Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City 9780226512075

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Passing

Passing T wo P ubl i c s i n a Me x i ca n B or der Cit y Rihan Yeh

The University of Chicago Press C h icago a n d Lo n do n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51188-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51191-7 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51207-5 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512075.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yeh, Rihan, author. Title: Passing : two publics in a Mexican border city / Rihan Yeh. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017026168 | ISBN 9780226511887 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511917 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226512075 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico)—Emigration and immigration. | Mexican-American Border Region—Emigration and immigration. Classification: LCC JV7409.Z6 T594 2018 | DDC 304.80972/23—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026168 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Note to the Reader vii Methods/Debts ix

Introduction 1

I : Pa ss ag e / Proh i b ition Overview 27

1: The Line 29 2: Inés’s “I” 53 The Assembly Plant 75 3: The Place Where Anything Can Happen 87 4: “They Say” in the Country Club 113

I I : Proh i bi t i on/ Pa ss age Overview 139

5: Clase Media and Pueblo before the Law 143 The Visa Interview 161 6: Passes 171 7: The Street Is a River 197 8: The Stone 223 Conclusion 249 Acknowledgments 251 Appendix: Interview Excerpts from Chapter 2 255 References 261 Index 279

Note to the Reader

Ethnographic quotes are verbatim unless otherwise indicated. I have tried to be generous in providing the original Spanish (even for many paraphrases, for these are generally quite close to the original), though I have omitted it in shorter quotes where the translation seemed especially straightforward. All transcriptions and translations, including those of works cited in Spanish, are my own. In the extended quotations, commas and periods indicate more rhythms of speech than grammatical units; hence, the omission of capital letters at the beginning of “sentences.” Question marks often indicate a rising tone rather than an actual question. I have substituted pseudonyms for all names besides those of public figures.

Methods/Debts

My debts in Tijuana run back to the time of my adolescence in the late 1990s, when I was taken in as an awkward volunteer at one of the city’s many orphanages. Over the five summers I spent there, I got into the habit of soliciting stories from the children. One in particular stuck with me: Meño’s story of the man who went searching for his stolen cows. Saddened, the man bought a car to follow them; suddenly, he saw one, but the thief took her away. He crossed a river. He heard their footsteps. He got out of his car and saw them on a hill, and then he walked and walked. Walking, he came upon his grandmother’s house, and he ate there. But again he heard the footsteps and left to follow them. The story ends there. Like other stories I heard at the orphanage, Meño’s makes an allegory of his abandonment; his tale is saturated by the sense of limits imposed on him and moved beyond, mushrooming up again and moved beyond again in repetitive gestures of loss, searching, discovery of the unexpected, and loss surging up again to drag one on. Meño was only one of the many young people to whom the directors of the orphanage introduced me in these explicit terms: “Rihan, there is someone I want you to meet so that you may know another world.” Before knowing it, I was already being interpellated as caminando para conocer, walking so as to learn and know, engaged in a search of my own that brought me closer to the people I met even as I verified, over and over, my distance from them. Meño’s was a good introduction to Tijuana. Later, I began to hear similar gestures— loss, search, discovery, loss— in the narratives of the adults who cared for these children as they explained to me, now a novice anthropologist, their movement toward the border and what they simultaneously found and failed to find there: new attachments that both substituted for old losses and reminded of their irrevocability. As they narrated themselves into the city, and the city into their own lives, I began to hear a throbbing sense not just of the individual “I” imagining and ar-

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ticulating and presenting itself before me— an other precisely from “the other side,” as the United States is known here— but also a sense of “we,” of collective subjectivity, shadowy and implicit but giving all these stories social bulk as part of a mass phenomenon born of migration and inequality and the border as a sign summing up all that was desired, unreachable, inexplicable, or surprising in life. If not the word we itself, something (I could not yet say what kind of cue) framed these stories as the stuff not only of those who told them but of these people as part of some larger whole, and I sensed, dimly, that even in the most intimate depths of their experience, that was how they thought of it themselves. That summer (it was 2003), I was also thrown together with other people, who talked about themselves quite differently and who went about their business in ways that seemed at first glance much more familiar from my US perspective. Edith, who has been for twenty years my closest interlocutor in Tijuana, brought me into Inés’s home and introduced me to her daughter Dara.1 They too were concerned that I understand Tijuana, not just their Tijuana but Tijuana as theirs and, beyond this, Mexico as theirs, and they took pains to reorient my sense of the city to a world not of improvised shacks and muddy hillsides but of singlefamily residences on suburban-style streets, with supermarkets and shopping centers close at hand, friends over for lunch, and occasional, measured nights out to a café or for Italian food. But these practices too, I found, and the sense of Tijuana that arose from them, seemed ultimately— though disavowedly— articulated around the figure of the border. The breaches of class and status that my interlocutors seemed to be forever fording were suffused with a strange sense of stymie that flourished into fullest form in the legal border crossing that their US- issued documents (mostly Border Crossing Cards, a kind of nonimmigrant visa that I will properly introduce further on) afforded them. This is a crossing that is always also not crossing, that fears prohibition and holds it present, that must ever forestall itself in the intention of a quick return to Mexico. It is a crossing haunted by the sense that with legal approbation one obtains no real self-transformation, no surety of status and self, but is only passing oneself off as what one really is not quite. These first, intimate debts opened the city to me as a space formed by intensely felt but opposed images of it. They led me to ask, eventually, this book’s basic question: how Tijuana’s “we”s— the different publics that lay claim to the city as a whole— are inflected by the border. Beyond 1. With her perspicacity, Edith has fundamentally shaped my understanding of the city. My apologies to her for having stuck, for no good reason, with a pseudonym she dislikes.

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these first debts come a flood of others great and small. That summer and the next I spent furthering my contacts: old acquaintances from the orphanage and whomever they might lead me to (people who made one thing or another of me but always welcomed me and fed me and forced me to drink tremendous quantities of Coca-Cola); new acquaintances I became friendly with by such simple accident as the habit of walking by their houses; and also people I met at the Casa del Migrante, a shelter where I volunteered part-time. These habits of visiting and roving, of expanding on chance encounters, continued throughout my fieldwork proper, carried out over eighteen months in 2006 and 2007.2 To them I owe as much as to the formal structure of my fieldwork, built around close engagement with a small set of households. The households were selected to provide contrasting cases of socioeconomic status, of access to the United States (through US citizenship, permanent residency, a Border Crossing Card, unauthorized crossing, or none at all), and of practical relation to that country (work, shopping, entertainment, socializing, visits frequent or infrequent, past unauthorized stints, or again no direct relation at all). I lived in two homes besides Inés’s for a period of two months each, though my regular visits to both extended over a year. I became involved with other households in a variety of patterns, including intensive periods of visiting and of accompanying members on expeditions outside the home, both routine and extraordinary. Some of the most extraordinary included the trip to San Diego to bring seventeen-year-old Q and her newborn baby home from the hospital, the vacation trip south to Mrs. H’s hometown outside Mexico City, and the period spent visiting Tijuana’s public hospital and then its funeral home when Mr. R’s ex-wife passed away. I very, very often had occasion to feel honored by the place so many people allowed me in their lives. I supplemented my work with the households by observation of all sorts of public events and spaces, by reading the news, watching television, surfing the Internet, listening to music, and so forth. My fieldwork also included several sustained engagements with formal institutions, almost entirely absent from this book and yet essential to my understanding of public life in Tijuana. When I arrived in 2006, presidential elections were imminent, and I spent several months visiting the different parties’ headquarters, attending mass rallies, and eventually falling in with a party subcommittee that welcomed me to observe their weekly meetings and campaign activities; they deserve profuse thanks for their generosity. Originally, the morgue was to have been a major field site, but, in my efforts to gain permission to work there, I learned enough to 2. I have been back to Tijuana numerous times since, but only for short stays.

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decide against involvement with an institution that remains intimately tied to the state police. Another focus of research was the movement against insecurity spearheaded by the local business class. Though I did not gain intimate knowledge of its workings, I again spent significant time attending meetings and pursuing interviews. These three sites provided invaluable insight into the major institutions shaping the public sphere: party politics, the state with its “legitimate violence,” and “civil society.” One last field site, where I spent all too little time, was an assembly plant. Since it figures in the book, I will say only that I am deeply grateful to all who spoke with me. Again, I have Edith to thank for this opportunity, as well as the plant’s manager.

*** My thanks, though, are due not only to the many people who took the trouble to help me on my way. They spiral out, instead, from intimate and long-term debts to ones unnamed and even beyond, to crossings of paths that never figured in my project in any explicit way at all. I do not want to equate people who have known me for years to those with whom I had only a chance meeting on the street, but I owe my sense of Tijuana just as much to those who either refused to help me or had no idea they were doing so. I would like to remember just two of them here. The Guerrillero wears his hair in an Aztec knot. He lives on a plot of land without water, and he is not on speaking terms with most of his neighbors. It was not until I returned to Tijuana in 2009 that I found the courage to ask for permission to write about him. During my fieldwork proper, he surprised me more than once. The first time was when he found out I spoke English. Like many, he immediately remarked that he too spoke it very well. I was just nodding my usual deference when he winked and said, with a surety with which I have not heard the language used in Tijuana before or since, “I was an English major. So you can just imagine.” And then, after inhaling deeply from his joint: “I’m sharp, you know. Very sharp.” A second time, when I was again sure the marijuana was filtering reality, he backed up his stories about his time in San Quentin (California’s famed maximum-security prison) by pulling out binders full of photographs, clippings of the newspaper he ran on the inside, all the sonnets he wrote teaching himself correct literary Spanish, and the full-length sociological treatise (on the benefits of organizing among inmates) he presented to the governor of California.3 Deported to Mexico, he turned to labor organizing in the assembly plants, but with a flair for 3. The treatise, he explained, forced the warden to let him operate freely.

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trouble that landed him in prison more than once. The result, forty years later, is almost complete isolation and extreme poverty— the Guerrillero rarely dares to leave his home, and he survives on as little as two or three dollars a week, earned from the sale of junk outside his front door. He grew up in Tijuana, and he plans to die there. Like the Guerrillero, Mr. L believes the government has deliberately corralled him into his scarcely solvent way of life, and even that it is slowly poisoning him to death. My next-door neighbor for several months, he summarily dismissed any anthropological engagement by refusing to read my consent form, waving his hand and saying, “I already know exactly what you’re doing.” He then explained how my work would be used by the CIA. But despite thus foreclosing any research relationship, he became an inevitable fixture of my daily life, with his long harangues on politics and society, his pride, his gentleness with his grandson, and his endless generosity in the face of my automotive difficulties, even when I was not particularly disposed to accept it—“Estás terqueando” (You’re being stubborn), he would tell me before resuming exposition of his (highly idiosyncratic, I thought) theory of electricity. As with the Guerrillero, I eventually found, with surprise and shame, how wrong I had been to follow Mr. L’s neighbors in their inclination to be just a bit dismissive of him. Watching videos of the settlement of the neighborhood, with its initially violent battle with the authorities, I saw Mr. L turn his tongue to political use, speaking into the microphone, rousing the crowd, playing a truly active role in the movement. Also as with the Guerrillero, it took two years of absence on my part for Mr. L to decide to speak to me of his own history as a labor organizer. Both these men are testament to the obstacles Tijuana presents to any political or social project that would include the marginalized on their own terms. These obstacles are simple, but they are fundamental to the picture of public life I present here; I saw the other side of them in my work with the institutions mentioned above. One, the unity of the assembly plant industry means that many people fear not only losing their jobs and being blacklisted but prejudicing employers against their entire neighborhood. This fear goes hand in hand with another: where large portions of the city have been settled by squatters’ movements, land ownership takes years (often over twenty) to be formalized, and people fear the loss of their homes in retributive action by the state. Lastly, straight-up police violence is a far more routine fact for the marginalized than someone living a middle-class life in Tijuana is likely fully to realize. It was only very late that I understood how vividly present these fears are for so many and their true import for public life in Tijuana. All my respect is due those who go forward in the face of them.

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The Tijuana of the colonias, the working-class districts such as those the Guerrillero and Mr. L inhabit, is only one side of the city. Another Tijuana, the Tijuana of established, “middle-class” society, appears also in these pages, and I owe much to those who took the trouble to teach me about it. It is no less deserving of my or the reader’s sympathetic understanding— but the facts of repressive social control mentioned above must not be forgotten. Of all the places where I was grilled about my research, I most dreaded being put on the spot in the colonias. In one of those uncomfortable interviews, I told a man that I was interested in “life at the border.” “And what do you make of life at the border?” my questioner returned, dry with skepticism. Nervous, I blurted out: “¡Está cabrón!” (It’s a bitch!) “Ain’t it though?” he replied, chuckling wryly; the ice was broken. My thanks to him for clarifying that I had indeed understood something of his world— though it is an understanding denied by dominant discourses, which insist on Tijuana as a city of prosperity and opportunity and call its roughness but a stereotype imposed from without. On any given day, I might speak with someone like the Guerrillero or Mr. L in the morning and then rush to Inés’s to change for an interview with a lawyer or businessperson or to attend an academic event or press conference. My sense of Tijuana is cobbled out of my own constant movement, not only across the border but also across social barriers that were sometimes dizzying to traverse so quickly. It is cobbled, too, from my physical movement— my driving along Tijuana’s thoroughfares, from the Vía Rápida (Tijuana’s version of a freeway), to the neat neighborhood streets of the older parts of town, to the potholed mud messes of the newer areas, all the way out to the long dusty roads reaching into the hills, where little improvised houses are just beginning to appear. It is cobbled not only from my driving, but from my riding of collective taxis and buses, the customs of courtesy on them, the quick exchange of hand signals between driver and potential passenger, the abbreviated body language between travelers and its sudden flourishing into conversation. These are all lessons through which the city is learned and for which I feel no little gratitude. It is as part of a public that I learned to walk and talk in and understand Tijuana in the ways it demanded of me: the city itself had its say in how I might make its terms, both personally and analytically (though of course only ever partially), my own. However differently from other people, Tijuana’s streets bore for me, too, a gift. This book is only the feeblest attempt to return it. Even this street of cars and buses, the interactions that make the most basic texture of daily public life, is too formal, perhaps, for a complete understanding of the city. Tijuana is not a hospitable place for walking; it is too sprawled out, too industrial; its main arteries, like those of a

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Western US city, are lined by mini-malls; even the downtown, minuscule by comparison with the rest of Tijuana, is not easy to manage, and I never learned it well. But along all the highways are little footpaths traced out in the dirt and refuse; they weave and split and merge like the lines of a hand in all the forgotten spaces that might be used to move from one place to another. They are not always very safe to walk on, and they are usually very lonely. They run along the train tracks, where druggies make nests for themselves in the grass, and they run along the river to the tunnels near the border that are inhabited, too. I imagine these paths once running not only along but across the border itself, as they do in the mountains to the east. They go through empty lots and hang along overpasses, where one thinks that surely one of the trucks roaring by will sweep one into oblivion at any second. When they turn through a sheltered stairway, they reek of piss. In the colonias, they run in the narrow spaces in between houses, up endless staircases made of old tires and lined by scrap-wood shacks, where dogs lunge and cower at every turn. They plunge straight down hills that turn to mudslides in the rain, to reach homes that cannot be gotten to any other way. They emerge shyly, surreptitiously, inevitably, the ghosts of improper and sometimes illicit passages through spaces not made to welcome them. They rub themselves into the landscape of even the neatest new developments, where they insinuate themselves into the edges of embankments, along sewage canals, and through small holes in chain-link fences slowly widened by fleeting use. The people who make them are already gone before they arrive; they are already disappearing in the moment of their passage. To these paths and backways, where I so often felt myself a trespasser, even to these what has been written here owes a debt. Thank you.

Introduction

In Tijuana, Mexico, the “International Line” is not the border per se. Rather, la Línea is the area just south of San Ysidro, the city’s main port of entry to the United States—Línea Internacional is actually the name of the street where the line forms to cross north. Properly, línea could refer to the international boundary, as in la línea divisoria (the dividing line), but in Tijuana the word is not commonly used in this sense. As a loan from English, it refers to the lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to cross. People do ask of the border, “Is there a lot of línea?” meaning, “Is the line long?” or they say, “Hice dos horas de línea” (I did two hours of line). But in other contexts, the usual Spanish term for a queue is preferred. The two meanings of línea, neither of which stands on its own, run perpendicular to each other: an east-west line signifying prohibition and a north-south line signifying passage. The Line is the point at which they cross. When elderly Inés drew me a map of the port of entry and its environs, I got confused about where the international boundary was. “Let’s see,” I asked her, but then stumbled, not finding the word: “Here where the border ( frontera) runs, the line (línea), the line of the border?” “Of the border,” she echoed. “Well, that’s this, right here, it’s where they check your papers . . .” and she circled the row of tiny rectangles she had made to represent the one-man booths at which US immigration officers sit.1 For many, the meaning of the border may be condensed to this point: the Line, prohibition and passage, a momentary confrontation staged over and over, the perpetually repeated surrender of oneself and one’s documents to the representatives of the United States. 1. Today, US ports of entry are run by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. I refer to the officers generically in reflection of local usages.

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This book asks how the border, as it blends enticements to passage and stern prohibitions, splits Tijuana. At a basic level, half the population has papers to cross, half does not (Alegría 2009:86).2 In Mexico, Tijuana used to be known as a ciudad de paso (city of passage), in reference to the unauthorized labor migrants who came through here in substantial numbers. But while incipient “illegal aliens” do still pass through the port (hidden in the trunk of a car or with false documents or visas to be overstayed), it is legal border crossing that San Ysidro spectacularizes.3 Though crossings have gone down since the time of my fieldwork, when they reached 110,000 daily (Blum 2007), San Ysidro continues to be known as the busiest port of entry in the world. In addition, the Otay Mesa Port handles all cargo as well as a considerable amount of regular traffic, and yet another port, just for air travelers, opened in 2015. The border splits Tijuana, though, not just in terms of having or not having papers, but as it splits the city’s very sense of itself and of Mexico as a collectivity. Two “we”s will be this book’s protagonists. On one hand, Mexico’s clase media or “middle class” has been increasingly invested with promises of political and consumer modernity. In Tijuana, legal access to the United States validates and bolsters the dream of the clase media and of Mexico as a middle-class nation. On the other hand, the pueblo, “the people” as paradigmatically plebeian, was enshrined by the 1910 Mexican Revolution as the national subject proper. Decades of neoliberal reform, however, have pushed it toward the margins of recognition.4 Now, in the view of many, the need to migrate, to expose oneself to the risks of unauthorized border crossing and of living in the United States as an “illegal alien,” evocatively condenses the broader economic marginalization and political delegitimation of the pueblo. Like passage and prohibition at 2. Alegría’s estimate that 55 percent of residents are authorized border-crossers is based on research conducted in 2001; I use it only as a ballpark figure. If we apply his estimate to today’s population, this group would total close to a million. 3. I use illegal alien, while keeping it in quotation marks, to mark the stigmatization of unauthorized crossers. Plascencia (2009) explains the term’s pernicious history. 4. The Mexican Revolution was a decade- long armed struggle that has been predominantly understood as the first of the great peasant revolutions of the twentieth century. Eiss’s (2010) careful historical treatment of the idea of the pueblo, ethnographically grounded in the southern state of Yucatán, has been essential to my understanding of its fluctuating fortunes. Amid narratives of dispossession and rallying calls to repossession, both traceable to the pueblo’s roots as a colonial institution endowed with territorial sovereignty (a township), Eiss shows how, throughout most of the twentieth century, the pueblo was a central political site to which multiple conflicting projects strove to lay claim.

