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Performing the Nation:Unauthorized MexicanMigration and the Politics ofLanguage Use and the Bodyalong the US–Mexico BorderChar Ullmana

a University of Texas at El Paso, USAPublished online: 04 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Char Ullman (2015) Performing the Nation: UnauthorizedMexican Migration and the Politics of Language Use and the Body along theUS–Mexico Border, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 80:2, 223-247, DOI:10.1080/00141844.2013.831941

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Performing the Nation: Unauthorized MexicanMigration and the Politics of Language Use andthe Body along the US–Mexico Border

Char UllmanUniversity of Texas at El Paso, USA

abstract Given the harsh environment for Mexican migrants in the US state ofArizona, migrants must think carefully about instantiating their identities in Whitepublic space through clothing, bodily movements, and language. This article exploresthe ways some unauthorized Mexican migrants in Arizona perform belonging to theUSA by performing Chicano. Performing Chicano means passing as a US citizen, andmigrants’ well-being can depend upon the recognition of those performances. Otherunauthorized migrants perform the Supermexicana, to pass as Mexicans who are shop-ping in the USA, and need to hide the fact that they clandestinely live there. This articleexamines how some migrants perform a commitment to the USA in public while pri-vately disavowing it, and how others perform a commitment to Mexico that theysimply cannot have. This analysis argues that the experiences of unauthorized migrantsin the USA can be productively seen through the lens of national performativity.

keywords Unauthorized migrants, identities, language, semiotics, citizenship

IntroductionNo es un juego . . . . Pero sı, ES un juego [It’s not a game . . . But yes, it IS a game.]Juan1

To be a citizen is to learn to imagine all the different parts of the nation atonce, as Anderson (1991) suggests, ‘from the mountains, to the prairies. . . ’. One’s identity as a member of the nation is not solely conferred

by birth, but national identity is also learned and processual. The nation pro-duces and reproduces itself through policies codified into law, but also

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through iteration, through repeated identity performances among individualsand groups. Butler (1990), in her theorization of gender, notes that gender is aseries of identity performances, and that identity performances always involvemistakes. She argues that it is through repeated ‘mis-performances’ that socialchange occurs. If national identities are constituted simultaneously along withgendered and racialized identities, as Butler suggests, then the nation doesnot proceed through logic and order only, but also through ambivalent identityperformances. Sometimes, identity performances are intended to subvert,disavow and yet simultaneously, still commit to being part of the nation.

Butler refers to gender as ‘always a doing, though not a doing by a subjectwho might be said to pre-exist the deed . . . [rather] gender . . . is performativelyconstituted by the very ‘expressions’ which are said to be its results (1990: 25).Butler understands gender to be something that people acquire by the iterativeperformance of normalized behaviour. She suggests that gendered bodies are‘styles of the flesh’ (1990: 139), with particular histories that are both limitingand defining, and that gender is actually ‘a corporeal style, an “act”, as itwere, which is both intentional and performative’ (1990: 139). That is, the repeti-tive performance of acts (e.g. mannerisms, gestures, ways of speaking, etc.) makepeople legible in relation to the gender norms of a particular cultural context.

But how might the notion of gender performativity relate to other processesof identification? Butler herself has addressed the idea of racial performativity,specifically in her analysis of the Rodney King beating, in which the LosAngeles police were videotaped pulling Rodney King out of his car andbeating him. She has said that

It seems to me that this [the video of the Rodney King beating] is a modality of per-formativity, that it is racialization . . . and part of what I would understand as the per-formativity of what it is ‘to race something’ or to be ‘raced’ by it. (1999: 169)

A number of scholars have asked how Butler’s theorization of gender performa-tivity might speak to the formation of racial subjects (Miron & Inda 2000; Rot-tenberg 2008; Roxworthy 2008; Ehlers 2012). While theorists have debatedwhether and how racial performativity might differ from gender performativity,I concur with Ehlers, who suggests that instead of trying to disentangle race andgender (as gender is always raced and race is always gendered), it makes moresense to pay attention to how racial performativity operates, and to understandthat identity performances are always relational. In this article, I examine theways unauthorized Mexican migrants use signifying practices to signal a

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commitment to alterity. By analysing their linguistic and symbolic perform-ances within the context of globalization processes, I seek to deepen scholarlyunderstanding of identification and to expand the uses of the gender and racialperformativity to include national performativity.

The data I discuss here were drawn from a two-year ethnographic study thatexplored the circulation of ideologies of language and work among threefamilies of unauthorized Mexican migrants living in Tucson, Arizona. I col-lected data among their families and social networks in the USA as well as intheir hometowns in three locations in Mexico. Data collection in both countriesspanned the years 2000–2002.

Using a snowball sample, I selected three primary participants from amongstudents I had worked with as an English for speakers of other languages(ESOL) teacher at an adult education centre in Tucson, Arizona. Each partici-pant was part of a dense circle of social networks in both countries, and partici-pant observation was documented in field notes. I conducted formal andinformal interviews and collected documents, as well. Two of the threeprimary participants preferred not to be audio recorded. Their homes werethe only places where they had some autonomy, and they told me theywanted to feel safe and make the rules there.2 While I could observe peoplein their Tucson homes and their communities, I could not observe the US-based participants at work, as it would have threatened their employment.Instead, I contextualized people’s talk about work by conducting focusgroups with students at the adult education centre with people who workedin the same fields. The areas of work included: childcare (mostly women);cleaning (mostly women); landscaping (mostly men); construction (mostlymen); and restaurant work (both men and women). I recruited participantsjust as classes were ending each evening, and tape-recorded the sessions. Allresearch was conducted in Spanish and translated into English.3 The data ana-lysed here are drawn from participant observation conducted with Juan andPatricia. Juan and Patricia were primary participants in the larger study, and Iwas Patricia’s ESOL teacher from 1998 to 2002, and Juan’s throughout theyear 2000.

