Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser

Estoy haciendo fila, haciendo fila, estoy haciendo fila

para salir del país. Es algo natural, cosa de todos los
días. A mi izquierda, una familia en una vagoneta
Nissan; a mi derecha, un gringo de lentes oscuros en
un Mitsubishi deportivo. Por el retrovisor veo a una
muchacha en un Volkswagen. Adelante, un Toyota.
Vamos a salir del país y es algo natural, cosa de todos
los días.
[I’m in line, in line, in line to leave the country. It’s
natural, an everyday occurrence. To my left, a family
in a Nissan station wagon; to my right, a gringo with
dark sunglasses in a sporty Mitsubishi. In my rear-
view mirror I see a girl in a Volkswagen. In front of
me, a Toyota. We’re leaving the country, and it’s OK.
It’s natural, an everyday occurrence.]
—Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, ‘‘La fila’’

Telling Stories, Making Place

The beginning of the story ‘‘La fila’’ (‘‘The
line’’) by the tijuanense writer Luis Humberto
Crosthwaite serves as an apt epigraph for this
discussion of borders, borderlands, and border
crossings.1 The narrator is waiting to drive his
car across the border into the United States. The
story is one of wandering and of waiting, for

South Atlantic Quarterly 105:4, Fall 2006

doi 10.1215/00382876-2006-004 © 2006 Duke University Press
700 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

on the endless journey to the border gate there are innumerable stops and
starts. Even when it begins to look as if they might finally move, ‘‘la fila no
avanza’’ (the line does not move). Yet the people continue toward the bor-
der, for crossing the border, as the narrator states, ‘‘es algo natural, cosa de
todos los días’’ (is something natural, an everyday occurrence).2 Some do it
in cars, some do it by swimming, some by running. But to cross the border,
any border, is a natural thing, an everyday occurrence.
At the same time, the narrator is telling himself a story, one about wait-
ing in line at the border. Patricia Price, in her book Dry Place, argues that
‘‘place . . . is a processual, polyvocal, always-becoming entity.’’ 3 In telling a
story, the narrator is making a place in a space that is of movement (and, in
the case of the waiting line to cross, nonmovement): the border.
This is a story of borders, borderlands, and border wanderers. This is a
story about living in/on/across borderlines. But today, this is just a story: a
story of movement, a story of wandering, a story of stories about the U.S.-
Mexico border, and a story about rethinking the borderlands.

In These Borderlands There Is Movement

My identity is as rooted in place and space as it is enforced by movement.
As a child of Mexican immigrant parents, I was born and raised in north-
ern California, with frequent excursions to visit relatives in the northern
Mexican border city of Mexicali. Though the drive took between twelve and
fourteen hours, it was nothing for my young parents, who considered gas
inexpensive and found the pull of family stronger than the burden of driv-
ing twelve hours down the center of the state. In those frequent migrations
from north to south and back again, we became a part of what Breyten Brey-
tenbach has called the Middle World: a world between nations and popu-
lated by migrants. Its citizens—‘‘uncitizens,’’ as he calls them—in constant
migration.4
As a teen I would often walk to the border from my grandmother’s house.
Sometimes I would stand at the fence separating Mexicali from Calexico,
my fingers reaching through, illegally touching the other side. Though it
did not feel any different, I would try to imagine that it somehow was.
At times there would be others with me, staring through the chain link
at the other side. Once when my family and I were waiting in our car to
pass, I saw a couple of teenagers at the top of the fence sitting defiantly in
the space between nations. Breytenbach’s Middle World refers to a world
between the first and the third, a liminal space where ‘‘truths no longer
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 701

fit snugly and certainties do not overlap.’’ He emphasizes that though the

Middle World is everywhere, ‘‘belonging and not belonging,’’ it is not ‘‘of
the Center . . . since it is by definition and vocation peripheral; it is other,
living in the margins, the live edges.’’ 5 The physical border between the
United States and Mexico can be read as a material manifestation of this
Middle World: the seam—or, to use Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous formula-
tion, the herida abierta—that exposes the uneven relations between the two
nations.6
When I was fourteen, my family was living in Imperial Beach, in San
Diego County. Our apartment was on the edge of Border Field State Park,
a large, undeveloped wetlands area from where we could look out and see
Tijuana built up to the border fence. I remember the nightly flyovers by the
border patrol, the searchlights piercing through the windows of our apart-
ments. One night my mother found two brothers trying to hide from the
migra on our back patio. Without thinking twice she offered them a place
to stay inside the apartment. They were trying to make their way to Stock-
ton, in northern California. The older brother had a wife and family waiting
there; he was bringing his brother across for the first time. They had chosen
to throw themselves into the uncertainty of the Middle World. While the
searchlights of the INS helicopters crisscrossed our apartment complex, my
mother offered the brothers a place to stay. She also volunteered to drive
them north. And she did, with all of us kids in tow. She used the trip as an
excuse to visit my tios in northern California.
In the mid-1990s I often went to the border to visit a friend who lived in
Playas de Tijuana. On one trip we headed down to the beach to the fence,
a solid wooden wall that continued into the ocean. On the wall large white
pieces of plywood had been erected. On them, in stark black paint, were
painted the names, ages, and places of origin of those who had died cross-
ing the border since the institution of Operation Gatekeeper in the early
1990s.
North America, I am your scar, the border might say at times.