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the Line, though, clase media and pueblo are both starkly opposed and intimately, inseparably entangled.5 Passing is a term US readers will associate with the lived dilemmas of race— the ambiguities, tensions, and anxieties that come of trying to get by in a system in which law aspires to fix identity all too clearly and with all too obvious advantages and disadvantages for those to whom one or another racial label sticks. Race is, of course, a basic factor at the border, though racial hierarchies in Mexico work much differently from US ones, and mapping their confluence is no simple task. Beyond race, though, passing highlights the vulnerability of identity in general, how it must be risked and reestablished in the vagaries of self-presentation and moment-to-moment recognitions (Goffman 1963). Discourse is crucial here: the simultaneous malleability and straitjacketedess of language, of narrative, of which stories about oneself do or do not stick from one situation to the next. When the police knock on Inés’s door to ask who owns the car out front, she tells them its US license plates are legal, for the car belongs to a young citizen of that country whose papers are all in order. In my absence, she helps me pass before their scrutinizing gaze. Telling me the story, she shows me how she did it: by showing herself as what she is, a respectable old lady. To grasp the intertwining of passage and prohibition and show how clase media and pueblo emerge from them means tracking the vicissitudes of performance in moments like this one, as people interact. Inés’s encounter with the police does not take place at the border, but the border’s distinctions are at stake in it: limits of national belonging as well as limits of legality. As Inés upholds her respectability, limits of class and status are at stake too. Each of these limits runs through this book. The most extreme limits, though, without which the border’s importance for Tijuana and for Mexico cannot be grasped, are the limits of life that unauthorized crossers confront on passage through the desert. The risk of death became central to unauthorized passage when, in 1994, Operation Gatekeeper shifted migrant flows away from urban centers like Tijuana (Nevins 2002; De León 2015). Though protracted desert crossings are rare in local experience, migrant deaths are the most poignant and terrifying expression of the wider society’s— not just the United States’ but also Mexico’s— disregard for those without access to the privilege of legal passage. Ethnographic focus on passing shows how these disparate 5. I use clase media and pueblo as figures people evoke and within which they place themselves. Throughout the book, I refer to a “popular” public in deference to the Spanish, where popular is the adjectival form of pueblo. The term is very close to the poor, and often almost synonymous with it.

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limits play into each other, how they are tied to the border, and how they shape the very possibility of we-ness in Tijuana. Since Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) foundational work exploring her own hybridities as a border- crossing subject, the border has been regarded as a metaphorically potent figure where different limits converge. This approach, however, stalled methodologically as critics pointed out that it had deterritorialized the border beyond recognition (e.g., Heyman 1995a). Moreover, Pablo Vila (2000, 2005) showed that at the border itself, limits were not always crossed but could also divide invidiously. Slowly, academic emphasis shifted from the promiscuity of transnational flows (Kearney 1991, 1995; Alvarez 1995) to violent practices of policing (Andreas 2000; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Fassin 2011; Rosas 2012; De León 2015). Thus, the larger question of how borders as state institutions shape multiple social boundaries (Sahlins 1989; Heyman 1991, 2001a; Rutherford 2003; Pelkmans 2006) has, in the US- Mexico case, largely shrunk to examination of the border’s role in instituting the “illegal alien” in the United States (De Genova 2002; Ngai 2004; Gonzales and Chavez 2012). By picking apart passage and prohibition both at the border itself and in the many “border inspections” (Lugo 2008) of class and race Mexicans impose on each other, this book shifts the focus to the border’s influence on Mexican society. It asks, fundamentally, how a shared sense of collectivity— a “we” that can hold a city or country together— can take root in face of the border's challenge. Out of the uncertainties of passing, two “we”s emerge, two collective subjects diametrically opposed in their relation to the border, both as state apparatus and as marker par excellence of national limits and limitations. As they dispute between them not only their rights to the city but also their status as national subject proper, the border both undergirds and deeply destabilizes them. The two divide Tijuana, but each is also divided within itself. Like the individual “I”s that compose and inform them, Tijuana’s “we”s must pass inspection whenever they are spoken, and so they too are shot through at every step with hesitations, feints, and contradictions. They do not hold together, even as they are what holds Tijuana together. But it is not just Tijuana that is at stake in them. The United States is the world’s foremost imperial power today, and Mexico is the country that has lain closest and longest in its shadow. The ways in which the border unsettles Tijuana speak broadly to the ways in which Mexico, given this history, does not hold together either. The rest of this introduction unfolds in three sections. First, while fleshing out clase media and pueblo in Tijuana, I explain the conceptual anchoring of my ethnographic and argumentative method. Next, I sketch

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the dynamics of desire and disavowal that have shaped this border historically. Finally, I turn to the lessons Tijuana offers about public life in general and the forms of we-ness this city foreshadows for the world.

Two Publics Sometimes people hammer on their “we”s; sometimes we- ness shows in small ways. “Everybody has a visa!” a university professor exclaims, revealing just who she thinks “everybody” is. “all my support for tijuana’s police. [ . . . ] Tijuana is with you,” a participant in an online news forum writes, presuming to speak for the city as a whole (Andrade 2009). In the same discussion, someone else insists the police are no angels, for “we all know that those who die do so because they owe something”— but this voice is quickly run out of the forum. Here “we” is explicit, but the sense of Mexico this phrase posits and defends is akin to subtler formulations. The phrase “It’s said that the border is a nest of traffickers,” for instance, from a popular song (Los Tucanes de Tijuana 1997), likewise conjures up a sense of all those who share this knowledge as a collectivity. The first two examples resonate with the assumptions of Tijuana’s documented, law-abiding clase media; the second two are charged with the assumptions of the pueblo. In each case, language provides a strong clue to which group is at stake and how it is being imagined. In unpacking the border’s effects on Tijuana’s “we”s, I rely on the concept of publics. As developed in recent linguistic-anthropological work (Cody 2011), publics trains attention on the micromechanics of interaction through which collective subjectivity comes to life.6 Moving firmly away from the liberal tradition of thought on the public sphere, it plunges us into the ethnographic nitty-gritties of communication, the details of the discursive genres through which “we” becomes (or does not become) articulable: participant roles, institutional contexts, narrative representations of lived worlds. Understood as constituted by the reflexive reiteration of we-ness, publics provide a close-up lens on passing, pinpointing it in the performative successes, slips, and forceful derailings of the attempt to establish “we” or “I” amid a shifting complex of constraints and possibilities (think of the failure of “we all know” on the web 6. Following Benveniste, I understand subjectivity to be “the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ‘subject’” (1971a:224). Though Benveniste saw pronouns as the crux of subjectivity, they are by no means its only locus in language (Lee 1997; Rumsey 2003).

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forum). Groupness here is a discursive achievement.7 Only through their perpetual evocation, embedded in the give and take of interaction and the risks of recognition it implies, do publics become taken-for-granted social realities, presupposable referents within which individuals may routinely locate themselves. Only through it do they become not just imaginable but inhabitable. To expose the senses of collectivity informing Tijuana’s two publics, I follow a cumulative method of argumentation. Though I often hone in on pronouns, my case does not rest on statistical patterns of language use. Instead, the concatenation of carefully analyzed ethnographic examples shows the strength of the cultural assumptions that sustain these two publics, just as my interlocutors drew me in by their mutually resonant yet always unique address. The examples I have chosen to include are of course but a handful among many. Often, I picked them not to stand in for typical uses but for their idiosyncrasy, to demonstrate, time and again, the ease and expertise with which radically different people tailor common senses of we-ness to their own circumstances (whether lifelong or momentary). In this approach, I am guided by a linguistic anthropological tradition potently summarized by Michael Silverstein (2004). Silverstein shows how cultural categories as basic as gender or as erudite as taxonomies of wine or Jesuit colleges can and must be evoked— and thus continually reworked— in situated human interaction. As cultural concepts, clase media and pueblo can be indexed by subtle cues; that is, they are more often assumed than named. The ethnographic labor here is to unpack those assumptions in the heat of their conflictive mobilization. Michael Warner has called publics “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (2002:90), but this space is never homogeneous; to sketch its contours with any precision, to grasp its depth and bulk as a social form requires attention to the subtle divergences between articulations of we-ness in all the various contexts of their appearance. Every time a claim is made to voice the public (“Tijuana is with you”), a story about who “we” are is also at stake. Linguistic representation is key to publics in the sense of both political delegation (who speaks for all) and depiction; public-making interactions are rich in narratives that, performatively mobilized, produce “a fiction of premediated existence” (Mazzarella 2004:357) that includes not just “we” but the spatiotemporal and sociological world in which it finds its place. These projections of “we” and its world sometimes echo into each other, while other times 7. More technically put, groupness depends on ongoing processes of uptake and recruitment to role (Silverstein 2004) and is tightly regimented, as performativity always is, by felicity conditions (Austin 1962).

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they shove and thrust among themselves. By looking at how they knit together dialogically (Bakhtin 1981a), this book pushes thought on publics beyond the examination of particular, often media-delimited (counter) publics and back to the question of the public sphere as a problematic and always provisional whole. Given stereotypes of Mexican border cities, readers may be surprised to hear of a substantial middle class in Tijuana.8 Those who would occupy a middle-class identity there face this issue daily. Like the person who declared, “all my support for tijuana’s police,” they are often deeply invested in defending, against widespread stereotypes of vice, crime, and poverty, Tijuana’s decency and commitment to civic values. These people consider liberal publicity a requisite for modern societies, and so they do their best to model its autonomous, upright “I” (a point chapter 2 develops). In tune with classic liberal theories of the public sphere, they like to debate matters of common concern and aspire to build a rational consensus that will influence state policy (Habermas 1989; Calhoun 1992; Mazzarella 2010). At root, however, the “I” that liberal publicity relies on is that of the legal subject and full citizen, signing its name before the state as before the public at large. In the quest to consolidate this “I,” many in Tijuana turn to the US Border Crossing Card, or “laser visa.” This document sums up past achievements (education, employment, property, and self- presentation are all potentially reviewed in the application interview) and allows access to crucial realms of consumption in San Diego and beyond, thus feeding further performances of status. Most importantly, the visa underlines one’s rejection of unauthorized labor migration to the United States, a rejection crucial to middle-class morality here.9 But the visa’s confirmation of self and status is tenuous at best. Aside from the fact that many people use 8. The English-language ethnographic literature has countered perceptions of these cities as dens of iniquity almost exclusively by focusing on the working poor and, in particular, their labor in the transnational assembly plant industry established with the Border Industrialization Program in 1965 (e.g., Peña 1997; Salzinger 2003; Lugo 2008). All these studies are set in Ciudad Juárez, the other major city along Mexico’s northern border. Heyman (1991), Rosas (2012), and Muehlmann (2014) are important exceptions to the overwhelming anthropological focus on Juárez, but they too feature disenfranchised populations. In contrast, Tijuana has drawn more scholarly attention in the United States for its cosmopolitan art, music, and literary scenes (Madrid 2008; Kun and Montezemolo 2012). 9. The strength of this rejection cannot be overemphasized; it is deeply racist as well as classist, for migrants as a group are often assumed to be more indigenous. While usually couched in sympathy for those driven to migrate, rejection can also be virulent. On a couple occasions I was told that unauthorized migrants should be

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it precisely to facilitate unauthorized work in the United States (Chávez 2016), in the port of entry everyone is a suspect. Under the unabating surveillance of the US state, the upstanding citizen must constantly displace the fear of suddenly finding themselves nothing but another marginal, excluded subject in relation to US authority. For Tijuana’s popular public, in contrast, the border puts a finishing twist on a whole series of exclusions seen as arising within Mexican society, which have long pushed a significant part of the population into the United States. As archaeologist Jason De León argues, the Sonoran Desert has been recruited by the US state as part of a complex “killing machine” (2015:3) aimed at unauthorized border-crossers. He shows, to devastating effect, how the devaluation of their lives is a political fact quite literally “inscribed upon the bones of the dead” (2015:72). This devaluation, though, is only the most radical affront of many that, I argue, deny subjectivity to the undocumented and all those who identify with them. Lacking recognition, “we” can become very thin indeed. At an extreme, one may not even voice it; at an extreme, subjectivity may turn inside out and “we” may become, at once holding on to and eschewing recognition, the third person of such commonplace forms as “they say,” “it is said,” or “what I heard.” This is the province of what I call the hearsay public: the main form taken today in Tijuana, I argue, by the venerable figure of the pueblo.10 Different chapters find the hearsay public in materials such as a bestselling exposé, popular music, interactions in public, or even intensely intimate interviews. The hearsay public pops into focus at the border, but it extends far beyond; its social imaginary commands perduring allegiances and regiments the worldviews of a vast population. From the perspective of liberal publicity, it is radically unfamiliar. It does not rely on broadcast communication or the circulation of text-artifacts (though it may use either of these); it is not a modality of debate for the agonistic exchange of opinshot. Though this is by no means the prevailing opinion, the people who expressed it were squarely within the middle-class social circles I studied. 10. I prefer hearsay to rumor (Lomnitz 2001) because it refers explicitly to the chain of “shadow conversations” (Irvine 1996) hearsay frames can evoke. As Paz argues, these “shadow conversations,” by representing discourse as already in circulation, “help to project the group that is purportedly circulating the story” (2009:120); in the case he examines, he likewise emphasizes these groups’ marginalization from the dominant public sphere. One of my first inspirations for the idea of the hearsay public was Warner’s suggestion that gossip about political figures, when prefaced by such tags as “Everybody knows that . . .” or “People are saying . . . ,” can be a public-making genre (2002:79).

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ions or the production of rational consensus. Its topics may be political, but it is not oriented toward a future in which conversation might influence formal political decision making. Indeed, it is based on exactly the opposite principles from those on which politics is generally premised: not positive identity but negativity, uncertainty, the hollowing-out of “I.” This hollowing out expands and becomes contagious via a mode of listening across disparate encounters for the echoes that might connect them. Early in my fieldwork, as the hearsay public was just inducting me into its world, it was this mode of listening that first drew me to the literature on publics. Even as their constituencies hover and shift between them, middleclass and popular publics face off contentiously as voicings of subjectivity cluster at opposite extremes of a spectrum: the apparent solidity of the first person versus the apparent emptiness of the third. This radicalization of the clase media’s and the pueblo’s senses of we- ness sheds light on their relationship more broadly. Both clase media and pueblo are common figures in Latin America. As publics, they give subjective shape to social difference in this most unequal of world regions; they express tensions brought to snapping point by the rapid expansion of consumer capitalism in countries where the “poor” predominate. While clase media or pueblo may be applied to incredibly diverse social formations, in an urban context they conjure all-too-real images of highly stratified societies squashed up against themselves in space, conflicting demands and aspirations colliding explosively.11 But they cannot be understood as referring in any simple way to concrete, statistically measurable populations. They are terms in use in the contexts they refer to; they are tags for imaginaries under dispute, irreconcilable directions for collective action and becoming; and they are, most crucially, subject positions taken up and lain down in the heat of interaction. They are pinned to shifters (pronouns such as I, we, and you) that, even as they anchor voiced imaginaries in the here and now, throw open a treacherous ground of moment- tomoment negotiation. They articulate material social differences, pressing questions of distribution and access to resources, but they cannot be reduced to these. Giving form to class status, urban belonging, and even national citizenship, they vivify in the form of a two-sided dispute, immersed in all the thickness of lived interaction, an old tension running back to the beginnings of the public sphere as a social form: bourgeois versus plebeian, enlightened versus not, the circle of established society 11. See Gandolfo (2009) and Leal (2011), who beautifully capture the insidious tensions and unexpected intimacies of public, cross-class interactions in urban Latin America.

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versus what it cannot admit or contain. The public sphere’s fragmentation is not an effect of globalization and the proliferation of cultural minorities as is often thought; instead, it is a basic conundrum first phrased— like clase media and pueblo— in terms of class. Within Tijuana, the two publics articulate social divisions between center and periphery that are common throughout urban Latin America and that are especially crucial in a country that, like Mexico, has urbanized dramatically over the course of the last century.12 As anywhere else in the region, class intertwines inseparably with race and citizenship.13 The periphery takes shape through the usual struggles and negotiations with government officials for water, electricity, and the slow legalization of squatted or irregularly purchased property; “the poor” who inhabit the marginalized districts known as colonias populares14 are generally believed by the better-off to all be newly arrived migrants and lowly factory workers, if not criminals; and the two most recent waves of arrivals are labeled oaxaquitas and chapitas, derogatory diminutives derived from the names of two of Mexico’s most indigenous states. For the middling strata who occupy the more central parts of the city, “the poor” are often conceptualized as those who live “lejos” (far away). These middle sectors may not be a demographic majority (and those who consider themselves middle-class, it should be kept in mind, are for the most part nowhere nearly as well off as their analogues in the States), but they are substantial in this relatively prosperous city, and they have a social, political, and spatial grasp on Tijuana that effectively allows them to think of it as theirs.15 Unlike the rest of Latin America, however, Tijuana’s public sphere takes shape directly in the shadow of the US state apparatus of the border and its relentless sorting of subjects into those fit and unfit to cross it legally. Besides legal categories (citizen, visa holder, “illegal alien”), this 12. In 1900, only 10.5 percent of Mexico’s population lived in cities of 15,000 or more inhabitants (Garza 1990:45). By 2010, 62.4 percent did (INEGI 2010). Forty percent lived in cities of 100,000 or more. 13. On urban citizenship in Latin America, see Caldeira (2000), Goldstein (2004), and Holston (2008). These studies reflect Holston and Appadurai’s (1996) influential argument that the city is now the primary sphere of citizenship. I highlight instead the continuities between urban and national citizenship. 14. See note 5 above on popular, which lacks an adequate English translation. 15. Income distribution in Mexico is calculated in multiples of minimum wages, which differ regionally, Tijuana being in the highest bracket. In 2005, 24 percent of Mexico’s economically active population earned less than the minimum, while only 10 percent earned above five times that minimum (INEGI 2005c). In Tijuana, however, only 1 percent earned less than the minimum, while 31 percent earned over five times the minimum (INEGI 2005a).

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sorting enacts racial distinctions: until recently, Anglos routinely walked through without showing any documents at all. If class has tended to be invisible in the United States, in Mexico it is racial difference that remains widely unacknowledged; at the border, these two idioms potentiate each other, for example, in the remark that someone has the “look” of a potential “illegal alien.”16 Through the adoption of its categories, the US state puts a definitive twist on clase media and pueblo, giving further substance to their self-framing in terms of class: who goes to the United States to shop, as the visa allows, and who goes to work, as an “illegal.” In Tijuana, the “we” of either clase media or pueblo must balance itself in the intermeshing of two national regimes of social status, each defined by a particular imbrication of legal, socioeconomic, and racial recognitions. But the two publics do so very differently, for the border does not interpellate all subjects equally, and, just as importantly, each public has its own logics governing the transit between individual and collective subjectivity. If middle-class “I”s root themselves, however insecurely, in the US state, the insufficiency, unreliability, or flat-out lack of any validating connection to even the Mexican state makes itself exponentially more patent for “the poor.” Birth or marriage certificates, basic IDs, school diplomas, property deeds, even water and electricity bills— as chapter 6 explores, the absence of all or any of these can potently index a deeper lack of official recognition. Passing begins to appear necessarily illicit, rebellious, even (though only incipiently) revolutionary.17 In this context, popular discourses— like the songs analyzed in chapter 7— draw on the figure of the undocumented border-crosser as paradigm and pinnacle of such transgressive passing and the marginalization that provokes it. This passing and this marginality, moreover, defines “us” as the authentic heart of the nation, the true pueblo.18 16. Knight (1990) shows how the postrevolutionary national myth of mestizaje (racial mixing), while appearing to be anti-racist, was actually continuous with nineteenth-century positivist racism. See also Bartra (1987) and Alonso (2005). On race at the border, see Vila (2000), Rosas (2012), and Yeh (2015). 17. Dorotea’s neighbors often accused her of treachery, for she worked with the same political party that had opposed the settlement of their colonia with police violence, resulting in several deaths. It was only once, in private and in a voice tight with rage, that Dorotea told me her political work was an act of revenge: to make them pay, literally, by investment in the neighborhood, for what they did. 18. Of Indonesia, Siegel writes that people feel a lack of connection to state authority as exclusion from the nation (2006:157). But in Mexico, the most forceful statement of the pueblo may emerge precisely from a moment of disconnection or disenfranchisement. Discussing the failure of her seniors’ club to secure official

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Thus the border radicalizes the basic split in the public sphere. With its relentless surveillance and constant threat of violent exclusion, it profoundly unsettles subjectivity; as the US state authorizes the daily adjudication of social status among Mexicans, its foreignness turns one of the basic conundrums of liberal public spheres— their ambivalent relation to state authority— into a biting irony.19 The international system of social hierarchies that shows itself so starkly in Tijuana appears structured by a slippery recursive distinction, unsettling multiple levels at once; the lines between foreigner and national, middle-class and marginal, citizen and criminal are at once all the more contested and all the more nervously reaffirmed as subjects verge on all of these identities at once, tottering in a shifting meshwork of distinctions. Boundaries of all sorts become crisper, at the same time that they take on a hallucinatory instability.20 With its implacable processes of surveillance and distinction and the shimmering confusion they generate, the border both cleaves and joins Tijuana’s two publics. One struggles to bolster itself with US recognition by insisting “we” are not “illegals”; the other, harshly stigmatized, struggles to say “I” or “we” at all— it struggles, in the last instance and as I will explore in chapter 8, in its relationship to the migrant dead. As the two publics vie to represent the city and the nation as a whole, there swirls at their basis all the complication of desire and rejection, recognition and evasion, displacement and disavowal that arises from the pressure to pass. The border looses a flood of ambivalences, hesitations, and outright transgressions, at once sharpening and unmooring opposed voicings of collective subjectivity. It is no accident that split publicity, as a national problematic, should come to a head here. But if the border is such a powerful site of resonance, vibrating ambivalence out into society at large, this cannot be explained only by its force as a state institution in the present. In reality, the border has long been at the heart of the question of passing for Mexico as a whole.

patronage, a woman declared, “We the poor are more [in number], and we are going to beat the shit out of them [les vamos a partir la madre].” Presumably she meant in the electoral sense. 19. By liberal standards, the public sphere should be independent, yet it must always orient back to the nation-state (see Kant 1970). At the same time, the state guarantees the property of the bourgeois citizen (Habermas 1989:83). 20. Anzaldúa’s (1987) contrast between borders as sharp lines of difference and borderlands as zones of indistinction has become a powerful commonplace in the literature. Taking a cue from Lugo (2008), this book challenges that contrast by showing the proliferation of unstable lines of distinction.

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The Border as Fetish In late 1847, the war between the United States and Mexico (spurred by the former country’s annexation of Texas) culminated with the US occupation of Mexico City. In the United States, a furious debate ensued over whether to annex Mexico entirely. The All Mexico movement had gained momentum with classically colonialist rhetoric casting the United States as liberating savior; if the country’s standing in the ranks of “modern civilization,” as one contemporary put it ( Johannsen 1985:32), was at stake in the war, these ranks were composed of European powers at the height of their colonial expansion. Observers proudly compared US action in Mexico to that of the French in Algeria (15) or the British in India (307– 8). With the decision to pull the colonial project up short and simply split Mexico in half, though, the fear of failure prevailed— the fear not just that short-term control might be impossible, but that Mexico’s racial mixture would prove stubborn against all efforts at social betterment; that annexation meant eventual incorporation and hence legal equality; and that this equality with an inherently unequal other would be the downfall of the United States itself (Russel y Rodríguez 2000; Horsman 1981:229– 48). In the face of this menace, the creation of the border was a gesture of self-preservation. With this double gesture of consumption and spitting out, the United States established a novel and highly ambiguous quasicolonial dynamic— several decades before it would emerge as the unrivaled center of economic dependency for Mexico as for most of Latin America. To be an independent nation is to be one among many, an equal member of the series of sovereign nation-states that make up the global order. But Mexico only remained sovereign at this moment thanks to a judgment as to its unerasable inferiority, a judgment, in effect, that it could never really be fully sovereign. The United States’ decision— the sovereign decision of a conquering nation over the body of the conquered— installed inequality at the core of the very fact that should bespeak equal standing. The border was first instituted not just to mark but to maintain a line of insurmountable difference, and this fact remains as a persistent subtext of contemporary Mexican sovereignty.21 The border concretizes difference, but it can also be quite mobile. In 1930, anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote, “Mexico is in no small part modern [ . . . ] In the more sophisticated villages of the north, in the 21. The issue, of course, is recognition. As Rutherford contends, audience— including, prominently, other governments— is “sovereignty’s basis and its bane” (2012:4).

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middle classes in the cities everywhere, are to be found a people much like the masses in our own country. They not only can read, but they do read. The folk hear rumor; these people read the news” (1930:3). In effect, he tries to shift the border south. The distinction between modern and not, he proposes, does not define “our own country” against Mexico but may be traced in the details of a complex social geography. By addressing the reader as part of a US public, though, this casual introductory sentence reevokes the border in the difference between “us” and “them.” In such subtle ways, it plagues efforts to assert Mexico’s modernity, marking them with a persistent and endemic ambivalence. Redfield’s “much like” stands against US prejudices, but it resonates with a whole tradition of thought, running back to Frantz Fanon (1967), on the ambivalence of colonial subjectivities. In particular, “much like” resonates with the phrase “not quite,” which Homi Bhabha uses to sum up how, despite its civilizing rhetoric, the colonial gaze insidiously resurrects the backwardness of the natives, reducing them to hollow mimics of Western models (1984:132).22 In Mexico, this ambivalent gaze is not only imposed from outside. In 2009, pundits Héctor Aguilar Camín and Jorge Castañeda published a manifesto titled A Future for Mexico. They frame their call to arms with a basic assumption: “The country [ . . . ] that Mexicans want [ . . . ] [is] a middle- class society as like the others as a drop of water [is like other drops]” (21). Much like? Not quite. The manifesto enacts the ambivalence of mimicry by first addressing the reader as a member of this “growing middle class,” the only hope for Mexico’s future, and then berating him or her for not quite having embraced the decision to modernize. For instance, the authors praise Turkey for choosing to be “European, secular, democratic and globalized” over being “Asiatic, Islamic and involuted” (46) and accuse Mexico (and thus their readership) of lagging behind.23 Through the double interpellation of mimicry, the book replays “the pervasive sense that the [Mexican] nation is always about to cross over the threshold to modernity” (Lomnitz 2003:127). It is no accident how Aguilar Camín and Castañeda literalize this threshold: “Our place in the world [  . . .  ] Latin America or North America?” they ask. Does the border lie to the north, separating us from the world’s paradigmatically modern, middle-class society, or can we succeed in moving it south? In the most diverse contexts, the border serves 22. To be clear, I understand mimicry as emerging in accusatory acts of outing, not actual practices of imitation. As Newell argues, modernity “is in fact built upon the production of copies” (2012:22). 23. My translation plays up the racism of the passage, since asiático is a normal term for “Asian.” But its use here is clearly derogatory.

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as a figure for a shifting line of difference and inequality. This line is, thus, nowhere more present than at the border itself, the main site threatening to expose all pretensions to equality with the United States (of whatever sort) as no more than that. If mimicry is instituted in the moment of its revelation, when the subject is outed as merely passing, the border makes this act of interdiction routine, up close, and personal. One can always slip, have one’s papers taken away, be reduced to a wannabe “illegal alien.” The border’s mobility as metaphor fuels a profound insecurity (however forcefully it may be denied) regarding the physical border itself. As a conceptual elaboration of ambivalence, I use the fetish to unpack the slippages and flips of passing at the border. The visa, for instance, is a classic fetish object, at once tendering the possibility of passage and reminding its possessor that the power to pass is not one’s own. Above, I drew on Bhabha not just because of the echo with Redfield, but also because the fetish is the theoretical bedrock of his approach. Bhabha borrows “not quite” from Samuel Weber’s (1973) reading of Sigmund Freud (1963), and, indeed, even just in the Freudian sense, the fetish illuminates much of what is at stake for both countries in the border.24 For the United States (and one must understand what is at stake for the United States in order to understand what is at stake for Mexico), the border secured the national “we” in the mid-nineteenth century, and it does so still today. If, as Freud writes, the fetish “remains as a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it” (1963:216), the border stands as just such a monument against the threat of national disintegration, a materialized outer limit of the “melting pot.” Thanks to the border, “we” can appear unitary, untroubled by memories of conquest and the sense of relationality they might engender. The war has been forgotten, even as it stands at the origin of an unequal relationship that, through the labor of the “illegal alien,” continues to sustain the national economy.25 The 24. Weber uses Freud’s theory for its “hermeneutical relevance” (1973:1113) in bringing ambiguity into focus. Though much has been written on the fetish’s conceptual affinity with borders (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988; Butler 1993; Spyer 1998; Rutherford 2003), I understand the border as just one site, albeit a central one, where ambivalence is spatialized, calqued onto the landscape as it may be calqued onto a variety of objects and social relations. 25. Solnit provides a vivid example of such forgetting, as a couple reproved her, at an event commemorating Anglo secessionism in California: “Young lady, California was never part of Mexico” (2007:79). The figure of the “illegal alien” as stereotypically Mexican (Ngai 2004) formalizes in a legal register a racial and class identity that emerged in the wake of Anglo-Mexican conflict in the annexed territories and in Texas in particular (Montejano 1987:13–99). It thus directly extends nineteenthcentury imperial conquest into the present. Resolving the “inner incompatibility”

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border for the United States is a material fetish, increasingly inscribed on the landscape, that at once wards off and incites anew anxieties born of a deep and foundational contradiction in the national project, between the violence of settler colonialism and national myths of equality and openness. Freud writes further that a fetish holds together “two incompatible propositions,” the simultaneous recognition and denial of reality (219). It is thus not merely a “token of triumph”; it is also a reminder of failure. The most firmly established fetish object, writes Freud, is that which combines these two possibilities most successfully. The combination provokes a wild oscillation: “Tender and hostile treatment of fetishes is mixed in unequal degrees— like the denial and recognition of castration— in different cases.” Just so, “much like” oscillates with “not quite” or, more dramatically, “not even close.” As a fetish, the border concretizes each implication, splitting them apart territorially even as it knits them together. Mexico’s northern half, fully incorporated into the United States, stands as the positive affective train, the triumph of national unity and of a colonialist project of assimilation. The southern, independent half remains caught as the materialization of the fetish’s negative pole, the site where the failure of this project takes on bulk and form as a social reality. On both sides of the border, the establishment of proper and selfsufficient presence alternates with its recurrent undoing. But recognition and denial, failure and triumph are, as Freud notes, “mixed in unequal degrees [ . . . ] in different cases.” In the United States, traces of the Southwest’s otherness may be felt, for instance, in jokes about people who ask if it’s Thursday in Texas, is it also Thursday in New Mexico, or whether a passport is necessary to travel to the latter state.26 “Not quite” is felt too in the chronic slippages of status in which class, race, and citizenship fade ambiguously into each other, in which the socioeconomically marginal Anglo clings to racialized citizenship as a last, unstable reef of distinction, or in which Mexican Americans are mistaken for “illegal aliens.” Most dramatically, the fetish in its negative guise impinges on the United States when Mexico does not stay in place, and “illegals” seem to flood across between empire and nation (Anderson 1983:93), it brings the body of the conquered colonial subject straight into the territorial heart of the empire, with none of the moral or legal prevarications that might have ensued from an explicitly colonial relationship. 26. Of the appropriated territories, New Mexico has the deepest Spanish colonial past. It also remains the most Hispanic state in the country, with 46 percent of the population (Associated Press 2011).

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the border. The “hostile treatment” they then receive recalls the fury with which Georg Hegel (2011:87) imagined Africans destroying their fetishes when they failed to deliver what was asked of them. Such slippages perturb the “we” the border should shore up and the historical denials on which it is based. For Mexico, the fetish’s negative force traverses the core of national being with a vengeance far more difficult to suppress. No two countries with such a history behind them— almost, but not quite, a colonial history— share such an intimate border, so long, so populous (it is the only border that has created a string of twin cities along it), so traversed. Mexico did not reify the border for itself; it has instead been in the position of responding to its northern neighbor’s process of externalization and ritual marking of the outer limits of its national project. As the negative moment of the border as national fetish for the United States, Mexico’s struggle to disavow the contradictions and failures of the national “we” lies much closer to the surface, endemically disrupting national selfarticulation. Mimicry haunts progress in registers running from national sovereignty to the everyday details through which people hope to claim modernity. This ambivalence throbs out from the border and feeds back into it from other sites, augmenting all that is at stake in actual passage. As the physical scar slashed by the 1848 excision of almost half the national territory, the border is at the heart of the problem of selfhood and subjectivity, passing and prohibition posed by Mexico’s unequal and denied colonial relationship with the United States.

*** Of Mexico’s border cities, the densest site of the negative force born of this history is Tijuana. For the United States, it has provided a particularly vivid spectacle of what the border saves “us” from.27 It was a special target of vituperation even before the 1920s, when it became world-famous as a Prohibition boomtown (Taylor 2002): “The Road to Hell” read a sign on the highway south from San Diego (Vanderwood 2010:102), “The filthiest cesspool that ever defiled the face of the earth,” wrote a visitor of the same period (114). At close of century, Tijuana was still “the most celebrated bastion of chaos on the border” (Urrea 1993:112). Similar discourses, however, are rampant in Mexico as well. 27. Berumen (2003) argues that Tijuana’s “Black Legend” was projected on it by San Diego in an effort to exorcise its own ills, while Davis (2005) suggests Tijuana has been a crucial escape valve for San Diego, with its highly lucrative image of puritan affluence.

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For many Mexicans, Tijuana is a peculiar place to be talking about the nation. “Why, that’s not really Mexico!” southerners are apt to say with a smile. Heriberto Yépez argues that the city is the occasion in which “our national ills (poverty, migration, crime) occur to others; it is the [movie] set where Mexico becomes a foreign country for Mexicans themselves” (2006:84). He describes the production of “tijuanology,” in which a parade of Mexico City intellectuals write up their lightning tours of the city in an endless succession of magazine and even academic articles. Zooming through a series of obligatory sights (the red light district, the tourist strip, the assembly plants, the border fence, the port of entry), these reports reproduce a national fascination with Tijuana as an internal other, in which a certain dizzying degradation of “us” can be witnessed. Though technically within national territory, this city has gone beyond the limits of national being. It is what Jacques Derrida (1974), building on the concept of the fetish, calls a supplement. Threatening “the degeneracy of culture and the disruption of the community” (45), Tijuana is a dangerous element within the body of the nation, the concretion of absence and lack, that always already traverses and constitutes positive being. There are historical and even geographic reasons why Tijuana fulfills this role. It is located on a peninsula that has always appeared as something of a dangling appendage about to fall off, easy prey to US expansionism— originally the border line was negotiated to keep a narrow bit communicating the peninsula with the mainland, lest the detached part atrophy on its own. Baja California remained a territory, not considered capable of self-government, until 1952. Tijuana itself lies across a steep mountain range, making integration with Mexico a particular challenge. Consumer products, basic services, and mass media were imported from the United States until the devaluation of the peso in 1976 let Mexican companies gain a foothold. The devaluation, oral history maintains, marked the beginning of the use of national currency here. As one woman told me, “Tijuana was completely isolated from the Republic of Mexico.” Tijuana is not just twice as far from Mexico City as Ciudad Juárez is; it has none of the history that situates Juárez firmly within the national imaginary. As Rachel St. John (2011) succinctly explains, the settlements along the western half of the political boundary have no history at all apart from it. Juárez was on the map since the early 1600s; a hundred years ago, Tijuana was still a scrawny village. Though now comparable in size, the cross-border dynamic is radically different. Juárez dominates El Paso, whereas Tijuana is an outlier to the massive metropolitan agglomeration of southern California. San Diego bills itself as “America’s Finest City”; it is conservative, wealthy, and exceptionally white as compared to the rest of California. New Mexico and south Texas, in contrast, include

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some of the most economically depressed areas of the United States, and some of the most Hispanic. In the most loaded registers of economy and race, the contrast across the Tijuana–San Diego border is at a height. Assailed on both sides by censure and derision, fear and exoticizing fascination, Tijuana is caught within a double interlocution. Looking south, it places itself on the “modern” side of the divide in much the same terms Redfield used in 1930: northern, urban, middle-class, “much like” the United States. Looking north, that country sets an unreachable standard, and “much like” becomes “not even close.” The shifting line of difference picks up its speed of oscillation. Crossed and double-crossed by the border, all forms of subjectivity in Tijuana find themselves (if they find themselves at all) shot through with hesitations, disavowals, and constant feints as they look both north and south.

Fetishism and the Public Sphere With this quasicolonial history and the idea of the fetish in mind, let me return to the question of the public sphere. While I use public sphere in a technical sense to refer to an inclusive range of voicings of we- ness, the term comes loaded with the normative values of a liberal theoretical tradition.28 In this sense, the idea of the public sphere raises, in Mexico and in general, a series of anxious questions. Is rational debate rational enough? Inclusive enough? Do the media not keep a stranglehold on analysis? How influential can public debate be, when state authority remains mired in corruption? These are important questions. I would, however, displace them slightly, for they are the very means whereby liberal publicity, as a requisite for properly modern societies today, participates in the fetishistic ambivalences that originated in colonial discourse. Liberal publicity works by establishing cuts, saturated with doubt but also promise, between those who seem able to inhabit its lifeworld and those who seem to fall short. While these cuts have intimately supported colonial dynamics (the history of the border is a case in point), they derive, more basically, from the tension between liberal publicity’s utopianism and its “grounding in social life” (Lee 1992:406).29 Harnessed to projects of distinction and rule, liberal publicity continually runs up 28. Liberal publicity takes canonical shape in a broad tradition of political philosophy. I take Habermas (1989) as perhaps not just the clearest but also the most influential example of this tradition. 29. Mazzarella (2013) specifically locates this tension in publicity’s “open edge”: the indeterminacy of address on which its expansive aspirations depend but which also dooms it to endemic failure.

