Border Crossing

Abstract

In this autoethnography, I share a snapshot from a research trip I took with my husband Dan to Mexico in 2006 seeking stories from the “other side.” I wanted to talk to the families of the Mexican women I had worked with in my own US city for the past seven years to find out the effect the women's emigration had on the transnational families who remained on the other side of the border. I heard many stories from the Mexican families, and I also experienced my own story when Dan and I were threatened with arrest at the border by Mexican immigration officials who canceled our passports and called us “illegals”. I refer to my journal entries to create data poems, connecting the “autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). Thus I am able to perform a poem that features “concrete action, self-consciousness, and introspection” (p. xix) to make a statement in “tension with dominant expressions of discursive power” (Neumann, 1996, p. 189). I choose to use images to “[set] a scene, [tell] a story, [weave] intricate connections between life and art” (Jones, 2005, p. 765).