Rethinking la(s) Borderlands: The Border Is . . .

While the term borderlands has come to be associated—at least in the United
States—with the southwestern United States and, in particular, as a Chi-
cano/a space, the geographic borderlands is much larger. Extending from
the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a vast geo-
graphic region that encompasses not just the southwestern United States
702 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

but also northern Mexico. Since the 1980s, the geographic borderlands
have often been rendered in cultural studies in metaphorical terms—hybrid
space, liminal space, gateway, no-man’s-land—and in many cases some
of these metaphors have come to represent the totality of the geographic
borderlands. As James Clifford rightly notes, ‘‘A specific place of hybridity
and struggle, policing and transgression, the U.S.-Mexico frontier, has re-
cently attained ‘theoretical’ status. . . .The border experience is made to pro-
duce powerful political visions: the subversion of all binarisms, the projec-
tion of a ‘multicultural public sphere (versus hegemonic pluralism).’ ’’ 7
In a review of U.S.-Mexico border studies, it has been noted that there
are generally two ways of talking about the border. According to Kathleen
Staudt and David Spener, ‘‘Version 1 is old-style border studies, grounded
in history and the empiricism of the social sciences. Version 2 is new-style
literary studies.’’ 8 That is, while version 1 gives primacy to the physical bor-
der and the geographic borderlands, version 2 constructs a metaphorical
borderlands that can reduce the complexity of the geographic region, often
through elevation of a few border artists/writers/theorists as ‘‘the’’ border
representatives. Pablo Vila, in his work Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders,
writes, ‘‘I arrived in El Paso with the ‘mission’ of validating with an ethno-
graphic work the ideas of García Canclini, Anzaldúa, and Rosaldo . . . ideas
that were developed within a literary criticism framework, not an ethno-
graphic one. Yet as soon as I launched my fieldwork, I discovered that these
ideas were only partially addressing the much more complex process of
identity construction in the area.’’ 9
Staudt and Spener argue, quite correctly, for mixing these two types of
border studies, and more recent works reflect this hybrid type of analysis.10
While in complete agreement that a strictly metaphorical reading of the
border is questionable, I would like, however, to examine some of these
metaphors—or, more precisely, narratives—that do conform to a particu-
lar type of border experience. Here I examine these stories told about the
border and the ways in which these serve to create particular ‘‘imaginative
geographies’’ for the region. I will focus primarily on Tijuana.
The diverse landscape of northern Mexico engenders distinct cultural
productions that in turn both reflect and constitute their cultural context.
In viewing the borderlands as a heterogeneous field crossed by multiple
geographies, my focus is on itinerant ‘‘identities that are constantly subject
to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming—completing
the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility.’’ 11
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 703

If we take the position of the borderlands as a complex field made up

of a variety of imaginative geographies, we could then read the border-
lands as a dynamic region that is constantly under construction. In viewing
the borderlands as presenting multiple—alternative—histories, the map-
ping of this space should be accomplished through the illumination of the
diverse cultures in the border region.

The Border Is: Danger

Some friends and I are in a cheesy piano bar of some tourist hotel in Ciudad
Juárez. A man is telling us about the dangers of Juárez, about how it is far
more dangerous than Tijuana. He asks one friend of mine, a tijuanense, how
many killings there have been in the past year. My friend does not know, but
he ventures a guess. The man snorts and states that since the beginning of
the year in Juárez there have been twice that many murders. He talks about
having to ride in an armored car, how he has a bodyguard, how he has to
be extra careful in a city like Juárez. He never mentions the femicidios, the
murdered women, in that city. We just listen to this man talk and later end
up in a diner trying to make sense of it all.
Norma Klahn has written of a ‘‘South of the Borderism’’ trope in U.S.-
Mexico relations, referring to the ways in which the United States culturally
constructs its southern neighbor: often the Mexican becomes ‘‘everything
the Anglo was not.’’ 12 A similar process has taken place in Mexico, in what
Socorro Tabuenca has called a ‘‘North of the Borderism.’’ 13 In each case, this
cultural ‘‘othering’’ becomes self-serving, as it affirms national identities.
For the United States, South of the Borderism justifies the myth of manifest
destiny and the continued militarization of the border; for Mexico, North of
the Borderism vindicates cultural nationalist projects to combat the spread
of American culture.14 These two tropes—stating what ‘‘the border is’’—also
shape the most common negative stereotypes about the border as a zone of
danger or vice.15
To read the border as danger, as is most often the case in the media, is to
both reinforce notions of cultural identity and justify the increasing milita-
rization of the border. Tijuana stands out within the imaginary of the United
States as a particularly dangerous site. In a column for the Mexico City daily,
Milenio, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite writes: ‘‘Me he dado cuenta de que una
buena manera de hacer amigos fuera de Tijuana es diciendo que eres de
Tijuana. Esto deposita sobre ti un aire místico, como de gangster, como de
704 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