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against a world that does not conform to it and that threatens to undo its performative constitution of social totality. Subtle and not-so-subtle nonconformities are embedded in every articulation of “we,” which always conceals multiple shortcomings with respect to normative political theories. Those committed to these ideals, however, tend to project the specter of their failure out into a genealogy of interrelated social figures: the crowd, the mass, the plebe, the folk. As liberal publicity’s living supplement, these are figures of excess (the excess of ground over ideology), incompletion (theory’s incapacity to incorporate fully its ground), and sheer negativity. Such specters are no stymie for liberal publicity; instead, they feed its moral imperative and forward momentum (Povinelli 2001; Mazzarella 2013). Continually excised from the larger whole, these anti-publics incarnate the productive threat (and hope) on which liberal publicity depends. Western European plebeian masses, classic colonial subjects, and contemporary minorities have all played this part in different ways. But if they begin as specters, what substance can they have as publics in their own right? In what ways are they part of the project that conjures them; in what ways are they truly external to it? Studies of the public sphere are still caught between the search for alternative traditions of publicity and recognition of these traditions’ entanglement in liberalisms’ spectral projections, cast indiscriminately on subalterns of the most various stripes. As one of the oldest edge formations of that nebulous entity known as “the West,” Latin America helps break this double bind. Here, liberalism’s conflicted history (never clearly distinct from that of republicanism) goes back a good two centuries.30 In a classic argument, Charles Hale (1968) has explained how liberalism turned over the course of the nineteenth century into a unifying ideology that, as a future goal for progress, could justify utterly illiberal political practices such as, in Mexico, Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. As a unifying ideology, liberalism has played a key part in producing “differentiated citizenship” (Holston 2008); paradoxically, commitment to the utopic promise of a liberal society can affirm status in ways ultimately consonant with hierarchical relations of patronage. But though clientelism, communalism, and corporate groups remain basic social forms in the region, they are insufficient for explaining contemporary public spheres here.31 30. I have stuck with liberal publicity mainly to underline the continuities with neoliberalism in contemporary Tijuana. 31. In the case of Mexico, studies of patrimony are a rich source on the ties and disconnects between communal “we”s and national collective subjectivity (Hayden 2003; Ferry 2005; Rozental 2014).

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Latin America shows liberal publicity not as part of an objectively operating sociopolitical system, ever beating back its dysfunctional fringe, but as a normative ideal the presence or lack of which can be indexed in interaction to powerful effect. Public spheres here emerge as arenas crisscrossed by liberal practices of cut-making. Hope and fear saturate them, generated by performative attempts both to establish properly liberal “I”s and “we”s and to offload failure onto someone else. Liberal publicity is always in question in Latin America, and the pragmatic force of this question proliferates throughout society in a way that allows no permanent, apparently impartial determination of any boundary between those who truly inhabit the liberal norm and those who have it foisted on them superficially. Instead, cut making charges the public sphere with the energy of the fetish, with risk and potential, and this energy substantially reshapes social differences of all sorts along the way. Another, closely related boundary that has oft been flagged as a constitutive limit of liberal publicity and that Latin America destabilizes is the boundary between mass-mediated and face-to-face interaction. Because Independence happened so early here, liberalism’s fetishistic ambivalence over “we”s capaciousness was shaping national public spheres long before they acquired their mass character in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Lomnitz 2001; Piccato 2010a). I do not mean to deny the specificity of different media (newspapers, Internet, compact discs, and so forth), but in this book I am more interested in dynamics that cut across not only multifarious media formats but also the divide between the mass mediated and the face-to-face. The latter too is indispensable for understanding the propagation of mass “we”s. Rather than finding liberal publicity’s fetishistic wavering in the properties of particular media, I find it in structures of address (the first person, the third) mobilized across mass-mediated and face-to-face settings. Broadening the ethnographic gamut of interactions in which the pragmatics of publicity play out, this book takes a dialogic way out of the conceptual double bind between authentic alterity and liberal projections. By now, proper and improper publics alike are all too familiar with the gesture of cut making— but this fact does not limit the ways in which they can anticipate and react to it. As Francis Cody contends, we must seek the processes of “mutual recognition” (2015:55) shaping the larger public sphere of which the properly liberal (ever an unstable grouping) forms only a part. A dialogic approach asks not just how excisive projections occur or even what happens when they fail in their stabilizing role. It also asks what those subjected to these projections do in turn: what it means for you to be the supplement sustaining (and disturbing) my apparent plenitude.

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How to sustain a dialogic approach, though, when the whole point of the cut is that liberal publicity does not consider those beyond it dialogic interlocutors? Here is where the third person comes in, as used in such public-making formulations as “It’s said that the border . . .” (versus, for example, “we tijuanenses”). While the linguistic give-and-take between “you” and “I” posits “our” mutual subjectivity, the third person remains external to this play. It stands in, as Émile Benveniste explains (1971a, 1971b), for the world-as-object-of-discourse— that which passes between “us” in our dialogic constitution of subjectivity but which is relegated to a distinct plane of language and being. For Benveniste, the third person is, both grammatically and philosophically speaking, not really a person. To refuse interlocution is, thus, to deny subjectivity; it is to put the other in the place of the third person. For Tijuana’s hearsay public to posit itself in this form is both a logical contradiction (a subject that speaks itself as a nonsubject) and a direct result of its historical marginalization from dialogue.32 If the first person can incarnate the fetish’s triumphal moment, the third person is, emergently, the form the fetish takes in its negative moment, when it swings toward lack and alienation. Attributing and withdrawing subjectivity, dialogic interaction socially distributes the plenitude and negativity that liberal publicity, as a fundamentally fetishistic enterprise, continually generates. As fetishes, though, “we” and “they” never stand alone. Instead, they link into larger chains of supplementary relations. The disenfranchised, for instance, may fetishize the patron who helps them assure passage on Tijuana’s streets, but that middle-class patron’s “I” is secured in turn by their US visa. These chains run through but also beyond formations of publicity per se. Dialogism thus turns into a strategy for disaggregating liberal publicity into different objects of desire in tension (to begin with, the clase media’s upstanding “I” and the US State) and locating them within a wider frame that includes other sources of fetishistic energy intimately related to but nonetheless distinct from liberal publicity.33 Prime among these, as we have seen, is the US state with its fundamental forms of law and violence. After all, each of the specific fetishes just mentioned link up in one way or another to the border and its basic and terrible duality: the promise of passage, the potentially devastating threat of prohibition. 32. Siegel (1997) and Rutherford (2008) have been fundamental in shaping my thought on third-person collective subjectivity. 33. I use “the big S of the State” (Taussig 1997:3) to accent its inflated nature as a fetish; when the emphasis lies on the institutional apparatus I do not. Of course, the two aspects are never really distinguishable.

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As these fetish forms pulse in tandem, they make up a veritable transnational system. In this book, I replace liberal publicity as ethnographic object with the larger syncretic structure of fetish substitutions of which it forms a part. This replacement is urgent in the context of today’s massive economic and affective investment in borders. Transnational, cosmopolitan publics have been on the scholarly radar for some time now, but where other populations are either corralled in or forced to move in ever more dramatically vulnerable ways, these more privileged publics clearly do not give a full picture of the future (Ong 1999, 2006). The implications for we-ness of the rapidly evolving ways in which borders are kaleidoscopically fragmenting and refiguring populations hinge on the twisting influence that newly imperial forms of sovereign recognition can exert at unexpected distances: in Tijuana, the ways that having or not having US documents underlies and undermines the city’s “we”s. For the clase media, such exigencies of recognition can take the conundrums on which their social worlds rest to crisis level; as explored in chapter 3, their reactions are vigorous and creative. What the worse- off in Tijuana do, however, provides even more food for thought. When fetishes fail to deliver on expectations, the energy invested in them is set loose. It can take a destructive form, as Hegel and Freud warned. Or, it can latch onto a new object and buttress a new essentialism. This book explores a third possibility: that the fetish’s negative force can produce a deconstructive ethic (Derrida 1998, 2005) for public sociality. Earlier, I said that the migrant dead in the Sonoran Desert are the most terrifying manifestation of Mexico as a negative fetish for the United States. But that binational relation, as I just explained, should be understood in terms of the larger question of mass we-ness in an evolving global system of imperial power. The hearsay public’s response to the deaths in the desert is a suggestive response to that system as a whole. Through the third person, the hearsay public opens itself to these deaths as the site of a negativity socially situated in the whole history of conquest and inequality between Mexico and the United States. As one woman told me, “All the time you hear the same thing, the same thing.” Recounting rumors of these deaths as she did, drawing them into relation to their own experiences, people try to share in them, impossibly, in the same way the hearsay public tries to make all of the pueblo’s suffering into something sharable. From the destructive and absolute devaluing of life (death as the ultimate prohibition), the hearsay public builds an ethical practice of encounter, of listening, and of passing on, that it turns into a first, minimal basis of recognition between strangers and thus, tenuously, of solidarity. Making death public, the hearsay public powerfully reformulates

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the very “idea of Mexico” (Lomnitz 2005a). In the gaps and impasses of publicity’s fetish system, it finds room for a return to the principles of equality, freedom, and justice that liberalism has so distinctly failed to deliver on— though these principles do not look much at all like they do through a liberal lens. The hearsay public does not present an alternative for governance, and I cannot say that in Tijuana it has borne any recognizable political fruit. Tijuana, though, is not the end of the hearsay public’s passing on.

·I· Passage/Prohibition

Overview Focusing on a demonstration in favor of the 2006 immigrants’ movement in the United States, chapter 1 examines performative efforts to establish the Tijuana of the documented. The politically charged context of the demonstration reveals the unsettling challenge that the border poses to this public, and the paradoxes of its relation to the undocumented: at once co-nationals in need of “support” and an excluded other. “These are not Tijuana!” an informer for the state government energetically warns me, pointing to the punk teenagers whose chants channel the “we” of the undocumented. In the very act, he reveals how his Tijuana is all too used to contending with other representations of the city, against which it must strive to keep its footing— or, rather, to keep itself as the basic footing of interaction here (Goffman 1979). Building on these struggles and paradoxes of self-articulation, the chapter ends by unpacking how the border works as a fetish for documented Tijuana. The empty structure of the Law provides a basic framework for connecting the multifarious forms the fetish takes in Tijuana and that the reader will encounter in subsequent chapters.1 Whereas chapter 1 looks at diverse communicative genres in and around public interaction on the street, chapter 2 hones in on a single narrative told over the dinner table. From the heart of her domestic space, Inés situates Tijuana’s public sphere within a network of interlocked scenes and genres of communication, from intimate family talk to relatively private circles of cultured debate to formal political ritual. Giving personal flesh to projects of liberal publicity, Inés narrates her “I” moving through these different scenes, knitting them together differentially even as it remains steadfast across them: the honorable “I” of a responsible speaking subject. The trigger for Inés’s performance, though, is my misrecognition, when I address her as someone who might engage in hear1. Like State, I capitalize Law to distinguish the fetish object from the legal code.

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say. In our conversation, two modes of public communication intertwine dialogically, one rooted in the anonymous citationality of hearsay, the other in a stable, verifiable “I.” In the end, the “I” of liberal publicity remains inextricable from the hearsay it would censure and expunge. Between chapters 2 and 3, “The Assembly Plant” brings the assumptions of documented Tijuana explored in chapter 1 together with the ideals of liberal publicity that Inés defends in chapter 2, thus showing how the border plays into liberal publicity’s productive ambivalence over whom “we” can and cannot include. As in the city at large, boundaries in the factory turn unstable, even as they are emphatically marked. Following through on this instability, chapter 3 returns to Inés and her daughter Dara to show how their projects to consolidate middle- class status turn inside out. The kind of passing that grows of the street, of fascination with anonymous encounter, does not just lap at the lower reaches of the clase media but infects the premises of its entire project. Even within the stolid self-transformation of upward mobility, the possibility looms of more unpredictable transformations moving in different directions. This other sense of possibility thrives on fiction and citationality, the imaginative inhabitance of absent scenes that cannot necessarily be worked toward and that are not always the fruit of a persevering “I.” As “I” loses its grip, fiction takes over. This breakdown does not just affect personal projects of status; it affects the entire ideology of Tijuana as an ostensibly “middle-class” city: a city of the documented, oriented toward the norms of liberal publicity. Inés and Dara flirt with fictionality, but Tijuana’s hearsay public embraces it. Hearsay first appears in chapter 2 as the figure against which Inés mobilizes a narrative of liberal publicity; in chapter 4, it emerges as the communicative stance at the basis of another public and another Tijuana. This Tijuana is made of migrants moving about in public space and repeating their stories so that they resonate into each other. Gerardo is a border-straddling rags-to-riches impresario, but he remains an outsider to the realms he has reached. In our first interviews, he strives for the standards of liberal publicity, presenting himself as knowledgeable, responsible, and engaged in debate. Slowly, though, he lets hearsay take over, projecting and enacting Tijuana in its terms. Liberal publicity’s “we” of stolid “I”s (Urban 2001) turns into the “they” of dicen (they say). In the country club, Gerardo uses hearsay to turn our visit into an unapologetic exercise in social passing. Though his dicen has its limits, he begins to show the implications— developed in the second half of the book— of the hearsay public’s reliance on the third person.

1

The Line

The court wants nothing of you. It receives you when you come, and it dismisses you when you go. franz kafka, The Trial

The Line is a busy place. This is where people wait to enter the United States through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the most traveled port, it is said, in the world. At the time of my fieldwork, San Ysidro saw on average 110,000 crossings daily: 110,000 presentations of visas, passports, green cards, IDs; 110,000 mostly muted exchanges, sometimes nothing more than a nod from the officer to pass one through (Blum 2007). Even with twenty-four lanes for vehicular traffic, the wait to cross could take hours and still can today, despite a massive expansion undertaken in 2011.1 The hustle is stifled but relentless. Cars idle at a standstill, pedestrians shuffle forward, but all attention is on the opportunity that could save or make another moment of waiting. Women in heels run to beat others to the end of the line. Behind the wheel, with her big glasses and curly gray hair, Inés signals to the young man in the next lane over, asking if he’ll let her merge in before him. His eyes meet hers, expressionless; the slightest shift of his head tells her no. A moment later he is not quick enough to close the gap when the car ahead of him rolls forward, and Inés noses in anyway. The hustle of the crossers is stifled, but that of the hawkers is not. All sorts of people come and go, and all sorts of people try to make money off them. The teeming crowd, the sheer range of types rubbing shoulders, immediately attracts ethnographic attention: hawkers of blankets and popsicles and newspapers and kitsch, indigenous beggars in their traditional shawls, security guards armed with Mace (“Keep walking, 1. Generally in this book, and in keeping with the ethnographic convention, I use the present tense despite the fact that my fieldwork took place ten years ago, and only occasionally point out relevant historical developments since.

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please”), middlemen for dentists and doctors, real estate salesmen, burrito vendors, criers for last- stop liquor shops, and young fellows in smocks darting through traffic to deliver mochaccinos. These characters do their best to divert the attention of the crossers facing north, shuffling or edging their cars forward foot by foot, a more or less orderly crowd of potential consumers. Businesspeople in suits, homeless people with their towering shopping carts, housewives, gangsters, schoolchildren, construction workers, college kids, church groups, competition bikers, families on holiday— the list of crossers runs on as endlessly as the line itself. Even as they edge their way forward, keeping tabs on each other out of the corners of their eyes, they are themselves the spectacle of the Line— as, for instance, on postcards (see figures 1.1 and 1.2), in radio and Internet updates on wait times, or on the Line’s own television channel, where surveillance-style takes of crossers are continuously broadcast. If the crossers at the Line form a public in passage, however, they do so in the first instance in relation to the US state. In Tijuana, legal access to the United States ratifies socioeconomic status within Mexico; the US state becomes the authoritative source in which to anchor social value. This process begins, perhaps, in such simple address as that of the notices Customs and Border Protection issues to “the traveling public.”2 As described above, this public would seem to include a range of social types too various to classify. In fact, however, its members belong to a single basic category. They are the documented: US citizens, permanent residents, or holders of other visas. They are those who have already undergone some prior process of obtaining recognition from the US state. Members of all categories reside on both sides of the border, and they cross in an immense variety of patterns, for an immense variety of reasons. In all their variety, though, they are categorically distinct from their “other”— the undocumented. When the undocumented appear at the Line, it can only be with a certain stigma. They are picked out of the crowd, interrogated, held, and marked, all in front of and as if on view for the “traveling public.” Approaching the booths for pedestrian crossing, the single line splits into several. All eyes are intent on the routine of processing, gauging 2. At the time of my fieldwork, these notices insisted on a linguistic criterion of membership: they were usually in English. So were the welcome notices that lined the walls of the port of entry, the pledges to serve, and the telephone numbers to contact in case of complaint. The signs announcing restrictions on passage (that foreign nationals must present identity documents, that fruit and vegetables are prohibited, that one’s movements and conversations are being recorded) were all bilingual. Thus the CBP’s address of its “traveling public” is subtly split.

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Figure 1.1. Postcard of the Line. Photography and design by Antonio Blanco.

Figure 1.2. Postcard of the Line. Photography and design by Antonio Blanco.

which officer is moving crossers through the quickest, watching for any peculiarities or setbacks. All eyes catch the flash of the bright orange slip referring a crosser to secondary inspection; all eyes follow the officer as he or she leaves the line unattended to escort the suspect back to the counter where the preliminary grilling takes place. This area is in full view, a backdrop to the officers’ booths as crossers wait to show their

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papers and, with luck, answer just a question or two (Where are you going? What are you bringing with you from Mexico?). As they hurry past, they might hear snippets of the interrogation: “Me no believe you!” exclaims an officer in broken Spanish, with all the bluster of amateur theatricals. Failing this preliminary interrogation, the undocumented are gathered and displayed even more conspicuously for what they are: failed crossers caught trying to pass. It is not uncommon to see lines of twenty or so of them being led back into Mexico, through those waiting to cross north. They are chained together, handcuffed, and they carry behind their backs little plastic bags filled with their belongings. People surreptitiously sneak glances or look away, an uncomfortable audience. Those in cars and buses, more concealed, may stare. One wonders which of them will join the show.

*** This chapter consists, at one level, of a fairly elementary exercise. It traces the articulation of “we” through a set of examples involving different communicative genres and different scenes of public sociality. In each, it shows how collective subjectivities situate themselves in relation to the Line and the difference it stages between documented and undocumented passage: a difference at the root of differentiated citizenship (Holston 2008) within Tijuana, between people who are all formally Mexican citizens. Some of these articulations of collective subjectivity are more explicit, some more deeply ensconced in the basic presuppositions of interaction; some are also sure of themselves as others are not. “We” circulates through an uneven terrain of concrete, institutionally shaped contexts to which social actors have differential access and in which they have different parts to play. As more marginal, unformed “we”s move into arenas not their own, their footing slips. For the trespass of introducing an alternate “we,” marginal subjects may face literal violence— or, anticipating sanction, they may flail for some more conciliatory voicing. In contrast, the stronger “we”s, secure in their own domain, echo into each other across the contexts and genres central to the regulation of public life in Tijuana. They form Tijuana’s dominant public. This chapter focuses on one unprecedented day when these opposed “we”s crystallized with special clarity: May 1, 2006, when local involvement in the movement for immigrants’ rights in the United States briefly succeeded in shutting down the port of entry. On this day, the Line’s usual mess of colorful activity evaporated. Pedestrian crossers straggled through, and the lanes of traffic stood empty, leaving room for the stag-

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ing of a confrontation between documented and undocumented Tijuana. While revealing the exclusion of the undocumented in both the United States and Mexico, this confrontation also revealed the predicament of documented Tijuana vis-à-vis the US state. This predicament, as I will discuss at the end of the chapter, is that of any subject who stands— like K in The Trial (to whom the words of this chapter’s epigraph were spoken)— before a Law that must be understood finally as a mystified absence, a fetish object that, all too terribly, would simply dismiss one and vanish should one have the temerity to turn away from it. When documented and undocumented face each other as collective subjects here, they do so within the empty structure of the Law, the infinite deferral of encounter with authority, of which the Line is such a fitting mise-en-scène. Let me begin, though, with some basics. The most common document for border crossing is the “laser visa,”3 and at the core of the dominant tijuanense public lies the idealized figure of the upstanding, visa-holding Mexican citizen. This figure has a long history. Since 1918, what would become the US-issued Border Crossing Card has functioned in one form or another as a sort of special pass for Mexican border residents (Wilson 1918).4 In 1998, the card was merged with the regular tourist visa for all Mexicans, and the laser visa was born.5 At the border, the visa is deeply imbued with all the significance of local belonging, all the echoes of northern, border-dwelling, Baja Californian, tijuanense identity and pride. It is good for ten years, allows travel within twenty- five miles of the border (more in Arizona and New Mexico), and, crucially, does not permit employment in the United States. By 2006, when I was doing my fieldwork, over 8.5 million Mexican citizens held one, more than 8 percent of the national population, and they were being granted at the rate of about 700,000 more per year.6 In Tijuana, the percentage of visa holders is much, much higher. Consular statistics imply that, at that time, 3. There are no statistics I know of to bear this out. It is my impression, based on my own participation in the scopic regime (Feldman 2004) of the Line— crossers can see others’ documents as these are handed over for inspection. 4. Thanks to Zack Wilske of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ History Office for kindly providing me a copy of the executive order that created what would become the Border Crossing Card. 5. The two were separated in 2007 and then merged again in 2012. 6. I calculate these figures on the basis of statistics published by the US Department of State (2006). In the same year, the US Department of Homeland Security estimated the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico residing in the United States at 6.6 million (Hoefer, Rytina, and Campbell 2007:1).

