La luna siempre será un amor difícil: Bordering on Consuming (and) Nationalizing Narratives

Abstract

Paul Fallon is Assistant Pro fessor of Spanish at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. His areas of interest include the contemporary narratives of greater Mexico, border studies, and critical theory. He is revising his disserta tion, Borderline Tactics: Negotiations of Community, Subjectivity, Nation, and Agency in Temporal Repre sentations in Northern Mexi can Border Narratives, into a book manuscript. He is also currently investigating the representations of youth and the development of electronic media in Mexico. The spare, static certainty of the aphorisms Time is and History is obscures the un stable, abstract concepts that constitute them. Along the Mexico-U.S. border, the last thirty-five years have brought rapidly increasing industrialization, urbanization, and transnational investment, often promoted as modernizing progress for Mexico. Yet those living in the region negotiate the variables of the aphoristic equations on a personal (and, occasionally, a collective) level. They barter their time at unfavorable exchange rates, and assess their histories by the satisfaction of subjective desires and basic necessities. Perhaps no border residents struggle more directly with how versions of modernity and progress are cast in terms of time and money than maquiladora workers. Personal accounts of these workers have been collected in several recent works. In the testimonial collection, La flor m?s bella de la maquiladora, Angela, one such worker, tells a story of a daily struggle to control her time and improve her economic situ ation. After moving to Tijuana from the town of Comala in West-central Mexico, she gets a factory job. At work, she faces constant pressure to produce rapidly: si no lo hago rapido no saco el estandar, me pongo nerviosa y me reganan (FMB 35).1 Yet rather than submit, she negotiates the tem poral demands on her own terms: