The message (Figure 1) both taunted and accused the passer-by. In bold letters it read, ‘Why are you a good citizen in Calexico?’ Graffitied on the wall of a dance studio in the city of Mexicali, Baja California, the question cut through not only the city’s traffic but, remarkably, the international border. Although it was squarely located in Mexico, the message referred to the distant-yet-close world of the other side, the United States, referenced in the photograph as Calexico, California. In this border city, characterised by daily exchanges with its northern neighbour, the message read oddly, strangely even. In no uncertain manner, it accused Mexican nationals with sanctioned access to the United States of performing a superior form of citizenship while visiting the other side. Why direct this message specifically towards privileged individuals with access to the United States and not ask more generally: why are we not all good citizens in Mexicali?
Figure 1. Graffiti in Mexicali, Baja California
While the message may well have been targeted towards US citizens visiting Mexico to take advantage of the younger drinking age, its location amid family homes put it out of sight of the main business areas that cater to US visitors. Instead, the message sat amid a residential neighbourhood, home to individuals who regularly cross the border to shop, work or study in the United States. Adding to the mystery, the message omitted the inverted question mark that is customary in Spanish – did the author perhaps have more familiarity with writing in English than in Spanish? Was she possibly one of the hundreds of students who reside in Mexicali but cross the border daily to attend school in Calexico? Then, as if burning to solve the riddle, a passer-by countered in the top right corner, ‘Porque te lleva la vrg [verga] si no lo eres’ (‘Because you are fucked if you are not’).
The border fucks with you. It opens doors to sanctioned travellers, but it doesn’t let Mexican nationals forget their precarious position as guests and racialised subjects in a region that is growing in its everyday capacity to police individuals. This is a well-documented dynamic in Latinx communities living within the Border Patrol’s jurisdictional parameters, where Brown subjects are routinely stopped at check-points and continually suspected of criminal activity.Footnote 1
Figure 2. Map of the Mexicali–Calexico border region
But the border also fucks in a completely different way: as a figure of the state, it produces and assigns categorical hierarchies that index social encounters, thereby ascribing difference. It sounds innocent and obvious: the border marks a distinction between First and Third Worlds, developed and developing nations, United States and Mexico. However, these everyday distinctions manifest in extraordinary ways for those who cross the border. The extraordinary here refers to the sociocultural fantasies of potential transformation and experiences that may await travellers on the other side. These fantasies materialise in everyday life via the geopolitical border and the restricted access it denotes. In this context, what is considered ‘extraordinary’ are the non-bureaucratic possibilities associated with the border that hold the type of potentiality to transform an average citizen into a ‘good’ citizen simply by crossing an international line, as suggested by Figure 1.
In 2017 alone, there were an estimated 186 million sanctioned border-crossings at 27 vehicular and pedestrian ports of entry, with 19 million of these trips occurring between Mexicali, Baja California, and Calexico, California (Figure 2).Footnote 2 This article draws on 60 interviews, numerous informal conversations and hundreds of hours of ethnographic observations conducted at four ports of entry in California and Arizona (2017–21).Footnote 3 It employs a Žižekian critique of ideological fantasy – defined below – to investigate the fantasies of hope and terror that enliven Mexican nationals’ sanctioned border-crossing experiences. My analysis invites a conversation on how the power of the US–Mexico border materialises in everyday life, not only via state forces but also through the sociocultural fantasies that are attributed to it by the surrounding communities.
I propose that communities immediately adjacent to the US–Mexico border must learn to recognise and internalise the state power embodied by the border for its material forms – such as border fences, ports of entry and blue-uniformed officers – to be experienced as threats (fuckeries) or, alternatively, as a source of desire (fantasies). Put differently, instead of taking the US–Mexico border’s terrifying power as a given, I suggest communities must learn to recognise and negotiate such power. I study the process of recognising, internalising and negotiating the border’s power by exploring border-crossing fantasies conceived by Mexican nationals who spend a small fortune securing access to the other side in hopes of consuming US goods and culture.Footnote 4
In this regard, I argue that the ideologies of difference – such as racial capitalism, frontier surveillance and settler colonialism – that underpin the US–Mexico border materialise in the lives of Mexican border-crossers via fantasies that run the spectrum between hope and terror. Crucially, both desires and fears are integral to the concept of fantasy discussed here. In this context, fuckery does not represent a separate conceptual framework but is used to distinguish between popular notions of fantasies as hopeful dreams and the more nightmarish, fucked-up fantasies of state power described by my interlocutors.
It is important to note that Mexican nationals with authorised documentation to travel represent a diverse group. Mexican and US scholars distinguish between those who regularly cross to work in the United States (border commuters) and those who cross more sporadically for shopping or other activities (border consumers).Footnote 5 Since the border’s inception, Mexican nationals have engaged in both types of labour and consumption-driven border-crossings.Footnote 6 This article focuses on Mexican nationals who cross the border weekly or fortnightly for activities such as grocery shopping, buying clothes or visiting loved ones – activities that appear mundane yet reveal complex social dynamics.
Significantly, the categories of border commuters and consumers are not mutually exclusive but rather exist on a spectrum of border-crossing practices. Many of my interlocutors had previously worked in the United States, even when their primary reason for crossing at the time of our interview was for shopping or visiting friends and family. Shedding light on this transborder dynamic, Germán Vega Briones estimates that approximately 3 per cent (11,706) of Mexicali’s economically active population is employed in the United States, predominantly in the agricultural and service sectors.Footnote 7 Additionally, Lya Niño and Magdalena Villareal observe that women in Mexicali engage in essential, yet often unpaid, caretaking labour for family members residing in the United States.Footnote 8 For these women, the distinction between crossing for work or consumption is often blurred, as cross-border shopping is typically gendered as a female activity, with women handling domestic shopping tasks.
Beyond individual experiences, border consumers collectively represent a significant – if not crucial – economic force in border communities. Regionally, Geraldo Cadava and other scholars have observed that US border communities are often shielded from national economic recessions due to the revenue generated from Mexican border shoppers.Footnote 9 More locally, a 2017 study estimated that cross-border travellers spend an average of US$140 per week in Imperial County, which includes the city of Calexico.Footnote 10 This same study reported that border travellers contribute approximately $380 million annually to retail and grocery expenditures in Imperial County, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total spending in these sectors. The economic impact of border consumers underscores their critical role in sustaining the financial stability of border communities, making their contribution a vital component of regional economic resilience. And yet, the following pages will explore the sociocultural fantasies that surround these economic activities, highlighting that crossing the border – even when ostensibly for consumption – is frequently motivated by deeper cultural narratives and desires.