Because I had taught at the school for five years prior to conducting thisresearch, my role as a former teacher facilitated the development of rapportwith learners’ families in Tucson. This more reciprocal teacher–studentrelationship is uncommon in K-12 education, but it does occur in adult edu-cation settings, where grades are not given, and teachers and learners areoften age peers. Since I had earned the trust of US relatives, I was able to

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build rapport rather quickly with their relatives in Mexico. My history at theschool also allowed me to enter ESOL classes and ask undocumented peopleto participate in focus groups without resistance.

In 2002, people volunteered their undocumented status while in class, andconsented to being recorded at the school, something that would not have hap-pened today, given the volatile and inhospitable climate for migrants that hassince been normalized in Arizona. My years of having attended baptisms, quin-ceaneras [coming-of-age ceremonies for 15-year-old girls], weddings, and fun-erals in this community, along with my having acted as an advocate forunauthorized students while I was a teacher at the school, allowed me aspecial kind of entree. While most teachers attend an occasional student cele-bration, it was less common to be a regular guest, and an advocate for undocu-mented students, as I was. In the next section, I consider various conceptions ofcitizenship and national belonging as they speak to the experiences of unauthor-ized migrants.

Citizenship: Performing the NationCastles and Davidson (2000) note that the borders between being a citizen

and not being a citizen are obscured, especially for migrants. In fact, there areno definite demarcation points in the process of becoming a citizen and being acitizen. Ong (2003) argues that the bellwether of citizenship in neoliberaldemocracies has swung from a focus on the obligations and duties one has tothe nation to a process of self-creation that involves transforming oneself intothe right kind of citizen. The right kind of citizen is a neoliberal subject whoasks little of the state in terms of health, education, and welfare, and is able toadapt quickly to changes in the global market. Ultimately, Ong describes con-temporary citizenship as the ‘social polices and practices beyond the state thatin myriad mundane ways suggest, define, and direct adherence to democratic,racial, and market norms of belonging’ (2003:15). Following Foucault (1988),Ong suggests that racial and cultural categories of the right kind of citizen areemployed discursively and soon become embedded in the values and beha-viours of particular groups.

Butler (1990) adapts Foucault’s notion that discourses become internalized inthe body (1978) by suggesting that while gender feels ontologically real, it ismerely the effect of constant iteration that produces the illusion of normalizedgender roles. The production of polarized gender roles results from a narrativeabout gender that is part of an implicit social agreement to perform and main-tain these constructions. The parallels between performing gender and race, and

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performing the nation are striking, in that performing the nation (regardless ofactual legal documentation) is also an effect of iterative performances that createthe mirage of normalized national identities.

Mendoza-Denton (2008), in her ethnography about linguistic and culturalpractice among Latina gang girls, uses Butler’s notion of performativity (1993)to understand how gender and gang affiliation come to be displayed in symbolicand linguistic identity performances. Coining the term hemispheric localism,Mendoza-Denton argues that gang girls perform identities that are part of alarger political discourse in which ‘the projection of neighbourhood-based,specialized discourses of ‘turf [are projected onto] broader domains that playout in debates over race, immigration, modernity, and globalization’ (2008:104). Notions of belonging and a kind of citizenship (affiliation with a particularhemisphere) are symbolically and linguistically performed, and gain theirstead through iteration. While differences remain, it seems that identificationcan work in some ways that are comparable, whether it is the production ofa gendered subject, a raced subject, or the production of different kinds ofcitizens.

Butler’s notion of identity as performative owes much to Althusser’s (1968)argument that ideology precedes the subject. He said that in order for individ-uals to become subjects who are part of the symbolic order, they must continu-ally perform themselves as subjects. The Althusserian scene of a person crossingthe street and being ‘hailed into being’ by the police officer who says, ‘Hey, youthere’, is the place from which Butler asks, ‘What does it mean to appropriatethe terms by which one is hailed or the discourse in which one is constituted?’(interview with Bell 1999: 164). This article explores that question.

National PerformativityFor Butler, subject formation (1997), owing much to Foucault (1990), has

three primary components. First, discourse acts as a means to normalizepower relationships amongst subjects. Secondly, disciplinary apparatuses playa key role in producing subjects, and finally, language and discourse generatepower/truth, so that the subject is produced as ‘truthful’ within a regime of‘truth’. Butler sees subjects as effects of discursive practice, so a subject’s beinginterpellated (socially called into being), is a performative act. Gender, then, isa primary identity category that is produced through citationality (referringto previous performances), according to Butler.

How might gender performativity speak to the production of racial subjects?(Miron & Inda 2000; Rottenberg 2008; Roxworthy 2008; Ehlers 2012); interalia,

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have explored this question. Like gender, race may appear to have an inneressence, but scholars who use Butler’s theories suggest that ‘it [race] is a perfor-mative practice that produces the very bodies and subjects that are said to be aparticular race’ (Ehlers 2012: 70). Race is produced through disciplinary relation-ships. It is produced and reproduced through the perpetual reiteration of nor-malized behaviours and acts that come to constitute one’s membership in aracial group. Indeed, we are all born into discourse communities that designateus as particular racial subjects, and we learn to perform according to the givennorms, so that we are intelligible to others.

One can theorize, then, that national identities, similar to but not the same asgendered and raced identities, can be understood as performative, as well.Nations are not eternal entities, but rather, must be constructed and dutifullymaintained. If their borders must be diligently guarded, both symbolicallyand literally, then nations can be seen to lack stability, and that means theycan be misperformed or rearticulated. Instead of looking exclusively at theeffects of the nation, such as the deportation of unauthorized residents, theapproach taken in this article, that of performing the nation, results in a focuson the ways in which individuals and groups of people produce and maintainthe nation in which they live.

