WANDERING IN THE BORDERLANDS:
MAPPING AN IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHY OF THE
BORDER

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Texas A&M University

In contemporary cultural theory, the metaphor of the Borderlands has become a repository in which all manners of cultural Otherness is contained. The assumption is that "border thinking" posits a contestatory space for emerging cultures; it shapes the concepts of national and cultural authenticity and promotes global and transnational processes. The border has become referred to so often, as Trinh T. Minh-ha notes, that "it already runs the risk of being reduced to yet another harmless catchword expropriated and popularized among progressive thinkers" (2). And yet, the Borderlands metaphor resonates even more at the end of the century, when borders are continually crossed and recrossed.

In focusing on geographic borderlands, more specifically, the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, metaphorical readings often displace the cultural reality of the site in favor of a particular border vision. In cultural discourse on the US/Mexico Borderlands, the dominant inscriptions are most often that of the Chicano and that of a global communal space. The region has been variously encoded as Aztlán--the pre-Columbian mythic past which is the cornerstone of the Chicano movement--and more recently as "Borderlands," the universal cultural construct representing the encounter of diverse cultures, genders, social classes, and world-views. As observed by Claire Fox, the Borderlands has come to replace Aztlán as "the metaphor of choice to designate a communal space" (61). This favoring of a universal reading of the Borderlands in contemporary criticism tends towards the collapsing of the distinct geographic differences between border regions and the abrogation of the cultural production of writers and critics in that region for an authentication of the border "reality" through a small number of primarily Chicano critics and writers.

In this appropriation of the border, the Mexican perspective is largely silenced; there has been little interest in promoting the vision of the border as viewed from the northern Mexican border provinces.¹ As a result, the image of the borderlands that is generally preferred is far removed from the multi-faceted reality of the site, a fact which puts into question the validity of the Borderlands metaphor: To what degree does current discourse on the Borderlands illuminate the border region, and to what degree does it obscure the very region to which much of this discourse is addressed? The present work aims to redress this oversight by focusing on the diverse "imaginative geographies" which arise from the Borderlands. In so doing, the work contributes to the formulation of a more extensive and complete account of border culture in general, and of the US/Mexico border in particular.

Cultural criticism on the Borderlands has created a discursive practice which arises from the meeting of the so-called "First World" with a geographic "Other," the "Third World." This type of project, in which a critical field is marked out through a geographic region, is similar to the practice of "Orientalism" critically reviewed by Edward Said. However, where Orientalism becomes a colonialist project by the West to control the East-through a discourse which displaces the geographic differences between the East and West into one single vast imagined territory-Borderlands criticism, and its controlling forces, arises from within the area in question.² Just as Said reads Orientalist works through the "imagined geographies" that the works construct, so too can the borderlands be subjected to a topographical reading. The region that is now the southwestern United States, and formerly Spanish and then Mexican territory, comprises the largest body of work in what we can term a "Borderlands project," a project which is a discursive field made up of historical chronicles, linguistic documents, artistic and literary works, and distinct political and social realities. This is an ongoing work that has been under construction since the 16th century Spanish chronicles describing the region. However, rather than map the history of this area-such a historical review extends well beyond the purview of this study^{3 -}-the present work presses forward to the twentieth century to note recent formulations of the border as the Borderlands.

This reconfiguration of the border region into the Borderlands is a projection through which various cultural positions are staked out. It is used to invoke hybrid identities as well as configure a sense of home for the Chicano. With the metaphor of the Borderlands, the position of Chicanos in the United States, not just in the Southwest, can also be ventured. Sergio Elizondo asserts:

There are a number of issues that arise in this citation which inform contemporary Chicano culture: the Borderlands as a region of movement that extends the geography of Aztlán, the relationship to other cultures, and the connection to a fixed place, a home. Chicano culture is posited as a migrant culture, no different from other cultures, Aztlán is not a fixed site, and the Chicano experience is multiple and dynamic. In this position, there is a motioning towards the universal, that is, the negation of a geographic specificity. The citation also lays bare the ways in which the Borderlands has been appropriated in contemporary cultural theory. A reading of recent works on the US/Mexican border leaves the impression that the borderlands of Mexico and the United States are a homogenous region and that it is primarily a Chicano space. This reading most often results in works which promote the borderlands in generalities and encapsulate the border experience into a category of hybrid and largely Chicano acts.

One of the most cited works in this type of configuration is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La frontera. For Anzaldúa, the borderlands is a critical site of meeting between genders, ethnicities, and social classes: "It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the "normal" (3). Anzaldúa's work is a personal reflection on life in the borderlands, be they physical (she reflects on the Texas-US Southwest/Mexico border), psychological, sexual, or spiritual. Hers is a call for a border space as a communal living space for marginalized groups. Her Borderlands is also a reconfiguration of Chicano movement concepts, in particular, Aztlán. Where Aztlán served as a symbol of a homeland, an originary terrain, the borderlands represent the multiplicity of the Chicano experience--the region has no real borders. Borderlands/La frontera, is a hybrid work, part theoretical inquiry into the Borderlands, part collection of poetry. The language that Anzaldúa employs is also hybrid as she mixes from Spanish to English to Nahuátl. The structure of the work is built in the interstices, the "intersticios" as Anzaldúa calls the region, the crossroads of the Borderlands.

