Download Notas sobre “Reading the Border, North and South”

Notas sobre “Reading the Border, North and South”
Rolando Romero escribe “Border of Fear, Border of Desire” Borders are perceived very
diffently by people because they have different cultural lenses when they cross it. He
speaks about the imaginary and material border (Mexican immigration and gringo
tourism). It is on the one hand a material line that divides territories and an imaginary
metaphorical line that affects individual and cultural identities.
Gloria Anzaldúa comments in Borderlands?La Frontera that the border studies have
become very prevalent sind mid 1980’s in the U.S. where it’s been used as a locus of
discussion on the deconstruction of monolithic nationalistic structures
She says it is an intellectual project on the one hand of a nationalistic discourse and on
the other hand of a heterogeneous transnational space of construction of identities
From the Mexican side of the border it is difficult to see the border as a metaphor but it is
seen as a mean to relocate discourses about the Mexicanidad. From the U.S. border it is
seen as a definition of monolithic and national structures but also as an objective
correlative for discussions of U.S. dominant cultures and its margins,
or spaces of resistance (3)
The Mexican border is also seen as a obstacle against Mexican national’s dreams. To
think of the border as the line shared by inhabitants on both sides it is important to take
both sides into consideration or to be specific about either one, and to see the
metaphorical differences involved in such transnational analysis (Garza)
The social space does not corresponds any longer toe the abstract cohesion of a compact
national State that can be defined because of its relation with a specific territory neither to
the opposition between center and peripheries. That is, the border it is what Homi Bhabha
has called “The beyond” in the sense that it is not a new horizon or space that leaves out
the past but it is a space where the time and space traverse each other to create new and
complex identities beyond the structures of nationalism. It resists the concept of culture
as an internally coherent nationalistic universe because it is not static place with people
with fixed identities but rather “as dynamic territories and peoples with multiple
identities” (4). Garza resists this possibility
Garza pretends to live in a space of in-between? Without considering other
posibilities of being, or identity or subversion to define society itself. This is due to
the strong nationalism of the Mexico de Afuera
Within the border metaphoric space Mexican Border occupies the subordinate space as
oppose to U.S. Mexican Literature becomes dominant in this space but yet it is a minority
literature within the U.S. cultural production
Is a border of gender as well, a world with borders (Mexico/U.S., man/woman, Mexican
woman/American woman, Eva/Mary, la pelona/la matrona. Etc in GARZA
The border is at the same time a space of agglomeration in which other (sub)borders are
drawn or blurred.
The borders transgress the traditional chronotopes of patriarchal literature through
focusing on a narrative voice of a female subject. Reading together the Mexican woman
with her Chicana counterpart yields to a dialogue of relationships within the private and
public spaces in relation to a wider national reality, to the local cultural enclave, the
(re)interpretation of the dominant national culture, to the rethinking of transborder
dynamics (8)
Garza’s language is direct and taken from the everyday life. She does not hesitate to
express when necessary her nationalism, to express her individual and social voice.
Nelly Richards in “Cultural Peripheries: Latin American and Postmodern De-Centering”
suggests that in order to decenter the centers it is essential to incorporate the rhetoric of
the other within the concerns of progressive intellectuals. It is fundamental to achieve
democratization of the mechanisms of cultural meaning which depend on the
dehierarchization of those discourses that comprise the production circuits of critical
discursive exchange.
“Border writing stresses the relevance of otherness whose locus is to be found in a
nonplace of transition that gives rise to either a game or a struggle between two or more
cultures and languages” Harry Polkinhorn.
Border literature is subversive because it is a “bastard” form since it takes root in a
transformation of linguistic code for one matter, and an unawareness of an external
identity, external to the nationalistic structures. The offspring (the border lit) is a threat to
the status quo because it produces a fragmented and marginal literature (identities).
By border thinking Mignolo means the moments when the imaginary of modern
(nationalistic) nation states collapse.
By means of ideological strategies the Anglo Culture mystify the relationship between
the minority culture and itself and such act extends American cultural imperialism
beyond borders.
For Hicks the border is much more a metaphorical border of ideal types of
creators/writers and blurs the social, economic, political and economic policies that affect
the real life of the border peoples.
To see the border as a metaphor is to reduce it and to omit the convergence of different
discourse of ethnicity, class, gender/sex etc that happens and this dynamic essentialize the
relations between Mexico and the U.S.. A third country emerges between these two
defined nation states (El Mexico de afuera) narrated by the perspective of the other two
nations. Garza: For her “us” is limited to a minority, a cultural enclave that extends
form the nation state, her “them” is the dominant culture. For her this is a space
inhabited by morally superior peoples (Mexicans) but by mulish persons, from the
Anglo perspective. Therefore the need for such division
Garza is screating her own utopia, under the guise of a quest for knowledge and
ressistance to assimiltation. She inverses the Other (the dominant culture) as the
inferior culturally and morally reinforcing a romantic notion of national identity, to
preserve the essence of what it was to be Mexican. Her concern is one to
nationalization to avoid disruption and hybridity by means of acculturation. Thus,
she is suggesting homogenization of culture with a very specific- agenda, agenda
that is romantic in nature and based on the nineteenth-century models of nation
formation. For her purpose she uses “a narration of fulfillment” that is, to identify
the Mexican woman with civilizing force of national culture (as opposed to la
pelona/la Eva or the savage and uncivilized) in order to impose another discourse
(more liberating) for (Mexican) women transforming and normalizing it within the
national taxonomy system.
She evokes the tension of living in two cultures that conflict not only with each other
but with presumed cultural underpinnings that are highly charged.