(gentle music)
If I ask you what the border is,
each of us would come up with a personal,
hmm, the border is this or that.
The truth is that the border seems to be everywhere.
We see it in literature like the
classic "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost.
We see it in Kafka's works.
Also in Jorge Luis Borges' "La Muralla y los Libros.
" There are plenty of songs dealing with the crossing
of borders such as Manu Chao's "Welcome to Tijuana.
" Or we can also listen to Los Tigres del Norte's song,
songs such as "Frontera Internacional.
" We can also see a particular tracing of the border
in advertising like this Coca-Cola ad.
We can see the workings of the geopolitical border
in films that dramatize all kinds of situations.
If we listen to the news, we will also see how the Mediterranean Sea
and the US-Mexican border frequently make the headlines.
Given all this information about borders,
we have probably come up with multiple
answers to the question I just posed.
What is a border?
We may have in mind the traditional layout of the border,
atlases of the world, lately demarcating the contours of each country
with different colors assigned to the different nation states.
There is no color gradation on such maps
and one can tell where one country begins and ends.
Let me dwell on this image for a second.
These maps with easily traceable borders
contribute to creating the image of a world
where everything seems to stay in place and people do too.
This kind of narrative is comforting and reassuring
for limits provide a sense of belonging, rootedness and safety.
Yet, there is a lot that goes unsaid
and that there is deeply unsettling about this narrative.
In Juan Mayorga's play "The Cartographer,"
an old man laments how many catastrophes have started with a map.
Good times for the cartographer, difficult times for humanity.
There are maps at the table of the powerful, the man adds.
And indeed, the map provides a visual narrative
that divides and separates, creates sides and demarcations
irrespective of what those new lines mean
for the people who live or are placed there
or who are simply crossed or "atravesados"
as Gloria Anzaldúa would say, by the drawing of arbitrary lines.
These maps with easily traceable borders do not convey a few facts.
First, the border is a relational zone
and as such, it is an open ground for power tensions.
Borders are asymmetrical and change depending on what side you're on.
Second, borders have always leaped
and have produced what Neel calls transition zones.
These transition zones, as opposed to the logic of separation,
emphasize what Alfredo Arteaga calls an overlap between nation states
where the sharp distinctions are both contested and ambiguous.
The third aspect has to do with the
visual layout of the geopolitical border.
In these maps, borders appear as peripheral.
This widespread vision of the border
as the cartographical representation of the division between countries,
Sandra Mazzadra and Abret Nielsen
explain, has led us to consider the border
as literally marginal to our thinking.
Notwithstanding this visual image,
the border is central to our experience and to the way we conceptualize
not only those who cross borders, but also ourselves,
not only the outside, but also the inside.
In what follows, I will first address what the border is
and I will also try to answer other questions
such as where the border is, how it works
and what are its effects for different people.
Now, how to define or describe the border?
It is a complex concept with multiple meanings.
There are also different kinds of borders.
The easiest to identify are the physical
ones, but there are also more elusive ones
such as psychological, social, economic, sexual,
racial, linguistic, cultural, historical, religious.
And while I mentioned these possibilities,
you may have come up with other options.
Now, part of this complexity lies in the fact
that the border is genus-based and has always two sides.
It is not the same to be on the US side than to be on the Mexican side,
not the same to be on the Spanish side
or the Moroccan side, for example.
Now, how to describe it?
We can use quite a lot of terms
such as checkpoint, membrane, cordon sanitaire,
scar, gap, abyss, outskirts of the world, margins.
Chicana critic Gloria Alzaldua
in her groundbreaking "Borderlands, La Frontera"
describes the border in the following terms.
The US-Mexican border is una herida abierta
where the third world greets against the first and bleeds.
And before a scat forms, it hemorrhages again,
the lifeblood of two worlds merging to
form a third country, a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places
that are safe and unsafe to distinguish us from them.
The quote stands as an example of code
switching or the alternation of languages.
Notice the metaphor Alzaldua uses,
the border is open-wound, that bleeds,
that is, it is ongoing, it is in process, it's not a scar, it is alive.