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fully a third of residents of the Baja California peninsula held visas,7 and, within the peninsula, these residents are undoubtedly clustered near the border, above all in Tijuana, which is not just where a third of the peninsula’s population lives, but also where the US consulate is located, making the application process immensely more accessible.8 Even these grossly inadequate statistics make it easier to understand why the myth that it is easy for someone from Tijuana to get a visa is so widespread. The visa, and membership in the “traveling public,” is virtually a requisite for local belonging.9 Not just that— having or not having legal access to the United States provides one of the most fundamental idioms of social distinction. Consumption, education, and all the regular signs of status revolve around it. As the marker of distinction and belonging, though, the visa smuggles its own premises into Tijuana’s system of social recognition: fundamentally liberal premises of territorial sovereignty and citizenship and a personal relationship with the United States that is also a permanent renunciation of relation, for to achieve this status, one must prove one does not want to emigrate there. As a supplement authorizing proper citizenship in Tijuana, the visa is vital for understanding how the May 1 demonstration played out. In the United States, May 1 was planned as a general strike culminating a months-long series of demonstrations hailed as “migrants’ mass entrance into the U.S. public sphere” (Fox 2006:1). Some called these demonstrations the largest mass mobilization in US history.10 Though the movement did not reverse immigration policy, its effects, as proof 7. From 1998 to 2004, the US consulate in Tijuana issued a total of 1,153,268 laser visas, the vast majority of which, by consular policy, should have gone to legal residents of the Baja California peninsula, with an official 2005 population of 3,356,639 (INEGI 2005b). There is no way of telling how many of these visa holders have since left Baja California or how many were actually residents to begin with. The information on the consulate is from a 2006 interview with Liza Davis, press officer for the US Consulate in Tijuana. 8. In a rural community near Tijuana, residents I met could not think of anyone they knew with a visa. Such a situation would be unheard of in Tijuana, even for the most disadvantaged. 9. As mentioned above, US citizens and permanent residents are plentiful, but these legal statuses do not form a standard for local belonging. Instead, the celebratory discourse on Tijuana as a bicultural “third nation” responds in contestatory form to the quandaries and insecurities addressed throughout this book, and its circulation is fairly restricted. 10. Bada, Fox, and Selee estimate 3.5 to 5 million marchers over a period of several months (2006:36). Demonstrations took place in a stunning array of cities, and

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of a capacity for large-scale organization by those categorically denied the right to political participation, were immeasurable. The press stuck a lasting tag on that spring: it was the awakening of a “sleeping giant.”11 Indeed, the occupation of public spaces across the country seemed the indication par excellence that the undocumented had come into their own as a collective political subject. In Mexico, May 1 was planned as a boycott; it received a great deal of press and was taken up as a national affair, to the point that, in coverage of the demonstrations in the United States, the participation of immigrants from other countries was treated as a curiosity. Many calls for support were issued— all restricted to the notion that on May 1 one should not buy products from the United States— and celebrity adherences to the boycott were well publicized. In Tijuana, enthusiasm for the boycott ran high, and sentiments of allegiance to fellow Mexicans in the United States were strong. Ultimately, however, for many the impulse to join their expressions to the migrants’ was hampered by a sense of social distinctions buttressed precisely by the US legal system that the May 1 strike sought to dispute. The political demands of the movement came into conflict with a basic acceptance of the border and the distinctions it draws between legal and illegal, documented and undocumented passage and populations. The examples that follow show the differentiated system of genres through which the predicament of documented Tijuana (its contentious and ambivalent relation both to the United States and to the undocumented) emerges as the unstable basis on which it must articulate itself as a collective subject. The “we” of the documented, however, is not the only one that will make its appearance over the course of these pages. Whether in face-to-face interaction, in the production and circulation of texts, or simply in “doing line” (haciendo línea), two Tijuanas— two Mexicos, really— are evoked and re-created. In them, the split between citizen and “illegal alien” in the United States spills across the border, reconfiguring and intensifying social divisions within Tijuana.

The Flyer I found the following flyer stapled to a telephone post in an older, working-class neighborhood: in many, even such major ones as Los Angeles and Chicago, they were the largest ever (38). 11. This characterization of course erases the history of immigrant activism in the United States.

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El Gran Paro Americano 2006 The Great American Boycott 2006 Un día sin latinos12 A day without latins It happens that on May 1 in the US the movie A day without Mexicans is going to be made reality, this means that no Latino will work on that day in the US and they have asked their compatriots for us not to buy anything American that day. [They ask] this with the objective that they be recognized our right to work, to the education of our children and to medical services in that country. What we’re asking is that on May 1 nothing be bought in the country nor anything consumed in American chains, this means no Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks, Sears, Krispy Kreme, Walmart, Costco, Office Depot, Home Depot and others. . . . of the interminable list of American companies in Mexico. I know it’s an effort for everyone but it’s the least we can do for those folks who are practically supporting our country with the remittances I hope you can make this little one-day effort (May 1). A new show of force to put between the sword and the wall conservative legislators who still combat immigration reform. this may 1 don’t work, don’t go to school, don’t put gasoline [in your car], don’t buy, don’t sell!! let’s highlight how important we mexicans are to the united states!!! 13 12. In the movie Un día sin mexicanos (2004), often called in English A Day without Latinos, all people of Mexican origin mysteriously disappear from California. 13. “El Gran Paro Americano 2006 / The Great American Boycott 2006 / Un día sin latinos  / A day without latins  / Sucede que el 1 de mayo en EE.UU. se va a hacer realidad la película Un día sin mexicanos, esto quiere decir que ningún latino trabajará ese día en EE.UU. y han solicitado a sus connacionales que no compremos nada estadounidense ese día. / Esto con el objetivo de que se les reconozca nuestro derecho al trabajo, a la educación de nuestros hijos y a servicios médicos en ese país. / Lo que solicitamos es que el 1 de mayo no se compre nada en el país ni se consuma nada en franquicias americanas, esto quiere decir no Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks, Sears, Krispy Kreme, Walmart, Costco, Office Depot, Home Depot y otras . . . de la interminable lista de empresas americanas en México. / Sé que es un esfuerzo para todos pero es lo menos que podemos hacer por esa gente que prácticamente está manteniendo a nuestro país con las remesas espero puedan hacer este pequeño esfuerzo de un día (1 de mayo). / Una nueva demostración de fuerza que ponga entre la espada y la pared a legisladores conservadores que siguen combatiendo la reforma migratoria. / este 1 de mayo no

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The text ends with a rousing call, a rhythmic series of exhortations in which the author for the first time addresses the reader directly as “you”: “don’t work, don’t go to school, don’t put gasoline [in your car], don’t buy, don’t sell!!” It is a comprehensive call to all interested parties to participate in the boycott, and it attempts to interpellate the reader directly by using the familiar form of the second person singular, tú, expressed in the ending of each verb in the series. Immediately, in the next sentence, the text passes from singular to plural, still in the imperative mood, incorporating author and reader in the same social group: “we mexicans.” Whoever “you” might be, you must be part of this national “we,” whose interests and actions span borders. The text convokes the boycott by invoking this cross- border national “we” and attempting to draw the reader into it. This articulation of “we” is preliminary. It looks to the future. It wants to pass into the mouth of the reader; it wants him or her to articulate it him or herself, on May 1, when “our” voice will resound before its true interlocutor, the society and government of the United States of America. Here, “we” refers reflexively to its own articulation in order to put itself into motion, to communicate its momentum, to continue its trajectory, to move the reader to take up “we” and voice it anew on the first of May. For Greg Urban (2001), the articulation of “we” is essential for the formation of a modern imagined community. The national “we,” he says, must be so amply disseminated as to be completely presupposable. Urban traces the use of “we” in one of the United States’ foundational texts, the Declaration of Independence, to show how it emerges in counterpoint with the “they” of the British. In comparison, the flyer for the Great American Boycott achieves no such neat contrast between first and third persons. The final incorporation of “you” the reader into “we Mexicans” is a weak gesture after the vacillations that lead up to it. This “we” is vulnerable; its articulation is not conclusive. It reveals the doubts and hesitations that trouble the social group it tries to invoke. The text begins by stating that “the Latinos” (third person) are asking their compatriots for “our” support, thus implying that reader and author are both “compatriots” and not Latinos. Two sentences later, though, “we” ask for support. The intervening sentence confusingly proclaims that “the Latinos” want “our” rights recognized, as if “we compatriots” residing in Latin American countries had the right to education and medical services in the United States. The first person plural appears six trabajes, no vallas a la escuela, no eches gasolina, no compres, no vendas!! resaltemos lo importante que somos los mexicanos para los estados unidos!!!”

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times before the concluding paragraph, and in no case does it clearly refer to the inclusive and cross-border group “we Mexicans.” That is, “we” does not emerge via any strict poetic structuring of the text. Rather, the “we”s that appear represent a series of slips and obfuscations. We might suspect that one of these obfuscations is the identity of the author as a Latino and therefore not precisely a Mexican with the full right to address his or her “compatriots” in the home country— which points precisely to the breach between social groups, evident from the first sentence, that “we Mexicans” attempts to seal over. Indeed, references to Mexicans living in the United States as “those folks” who live in “that country” reinforce the split between them and Mexicans in Mexico. This flyer is a prime example of a public text, not only because of its elemental form of distribution on the street, ideological site par excellence of that which is public in the most general sense of the word, but also because of the flyer’s method of invoking its reading public. “We” here is a reflexive mechanism. The existence of “we” and the group it refers to depends on its ability to project itself into the future, and it does this by subtly igniting the imagination of the group among which the flyer circulates, thus evoking this group as a public. However, the public is never “everybody,” as it pretends to be, and this condition of denied exclusivity becomes patent around the border. The division between “they Latinos” and “we compatriots” is not only a matter of pronouns; there are also indications that both author and hypothetical reader are to be imagined as located within national territory and that their ties to the two countries in question are different from those of the “Latinos.” The author exhorts the reader not to consume, enumerating US franchises in Mexico. Moreover, the first sentence conceals a parallel construction: the Latinos will not work, while their compatriots will not buy. The sentence sketches a division of functions and correlates it with the division between two social groups (a gesture that, of course, ignores the rich variety of relations one may have with the United States). Those who live there, and those who live here; those who work there, and those who shop there. This division reappeared on May 1, for the suppositions that clouded the articulation of “we Mexicans” in the flyer were not mere idiosyncrasies of their author. In sum, the flyer is a public text because of the mechanisms whereby it evokes a social group by inviting the reader to take up its articulation. It also partakes of a long history of ideology about public communication on the street; its very mode of dissemination is a call to a certain audience and a reference to a tradition in which political action and the circulation of news on the street are intimately tied. Moreover, the flyer bears the marks of an uncertainty over public space on the Mexican side of the border— an uncertainty about how to speak, by what rights, and

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to whom. The uncertain identities of projected author and hypothetical reader reflect an unconsummated struggle over who may speak in public and on what basis: a struggle over the limits of “we Mexicans.” Its traces will return repeatedly over the course of this book.

The Poll Shortly before the boycott, one of the main daily newspapers in Tijuana published a poll on the topic. The newspaper has been ideologically a locus classicus of publicity; produced in a formal institutional context, its “regime of circulation” (Cody 2009) is quite distinct from that of a photocopied flyer stapled to a telephone post.14 Like the flyer, though, the poll reflexively presents an image of the group among which it circulates. This image also reflects, though somewhat differently, the social division that compromised the “we Mexicans” of the boycott flyer. The “mega-marches” (as they were known at the time) carried out in the United States were proclaimed a resounding success by the Mexican press, as was the boycott. Beforehand, the local Tijuana press had also given the action very positive coverage, with multiple calls for “support.” The day before May 1, Frontera reported the consensus: “Tijuanenses Will Support Boycott” (Ovalle 2006) was the title of an article that consisted of a series of brief testimonies. The poll as a genre is a mise-en-scène of society, in this case “tijuanense” as the title proclaimed; the pretension to stage society in miniature for its self-contemplation is accented by Frontera’s motto, “Identity and Expression of Tijuana.”15 The genre itself bears the reflexive self-reference that makes it capable of evoking a public. The twenty-three people polled spoke of their intention to “participate” (participar) in the boycott, to “support” (apoyar) their “countrymen” (paisanos, a standard term for migrants to the United States) who “live on the other side” (que viven en el otro lado). Their language thus echoed that of both the press and the boycott flyer. But eight of these “tijuanenses” said that they live in the United States, two said they work there, and two identified themselves as residents of neighboring munici14. Regimes of circulation are “cultivated habits of animating artifactually mediated texts, enabling the movement of discourse along predictable social trajectories” (Cody 2009:286). Cody writes precisely of newspapers, though for the iconic status of these in studies of the public sphere, one must look no further than Habermas (1989) or Anderson (1983). 15. Frontera was founded in 1999 by an out-of-state chain. I use it extensively because its aesthetic and ideology of what the news should furnish reflected well, in its early years, the communicative standards of liberal publicity in Tijuana.

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palities in Mexico. While the article presents those polled as a sample of tijuanense society, that sample was not selected by any criterion of rootedness. The subtitle reads, “Residents of the city interviewed at the International Line at the moment of crossing towards San Diego commented that on May 1st they will not go to the neighboring country, in support of the action announced.” Interviewed in the act of crossing the border, those polled are clearly documented, possessors of papers of one sort or another for legal crossing. This is the only criterion that, in practice, has given them the right to represent Tijuana in Frontera’s pages. As a genre, the poll is based on the figure of “the man on the street”; with a handful of these, the average of public opinion is plumbed. At the International Line, though, the general public comes preselected. The Line is used to represent Tijuana; its passersby represent the tijuanense public at large. No vendors, for instance, were included. Despite all the variation in the sample, it was taken from a restricted social group: those with legal access to the United States. Frontera applauds the attitude of this group (named and defined by Frontera) and encourages its participation in the boycott. While the flyer revealed a division between “Latinos” and their “compatriots” south of the border, the poll seems to ignore that division, lumping together people who live and work on both sides of the border, calling them all indiscriminately “tijuanenses.” However, the poll actually works just like the flyer: by covertly excluding those who cannot legally cross to the United States, it distinguishes between social groups on the basis of their relation to that country. The distinction between documented and undocumented is perhaps the grossest cut of social differentiation in this context, and it underlies as well the tremulous formulations of the flyer— for the Great American Boycott is, after all, the concern of the undocumented and of those who could, even if only imaginatively (Dick 2010), occupy their position. Just as in the poll only the documented have the de facto right to represent themselves in public, as the public, the waverings of the identity of the speaker throughout the text of the flyer (what “we” does the author claim to speak for?) show in what sense the undocumented lack in Mexico a position from which to speak in public. The author tries to speak for them, then as them, then again for them, retracing at every step the division between “us” and “them.” The predicament is, perhaps, even more acute than in the United States, where at least the Great American Boycott did, in fact, happen.16 Flyer and poll do not merely paint a picture of social groups and their distinctions. The 16. I am told, however, that the movement in the United States was plagued by similar uncertainties and contentions over who should appear in public: the undocumented themselves or permanent residents and naturalized citizens who

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self-image the poll provides is one of the very mechanisms by which a documented public re-creates itself; the flyer attempts to open space for a “we” that would include the undocumented.

The Demonstration On May 1, a group of people, not content with “supporting” the boycott from the silence of their homes, attempted to shut down the crossing to the United States through the San Ysidro Port of Entry.17 This action was structured by much the same presuppositions as the flyer and the poll; it was carried out within the same framework of “support” for the boycott, and its declared motive was to keep people from crossing to the United States and spending their money there. Frontera did not look favorably on this effort. “Botched Blockade,” it titled one report (Villegas 2006). Much was made of a policeman wounded by a plastic water bottle, which led “the attempts at violence between activists and police to become even more raw” (San and Villegas 2006). Frontera made known that “Police prevented the demonstrators from assaulting drivers” (San and Villegas 2006) and that the demonstrators “hurled offenses against whoever passed by foot or by car” (Villegas 2006). In the context of a successful boycott and a day of peaceful mass demonstrations in the United States, local media portrayed the demonstration at the Line as a small black stain. Of twenty-two people arrested, the televised news chose shots of young men, the sort regularly seen on TV being arrested for robberies and such, and not of older people or those of middle- class aspect— in particular, of the organizers, whose arrest broke up the demonstration. In fact, the composition of the crowd was fairly broad: of mixed ages, and mostly middle class and well-to-do working class. A good number were housewives; several people told me they had heard the demonstration announced on the news. Of corporate groups, only the braceros made an appearance, but they soon mingled with the crowd.18 A congressional candidate from the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), running in a well-off district, showed up in the morning with a contingent of supporters but was booed away. A couple leftist groups handed out might represent the immigrant whole in more seemly fashion ( Joe Grim Feinberg, personal communication). 17. Although shutting down the border is a common tactic for demonstrators in other border cities, in Tijuana no such attempt had been made for many years. 18. From 1942 to 1964, the United States imported Mexican agricultural laborers under the auspices of the Bracero Program; ex-braceros have organized to seek compensation for withheld earnings.