cowboy. Y, claro, para esos momentos, uno siempre trae consigo una buena
historia para contarle al primero que se deje.’’ 16
He goes on to write about the image of Tijuana as a violent city, especially
since Arturo, his editor at Milenio, only likes to hear these types of stories:
Entonces yo tengo que elaborar cuidadosamente mi testimonio, para
no poner en entredicho la imagen que él y muchos otros tienen de esta
ciudad fronteriza.
‘‘N’ombre, pos ta reduro. El otro día ya ni se podía cruzar la calle
frente a mi casa por la cantidad de cadáveres.’’
‘‘N’ombre . . . allá en Tijuana puedes comprar coca hasta en el
seminario.’’
‘‘N’ombre . . . mi papá me dio mi primer pistola a los cinco años.’’
‘‘N’ombre . . . el otro día quise cruzar a San Diego, nos salió la migra
y nos metió una corretiza.’’
‘‘N’ombre . . . yo perdí mi virginidad a los diez años, y mis compa-
ñeros de primaria se burlaron de mí por retrasado.’’
Los ojos de Arturo brillan, se llenan de lágrimas, mientras toma
notas en una libreta y suspira.17
Crosthwaite goes on to say that he used to feel insulted that his city was
imagined in the worst possible light, ‘‘alejada de todo lo que es mexicano
y engullida por todo lo que es gringo,’’ 18 until he said to himself that tijua-
nenses are as Mexican as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and all the talk about the
violence was pure myth. Once he came to that realization, he decided that
he could tell any story he wanted. He chooses to propagate the myth of
Tijuana as a den of violence purely for narrative effect. For the rest of the
column he proceeds to talk about the most recent act of violence that he
had witnessed, an argument at his house that escalates to guns being drawn
against the neighbors. The situation is diffused by the arrival of Tere, Crosth-
waite’s wife, who had gone over to San Diego to shop at a Kmart pillow sale.
She proceeds to beat all those present—neighbors, friends of Crosthwaite,
and Crosthwaite himself—with the new pillows. Arturo is impressed with
the tale, which Crosthwaite finishes, ‘‘Dude, the only thing more dangerous
than Tijuanenses are their wives.’’
The story subverts both North/South of the Borderism with Crosthwaite’s
characteristic humor. His references to the violent image of the city are
undercut by the constant play of references to the binational location of
Tijuana and the transnational mixings that take place there. In the process
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 705

of parodying the narrative of violence about the border, he is also reveling

in the local culture.

The Border Is: Vice

I am eighteen and awkward. Uncomfortable in my own skin. Mexicali.
Christmas break. A very large family reunion. Some of my American uncles
decide to hit the town with a couple of my Mexican tíos. They take me along,
though I am battling a cold that adds another surreal layer to the night. We
travel through the Mexicali strip clubs, consuming mass quantities of alco-
hol. In the clubs we see all sorts of women, young, old, stepping out to bad
disco music. This is Mexico, one of my uncles states. My tíos no longer lis-
ten. We are traveling in another zone. The night becomes a blur to me.
Related to the image of the border as danger zone, this rendering config-
ures the leyenda negra of the border: a zone of illicit activity, of transgression,
of prostitution. The border strip club comes to represent the border cities.
The northern Mexican writers Rosina Conde, from Tijuana, and Rosario
Sanmiguel, from Ciudad Juárez, have written of these spaces as a means
of subverting the South of the Borderism implicit within the leyenda negra
that surrounds the border cities.
In drawing on the theme of the Tijuana nightclubs in her story ‘‘Viñetas
revolucionarias,’’ Conde appears to reinforce the leyenda negra.19 But this is
not the case. In focusing on this ‘‘masculine’’ theme—the city as a space
of prostitution, or as spectacle—Conde reconfigures this negative stereo-
type by focusing on the women who work in the clubs and by using a direct
language that does not pretend to overdramatize or romanticize her char-
acters. In this way, Conde demystifies one conception of Tijuana by sub-
verting the male gaze in the club. By shifting the focus to the women, she
puts the men on display. The women who star in the vignettes demonstrate
their power over the male public. But the story is not an idealization of the
stripper lifestyle. More generally, in recurring to the figure of the stripper,
Conde questions the role of woman in the city. She demonstrates how these
women in the city, by living in a second city—the world of the nightclubs—
survive and flourish in this space. When the men enter the club, they are
not entering a male-dominated space; they are the ones on display, not vice
versa.
The club space here is a nonplace, a space of transit. The people who fre-
quent the clubs, like the women who work them, are homeless. There is no
706 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

sense of a male colonizing gaze; there is only the opening of this liminal
space that opens outward, connecting other places into a larger night city.
While shifting the gaze away from the masculine, Conde also does not offer
a vision of redemption in these ‘‘revolutionary vignettes’’: There is no sal-
vation for those who have found themselves in this nonplace. And in this
way the tropes of North/South of the Borderism are themselves displaced.
These vignettes, in their deliberate forcefulness—in the narrator’s direct,
unwavering, feminist gaze—do not moralize or romanticize the space of
the strip club. Rather, as Castillo and Tabuenca point out, the vignettes
‘‘serve as a performative act by which the theme of the border as brothel
takes shape.’’ 20 By acting out this theme, the story destabilizes the forces of
North/South of the Borderism—the forces that would attempt to inscribe
the border into a particular, static conception.21

