Peter Hasdell and Ana Betancour

Tijuana / El Otro Lado / Borderline Reality 1

The borderline reality of the US / Mexican border

is a potent site for a reconsideration of the

other2 as a complex set of relationships that are

forming and deforming identities and as issues of

emergent conditions and new spatial

configurations in an increasingly trans-

nationalised and globalised urbanity. The lines

of these reconfigurations that circumscribe the

other necessarily include the borderline itself

and cut between different cultural, geographic,

economic, political, historic and social aspects.

They lead to a series of questions that are

1 The authors conducted research and fieldwork in Tijuana during 1999-2001. An original version of the essay, Tijuana Borderline Reality: The Laboratory of the Future? was presented at the conference, Transcultural Architecture in Latin America, Drayton House, UCL, 9-10 November 2001, and another, Tijuana: the branding of displacement at the Tate Modern public lecture series Century City, London, March 2001. 2 The notion of the other here refers to a range of parallelinterpretations and meanings: otherness as a dynamic set of relationsin cultural theory, gender roles and the female sex, as well as theeveryday nick-name, at the borderlands, for the inhabitants on the‘other’ side of the border-line.

implicated in the mechanisms of the borderline:

for example how globalisation gives form to a new

type of urbanity: trans-border urbanity. What

kind of spatial and social practices occur

across, along and in between the borderline? As

Saskia Sassen writes:

The joint presence of corporate power andof disadvantaged people have made cities a contested terrain. The global city concentrates diversity. Its spaces are inscribed with the dominant corporate culture but also with a multiplicity of other cultures and identities, notably through immigration. The slippage is evident: the dominant culture can encompass only part of the city. And while corporate power inscribes non-corporate cultures and identities with “otherness”, thereby devaluing them, theyare present everywhere.3

Due to the increasing disparities and

volatilities that are rapidly restructuring

social, urban, economic and political fields on

both sides of the border region, otherness and El

3 Sassen 2001: 14.

Otro Lado / ‘the other side’ can represent from the

point of view of the North all that is not fixed,

stable, incorporated and enfranchised within the

codex of the first world. Similarly from the

South the North represents a horizon of hope,

dreams and stability. In this way Mexicans have

symbolically been represented as other in a

multiplicity of ways, for example as having other

racial characteristics. This issue can be further

contextualised and problematised through the

consideration of how South America is and always

has been other; from the perspective of the North

/ El Norte (USA) it has always been a gendered,

symbolic and highly loaded construct that has

been portrayed and presented as such by the

North.

While the scope and implications of these issues

broadly considered are enormous, this inquiry

specifically situates otherness in relation to

issues of gender and the role of women in or

rather on the US / Mexico borderline. In this

context gender has a multitude of implications

that reflect on issues of the body, incorporation

of the body, cleanliness and dirt, as more and

more women drift north towards the border only to

be stopped at the line itself, whilst the men

more easily pass - illegally - through the

borderline. A factor evident in the way that the

US owned tariff-free assembly plant enterprise

zones and their assembly factories increasingly

employ only women, thereby beginning to affect

the role of women in the borderline cities in

Mexico. The borderline therefore is becoming a

borderline reality, a demarcation of otherness on

a geographic scale that aligns clearly with

gender differences.

La Otro / The Other

To live in the borderlands means youare neither hispana, India negra, espanolani gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half

breed ....

Cuando vives en la fronteraYou’re a ... forerunner of a new race,Half and half – both woman and man, neither –A new gender; ….

To survive the borderlandsYou must live sin fronterasBe a crossroads.4

The crossroads inhabitants described by the

Chicana writer and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, inhabit

La línea: the US / Mexican borderline; the North

contra the South, a line between the two

Americas. The other / el otro is characterised by

the borderline reality. An otherness that

4 Anzaldúa, 1999: 17.

reflects globalisation as dream contra reality,

as profit margins versus hope and as an

outsourced, cross-border condition. The otherness

depends on where one stands, so to speak, from

which side of the line you view, which language

you have. It depends on how you look to the other

side; on whether you can cross the line and on

how you cross the line. These things influence

one’s state of mind, a borderline reality between

different psychological conditions, demarcating

or delineating between different states, states

of being and realities; marking a limit where two

different worlds meet. The sign ‘/’ is therefore

a figurative dichotomy a boundary, a borderline

conditional on what happens either side. A

demarcation between: consumption / pollution,

head office / sweatshop, imigrante / tourist, baja /

alta to name but a few. It transforms norteňos into

consumers, Mexicans into itinerants, pesos into

dollars, humans into illegals, dreams into dust,

factories into free-markets.

