Demystifying the United States--Mexico Border

Abstract

My interest in exploring borders as a way to understand cultures, particularly American and Mexican cultures, goes back to my childhood. I grew up in the border state of Chihuahua. I was fascinated when I was told that the border city of CiudadJua1rez was full of sinful activities and not a place for children. I developed this fascination into my professional interest when I made Mexican immigration to the United States my major subject of research in graduate school. When I had to go to the United States to study sociology (because there was no doctoral program in Mexico and the University of Notre Dame offered to support my studies), I concentrated on Mexican immigration to the United States. My research took me back to the border, where I did fieldwork. Immigration represents a window through which one sees how people live between cultures. In the movements of people between Mexico and the United States, we see the Mexican and American economies and cultures as well as how individuals survive, aspire, and adapt. My interest in immigration shaped my larger interest in border studies. While I was doing fieldwork in the late 1960s, I realized that the border provided a distinct place to study different cultures. It was a place of contrast between two cultures and economies, but it was also a place where people worked out everyday accommodations between those cultures. It was the place where nationalists imposed their prejudices, but it was also a place where pragmatists developed a spirit of solving problems and getting along. By the late 1970s I believed that Mexicans could better understand the United States and contribute to solving problems shared by both countries from the vantage point of the border itself. I began to advocate a perspective called border studies, which could be advanced best at the border. In Mexico City, scholars and officials studied national institutions, political parties, businesses, and cultures. The study of the United States and Mexico was primarily the study of their foreign policies and the relations between the two nation-states. At first many in Mexico City were suspicious that a border perspective would challenge the national approach to scholarship and culture, but we created el Colegio de la Frontera Norte as a place to put scholarship in touch with the daily interactions at the border. Now people in Mexico City have accepted the border perspective as an important way to understand the United States and the relations between the United States and Mexico.