Fantasies and Fuckeries
The most well-known understanding of ideology comes from the Marxist formulation, ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it.’Footnote 11 For the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, however, the illusion produced by ideological fantasy is not about whether individuals are aware of enacting a fantasy. Instead, Žižek argues that the illusion of ideology is inherent in reality itself. According to him, ‘The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing … What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity.’Footnote 12 In other words, fantasy – conceived as the unique systems of languages, thought and values created by humans – serves as the foundation for the construction of our social worlds. Fantasy is not separate from reality; fantasy is what humans perceive as reality.
In this context, fantasy is not a dreamlike state of escapism. Rather, Žižek argues that ideological fantasy actually sustains our everyday reality by creating an ‘illusion’ that structures our real social relations.Footnote 13 This illusion conceals an underlying, irreconcilable core that cannot be integrated into our social reality. Žižek calls this core an ‘impossible kernel’ – a form of ‘traumatic social division that cannot be symbolized’, which theorists refer to as ‘the Real’.Footnote 14
The Real represents what exists beyond human-made systems of meaning – it is the raw material world that exists independent of language and our attempts to categorise it. Since the Real exists outside our social and symbolic frameworks, it remains fundamentally unknowable. It represents an epistemological rupture – a traumatic fissure in our ability to fully understand, conceptualise and interact with the material world around us. In this way, ideology and fantasy function precisely to shield us from this uncomfortable confrontation with the Real. Building on Žižek’s description, I argue that geopolitical borders function as a form of ideological fantasy, an illusion that feels, looks and acts as real and, therefore, holds power to structure everyday life. Yet, at a fundamental level, geopolitical borders remain a fantasy of the state – one that materialises in the lives of Mexican border-crossers through their everyday crossings between Mexicali and Calexico.
To this end, critiquing the ideological fantasies that produce and reproduce the US–Mexico border as a material and sociopolitical reality is not a simple process of unmasking a truth. A simplified version of this truth posits that geopolitical borders are human inventions better described by what historian C. J. Alvarez calls a ‘fantasy of cartography’.Footnote 15 Yet, a more accurate perception of geopolitical borders underscores the process of fabricating, imposing and policing these constructs. What is crucial in recognising the border’s architecture of power is not only the insidious ways the cartographical fantasy of the border itself structures our reality by demarcating the geopolitical boundaries of the United States as it adjoins Mexico, which is to say, as it enacts the ideological fantasy of a bounded and enclosed nation-state; also important are the ways in which those whose lives are closely intertwined to and with the US–Mexico border must necessarily accept, internalise and reproduce the fantasies that sustain the border.
This idea is perhaps best represented by ideological cynicism, construed by Žižek as ‘They know … what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’,Footnote 16 which in the case of sanctioned travellers may be translated to, ‘They know what they are doing, and they are still doing it because they greatly benefit from border-crossing even when they are terrified and perturbed by it.’ As such, sanctioned travellers are socialised to recognise the immediate and tangible benefits of believing and upholding the categorical differences decreed by the border – North vs South, rich vs poor, and United States vs Mexico, to name a few.
On the calibre of everyday life, Lauren Berlant invokes fantasy as ‘the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something”’.Footnote 17 The tableaux at stake for sanctioned Mexican travellers is a material border embodied in steel fences, labyrinth-like ports of entry, military-grade surveillance technology, and so on. Notably, the fantasy at play is not only the idea of the good life enabled by privileged access into the United States, but also perceptions of state power and emotional attachments to locations in the United States as travellers learn to negotiate entrance by way of bureaucratic documentation and subjective border inspections.
Of particular interest is a fantasy expressed by many interlocutors: that obtaining a Border Crossing Card (BCC), and thereby gaining sanctioned access to the United States, may radically better one’s social standing in Mexico. Additional meaning-making layers reveal the fantasy that travellers may escape daily life – perpetually damaged roads, aggressive driving cultures and frantic urban expansion in Mexicali – and even their own Mexican self by simply crossing a geopolitical boundary.
Journeying into the United States represents a golden opportunity to temporarily experience life within the most affluent nation in the world and momentarily form part of this global power. In other words, border-crossing opens a possibility to test how the forces of geography and state formation may or may not change how one acts in response and in relation to a different geopolitical setting. Border-crossing thus becomes more than a simple geographic transition; it carries an excess of meaning that transforms it into something extraordinary. This excess – all the fantasies of personal transformation, social mobility and escape that travellers attach to the act of crossing, conceptualised here as the extraordinary – and the other-than-border-crossing qualities affixed to entering the United States help justify spending months of personal savings to secure a US visa, in addition to undergoing routinely aggressive border inspections and exhaustingly long wait times that range from 30 minutes to four hours at intensely chaotic, loud and stressful ports of entry in order to shop at Walmart, to cite one of the most recurring reasons Mexican border-crossers offer for travelling to the United States. Yet, these fantasies necessarily uphold socioeconomic asymmetries between Mexico and the United States, while also reinforcing state classifications of the undocumented and documented. How these fantasies fail to materialise, or not, is an issue I explore with my interlocutors later on.
And yet, these fantastical appeals are countered by the fear of the type of fuckery – understood as disruption and dispossession – that the border may unleash onto travellers. The fuckery is dangerous – it represents, to borrow from Michael Taussig, the ‘magic of the state’,Footnote 18 embodied in its capacity to foreclose access to the United States at any point via incredibly subjective and often-times aggressive border inspections. As indicated by my interlocutors, border officials’ discretionary power to revoke travellers’ access to the United States, in addition to a lack of clear and transparent border-crossing policy, results in a type of maddening confusion. This form of uncertainty begets Begoña Aretxaga’s portrayal of the state as an ‘all-pervasive ghostly presence, a threatening force shaped by the collective experience of being overshadowed by an unfathomable power which can shape social life as a dangerous universe of surfaces and disguises.’Footnote 19 Porque te lleva la verga – a state, a border, a border-state that fucks with you: it leaves you guessing, it keeps you suspecting it suspects you may be a suspect. And as border scholars have demonstrated, suspect we are. From the way one speaks, to the way one dresses, the state classifies the border-crossing body according to immigration status, class, nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on.Footnote 20
Consequently, I begin by providing a broad sketch of the bureaucratic process Mexican nationals undergo to secure a BCC, a type of travel visa that grants border residents access into the United States for no more than 72 hours and only within what is classified as the border zone, defined as 25 miles (40 km) inland in California.Footnote 21 I then present the rich ethnographic conversations I conducted with my interlocutors, as together we contemplated the densely surveilled experience of entering the country through a port of entry and the many fantasies and fuckeries that accompany the privilege of sanctioned travels into the United States. Notably, the point in studying these dynamics is not to cast judgment on the substance that binds these fantasies together. Rather, at stake here is an understanding of how the ideologies that sustain the US–Mexico border circulate in everyday life, thereby positioning what was once considered a fantasy of cartography as a real, material and life-threatening force.