As the Mexican writer Norma Cantú has written:

These lands have always been here; the river of people has flowed for centuries.It is only the designation ‘border’ that is relatively new, and along with the term comes the life one lives in this ‘in-between world’ that makes us the ‘other’ the marginalized. But, from our perspective, the ‘other’ is outside, awayfrom, and alien to, the border. This is our reality, and we, especially we Chicanos and Chicanas, negotiate it in our daily lives, as we contend with beingtreated as aliens ourselves.5

The other in the borderlands context is not a new

concept. It has existed since Columbus and Cortéz

‘discovered’ or claimed America, and those who

have borne this label have included the native

American Indians, the outlaws or bandidos who

5 Cantú, http://educate.si.edu/migrations/bord/live.html.

inhabited the badlands when the US was a loose

agglomeration of states and Mexico was not yet a

Republic. It has included the wetbacks and

immigrant labourers who worked picking fruit

during the Bracero programme which employed

Mexican labour after the 1900s as a way to

develop US agrarian policy. What is new is the

way that the borderlands, which themselves are

full of various forms of normalised otherness,

are now developing forms of the other which are

embedded within practices and operations of

globalisation. These ways include the binding of

women into assembly line workers in ways that are

radically transforming the matrix of the

borderlands. However, as the nature of these

transformations is complex, it is important that

an understanding of these aspects embraces the

wider context of the borderlands.

La Línea

La Línea, the border line, part fence made from

gulf war surplus instant runway, part chain link

fence, part river, sensors of all kinds and

innumerable border patrols and vigilantes,

divides, cuts across, and delineates difference.

It makes the US / Mexican border not only a legal

boundary between two countries but a sign of

otherness. It generates through its differences a

denationalised entity, a territory whose identity

is defined as other. The border itself is

strictly controlled, surveillance is maximal and

it forms an invisible division line between

differing political, social, and economic factors

as well as ephemeral factors. For the US the

border keeps the other out; across the border is

a lawless land whose citizens wish to have the

lifestyle that they themselves enjoy;

alternatively it is where they can escape from

the strictures, the order of US life for some

moments, only easily to return. For the Mexican

the US exists perhaps as a horizon of dreams of

riches or lifestyles to be glimpsed across La

Línea.

Today, cities are doubled either side the

borderline, almost reflected but totally

different at the same time, with completely

different language, culture, and appearance. The

symbiotic relationships shared by the many pairs

of border towns, such as Tijuana and San Diego,

El Paso and Ciudad Juarez or Calexico and

Mexicali, are born of necessity, such that to

pass from one to the other is to go to another

country, through a passport control: the US

citizen’s passage being easier than that of the

Mexican’s. The cities are coupled like reluctant

lovers, embracing for fear that letting go could

only be worse, but are in essence as far removed

from each other as they could be; having

radically different wealth, lifestyle, social

structures and culture. The Mexicans commute

daily across the border to their workplace, and

new settlements are expanding adjacent to the

borderline. The areas either side of the border

are growing dramatically and changing the

landscape, the law and legal procedures.

Who crosses this line? Mike Davis has famously

written about the ilegales who relocated from their

small village in Mexico all the workingmen and

women to California USA. The men worked for the

rich Norte Americanos and sent their money back

home, and even began to get their children- who

grew up in Mexico –into US Colleges. The

immigration officials were not aware of these

people, their organised network and their

displaced village until, under tragic

circumstances, the flop-house in which they were

staying burnt down one night when the men were

sleeping. In effect their whole lives, those of

their families and their economic basis, their

hopes and dreams spanned across La Linea. They were

in effect clandestine operators who started from

a particular cross-border reality; operating in

highly specific conditions with a modus operandi

that allowed them to effectively operate either

side of the line. Stateless travellers and

liminal bodies, who inhabit and subvert the

existing everyday reality, spinning spatial

fictions and territorial tales, and making

disturbances, footnotes and appendices to real

places. In effect they are citizens of an

emerging global reality that allowed the mutation

of existing patterns of development from within

by defining new modes of operating in cross-

border conditions.