This vision of the border as wound
has become central to Chicano studies and beyond.
Apart from this definition,
Alzaldua gives us a sense of what borders are for.
Borders are set up to define places, to distinguish between us and them.
Just the mere formulation of the sentence
allows us to see how borders are
essential to the creation of categories.
Here, there, inside, outside, us and them.
So where is the border?
Yeah, these binaries, here, there, inside, outside, et cetera
don't necessarily have to be directly associated with
or situated along the geopolitical boundaries that separate countries.
So where else can we find the border?
I'd like to show two other images.
The first is what we can call the concentric border
and illustrates how the border creates ripples on the outside, inside,
and creates outsides within the inside.
As Derrida and Cixous explain, one can be inside without being inside.
There is an inside in the inside and outside in the inside.
That is, one does not need to be
on the other side of the border to be part of this outside.
And then we have Santiago Serra's tattooed bodies
or what we can call the crossed ones.
Serra's work is always very provocative.
And what I find interesting in this image
is how the artist is able to make visible
how the border not only cuts across the
land, but also across or through the body.
So the photo manages to capture the structures
of power that condition people's lives.
So how does the border work?
Now, this ability to divide and classify
is central to the workings of the border apparatus.
Mary Pat Brady in "Extinct Lands"
has conceptualized the border as a mechanism
that works in part like an abjection machine,
and I quote, "Transforming people into
aliens, illegals, wetbacks, or undocumented,
and thereby rendering them unintelligible
and unintelligent, ontologically
impossible, outside the real and the human.
" This inherent power to categorize and stigmatize
implies that borders contribute to the creation
of categories of centrality versus the marginal and contingent.
Now, why is that?
Well, borders, walls, boundaries,
are more than theatrical physical separations.
Rather, they work as structures that
are essential to cognitive processes.
The reason is that borders and demarcations
allow both the establishment of taxonomies
and conceptual hierarchies that structure
the movement of thought, to quote from Misadra and Nathanson.
As powerful as epistemic devices,
again, to go back to Misadra and Nathanson,
borders determine our vision of the other,
the migrant, the foreigner, the different,
but also of ourselves in relation to these categorizations.
The border creates order, separates, labels,
and transforms people into categories
that depersonalize individuals into homogeneous groups,
hence exemplifying the power of the wall, fence,
boundary, to rearrange and create meaning.
Not in vain is order part of the word border.
And we see the power of these categories
every day, such as bad hombres or pet eaters.
What are the effects of the border mechanism?
For the crosser or the migrant,
there is always a sense of vulnerability.
Migrants are totally devoid of any power.
They're always viewed with suspicion,
and according to widespread nationalistic
rhetoric, migrants are inherently suspect.
The border actually is where the migrant is.
For the gatekeeper and for immigration authorities
and officials such as ICE, they are always gonna be endowed
with the ability of closing or opening a door,
and this power is absolute and unquestionable.
And we can say this in short stories such as Kafka's
"Before the Law," but also on the news every day.
Now for the country, the border security and the
border apparatus work as a national tranquilizer,
as a great wall that protects against the outside,
against the nomad, against the barbarian, against the non-self.
So why is it important to rethink borders?
I'm gonna give you two quotes.
Patricia Price in "Dry Place" explains
that rethinking borders involves nothing less
than a rethinking of the conceptual
scaffolding of modernity's key institutions.
Along the same lines, Walter Mignolo
in "Colonialities of Alternal Nologies and Border Thinking"
defines this concept of border thinking
as the moments when the imaginary
of the modern world systematically cracks.
Now, this is the urgent need, I would add,
that we have to rethink how borders contribute
to the creation of categories and the establishment
of hierarchies in our perception of the world.
As powerful epistemic tools, to go back to Mazada and Nathanson,
borders are key in homogenizing,
depersonalizing, and dehumanizing groups.
And history has repeatedly shown us the effects of such processes.
In the following slides,
I offer you suggestions for doing different activities,
such as further reading, further watching.
I also give and provide examples of the
border in music and the border in photography.
(gentle music)