In configuring the borderlands as a region intersticios, a region of middles" Anzaldúa is also evoking another Aztec trope, that of Nepantla. In "Border Arte," she reconfigures her borderlands space, foregrounding not merely the notion of dwelling as she does in Borderlands, but further addressing the question of movement inherent in the term Nepantla. In her conception, this term is the "uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race, or sexual position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity" (110). Pat Mora also speaks of the Borderlands as "Nepantla.... the land in the middle" (5). For both Chicana writers, Nepantla becomes a chronotopic motif, a pre-Columbian inscription in the Borderlands chronotope that Anzaldúa explicitly configures and in which Mora implicitly participates. In appealing to this Aztec conception of limbo, a link to a cultural past is established, and a particular depiction of the borderlands is constructed: the borderlands are generalized into a mythological/metaphorical, and universal, meeting site.

Emily Hicks presents a similar universalist tendency in her work on border cultural production in which she proposes a theoretical "holographic" model for the reading of border writers. In her study, Border Writing. The Multidimensional Text, Hicks suggests that just as holograms can present a three-dimensional simulacrum of an object, offering up the "whole" image, so too does border writing capture the multiple cultural referents into one "holographic plate." Such writing affords the reader "the opportunity to practice multidimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory" (xxiii). Viewed in this way, border writing is not a definition, but a mode of operation, "an attitude on the part of the writer towards more than one culture" (80). This conception of border writing as a universal practice allows her to consider as examples of "border texts" the works of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, Luisa Valenzuela, and Gina Váldez, among others.⁴

The borderlands as a universal space also figures prominently in the works of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. One of the founding members of the Border Arts Workshop / El Taller de Artes Fronterizos (BAW/TAF), Gómez-Peña revels in the nomadic and the deterritorialized space of the border. His space is the line between Tijuana and San Diego which at one time served as a laboratory for his performance pieces to the nation of what he called the "transterrados," "los descoyuntados, los que no fuimos porque no cabíamos, los que aúm no llegamos o no sabemos a dónde llegar, o incluso ya no podemos regresar"(389). However, although the border between San Diego and Tijuana was the zone of departure for Gómez-Peña in the 1980's, the decade of the 1990's has seen him pack up his border paraphernalia and move far beyond the meeting place of the Californias towards a conception of a global border economy, the New World Border. In doing so, he has also become encoded -by such critics as Homi Bhabha and Néstor García Canclini-- as the "authentic" border artist.⁵ As the consummate migrant in the global borderland, Gómez-Peña presents a vision of the world as a hybridized space, a vast rhyzomatic network in which cultural differences are dissolved: "in fact, there are no longer any visible cultural differences between Toronto, Manhattan, Chicago, Lost Angeles, or México Cida. They all look like downtown Tijuana on a Saturday night" (The New World Border 27).

Inherent in the works discussed thus far is a marking out of a particular notion of space in which the border is spatialized into a universal. The application of the proposed theories is significant, and at once problematic, in that the very border which serves as a convenient point of departure is erased in a universalizing measure that moves well beyond the specific border cultures of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. These authors speak not so much to the borderlands reality as to imagined Borderlands geographies. Nevertheless, their readings have been embraced by contemporary cultural critics as true border representations in an appropriation of the borderlands, which, as Socorro Tabuenca argues, becomes a type of "intellectual colonialism," "la cual, en ocasiones... da pie para excluir a sus referentes primarios" ("Colonizaje Intelectual"). But the Borderlands as a critical field of study is much more complex and diverse than the collected works of Anzaldúa, Mora, Hicks, and Gómez-Peña.

It merits emphasizing that the metaphorical treatment of the border is not at issue-in fact, alternative metaphorical readings of the borderlands will be proposed herein. What remains at issue is the conceptual essentializing of the border, a complex and highly contested zone. The intent is not to debase the perspectives offered by the aforementioned critics, but rather to position them not as 'the" border representatives, but as critics functioning within a larger discursive field. Conceived in this way, the Borderlands becomes a dynamic region that is constantly under construction. As such, the method for mapping this space is not singular, but rather multiple.