What is significant is that the border as marker

of difference has become a mechanism for

structuring and reinforcing differences in ways

that freeze and maintain existent inequalities so

that free trade, free market and transnational

capital can take advantage of these. For example,

the new labour market for Mexican-based US

factories is primarily young Mexican females,

while middle managers and higher-level positions

are US male. This means that La Línea becomes a

mechanism for reinforcing difference. This is

also reflected in the numbers of illegal Mexican

border crossers, of whom men outnumber women by a

factor of five, whilst at the ports of entry6

(passport controls) women who are caught

outnumber the men. In effect then the border is

more of a barrier to women than men, La Línea is

furthermore a separation between, along, across

gender7 lines, with the men on the north of the

line and the women on the south. This distinction

has come to characterise the urban growth of the

border area as well.

6 At the port of entry, women are a major share of would-be illegalcrossers that make their share elsewhere. Historically, men have beena greater share of the border crossers. To the extent that menillegal crossers use the fence more than the port of entry, men arestill a greater share of all would-be illegal crossers. (The fencepopulation appears to be about 5 times as great as the population inthe port, based on 1994 monthly data for apprehensions by the BorderPatrol).7 Gender is here defined as a social construct on a sexed body.Scott, 1988: 25-26: "If the group or category 'women' is to beinvestigated, then gender - the multiple and contradictory meaningsattributed to sexual difference - is an important analytical tool.The term 'gender' suggests that relations between the sexes are aprimary aspect of social organisation (rather then following from,say, economic or demographic pressures); that the terms of male andfemale identities are in large part culturally determined (notproduced by individuals or collectives entirely on their own) andthat differences between the sexes constituted by hierarchical socialstructures." For further elaboration on gender and spatial practice:Betancour, 2000: 39 - 41.

Furthermore, the border region has been

transformed through the North American Free Trade

Agreement to become the site where American

companies establish new factories in order to

hire cheap Mexican labour, paying wages far below

American standards. This has radically

transformed the borderlands and the nature of La

Línea during the past 10 years.

NAFTA

In the newly emerging global economic order, such

factors become intensely manifested at the US -

Mexican borderline in phenomenal ways. Since the

mid-sixties, the neo-liberalisation of trade

relationships has led to the increasing

industrialisation of the border, and has greatly

accelerated in the 1990s due to the NAFTA

agreement, which removes national protection

barriers across borders. The North American Free

Trade Agreement signed by Canada, the U.S. and

Mexico in 19948 eliminated many tariffs and

commercial barriers between these countries,

shifting the location of many companies from

Southeast Asia to Mexico. The context for this

development has been determined by changes in the

global economy that have permitted the relocation

of the production process around the world. In

the "post-industrial" era, the economic

activities of large corporations become globally

dispersed according to the availability of cheap

non-unionised labour and have led to the "global

assembly line" that is not located according to

the specifics of city or national interest.

8 Nafta secretariat: www.nafta-sec-alena.org.

The border region has therefore become an

essential part of the USA's global trade

ambitions, one that is intrinsically linked to

the issues of the World Trade Organisation talks

in Seattle in November 1999 that irrupted in the

riots that closed the city. Implemented in 1993,

NAFTA set a requirement that factories from

countries outside North America use a certain

percentage of components made in the treaty

countries in order to qualify for preferential

tariffs provided by the NAFTA agreement.

‘Nafta land’ is therefore the special and

specific circumstances that make the borderlands

including La Línea a territory with two radically

contradictory sides, two ways of operating, and

two different states of mind. In essence it is a

land no longer wholly belonging to one nation

state. In effect it belongs to neither nation,

and yet is controlled by two faraway powers. This

territory has its own laws and own outlaws,

police and policy makers. As the borderland

itself becomes increasingly an entity or a state

in its own, an assembly factory (Maquiladora)

urbanism expands along the borderline right next

door to developing world cardboard shanty towns

in which the workers or the hopeful live. This

urbanity coupled with a rampant viral expansion,

massive migration or attraction of immigrants to

the border, from other parts of Mexico, and a

growing drug trafficking trade, have all

contributed to a massive growth and

transformation of the area. The population

explosion has meant, for example that growth

rates, infrastructure development, urbanisation

and industrialisation have been astronomical. The

population of the border region is approaching

that of California, although most of the growth

occurs on the Mexican side. In addition its joint

annual economy is more than $88 billion (more

than Mexico’s GNP) although most of this wealth

occurs on the US side or in US held interests.