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propaganda. The most diligent participants were a large number of teenage punks. They made banners and signs, chanted all day long, and stuck together in small groups. I should note that the crossing was only closed for a brief period about midday. Before that, the police were in effect the ones carrying out the blockade, out of sight of the demonstrators. They would let vehicles through for fifteen minutes of every hour, apparently by agreement with the organizers, who were quickly arrested once the crossing was closed completely. After that, the police cleared the area little by little, though when I left at 6:00 p.m. they were still there, ambling about the deserted lanes along with a few scattered demonstrators. Contrary to news reports, confrontation was not the tone of the day. Most demonstrators used a rhetoric of national/racial solidarity to try to persuade motorists not to cross the border. They would approach the cars and talk to drivers through rolled- down windows. Every time a car turned around to return to Mexico, the demonstrators would applaud, and those in the car usually left grinning, fists raised in sign of solidarity. The logic of “support,” with its emergent social divisions as seen in the flyer, was frequently expressed. For example, a professionally printed sign held up by an older, well- dressed couple begged passersby: “No consumamos en Estados Unidos por este día” (Let’s not consume in the United States for this one day). Despite this relatively innocuous rhetoric and heavy police presence (including the municipal Elite Unit, sitting in vans with their automatic weapons), at several points demonstrators did directly confront drivers. What follows is an excerpt from my field notes: A young man in a white dress shirt earnestly exhorts her [the driver] to support her raza [loosely, race or people]. Behind him a group of much younger teenagers shout: “¡Váyase por el cerro!,” go through the hills, or, by way of the hills, i.e. illegally, by foot through the desert, as the poor must. The young man goes on exhorting her. She is indignant. She waves her arm and shouts, “¡Flojos! ¡Flojos!,” Lazy bums! Lazy bums! I do not see how, but the young people start to bounce her minivan. It gains momentum, higher and higher it flies. She tries to hold on, laughing. I do not know how she started laughing, but she is grinning and laughing as if she were on a carnival ride. Her glasses jounce off her face, they are stuck there at a crazy angle, she cannot reach them. She tries to hold on and grab her glasses at once. I have a vivid impression of the bright pink lipstick on her puffy middle-aged face, her permed hair, her big cockeyed glasses, her hand reaching up toward her face, and the grin she cannot help. The police are there instantly. They are professional, quick, and calm.

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The words “go through the hills” constitute a direct accusation aimed at those who enjoy the coveted privilege of legal, documented crossing.19 When the teenagers tell the woman váyase (go), they address her not as a consumer on the point of breaking the boycott, but as a possessor of documents.20 They interpellate her in that role, and we may imagine that, possibly, her “Lazy bums! Lazy bums!” reciprocally recognizes the teenagers not just as rabble-rousing no-goods but as at least potential undocumented crossers— for “lazy” continues to circulate in certain circles as an epithet of the unauthorized labor migrant to the United States. Later that day, I heard again the words “through the hills,” which appear in my notes next to the chant, “La raza obrera no somos criminales” (We the working people [or race] are not criminals). Again, the use of the first person plural indicates, if not who speaks exactly, then who the speaker pretends to represent. The chanters were dressed as punks, a youth style that in Mexico has preserved its association with anarchism more than with music. The point, however, is not whether an authentic undocumented identity spoke for itself but rather to mark a shift away from the delegative mode of representation (we “support” them) to a mode in which “we” includes the undocumented. In this brief exchange of imprecations (“Go through the hills!” and “Lazy bums!”), two social groups articulated, re-created, and defined themselves one before the other, dialogically, around the issue of their manner of crossing the border. The border-crossing document guarantees or underlies a social role— it is the basis of the woman’s indignation, of her sense of her own right to be there and to carry on with her business as well as to call these young people names.21 She speaks from a position consolidated by the authority of the United States, while the teenagers, and the undocumented people they (try to) represent, speak from outside this officialized system of social recognition.22 The logic of this latter 19. Por el cerro (through the hills) forms a standard conceptual pair with por la Línea (through the Line). While here they represent the distinction between undocumented and documented, they recursively represent a significant status distinction among undocumented travelers as well. To go through the Line is quicker, safer, and more expensive. 20. Váyase por el cerro echoes the vulgar váyase a la chingada (fuck off ). Thanks to Humberto Félix Berumen for pointing this out. 21. Compare Silverstein’s (2005:11) analysis of the birth certificate, in which the state authorizes the individual’s named identity such that later use of the name refers back to and relies on that sanctified recognition. 22. However different from the “outsideness” of the undocumented, the “outsideness” of the punks was made clear by an indignant remark I overheard from a motorist: “People dressed like that, what are they doing here? It should be people

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speech is the traditional logic of the demonstration, according to political philosopher Jacques Rancière. It is the attempt of the demos, of “a part of those who have no part,” to force its way into public space (1999:99).23 This logic informed much of the discourse on the Great American Boycott, which represented it as a clamor for recognition by the “sleeping giant,” the undocumented immigrants who normally, it was said, are invisible. The accusation, “Go through the hills!” and the sudden crystallization of opposite positions with respect to the border exceeded the original logic of “support” and “boycott.” Recall the formulation from the flyer: the Latinos will not work, while their compatriots will not buy. At this moment, the demonstration revealed another logic: the universal application of the border, the border as egalitarian and absolute. For that day, it would exist for everyone as it exists every day for those who do not have access to documents and the social power these imply. If you want to go, go through the hills. From the time the closing down of the border was undertaken, the demonstration could no longer be about a boycott exactly— at least, in the consumerist vein in which the Mexican press and even the flyer on the telephone pole framed it. If so far supplication and persuasion had predominated, this too reflected the essentially voluntary nature of the consumerist boycott, a priori the action of those with the power to buy. Such a boycott is projected as the act of a public of autonomous individuals, not as the space created by the irruption of the excluded. The consumerist idea of the boycott and the idea of closing the border are not, at root, compatible. This is why, when a man and a woman in suits got out of their car to approach a young demonstrator, they had to repeat their question without success: “¡Joven! ¡Joven! ¿No creen que debe ser voluntario?” (Young man! Young man! Don’t you think it should be voluntary?) He remained stiff and mute, eyes fixed, gripped to his sign. The suited couple were appealing to the logic of the boycott, a logic that permitted them to retain their privilege without questionings— although ultimately only with the help of the police. Classically, a demonstration is an appropriation of public space, the manifestation of “those who have no part,” to cite again Rancière. The demos speaks in public by taking public space. The anger of the woman of the pueblo, people like us.” She did not, needless to say, get out of her car to join the demonstration. 23. Rancière contrasts democracy, as the emergence of an uncounted part of society in a way that unsettles all systems of count, with a system that “presents the total of ‘public opinion’ as identical to the body of the people” (1999:103). Compare the poll examined above.

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who shouted, “Lazy bums! Lazy bums!”— an anger expressed by other motorists as well— is the anger of those who see their space invaded. The premise of “go through the hills” is that now, today, “we” who normally stick to the hills are here, at the Line, where normally “we” cannot openly appear (normally, we only pass through disguised, for example, with fake papers), where we have neither part nor voice. And when we appear where we cannot appear, our simple appearance causes a major disturbance in the system. The demonstration in the first instance is a matter of the right to appear in public. This implicit reference to the very act of appearance is the reflexive mechanism that turns the demonstration, as a genre of political communication, into the kind of event that constructs a public. The confrontation between the motorist and the punks was not just a fleeting configuration. It repeats, albeit a bit differently, the connection between documentation, liberal publicity, and the articulation of different “we”s that we saw in the flyer and the poll. I continue with an individual whose role that day may have been singular, but whose views are not.

The Informer I was approached by a man in his forties with exceptionally good posture, graying hair neatly trimmed, and a crisp, plaid short-sleeved shirt tucked in. Bubbling with vitality, he engaged me (I paraphrase): “Are you a reporter? I work for the state [government of Baja California]! In the Department of Information and Analysis! See?”— and he drew my attention to his belt, bristling with radios and cell phones, and to the heavy professional camera hanging from his neck. He also clarified that his job was to preemptively identify threats to public order. When I explained that I was an anthropologist doing research for my thesis, he pointed to the demonstrators a little ways off, and, in a confidential tone but with the same irradiation of optimism and self-confidence, told me: “Estos no son Tijuana. No me representan” (These are not Tijuana. They do not represent me). He went on (I paraphrase again): “In my opinion, the police should remove them, by force if necessary. Why? Because I have the right to move wherever I want, and they are taking that right from me.” I asked him if he said the demonstrators were “not Tijuana” because he thought they literally did not live here. “No,” he said, “porque no representan a Tijuana” (No, [I said it] because they don’t represent Tijuana). In one blow, the Informer identified himself with the figure of the motorist, positioned himself among the documented, and identified this group as the legitimate tijuanense public. The documented public not

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only deserves the protection of the authorities but is unique in its right, as he put it, to represent itself in Tijuana’s public space— a right he exercised in our conversation, in the alacrity with which he stepped into his role as private citizen to opine to the anthropologist. As in the poll, the twentyfour lanes of traffic north become the emblematic space of the city’s publicity. The right to represent Tijuana is welded to the right to cross, with no hint of anything odd about feeling so fully one’s right to move “wherever”— technically, the constitutional right of the Mexican citizen within national public space— while standing almost in the very shadow of the port of entry itself. By ignoring that only those with documents have the “right” to use that particular highway, the Informer conflated the privilege of crossing to the United States with the rights of Mexican citizenship.24 The US-conferred “right” to circulate north appears as a supplementary authorization, without which Mexican citizenship remains incomplete. Making the Line a synecdoche for Tijuana, the Informer makes the city again a ciudad de paso, a city of passing, but in a sense quite different from the pejorative stereotype— he represents Tijuana as a city of people whose very sense of local belonging is rooted in their “right” to pass the border and leave Tijuana temporarily behind. The rest, those who believe in solidarity beyond borders, “don’t represent Tijuana” and should not be occupying public space or attention. At the demonstration, the Informer was not the only one worried about violating people’s “right” to cross. I overheard several people voice concern that among those who were being kept from crossing there were “gringos,” and that it was wrong to hold these people up, for after all, “it’s their country.” As if we were not precisely in Mexico, as if foreigners had more right to pass than nationals, and, moreover, as if the “gringos” were but innocent bystanders with no part in the matter and to address them even improper. The comment is out of tune with the May 1 strike as a political act addressed to US society, but it is, of course, perfectly in tune with the consumerist logic of “support” that made other Mexicans the demonstration’s main interlocutors. On the one hand, the worry traces distinctions between social groups, “we Mexicans” versus “the gringos.” On the other, it orders groups along a continuum, according to their “right” to cross the border. I met the Informer again two months later in yet another locus clas24. No documents conferred upon a foreign citizen constitute a right to enter US territory. As explained on the webpage of the US Secretary of State, “A visa doesn’t permit entry to the U.S. [ . . . ] A visa allows you to travel to the United States as far as the port of entry [ . . . ] and ask the immigration officer to allow you to enter the country” (US Department of State n.d.).

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sicus of publicity: the plaza outside town hall, where a World Cup game was being shown. As at the Line, he took pains to distinguish himself from the crowd and to inform me, a bit more subtly this time, that the crowd did not represent Tijuana. He approached and greeted me cheerfully, explaining that he was not working but practicing his hobby, photography. As before, he brimmed with contentedness. He leaned toward me to speak in confidence (I paraphrase): “As I’m sure you can tell,” he grinned, “I don’t like soccer. But some excellent pictures may be had of the fans.” Again he took charge of explaining his “culture” to the anthropologist: soccer, he said, is popular in the South, but here not so much. Here, baseball is the sport. The classic contrast between “here in Tijuana” and “there in the South” (meaning virtually anywhere else in Mexico) was a direct continuation of our conversation two months before; the Informer’s talk of soccer versus baseball elaborated on the same distinction between documented tijuanenses and undocumented migrants, stereotypically from “the South.” In contrast to the public of soccer fans, the Informer described the baseball public. A lot of the people who go to San Diego to see the Padres, he said, are Mexican. He emphasized, “It’s the same public [público] that here goes to see the Potros [then Tijuana’s local baseball team].” The statement was as conclusive as if he had said, pointing to the soccer fans dressed in the green T-shirts of the national team, “These are not Tijuana.” The image evokes the same tijuanense public he described at the Line in legal terms, making clear just how much of a presupposition the right to cross the border is for membership in it. In this representation, the tijuanense public joins an international public in the Padres’ stadium in San Diego, while in the Potros’ stadium, those who don’t have a visa to see the Padres remain invisible.25 But the tijuanense public continues to depend on them. As in the US Declaration of Independence, “we” emerges in counterpoint with “them.” The Informer proceeded to bring home even more forcefully the comparison between the soccer fans and the demonstrators and his own distinction from both. We soon turned to discussing what had happened on May 1. (He also probed my knowledge of various left-wing groups— “Not to repress them!” he assured me, after boasting of a complete list of those even vaguely interested in the Zapatista and anarchist movements.) The Informer clarified that the event fell apart when strategic arrests were made. He spoke of one in particular with great satisfaction: that of Jaime Cota, a well-known activist and “leader of the Zapatistas in Tijuana” (as 25. Several baseball fans I talked with all mentioned straight away that they go to San Diego to see the Padres. A few people told me they wanted a US visa for the exclusive purpose of attending Padres games.

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the Informer put it). “Man,” he grinned (I paraphrase), “I got a really great shot of him”— and the Informer very colorfully imitated for me the choked face and futile strugglings of Mr. Cota being dragged off backward by a firm police arm about the neck.26 Just as he detests soccer and its fans but finds photographing them a source of pleasure and distinction (he boasted of his participation in amateur photography shows), no doubts may be had of his feelings for the demonstrators. Via his camera, the Informer distances himself from the crowds that surround him. His expressions of enthusiasm bring the soccer fans and the demonstrators into poetic parallel. They are both the object, finally, of a communicative activity that allows him to accede to realms he constructs as beyond them (the world of amateur photography as much as the professional world of government); they are the third person constituting his own subjectivity and his belonging to a different social group, the contours of which he traces and inhabits without any need to say “we.”

The Line and the Law For those with papers to pass it, the Line is an open door. Diecinueve puertas abiertas, the radio blares, nineteen doors open. One only has to wait a little. But it is the open door of the Law, Derrida (1992) points out, that is the most prohibitive. He writes this in reference to a short parable by Franz Kafka, in which a man from the country seeks admittance to the Law. A doorkeeper, however, defers his passage, explaining that he cannot go in just then, and in any case, “I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him” (Kafka, cited in Derrida 1992:183). So the man waits. He waits so long he dies. On May 1, a small group of people made their appearance before the door. They did not face it, though. They faced south, addressing their fellow men from the country, as if to break the chain of substitutions (doorkeeper after doorkeeper) that is the Law. They did not address the Law of the United States of America. Instead, they told their fellows: do 26. The Zapatista political presence in Tijuana has been minimal. The collective with which Cota worked is named in honor of Cosme Damián Sastreé Sánchez, a young man who in 1999, having been selected to represent Tijuana at a national Zapatista convention, was picked up by the police outside his house; his death while in detention was recorded as a suicide. Thus the Informer’s jovial questions are far from benign.

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not wait, do not “do Line,” do not languish here, for you will never be admitted, no matter how many times nor how often you pass. You may as well go through the hills, for you have no better standing here, in the end, than the undocumented. The protesters did not quite say this, it is true. They hesitated before such a possibility, for they were themselves men from the country, as it were, and they could not quite forsake the door of the Law either. They said it, though, simply by facing south, by usurping the place of the doorkeeper and injecting blunt prohibition into this eternal staging of the promise of passage. This is what provoked the ire of media and police and necessitated, after all the enthusiasm leading up to May 1, that the little demonstration at the Line be smudged out and discredited as much as possible. In closing the Line, the protesters revealed something of the predicament not just of the undocumented but of documented Tijuana as well. That was what made so necessary the reassertion of the “right” to cross where that right is no right at all, but only its infinite deferral. But in blocking the doorkeepers, taking their place, the protesters blocked nothing. The Law, Derrida argues, is defined in Kafka’s fable by a two-part structure secreting absence. The doorkeeper turns his back on the Law “not in order that the law present itself or that one be present to it but, on the contrary, in order to prohibit all presentation. The other, who faces the law, sees no more than the one who turns his back to it. Neither is in the presence of the law” (201). Like any good fetish object, the Law is thus “a nothing that incessantly defers access to itself, thus forbidding itself in order thereby to become something” (208). However, the empty structure of the Law in Tijuana is not just a problem in relation to the United States. The border echoes and throws into crisis a basic principle of Mexican society: its hierarchical structuring around an intensely fetishized center of authority.27 The difference between the man from the country and the doorkeeper would seem clear and absolute, as would the difference marked by the Line. But the double structure of the Law is repeated ad infinitum: even the third doorkeeper is already so terrible that the first cannot bear to look at him. He is thus, with respect to further doorkeepers, in just the same position as the man from the country. Which role he plays depends on which way he faces. Documented Tijuana is likewise caught between two diametrically opposed roles. By playing the part of the doorkeeper,

27. In the chain leading to the Law, the Mexican state is a doorkeeper too, to begin with, because many steps of Mexican bureaucracy must be traversed to obtain the documents required to apply for a US visa.

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documented Tijuana tries to draw nearer to the Law. It constantly finds itself, however, more in the position of the man from the country. These doorkeepers encourage the boycott, they even get worked up about it, but they will tolerate no real demonstration. That would make protagonists of the undocumented, cutting out the mediation of established society. To permit the boycott is as if to say, with Kafka’s doorkeeper whenever he accepts a bribe from the man from the country, “I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything” (cited in Derrida 1992:184). That is, he plays his sympathy up to the utmost, without forsaking his position. In Tijuana, the earnest solicitousness of established society ceases as soon as the crowd provokes a shift in footing, appearing between crossers and US officers rather than begging “support” from the side. That shift of footing uncomfortably reminds Tijuana’s visa-holding liberal citizenry of the fact that the undocumented in the United States did indeed already slip past the double structure of the Law as staged at the border and no longer rely on “us” as intermediaries, as the face of the nation abroad. Whatever their relation to the Law, it is different now from our own, and they militate for a recognition (literally, a path to citizenship) we can never hope for— nor even admit to hoping for. It is crucial to remember that the Mexican citizen before the US state, and above all the border-dwelling Mexican citizen, is not in the position of just any foreign national before a state that is not their own. The introduction already laid out the intimate quasicolonial relation that informs even the most minimal brushes with the United States. More to the point, though, the United States has always recognized territorial contiguity as defining a qualitatively different relation with its North American neighbors. When the United States instated its quota system in 1924, Mexico was exempt, so that it is a bit of a paradox how Mexicans became the iconic “illegal aliens” (Ngai 2004). Still today, the laser visa is a special visa category available only to Mexicans. This “privileged” legal relationship stands out even more at the border.28 Someone like the Informer cannot be considered a foreigner exactly. He has been shaped by a lifelong relationship with the United States and its state into which, as a tijuanense, he was to all practical purposes born. “The doorkeeper,” Derrida writes, “does not bar the way by force. It is his discourse, rather, that operates at the limit, not to prohibit directly, but to interrupt and defer the passage, to withhold the pass” (203). Just as the man from the country himself decides to wait, documented Tijuana 28. I put “privileged” in quotes to acknowledge that the relationship is not usually felt as such, and with good reason.

