Tijuana / El Otro Lado / Borderline Reality
Transcript of Tijuana / El Otro Lado / Borderline Reality
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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