While the vision of the border as a metaphor for a hybrid, communal zone may be appealing, it has further advanced the displacement and "invisibilation" of the borderlands reality, and particularly, of northern Mexico. As noted at the outset, and corroborated throughout the present discussion, much of the Chicano cultural discourse has ignored the Mexican perspective.⁶ If there is a conception of Mexico at all, it is as an echo, a cultural tie in the past-such a trace is evident in the works of Anzaldúa and Mora-or as a zone of poverty and lawlessness, as in much of the media portrayals, the political discourse out of Washington D.C. and Mexico City, and such works as Luis Alberto Urrea's Across the Wire, in which the author documents the hardships of Tijuana's lower classes. While the latter work is a powerful testimonial, exposing the terrible conditions of the poor on the border, it also maintains the stereotypical image of Tijuana--and on a larger scale, the perception of the border region--as a zone of corruption.⁷ A necessary component of the present Borderlands project. then, is the in-depth study of northern Mexican border perspective.

There are a number of problems which arise in taking a binational perspective of the region, for instance, the dissemination of northern Mexican writing and criticism outside and within the border regions. Notwithstanding such difficulties, several binational projects dedicated to the border and studies have taken in the region as a geographic unity. The BAW/TAF, for example, was composed of artists from Mexico and the United States. However, it should be noted that the BAW/TAF was not always a contented binational collective. Several of the Mexican writers rebelled against the border "reality" that the American artists, in particular Gómez-Peña, were presenting. Rosina Conde, for instance, left the workshop because "they wanted to present a border art much different than ours, but this was not the problem since art can be represented in a number of forms. The problem was that they wanted to impose their will. They wanted to turn us into pseudo-Chicano/as, or into a fronterizo/a that did not represent us" (Tabuenca, "Viewing the Border" 164).

One early successful binational encounter was the Primer Festival de Literatura Fronteriza México-Estados Unidos, which took place in 1981 in Tijuana. At this meeting, Luis Leal states of borderlands culture, "en verdad, ambas literatures pueden ser consideradas como dos perfiles de la misma cara..." and that they both examine "las relaciones entre las dos culturas, principalmente con el objeto de llegar a comprenderse mejor exponiendo las diferencias, las causas de los malos entendimientos y lo que cada cultura puede aportar a la otra" (38). His work proposes to view the region not as a homogenous zone, but rather one in which both Mexican and American writers negotiate the borderlands but through different means. It merits noting that this work by Leal is a call for a truly binational study which has yet to be undertaken.

An alternative perspective is offered by Armando Miguélez. In his article, "An analysis of the border as a literary setting," Miguélez focuses on writers, primarily novelists, from both sides of the border. Though he bases his methodology in Bruce-Novoa's polemic essay on the space of Chicano literature, and, in so doing, gives primacy to the Chicano perspective, the corpus of works that he discusses includes three Mexican writers.⁸ In his readings, he notes that due in large part to socioeconomic and cultural factors, the Mexican and Chicano borderlands are developing a common culture. He writes:

In his naming of this third intercultural border space as "Mexican-American, pocho, or Chicano" reveals once again the way in which the northern Mexican borderlands are subsumed into a Chicano spatiality.

Largely in response to Miguélez, Francisco Lomelí, in his seminal article "En tomo a la literature de la frontera," posits a vision of the borderlands not only as a third unified space, but as one which is also divergent. As he correctly states, "los pueblos chicano y mexicano funcionan como la cara del otro sin que el primero sea únicamente la 'otra' cara del segundo y viceversa. La relación siempre está presente, sólo que cada pueblo se encuentra en vías distintas de tratar con su circunstancia en un ámbito diferente y bajo condiciones variantes" (26). Lomelí sidesteps/circumvents/resists/obviates the inscription of the region under the totalizing view that favors, in the case of Miguélez, the Chicano, and seems to promote the type of binational border study that Leal's essay calls for. By reviewing criticism from both sides, he is able to discuss the dynamic relationship between the United States and Mexico that exists at the border.

In his work, Lomelí focuses on two perspectives of the border in particular. On the US side, he notes the tendency in Chicano literature to move beyond the border as a limit, to proclaim an interstitial identity, in other words, the border as hybrid, a zone of mestizaje. This type of mestizaje can be manifested in various ways: the Chicano can, "retener su mexicanidad intacta, modificarla, combinarla con otras influencias o transformarla en algo totalmente distinto a lo que conocía en México' (30). As examples of this type of border mediation, Lomelí mentions the Chicano newspaper, Sin Fronteras, as well as authors such as Miguel Méndez and Aristeo Brito. On the Mexican side, he continues, the border is viewed as a limit between two realities, Mexican and American: simboliza un reto y represents una verdadera amenaza donde se juegan la vida y la muerte, debido a que el pase es menos accesible y mas controlado" (32). Interestingly, he cites as an example of Mexican border writing Murieron a mitad del no by Luis Spota, a writer from central Mexico.⁹ While it could be argued that at the time that Lomeli's article was published -1986- there were few northern Mexican writers dedicated to the representation of the border in their work, much more noteworthy is the marked absence of the border as a limit, or even as a presence, in the works of better known northern Mexican writers of the time (e.g. Jesús Gardea, Daniel Sada, or Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo). Perhaps a more fitting and compelling argument in explaining the motive for this selection is that the border as a limit is primarily a central Mexican perception.

