The Mexico-US borderlands through two decades

Abstract

Firsthand knowledge about place is achieved by being there. Travel writers come to understand place through fresh eyes and often from quick exposure--a visit here, a short stay there. Others, including geographers, cultivate an appreciation from repeated visits to places in an area developing what some call regional expertise. Regional understanding requires diligence and persistence beyond repeated visits. It is not convenience food geography quickly heated and served. Rather it is like a slow simmering stew that permits ingredients to mix thereby enhancing an overall flavor. Cooking can take years, sometimes decades, to perfect. My association with the Mexico-United States borderlands is an academic path some two decades long. It is an ongoing enterprise that derives from repeated field and archival research and from a commitment to share the field with students both undergraduate and graduate. (1) The Mexico-US borderland is a tricultural zone--Native, Hispanic, Anglo--cut by a boundary line. For much of its one hundred sixty-two year political history this zone was without significant formal bounding, and only recently has the line become material through construction of a fence along much of the divide. The 200-kilometer-wide (124 miles) zone--100 (62.5 miles) on either side of the international boundary--was declared an official borderland by Article 4 of the 1983 La Paz Agreement. That bounding was based on trans-border watersheds and local administrative units (counties and municipios) (Figure 1). While the region has been called A Third Country, it has also been described as entre siempre (forever in between) (Arreola and Curtis 1993, p. 219-220; Miller 2003, p. xix). The border has been characterized as a Poso del Mundo (hole of the world), Troublesome, Where North Meets South, and a Land of Necessity. Recently, researchers have created a Border Human Development Index to rank quality of life in twenty-five US counties and thirty-eight Mexican municipios that cling to the boundary. To others, especially English-language speakers, the zone is simply the border or the borderlands, relative terms of geographic distance from an administrative center suggesting the opposite of heartland and thus implying a kind of cultural uneasiness, even deviance. To Spanish speakers, including many Mexican nationals, on the other hand, the border is la frontera, literally the frontier, a term imbued with optimism and opportunity and a very different vision of the region. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In this essay I transect the borderlands of my experience over some twenty-plus years from the late 1980s through to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a personal recounting and not meant to be the same for any other scholar or borderland habitue. Nevertheless, reflection permits a freedom to explore what I have seen as persistent and or changing themes about the human geography of the region. My journey starts with a brief discussion about the changing knowledge of the borderlands for scholarly and popular cultures. Next, I examine two general themes that continue to shape places in the region in significant ways. The first theme concerns the consumer economies of towns along the international boundary including the medical and pharmaceutical businesses that now permeate so many Mexican border towns attracting chiefly non-Mexican (Anglo) shoppers to the border. This is followed by complementary observation on the other side of the line, especially the explosion of Mexican shopping districts in American border communities that service the growing numbers of Mexican transnationals and others, including Mexican Americans, in US towns. The second theme reviews the changing landscape impacts resulting from the construction of security installations such as fences and vehicle barriers that have militarized the boundary line from the US side. I then explore the consequent transformations of spaces in Mexican border towns to service the growth of crossers who stage by gathering on the Mexican side of the line. …