The numbers of assembly plants meanwhile have

skyrocketed as US companies and global

corporations have fought to gain a cheap assembly

foothold in the borderlands adjacent to the

world’s biggest consumer market.

Additionally, the border area, having been for a

long time an area of flows of illicit drugs, hot

money, people and contraband, has seen a massive

increase in these flows since NAFTA came into

effect. Tijuana, for example, has become the

major point for drug traffic entering the US, the

Tijuanese having replaced and outmanoeuvred the

Colombians of the Medellín Cartels in recent

years.

The essence is that the provisions of NAFTA that

utilise and exploit the border for economic gain

have catalysed the recent decade’s development.

The establishment of what are termed Zonas Libres

(free trade zones) in which assembly plants could

be established all along the border have

radically transformed the area and its

demographics. Often sited close to border

crossings and to strategic infrastructure such as

airports, the areas which superficially resemble

industrial parks are in fact bonded areas,

controlled by transnational interests. Nearby are

often minimal housing and base level amenities

that are linked by company buses to the

factories. What has been notable is that the

housing is, as Naomi Klein writes of the similar

assembly areas in the Philippines,9 primarily for

women. As the traffic and migration flows move

north in Mexico it is the women who come to rest

at the border, whilst men, drugs, goods and money

travel across the border.

Zonas Libres, however, once signified the red-light

areas in border cities such as Tijuana and Cuidad

Juárez where the excesses of the US Military

personnel on leave from San Diego or US college

kids on vacation could be enacted out. Tequila,

drugs, prostitution and gambling made Tijuana

infamous for example, becoming Al Capone’s

favourite holiday city. Quite often Zonas Libres

were located strategically close to the border

9 Klein, 2000: 195 – 229.

and were (with a few notable exceptions10) zones

of tolerance. Women in the past were like their

granddaughters today effectively connected to the

zonas libres: where they lived in sight of the

border and the promised lands to the north.

Tijuana

The city of Tijuana has always been on the edge.

Through its history the city has developed in a

constantly changing relationship to the parts of

California above it, and specifically to its twin

city of San Diego. It has had a role as the dark

side for US citizens to come south of the border

to gamble or to indulge in other pleasures or a

cheap labour pool for US production and industry.

There has therefore always been a symbiotic,

albeit unequal relationship across the border.

10 The Tijuana Casino was closed down by the then Governor, thiseventually led to the development of Las Vegas as a replacement.

With growth rates that are astonishing in

comparison to US cities, Tijuana has grown from

170, 000 inhabitants in 1960 to 400,000 in 1980

to over 2 million today, and their influx has

transformed the city into a regional metropolis

that is the fourth largest city in Mexico and one

of its fastest growing cities. What is peculiar,

however, is that it is not a destination but is

only the transit lounge, so to speak, where

people who flood north come crashing up against

the border.

Tijuana as a city reveals characteristics that

place it within a distinct but ill-defined

category of urbanity not yet classified. Like the

burros painted in black and white stripes to

resemble zebras that parade along Revolución, the

main tourist street, Tijuana is not what it seems

at first sight. Neither city nor highway but

something in-between, the structures, systems,

energy and dynamic of the town belong neither to

the villages and towns of Mexico nor to the

glossy veneer of US cities. It is in fact the

place of an almost magical transformation, where

sofas become customised car seats, where US waste

becomes building materials for a virally growing

town. Buildings become hollowed out, streets go

nowhere, areas are totally disconnected from each

other and bored teenagers attack the fence with

grinders, welders, and cars, while on the US side

it is constantly patched up. The global city of

Tijuana is therefore not New York, London, or

Tokyo. This urban site requires a re-definition

of the conventional understanding of global

cities as merely multicultural places and market

trading cities. An estimated 300 million people a

year pass through its border said to be one of

the world’s busiest border crossings. This flow

encompasses a territory from Tijuana to the city

of Los Angeles, 300km to the North.