Passing: Appropriating the Terms of DiscourseGendered and raced identities, along with national identities, are at least par-

tially maintained through visual norms. People look as if they belong to a par-ticular nation, and the language they use or their accented speech function asauditory markers. Of course, legal documents matter as well. State-issued docu-ments, such as passports and driver’s licenses, claim to fix these aspects of iden-tity. However, one’s phenotypic performances can strongly impact the ability toobtain a desired official identity. Transgendered people (Feinberg 1996), Blackpeople who pass as White (Scharfstein 2011), and Jewish people who pass asChristian (Itzkovitz 2001), are just a few examples of groups for whompassing has been a part of their collective history. All instances of passing –national, classed, religious, raced, gendered, and sexual – call into questionour agreed upon systems of social intelligibility (Schlossberg 2001). Historically,the passing for straight of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people has been understoodto have parallels to Jewish people passing as Christian, in part because of theways that these identities are not necessarily written on the skin, makingthem unreadable.

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But all the above noted forms of passing, along with unauthorized migrantspassing as US citizens, are highly self-conscious, intentional acts. Perhaps theyare more like theatrical performances than performative utterances. The perfor-mative utterance is a concept introduced by Austin (1980), a speech act theoristwhose ideas have, along with Foucault’s, been foundational to Butler’s work onperformativity. Austin understood some forms of language to be performativeutterances, in that, given the right circumstances, they perform a concretechange in the social world. The famous example is that of a member of theclergy saying, ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’. Performative utteranceswere, for Austin, in contrast to constative utterances, which had to ‘state somefact . . . which they must do either truly or falsely’ (Austin 1980: 1). Performativeutterances are not true or false, but rather, they were felicitous or infelicitous.That is, performative utterances either accomplish the action they set out toperform, or they do not.

Austin specifically dismissed theatrical performances as etiolations, speechthat was for him, ‘linked with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, theabnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased’ (Parker & Sedgewick 2004:169). Austin saw theatre as comprising imitative performances, and deemedthem empty and without intention. He saw intention as a necessary prerequisitefor the performative utterance. Derrida (2000) critiqued Austin’s dichotomybetween serious and non-serious language, arguing that every possible utter-ance (performative or statative) must be iterable in order to be understood.That is, all speech is citational, depending on previously established norms inorder to be interpreted. Derrida also called into question the very idea ofanyone having a pure intent, noting that intention is always coloured bynorms and context. Austin saw citationality as an aberration to be dismissed,and Derrida made citationality the singular criterion upon which all speechacts stand, so that they can be understood by others.

If passing is a performance that, like any other speech or semiotic system,depends on citationality to be intelligible, it is also a performance that destabi-lizes what Ehlers, following Foucault, calls, ‘the disciplinary regime of race’(2012: 61). I argue that people who perform the nation and pass as citizens,also destabilize the very idea of the nation. In her powerful discussion of thephenomenon of racial passing, I have taken the liberty to substitute, ‘the/acitizen’ or ‘citizen’ for Ehler’s original ‘black’. Consider this:

The passer illuminates that [the citizen] is, essentially, a scopic regime because it relieson the ability to visually identify difference as the means by and through which to

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delineate subjects. If the subject cannot be visually coded as [a citizen], then the possi-bility of regulating this subject within [citizen] status becomes compromised. Thus,passing disturbs the accepted axiomatic relation between visibility and epistemic‘content’ as it were. (2012: 61–62)

If people who are passing as citizens are able to cross the border, or engage inidentity performances that prevent them from being deported, they call intoquestion traditional beliefs about the knowledge that we think is written onthe skin. Passing shows that the construct of the nation is actually quite vulner-able, and that national identities are available for rearticulation. In the sectionthat follows, I historically situate the hotly contested context in which thisstudy was conducted, Tucson, Arizona.

The Mexico–US Border: ArizonaIn 1568, Spaniards began colonizing the territory that is today called New

Mexico and Arizona (then broadly called New Spain). Those colonists, it issafe to say, did not share a common sense of national identity in the waythat is characteristic of the modern nation-state (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1997;Gutierrez 2009). Isolated from the locus of Spanish culture then situated inMexico City, early Spanish colonizers were surrounded by Indigenouspeoples with whom they discontinuously cooperated (the Tohono O’odhamand sometimes the Pimas) and more often warred (the Apaches and sometimesthe Pimas). Rather than being bound together by the modern idea of the nation,these colonizers seemed to have been more united by Catholicism (Gutierrez2009).

After establishing a Spanish military fortress in Tucson in 1775, land grants forthe territory were made by the Spanish and Mexican governments. Followingthe Mexican revolution for independence from Spain in 1821, the Tucsonregion became part of the Mexican state of Sonora. But boundaries continuedto shift, and the Mexican-American War (1846– 1848) ended with Mexicoceding land to the USA through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.Almost half of Mexico’s prewar territory came under US jurisdiction (Martınez1995), including the states of California, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah,New Mexico, Kansas, Arizona, and much of Texas. These states were abdicatedto the USA, and although Tucson and surrounding parts of southern Arizonaand southern New Mexico remained part of Mexico until 1854, the GadsdenPurchase made Tucson, and what is now known as Arizona, into a US territory.

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In spite of American colonization, Mexican people continued to controlranches in Arizona until the 1870s and 1880s. But by the end of the nineteenthcentury, as the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad were laid across theWest, and Anglos (non-Mexican White people) came to dominate the owner-ship and politics of Arizona. The capital was moved from mostly MexicanTucson to Prescott and later to Phoenix. Although Tucson remained ethnicallyMexican through the early twentieth century (Sheridan 2012), by the 1920s and1930s, Mexican people were living in segregated parts of the city. Historically,most people of Mexican ancestry in Arizona have roots in the nearbyMexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua (Sheridan 1997). At least since the1980s, a south–north migration chain has gone from the Mexican states ofJalisco, Nayarit, Sinaloa, and Sonora to the US state of Arizona and to otherpoints north within the USA (Massey 1997). All of the participants in thisstudy reflect this pattern, and the people who are highlighted in this articleare no exception. Patricia is from Sonora, Mexico and Juan is from Jalisco,Mexico.