We Just Have To Take Everything: The Pan, The Cat, The Dog. Everything!
In order to situate Mexican nationals’ border-crossing narratives, it is important to briefly review the resource-intensive process of obtaining a BCC. Firstly, travellers must obtain a Mexican National Voter Identification card (considered to be the equivalent of an ID card) and a passport, a documentation-heavy process that takes up to eight weeks and costs up to US$136.Footnote 22 Secondly, Mexican nationals submit a visa application, also known as the DS-160, a document that elicits extensive personal information regarding monthly income, work status, educational training and previous travel. After paying a US$160 fee, folks schedule an in-person interview at the nearest US Consulate, in this case located in Tijuana, three hours west of Mexicali.
Because the US Department of State indicates visa applicants must ‘Demonstrate that they have ties to Mexico that would compel them to return after a temporary stay in the United States’, Mexican nationals often travel to their visa appointments with entire binders overflowing with bank statements, pay slips, school report cards and utility bills, to name a few.Footnote 23 As Ana, an interlocutor, pointed out, ‘You never know what documents they are going to ask to see during the appointment at the consulate, so you just kind of have to bring everything, especially because we all know someone who was denied a visa. So, we just have to take everything: the pan, the cat, the dog. Everything!’Footnote 24
The uncertainty of being granted a BCC even when the proper documentation is presented, along with the high costs associated with obtaining one, situates BCCs as the ‘ultimate privilege’, according to more than a few informants.Footnote 25 Whether my interlocutors’ perception that BCCs are the ‘ultimate privilege’ granted to border residents is necessarily factual or not, what I register is a socially produced belief that speaks not only of material gains – like having physical access to the United States – but also invokes the extraordinary possibilities implicit in holding sanctioned passage to the other side. For example, working- and lower middle-class interlocutors often reasoned that obtaining admission into the United States, and thereby potentially accessing the same goods and experiences as wealthier border travellers, afforded them a better social standing in Mexico, if not palpably, at least in the eyes of other border residents.Footnote 26
Sanctioned access to the United States is further complicated by the institutionalisation of the categories ‘documented’ and ‘undocumented’. Migrants and deportees are an integral part of the daily social fabric in border communities. Many of these individuals earn a living by selling snacks and artisan curios or cleaning the cars of travellers at ports of entry. Sergio Chávez’s incisive Border Lives highlights how various guest worker programmes and changes in immigration law have influenced the livelihoods and documentation status of border commuters in the Tijuana–San Diego region, thereby underscoring the fluid and unstable nature of these categories.Footnote 27
Yet, scholars continue to find an underlying tension in how documented travellers understand sanctioned access into the United States. In this regard, Heidy Sarabia’s study of border-crossers demonstrates interlocutors generally conceived of documented access into the United States in contradistinction to that of undocumented migrants.Footnote 28 Similarly, in her ethnography of public citizenry in Tijuana, Rihan Yeh observes sanctioned travellers drawing strict distinctions between themselves and undocumented travellers, whom they refer to as ‘wetbacks’.Footnote 29 Certainly, there is no denying my interlocutors are keenly aware of the ever-present repercussions of entering the neighbouring country without appropriate documentation. However, my research maintains that in thinking about sanctioned access into the United States, my interlocutors were much less preoccupied with drawing distinctions between themselves and undocumented migrants than they were with being able to reproduce the fantasy of higher social standing attributed to those with the resources to obtain sanctioned entry to the United States.
In this context, obtaining a BCC is always thought of in relation to the social fantasy that posits access to the United States may better one’s life in Mexico. Other fantasies situate the United States as a restricted destination – while perhaps not the most luxurious, certainly a travel destination that is not for the masses. Others insist that the heat isn’t as bad, the people much nicer, and life just so much easier across the international boundary. These less-tangible border-crossing dimensions, ways in which the US–Mexico border fucks with individuals’ social appreciation of themselves and surrounding environments, I suggest, reassure travellers that the emotional stress and physical strain of waiting for between 30 minutes and four hours in scorching temperatures at ports of entry, where there is limited or no public bathroom access is, indeed, time well spent.
The Border Knows, but I Just Don’t Know
He was suspicious, not of me, but of my project. ‘So, you study going to the other side?’, he asked sceptically.Footnote 30 ‘And you get paid to do this?’ His accusatory tone of voice pierced every bit of my academic ego. To Mark, who had intermittently crossed the US–Mexico border since childhood, border-crossing was a straightforward act that required no explanation. It just was, like it’s always been. It was bland, sometimes painful, and really not worth studying.
So, when the 27-year-old started sharing deeply personal stories about crossing the border and failed to conclude any of them, instead circling back to the beginning and opening more questions, I got the sense that border-crossing was more complex than Mark was initially willing to concede. His circular descriptions revealed a certain level of ambivalence and a degree of exasperation at not being able to discern the exact parameters of border-crossing policy. I just don’t know, he kept repeating.
A peculiar narrative reflected the border’s potential to fuck with Mark’s access to the United States. It started years ago as then 18-year-old Mark began dating Lucy, who lived across the border in Calexico. Coincidentally, Mark’s close friend, Tony, had also started dating a US citizen. To pass the time while waiting long hours at the pedestrian port of entry, Mark and Tony preferred crossing the border together when visiting their dates.
Tony introduced the idea: if a Mexican traveller disclosed he was crossing the border to visit a girlfriend, the border officer tasked with inspecting traffic at ports of entry held sufficient grounds to revoke the traveller’s BCC. The presumption was that, in creating ties to the United States by way of a romantic relationship, the traveller might be compelled to breach the parameters of the BCC and overstay (or permanently stay) in the United States. All those years Mark crossed to see Lucy, he could never figure out if this was true or not. He just didn’t know.
