Volume 14 (1998)
(De)Constructing the Mexican-American Border

INTRODUCTION

The Mexican-American Border constitutes a social space involving an exceptional amount of political, economic, and cultural interaction and conflit. Constructed and deconstructed over the course of nearly centuries, the border according to Norma Iglesias has been converted into a kind of floating culture in which there are no fixed categories from a racial linguistic or cultural point of view. The frontier culture is liminal and unstable, full of constant change, It is for that reason that Nestor García Canclini in Culturas Híbridas argues that "[l]a incertidumbre generada por las oscilaciones bilingüístas, biculturales y binacionales tiene su equivalencia en las relaciones con la propia historia" (299). The absence of fixed categories along the frontier, in turn, produces an anxiety that is mirrored in the uncertainty of cultural identity, since identity prefers stability and the rootedness of permanent "essences."

The floating frontier is a social space of cultural hybridization, a space in which one's identity shifts accoring tot he perspective(s) that one inherits and the changing forces that affect social reality. For nearly two centuries, Mexicans and North Americans along the border have intermixed and produced a floating, hybrid culture that, paraphrasing Homi Bhabha in his article "The Commitment to Theory," is neither Mexican nor American but rather is Mexican and American at the same time (10). The results of such a hybrid culture are manifested not only in language (Spanglish) but also in food, customs, art, and literature.

In "(De)Constructing the Mexican-American Border," Latin American Issues provides an important discussion of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts and trends that have arisen in this social space. In their essay, Mónica Gendreau and Gilberto Giménez analyze the impact of economic and cultural globalization on traditional rural communities in central Mexico, particularly focusing on migration patterns to and from the United States, while Glenn Martínez examines the representation of the immigrant experience in contemporary Mexican cinema. Silvia Pellarolo, in examining the life of slain Tejana singer Selena, proposes a new reading on her construction as a cultural icon in cinema and the mass media in the United States. Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui discuss the important economic changes that have taken place under the auspices of the Border Industrialization Program and NAFTA, placing special emphasis on the way these programs have differntially affected capital and labor. Alexandro Silva and Howard Campbell use Edward Said's analysis of the Other to illuminate the largely negative stereotyping of the colonias (neighborhoods) that have proliferated in the United States border cities within recent decades, while Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez works from a cultural studies perspective to analyze the Mexican-American border as the space of the Other.

Each of the essays included in this issue helps to shed light on a complex and increasingly important set of realities that link the United States and Mexico.