Ethnography at the border

Pablo Vila

U of Minnesota Press, 2003 - History - 345 pages

For cultural theorists, "the border" has proven a fluid and hybrid space profitably explored for new ideas about identity, gender, and ethnicity. But for those who occupy this region, the border is not merely a metaphor, but a lived experience, yielding immediate, often pressing ambiguities, problems, and perils. Focusing on a particular area of the U.S.-Mexico border, Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, Ethnography at the Border brings out the complexity of the border experience through the voices of the diverse people who inhabit the region. In a series of ethnographic essays that investigate specific aspects of border existence, the contributors provide rich and detailed insights into such topics as life in illegal subdivisions, called colonias, in Texas; the experience of actually crossing the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez; the impact of Operation Blockade on illegal crossings; the controversy surrounding El Paso Border Patrol's proposal for a border wall in Sunland Park; the paradoxes of making "American products" using Mexican workers; and the relevance of grassroots efforts, environmental problems, and the multiple meanings of "Mexican." The final chapter offers a critique of the all too metaphorical border often depicted by cultural studies. Painstakingly conveying how the border looks and feels to those on both sides, Ethnography at the Border transmutes statistics on migration, labor markets, and economic trends--as well as conceptualizations of cross-cultural identities--into the experience, the observations, and the troubling lessons of border life.

Contents

• Reflections from the Bridge: 1
• Gender Nationality and Value in: 23
• Making Subjects: 46
• Gender and the Overlapping of Region Nation and Ethnicity: 73
• The Polysemy of the Label Mexican on the Border: 105
• The Making: 141
• An Intertextual Reading of the Border: 166
• Blockade or Operation Charade?: 182
• Democratic Debate versus: 199
• El Paso as an Eternal Yet Not Last Frontier: 236
• A Social: 251
• The Rearticulation of the Border Territory in the Stories: 279
• The Limits of American Border Theory: 306
• Contributors: 343

About the author

Pablo Vila is Professor of Sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He conducted this study from 1991 to 1997, while teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Ethnography at the border; Volume 13 of Cultural studies of the Americas
• Editor: Pablo Vila
• Publisher: U of Minnesota Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0816640343, 9780816640348
• Length: 345 pages
• Subjects: History / Latin America / Mexico; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Hispanic American Studies; Social Science / Sociology / General