Postborder City

Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California

Michael Dear, Gustavo Leclerc

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415944205
• eBook ISBN: 9781317794028
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The postborder metropolis of Bajalta California stretches from Los Angeles in the north to Tijuana and Mexicali in the south. Immigrants from all over the globe flock to Southern California, while corporations are drawn to the low wage industry of the Mexican border towns, echoing developments in other rapid growth areas such as Phoenix, El Paso, and San Antonio. This incredibly diverse, transnational megacity is giving birth to new cultural and artistic forms as it rapidly evolves into something unique in the world. Postborder City is a genuinely interdisciplinary investigation of the hybrid culture on both sides of the increasingly fluid U. S.-Mexico border, spanning the disciplines of art and art history, urban planning, geography, Latina/o studies, and American studies.

PART I

Regional Groundedness

1

“Where Are You Going to Be Worthier?”

(The Border and the Postborder)

CARLOS MONSIVÁIS

Today, urban life is a gift: a daily negotiation that reconciles opposites, a contrast between genuine ugliness and prefabricated beauty, between a never-arriving prosperity and an ever-expanding poverty. In Latin America, urbanism is also a rejection of discipline, a miracle of order in spite of everything, an uncertain combination of strength and fragility, eating itself from its moment of birth, so that—almost without paradox—the present generation can take revenge on the indifference that will be professed by forthcoming generations (“They are going to forget us, so we bequeath to them these ruins”).

Throughout the twentieth century and almost to the present, the cities of the Northern Border of Mexico have specialized in harmonizing improvisation. This is where they’re coming, this is where we came to…. Cities are assembled with patience and impatience by migrants with dreams and ambitions, by those who wanted to live in North America and those who have not yet achieved it, by establishing dynasties that take advantage of opportunities, by spreading throughout hills and organizing colonias, discovering how swapping gullibilities strengthens prestige (“I know you are a great physician, and you, better than anyone, appreciate what a great lawyer I am”).

But above all, cities of the twenty-first century document the victory of space over time. There will always be time, space perhaps not. Although the metropolis sprawls, its typical inhabitants (the majority) are restricted to apartments and small houses, whereas others (the minority), the millionaires and multimillionaires, live in confined or expensive spaces for security reasons, thus guaranteeing the ultimate certainty: the perfect solitude of a master requires a bedroom that would seem an infinite space to the twenty people squeezed into any room of the colonias. Fiercely chaotic, the cities of the Northern Border are governed by the insoluble contradiction of survival (“If we are going to stay here, let’s try to leave as soon as possible”), and by the dazzle of its imperial neighbor, the United States of America.

“I Left Comala Because They Told Me That My Father Lived in Los Angeles, a Man Called Pedro Páramo”

If anything is common to border cities, it is the mobility of the great majority of their residents:

• from the ranch that is tedium redeemed by occasional sensations of significance to the city where anonymity is a synonym of secrecy,

• from the small town to the procurement of unknown freedoms,

• from the favorite dream of imagined utopias to the opportunities of mass production,

• from the joy of learning English to the memory of blue skies and clear places,

• from tribal family to nuclear family,

• from multiple descendants to a lineage that fits into an apartment,

• from intolerance to a tolerance that begins as resignation in the face of alien behavior that cannot be altered,

• from a gathering in a neighborhood patio to a hurried greeting in a condominium,

• from family evenings to television autism,

• from the violent protection of honor to the not-so-secret wish that adultery, by one or both parties, will revitalize a marriage,

• from idolatrous appreciation of the modern to the confused worship of the traditional, and

• from the desire of provoking envy to the fear of inciting the greed of strangers.

To inhabitants of the Northern Border, the time spent in the acts of waiting and hoping is their formative matrix. They wait in la línea, they wait in buses, they wait in line to obtain a North American visa, they hope for a steady job, for a place to live, for water, and transportation. And while they do this, they sometimes imagine how their houses and apartments will be; they are guided by a practical view, that everything and everybody will fit, that the furniture will not take a lot of space in case the relatives arrive, that the bed in the bedroom will be very wide, that the kids finally understand and settle down: crowding does not mean promiscuity.

Until recently, the idea and pleasures of the aesthetic had little or nothing to do with the Northern Border. The beautiful is a luxury of the second generation, a generation that distances itself from a peasant asceticism and ornaments of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and has, as the new center of its home, a television around which joy and despair revolve. As a general rule, the desire to obtain representations of the beautiful stems from television or newspapers, or from observation of tastes that permeate the city like a nomadic sensibility. And the beautiful is gaudy, a color that blinds, the repetition of religious themes, supermarket sales, and the never-ending sales.

