Remapping the Border: Taxation, Territory, and (Trans) National Identity at the Mexico—Guatemala Border

Abstract

This paper examines how rural communities on a clandestine road crossing the Mexico—Guatemala border stake claim over this route while delegitimizing state control. Each community delimits its control by erecting a cadena, or chain, across its section of the road, from which it levies tolls on cross-border contraband. The cadenas shape political, economic, and cultural geography by instituting a local sovereign system of morality, economy, and legality. As border residents reimagine and rematerialize the border by displacing it from the geopolitical line to their cadenas, they mark their claims to this space. In a region where the majority of border flows occur through clandestine routes, residents contest the power of the nation-state to determine the border, sovereignty, belonging, and transregional development. Simultaneously, however, residents' border practices mimetically reproduce the relation between territory, power, and identity. I argue that the margins of the state can be critical junctures for examining how everyday people and state actors continuously negotiate and reconfigure the shifting materializations and meanings of territory, state power, and (trans)national space.