In 1913, Arizona passed a law requiring an English literacy test in order tovote in the state (Sheridan 2012). This discriminatory Arizona legislation pre-ceded federal legislation requiring English literacy for immigrants, which wasnot passed until 1917. Arizona passed the Claypool-Kinney Bill in 1914, legis-lation that prevented Arizona employers from hiring people who were ‘deafor dumb, or who could not speak or read the English language’ (Cadava2008: 42). While this bill did not specifically refer to people of Mexican ancestry,they were indeed its target. It is clear that Arizona has a history of attempting tolimit the rights of people with Mexican ancestry within the state, and of battlingthe federal government when it comes to questions of national belonging.

In 2000, when both Juan and Patricia were taking ESOL classes with me inTucson, the state of Arizona passed Proposition 203, which effectively elimi-nated bilingual education in the state. With advertising funded by billionaireRon Unz, the legislation passed with 63% of the popular vote (Wright 2005).Support for similar legislation was financed by Unz in California and Massachu-setts, as well.4 While this legislation did not impact my participants directly, ithad powerful implications for Patricia’s grandchildren and Juan’s niece andnephew, and it represented a move towards restricting migrants’ lives.

In 2006, Proposition 300 was passed, which specified that no one could par-ticipate in adult education programmes, including ESOL classes, without a validvisa. While the legislation specifically singled out adult education programmes,

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colleges and universities throughout the state were also impacted. Proposition300 paved the way for SB 1070 and SB 2281, both of which were passed in 2010.

SB 1070 made it a crime for migrants to be in Arizona without carrying docu-ments on their person. The bill was amended soon after its introduction,morphing into house bill (HB) 2162, which was intended to address concernsabout racial profiling. HB 2162 differs from SB 1070 in that it lessens the finesand length of incarceration that were initially proposed. Although protestsagainst the Arizona law were held in more than 70 cities across the country,and the US Department of Justice filed a federal injunction against the legis-lation, other states such as Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana, and South Carolinahave passed comparable laws (Oh & Cooc 2011).

At the same time that SB 1070 dominated the news cycle, SB 2281, the Anti-Ethnic Studies legislation passed the Arizona legislature. This law prohibitedany publically funded classes, from the elementary-school level through univer-sity, that were designed for students of a particular ethnic group. Particularly tar-geted was Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American/Raza StudiesProgram, an innovative curriculum that has become a site of intense politicalstruggle (Cammarota 2009). SB 2281 stated that students should be taught tointeract as individuals and not as members of races or classes, in essence outlaw-ing culturally responsive teaching throughout the state (Ladsen-Billings 1995;Gay 2000). Questions of national identity and whether or not Mexicannationals and people of Mexican ancestry can find a sense of belonging inArizona are, sadly, not new. While SB 1070, HB 2162, and the anti-ethnicstudies law, SB 2281 were passed after these data were collected, the climatethat led to their passage was palpable during the 2000–2002 data collectionperiod.

Continual change, dispossession, and ambivalence have been normalized inthe lives of people of Mexican ancestry who live in Arizona. In the section thatfollows, I present four episodes of data that describe the experiences of Juan andPatricia as they navigated their national affiliations, balancing them with ‘aspira-tions, fear, desire, pride, responsibility, and pragmatic necessities’ (this volume,Doerr 2013 page number to come).

Episode 1: The CowboyJuan looked down at his feet, shuffling his weight back and forth as we spoke.

We were standing outside his trailer in Tucson, Arizona, waiting for his oldersister to gather her baby gear, so that all of us could go for a walk around thetrailer park, to give his sister Evangelina, and her nine-month-old, Juanito,

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some time out in the air. It was late afternoon on a Friday in August, and theshadows were long. Juan was dressed to go out for the evening: A whitestraw cowboy hat, rattlesnake-skin boots, a plaid cotton shirt with snaps (notbuttons), jeans, and a belt buckle with the Virgin of Guadalupe that measuredfour inches in diameter. He told me that Friday and Saturday nights were theonly times he felt alive, the only times he could be a vaquero [cowboy],5 an iden-tity that has been contraband for him in most spaces in the USA. ‘Es un peligrovestirme asi’ [It’s dangerous for me to dress this way], he explained. When hewas at work, walking around his neighbourhood, or going to the store, he per-formed the identity of Chicano, which for him meant someone of Mexicandescent who was born in the USA, someone with legal authorization.

As an unauthorized Mexican migrant living and working in Arizona, Juanknew it was unwise for him to perform the cowboy in White public space(Hill 2008). This meant he was hard-pressed to perform another identitywhile he was out in the world, if he did not want to be apprehended by immi-gration and customs enforcement (ICE). Any time people act in a particularcontext, we are understood to be ‘acting and interacting as a certain kind ofperson’ (Gee 2000/2001: 100). Juan’s identity performances were nuanced andcomplex, largely because his public persona as an unauthorized Mexicanmigrant in the southwest was highly surveilled (Foucault 1978; Chavez 1994;de Genova 2002; 2004; 2006; 2007). Juan carefully sized up whomever he wastalking to because a misstep could result in deportation.

Benjamin (1979) says that the mimetic principle is kind of compulsion, andTaussig (1993) elaborates on this point, calling it ‘the ability to mime, andmime well, in other words, is the capacity to Other’ (19). Juan knew that hiscowboy identity marked him as Mexican, so he actively studied his Chicanobosses, hoping to pass in public as Chicano. He did this because he neededto continue living and working in the USA, in spite of the fact that he frequentlyexpressed a barely veiled hatred towards Chicanos.

As an undocumented worker, all of his immediate supervisors in the USAhad been Chicano (people of Mexican descent who are US citizens, and whomay or may not speak Spanish).6 Although racial passing has a long historyin African American communities in the USA (Baldwin 1991; Sanchez &Schlossberg 2001), it is less well documented or understood in Latina/o com-munities. Eng and Han (2003), whose work focuses on the experiences ofsecond-generation Asian Americans and issues of passing, parallels Juan’s situ-ation in profound ways. They describe Asian Americans who are obliged todisavow their Asian roots and perform Whiteness, even though they will

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always be seen as mimicking White people. Juan must assimilate not to becom-ing white, but to becoming Chicano. He must lose his cowboy identity, becauseas an unauthorized Mexican man living in the USA, public performance of theMexican cowboy is likely to lead to his deportation. For Juan, performingChicano is an ambivalent act. While he understood the necessity of this per-formance in order to avoid deportation, he also had negative views about Chi-canos. He saw them as oppressive and exploitative, based on his ownexperiences in the USA. These feelings are worsened by a sense of betrayal,his expectation that Chicanos, his paisanos [fellow Mexicans] should havehelped him to navigate life in the USA, and they had not.