In the foregoing discussion, we noted the various and diverse border visions elaborated by cultural critics: the border as a universal space, the border as a hybrid zone, the border as a limit. In criticism and literary works from northern Mexico, these visions are seen as operating in tandem, and are further complemented by additional renderings: the border as a line of demarcation, the border as a gateway, the border as a cultural desert, and the border as culturally marginal, each addressed in turn. The aim of the ensuing paragraphs is to address the multiple imaginative geographies of the border.

The border may be read as a line of demarcation, through the prism of transnational cultural negotiations. Such a reading posits an unequal relationship, one of domination and subjugation. Martín Alberto Piña Ortiz, in his study of the border as represented in the works of Miguel Méndez, comments on four characteristics of this relationship. Piña Ortiz notes that not only is the border the demarcation between Mexico and the United States, it is also the limit "prácticamente entre los Estados Unidos y toda la América Latina" (10). It is the border between the "First" and the 'Third" world as regards political economies, and, as a result, it is a limit between two distinct cultures, "la latina y la anglosajona ... las que reciben también el nombre de 'cultura de la pobreza! y 'cultura del progreso,' respectivamente" (10). Finally, it is a border zone in which the cultural interdependence between both countries "se manifiesta como un complejo proceso de intercambio, de asimilación y de contradicciones en todos los órdenes de la vida" (11). For Sergio Gómez Montero, another feature of this border with the United States is that it is, "un límite siempre en peligro, o si se quiere es un límite en tensión continua en donde la presencia avasallante de los Estados Unidos es para México una espada de Damocles desde tiempo atrás" (92-93).

One of the implications of this conception of the border as a line of demarcation is that the northern Mexicans, living on the borderline, can be rendered heroic figures. Heroic in the sense that they are fighting a losing battle in the name of Mexican sovereignty. Víctor Zúñiga sums up this view, "la frontera norte es una trinchera cultural, lo ha sido muchas veces de manera heroíca porque el enemigo cultural es muy poderoso, pero debe seguirlo siendo aunque a veces no cumpla muy bien esta función que la nación le ha encargado" ("lmágenes de la frontera norte" 17). As an example, we can offer Luis Humberto Crosthwaite's story, "Where have you gone, juan escutia?". In the story the border is presented as a wall of protection against the invading north. Three soldiers on military leave decide to cross the border to hit the bars and revel in the vices that Tijuana offers. At a bar in the city's red-light district they hatch out schemes of sleeping with the bar prostitute without paying. Their plans are foiled. as they are knocked out by the one thing they had not counted on: Mexican beer. The next day the three soldiers cross back into the United States, hung over, their wallets stolen, conquered.

Significantly, the story is structured against the national myth of the Niños héroes. Early in the narrative, the narrator states:

References abound to the niños héroes throughout the text, and what begins as an all-too familiar scene of the American military on weekend leave in Mexico, is reconfigured into an ironic inversion of a national myth of identity. The story short circuits different mythologies; the niños héroes, the construction of national identity, Tijuana as playground in which everything can be had for cheap or for free, and the border as region ripe for conquest.

Yet, rendering the norteños as national heroes is not the sole reading that can be invoked in this notion. Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, in his 1989 article published in Nexos, "Frontera norte: la línea de tu mano," compares the borderlands to central Mexico, stating of the former, "parecen construídas de la nada, entre el desierto y el litoral; es el espacio donde lo gabacho reina y el dinero fácil está a flor de tierra" (69). This writer, from the cultural and hegemonic center, presents a specific ideological stance-the border limit must be respected and maintained. But because of the cultural mestizaje that is manifest on the border, the northern Mexicans are not heroes of Mexican nationality; in succumbing to the American aggressor, the northern Mexicans are less Mexican.

In reading northern Mexican writers from the border cities, one comes away with the notion that the border is not so much a limit, but a gateway. In Rosina Conde's short story "De infancia a adolescencia," for example, the female protagonist lives in Tijuana, but travels freely between Tijuana and San Diego. Her urban space encompasses two nations. In a related vein, in Federico Campbell's "Insurgentes Big Sur," the narrator states of the options on living on the border: "Y uno volvía la vista de un lado a otro, de Los Angeles al DF y viceversa, como en un juego de ping pong. No se decidía uno muy bien hacia cuál de los dos polos dejarse atraer; no quedaba muy claro si las innovaciones en el caló o el bien vestir ... procedían de Tepito o del East Side" (170). For this narrator, the option to live in Los Angeles is just as easy as it is to live in Mexico City. He is caught in a ping-pong match bouncing back and forth between both poles. And yet, this perspective of the border offered by these northern Mexican writers is subordinated in the process of intellectual colonialism noted in foregoing discussion.¹⁰

In treating the border as gateway, Francisco Hinojosa writes that northern Mexico is "una suerte de limbo cultural donde nada es nada sino apenas un poquito de todo" (32). The implication is that northern Mexico is not any one thing but a multiplicity of them. This reading focuses on the border in relation to not only Mexico but also the United States. That is, it positions the border region in the interstice and as such, the border is remapped as a bridge which gathers and links the diverse cultures.