‘The first time that I crossed to see Lucy, it was like “super myth” time. I don’t know if it’s true and I don’t know if I still believe the fact that you can’t say you are crossing to see your girlfriend on the other side. That you can’t say you have a girlfriend in the United States’, said a confused Mark. Perplexed at hearing this statement, I asked him to elaborate. Drawing a deep breath, Mark continued, ‘Because supposedly the border officer takes your visa away. I’m serious! I lived two years with that fear.’ In the way he oscillated between describing this as something he didn’t know was true or necessarily believed in and stating it as a fact, it was clear that Mark remained mystified about the actual policy regarding transborder romance, if there in fact was one.
Circling back to the roots of this story, Mark admitted the source had been Tony’s parents. I presumed Tony’s parents fabricated this narrative to protect their son from unwarranted questioning. Why give border officers reason to believe dating a US citizen was a way of establishing ties in the United States that might keep the traveller from returning to Mexico when a simple explanation like I’m crossing to shop at Walmart, one of the most recurring reasons travellers offered for visiting the United States, sufficed?
Still, more than six years after ending the relationship, Mark wondered whether this was in fact true or false. ‘So then, I don’t know why, I mean, I don’t know if there is a US law that doesn’t allow Mexican citizens with a visa to have a girlfriend on the other side. I think about it now and I think it is so silly’, he circled back to this doubt. Yet, it was not clear whether he found the idea of a law that prevented transborder romance ridiculous or if he found the act of believing it existed ludicrous.
Instead of stating he was crossing to see his girlfriend, Mark simply said, ‘I’m going to Walmart.’ He continued, ‘So, I was in total panic. I’m serious. It was a deep sort of fear every time I crossed to the other side because I was obviously lying’, he shared. ‘And obviously if they found out I was lying or my crossings became too regular’, he paused, explaining, ‘because before dating Lucy I crossed maybe once a month, so when I became Lucy’s boyfriend it was like, oh, they’re going to realise I’m crossing more often. And it was like I would cross every Friday at the same time, you know? And if you think about it’, he said, employing a border officer’s rough tone of voice, ‘Hey, he goes to Walmart but returns with no shopping bags’, Mark concluded, returning to his own voice, ‘I started tripping out.’
‘But it’s not like there’s an officer inspecting you on your return to Mexico!’, I blurted out, finding the thought of a border officer double-checking that travellers had indeed visited the locations they initially said they were going to quite laughable. In fact, border officers rarely formed part of the process of exiting the United States. ‘But internally you believe you are being surveilled’, I added, hoping to validate his feelings.
‘Exactly’, he said, ‘there’s an internal fear and you believe they are watching you all the time.’ Mark’s suspicion of being closely monitored did not strike me as a conspiracy theory. Quite the contrary. His statement reflected the bureaucratic and document-intensive process that was the securing of a BCC as a Mexican national. Mark’s fear stemmed from a fantasy of state surveillance, what Camilla Fojas terms ‘borderveillance’ in her analysis of the US–Mexico border’s desire to control movement across territories.Footnote 31 Furthermore, border scholars have accurately critiqued the infringement of constitutional rights at the border, amongst other abuses of power.Footnote 32 Mark’s fear rightly reflected the capacity of the US government to act as an all-knowing state, especially given that border officers possessed easy access to his personal records and a detailed account of his border-crossing activities.
‘Fear drives you to reduce something strange to something familiar so you no longer marvel at it. And then the familiar itself becomes more difficult to see as strange’, writes Taussig.Footnote 33 By the end of our conversation, Mark and I could not decide whether this ‘super myth’ was indeed reflective or not of applied border policy. I write ‘applied’ because no official document stated Mexican BCC holders might have their visa revoked for dating a US citizen. In this sense, the truth about whether such policy existed mattered less than what Aretxaga calls the ‘truth effects’ of the myths surrounding this policy, that is, ‘the stories which themselves constitute an immediate, affective, charged political reality’.Footnote 34
At that moment, Mark and I were reasoning in absolute terms, forgetting that the border’s power lay in its capacity to keep us guessing and its power to fuck with Mark’s state-sanctioned ability to cross the US–Mexico border to visit his girlfriend. The border, as an extension of the state, kept us guessing because the parameters of border-crossing policy remained entirely subjective. Furthermore, the state’s suspicion of border-crossers – and their potential to transgress the parameters established by BCCs – kept travellers, kept Mark and me, suspecting we might be suspects. In Mark’s story and in reality, border officials held discretionary power to revoke a BCC at any point.Footnote 35 If an officer considered dating a US citizen enough proof that a traveller would not return to Mexico, the officer retained the authority to revoke that individual’s border-crossing document.
A-Not-So-Magical Place
The question was not a particularly vexing one, nor was it meant to rattle her, but it had this confusing effect. The 23-year-old university student looked unsure, but finally answered, ‘Well, technically it was not my “first time” crossing’, she stated, gesturing air quotes. ‘I had already crossed as a child before I had a BCC on a school trip to the San Diego Zoo, but it’s not like I remembered much about the other side.’Footnote 36
Equally mesmerised by Japanese animé as by the Vogue September issue, Alexa was profoundly aware of the ways border-crossing fucked with Mexican society. The daughter of parents who had migrated to Baja California from the coastal state of Sinaloa, Alexa noted: ‘My parents came north with a different attitude towards crossing compared to families who are from the region. They didn’t see crossing as a necessary thing until, after years of living here, they realised it was necessary to cross. My dad was the first one in the family to have a visa. He was our pioneer.’ As she punctuated this statement, Alexa dismissed her last words as dramatic. Nonetheless, her proud posture and facial expressions revealed that having access to the United States – indirectly through her father – was a meaningful and important attainment.
A newcomer to border culture, Alexa first encountered extraordinary narratives of the other side at school. Her girlfriends spent what seemed like hours detailing all the exciting shopping opportunities available in Calexico, enthusiastically outlining the names of the discount stores selling beauty supplies at a fraction of the cost compared to Mexicali. Yet, when Alexa obtained a BCC in hopes of shopping at this exotic destination, she felt betrayed by her friends’ unrealistic descriptions. She recalled:
The first time I crossed with my visa it was really a new experience because I guess when friends told me about Calexico, I thought it was like this magical place. So, the first time I crossed, I was disappointed because I thought it was going to be much more urbanised, like a modern city and in reality, it was just like any other neighbourhood in Mexicali. Nonetheless, I still had the privilege of witnessing it myself.