The Border Is: Global Corridor

Here is an old photo. A pregnant young woman holds a two-year-old child
in front of her. They are both seated on a donkey pulling a cart. The don-
key is painted as a zebra. This is, after all, the border. The young woman
and the child on the burro both wear sombreros; his says ‘‘Cisco Kid,’’ hers,
‘‘Tijuana.’’ The carreta is painted with bright colors (I imagine, given that
the photo is in black and white). In the center is an image of a woman who
appears to be doing laundry by the side of a river in a tropical jungle set-
ting. She is looking (smiling?) up at a man dressed in full charro regalia and
seated on a horse. It is an image that represents México, that of Mexico’s
golden age of film—its cine de oro, as captured by the likes of Gabriel
Figueroa—that of the national tourist agency, that of the national myth.
‘‘México, rrrrrrrrrooooommmmaaaaanntiiiiccc México,’’ as the border brujo
Guillermo Gómez Peña would sing.
In Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar asks why readers of newspapers so
readily accept photographs as truthful representations: ‘‘Why do we so dras-
tically reduce the immense complexity of reality, its wide heterogeneity and
scope of dissent, by what we so quickly accept as the singular truth repre-
sented in the shallow frame of an image?’’ 22 In this old photo we only see
tourism in Tijuana.Yet the imaginative geography that constructs this Mexi-
can postcard is complex. This is Mexico, romantic Mexico. Smiling tour-
ists, tropical jungles, content women washing by the side of the river, men
on horseback looking as if they should be backed by a full complement of
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 707

mariachis. The painted image on the donkey cart contrasts with the region
where the photo was taken: Baja California, northern Mexico, a region that
is largely arid. In Tijuana, the only tropical forests are the ones painted on
the donkey carts.
I was almost two when the photo was taken, my mom and me, at the end
of spring, spending time with my grandparents on the border. Beneath the
bucolic image painted on the donkey cart was painted the words, ‘‘Tijuana
1968 México.’’
Tijuana, viewed as a mirror of Mexico, is an outpost in the Middle World
that is created in its practice, in the itineraries of the people who use it.
In Mexico, the naming of streets after important Mexican historical events,
heroes, and places serves to unite a national narrative literally at street level.
This naming functions within a project of national unification; all urban
areas partake in the nation of Mexico, but these meanings often become lost
as new significations are ascribed to the streets by those who walk them.23 In
Tijuana, Avenida Revolución is the main touristic drag and, as such, serves
for many as an introduction to ‘‘Mexico.’’
Avenida Revolución, ‘‘la Revu,’’ is a site of contact, of meeting, where, in
a sense, all roads lead. Its urban architecture is a mishmash of styles. Juan
Villoro notes that its landscape ‘‘cambia como si respondiera al zapping de
la televisión.’’ 24 Anchored—if it can be called that—on one end by the Fron-
tón Jai Alai, a large structure with a vague Moorish air, it ends—if it can be
called that—at a small triangular plaza where the mariachis meet, across
from the zona norte, Tijuana’s red-light district. In between these two zones
are megadiscos; open markets—with the air of a bazaar—that sell a dizzying
number of items (sign over one: ‘‘Cheap Liquor. Public Bathroom.Welcome
to Mexico. Want to buy a blanket?’’); liquor stores; restaurants (Cesar’s, a
large, vaguely Art Deco palace and the birthplace of the Caesar salad); don-
key carts. There is a sense of placelessness, as there seems to be no archi-
tectural unity. While there are markers that evoke Mexico—a plaza where
mariachis meet, the signs that welcome you to Mexico, the images on the
donkey carts—at the same time the visitor is placed in a zone that evokes
Mexico and a lot of other places. As Lawrence Herzog states, ‘‘Revolution
is carnival—buildings decorated like zebras or Moorish castles, flags and
colorful blimps floating overhead.’’ 25 Reminding us, too, that in Tijuana,
Revolution is an avenue.
The many donkeys-painted-as-zebras—what Heriberto Yépez has termed
the ‘‘zonkey’’—posed for photographs on Avenida Revolución lead carts that
708 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