Still, for the northern Mexican critic, the issue is not simply the conception of the border with the United States, but the relationship of the northern provinces with the cultural center, Mexico City. For as often as the northern Mexican borderlands are defined against the Chicano borderlands culture of the southwestern United States, they are also examined with reference to the central hegemonic culture of Mexico City. Among those engaged in this latter enterprise, one finds critics such as Félix Humberto Berumen and Leobardo Saravia Quiroz, who focus on the decentralization of Mexican culture in the 1970s. Saravia Quiroz has noted how "el centralismo ha sido una realidad que define ámbitos, líneas de conducta y realidades específicas..." (46). In this type of cultural reality, he argues that it is not possible to study northern Mexican border culture in relation to culture on the other side of the border (46). Articulating the border region in this way leads to two other forms of mapping the border, as cultural desert and as culturally liminal.

In mapping the border as a cultural desert the relationship that is stressed is not between nations but between the North and its placement within a national cultural identity. That is to say, what can the North add to Mexican cultural history. The Mexican North is a desert because it is lacking in cultural history and resources; it is lacking in cultural models. As northern Mexican writer Daniel Sada once stated, "en el norte, a diferencia del sur, no hay paisaje; todo se afiora, bay que imaginarlo todo" (Torres 119). Ignacio Solares in a similar vein states, "tenemos que inventarnos nuestro Lope de Vega y nuestro Balzac, nuestro Siglo de Oro o nuestro Surrealismo. Todo está por hacerse" (Zúñiga, "lmágenes de la frontera norte" 18).

As cultural desert, the border region can represent either a space of negativity or of potential.¹¹ In one sense, the border as desert presents northern Mexico as a cultural wasteland, officing little way of a cultural life. As Zúñiga summarizes, "la idea de desierto es una imagen que impide al artista fronterizo la observación de las tradiciones culturales regionales y el díalogo con ellas. Si el desierto es sinónimo de carencias, el artista es conducido a sentirse solo, produciendo desde la nada" ("Imágenes de la frontera norte" 18). However, in another sense, viewing the desert as a space of potential, Sada's observation on the northern deserts implies a more positive reading of the north: landscape may not exist in the north, but it can be imagined. To imagine a landscape is to fill it with a sense of purpose. As Severino Salazar states of the Mexico's northern desert, "es un sitio tan enigmático e incommensurable que cualquier historia puede caber en él" (Castro 8) Though the artist may be producing in a cultural vacuum, the artistic production contributes to the construction of a cultural history of a region. As examples, we can turn to the writings of such northern Mexican writers as the aforementioned Sada, Jesús Gardea, and Eduardo Parra, among others, to see how they are adding new and distinct voices to the landscape of contemporary Mexican literature.

In mapping the border region as culturally marginal, the relationship between the center and the periphery is foregrounded. In this conception, the north is marginalized because the center has abandoned it. Humberto Félix Berumen states, "en su doble vertiente de provincia y frontera, desarraigo y abandono, Baja California ha sido por décadas un punto más en la vasta geografía de rezagos nacionales. Una de tantas regiones condenadas a la inercia cultural" (21). Here the emphasis is placed on the relationship between the North and the cultural hegemonic center, Mexico City. The spectre of centralism raises its head, as the North is effaced in the national narrative. What the center returns to the periphery is a transplanted history.

Allied with the concept of centralism is also that of decentralism. The 1970's witnessed the rise of literary workshops in the northern provinces, and the subsequent foundation of universities and cultural institutions which sprang up around them. The federally subsidized program to institutionalize the literary workshops was viewed as politically motivated. Francisco Luna suggests that the interest in the literary culture of the northern provinces arose from the obsession of the Mexico City authorities to "reforzar el fardo romántico de la identidad nacional" (79). It could also be argued that the motive for the federal policy of decentralization is the protection of the border. That is, federal funding of cultural institutions is akin to a "cinturón de castidad a la nacionalidad que enmascara lo autóctono y lo patriotero ... en una suerte de provincianismo y autoencierro para resguardamos de la influencias extranjera" (80).

Borders are danger zones, it is on the border that the notion of a homogenous national identity is rendered an illusion. Those who live in the borderlands are a threat to an "official" culture -represented in the rhetoric of national symbols-, both on the American as well as on the Mexican side. The maintenance of the border is just as important for Mexico as it is for the United States, even in the age of NAFIA. In noting the decentralization of the culture that arises in Mexico since the 1970's, on the one hand we can speak of centrifugal forces at play in contemporary Mexico. However, as noted above, this cultural decentralization begins at a federal level. How centrifugal can the culture be, then, if it is the center which is promoting the rise of regional literatures?¹² The institutionalizing of decentralization by the Mexican federal government can be read as a stratagem or device of a "border machine." The border machine, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, functions as an organ of the official power, hence it is a part of a much larger state apparatus whose goal is to set limits on its national borders. Yet, this machine, as an organizing machine is resisted by the chaotic border itself. Conveighed within the framework proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the borderlands region can be viewed as a smooth space, a "body without organs" which resists the organization of border machines because it "experiences them as an over-all persecuting apparatus" (9). Deleuze and Guattari state that "in order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier"(9).