Juan, and all of the people with whom I worked had negative feelings aboutChicanos. They saw Chicanos as traitors to Mexico, and as people whooppressed Mexican migrants in order to get ahead. Chicanos, for them, werepeople who had adopted the values of the mainstream White culture of theUSA, and had disavowed any loyalty to Mexico. They were understood byMexican migrants like Juan to be people who mimic White norms.

Juan found himself Othered by Chicanos who were, in turn, Othered becauseof racism in the larger cultural context of the USA (Chavez 2008). But Juanmimicked Chicanos in order to participate more fully in their world. In orderto perform Chicano and commit, at least through performance, to a US nationalidentity, Juan had to disavow the Mexican cowboy.

While Juan talked about the falta de humanidad [lack of humanity] that hisChicano bosses had, he did have close contact with one Chicano – his two-year-old nephew Juanito, who was born in Tucson. Since his sister Evangelinahad never told Juanito’s father back in Mexico that she was pregnant, she livedas a single mother. She was a single mother who lived with her brother, and herbrother played the role of father to her children. Juan had a special fondness forJuanito. While he loved his nephew and namesake, he talked about how muchhe hated what he knew the child would become. Juan’s ambivalence was palp-able. Every Friday night, Juan would go to his beloved dances, dressed as acowboy, and even though he expressed his anger about the injustices perpe-trated against him by Chicanos, he attended the dances with the goal of meet-ings a Chicana, getting married, and getting papers. Chicano/as were the sourceof his frustration, and they were also his hope for the future – for himself and forhis nephew.

In Mexico, Juan said he felt his Mexicanness was unquestioned. He was twogenerations from his Indigenous past (his grandmother spoke what he called adialecto, probably the language Nahuatl and he, his parents, and his siblings all

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identified as mestizos [of mixed Spanish and Indigenous blood]. His identitypositioning, with Indigenous roots, but no connection to Indigenous languagesand cultures, put him at the centre of the Mexican nation, in spite of his beingimpoverished. His performance of the Chicano, which he engaged in each day,put him at the periphery of US power. However, his performance of the cowboybrought him closer to the centre of Mexican power.

Bhabha (1994) argues that in colonial contexts, the only way for a colonizedperson to become a subject is through mimicking the ideals of Whiteness. Ifmimicry is the practice of trying to be someone, it is fundamentally impossibleto become, it is the practice of trying to become, as Bhabaha says, ‘almost thesame, but not white’ (1994: 96). He says the impossibility of achieving White-ness (i.e. subjecthood) produces ambivalence. Juan was not trying to pass asWhite, but rather, as Chicano, people who look like them, but who are legalsubjects in the USA. Patricia, who is the focus of Episodes 3 and 4, has livedin the USA for many years, but when she was in White public space or crossingthe border, she had to perform the Supermexicana, a stereotypical Mexicanwomen who knows nothing of the USA.

Episode 2: ‘S’up’Juan had told me many times that crossing the border was a serious, expens-

ive, and sometimes a deadly journey. His speech was usually woodpecker fast,but he told me ‘No es un juego’ [It’s not a game] slowly and deliberately. Thenhe paused. We had both just heard the radio news about another migrant whohad died of dehydration in the desert the day before. The man who had just suc-cumbed was the 201st crosser that year, and it was only August, with fourmonths of cooler crossings ahead. Juan’s mother was sick, and he was thinkingabout going to see her. The cost of returning to the USA, according to hiscoyote, was $2000. Juan returned from his reverie and finished his beginningthought, saying ‘ . . . y ES un juego’ [ . . . and it IS a game]. The importantthing, he explained, ‘es saber que es un juego’ [is to know that it’s a game].

Juan was 25 when this conversation took place, and he had been in the USAsince he was 17, without authorization. Third grade in Juan’s western Mexicanvillage was a struggle, and Juan’s parents decided that it would be better for himto work than to attend school. He helped his father with the farm, and when thecornfields were fallow and his father migrated to California to take in cucumbersand almonds, Juan worked as a hauler for a local building contractor. New con-struction happened in their village because middle-class people from the not-to-distant city of Guadalajara built weekend homes there. New construction was

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also inspired by return migrants, people who had lived in the USA and nowwere returning home with a nest egg. They wanted newer, more elaboratehomes for their retirement. This meant that Juan had developed work skillsat home that were transferable to the US context.

One afternoon, Evangelina and I were sitting at the kitchen table in the trailershe and Juan shared with her two children, Alejandro and Juanito. We werefolding clothes and talking. Juan arrived home from his job applying stuccoaround 2 pm, after having started at 6 am. He talked about what had happenedthat day, and I recorded what he said in my field notes.

It is important to note that Juan never went to work dressed as a cowboy.Instead, he shaved his head, wore reflective sunglasses, a Dodger’s baseballcap, an oversized Chicago Bulls T-shirt, and long shorts. His high-top Nikeswere crucial to completing his symbolic Chicano performance, or what hecalled the cholo [a Chicano gang member or gangster].

Juan had worked on the west side of Tucson that day, at a construction sitewhere new houses were being built. He had applied stucco to the exterior wallsof new, four-bedroom, two-bath houses that day. The crew was composed of 11

men, and Juan explained that all of the workers, including the ersatz supervisor,were mojados [wetbacks],7 a term he commonly used to talk about himself, aswell as to refer to friends and family.

Just around 7 am, two Border Patrol agents drove up and parked on the as –yet unnamed road where they were working. The two ostensibly White maleBorder Patrol agents sat in the car and talked. Juan said that when two of hiscoworkers spotted la migra [immigration officers], they threw down theirtools and ran. The others who were at the back of the house heard the toolsdrop and made their escape.

