supply and demand for drugs and migrant labor in the United States.
For those needing to cross the border illegally, there exists a system for insuring oneself against risk. One can hire the services of an experienced smuggler. Of course, the risks and costs of crossing the border have risen considerably since NAFTA, but for most illegal migrants this simply means that they will make fewer trips back to Mexico. The border game has been as insignificant a barrier to the export of labor from Mexico and Central America as it has been to the drug trade.
Andreas and others have commented on the co-evolution of the smuggling businesses and the administrative agencies that operate on the border in the 90’s. In its crudest form, it is as simple as this: if one wishes to bring illegal drugs into the United States one can find a customs agent who will happily accept a bribe to wave your truck through a checkpoint. Consider the following tale from John Burnett’s recent investigation of corruption among US customs agents and border patrol:
In one high-profile case, a Customs Service agent won accolades for leading a task force that seized more than 100 tons of marijuana over four years. But a two-year investigation revealed that the agent conspired with a drug trafficker to arrange for some drug shipments to be seized while other, more lucrative shipments made it safely into the United States.
“The anti-drug agent and the drug smuggler — who called each other compadre — each got what they wanted,”… The smuggler earned fabulous profits, and the agent won awards and the respect of his peers. (http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/sept/border_corruption/)
In this case we find a microcosm of the connection between the administrative agencies which support the border system and the narcotraffickers and people smugglers for whom the risks involved in crossing the border are simply calculated into the price of doing business.
5. Fronterizos
As mentioned previously, most of those who cross the border from Mexico do so legally. Mexicans who live in the border region are (for a fee) entitled to apply for border crossing card which permits them to move back and forth with relative freedom. Perhaps it would horrify many Americans to know that Mexicans in their thousands drive and walk back and forth across the border every day. Perhaps they would even be puzzled as to why these Mexicans wouldn’t want to stay in paradise when they get here. It’s best not to let the Pat Buchanans of the world know what’s going on.
For those of us interested in understanding contemporary politics, the bright yellow license plates on a good portion of the cars in El Paso – Ciudad Juárez hint at something significant. These “Fronterizo” plates mark cars which have been bought in the United States and registered in the state of Chihuahua. The plates mean that you bought your car without paying the steep taxes and duties to which cars bought in Mexico are subject. There are drawbacks to this arrangement. For instance, fronterizo cars must pay a fee to travel into the interior of Mexico. And yet, this very restriction to el veintiocho, the 28 kilometer zone along the border, is itself an indication of an emerging new kind of life. The fronterizo plates mark an administrative compromise to a way of life which is neither the depressing desperation of the migrant worker, nor is it the jet-setting existence of the globalized professional and managerial class.
Jet-setters and migrant laborers are the kinds of nomad that have featured prominently in, for example, the discussion surrounding Antonio Negri’s subtle and insightful recent discussions of globalization. The Fronterizo is a third kind of transnational creature who fits neatly within the optimistic model of globalization contained in his recent work. The Fronterizo is the product of a kind of everyday accommodation to the realities of a transnational existence without necessarily being dislocated by or subject to those realities. Living on either side of the border, the Fronterizo has both the comforts of home and the multi-lingual and multi-cultural benefits of globalization. In spite of the hardships and obstacles faced on the border, cultural products of the border cities, from Nortec in Tijuana to the work of artists like Willy Varela, Ben Saenz and countless others in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez attest to the fertility of the homey transnational existence enjoyed by the Fronterizos.
But this is not a condition to be enjoyed solely by those who live within 28 km of the border. The Fronterizo can function as an ideal for anyone who wishes to abandon the stupidity of nationalist and racist systems of thought without accepting the neo-liberal dreams of the jet setters and without accepting the wrenching dislocations of the migrant laborer. A Fronterizo need not see himself as a victim of the forces of global capital and power, and yet will recognize that his life is organized by, and accommodated to, that system. In a sense one could sum up the Fronterizo (at least as they are found in this part of the world): They are provincial, but at the same time multi-lingual, multi-national and multi-racial. The border itself has produced the co-existence of these traits in the people who live here and hence, they are at home on the border.
And yet, not everyone who lives along the border is a Fronterizo. Long before regulations that created the tight-seeming NAFTA-border, trams ran across the bridges and El Pasoans would regularly go for lunch on Avenida Juárez across the river. Because of the delay at the bridges and the disappearance of transnational public transportation, lunch in Juarez is now out of the question for the workers of downtown El Paso. While the inconvenience of the border crossings has provided a practical division between the cities, perhaps this division is felt more strongly on the American side of the border. While citizens of Ciudad Juárez can legitimately see themselves as an important part of Mexican life and culture, El Pasoans live in little more than an outpost of the United States. The newly reinforced border has had the paradoxical effect of keeping many Americans in. In certain quarters on the US side, even among Mexican Americans who one might assume would know better, there is a staggering level of paranoia and anger directed towards Mexico. Ciudad Juárez has come to be seen as a dangerous and threatening presence by some. The effect has been the creation of a gated-community mentality among many on the US side. The striking thing about gated communities is how little protection they actually afford their residents. Like the US-Mexico border, the gates are little more than an illusion. The political danger facing the United States is that it will follow the model of the gated community, spinning a combination of fear and the illusion of superiority into a kind of prison for its residents.