are usually adorned with the imagery of ‘‘traditional’’ Mexico: images of vol-
canoes, pre-Columbian cultures, and the national symbol of the serpent and
eagle on the cactus—imagery that has very little do with the reality of Baja
California.26
The result is a city covered by the texts of a Mexico that never existed
in that region, an atopical Mexico superimposed in a city crossed by itiner-
ants. Covering the city with these hybrid cultural texts effects not only the
invention of a history for the tourists but also the inscription of the city,
and the Mexican border region, into a national narrative. Tijuana becomes,
then, a mirror that reflects the whole country, marking out the differences
between this and that side of the border.27 Avenida Revolución, as a frag-
ment of the mirror, creates an idealized Mexico: ‘‘a fantasy land that is a cari-
cature of what Americans might think Mexico is (land of bullfights, som-
breros, burros, and mission-style churches), insulated from the real Mexico,
but with just a touch of a veiled sense of mystery and foreign intrigue.’’ 28
At the same time, if Avenida Revolución constructs a fictional Mexico,
it does so through an appropriation of styles from all over the world. In a
fragmented text that reads less like an essay and more like a collection of
one-liners (or a quick surf through the TV channels), in keeping with the
fragmented nature of the border, Yépez writes, ‘‘Space Invaders could easily
define Tijuana. It is a city of ‘anarchitecture,’ a city of self-destruction. . . . Its
official architecture is pure simulacrum, pure kitsch. Tijuana existed long
before Baudrillard.’’ 29 Despite Gómez Peña’s celebrated phrase about all
cities beginning to look like Tijuana on a Saturday night, we could not argue
that Tijuana is a global city. At least not as proposed by Saskia Sassen, where
she defines these types of cities as ‘‘centers for the servicing and financing of
international trade, investment, and headquarter operations.’’ 30 Tijuana is
a peripheral city, situated by its history on the margins. However, given this
peripheral standing, Tijuana, Mexico’s northern frontier in general, is a par-
ticipant in a global economy and forms a part of a global corridor, bridging
the global cities of Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Do Not Attempt to Adjust Your Television

Spending a lot of time on the border has meant being able to watch channels
from both sides, even before the advent of satellite cable service. During
my summers in Mexicali, we often watched broadcasts from Yuma, Ari-
zona. The television waves traveled across the border and were caught by
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 709

the antenna installed by my uncles on the roof of the house. We watched

broadcasts from both sides, traveling across language and geography, pass-
ing through the Middle World. Sometimes the channels from this and that
side came in snowy, the television seemingly under control from the outer
limits. The waves were lost somewhere in the desert, I imagined, spiraling
around in whirlpools of wind that raced through the mountains. In a sense,
too, we were somewhere out there, on the edge of two nation-states that
attempted to place controls on their borders.
Watching television in the age of cable means cleaner reception and a
wider variety of broadcasts. A couple of years ago the Tijuana border cross-
ing briefly became a fixture on cable. We dubbed it the Border Channel, or
BTV. An odd channel, it had no station ID coming up every few minutes,
and there were no commercial breaks. It was simply a video camera, more
than likely a consumer model, trained on the Mexican side of the border.
There was a soundtrack, of sorts—usually classical music, though one night
I tuned in and heard rock en español.
There is this too: BTV had no production whatsoever. There was no fancy
editing, save for the times when the video camera, in demo mode, began to
show off its built-in transition effects. BTV felt like pirate television, as if
somebody had jacked into the wired network of broadcasting. And this too
seemed fitting. The first time I tuned in, I thought it was something shown
at the end of a broadcast day. But the next day BTV was still there.
And my friends and I watched. We watched because of the channel’s
oddity, because we wondered how long it would stay on before a ‘‘proper’’
television station replaced it.We watched because BTV was reality television
taken to the outer limits. Mainly, though, we watched because of the sheer
mesmerizing sense of viewing a surveillance camera trained on a mon-
strous thing, a massive border machine. We joked about looking for people
we knew in the process of crossing, but the camera was too far away to make
anybody out. Those times when we saw a short wait we were filled with a
desire to cross the border. Secretly we hoped to see something happen: a
rush of people through the borderline, racing out onto the freeway; a drug
bust, with trained dogs passing between the cars; a fight between drivers
angered over the long wait. By being transfixed by BTV, we too were caught
in the border machine. Mostly, though, we saw only what it was: a time
of delay, a time when patience is strained. Sometimes the border is this:
tedium.
It appears that before the revolution, the border will be televised.
710 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