But Juan could see the Border Patrol officers clearly from where he stood.Although he explained to me that he felt angustia [anxiety], he tried to staycalm. He continued stuccoing the wall, glancing at the Border Patrol carevery now and then. The first time his eyes met the gaze of one of theagents, he waved and nodded. He continued to spray stucco on the wall. Helooked up again, met the other officer’s eyes, and nodding, yelled ‘S’up?’using his best Chicano English. The officers waved back. About 10 minutespassed, and Juan continued to spray stucco onto the chicken-wire frame thatwas wrapped around the house. The officers stayed in the car for a while,and eventually drove off.

Within 10 minutes, his co-workers had returned to the site and continuedworking. Juan explained to me that encounters like this with the Border

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Patrol were common. One week Juan was the one who stayed and performedChicano. Another week, it was someone else. With time and distance from theevent, Juan’s story broadened. Among mostly male audiences, fuelled by beer,Evangelina and I heard this story transform into a heroic tale (Taggart 1997)of Juan against the Goliath Border Patrol. Even though Evangelina and Iknew how different the original story was, we kept his secret.

Althusser has said that ‘the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpel-lation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’ (Althusser 1968: 175).Rather than waiting to be interpellated, Juan hailed the Border Patrol agentsinto being by performing Chicano, a kind of national identity characterized,he explained to me, by a lack of fear around Border Patrol agents. Identifyingand deporting unauthorized workers is part of the everyday functioning ofthe nation, as performed by the Border Patrol. But through disavowing hisMexican cowboy identity, at least in White public space, and performingChicano, Juan was able to remain in the USA for another day. This is oneanswer to Butler’s question, ‘What does it look like to appropriate the waysin which one is constituted?’ (interview with Bell 1999: 164).

Through his carefully orchestrated linguistic and semiotic performances,Juan took the reigns of the interpellation encounter, and found a way to consti-tute himself, as Butler has said, ‘along certain kinds of fault lines’ (interview withBell 1999: 164). Even though Juan’s English proficiency was at the beginninglevel when this event occurred, he chose a single word, ‘S’up?’ and pronouncedit flawlessly in Chicano English (Fought 2003), elongating the vowel and swal-lowing the final /p/ sound.

Because Juan wanted to communicate the aspect of Chicano that is docu-mented, and because his audience consisted of two seemingly White Americanborder patrol agents, he used a symbolic system (clothing), an emotional per-formance (coolness), and language (‘S’up’) to perform an identity that impliedlegal status. ‘Identification’ says Fuss, ‘is the detour through the other thatdefines the self’ (1995: 2), and this was evident in his everyday life, where Juanwas engaged in the project of defining Mexican as ‘not Chicano’. He and hisfriends and family talked about the falta de respeto [lack of respect] and racismthat they experienced when working with Chicanos. They told me aboutChicano bosses who hired Mexican workers and told them they would bepaid at the end of the month. Instead of being paid, they found ICE agentswaiting for them when they went to pick up their checks. All study participantstold me versions of this story, but it was especially common among construc-tion workers, restaurant workers, and landscapers.

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Juan continually repeated his performance of the nation, performingChicano, even though it was an identity he found to be a symbol of betrayaland oppression. There is a history of recent immigrants to the USA passingas White, in hopes of avoiding unfair treatment (Epps 2001; Eng & Han2003), and those migrants express a similar disgust for the identities they are per-forming. Sometimes, however, the iteration of the new identity performanceleads people to feel disgust for their ‘original’ identity (Itzkoviz 2001). I didnot observe this behaviour in Juan. However, it remains that his situation isdifferent from those of minoritized people passing as White in the USA,since he is a first generation Mexican migrant performing a second generationMexican migrant. The necessity to migrate at any cost is a result of globalization(Giddens 1991), and Juan is in a peculiar place, as the identity performance hemust reiterate daily is that of someone who is similar enough to him to behis relative, but with one difference: legal papers. Next, I will discuss Patriciaand the complex context in which she must perform not Chicana, but theSupermexicana.

Episode 3: The SupermexicanaPatricia was 44 when these data were collected, and unlike Juan, she came to

Tucson from the Mexican state of Sonora, which borders Arizona. Because shewas from a border state, she was eligible for a border-crossing card, a legal docu-ment issued by the US government, which allows Mexican nationals to travellegally into the USA to shop. At the time, consumer goods such as food, cloth-ing, and small electronics were considerably cheaper in the USA than they werein Mexico, and this programme not only benefitted Mexican consumers, but italso increased US profits. Patricia’s border crossing card was intended for her totravel to the USA for brief shopping excursions, and was only valid within 100

miles of the border. However, like many people, Patricia used this document tocross the border so that she could live and work in the USA. She had done thisfor 10 years before I collected this data. She called herself illegal, and I heard heruse the affectionate term ile to refer to friends and family living in the USAwithout legal documents. Patricia, a single mother with two grown childrenand five grandchildren, had cleaned houses all her life – both in Mexico andin the USA. Because of her border-crossing card, she had been able to returnto visit her family in Sonora, more or less legally. However, when she crossedback into the USA, border patrol agents routinely stopped her for an extensiveinterview, and she was forced to perform the Supermexicana, an identity that,like Juan’s cholo was part of her simultaneous commitment to and disavowel

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of the nation. In his analysis of identities among Japanese heritage learners, Sato(forthcoming) notes that identity is a ‘meeting point between discourses andpractices and points of temporary attachment to the subject positions whichdiscursive practices construct for us’. The issue of temporary attachment is par-ticularly salient for Patricia.

During the 10 years Patricia had lived in the USA, she had learned a signifi-cant amount of English (she was an advanced-intermediate student at the com-munity centre, level 3 of 4). She had made the transition from cleaning housesfor Mexican nationals to working for White Americans, whom she said paidbetter and did not make her work quite as hard. Working for White peoplealso allowed her to practice her English, and this was a significant advantage.Having the opportunity to practice English with other English speakers issomething that most migrants lacked, and Patricia realized that she was fortu-nate to have found this opportunity.