The imposition of a border machine implies the creation of border subjects who are subordinated to it. The machine attempts to reign in the subject by placing prohibitions on the border. Examples are readily observed in efforts to close off borders, in the strengthening of border patrols, and-in the case of Mexico-by the imposition of a national homogenous culture centered on national myths, and by the aforementioned policy of "official" decentralization which has, as of yet, not set into place an infrastructure for cultural diffusion across the northern Mexican border region.¹³

In these last two maps for reading the northern Mexican borderlands what is at issue being situated against the border, relegated to the margins of national cultural discourse. In viewing northern Mexico as desert or as marginal does not deny a Mexican nationality, but rather promotes a distinct recontextualization. That is to say, that there is not one Mexico, but many Mexicos.

The four maps that result from the readings of the border outlined here trace the different ways in which cultures move along borders. Yet these "imaginary geographies" traced here are not the only possibilities. The ensuing discussion maps another border geography through the conception of dwelling and wandering. This imaginary geography, admittedly metaphorical, posits a reading of a border consciousness that travels between many different discursive zones: Mexico City, the border, the borderlands, the United States, the rural, the urban, the postmortem, the normal and paranormal, to note a few. In participating in these diverse cultural practices, border culture resists and subverts national hegemonic consciousness, from Mexico and from the United States. The resultant "doubled" code-being a part of the national culture while also standing against it-is structured into cultural artifacts, affording the requisite migrant sensibility for negotiating the open, ambiguous nature of the border. In reading the border as a zone of itinerancy, the perspective is placed on the border itself, as marginal and liminal space.

Border culture "wanders" in the sense that being in the space between countries produces a diversity of cultural effects. Sergio Gómez Montero proposes four structural axes--or dimensions--for studying border cultural production: borderization, intertextuality, vanguardism, and biculturalism-bilingualism (96-98). As culturally specific strategies produced by marginalized communities they express "la necesidad de tomar distancia de la tradición heredada de sus predecesores y a la vez recordarla..." (149). Each one of these structural axes can be analyzed separately as a line of flight to study a text, and each one can be a study in itself: not all of them will always be present in a border text.

These hybrid strategies are also characteristic of liminal cultural identities. As pointed out by Lauro Zavala: "Las culturas liminales, debido a su condición histórica consciente de sí misma, tienden a hacer un uso carnavalesco de las tradiciones y de las fronteras tradicionales, ya sea en términos geográficos, culturales, históricos o politicos, o bien en términos estrictamente lingüisticos o literarios" (149).

This cultural hybridity --especially prominent in the works of such northern Mexican writers and critics as Regina Swain, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, and Leobardo Saravia Quiroz, among others--articulates a border culture that is created through migrant practices.

To focus on one example, we can turn to the different conceptions of the border in the stories of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. Crosthwaite, a writer born in Tijuana in 1962, constructs border stories which not only subvert questions of Mexican national culture but also undermine the notions of cultural sovereignty through the use of parody and irony. The story mentioned above, "Where have you gone, juan escutia" offers one representation of the border. In another, "Marcela y el rey al fin juntos en el paseo costero" the border is positioned as merely an imaginary line. In the story, Marcela is a young woman who works in a maquiladora and feels marginalized within the city. Her displacement from Tijuana is so great that she spends most of her time on its limit, at the beach where she walks. El rey is Elvis, lost in Tijuana and trying to make it back to Las Vegas. He too is marginalized by the city and is forced to wander along the beach. Occasionally he arrives at the border where he is greeted by a large sign: "HEY TÚ. ¡PRECAUCIÓN! ESTAS ENTRANDO A LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PAÍS MÁS PODEROSO DEL MUNDO. ¡NO LO HAGAS!"(19).

When Marcela and el Rey meet for the first time they realize that they share a common bond in being marginalized by the city. They walk along the beach, talking until they arrive at the border. Without thinking, Marcela decides to cross "el famoso límite que llaman 'La frontera,' conocido en otros lugares como la línea de crucecitas dibujada en todos los mapas y que nos enseñan a respetar en la primaria"(20). Elvis follows and soon after so does the border patrol, followed by helicopters with strong searchlights. The couple does not notice, Elvis feels as if he is in a concert illuminated by spotlights and begins to sing to Marcela. Shots are fired to no effect. The couple keep walking because, "la gente tonta nunca comprendió que ni ellos ni sus pistolas existían para Marcela y el Rey, que eran, como la frontera, sólo cruces pequeñas en un mapa quemado hace mucho tiempo" (21). The story lays bare a different border consciousness. When Marcela and el Rey cross the border they cross it out, in effect stepping into another space. In this interstitial space nothing can affect them.