The proximity of Tijuana (and the borderlands in

general) to the massive consumer market in the US

has minimised the costs of transportation of

manufactured goods from the border to the US. The

closeness of San Diego's harbour to the factory

area of Tijuana has meant that components mostly

from the Pacific Rim countries (US, Japan,

Malaysia, and Korea) can be easily freighted to

Tijuana. Furthermore, the closeness of Tijuana to

the U.S. has attracted manufacturing industry

from other countries such that many consumable

household electronic devices that were previously

imported whole from Asia, are now assembled at

maquiladora factories. This development has been

aided by peso devaluation during the early 1990s

that has made it attractive for Hitachi, for

example, to relocate assembly plants from

Malaysia to Tijuana. The result is that most of

the important Japanese television manufacturers

have either built, or are planning to build,

assembly plants at the border. Tijuana is

becoming the television assembly capital of the

world. Over 800 maquiladoras operate throughout

Baja California, with roughly 535 of these

located in Tijuana. Known by various name’s such

as twin or in-bond plants, and maquiladoras,

these facilities generate jobs on both sides of

the border, given that the labour intensive

products are manufactured in Mexico, while the

administrative research, development and/or

distribution operations are located in San Diego.

Tijuana's maquiladora expansion has often been

aided by state built infrastructure since the

early 1970s, with the construction of an

industrial park called Nueva Tijuana, an

international airport, a new international

crossing point for industrial trucks, new zones

with industrial parks and related services such

as US style shopping malls. Most maquiladoras are

located in areas that are strategically close to

major infrastructures such as the border crossing

and the airport. As well as making use of an area

of land that is open and flat, a plateau (mesa)

known as the Mesa de Otay, conveniently situated

on the west side of the city. This has led to a

devlopment of the city, a development that is

determined by the city’s otherness, by what lies

across the border, by what occurs at crossing

points that allow the passage of trucks, trains,

people, cars and contraband. The area near Mesa

Otay, for example, is characterised by the

assembly plants but also by the collecting of

people who work in the factories, which in this

case are predominantly women.

Maquiladoras

‘Maquiladora’ is the term used to describe the

assembly factories and comes from the Spanish

word "maquila", used to describe the payment

which millers historically received from peasants

for grinding corn. Maquiladora’s have been in use

since the 1960s and 1970s but they came to

predominate during the late 1980s and 1990s as

transnational corporations geared up for NAFTA.

Even by 1970 the maquiladora industry was the

most dynamic economic sector of the border

region, generating over 30,000 jobs and by 1999

employing over 1,000,000 workers. It became the

third largest generator of foreign currency in

Mexico, after oil exports and tourism. The

development of maquiladoras was further

supplemented by the introduction of new

technologies that allowed for the separation of

routine low-wage operations from highly skilled

specialised tasks. In maquiladoras cheap labour

can be put to use provided the components can be

easily shipped. This change led to the shift of

the production process from developed

industrialised countries. In the 1970s, countries

like Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and in the

1980s and 1990s places such as Africa, India and

South America (including Mexico) have become new

assembly centres. Today, more then 4,500

companies operate in the area, assembling

electronics, televisions, furniture, cars, toys,

clothes and other goods.11

However, the maquiladora industry has created a

cross-boundary economic system that is highly

problematic. On the one hand, the industry

thrives on the human and technical resources

north and south of the border, combining the

politically divided region into a powerful

economic unit although one whose benefits have

been mostly directed towards the US. On the other

hand, the industry's location in Mexico has

enabled US corporations to ignore basic standards

11 Companies include: 20th Century Plastics, 3 Day Blinds, AcerPeripherals, Bali Company, Inc., Bayer Corp./Medsep, BMW, CanonBusiness Machines, Casio Manufacturing, Chrysler, Daewoo, EastmanKodak/Verbatim, Eberhard-Faber, Eli Lilly Corporation, Ericsson, ErtlCompany, Fisher Price, Ford, Foster Grant Corporation, GeneralElectric Company, GM, Hasbro, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi HomeElectronics, Honda, Honeywell, Inc., Hughes Aircraft, HyundaiPrecision America, IBM, International Rectifier, JVC, KendallHealthcare Products, Kyocera , Leviton Manufacturing Co., Matsushita,Mattel, Maxell Corporation, Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi ElectronicsCorp., Motorola, Nellcor Puritan Bennet, Nissan, NSK Autolive,Philips, Pioneer Speakers, Samsonite Corporation, Samsung, SanyoNorth America, SMK Electronics, Sony Electronics, Squares D, Tiffany,Toshiba, VW, Xerox, Zenith.

of production and worker’s rights, allowing them

for example to pollute to degrees that would lead

to massive litigation if it happened under the

stringent pollution laws of the State of

California.12 Additionally the industry’s

existence has led to massive internal migration

often by women and it is estimated that over one

million people have moved into the border region

from other parts of Mexico.