She told me that she had made the decision never to speak English in Whitepublic space, because her status as a learner of English would reveal her asundocumented. ‘Sı hablo ingles, quien soy? [If I speak English, who am I?]Patricia explained. Knowing that her working-class status was quite literallywritten on her skin, Patricia understood that her age and her working-classways of dressing, in conjunction with her being a learner of English, markedher as undocumented. In order to stay safe, she knew she had to not speakEnglish in public. Patricia performed her Supermexicana identity, theshopper who is just in the USA to buy a few things, even at the grocerystore, when she was on her way home from a long, dirty, day of work. Shetold me that she knew her performance was less nuanced at the grocerystore than it was in the offices of the Border Patrol. However, she explainedthat she was often too tired to dress up in her Supermexicana attire, just togo to the store. Her vow never to speak English in White public space wasa part of the performance she could always accomplish. She noted that shehad seen people apprehended by the Border Patrol while shopping atWalmart and at Food City, a local grocery chain that catered to Mexicantastes. More than once, she had overheard Chicana/o employees of thesestores, many of whom were bilingual, calling ICE to report an undocumentedperson. Like Juan, Patricia felt antipathy towards Chicanos, whom she saw asbetraying their Mexican roots in order to advance economically. Patricia alsosaid she thought Chicanos wanted to reduce the competition for jobs and toshow their patriotism to the USA by helping to get unauthorized Mexicansdeported.

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Cleaning three, sometimes four houses a day left Patricia’s hands perpetuallyswollen, chapped, and burned by chemical solvents. And because cleaninghouses is physical work, she usually wore a T-shirt and jeans or even shortswhen she was out (she spoke of shorts as being ‘very American’). She knewthis identified her as working class. She pointed out that Mexican peoplewho speak English, are usually wealthy, and since her working-class statuswas worn on her skin, speaking English would mark her as unauthorized.

The most legitimate way for Mexicans to speak English in Mexico to studyat an international school, and this is only available to some middle-classpeople, and to the wealthy. Poor and lower-middle class people in southernMexico might learn English through the hospitality industry, which is welldeveloped in those locales. However, in northern Mexico, where there islimited US tourism, the only way to learn English is through working in theUSA. This happens most commonly, without papers. Indeed, foreign languageeducation that goes beyond the basics in Mexico is indeed the providence of theMexican elite. The colonial notion that culture and intellect come from foreignlanguages has a long history among educated people in Mexico, given that in1919, just nine years after the beginning of the second Mexican Revolution, allMexican textbooks were written by US authors, and were published in theUSA (Cockcroft 1998).

Along with having to daily hide her English skills and the life she had built inthe USA, Patricia had to perform the Supermexicana identity when she crossedback into the USA after visiting her family in Sonora. Like Juan, Patricia paidattention to her semiotic performance when she returned to the USA, alwayswearing a dress, sandals with a heel, and an easily visible cross necklace. Shemade sure she performed the part of a traditional Mexican woman from arural area, not someone who had lived in the USA for years, wore shorts andT-shirts, and most importantly, spoke English.

When returning to the USA at the Naco, Arizona border crossing, Patriciawas typically held for questioning by Border Patrol agents for four-hourperiods. She told me how she made sure to cross her legs at the ankle, a signof modesty for Mexican women, and to finger the cross around her neck, notonly to draw attention to it, but also to soothe herself. She made sure shewore a simple, modest, cotton dress that she had bought in Mexico, and sheself-consciously used brands of soap and cologne that were available inher hometown, so that she would smell like someone who was just visitingthe USA to do some shopping. Because US products have more prestigethan those produced in Mexico, she brought American shampoos and

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soaps for her family in Sonora, but made sure never to use them while she wasvisiting.

While she waited for the agent to find her record in the computer, she triedto estar tranquila [stay calm] on the outside, even though her stomach churnedand her nervous system lit up. While one agent searched the computer, dauntedby how common her surname was, two agents stood in the small room, leaningagainst the wall and staring at her as they took long drinks from their waterbottles. In English, one agent said to the other, ‘I know I’ve seen her inTucson. She shops at Food City. I think she lives off of 22nd street.’ In reality,these statements could be made about many people of Mexican descent wholive in Tucson. Food City was a popular food store that sold fresh tortillas,and food that is popular among Mexican migrants. And 22nd street, south ofBroadway, is known as the centre of Mexican Tucson (Gonzalez 2005). Patriciaknew that these statements were intended to scare her, and to test her English.The agents used simple, declarative sentences, and they spoke clearly andslowly, techniques that would help a language learner. She was sure theirspeech style was intended to intimidate, but Patricia was determined not toshow fear. Dunn (1996) notes that the emotional intimidation Patricia describedis common technique used by the US military during wartime. Actually, theidentity performances that Patricia and Juan employed have much incommon with survival techniques that Jewish people used during the Holo-caust, as well (Itzkovitz 2001; Kennedy 2001).

Indeed, Patricia had to disavow the part of herself that had lived in the USAfor more than 10 years, who spoke English, used American shampoo, and woreshorts. Given the identity she needed to perform in order to be interpellated as aMexican who had only lived in Mexico, she had to make her years of life in theUSA unthinkable. The self that she performed for the Border Patrol had to be anexaggeration of her previous self. That is, before she started living in the USA,she had used American soap whenever she could in her hometown, because ithad status. But in order to perform the Supermexicana, and cross safely back toher home in Tucson, she had to erase the last 10 years of her life, pretend thatMexican and American people did not have a shared history of border crossing,and perform a stereotype.