Crosthwaite's stories are hybrid cultural mixes, and, as such, are representative of a type of writing from the borderlands. In viewing his writing through the prism of wandering, we can see how texts such as these are constantly shifting systems of signs in which the conditions of migrancy and exile are foregrounded. Migrancy and exile, the condition of the border writer who inscribes him- or herself into the border. What needs to be noted is that Wandering does not imply aimlessness, but rather a process of becoming. More specifically, we can focus on Wandering as a deterritorializing strategy. That is, to wander is not to reterritorialize oneself on aimlessness, but rather to deterritorialize the notion of a fixed dwelling. The identity that arises is not one based on territory, rather, the border identity that is proclaimed is fragmented, forged between national cultures, in a migrant movement that is situated in the limen.

"Being in the 'beyond,'" as Homi Bhabha so aptly states, "is to inhabit an intervening space" (7). The border subject who moves through the smooth space of the borderlands is deterritorialized and transformed in a process not unlike the transition rites surveyed by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. Transition rites are marked by three phases: separation, margin (limen), and reaggregation (232). In the second phrase, the liminal period, "the state of the ritual subject ('the passenger,' or 'liminar') becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification..." (Turner 232, emphasis added). Turner further describes people who are not ritual subjects, liminars, but who, like them, are in a liminal state. He calls these types "marginals, "people who "are simultaneously members (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often opposed to, one another" (233). These marginals are different from the liminars in that the latter are moving to a higher plane (reaggregation, the third phrase) while the former have no cultural assurance of such a movement. ¹⁴

This "betwixt and between" state of the ritual liminar and the marginal is that of the border dweller: the border is the seam with "the unmentionable," the borderlands are the liminal region of "the beyond." Of course, these observations beg the question of the possibility of inhabitance in the undetermined zone which is the borderlands: Can one speak of dwelling in this vague and itinerant region? For Martin Heidegger, dwelling is essential to the human condition.¹⁵ It is arrived at through the construction of place, which is evoked in the notions of identity, relations, and time. Identification with a place is one means of constructing identity. According to Marc Augé, "to be born is to be born in a place, to be 'assigned to residence.' In this sense the actual place of birth is a constituent of individual identity" (53). Kent Ryden also states, quite correctly, that "if we feel that our present lives are inextricably bound to our pasts-that our lives have historical continuity, that we are the products of our past experiences-and if we tie memory to the landscape, then in contemplating place we contemplate ourselves" (3940). He notes that the language of identity is commonly spatial; we identify with our geography: Mexican, Californian, Southwestern, Tijuanense, etc.

Moreover, a place always adjoins others, it is "an instantaneous configuration of positions" (de Certeau 117). As such, there are relations that are always functioning between places, and there is a shared identity that results from the common occupancy of adjoining sites. Following Augé, "the rules of residence which assign the child to his position (usually with his mother, and therefore also with his father, his maternal uncle or his maternal grandmother) situate him in an overall configuration whose inscription on the soil he shares with others" (54). When identity and relations are combined, place then becomes historical. By inscribing our identities into a place, setting roots, we are arriving at a sense of a place.

Yet, the case for dwelling as rootedness in the migrant borderlands is a difficult one to make. As a region of movement and of tension, the borderlands seem to better reflect more the characteristics of the non-place. As proposed by Augé, the relationship between place and non-place would be that between the point and the line. A place is fixed, the non-place is the movement between places. The non-place is ahistorical, just as it also displaces identity and relations (Augé 78). Itinerancy is a necessary condition for the non-place. This idea of itinerary, of the effect of passing through, is central for Marc Augé's concept of the non-place:

One dwells in a place, but one wanders in a non-place. Yet, this becomes a tricky division in relation to the borderlands if we conceive of them as a non-place.

Rather than an issue of dwelling in the borderlands, perhaps it is more appropriate to speak of wandering in the borderlands. Here we can turn to Blanchot and Benjamin, two critics who, according to Gabriel Josipovici, argue that "exile, lack of rootedness, is man's essential condition" (16). Note that this conception of man's condition need not contradict Heidegger's similar assertion on dwelling. One need only assume, as proposed here, that dwelling and wandering may be linked: dwelling-as-wandering. Such an assertion finds confirmation in the works of James Clifford.

In his essay, 'Traveling Cultures," Clifford develops an ethnography in which the notions of dwelling and travel are comparatively analyzed: "If we rethink culture and its science, anthropology, in terms of travel, then the organic, naturalizing bias of the term culture--seen as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, etc.--is questioned. Constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view" (101). In fact, one could argue further that the problematics of living in a constantly changing space render dwelling and travel inextricably linked. In the infinite journey of the border dweller, dwelling is wandering. Thus, in mapping the border as a zone of itinerancy, wandering becomes the central issue in the discussion of place and identity. This relation implies a mediation between the self and the "Other;" it is a dialogical ethics that is constructed in the approach to the "Other." In approaching the border, we are also, in a sense, approaching ourselves.