The Border Is: Language

I was born a Mexican in the United States; my parents crossed the border
a few months before I was born. Spanish was my first language. I began
preschool at an early age and became a part of the English-speaking world.
I became, then, a Mexican American, doubled, speaking with a forked
tongue: Spanish at home with family, and English at school. In my uni-
versity years I became politicized and took on the Chicano identity, but I
continued to speak with my forked tongue, often mixing the two languages
into Spanglish. Leaping, as I tell my classes, de una lengua a otra in a single
bound, como Superman. A few months ago one of my colleagues in linguis-
tics asked me to participate in a language study and the result was that I
scored very high as a bilingual: that is, both my languages were más o menos
on equal footing.What does it mean to speak with a forked tongue? To main-
tain dual languages on equal footing? What does it mean to be a one that is
more than one? A one that is, at times, two or even more?
Until I was around thirteen, there was a special word my siblings and I
used for crossing the border. We learned it from our mother, who wasn’t
allowed to invoke it: She was born in Mexico. She had a card that she flashed.
But for us, her children born on the other side, we had a word. Mercacirce.
As I grew older I continued to work on this term, trying to approximate
my mother’s pronunciation: Mercacirize. Murica cdc. I didn’t know what it
meant. It was a word that we had to say whenever we crossed the border.
It made no sense, like the border made no sense. My grandmother and my
tios lived in Mexicali, and to go shopping we would cross over to Calexico.
Sometimes we would walk alongside the chain-link fence dividing the two.
I couldn’t comprehend why there was a fence. There were cars and streets
and shops on this side, and the other side had them too.We spoke Spanish in
Mexicali, and we spoke Spanish in Calexico. Back then there were no mega-
flags proclaiming sovereignty over the respective sides. To speak nonsense
like mercacirce made sense. It was almost a magic term, like ‘‘Abracadabra,’’
that would allow us (some of us) to cross through the Middle World of the
border region and its state controls.
It was finally one of my U.S.-born aunts who cleared the matter up for me.
‘‘American citizen.’’
Then I understood.
We had learned the word from our Mexican mother, who had a differ-
ent way of saying things. I had never before questioned her accent, as I had
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 711

not previously stated a national citizenship. I knew that I was not Mexican,
having been born in California, but I did not feel secure in calling myself
American, as I had Mexican parents. I was a mix of the two, and a word like
mercacirce fit this combination. Once I understood what the word meant,
the border lost all its mystery. It was simply a long wait in a line of people
or in cars.
Mercacirce is also a word best spoken by those with forked tongues, those
from Breytenbach’s Middle World who ‘‘have broken away from the paro-
chial, to have left ‘home’ for good (or for worse) whilst carrying all of it with
you, and to have arrived on foreign shores (at the onset you thought of it as
‘destination’, but not for long), feeling at ease there without ever being ‘at
home.’ ’’ 31 The Middle World posits a counternarrative to the flows of power
that would attempt to control, to delimit. Language may be one such marker
of a Middle World identity.
Even now, when I am about to cross the border over to this side, I con-
sider pulling up to the border agent and saying, ‘‘Mercacirce.’’ Yes, proudly.
Mercacirce.

The Border Is: Sound

Tijuana, again. Sitting in a darkened bar with a couple of students from the
university.We are drinking beer and listening to norteño music coming from
the jukebox. There is a small dance floor, and a couple goes out onto it. They
are the only two dancing a slow waltz under a blue light. Outside is the Plaza
de Santa Cecilia, a square where the mariachis converge. It is on the bor-
der of the zona norte, the red-light district. Avenida Revolución, Tijuana’s
tourist strip, feeds right into it. We leave the bar and walk up Revolution
Avenue, among the underage college students trying to get into the mega-
discos and bars, oblivious to the cantinas where the locals go.We are heading
to La Estrella, a norteño honky-tonk and, I am convinced, one of the incu-
bators for the Nortec sound. La Estrella is a dance club where the musical
landscape stretches from Sinaloa, a twenty-hour drive south from Tijuana
to the border. No techno. Just banda, just norteños, just Tex-mex. It figures
prominently in the narrative of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, native tijua-
nense and one of the most important new narrators coming out of Mexico.
La Estrella was also taken up by academics from the university as a site of
contact and for its drink special, fifty Coronitas for fifty pesos. The beers
come in metal buckets of ice. We go to dance, drink, hang out.
712 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

Contemporary rock criticism champions the musical hybridity of per-

formers like Beck. But if one were to turn to rock coming from north-
ern Mexico, this would be found inscribed into the musical DNA. Bands
like Plastilina Mosh, El Gran Silencio, and the electronica collective known
as Nortec map out musical geographies that unite disparate places. Aqua-
mosh, the first record by the Monterrey duo Plastilina Mosh, could serve
as the perfect soundtrack for the multimediated generation—what Juan
Villoro calls the ‘‘Generación Molotov’’—nurtured on Nintendo and Sega.
The album moves from lounge to hip-hop to hardcore industrial, from Span-
ish to English to Japanese. The Nortec collective, from Tijuana, unite diverse
places in a similar way. By mixing tape loops of northern Mexican banda
with European techno, the collective constructs a soundtrack for another
type of migrant passing through the Middle World: the migrant who follows
the global flows of electronic music. El Gran Silencio, also from Monterrey,
constructs a hybrid sound through a band setup that recalls more traditional
norteño groupings; an accordion, acoustic and electric guitars, drums, key-
boards. But instead of playing ‘‘traditional’’ northern Mexican music, their
sound slips and slides between cumbia, norteño, Colombian vallenato, hip-
hop, punk, ska, and reggae. Uniting Latin American rhythms with Ameri-
can rock, they lay bare the connections across borders and align themselves
with histories of migration, both northern and southern. What bands such
as these do is not just cut up the musical DNA but scramble and reconfig-
ure it to show off the borderlands’ aural landscape. They remind us that the
border is sound.
Josh Kun has written of this other way of sensing the border.32 It is in the
sounds of the cars waiting to cross; in the crowds; in the mix of sounds from
the mega dance clubs and the honky-tonks steps away from each other in
the border cities. Cruising Revolution Avenue in Tijuana on a Saturday is
a trip across a varied aural landscape. The urban sounds connect distinct
places. By disrupting notions of national homogeneity (if such a thing ever
existed), the mixed sounds and languages coming from the megadiscos, the
nightclubs, and the stereos of passing cars negate the physical material bor-
der instituted by nations trying to impose border controls.