“When I Arrived at the Border, I Brought with Me a Desire to Leave Soon”

The availability of physical space is declining because of the demographic explosion of people and poverty; in the social arena, the public and the private are merging and, despite everything, they intensify the geography of exclusion and inclusion. If there is a utopian sentiment, it is that of purchasing power; and if there is a valued sphere, it is that of a migratory urge to identify fallow lands, to settle them, and after twenty years exhibit them as “great urban development.” These days, this fact starts to define the Northern Border: that the city (as a totality, as a concept) is escaping from the traditional idea of a city and becomes instead an anxiety to populate city-space without the intention of staying.

Cities on the way, this is what Tijuana, Matamoros, Reynosa, Ciudad Juárez have become. Here, a fugitive from the provinces or the capital comes, and here an insecure fugitive stays, in tune with the provisional nature of his environment, with the public and private devaluing that drug trafficking creates (the work of many), and with the power of violence, which is the most tragic partner of urbanization. In past decades, extreme mobility around the Northern Border has modified it, and resulted in signs of permanence (institutions, personalities, recovered history, centers of higher education, the discovery of local prides).

Such changes were experienced in the twentieth century along routes from Mexico to Texas, California, New Mexico, Illinois, or the Northern Border: peasants fed up with living on the edge between tyranny and extreme poverty; political activists who flee to preserve their lives; youngsters who abandon their villages, unable to endure any longer a monotony without escape; families whose longing for opportunities becomes a catalyst for their legendary journey; adjustment to migration demographics (a good number of illegal immigrants, while escaping from the Border Patrol, write and rewrite their conference papers and doctoral dissertations); a decline in physical abuse due to the development of minor technological advances; racial harassment, insecurities, and surprises; an effort to understand, for just one instant, what is being assimilated throughout the years. In summary, the behaviors and attitudes that announce or denounce the thirst for change, the desperation, the grand illusions: “Let’s go away from here, let’s go any place except this, I am tired of looking at the nopales, the sheaves of robavacas, the thieves in the Credit Bank, the window that it is never open, the market, and the office. Let’s go, the world is wide and maybe it is not that strange, this is over for us, let’s go, mano, and hope that our families will reunite with us later.”

The story is typical, a classic tale of migration from one place to any other place on the planet. To leave is to risk all; to stay is to accept that there will be no further opportunity to risk anything. Nomads aspire to a new sedentary life. Those living a sedentary life, as a compensatory strategy, used to imagine the place they never left. (This journey around my room is called “idealization” or “demonization” of the native land or city.) And the journey, even when executed alone, is still a matter of the tribe. Someone—from the town, the city, the colonia, from work, from the family—throws himself into it, and after him come the relatives, and sometimes after the relatives the entire community, which has already been abandoned to the anthropologists dedicated to researching customs and roots in the south of Oaxaca or the north of Jalisco. Exhortations become orders: “Come here, what are you doing over there? The season of the pizca is already coming, and the family that I work for assured me they will help you, you will live with us, I received your letter, órale, something will be done, don’t stay in the hole.” In this century, millions of nomadic Mexicans have departed from many more millions of sedentary Mexicans.

A web of emotional attachments and bonds attracts those eager for adventure and those anxious for survival. In their stories friends, relatives, and fellow countrymen idealize the region, city, or occupation that they have achieved, and the great dream of the outcasts is reconstituted, a dream that is not rooted in the open arms of the foreigner but in the solidarity of compatriots. (In foreign lands, no matter how one prefers to see it, the family is more family, the fellow countrymen more countrymen, the reconstruction of the familiar more devotional. This occurs even when the selfish and malicious side of human nature is not present, but even if it was, it would not break this norm.) And those who did not leave admire those who did; or, if they envy them, it becomes too late for them to talk about the “betrayal of the pochos,” or even worse, of tourism without opportunities. Immigrants are constantly associated with a modernity that, once discerned, seduces or frightens, because since the end of the nineteenth century (not only, but not even centrally) it is geographic destiny that forces Mexicans to define the modern out of the concept of “North American.” It is also the sense of anachronism that arises when comparing technological advance and knowledge about the world. Spoken or not, conscious or not, immigrants want to be modern; they want also to relocate themselves from one cultural condition to another, from one planetary existence to another. Does this mean that Mexico is an underdeveloped country? This implies, for the moment, a country in which the immigrant’s anxiety becomes synonymous with modernity and the opportunity for work.

