Crossing the Topographies of Modernity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Towards an Ethnography of “Out of Place” Ideas

Article Sidebar

PDF
Published: Jul 13, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17428/rfn.v14i28.1344

Main Article Content

Olivier Thomas Kramsch
Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen

Abstract

As the national economies of Mexico and the United States intertwine more tightly under NAFTA, the role of the U.S.-Mexico border as a catalyst for wider economic development has emerged as a central preoccupation of the administrations of Vicente Fox and George W. Bush. Yet, the sociocultural and intellectual contexts for successful cross-border development are riven by discrepant visions of the political possibilities inherent in achieving authentic transboundary integration. Drawing on recent key English- and Spanish-language works, the author attempts to account for this discrepancy in the transboundary spatial imagination by rooting observed discourses in diverging traditions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, focusing on the Latin American intellectual negotiation of the postmodern condition. Rather than celebrate the U.S. Mexico border as a postmodern space of radical openness or defend its position as a vital bulwark against the dissolution of “heroic” nation-state building projects, the article attempts to view both sets of discourses from a fragile middle-ground, hinting at possible linkages (and solidarities) with other, non-Western, “peripheral” modernities. RESUMENEn el ámbito de una cada vez más acelerada integración entre México y los Estados Unidos propiciada por el Tratado de Libre Comercio, el papel de la frontera entre ambos países como catalizador de un desarrollo económico más amplio ha emergido como una preocupación central para ambos gobiernos. Sin embargo, como sugiere este ensayo, los contextos socioculturales e intelectuales para el desarrollo transfronterizo se caracterizan por enfoques distintos de las posibilidades políticas inherentes a una auténtica integración transfronteriza. El autor intenta explicar las razones de esta discrepancia, buscando en discursos que encuentran sus raíces en tradiciones divergentes de modernidad, modernismo y modernización, haciendo hincapié en la negociación intelectual latinoamericana de la condición posmoderna. En lugar de concebir la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México como espacio posmoderno de apertura radical o defender su rol como baluarte inviolable contra la disolución de proyectos “heroicos” dirigidos hacia la construcción del Estado-nación, el ensayo abarca ambos discursos desde el punto de vista de un espacio intermedio y todavía frágil, además de indicar posibles vínculos (y solidaridades) con otras modernidades “incompletas” que perviven de manera marginal en Occidente.

Article Details

How to Cite
Thomas Kramsch, O. (2017). Crossing the Topographies of Modernity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Towards an Ethnography of “Out of Place” Ideas. Frontera Norte, 14(28), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.17428/rfn.v14i28.1344
Issue
Vol. 14 No. 28 (2002): julio-diciembre, 2002
Section
Papers

Authors publishing work in this journal agree to the following conditions:

  1. Authors retain copyright and assign first publication rights to the journal Frontera Norte (RFN), with the texts registered under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which allows third parties to use published material provided they give credit to the authors and acknowledge this journal as the first publisher.

  2. They authorize the reproduction, publication, translation, communication, and transmission of their paper and all accompanying material, publicly and in any form and by any means; its public distribution in as many copies as required; and public communication thereof in any form, including making it available to the public through electronic means or any other technology, and solely for dissemination and scientific, cultural, and non-commercial purposes.

  3. Authors may enter into further independent contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the paper published in this journal (for instance, to include it in an institutional repository or personal webpage, or publish it in a book), provided it is not for commercial purposes and they clearly state that the work was first published in Frontera Norte (RFN) [and add the corresponding bibliographical record: Author/s (Year). Title of paper. Frontera Norte, volume (number), pp. doi: xxxx].

To that end, authors must submit the form assigning ownership of first publication rights, duly completed and signed. This document is to be uploaded in PDF format as a complementary file on the OJS platform.

Licencia de Creative Commons

This work is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)..

References

Agnew, John, Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society, Boston, Allen and Unwin, 1987.

Alegría Olázabal, Tito, “Juntos pero no revueltos: Ciudades en la frontera México-Estados Unidos,” in Revista mexicana de sociología, 62(2):89-107, 2000.

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1991.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/la Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco, Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987.

Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York, Penguin Books, 1982.

Bustamante, Jorge, “La interacción social en la frontera México-Estados Unidos: Un marco conceptual para la investigación,” in La frontera norte: Integración y desarrollo, edited by R. González, Mexico City, El Colegio de México, 1981.

Castañeda, Jorge, “Mexico: Permuting Power,” in New Left Review, 7:17-41, 2001.

Dear, Michael, The Postmodern Urban Condition, London, Blackwell, 2000.

Franco, Jean, “Recibir a los bárbaros: ética y cultura de masas,” in Nexos review, 115, 1987.

García Canclini, Néstor, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, Mexico City, Grijalbo and Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1989.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, Warriors for Gringostroika, St. Paul, Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 1993.

Greenhouse, Steven, “In U.S. Unions, Mexico Finds Unlikely Ally on Immigration,” in New York Times, July 19, 2001.

Herzog, Lawrence, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Austin, Center for Mexican American Studies-University of Texas Press, 1990.

Hirschmann, A.O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1977.

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso, 1990.

Kramsch, Olivier, Waiting at the Gates: A Binational Assessment of Traffic Flows between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, Master's thesis, Los Angeles, Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California, 1990.

Marshall, Thomas H., Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, New York, Doubleday & Co., 1965.

North, Douglass, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Ortiz, Renato, A moderna tradição brasileira, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1988.

Paz, Octavio, El ogro filantrópico, Mexico City, Joaquín Mortiz, 1979.

Rosaldo, Renato, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon, 1988.

Rothschild, Emma, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard University Press, 2001.

Rouse, Roger, “Mexicano, chicano, pocho: la migración mexicana y el espacio social del posmodernismo,” in “Página Uno”, supplement to Unomasuno, December 31, 1988, pp. 1-2.

Schmitt, Eric, “Other Immigrants, Envying Mexicans, Demand a Break, Too,” in New York Times, July 26, 2001.

Scott, Allen J., John Agnew, Edward W. Soja and Michael Storper, “Global City-Regions,” theme paper prepared for the conference Global City-Regions, University of California, Los Angeles, October 21-23, 1999.

Serres, M., Angels: A Modern Myth, Paris, Flammarion, 1993.

Soja, Edward W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London, Verso, 1989.

----, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, London, Blackwell, 1996.

Storper, Michael, The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy, New York, Guilford, 1997.

and Robert Salais, Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy, Cambridge, Ma., Harvard University Press, 1997.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task. A Critical Introduction to Politics, A Work in Constructive Social Theory. Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1987.