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has fully internalized the structure of authority and the logic of deferral that keeps it where it is. To force the Law is not just a crime, it is unthinkably uncouth— which is not to say, of course, that the documented do not find all sorts of more surreptitious strategies for expressing their displeasure with the doorkeepers. But “one must enter into relation only with the law’s representatives. [. . .] And these are interrupters as well as messengers” (204). Positions here, however, are not fixed. These doorkeepers look alternately out into the crowds, to feel themselves augmented by their proximity to the Law, and back in to its recesses, to feel themselves diminished by its infinite absence. In this back and forth, groups take shape. The Informer does not merely represent Tijuana and the public life of the tijuanenses to me. The public represents itself through him. The “we”s of the flyer, the “tijuanenses” of the poll, the Informer’s baseball fans, all graft onto each other. Their constituencies overlap, their logics overlap, and their constellation forms a thickness of coincidences that reinforce each other. Tijuana, the Line, the municipal plaza, the stadium of the Padres and that of the Potros, the street, the hills, and the “other side” all appear imbued with meaning and value in relation to each other, as do the social groups that use these spaces differently, can say different things in them, and have different rights with respect to them. As “we” moves through them, it reinvents itself, but the discourses in which it is embedded inevitably bear the traces of institutional centers of authority— most centrally, the US Department of Homeland Security. They bear the traces of the treacherous, two-faced emptiness of the Law, amid which Tijuana’s “we”s, documented or undocumented, must failingly find their footing. As the “we” of the United States enters into dispute, Tijuana’s “we”s shift uncomfortably. People feel themselves both part and not part of this dispute; they cannot separate themselves from it, nor can they inhabit it properly. If publics form around the double structure of the Law, they do so via the interruptions and suppressions that locate different “we”s along a continuum (the continuum of doorkeepers), within a system of categorization involving ever-more-distant social groups. This continuum includes US citizens of different stripes, and it extends all the way “down” to include the Central American who does not “even” have papers to be in Mexico. This recursive structure of fetishistic inclusion/exclusion draws the United States and Mexico together into a more or less orderly continuum of hierarchical social difference. If the crossers at the Line form a public, they begin to do so in the embodied dispositions of their waiting, as they line up physically, facing north, in a relation of deference to authority that is also a temporal deferral of their encounter with it. The Line is surely emblematic of Tijuana,

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and it is surely, too, an ever-present figure in daily life here, a “point of reference,” as one young woman explained it to me. What with radio and television reports, the ebb and flow of traffic at the Line punctuates daily life whether one goes there or not. The infinitely repeated patience of it is staged and circulated, the deferral that is at once so necessary for and so injurious to the liberal publicity, with its reliance on territorialized sovereignty and citizenship, from which documented Tijuana draws its basic premises. The chapter that follows explores these premises in the intimate detail afforded by the speech of a single person and begins to explain in what sense this public considers itself clase media (middle class)— a term that, while constituting an overt attempt to consolidate a social position, condenses all the ambivalence of in- between-ness in which this public is caught up.

2

Inés’s “I”

Often, Inés and I would spend evenings sitting around her dinner table talking; often, I’d get up to fetch my voice recorder. On this occasion, I had asked her about Tijuana’s “old family names.” Some were already familiar to me— in the first interview I ever conducted, Inés’s daughter Dara had taken it on herself to introduce me to them. As she explained Tijuana’s history to me, as well as its distinctive “culture” and the characteristic traits of the tijuanense, Dara displayed her proficiency in these topics and her implicit allegiance to the ideals she represented as Tijuana’s. Not born here herself, she nonetheless proved herself tijuanense by her expert knowledge. As I heard others draw on elements of this story, I came to recognize it as a narrative typical of documented Tijuana, at the basis of the formation of a local, middle-class moral community. Inés’s reaction to my questions about these emblematic family names was much less enthusiastic. These families, I should say, are not the city’s founding fathers. Nor are they political heavyweights: their public identity is as businesspeople whose influence predates the battle between local and national capital in the 1970s. As told by boosters, the story of Tijuana’s integration into the national economy in this decade is ambiguous. Dara recounted with glee the failures of national chains to succeed in Tijuana, but overall the story is one of cultural Mexicanization and moral degradation, pitting the imperfect present against a pristine past in which Tijuana was a wholesome and solidary community. Thus, despite what might seem a shallow history, these “old family names” do carry the prestige of comparatively long residence, and their entrepreneurial commitment to the city is an implicit civic commitment. Dara, however, only moved to Tijuana in 1971, in her early teens. She is, moreover, no entrepreneur. Her performance of belonging is a double-edged sword in two senses: both her migratory past and her socioeconomic status could actually work to exclude her from this Tijuana. When Inés hedged against my pressure to talk about these families, she revealed the difficulties of

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belonging in Tijuana alongside them— above all for someone who, like herself, can make few claims to distinction if not through her verbal skill and her comportment. Inés’s defense against my questions was also a defense of these strengths. It was a magisterial introduction to liberal publicity in Tijuana.

Right Speaking, Front Stage and Back Stage My interest in Tijuana’s “old” families was renewed by an interview I had with a member of one of them— a Villarreal. When I tried to mine Inés on the topic, however, she proved reluctant. She did not deny me flat out but persisted in shifting the terms of discussion, veering into anecdotes about her personal relations with people she said belonged to these families. ry: mm. and what was the gossip [chisme] about, about the Leyvas? inés: oh, well the Leyvas weren’t, uh, Xicoténcatl was a good [municipal] president.1 and then later on, he was a good governor. the only thing was that . . . when . . . uh, Salinas was [in office].2 he . . . they removed him. because, they say [dicen]3. . . I wouldn’t vouch for any of this [a mí nada de esto me consta], of course, because, I worked with his wife, with María Elena Leyva, I worked at the DIF,4 because I taught sewing there. and, María Elena was a . . . lady. who, well, was born in silk diapers. ry: mm inés: she didn’t know anything; she was a person who, well, didn’t know anything. and the one who managed her [la manejaba] was Susana Salazar. Susana Salazar has been a politician her whole life. ry: what’s her name? 1. Xicoténcatl Leyva was Tijuana’s municipal president from 1977 to 1980. 2. Carlos Salinas was president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. 3. Leyva was state governor from 1983 to 1989; he stepped down nine months before his term was up. Presumably, he was forced to resign because of the victory in Baja California, not of Salinas but of the opposition candidate for national president (Amezcua and Pardinas 1997:38– 46). Leyva was the state’s last elected governor from the old PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], in power throughout most of the century, and his successor was the first opposition governor in the country, foreshadowing the “democratic transition” of 2000. Thus Inés positions herself in relation to key events in both state and national history. 4. Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, Mexico’s welfare and social programs agency. It is customary that the wife of the president/governor/mayor should head the corresponding DIF agency.

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inés: Susana Salazar. ry: Susana. inés: she’s a Salazar. ry: is that another family from here? inés: yes. a Salazar. ry: we’ve got the inés: the Leyvas, ry: the Leyvas, the inés: the, uh, the ones you just mentioned, uh . . . ry: the Villarreals inés: Villarreal ry: the Robles inés: the Robles, Salazars, yeah, there’s a bunch of them. and . . . Susana Salazar is a big ol’ fat woman like so. who’s, uh . . . [she flips her wrist] ry: [laughter] what does that movement mean? [mutual titter] inés: she’s, uh, a lesbian. ry: ah, she’s a lesbian. okay. inés: and she lived with her secretary. with Pati. and Pati would cry and I don’t know what-all, because sometimes Susana was a bit rude to her, right? ry: oh inés: with me she never, Susana always respected me a lot [i.e., she never came on to Inés]. and, and to this day she’s the one who organizes the festivals at the Teniente Guerrero Park. ry: ah inés: when the anniversary of Tijuana and all that happens, right? ry: ah inés: and she wrote in a magazine and all that. and . . . we were very good friends. who knows if she were to see me she’d still recognize me, or who knows, right? people change. and, at that time I worked at the DIF. and María Elena would say,

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“Prof, Prof. you speak for me.”5 so then I’d always, uh, because one had to see for her [sic] the little piece of paper and she’d read what one would say to her. well, that looks really bad, doesn’t it? that, well, the president of the DIF and there [she is] reading her paper, flat out [bad], doesn’t it? and . . . I’d start up and, they’d always name me master of ceremonies. I’d introduce her and, “Mrs. María Elena Leyva wife of the municipal president of Tijuana” [I’d say] and everything, and then I’d go on talking. and she’d stand up and wave and everything, right? and then she’d sit down and I’d go on and give the speech. whatever came out [of me] because I’ve never, ever written anything to be able to speak, right? always what, what comes out [of me], that’s what I speak. ry: yeah inés: um. and I was master of ceremonies many, many, many times. there at the DIF and in other places. and then, uh, Susana would say to me, when she saw the photographers or [anything] like that, she’d say, “Prof, Prof, come on, let’s go.” and the two of us would go out [laughter], because neither she nor I liked to appear [salir] in the newspapers. I don’t like to appear in the newspapers. one time they went to interview me at the DIF and they sai—, and they said there that Mrs. [she herself ], that I don’t know what-all, and that, [intake of breath]. everything. I say [to myself ], “oh, what did they publish that for.”6

By this point in the conversation, we had already been talking for some time. So when I ask at the beginning of this excerpt what the gossip about the Leyvas was, I am accepting her introduction of this family as a subject of conversation (besides this once, I have never heard the Leyvas included in the list of old Tijuana names— Xicoténcatl was not born there, though his father was mayor before him), but I am also reaching back to my original terms: hearsay about Tijuana’s prominent families, perhaps unconfirmed, but nonetheless informative as I think through my recent encounter with Villarreal. Inés’s immediate response (“Oh, well, the Leyvas . . .”) signals she will fulfill my request, and she indeed comes quickly to the classic marker of hearsay: dicen (they say). The word here is preeminently a distancing mechanism, and Inés underlines this, interrupting herself: “I wouldn’t vouch for any of this, of course.” The clarification safeguards her “I” as one that stands behind its words. But this “I” 5. Profesor, or for short profe, is a respectful term of address that does not necessarily indicate a high level of education. 6. The Spanish text of both extended interview excerpts examined in this chapter may be consulted in the appendix.

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in need of cushioning from hearsay’s implications does not lead (as one might expect) to the hearsay itself. Instead, it seems to distract Inés. What follows sounds like gossip (María Elena Leyva is a dimwit; Susana Salazar is a fat lesbian and abusive to boot), more or less as I requested, but it is, more essentially, in fact an elaboration on the witnessing “I” that stands opposed to the anonymity and unreliability of “they say.” The key to this is the word because: “I wouldn’t vouch for any of this, of course, because . . .” No me consta (I wouldn’t vouch for it) may be a commonplace, but the move to explain why is not. All of what follows Inés will vouch for, not in public, perhaps (“What did they publish that for?”), but certainly over the dinner table. Instead of using “they say” as a safety device to say what “I” cannot say, Inés rejects the uncertain status of one who speaks in those terms.7 The closed circuit of the gossip she proffers instead is that of the social circle in direct contact with the very figures of authority I began by asking about in rather removed terms, as if Inés could have no real dirt on them. Here Inés makes a crucial distinction between the gossip of the in-group and what, throughout this book, I will call hearsay: the broader circulation of what “they say.”8 With her anecdotes, Inés claims to have once belonged, as a full and legitimate member, to the closed circle of Tijuana’s elite. She marks the respect she once received by voicing, on two separate occasions, both María Elena Leyva and Susana Salazar addressing her as “Prof.” If we read the passage literally, Inés would not vouch for what “they say” about Leyva the husband because of her personal relation with Leyva the wife; it is the clause “because I worked with his wife” that opens into the narrative of her memories. The fact that this “I” stands in direct opposition to “they say” becomes explicit at the end of the excerpt, where Inés and Susana Salazar sneak out in complicity away from the journalists who would twist their words and put them into unwarranted circulation— a gross misunderstanding of the protocol of communication. The “they” of “they say” returns here as the world of reported news with its parasitic and improper practices of citation. Inés, in contrast, not only knows discretion, but also speaks her own words: “And then I’d give the speech. Whatever came out [of me], because I’ve never, ever written anything to be able to speak, right? Always what, what comes out [of me], that [is what] I speak.” Her words, she claims, index only the deep origin that is her “I.” 7. It was not unusual for Inés to tell me “what is said” about a given public figure. In those cases, however, the hearsay was unsolicited. 8. Gossip is only opposed to hearsay when different scales of groupness come into conflict. For Gluckman, both small-town gossip and mass society’s talk of “stars of film and sport” (1963:315) are mechanisms of group formation.

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Inés’s words evoke the emphasis on spontaneity that, according to historian Pablo Piccato (2010b:74, 111), was integral to the romantic approach to public communication dominant in late nineteenth- century Mexico. Her words echo those of a journalist of the period, who believed one should write “whatever comes [to mind] first” (74). Spontaneity was a way to guarantee sincerity and, thus, honor— a value essential to Mexico’s public sphere at the time. Honor was not simply “received from the state or the family” (64) but was to be won by verbal skill, and political authority rested on the ability to represent public opinion (5). Even earlier, during the Mexican press’s formative years, concerns over libel and efforts to keep publication pinned to prosecutable individuals shaped sensibilities around print (27– 62). In contrast to early Anglo- America, where anonymity and print were strongly linked (Warner 1990), print in contemporary Tijuana is still paradigmatically associated with the dignity of the speaking self ready to stand behind its words, whereas hearsay takes on the pejorative connotations of unreliability and disavowed authorship (though of course hearsay can take printed form as well). For Inés, the “authenticity of subjective feelings” (Piccato 2010b:9) goes hand in hand with a communicative practice bent on signaling constantly its author’s accountability (Hill and Irvine 1992). Her defense of me consta, of an “I” that can vouch for its words, fits within a long cultural history. Not far into Inés’s gossip, I interrupt to recall my original terms. I want to get Susana Salazar’s name right, treating it as a potentially useful datum. And I confirm that her name counts as one of those I am interested in: “Is that another family from here?” I ask. I continue my topic-policing interruption to place the name on a list, a list that refers back to the flow of our conversation to make explicit the sense I want it to have, as if Inés were doing what I asked her to: “So we’ve got . . . the Leyvas . . . the Villarreals . . . the Robles . . .” Inés joins in momentarily but finishes with a casual gesture reducing the list to a mere heap of the references that accumulate in her stories, a simple by-product of her narrativized life. “Yeah, there’s a bunch of them,” she says and resumes: “Susana Salazar is a big ol’ fat woman like so.” The frame and the topic I would reestablish fall again by the wayside. I asked about the Leyvas, but they do not matter. The wife is “managed,” manipulated as one manipulates inert matter, in the same modality of political imagination we began with: Leyva was a “good governor,” but an unspecified “they” removed him from power.9 Without my intending it, my original question set up a classic image of politics as divided between front stage and back stage (Lomnitz 2001:145–64). The latter is 9. Manejar (to manage) can also refer to manning a puppet or driving a car.

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where the action is, but the very use of dicen, as a distancing mechanism, maintains the back stage as not properly accessible to direct reference. What happened cannot be verified or vouched for; the evidential ground back stage is not stable for the public at large and thus requires such framing as “they say.” With her switch from Leyva the husband to Leyva the wife, Inés does not do away with the front- stage/backstage distinction but sweeps aside the curtain. Though Leyva the husband disappears from the account, we are in some sense closer to him: through his wife and the petty intrigue of the DIF, we are, like him, in the backstage world of politics, and dicen disappears. It belongs to the “they” out there, the excluded ones, who have access to the world of power only through the piecemeal indiscretions of the news. The closest Inés comes to specifying how María Elena Leyva was “managed” is in mention of the celebrations commemorating the founding of Tijuana. If Leyva is inert, Salazar is the agent, and the sphere of her agency is the public both of mass celebrations and of magazine readers (recall she writes for a magazine). Inés, however, “manages” Leyva in an even more profound way: she speaks for her. Inés is generally proud of her public-speaking abilities; whether speaking for herself or others, her speech as she portrays it is spontaneous, socially appropriate, and rationally convincing.10 If Leyva is but a hollow image, smiling and waving, this is because she was “born in silk diapers.” Inés in contrast simply is an agentive, speaking subject. And the speech that comes out of her, so authentically her own, is specifically public speech on the front stage of political ritual. When Inés stands to introduce and then speak for María Elena Leyva, she is herself the backstage agency speaking through the front stage of appearances. Susana Salazar writes for a magazine but does not like to be interviewed by journalists. She and Inés both can speak in public, but vouching for what they say, controlling their communication. When she accuses the press of indiscretion, it is not a matter of duplicity, of hiding things. It is a matter of Inés’s total attunement to context through her ability (which journalists lack) to produce appropriate speech spontaneously. She did not stand up and tell the public, “Susana Salazar is a big fat woman.” Journalists should understand that. Instead, they violate the in-group of 10. Inés loves to reminisce about her participation in the parents’ association at her children’s school. She recounts her capacity to clear up confusion and instantly convince the group, and the affectionate respect she won thanks to this. She is also proud of her ongoing participation in the homeowners’ association of a small weekend settlement outside Tijuana and of the celerity with which she says the other owners chose her to represent them.

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gossip. As speech travels between communicative contexts, “I” becomes vulnerable. When speech moves beyond the back stage, no one will vouch for it, though one imagines it flows originally, in a chain of repetitions, from the core of Tijuana’s power elite. The problem was not so much in publishing the information; what mortified Inés was the named citation, with its excess and indiscriminacy: “And they said there that Mrs. [Inés herself ], that I don’t know what all, and that. All the things.” Three times she repeats the journalist’s act of citation in a cumulative gesture of complete exposure: “Que no sé qué, que no sé cuánto, que. Todas las cosas.” There is something literal in the commonplace expression, “salir en los periódicos,” to come out (appear) in the newspapers. She does not like to step onto the front stage, into view of the public, under conditions in which her decency cannot be guaranteed. Inés’s statement that “I’ve never, ever written anything to be able to speak” might be taken as metapragmatic, cuing me in as to how to take her words. In this case, our interview would be a demonstration of her speaking ability and would thus be fundamentally public. But Inés’s persistent rejection of the topic I kept trying to resuscitate was not only that: it was a rejection of the evidential ground of hearsay I had used to frame the conversation. In moving behind the scenes, to ground where “I” can vouch that María Elena Leyva was a know-nothing and that Susana Salazar was a fat lesbian, Inés made the conversation confidential. It is up to me to respect the boundaries of communication, to not be like the journalists, but to recognize that the propriety of speech depends on its context. Inés risked her “I” to teach me a lesson by both narrating and enacting her perduring commitment to what she presented as a model for moral communication, for an “I” defined by its reliable coherence as it moves through a whole topography of diverse scenes of discourse. Her ideologies of public speaking are at once ideologies of maintaining a particular kind of “I” and, crucially, of belonging to Tijuana, of taking part in the very core of its social world. To make her point, she admitted me to a communicative ground I should respect. The metapragmatically relevant statement is not “what comes out [of me], that’s what I speak,” but “one time they went to interview me at the DIF.”11

11. The implication, of course, is that my publication of Inés’s words here is an equally indelicate breach of the communicative terms on which she spoke to me. For her, citation is inherently problematic. One day I showed Inés a book of poetry by a friend (García Manríquez 2005) that included an e-mail I had written. She reacted with sympathetic indignation, despite what I thought was my evident delight.

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Showdown with Fixed Status Since I persisted in my attempts to return to hearsay about Tijuana’s “old family names,” Inés was obliged to make her point more forcefully. The following excerpt begins with a question on my part parallel to the one that began the first excerpt. ry: so, what, what is said [se dice] about the . . . Villarreals [in stage whisper]? inés: you know, I tell you [ fíjate que te digo], I don’t really know what the deal [la cosa] is, what am I going to lie to you for. I know them and all, like so, but it’s not like I know a lot about them. the ones who know are my sons, but I certainly don’t. I certainly don’t. [silence] why tell you what I don’t know. ry: yeah. inés: because I know one little thing or another, but not well. ry: mm-hmm. mm-hmm. inés: Gil and Martín [her sons], on the other hand, they do. they spent time with them and on one occasion Gil . . . had a heated argument [discusión] with Villarreal. ry: but you don’t know which one. inés: no. no, I don’t ry: you don’t remember what it was about or anything? inés: no, no no no. no, I wasn’t there, I just heard about it [nomás supe]. ry: mm-hmm. inés: also, on another occasion when Gil had a heated argument, we had a friend, uh, may he rest in peace, Castillo Luna. Doctor Castillo Luna. a very good doctor here in Tijuana. a very good friend of ours. and, since he knew that Gil, well, didn’t work and that, all of that, well, we’d go see him and he never charged us for it. he was a Masonic brother.12 so then one day there was a photography exhibit and contest. and, uh, 12. Inés’s deceased husband was a Mason, and she identifies as a “freethinker” (libre pensador). For Koselleck (1988), Freemasonry was crucial to the development of liberal publicity. In Inés’s narrative, though, the Masons appear not counterposed to the state but integral to the back stage of politics.

