>more territorialised: border controls being a prime example?
Mike Davis has an interesting riff on the Mexico-US border in his NLR piece.
Doug
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[from Mike Davis, "Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City," New Left Review 234, March/Aprill 1999, pp. 15-16]
La Linea and the Border Patrol
The Mexican-USs border may not be the epochal marriage of cultures that Valladao actually has in mind, but it is nonetheless a lusty bastard offspring of its two parents. Spanish offers the useful distinction, moreover, between La Linea, the physical and jurisprudential border, and the distinctive, 2000-mile-long zone of daily cultural and economic interchange it defines, La Frontera, with its estimated eight million inhabitants. All borders, of course, are historically and geographically specific, and La Linea, even in its present Berlin-Wall-like configuration, has never been intended to stop labour from migrating al otro lado. On the contrary, it functions like a dam, creating a reservoir of labour-power on the Mexican side of the border that can be tapped on demand via the secret aqueduct managed by polleros, iguanas and coyotes - as smugglers of workers and goods are locally known - for the farms of south Texas, the hotels of Las Vegas and the sweatshops of Los Angeles. At the same time, the Border Patrol maintains a dramatic show of force along the border to reassure voters that the threat of alien invasion - a phantasmagoria largely created by border militarization itself - is being contained. An increasingly Orwellian, but deliberately porous, border is the result. 'This bizarre combination of ineffectuality and force at the border', as Josiah Heyman points out, 'determines the niches that undocumented immigrants occupy'. 'In the border area, immigrant peoples are both boundary-defined foreigners and tacit, though bottom of the class structure, insiders.' In the past, and still to a surprising extent today, the absence or non-enforcement of employer sanctions has ensured that only the workers themselves pay the cost of their 'illegality'-in deportation, lost wages, even imprisonment: a powerful tool for intimidating workers and discouraging unionization.
The emergence of a dynamic maquiladora - or maquila in border slang - economy employing nearly a million workers, 60 per cent female, on the border itself has done little to stem the flow of surplus labour northward, since Mexico alone produces one million more new workers each year than it can actually employ in its formal economy. Border industrialization, however, has dramatically changed the culture of La Frontera and the inter- relationships of the dozen or so twin cities that span the border from Matamoros/Brownsville on the Gulf to Tijuana/San Diego on the Pacific. The two largest and most dynamic of these binational metropolises are El Paso/Ciudad Juarez (1.5 million residents and 372 maquilas) and San Diego/Tijuana (3.07 million residents and 719 maquilas). Despite some obvious differences, such as the more radical abruptness of the socio-economic divide between San Diego and Tijuana, these ciudades hermanas are evolving along similar pathways that have few analogues within any other system of international borders.