If at Times You Can’t Read This It’s Because Estoy en el Otro Lado
During the construction of the borderlands there will be many maps drawn,
some more closely tied to the region than others. The geographies traced
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 713

here are just some of the possibilities of a complex and heterogeneous

region that offers up a diversity of itineraries. Borderlands metaphors aid
in the dearticulation of the hegemonic images that the centers of power
attempt to impose on the region and offer up a representation of a diverse
region: rearticulating a map that is theirs. In telling stories, those who live
on the border are making place. In analyzing the borderlands, it is necessary
to remember that the border is not just a single unit; rather, it represents a
different face for different people. As Vila writes, ‘‘I think that on the U.S.-
Mexico frontier we have several borders, each of them the possible anchor
of a particular process of identity construction.’’ 33
While living and teaching in Texas, I began to design a course on the U.S.-
Mexico border and on the borderlands region as geography and as field of
study. The class, called ‘‘Borderlands,’’ was a natural offshoot on my research
inquiries into contemporary border culture. A component of the course was
to introduce the students to border studies from the Mexican side, a per-
spective that is so often displaced in contemporary criticism that focuses
on the borderlands as a Chicano space. One of the first readings included in
the course packet was a text by Guillermo Gómez Peña, ‘‘The Border Is.’’ 34 It
seemed an apt way to get the students into thinking about the border.What I
came to realize was that though most class members are ‘‘borderers’’ them-
selves—the majority were students from south Texas—their own border
experiences were distinct from the border manifesto by Gómez Peña. His
position within the border arts movement was distinct and largely filtered
through an aestheticized/fetishized/romanticized Tijuana and San Diego
dancing to a banda beat. My students knew that the border contained some
of what the border brujo was proclaiming but that it was also more.
As a juncture in the Middle World, the border is where identities can be
reinscribed, re-formed, revalued. It asks us to step right up, to partake in
its multiple representations, and examine our own histories and identities
in relation to the border. As a line that is, as Alfred Arteaga writes, ‘‘half-
metal, half water,’’ the border is not un border puro.35 At times a wall, it is
also a door, a bridge, and a path.
Standing on the beach of Tijuana in the summer of 2005, I crossed out the
border. A few days earlier I had watched as workmen dismantled the bor-
der in preparation for building a larger wall. The old border fence of wood
and tin was rusted and rotting. As a temporary barrier, the workmen set
up an orange plastic fence. It lasted only one day before being washed away
by the high tide. On that summer morning, I stood on the border, one leg
714 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

on each side. I wasn’t the only one—others, too, were freely crossing back
and forth. There were no guards telling us to stay on the other side. And
so we crossed—unrepentant border crossers—crossing out the border in a
process that is, as Crosthwaite reminds us, ‘‘algo natural, cosa de todos los
días.’’

Notes
1 Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, ‘‘La fila,’’ in Instrucciones para cruzar la frontera (Mexico City:
Joaquín Mortiz, 2002), 13–21.
2 Ibid., 15.
3 Patricia Price, Dry Place: Landscapes of Belonging and Exclusion (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2004), 1.
4 Breyten Breytenbach, ‘‘Notes from the Middle World,’’ Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly
Attempt 6 (2001): 13–23.
5 Ibid., 13, 14.
6 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).
7 James Clifford, ‘‘Traveling Cultures,’’ in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, et al., 96–116 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 109.
8 David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, eds., The US-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions,
Contesting Identities (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 14.
9 Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative
Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 6.
10 See Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Cul-
tural Studies of the Americas 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Ale-
jandro Lugo, ‘‘Reflections on Border Theory, Culture, and the Nation,’’ in Border Theory:
The Limits of Cultural Production, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Santiago Vaquera, ‘‘Wandering in the Border-
lands: Mapping an Imaginative Geography of the Border,’’ Latin American Issues 14 (1998):
107–32; and three works by María Socorro Tabuenca: ‘‘Colonizaje intelectual en las litera-
turas de las fronteras,’’ paper presented at SCMLA Convention, San Antonio, November 1,
1996; ‘‘Viewing the Border: Perspectives from ‘the Open Wound,’ ’’ Discourse 18 (1995–
96): 146–68; and ‘‘Reflexiones sobre la literatura de la frontera,’’ puentelibre 4 (1995):
8–12.
11 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), 5.
12 Norma Klahn, ‘‘Writing the Border: The Languages and Limits of Representation,’’ in
Common Border, Uncommon Paths: Race, Culture, and National Identity in U.S.-Mexican
Relations, ed. O. J. Rodriguez and K. Vincent, 123–41 (Wilmington: SR Books, 1997), 123.
13 María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, ‘‘La frontera textual y geográfica en dos narradoras de
la frontera norte mexicana: Rosina Conde y Rosario Sanmiguel,’’ Ph.D. diss., SUNY Stony
Brook, 1997.
14 North of the Borderism also maintains—if a bit tenuously—the dominance of the capital
in the cultural life of the nation, through a curious project of ‘‘official’’ decentralization
in the aim to incorporate the Mexican agringado north into the bosom of the nation.
 Notes from an Unrepentant Border Crosser 715