Disappointed, Alexa faced this momentous occasion feeling quite underwhelmed by what she encountered after hours of waiting in line to cross the US–Mexico border: an agricultural community of 38,000 inhabitants,Footnote 37 a scene far from the metropolitan representations of the United States Alexa recalled watching on TV.
As our conversation continued, Alexa laughed off her naïve expectations. The fact that Calexico came across as just another Mexican neighbourhood did not affect how much she loved to shop on the other side. Yet, she recognised a fantasy at play in her friends’ descriptions of the United States. This fantasy perhaps circulated socially without raising many questions due to the overall limited access to the United States amongst Mexicali residents but, more likely, because these images of the United States as a glittering and impressive destination conferred a better social standing on those granted the privilege to undertake sanctioned crossings.
‘Oh, you know, there are those in Mexicali who like to cross because they feel the air is fresher on the other side and the heat isn’t as bad as in Mexicali’, she scoffed sarcastically. Hearing this comment, one has to wonder what a difference crossing a geopolitical line makes! Whether this statement was scientifically based or not, Alexa’s comment illustrated a belief that entered the fantastical in ways that resonated socially to the point of feeling true. The notion that environmental conditions might radically change due to a material and sociopolitical marker – the US–Mexico border – was commonplace amongst interlocutors, who jokingly introduced the idea but kept insisting on its veracity throughout our conversations. While certain factors – like the types of polluting industries established in both cities and differences in cultivated green spaces and urban landscaping – might influence the real and perceived air quality, no political border holds the capacity to isolate or enclose a nation’s air currents and weather conditions. Yet, that certain fantastical quality attached to the other side opened up a possibility amongst those with the coveted access to peruse its shopping malls, walk its parks and enjoy its burgers: that expending a considerable amount of resources to secure a BCC and waiting in line hours at a time inside sensorially overstimulating ports of entry was just a small price to pay to enter an extraordinary place where the air was fresher and the heat not as bad as a mere 3 feet (1 m) further south.
Žižek posits the object-cause of desire is precisely this excess of meaning – the fantasy that something offers more than its literal function.Footnote 38 In this case, border-crossing becomes desirable not merely as a physical act, but because of the imagined ‘something extra’ that it promises: fresher air, cooler temperatures and an overall better quality of life that supposedly exists just by virtue of being on the other side. Undoubtedly, the fantasies described by Alexa reflected precisely this phenomenon, an extraordinary quality attached to border-crossing that transformed a simple geographic transition into something magical and transformative. Put differently, these fantasies represent an excess of meaning, producing a type of joy and framing border-crossing as so much more than walking across border check-points. Indeed, Alexa’s words narrated a magical experience centred on entering a fantastical place where the climate, the streets, and even the air were much better just for the simple reason of existing on the other side of a geopolitical border. These fantasies ground, materialise and fold the ideology of separate nation-states onto travellers’ lives by moving beyond the realm of state power into the intimate domain of joy and pleasure. In doing so – by transforming a bureaucratic process into a source of personal fantasy and desire – Alexa demonstrates that the fantasy of ideology is not in the doing – crossing borders – but in the reality itself, a reality where borders function as tangible markers of difference, even as these differences are artificially produced and enforced.
To be sure, military-grade surveillance technologies and policing tactics position the US–Mexico border as a terrifying state institution with life-threatening powers. Nonetheless, this line in the sand depends not only on its state-granted force to delineate a frontier. Just as important in establishing the US–Mexico border’s power as a geopolitical marker is a collective recognition – that is, from the ground up – of it as a real and really powerful sociopolitical entity. This process originates from the oppressive forces of domination via military force that ultimately carry dire and life-threatening consequences. Yet, the effect remains: communities immediately adjacent to the US–Mexico border must learn to recognise and internalise the border’s power in order for it to function as a signifier of a nation-state’s beginning and end. Through this collective recognition and internalisation, the border unfolds a sense of difference, separation, a ‘more rather than a less’ that materialises as a fantasy of excess and extraordinary possibilities for those with the state-sanctioned ability to journey across.
A Tianguis Stops Being a Tianguis and Becomes Something Else
It’s a kind of fantasy that needs to be collectively summoned in order for it to cast its full force. Travelling to the United States does not only concern consumeristic impulses, although this is a necessary component – one brilliantly analysed by Alexis McCrossen et al. using a historical lens on consumer cultures in the borderlands.Footnote 39 Rather, access to the United States always speaks to a traveller’s life in Mexico and the socially imbued fantasies of the good life embedded in possessing a BCC: the potential to better one’s social standing by showcasing the ability to consume and enjoy certain US goods and experiences. Notably, the good life evoked by interlocutors hinged on ideas of social mobility and wealth accumulation often associated with the American dream, rather than the anti-development critiques articulated by Indigenous leaders in Latin America.Footnote 40
Alexa illustrated this phenomenon by contrasting the perceived higher social value attributed to shopping at the Las Palmas swap meet (flea market) in Calexico versus the similarly named Las Palmas swap meet in Mexicali. Remarkably, Alexa characterised Mexicali’s Las Palmas swap meet as a tianguis, an open-air market usually associated with the working classes. Having shopped at both locations, Alexa insisted the two markets essentially offered the same types of goods.Footnote 41
The difference between the two: each carried a unique class standing in the social imaginary of Mexicali residents. Alexa cautioned, ‘It is not the same to say, “I bought these boots at Las Palmas in Mexicali” as it is to say, “I bought these boots in Las Palmas in Calexico.” Do you get me?’, she asked with a sceptical smile announcing this was common knowledge. ‘If someone asks, “Where did you buy this?”, you are not going to respond, “Oh, in the tianguis”’, she said in an ordinary, boring voice denoting the lower-class connotations of the tianguis. ‘That’s totally different than saying’, as she switched to a more luscious and upscale tone, ‘“Oh, I bought it at Las Palmas in Calexico.” It changes your personal image.’ Alexa’s reasoning positioned shopping, in the words of Daniel Miller, as that ‘which transcends any immediate utility and is best understood as cosmological in that it takes the form of neither subject nor object but of the values to which people wish to dedicate themselves.’Footnote 42 In this respect, shopping speaks not only of the goods acquired but, also, of the process – in this case, crossing borders – undergone to obtain them.