It can be argued quite correctly that this migrant practice can serve as a model in other cultural discourses, for example in the discourse surrounding identity politics in the age of postmodernity and globalization. However, in focusing on the cultural production in the borderlands, such a perspective can be a useful tool for analysis for it participates in both a local and global perspective. In regards to a larger Borderlands consciousness, the migrant perspective is merely another facet of a cultural discourse in which many participate, shifting constantly across borders

In the analysis of the Borderlands, it is necessary to remember that the border is not just one, it represents a different face for different people. To quote, Luis Alberto Urrea, "there are ... many Mexican borders, any one of which could fill its own book" (9). In the construction of the Borderlands there will be many maps drawn, some will more closely allied to the region than others. The geographies traced here are just some of the possibilities of a complex and heterogeneous region that offers up a diversity of itineraries in a mapping that will continue, because, as Luis Humberto Crosthwaite writes in a recent story, "es algo natural, cosa de todos los días."

1. This is not to say that criticism from northern Mexico does not exist. There is interest in the cultural production of the border region by northern Mexican critics, however this work is often overshadowed by American and European cultural critics. Critics as Socorro Tabuenca in Ciudad Juarez, and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz and Humberto Félix Berumen, in Baja California attest to the strength of the cultural scene in northern Mexico.
2. This "imagined" borderlands that is constructed in Borderlands discourse can also be seen as a function of a vast organizing border "machine," as will be discussed.
3. See Bruce-Novoa's "The US-Mexican Border in Chicano Testimonial Writing" for a historical trajectory of crónicas from the borderlands.
4. Notably absent from Hicks's study is Anzaldúa's seminal borderlands work Borderlands/la frontera; Anzaldúa and her work are mentioned twice in passing.
5. See for example, Bhabha's Locations of Culture, and García Canclini's Culturas híbridas. María Socorro Tabuenca notes that the latter critic's work on hybrid cultures focuses on Gómez-Peña's, work to the exclusion of other writers and artists from Tijuana, in positing Tijuana as the representation of "'the' hybrid space" ('Viewing the Border" 153).
6. To illustrate, the Spring 1997 issue of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts is dedicated to Latin American and Latino culture at the border. Though there are some Chicano writers mentioned, there are no critics or writers from northern Mexico discussed.
7. The aim here is not to demean Urrea's important work, but rather to illustrate that personal border portrayals such as these run the danger of being read as faithful representations of border reality, rather than what they are: documents which chronicle a particular experience of the border.
8. However, it should be noted that of these three writers, only two -Oscar Monroy and Marco A. Jerez- are from northern Mexico.
9. One possibility for this choice could be the theme of the border in Mexican literature, but this is, then, quite a different thing than literatura fronteriza.
10. Citing Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gloria Anzaldúa as examples, Tabuenca warns of cultural critics, primarily from the southwest, who appropriate the borderlands to present authentic border realities, or who are authenticated by other critics as "the" borderlands representative.
11. The desert symbolically represents a space of absence. But it is also a space of potential in that to be in the desert is to not merely be apart from the world but also to be free of its demands.
12. Another question that can be asked is, if not the federal government then who? There is little history of transregional cooperation, and the various Casas de la Cultura in the northern cities promote primarily their own writers and critics. The problems at arriving at creating a transregional cultural awareness run from geography (mountains, deserts, coasts) to the lack of an infrastructure that allows for discourse across the northern border states. Distribution of literary works by regional writers is also a notable problem. Whereas in the United States there exist a number of small presses dedicated to the diffusion of Chicano writers, there are few small presses in northern Mexico. Luis Humberto Crosthwaite has recently begun a small press, Yoremito, dedicated to publishing northern Mexican writers, to date there have been four books published, with three more coming at the beginning of 1998. But funding remains uncertain.
13. There have been moves to rectify this situation. In November, 1997, there was a meeting held in Ciudad Juárez with this topic in mind. Over the course of two days, a number of literary critics and writers from northern Mexico proposed different methods for the distribution of regional works across the borderlands region. This brings up another result of the imposition of a border machine. Following Deleuze and Guattari, some of the effects of the machine--rendering its operation difficult--are hybridization, mixing, and worse, exchange. We can offer up examples as the aforementioned conference in Juárez, Yoremito, and the cultural magazine, San Quintín 106. Of course these efforts always run the risk of disappearing -primarily through financial difficulties- but they offer strategies to subvert a system of domination and control.
14. Turner offers migrant foreigners, "second-generation Americans," persons of mixed ethnic origin, parvenus (upwardly mobile marginals), the déclassés (downwardly mobile marginals), migrants from country to city, and women in a changed, nontraditional role' as examples of marginals (233).
15. See Heidegger's essays in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971).