“Put This Portrait of My Mother in the Living Room/And Where Do I Put the Living Room?”

Aesthetics comes late to communities inspired by the rush and eagerness of settling down, right now, so that they can leave as soon as possible. In the years before the 1980s, the photographs and the few films about Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali, Matamoros, and Nogales, for example, give a sense of pragmatism taken to an extreme; of the efforts of efficient contractors and architects without imagination, experience, or models to go beyond the obligations of professional practice. Determinism dominates during most of the twentieth century, a fierce determinism that grants nothing to its users or victims. Nobody even thinks of the question: “Why don’t I have the right to beauty?” And the few interesting or fearlessly kitsch buildings that exist usually are works by North American architects eager to give to the world the example of Los Angeles, California, or, more specifically, of Hollywood. (A noticeable example is the Casino of Aguas Calientes in Tijuana.)

Yet by the 1950s or 1960s, the cities of the border are a learning workshop. There, freedom, urban improvisation, and the metamorphosis of resignation to joy are being tested. The medieval proverb “City air makes us free” is combined with “Small town, big hell.” The cities’ downtowns arise through accumulation: from the lawyer’s offices specializing in divorce; from doctors’ offices where physicians adjust their specialization depending on their clients’ illnesses; from engineers and architects pressured by contractors. This disdain for the aesthetic is contagious, and clerics and professors also lean toward the law of the minimum effort. The flow of new traditions slows down, turning architectural literacy into the worship of speed. Hurry, hurry, hurry! Let’s put up a few more middle-class colonias, a few residences, schools, and some temples.

With the dissemination of construction and affirmation of the urban, the lack of aesthetic demands disappears as a defining characteristic of the border. But this does not happen before 1970 or 1980, still very recent times.

“We Are Escaping from Identifying Ourselves Everyday with Identity”

How are the basic ideas and mental habits of communities on both sides of the border formed and transformed? How are people far from the Center choosing Mexican traditions? What accumulated knowledge, frustrations, disillusionment, and hopes await those who have just arrived in North America? What knowledge do they borrow from other immigrants? How does the conscience of the barrio emerge (including its architecture), and how does a barrio differ from a ghetto? In what ways are the (merciless) rules of the game of Anglo society internalized by Mexicans who suffer them? How do immigrants know themselves, adapt, assimilate, and take advantage of social mobility?

In the case of people of Mexican origin, to be a “man or a woman of the border” in the United States is to live subject to prejudices against what is labeled “marginal,” “newcomer,” and “undesirable.” But at what precise moment are Mexicans who recently arrived no longer considered “new”? Before the decade of 1990s, even if two or three generations had passed in a Hispanic family, its members were still regarded as part of the Brown Tide. The immigrants’ descendents—even if they retain (or not) the denomination of Mexicans (in contrast to other ethnic minorities, excluding those from Latin America)—learn that they have also inherited, along with other habits and customs, the tradition of being exploited. Another history, further from the textbooks, shadows those of Mexican origin: the awareness of belonging to a people (until recently one would say “a race”) forever identified as plunder subject to disposition by the powerful. As Claudio G. Vélez-Ibáñez states in Visions of the Border. The Southeast Mexican Cultures of the United States:

After the Texas revolution, the war between Mexico and the Treaty of Mesilla of 1856, the basic strategy of the U.S. for acquiring property around the former missions, penitentiaries and large and small cities, was by using the taxation system, the control of borders, robbery, and by judicial means, for example, delaying the claims over land donations, in order to ensure [the U.S.] ownership of Mexican productive resources. The result was that a population already under a lot of pressure lost power and control over their land. In a very particular way, the majority of the people from Tucson, San Antonio, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and other rural areas, became subordinated not as a result of a cultural trait or practice, but of U.S. economic policy.

The fate of Mexicans in the United States has not depended on any ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Postborder Condition: Art and Urbanism in Bajalta California
• Portfolio: The Art of Postborder Bajalta California
• Part I: Regional Groundedness
• Part II: Regional Imaginations
• Part III: Regional Hybridities
• About the Writers
• About the Artists Represented in the Folio
• Index