Americanism/o: Intercultural Border Zones in Postsocial Times

Abstract

In what follows I propose a specific understanding of what I consider one of the most important forms of actually existing Americanism/o1 today. In the context of an entry on this keyword on inter-American relations, there were other potentially viable ways of approaching the subject, including doing the genealogy of the discourses and the practices that have shaped the historical relations between the frenemies of North and South, from Nuestra America to America Latina, from Manifest Destiny or American Exceptionalism to Good Neighbor and Free Trade Agreements policies.2 Instead, my interest here is to define this form of Americanism/o as the internalized border zones in which what used to be geographically distant forms of geopolitics (Third and First Worlds) find spaces of reproduction and transformation inside the United States. I am referring to US-based, everyday life spaces such as the city corner where day laborers seek daily employment and survival, the soccer field in which immigrants and nonimmigrants face each other on a more leveled plain, the condition of so-called American Dreamers or undocumented students, the agricultural field in which migrants produce and harvest the foods we eat, and, finally, the back of the restaurant in which they prepare our meals and wash our dishes. In all these spaces, a form of intercultural contact and friction takes place under hierarchical conditions suffused with mutual fear and distrust. I define the political economy context of such spatialized relative social inclusion and exclusion in this form of Americanism/o as the postsocial condition (more on this later). However, the political possibilities of such zones of Americanism/o to affect inter-American intercultural relations are immense, both inside and outside the United States.