15 For an extended discussion on these tropes, see works by María Socorro Tabuenca, includ-
ing ‘‘Colonizaje intelectual en las literaturas de las fronteras,’’ ‘‘Viewing the Border,’’
and ‘‘Reflexiones sobre la literatura de la frontera.’’ See also Jennifer Insley, ‘‘Redefining
Sodom: A Latter-Day Vision of Tijuana,’’ Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 20.1 (Winter
1994): 99–121; and Vaquera, ‘‘Wandering in the Borderlands.’’
16 ‘‘I have come to realize that a good way to make friends outside of Tijuana is to say that
you are from Tijuana. This places in you a mystical air, something like a gangster, some-
thing like a cowboy. And, of course, for these moments one always has to carry with them
a good story to tell.’’ ‘‘Entre cowboys y gangsters,’’ Milenio Diario (June 2003).
17 ‘‘And then I have to elaborate carefully my testimony so that I do not contradict the image
that he and many others have of this border city: Dude, it is so difficult. The other day, I
could barely cross the street because of the number of bodies strewn about. Dude, over
there in Tijuana you can even buy cocaine in the seminary. Dude, my father gave me my
first gun at the age of five. Dude, the other day I tried to cross over to San Diego, the bor-
der patrol saw us and gave us a mighty chase. Due, I lost my virginity at the age of ten
and my elementary school friends teased me for coming late to the party. Arturo’s eyes
shine, and fill with tears while he takes notes and breathes deeply.’’ Ibid.
18 ‘‘Separated from all that is Mexican and bloated with all that is gringo.’’
19 Rosina Conde, ‘‘Viñetas revolucionarias,’’ in El agente secreto (Mexicali: UA Baja Califor-
nia, 1990).
20 Debra Castillo and María Socorro Tabuenca, Border Women: Writing from La Frontera, Cul-
tural Studies of the Americas, 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 136.
21 Castillo and Tabuenca, in their discussion of another story by Conde, note how the female
narrator uses femininity for material gain and ‘‘creating an unfamiliar, dislocated space
for a feminist intervention in the unlikely staging of a helpless femininity. . . . Aware-
ness of the undercurrents of language and of the shifting ideological frames allow the
women . . . to use men’s strategies and expectations against them’’ (ibid., 142). I would
argue that ‘‘Viñetas revolucionarias’’ operates in a similar way.
22 Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2000), 45.
23 Michel de Certeau points out that as the original signification of the name of a street is
worn away and inscribed with another signification, ‘‘they [the streets] become liberated
spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic
rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geogra-
phy of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning’’ (The Practice of Everyday Life [Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988], 105).
24 Juan Villoro, ‘‘Nada que declarar. Welcome to Tijuana,’’ Letras libres 17 (2000): 16–20;
quote on 16.
25 Lawrence Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape across the Mexico–
United States Border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 208.
26 Heriberto Yépez, Tijuana: Processes of a Science Fiction City without a Future (Mexico:
CNCA, SRE; Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, UNAM, 2005).
27 But it is a poor likeness since—as Jean Baudrillard states of a simulacrum—‘‘it bears no
relation to any reality whatever’’ (Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Batton, and Philip
716 Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

Beitchman [New York: Semiotext(e), 1983], 11). Tijuana subverts, then, both national nar-
rativization and the border. In political discourse, not only from Mexico City but also from
Washington, D.C., Tijuana, as also the rest of the border, is a danger zone. On the U.S.
side of the fence there exists a type of border machine that attempts to set limits to the
border. Border Patrol operations such as Operation Wetback or Gatekeeper not only mili-
tarize the border but also function as strategies to maintain the line, protect the nation
from its southern Other. On the Mexican side, federal practices to inscribe the north into
a national narrative—through the creation of writers’ programs, for example—function
in a similar way, to maintain the homogeneity of the nation, to keep the Other back, to
protect the border.
28 Herzog, From Aztec to High Tech, 210.
29 Yépez, Tijuana, 46–49.
30 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2001), xxiii.
31 Breytenbach, ‘‘Notes from the Middle World,’’ 17.
32 Josh Kun, ‘‘The Aural Border,’’ Theatre Journal 52.1 (2000): 1–21.
33 Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders, 6.
34 Guillermo Gómez Peña, ‘‘The Border Is,’’ in Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance
Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1993).
35 Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities, Cambridge Studies in Ameri-
can Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).