Episode 4: ‘I Live in tukSO:N’Sato (forthcoming) has aptly quoted Edwards (1985), noting that ‘language is

an emblem of groupness’. Indeed this was the case for both Juan and Patricia,although they each performed quite different identities. Just as Juan used

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‘S’up’ to perform Chicano, Patricia knew that the pronunciation of the word‘Tucson’ was her shibboleth. Remembering to say tukSO:N, rather thanTU:son was key. After years of learning English, Patricia’s English pronuncia-tion was quite advanced, and it had become second nature for her to pronouncethe word ‘Tucson’ using the norms of American English. However, when aborder patrol agent asked her where she was going, she had to make sure topronounce ‘Tucson’ using Spanish phonology. If she had let slip that she hadmastered the English pronunciation of the word, it would have revealed heras someone who lived in the USA without authorization, given the working-class status that could be read through her clothing and her body. That is,since English mastery was associated with upper-class Mexicaness, as well aswith those from tourist destinations, Patricia’s English skills would havecalled her into being as a migrant without legal documents. This is becauseher working-class status was obvious through her clothing and her ways ofbeing in the world, and her border crossing card revealed that she was fromnorthern Mexico, not a tourist mecca. This is what Bhabha calls splitting,‘two attitudes toward exterior reality persist; one takes reality into consider-ation, while the other disavows it’ (1994: 91). Patricia spoke of how shelonged to be that Supermexicana, the Mexican citizen whose life circumstancesdid not demand that she migrate. However, that identity was for her, foreclosed.Patricia had lost her sense of an uncomplicated belonging to Mexico, and it hadbeen replaced by the continual performance of the Supermexicana both inWhite public space and whenever she crossed the border.

Sato (forthcoming), in his study of Japanese heritage learners, quotes oneperson as saying, ‘I am proud of being Japanese, but if I am in front of a Japanesenative person, it’s more like . . . It’s been called out that you don’t know thatmuch’. Patricia’s struggle for authenticity when she crossed the border wassimilar, but instead, it required her to lose the past 10 years that had shapedher, and to inhabit the person and the country to which she no longer hadthe same relationship. For her, it was not another Mexican national whowould judge her performance, but border patrol agents whose job was to ‘callher out’, along with Chicanos, who needed to show their loyalty to the USAby turning her in. Patricia tried to appropriate the terms of discourse by negatingher own existence as an unauthorized migrant in White public space. Butlernotes that, ‘If the Other is obliterated, so too is language, since languagecannot survive outside of the conditions of address’ (2004: 138). Fortunatelyfor both Patricia and Juan, their homes were safe spaces where their other

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identity performances and the Spanish that was the medium for them could bemaintained.

ConclusionsIn order for Juan to perform Chicano, he had to disavow Mexico and the

Mexican cowboy; for Patricia to perform the Supermexicana, she had todisavow her life in the USA and the reality of the historical cross-border connec-tions between people in Mexico and the USA. Language choice and variety(Chicano English and Standard Spanish, respectively) became stand-ins fornational identity, and those standards, as Sato notes, ‘may foster nationalisticunity . . . [while erasing] a sociocultural reality that is hetergeneous and multi-form’ (forthcoming). Both Juan and Patricia come to perform stereotypes ofChicanos and Mexicanas, in order to be interpellated as they need to. Butlersuggests that desire, an emotion that feels profoundly natural, has beenforged through social mechanisms, and is socially produced within relationsof power. Juan and Patricia understand this and have created symbolic and lin-guistic performances that display the commitment they must have in order tolive in the USA while at the same time, disavowing that same commitment intheir private spaces, both at home and at the Friday Night Dance.

Throughout the nation, the distinction between citizen and non-citizen isunclear, and the border context in which Patricia and Juan live is no different.Bhabha argues that the idea of a nation, a people, is not static. He writes that,‘”The people” are there as a process of articulation and political negotiationacross a whole range of contradictory social sites. “The people” always existas a multiple form of identification, waiting to be created and constructed’(1990: 220). Patricia worked her way through two national contexts in whichshe performed the nation; one in which she embodied the Supermexicana forthe Border Patrol, and another, in which she performed a lesser version ofthe Supermexicana at the grocery store. Juan navigated the world as anunauthorized migrant through performing Chicano, aware that marrying aChicana was his only hope for authorized status in the USA. In her analysisof the spectacle of the Korean Fan Dance, Lim (page number to come) notesthat ‘strategic challenges to racist ideas of difference take the form of a kindof cultural nationalism through these selective practices, in which a convention-ally gendered imagination is also always at work’. The same process seems to beat work with Patricia and Juan, whose identity performances depend on con-ventional and stereotypic ideas of national identity that are also, already inplace.

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In sum, Juan and Patricia’s performances of the nation illustrate the instabilityof the category. Each episode presented in this article is a rearticulation of thenation – both Mexico and the USA. Juan and Patricia’s identity performancessubvert, disavow and yet still, in the end, signify a commitment to alteritywithin the nation. Their commitment to alterity is manifested linguisticallyand semiotically through their complex identifications and repudiations, whatthey commit to and what they disavow. Their daily lives answer Butler’s ques-tion, ‘What does it mean to appropriate the terms by which one is hailed or thediscourse in which one is constituted?’ (interview with Bell 1999: 164).

FundingThis study was generously funded by the Mexico-North Foundation and the

Marshall Foundation.

Notes1. All names are pseudonyms.2. Because migrants living in the USA without authorization are highly surveilled, they

felt more comfortable with my taking field notes rather than recording their voices.Of course, I respected their wishes.

3. I translated the data into English, with the help of Hilda Arias and Darcy Alexandra.4. Arizona, California, and Massachusetts are all proposition states, where many issues

are voted on in popular elections.5. When Juan talks about being a vaquero, he is referring to the Spanish and later

Mexican tradition of driving cattle. While the cowboy is often thought of as anAmerican phenomenon, the Spanish and Mexican traditions preceded the traditionin the USA.

6. This was Juan’s definition of Chicano/a. When I told him about ‘Chicano’ beingassociated with the civil rights movment of the 1960s and 1970s, he dismissedChicano struggles as insignificant compared to his own.

7. Wetback is a derogatory term used for Mexican migrants who are presumed to haveswum across the Rio Grande river to arrive in the USA. Operation Wetback was theofficial name of the US governmental programme to deport undocumented Mexi-cans in the 1950s (Garcia 1980).

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