In the context of the post-Fordist industrial

production and global capital that characterise

today's volatile industrial landscape, the

maquiladora can still be seen to embody divisions

and inequities that characterised the

12 Similarly one might say that the Mexican women who work within theMaquiladora industry may be symbolically comprehended by thecorporations concerned. Symbolically women have at times been seen asthe unclean, polluting, see Mary Douglas for example, Leveticus inthe Old Testament. Interestingly Tijuana, having had its riverdestroyed by over-development caused by the US factories flows backinto the US and this has been a source of diplomatic tension followedby cross border initiatives aimed at alleviating the problem for theUS.

borderlands. As an example, the maquiladora

factory will contract its female workforce only

for a period of 21- days. The length of the

contract is shorter than the menstrual cycle, as

a measure to ensure women employed by the factory

are not pregnant. Human Rights Watch has

documented the widespread practice of testing

women for pregnancy as a condition of employment.

Workers who become pregnant are often fired. As

Naomi Klein writes:

Because most zone employers want to avoidpaying benefits, assigning workers to a predictable schedule or offering any job security, motherhood has become the scourge of these pink-collar zones. A study by Human Rights Watch that has become the basis for a grievance under the NAFTA side agreement on labor found that women applying for jobs in the Mexican maquiladoras routinely had to undergo pregnancy tests. The study, whichimplicates such investors in the zones asZenith, Panasonic, General Electric, General Motors and Fruit of the Loom, found that “pregnant women are denied hiring. Moreover, maquiladora employers

sometimes mistreat and discharge pregnantemployees.” [Human Rights Watch, 1997] The researchers uncovered mistreatment designed to encourage workers to resign: pregnant women were required to work the night shift, or to take on exceptionally long hours of unpaid overtime and physically strenuous tasks. They were also refused time off work to go to the doctor, a practice that has led to on-the-job-miscarriages. “In this way” the study reports, “ a pregnant worker is forced to choose between having a healthy, full-term pregnancy and keeping her job.” [Human Rights Watch,1996] 13

One of the consequences of the development of zonas

libres and maquiladoras is the feminisation of the

labour force. In the borderlands during the 1970s the

first assembly factories employed an almost entirely

female workforce as textile workers, as the Mexican

Labour News and Analysis reports:

In the early days women made up as much as 80% of the assembly plant workforce, today they number close to 60%. While they can legally be hired at the age of 16, it is common for these girl-women to

13 Klein, 2000: 222.

get false documents in order to go to work at ages as young as 12, 13 or 14.14

The policies of the overseers and management staff,

apart from having what has often turned out to be an

underage workforce, has been to employ people who are

non-unionised, non-mobile, and who have no real

financial independence and no recourse to systems of

power or organisational systems. This phenomenon

continues to challenge the worldwide women’s movement

as women battle for equal pay for equal work and for

the ending of sexual discrimination in the workplace

and in unions. Additionally, the feminisation of the

labour force continues to change the structure of

families as more women go out to work. They employ and

in many senses bind women to low-wage servitude, while

the factory controllers are middle management men from

14 Mexican Labor News & Analysis, 3/2/1999, v4, no4, as of the past fewyears the numbers of women working in maquiladoras has been around500,000. The percentages are decreasing according to tighterimmigration and deporting procedures in the US, that means men havebeen returning to Mexico from the higher paying but menial jobs theUS to the border areas Maquiladora’ s.

across the border. As the Washington Post reported

recently in a special report, sex discrimination is

notorious: women face sexual harassment, unequal pay

for the same work as men, as well as a glass ceiling

that prevents their promotion to middle management.

Some women even pay with their lives when they move to

the border to find work. There have, for example, been

180 murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez over the

last six years, most of them maquiladora workers.

