The Culture of Migration

Politics, Aesthetics and Histories

Sten Pultz Mosland, Ann Ring Petersen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784533106
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738370
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration has been a phenomenon throughout human history but today, as a result of economic hardship, conflict and globalization, a higher percentage of people than ever before live outside their country of birth. Increased international migration has resulted in more movement of information, traditions and cultures. Migration acts as a catalyst: not only for social change, but also for the generation of new aesthetic phenomena. The Culture of Migration explores the ways in which culture and the arts have been transformed by migration in recent decades--and, in turn, how these cultural and aesthetic transformations have contributed to shaping our identities, politics and societies.Making an important contribution to the emerging cross-disciplinary field of migration studies, this book examines contemporary cultural and artistic representations of migration and gathers new perspectives on the subject from across the disciplines of the arts and humanities. Renowned and emerging scholars in the field of migration, culture and aesthetics--among them the distinguished theorists Mieke Bal, Nikos Papastergiadis, Roger Bromley and Edward Casey--address the broader themes and underlying discourses of recent studies in migration and culture.

Part 1

Politics

1

A Matter of Edge

Border vs. Boundary at La Frontera

Edward S. Casey

The situation that will provide focus in this chapter is that found at La Frontera, the Spanish word for ‘border’ and a word commonly used to refer to the entirety of the US–Mexico border – a border that was established in 1848 at the conclusion of the war between Mexico and the United States.¹ This war consisted of a series of bitterly fought battles over territory and national sovereignty; its outcome was the annexation of vast tracts of land formerly belonging to Mexico (and still earlier, to Spain). The borderline that was agreed upon at the conclusion of the war was almost 2,000 miles in length and traversed extremely arid and rugged territory from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Over the last 150 years, this borderline has been delineated in various ways – by marker stones and barbed wire fence and, most recently, by a massive wall that now stretches more than 750 miles in length – a full third of the total distance, with the Río Grande river marking most of the rest of this length. My reflections in this chapter have been occasioned by the construction of this wall, its effects on those who attempt to traverse it, and by my own experiences in its proximity.

But first of all I want to discuss the kind of edge that is at stake in international borders and, in particular, the US–Mexico border.

Edges as Borders and Boundaries

Edges make a decisive difference in how we distinguish one thing from another, one place from the next, one woman from her sister, one man from his son. The fact is that edges make it clear where one thing, place or person begins and another ends. They can be considered the primary means by which differences between things and places, events and persons get established and expressed – sorted out.

Edges so understood come in a number of major forms, among them: brinks, rims, margins, thresholds, frames – and the list goes on.² Borders and boundaries, however, constitute a class of their own. Both act to demarcate a given place or region: to set it off from other places or regions. In this capacity, each is decidedly two-sided: we talk of being ‘on this side’ or ‘on the other side’ of a boundary or a border: indeed, we must do so, since straddling a border or boundary is to take up a precarious perch; eventually, one must go one way or another.

Despite this similarity, borders diverge from boundaries in certain basic ways. A border is a clearly and crisply delineated entity, and is established by conventional agreements such as treaties or laws; even if it has parallels in animal populations (such as territorial markings), it is a product of human history and its vicissitudes. A boundary, too, can have cultural and historical parameters; but it is paradigmatically natural in status, as with the boundary of a forest, its outer edge. It is rarely demarcated with exacting precision, varying in contour and extent depending on environmental or historical circumstances. Most importantly, it is porous in character, like the human skin, admitting the passage of various substances through it, whereas a border is most often designed to be impervious. Also, while a boundary lacks exact positioning (hence is difficult to map), a border is located just here and nowhere else: somewhere in particular. It is at once securely fixed in place and unyielding (thereby facilitating its cartographic representation as well as its designation in terms of such precise parameters as miles and metres). Whatever the confusion between the usage of ‘borders’ and ‘boundaries’ in ordinary English, I shall take them to be quite different in kind.

Border and Boundary at La Frontera

What do edges so arrayed, and borders and boundaries in particular, have to do with La Frontera? In my view, just about everything … The border aspect of La Frontera is massively evident: hence the common appellation ‘US–Mexico BORDER’. The original creation of the border as specified by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 was the conjoint product of people of very different job descriptions: opposed armies, politicians, commissioners, surveyors and cartographers, astronomers and artists. This is not to mention the stone masons (who laid down the marker stones that designated it), fence builders and (150 years still later) construction workers who built the wall that was initiated after 1993 with Operation Blockade and Operation Gatekeeper; and, more recently, a new army of border guards (all too aptly called Border Patrol), special interrogators, those who work at the checkpoints, and those who are employed in the 24/7 surveillance operation that overlooks large stretches of the wall.³

In short, it has taken a veritable phalanx of specialists and workers of diverse descriptions to lay down, build and maintain the border between Mexico and the US. It is as if the very nature of La Frontera, in living up to its designation as a major international border, has called for strenuous effort and special vigilance at every point of its century-and-a-half lifetime. At the same time, this entire enterprise has been an expression of state power on the part of the US, which dictated the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty was an unvarnished articulation of sovereign power that sought territorial expansion – and claimed the right to determine the exact extent and shape of the new territory. What Foucault held to obtain in circumstances of nationalist imperial power was true for La Frontera from the start: here ‘sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory’ (Foucault 2004: 12; my italics ).⁴

Nevertheless, despite its origins in the naked assertion of national sovereignty in the flush of a military victory, during the first century of its existence, La Frontera was a relatively relaxed circumstance. There are early photographs of the towns that straddled the border on either side with only a milestone or commemorative marker in the town square to remind people that this was indeed a ‘border town’ as the phrase went. Citizens of both nationalities could wander back and forth freely and with nonchalance.

La Frontera after NAFTA and 9/11

All this changed drastically after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the attacks of 9/11: the former highlighting issues of immigration control, the latter emphasising questions of national security because of the fear of ‘foreign terrorists’ that was so rampant in the immediate wake of the al-Qaeda attacks. After NAFTA went into effect in 1994, increasing numbers of Mexican far...

Table of contents

• Author Bibliography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Politics
• Part 2: Aesthetics
• Part 3: History/Memory