In articulating direct access to merchandise sold in Calexico, Alexa projected the image of a well-off and privileged individual, even when her lower middle-class household narrated a different story. Nonetheless, this social projection was necessarily attached to her ability to enter the United States as a sanctioned traveller. Put differently, Alexa communicated she had the resources to secure a BCC, an act that carried enough social capital to convey ‘I am wealthy enough to exchange pesos for dollars’: a hint that Alexa lived, or imagined herself living, a middle-class lifestyle in Mexico.
Reflecting on the social worlds enlivened by being granted access to the United States, Alexa continued:
It ends up being the same item, but in Mexicali no one is going to brag that they bought something at a tianguis. But on the contrary, when you go to a tianguis on the other side – and just because it is located in the United States – the item is all of a sudden a nicer, more coveted version of the same item found in Mexico; a tianguis stops being a tianguis and it becomes Las Palmas, Calexico.
A tianguis stopped being a tianguis, instead transforming into an extraordinary marketplace with the necessary social force to bestow upon its shoppers a higher social status as its location became entangled with border-crossing. Invariably, the US–Mexico border was implicated. It fucked, that is, it held a terrifying power over Mexican border communities by indexing perceptions of individuals’ social standing: in this case, via sanctioned border-crossings to consume US goods. Notably, this form of fuckery hinged on limited sanctioned access to the United States vis-à-vis the broader Mexicali population, therefore positioning BCC travellers as privileged individuals.
The extraordinary qualities attached to items hailing from the United States underline a sense of desire, understood as a lack of something in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Yet, this lack is never wholly individual. Rather, desire is a function of intersubjective struggle. This is why Žižek writes, ‘The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want”, but “What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?”’Footnote 43 Fantasies facilitated by sanctioned border-crossings and consumption of US goods thus ascribed a sense of privilege and higher social status onto travellers that went beyond mere access to the United States. Within the socioeconomic landscape of Mexicali, these fantasies revealed how border-crossing circulated hierarchical categories that appended ‘a more rather than a less’ to experiences and goods acquired in the United States. In effect, Mexicali residents learned to recognise and assign a higher social status to those with a BCC, regardless of actual living conditions.
If the exact same pair of boots were sold in both countries, how did the one pair bought in the United States come to signify higher social status, that is, wealth? Equating US-bought goods to wealth – beyond the actual resources expended in securing a BCC – could also be understood as a product of imaginary identification, defined as ‘identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other’.Footnote 44 By consuming US goods acquired through border-crossing, travellers cast themselves through a US gaze, one that privileged whiteness, heteronormativity, middle-class status, and so on. While this US gaze had a global reach, proximity to the border added a sense of immediacy, primarily in the ways border officials and surveillance infrastructure cast a literal gaze onto border-crossing bodies. On the ground, travellers had to internalise this gaze in order to expedite border inspections, resulting in a shapeshifting of bodies that included clothing choices and even tone of voice in hopes of fitting the parameters of a non-threatening subject.
In doing so, border-crossers learned to see and recognise themselves through the metaphorical and material eyes of the border institution. The result was an insidious process whereby travellers internalised the border’s gaze to function within border-crossing environments. It was through this process that travellers learned to align their own selves – even if only temporarily and forcibly to expedite entry to the country – with the world’s most affluent nation and the social markers that symbolised the United States: excess wealth, power and dominance, to name a few.
Undoubtedly, the idea that border-crossing may transform the social value of an item is necessarily a fantasy. Yet, in hearing Alexa speak, it would appear the border compensated travellers for its punishing wait times and exhausting border inspections by summoning an extraordinary reality – a type of excess that exceeded the mere act of crossing. This sensibility manifested in the span of one international step that assured travellers that the air was fresher and the heat not as bad on the other side of a material fence. As Alexa reasoned, at its core, ‘a tianguis is a tianguis’. Yet the fantasies unleashed by the US–Mexico border deeply influenced how travellers construed meanings and assigned importance to the world around them, thereby transforming the perception of a tianguis – from a lower-class marketplace to a more affluent exchange – according to national coordinates.
A Tour of the Other Side
Up until now, I have detailed some of the fantasies of state power and social standing that emerged as Mexican nationals travelled across the US–Mexico border. Yet, the ways the border fucked with Mexican nationals moved past ideas of social standing and entered the domain of intimate attachments. These other-than-border-crossing qualities surreptitiously folded the geopolitical ideologies that sustained the US–Mexico border into the social fabric of communities. This was not a simple matter of noting a material contrast between Mexico and the United States. Rather, these qualities manifested as emotional attachments which travellers cultivated in relation to the United States via sanctioned entry in ways that reproduced the categories of difference enacted by the border.
Ana, a down-to-earth economics lecturer, who worked for some time harvesting lettuce in California, called these intimate attachments a tour of the other side. I would almost have missed this fascinating detail had I not asked if Ana, like many other interlocutors, crossed into the United States just to fill up her vehicle with fuel. ‘Of course!’, she answered, ‘I am one of those people. Obviously!’ Before I could reply, Ana delivered a lesson on the variations of fuel prices between Mexico and the United States. By the time she concluded, I was convinced that Mexican nationals save up to US$1 per gallon (€0.20/litre) by buying fuel across the border.
‘Of course, you walk away winning!’ Ana exclaimed. ‘And there is a myth that no chemical engineer has ever researched but that we all know is true: American gas [fuel] lasts longer. It has better quality and you end up driving more miles per gallon. It’s strange, but even the car’s motor works better’, she asserted. Ana’s statement illustrated the type of (in)commensuration registered by Yeh, where interlocutors in the Tijuana region appended forms of excess, a more (as opposed to a less) to items hailing from the United States even when articulating a critique of the uneven political economies between the two countries.Footnote 45 At that moment, however, I didn’t doubt Ana’s last comment. Virtually every interlocutor argued a similar point.
In unpacking this seemingly trivial detail, Ana not only described an economic decision, she also underscored an approach to border-crossing. Elaborating on her last point, Ana added, ‘Crossing entails an entire tour. Nobody crosses just because.’ Just because in this case signalled crossing to carry out a single chore: just fill up the car, just buy milk, just eat a hamburger. She continued:
It’s part of the daily life of Mexicali residents and by that I mean crossing [the border] and going on a full tour. I think we all do it: Walmart or another store, hamburgers or other typical US food that comes your way and gassing [filling] up the car. It’s basic, that’s all. In essence, no one crosses just to do one thing. You have to take advantage of the ride, so to speak, take advantage of crossing and do as much as possible.