Nuova Terra

The damage done to us now and in the future by a system that fills our heads with artificial needs so that we forget our real needs - how accurately can it beassessed? Can the mutation of the human soul be measured? The spread of violence,the debasement of daily life? The West isliving the euphoria of victory. The collapse of the East served up the vindication: in the East it was worse. Was it worse? Rather, I think, one shouldask whether it was essentially different.In the West: justice sacrificed in the name of freedom on the altar of the god

of productivity. In the East: freedom sacrificed in the name of justice on the altar of the god of productivity. In the South, we still have to ask ourselves if that god deserves our lives.15

The relationships that the borderline establishes

can be read as a division line between genders as

has been outlined above. The differences that La

Línea and all its complexities set up establish

conditions of the other that begin to ripple

through the divisions between the North and the

South. These differences allow an understanding

of the inequalities that repeat throughout

history to become embedded in house, city,

territory and that are exaggerated within the

borderlands.

In an allegorical etching from 1619, the imagery

of Latin America is as a female body, as other,

15 Galeano, 2001: 59.

as supine, available, ripe; mother earth. 16

Therefore to some extent the practices of

globalisation and free market ideology, as

preached by the US within the borderlands, are

simply furthering this age old mythology of the

founding fathers and the generations of conquests

that commenced with Cortéz? Michel de Certeau in

The Writing of History tells us:

Amerigo Vespucci the voyager arrives fromthe sea. A crusader standing erect in hisbody armour, he bears the European weapons of meaning. Behind him are the vessels that will bring back to the European West the spoils of a paradise. Before him is the Indian ‘America’, a nude woman reclining in her hammock, an un-named presence of difference, a body which awakens within a space of exotic fauna and flora. An inaugural scene: after a moment of stupor, on this threshold dotted with colonnades of trees, the conqueror will write the body of the other and trace there his own history. From her he will make a

16 Etching by Jan Van der Straet for Americae decima pars by Jean-Theodore de Bry (Oppenheim, 1619) in the Certeau, 1988.

historicized body—a blazon—of his laboursand phantasms. She will be ‘Latin’ America.... she is nuova terra not yet existing on maps—an unknown body destinedto bear the name, Amerigo, of her inventor. But what is really initiated here is a colonialization of the body by the discourse of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written...17

The legal boundaries for the settlement of the

nuova terra, described above as virgin Spanish

Latin American land, originally evolved in

accordance with the planning ordinances of the

Law of the Indies. The Iberian conquerors

created, in Ramas clear words; ‘a supposedly

blank slate’, through the outright denial of

impressive indigenous cultures.18 These issues do

not appear to be so different today. The

transnational corporations maintain and develop

their operations under the sanctioning power of 17 Certeau, 1988: xxv.18 Rama, 1996: 2. For further elaboration: Betancour and Hasdell, inLesley Lokko (ed), 2000: 146 –175.

NAFTA and within the orbit of globalisation.

These operational powers continue the

colonisation process within nuova terra, the body

of the borderlands, the body of the other. As

Sassen writes:

Today’s global cities are in part the spaces of post-colonialism and indeed contain conditions for the formation of apost-colonialist discourse (see Hall, 1991; King 1990). Globalization is a contradictory space; it is characterized by contestation, internal differentiation, continuous border crossings.19

Globalisation increasingly raises a changing set

of socio-cultural and economic factors in cities

and urbanities, within which the restructuring of

issues of gender, for example, are constantly re-

defined, re-inscribed and repeated.

Postscript

19

? Sassen, 2001: 14.

The Mona Lisa ‘Five stories and butt-naked, La Mona (the Doll) struts her stuff in the dusty Tijuana suburb of Colonia Aeropuerto. Distressingly--to thegringo eye at least--she looks like the Statue of Liberty stripped and teased fora Playboy centrefold. In reality, she is the home of Armando Muñoz and his family.Muñoz is an urban imaginer somewhere on adelirious spectrum between Marcel Duchampand Las Vegas casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn. ‘Give me enough rebar and an oxyacetylene torch’, he boasts, ‘and I'llline the border with giant nude Amazons’.20

La Mona or The White Woman is the sign of the

Amazon-raw energy, irreverent and bold. She

stands on the border, at the crossroads, other to

all structures, and other to all systems of

order. She is a reproach to the Statue of

Liberty, a symbolic affront to the US’s

outsourced industrial parts and globalised

corporate mentalities operating on the border.

She contradicts the role of women as simply the

20 Davis, 1995: 27.

borderlands labour-force. The cheap and

immaterial bodies subordinated to the production

of televisions and computers for cosy

suburbanites in the US and its global markets. La

Mona/ The

White Woman represents the entire border,

embodied in architecture in ways that are other to

our conventional imagination.

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