By mapping out and agglomerating potential destinations in one trip, BCC travellers concocted an intimate tour of the other side. Ana’s tour centred on shopping, eating and filling up the car. However, to say that Ana and other interlocutors approached their US tours lightly would be a mistake. Many informants passionately detailed their tours as the ultimate type of ownership over their border-crossing experience. The undertones of these fiercely espoused tours brought to light what is left unaddressed by these rituals, particularly regarding border-crossing: the nerve-wracking and anxiety-producing process of waiting hours at a time to enter the other side. That is, I understand these border-crossing tours beyond their immediate function as place-makers, instead representing the ultimate reward for the emotionally and physically stressful process of undergoing border inspections. They were the carrot at the end of the stick.
Alexa spoke light-heartedly about the US tours her family had woven together over the years. Although she began by speaking casually, mocking herself for her devotion to these rituals, by the end Alexa clenched her fists intensely against the coffee table that separated us, the vibrations of her taps demanding attention. She detailed:
With my parents we have a tradition of always stopping to eat at Jack-in-the-Box. So, if I go to Calexico and I cross and I don’t eat there, I feel as if I didn’t cross at all. It’s something that my parents taught me: I can’t cross without at least eating a 99-cent taco so I can at least say I ate at Jack. No matter what time we cross, my parents always, always, always stop to eat there. So, when I cross with other people and they don’t have the initiative to say, ‘Let’s stop to eat at Jack’, I sort of feel so out of place and I have to ask, ‘Are we really leaving [the United States] without stopping for a hamburger?’
Alexa punctuated this last statement with an exaggerated facial expression reflecting disgust and disbelief. Her love of Jack-in-the-Box’s fast food was both about the pleasure of eating there and following a tradition started by her parents, but it was also a way to mark a difference between the two countries in a way a material fence cannot. Alexa’s Jack-in-the-Box burger, then, ushered in the fantasy of the nation-state as a separate and bounded entity. Her experience elucidated how the border’s sociopolitical force – that is, the stuff that assembles the border and posits it as real – was not only materialised by the 27-foot (9 m) steel bollard fence broadcasted in the media, but was born through a desire to consume the ultimate representation of the United States: fast-food burgers.Footnote 46 How the border entered her life and inner psyche was a process that rested on a negotiation between her desires and fantasies, the Mexicali community at large, and the global forces of capitalism. The US–Mexico border, as it appeared in Alexa’s life, was not the stuff of steel fences, but a distinction, a fantasy of difference she carried within herself as her body navigated the city.
For Alexa, eating a burger represented a way of conjuring up a sense of history and place and, at the same time, creating meaning out of the tedious act of crossing the border. In biting into a juicy burger, Alexa experienced a fantasy of what she imagined life in the United States was all about. Of course, she was also just eating a fast-food burger but, in savouring its salty pickles, Alexa was reminded of the type of experience one may only encounter on the other side. The sonic vibrations produced as her potato fries fought with the ketchup resonated with Alexa’s privileged position as a US visitor, a special experience that if she chose to – and she did – could be packaged and sold to her Mexican neighbours to conjure an image of comfort and affluence.
These tours spoke volumes about the ways travellers imagined and reconfigured a moving image of the United States – one necessarily conceptualised through the lens of border-crossing – in order to fit their needs, wants and aspirations. They provided travellers with a missing piece that could not be found in Mexico and that was always thought of in relation to life in Mexico: that very something that was unique to the United States. Moreover, they helped justify all the time and effort expended in entering the country. For Ana, it was filling up the car. For Alexa, eating a burger at Jack-in-the-Box. These seemingly trivial attachments reproduce the ideological fantasies of difference – United States vs Mexico, here vs there, belonging vs not-belonging – so desperately needed for the US–Mexico border to function as a geopolitical demarcation in everyday life.
Understanding sentimental attachments to the other side revealed an intimate type of fuckery that took place as Mexican nationals travelled across the border. Although seemingly inconsequential in a political sense, these attachments forged a way of being and relating to the world that corresponded to a geographical location with the potential to radically change behaviour. This change in behaviour began with the ways Mexican nationals related to the act of entering a different country by forging tours that spoke of familiar traditions. Through repeated travels, however, the intimate attachments formed as people journeyed into the United States began manifesting in publicly recognised ways, leading an unknown author to pose a provocative question: Why are you a good citizen in Calexico?
The Culture Changes
It’s a subtle fantasy barely articulated into conscious thought. But it is there. It is experimental, metaphysical, and revolves around escaping self and society in straightforward and circular ways. Rather than conceptualising escape as a form of departure or flight, as Bianet Castellanos beautifully articulates in her study of Mayan immigration narratives,Footnote 47 I think about the forms of escaping that are opened up by sanctioned entry into the United States as part of a fantasy. This fantasy reflects a desire to escape ordinary, everyday life in Mexico via the extraordinary possibilities opened by border-crossings into the United States.
In crossing the US–Mexico border travellers implicitly navigate two societies, each with its own set of sociocultural standards and legal frameworks. Border-crossing is akin to entering a parallel world where life looks similar but is not quite the same – recognisable but different. In the words of Arne Baruca and Mohammadali Zolfagharian, who study border shoppers in the Reynosa–McAllen region, ‘Crossing the border means experiencing the better environment, a different “reality”, and enjoying the blur between fantasy and truth … [interlocutors] regard trips to McAllen as a bonus, an award that contains much excitement, an escape “from ordinary life to a dreamy space of existence”.’Footnote 48 Simply put, the fantasy of escaping posits that the way a traveller engages with the world in Mexicali is not necessarily the same as the way she will engage with the world in Calexico. Something in her changes, adapts, transitions, escapes.
‘You cross a little strip of land and the culture changes’, Alexa pointed out. That the culture changes as people traverse an international boundary was painfully obvious. However, in this short sentence lies a transborder world asking to be unpacked. The culture changes was that barely perceptible grumbling of an incoming avalanche (US culture, broadly defined) that aims to remake everything and everyone in its own image, whatever that image is.
Yet, it was not only that the culture changes. It was also that crossing a strip of land offered travellers an opportunity to realise the fantasy of casting themselves in the image (or in relation to) a different culture and space – a form of imaginary identification mentioned above. In our conversations, interlocutors understood this form of escaping as a way of transgressing not only the physical layout of the city, but also its civic culture. By speaking of civic culture interlocutors construed the ways citizenship was performed in public spaces: in other words, how Mexicali residents followed or didn’t follow local ordinances regarding public behaviours like driving or littering, among others.
Escaping the city and experiencing the way the culture changes was nowhere more obvious than in the driving and pedestrian cultures of each country. Describing her experience as a pedestrian on both sides, Alexa reflected:
Everyone jaywalks here [in Mexicali]. People cross the street wherever they please. Over there [in the United States], pedestrians only cross at street corners and drivers always give preference to pedestrians. Here we essentially gamble our life away every time we cross the street, like every time you need to cross a boulevard you are risking your life. But over there, drivers are friendly and will tell you, ‘Go ahead.’ I don’t know why, but the culture changes.
Although Alexa relied on oversimplified generalisations, her statement illustrated a lived dynamic. In crossing to Calexico, travellers generally experienced and adapted to a different pedestrian culture. Alexa maintained that the same people who jaywalked in Mexico were the same people who only crossed at street corners in Calexico. Although she mainly journeyed into the United States with the stated purpose of shopping, Alexa escaped Mexicali’s unsafe pedestrian culture every time she entered the United States. Choosing to shop in Calexico because of the perceived safer pedestrian culture may or may not be a conscious decision. Yet, it deeply influenced the possibilities of being in a place.
The drastic variation in driving cultures was one border-crossers observed on a regular basis. The contrast was comical: the same driver who patiently waited for you to cross the street in Calexico might be the same one aggressively honking at you to get out of the way in Mexicali. Alexa further illustrated this point: ‘It’s like when you cross [into the United States], all of a sudden you put on your seatbelt and drive so carefully, when in Mexicali you drive super aggressively and without a seatbelt. It’s strange.’ This dynamic becomes less strange when taking into consideration how travellers relate to and conceptualise both sides – particularly the likelihood that law enforcement officers may or may not enforce a specific ordinance.
That the culture changes was apparent at every step of the journey north. It manifested in the manicured highway greenery, road conditions and other public infrastructure. To return to Žižek, the idea that the culture changes grounds the fantasy of escaping by providing a frame through which travellers experience the world as consistent and meaningful, thereby concealing the inconsistency of the symbolic order.Footnote 49 Without these fantasies, border-crossing loses all of its glamour and spectacle, instead becoming just another boring and tedious chore. The fantasy of divergent and separate geopolitical entities that sustains the US–Mexico border offers an extraordinary opportunity to escape Mexicali, if only temporarily, and envision what life might be like in a different context. It provides insight into the exercise of escaping the roads, the traffic, the politics, the foods, the neighbourhoods found in Mexico and entering a glittery space of ever-expanding wealth accumulation, super-fast highways and cheap fuel – while at the same time glossing over the glaring income inequality, structural racism and normalised gun violence that characterise the United States.
A Message
‘Why are you a good citizen in Calexico?’ the message read, followed by a ‘Because you are fucked if you are not.’ Graffiti and public art reflecting border-crossing experiences were scant across the city, with the exception of the areas immediately adjacent to the international boundary. That these words were rooted in Mexico but referenced the United States mattered. The impromptu message formed a type of space-warp merging both Mexicali and Calexico beyond the border. It created a wormhole asking readers to travel across both locations at once.
Yet, isn’t the notion that one may perform the duties of citizenship in the United States better than in Mexico necessarily a type of social fantasy? This social fantasy, as well as the ones outlined above, represent what Žižek describes as ‘a scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void’.Footnote 50 The void at play here is the fundamental impossibility of a nation-state to fully enact even the most rudimentary definition of geopolitical borders as political entities that enclose, separate and bind territories. Put differently, geopolitical borders are inherently incomplete projects: borders change over time, ecological environments refuse complete separation and, most importantly, humans continue to move across these imaginary lines in sanctioned or unsanctioned ways.
Yet, the fantasy of the geopolitical border as enclosing and marking separate territories is there. And communities know – as in conceptualise, accept and internalise – that these borders are there, not only because they witness the production of a material border fence. Rather, the border – as marker of difference and separation – becomes real through the social fantasies that maintain a sense of difference and separation in ways that feel tangible and immediate in everyday life. Otherwise, one is a fucked-up citizen anywhere. In this sense, the US–Mexico border, the very idea of an entity called Mexico and another one the United States, is concretised via contrast and difference, thereby grounding the fantasy that one may be a better citizen over there as opposed to here.
To say that the US–Mexico border materialises difference and that socially concocted fantasies – desires and fuckeries – allow travellers to conceptualise and ground the geopolitical border is painfully obvious. At stake here is an understanding of how the sociopolitical power of the US–Mexico border comes to life beyond the spectacle of military force and fences. That is, how the power of the border must necessarily be recognised, questioned and ultimately accepted and reproduced by sanctioned border-crossers for it to circulate as such within communities immediately adjacent to it.
The process of grounding the border’s power is not a simple act of faith, it is a socially imbued process that requires a careful negotiation between an abstract construct (geopolitical borders), material iterations (fences, ports of entry, surveillance technology), and border communities like Mexicali. In other words, the sociopolitical power of the US–Mexico border is not a given – as anyone who has, perhaps foolishly, attempted to explain to a child why travellers can’t just cross the border anywhere and, instead, must wait hours standing behind long lines of fellow travellers at ports of entry, may attest. At a social level, the US–Mexico border’s power must be recognised, learned and internalised in order for it to carry out its function as a geopolitical boundary. The result is an experience where crossing a border not only lands someone in a whole new country, it takes them to an extraordinary place away from everyday reality: the fantastical world of the other side.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University, Bloomington for supporting the writing of this article via a generous two-year postdoctoral position, where I began transitioning this work from a dissertation chapter into an article. Special thanks to Dina Okamoto, Michelle Moyd, Sylvia Martinez and Sonia Lee for their guidance, as well as to Vivek Vellanki, Juan Ignacio Mora, Chinbo Chong and all the other CRRES colleagues who provided valuable feedback. I also thank both the American Studies departments at Yale University, especially Kate Dudley, and at Indiana University Bloomington, especially Karen Inouye, for their support. Finally, I am grateful to the reviewers at the Journal of Latin American Studies and to anonymous reviewers whose feedback helped strengthen this article considerably.
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