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they came from various parts of the republic. and there was a young guy, who came from I don’t know where, but he was . . . indigenous type. like, dark skinned, hair sticking up, like, indigenous type. but Gil says that he had very good photos. and, what with landscapes and things like that, that he had very good photos. and so the exhibit and all happened. and the judges came out. and among the judges was Castillo Luna. and then, uh, well, they gave first place to a young guy from here from Tijuana, who didn’t have good lighting in his photos. and some other little defects he had, right? and they give him the prize. and Gil asked to speak. and he said that he didn’t agree with that prize, because, uh . . . the judges didn’t know what they were talking about. he says, “let’s see,” he says, “they put Dr. Castillo Luna as judge [laughter]. who is a great surgeon,” (because for tonsils he was the marvel of the world), “a very good doctor. very tijuanense, very much all that. but he doesn’t know anything about photography.” because he knew Castillo Luna for what he was, right? he’d chatted many tim—, he was a historian, nothing more, because he liked history, well, a lot. and he ended up with books of Gil’s, he did. because he died and we couldn’t get them back. and then, uh, he says, “and Engineer X, and Doctor Y,” he says. “may they tell me what they know about photography.” and then a doctor said to him. uh, also a Mason. he said, “look here, kid. you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and he said, “yes. I do know what I’m talking about because I do know about photography,” Gil said to him. and he started arguing with them. and well, nothing to be done about it. and so Castillo Luna calls Gil up and he says, “listen, your son,” if you’ll pardon my language, “scared the shit out of me,” he says [laughter]. “[out of ] all of us there. so that then we didn’t know what to do,” he says. “because he argued and argued with us and, ‘let the guy have the prize, because you can’t take it away from him now. but the one who deserves it, is this little fellow [fulanito de tal].’” Gil was also competing in the contest. but as Gil says, “I recognized that the guy had better photos than mine.” he says, “better lit, and . . . and, one must recognize/give due [hay que reconocer],” he says, “why not,” he says. “because they come from, a village, because they come from wherever else,” he says, “no, one must recognize/give due,” he told them. and he set to arguing with them and, well, they couldn’t figure out whether to take the prize away from the other guy and give it to this one, or, or what. and it was put up for debate and then, well . . . they gave the prize to the young guy.

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This time, my opening question is loaded. Pronouncing “Villarreal” in a stage whisper, I make a joke of the illicit quality of hearsay, even as I make explicit the very term Inés has, in a lengthy and complicated way, already taken a position against: “So what is said about the . . . Villarreals?” Unsurprisingly, she even more emphatically declines to uptake. She does not deny that there is something to be talked about; her very refusal to gossip asserts that it is so. Again, she seems to draw near revelation— her insistence that “I certainly don’t [know]” might appear a protracted hedging parallel to the no me consta (“I wouldn’t vouch for any of this”) of the first excerpt. I provide at first a backchannel of approbation (“yeah,” “mm-hmm, mm-hmm”), as if this were nothing more than the usual disclaimer, but soon switch to emphatic prompting. Inés does not budge. Like the first time, her refusal to participate in hearsay leads to a different narrative that acts as an even stronger corrective both to the communicative terms of my question and the preconceptions about Tijuana and Inés’s place in it that my question implied. Literally translated, Inés’s immediate response would be something like, “Pay attention to [the fact] that I say to you, I don’t well know how the thing is.” Fíjate is a commonplace, something like, “Look here,” or, more mildly, “Well, you know.” Te digo (I tell you) notes that we are returning to a topic that had been set aside. Both phrases might be regarded as similar sorts of verbal tics, small pervasive calls to the act of communication, part of the extensive reflexivity with which everyday talk is rife. But fíjate que te digo is also full of the echoes of gossipy speech and thus seems an obliging enough way to answer me. Rather than move on to the gossip, though, Inés dwells in and develops the theme of her not knowing and not speaking. It is as if she means fíjate que te digo literally, as if she wants to draw attention to her statement that she does not know as such, rather than use the pragmatic force of the phrase as a marker of gossip. At the same time, Inés unhesitatingly refers to la cosa (“the thing” or “the deal”), implying some particular incident or scandal connected with the Villarreals. Thus she obliquely discredits them even as she credits herself with the discretion to say nothing. Not only that— she hammers home the steadfastness of her “I” (which she articulates separately, though this is not grammatically necessary) in a quick succession of denials of knowledge adequate for speech: “Yo no sé bien cómo está la cosa,” “no es que yo sepa mucho de ellos,” “los que saben son mis hijos pero yo sí no. Yo sí no.” The more I ask, the more she puts that steadfast “I” on display; the concatenation of statements about speech underlines Inés’s own status as speaker. The “argument” between her son and Villarreal seems like it might be a subterfuge similar to the earlier substitution of talk about

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Leyva the wife for talk about Leyva the husband, but Inés declines to expand on it with equal steadfastness. The “argument,” however, positions Inés’s son behind the scenes, in regular social contact with Tijuana’s elite. What Inés could tell, if she were not so discreet, emanates directly from that world, not from the public world of hearsay. Now, though, Inés is outside, merely hearing the reports of events her son took part in. Just as she called on me to respect her confidences, here Inés enacts her own respect for the communicative grounds on which she represents her son as having repeated to her what happened between himself and Villarreal. Moving on, a pair of pointed questions from me elicit a small flood of “no”s and a phrase that might seem to contradict Inés’s insistence that she doesn’t know and therefore can’t speak: nomás supe, literally, “I only knew.” Saber, “to know,” appears here with a different meaning, as the most unequivocal and direct statement yet against se dice. Nomás supe is a standard phrase qualifying the evidential status of what is reported— the speaker was not present but only heard about the incident at issue. Like fíjate que te digo, it is another of the barrage of markers that usually announce gossip, but again, Inés literalizes it into a performance of her own character. Here, nomás supe represents a definite closure. From it, Inés turns to a parallel point that, while maintaining the boundaries of propriety and right speaking she has set up, allows her to address the very basis of my original interest in the Villarreals. She begins, “Also on another occasion when Gil had a heated argument . . .” As when she shifted to Leyva the wife, Inés’s sentence is broken off, grammatically incomplete. Strictly speaking, the narrative appears as a parenthetical subclause. As in the first excerpt, she backs up to describe the main character: Dr. Castillo Luna, a close friend of the family’s, “a very good doctor here in Tijuana.” In the first excerpt, Tijuana as the conversation’s frame of reference remained implicit; this time, it appears up front. Just as the Villarreals are one of Tijuana’s “old” families, so Dr. Castillo Luna is “a very good doctor here in Tijuana.” The remark foregrounds the commonality between them that will be at issue: it is the meaning of Tijuana and of being tijuanense that is at stake. Next, Inés introduces Tijuana’s counterpoint, the South: “They came from various parts of the Republic.” In two quick blows, Inés evokes the classic contrast of everyday discourse between “here in Tijuana” and “there in the South,” where the South comes to stand, practically, for the rest of Mexico. It is the viability of the Tijuana of Castillo Luna and of the Villarreals that is at stake in the relation between Tijuana and the South, and it is, eventually, Tijuana that Inés seeks to redefine via the figure of the South. Just as Castillo Luna represents the best of Tijuana, the South is summarily introduced in its quintessential representative: a young guy,

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who came from “I don’t know where” (it doesn’t matter), “but” (that is, this does matter) he was “indigenous type.” Inés elaborates: “Like, dark skinned, hair sticking up, like, indigenous type.” Así, which I have translated as “like,” functions as an appeal: I should recognize this fellow as an example of a common type. “But,” Inés says, “Gil says that he had very good photos.” Astoundingly, counter to all expectations, a dark-skinned man from the South has good photographs. And, somehow not counter to all expectations, the judges give the prize anyway to “a young guy from here in Tijuana” (one may suppose he was not dark and did not have sticking-up hair), despite his inferior work. “De aquí de Tijuana” is another set phrase, not smoothly translatable, in which “here” and “Tijuana” are fused, bringing together the interactional stakes of the conversation and the understanding of Tijuana at stake in the narrative. On selection of the winner, Gil asked to speak, “pidió la palabra.” The phrase is formal; pedir la palabra is what one does in a chaired meeting or at town hall. It implies a whole baggage of formalities and procedures: it evokes the scenarios of democratic debate, in which citizens rise to speak their mind and rationally defend their propositions. Gil’s “argument” with the judges, and by poetic parallel his “argument” with Villarreal, was really and fully a discusión in the literal sense of the word, a discussion in which status falls away, and reason merges with rhetoric to prove which man is best. Ultimately, Gil does not impose his decision by force but simply opens the space for true rational debate, the conclusion of which his reason merely foretold: “And it was put up for debate and then, well . . . they gave the prize to the young guy.” As in the first excerpt, right speaking comes to the fore in this dispute over status, this test of whether birthplace and race as the basis of social recognition will prevail over merit. “The judges didn’t know what they were talking about,” claimed Gil, just as Inés initially told me she didn’t know about the Villarreals and so wouldn’t talk about them. By means of argument, he vanquishes the judges within the very social form (the juried contest) they had been using as a ritual reaffirmation of local hierarchy. Inés makes clear what Gil is attacking when she puts in his mouth a direct criticism of Dr. Castillo Luna, conceding he is “very tijuanense, very much all that.” Tijuanense here is a shorthand for everything good— but this is only the Nietzschean good, the good of the powerful.13 Despite his goodness, Castillo Luna “knows nothing.” The confrontation is perfectly clear: fixed status by birthright versus flexible status by merit. 13. My interview with Villarreal was about his participation in a campaign against public insecurity, spearheaded by the business class, which used the slogan “Nosotros somos los buenos” (We are the good guys).

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Different vectors of status meld on one side or the other of this blunt opposition. When Gil calls on Engineer X and Doctor Y to speak up and prove themselves (as he is proving himself ), he attacks status by educational degree (Gil did not continue past high school).14 A moment later one of the judges tries to cow him by calling on seniority: “Look here, kid!” Like Castillo Luna, this doctor is a Mason— a covert status that might have been expected to command Gil’s respect. All these status systems come together on the side of the “tijuanenses,” the bastions of established society. They crumple miraculously when Gil confronts them with his word and his persistence. He shames the judges, showing the fragility of the appearances on which their status rests, for in truth, just like María Elena Leyva in her silk diapers, they “know nothing.” Instead of speaking from the back stage through the front stage of appearances, as Inés did in the first excerpt, Gil steps onstage to batter those appearances down directly.15 “Look here, kid,” the doctor says. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gil defends himself proudly: “Yes, I do know what I’m talking about, because I do know about photography.” As a debate, this may sound infantile. And yet, by virtue of its emptiness, the exchange is all the purer as an image: there is nothing at stake beyond the right to speak and to have speech effectually count. The dispute refers only to itself and its own nature; rational, knowledgeable speech needs only a bit of spirited persistence to carry the day.16 The judges are, by their own admission, “scared shitless,” and in the end, the young guy from the South gets the prize. Just as Castillo Luna is above all a figure representing tijuanense elite society and the “indigenous-type” guy represents the South, so the content of Gil’s “discussion” is done away with to leave an abstracted image of public, rational debate. As in Rancière’s (1999) theory of democracy, Gil might seem to speak as the demos, the part that has no part, emerging from outside to found a new order of things. If one sees Gil as representing the young “indigenous14. Though education has often been cited as fundamental to the Mexican middle classes’ projects of status (Loaeza 1988), a contrary discourse exists. Another small business owner I interviewed (Gil owns a photography studio) told me that in Mexico a college degree is nothing but a “title of nobility,” for it cannot guarantee prosperity. 15. As a man, Gil carries through what Inés began. Her friendship with Salazar foreshadows his with Castillo Luna; she too spoke in public, though in disguise, as it were, through her inanimate patron. 16. In late nineteenth-century Mexico, Piccato writes, a “polemic disposition” (2010b:94) was a prime value of public writing as of oratory.

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type” guy from a mutual position outside established society, this breakthrough of the demos might seem quite radical. But Gil’s position is in no way comparable to the young man’s. Gil may not have the prize-granting power of the judges, he may be to them nothing but a chamaco (a snotty brat), but he seizes that power not only by virtue of his speech, but thanks to a position Inés’s narrative carefully carves out for him. Gil and Castillo Luna are “friends”; they chat and trade books, and Castillo Luna calls Gil up at home. Having grown up in Tijuana (and by no standard dark skinned or with sticking- up hair), Gil is in a good position to claim tijuanense status himself. He does not represent the young guy from the South; he advocates for him. The young guy, meanwhile, never speaks. He remains a nonentity: the mute, dark, indigenous-looking fulanito de tal, a belittling designation in which the name of the person referred to is not just ignored but markedly dispensable. Gil’s speech does not admit the young man to the circle; rather, Gil’s recognition of him forces the judges’ recognition of Gil. They may be “very tijuanense, very much all that,” but Gil can prove himself their equal. By the end, the viewpoints of the “tijuanenses” and those contesting their status merge. When Inés reports Castillo Luna’s version of events, she does not have to say that Gil “scared the shit” out of the judges, because Castillo Luna says it himself. The whole story carries the smart of exclusion, of existence on the edges of what one feels to be power and recognition— not Gil’s, but Inés’s, as she fends off my importunate attempts to wring from her not what she herself might have to say about Tijuana, but only what secondhand rumors she might be able to dredge up about the (ostensibly) really important people in town. If there are sociological reasons for her reaction, these are embedded in her personal history, as will be seen in chapter 3. Hay que reconocer (one must recognize) are words she puts in Gil’s mouth, habitual words (“as Gil says”) spoken to Inés in the ongoing present that includes our own interaction. They are also private words, undergirding their family solidarity as mother and son. “Why not?” he says. “Because they come from a pueblo, because they come from wherever else”— just as Inés and he himself originally hail from afar. “Que porque vienen de un pueblo,” he says, actually. The initial que subtly marks the phrase as a quotation from an unspecified source, the naysayers, the tijuanenses who would unjustly exclude the meritorious outsider. Gil’s hay que reconocer is already in dialogue; it is already a response to another social position and perspective. In the next breath, Inés shifts smoothly back to the photography contest: “Hay que reconocer, les dijo [he told them].” The conviction that hay que reconocer, along with the readiness and ability to put the principle into practice and enforce recognition of it, becomes itself a sign of distinction that ultimately elevates Inés and her family beyond

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the “old family names” and all they stand for, even as it is permanently locked in a dialogic relationship with them. Hay que reconocer is at the core of the consistent moral self Inés depicts for herself and Gil as they move across mutually reinforcing contexts of speaking, upholding their dignity around the dinner table as in public. It sums up, in a final punch line, what she both performs toward and demands of me throughout this entire conversation, her final reply to my question, “What is said about the Villarreals?”

Rational Debate and Liberal Publicity: From Fixity to Dispersal According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere emerged in the eighteenth century amid a system of interlocked spheres of communication. He provides a diagram (1989:30), shown in table 2.1. For Habermas, the public sphere “constituted by private people” (this is the middle column) lay outside and clearly separate from the arena of public (political) authority. An apolitical, literary public sphere historically preceded the one that began to debate political matters and impinge on the decisions of public authority. The domesticity of the bourgeois family underlaid both these public spheres. Like Inés’s stories, Habermas’s diagram points to the tangled mass of sites, beyond those to which “rational debate” and “free discussion” are germane, where commitments to liberal publicity are forged and where its “I” is disciplined. These sites twine together a basic web of personal orientations and affects sustaining liberal publicity’s sense of collective subjectivity. But while Habermas’s diagram seems like an objective description of social reality, Inés’s stories appear starkly as weapons in her “struggle,” as Elizabeth Povinelli puts it, “to characterize the social nature of the interaction[,] the socially inscribed who, what, and where of [any] Table 2.1 Private Realm

Sphere of Public Authority

Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)

Public sphere in the political realm

Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)

(market of culture products)

State (realm of the “police”)

Public sphere in the world of letters (clubs, press)

“Town”

Court (courtly noble society)

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event” (2001:324). The stories slip their premises of publicity in as presupposed reality when in fact those premises are just what is at stake. Examined through Inés, liberal publicity appears clearly as a “performative dispensation” (Mazzarella 2013), an authoritative order that can never quite regiment and contain the excesses with which performance is always rife. The echoes between Inés’s stories and Habermas’s diagram are striking. Delicately, assiduously, Inés narrates herself into Tijuana as a place where “rational debate” remains the keystone of personal honor. She focuses on the front stage of political ritual, where the main drama occurs: the moment when reason breaks free of its essentially private exercise to engage public authority directly (breaking through, that is, the double bar of Habermas’s diagram). When Gil launches his critical reason against the judges, he performs in chiaroscuro miniature the political function Habermas claimed for the original bourgeois public sphere. When he “requests to speak” (pide la palabra), he addresses the judges as if they were a board running a meeting. The act reframes the event; by staging his public use of reason in these terms, Gil (as Inés represents him) brings out the true nature of the contest as political ritual. The judges’ photographic authority derives from their social authority as elites, and it is this authority Gil ultimately challenges.17 But Inés glosses too the other parts of Habermas’s schema. She notes the importance of her intimate communications with her son, the handing down of the egalitarian axiom, “Hay que reconocer.” Likewise, her description of Gil’s relationship with Castillo Luna crucially specifies the ground from which he addresses the judges: his protagonism at the photography contest only emerges from the long backstage brewing of horizontal debate. Gil and Castillo Luna had conversed together many times on such topics of learned interest, Inés fleshes out, as history. Moreover, Castillo Luna may have done the family an inestimable favor by providing free medical service, but he is also permanently indebted to them, for he kept books of theirs beyond the grave (Gil was the principal inheritor of his father’s library). Their relationship in this intimate arena is reciprocal 17. Pedir la palabra also underlines how Inés’s model repeats old ironies (Calhoun 1992). In the parliamentary contexts it evokes, participation rests on membership, on the fundamental conjunction between voice and vote (voz y voto). Thus, critical reason’s challenge to fixed status is also a claim to group membership; even in the act, it draws about itself the folds of a new exclusion. As Mazzarella points out, it is a “characteristic symptom of postcolonial modernity” that “the very principles of universality and inclusion that are supposed to be inherent to middle class social practice instead become marks of an elite identification with a cosmopolitan ideal and [ . . . ] a device of social distinction” (2005:12).

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and egalitarian. Two activities define it: cultured conversation and reading. As in the old bourgeois model, an apolitical public sphere of letters precedes Gil’s political intervention and appears clearly at its basis. It is the training ground where he first hones his argumentative skills. Inés’s stories turn the historical argument that triumphalizes the eighteenth-century emergence of rational debate into the narrative of modern-day Tijuana. But if we reduce Inés’s narrative to diagram form, some important differences from Habermas’s model pop out (see table 2.2). The activities of Habermas’s “private realm” look much the same, but the sites he labels “public sphere,” optimistically framing them as expansive and inclusive, here bear just the opposite accent. They constitute what I have called the “back stage,” following Claudio Lomnitz’s (2001:145–64) argument that spaces for free debate in Mexico are rare, so that publicity becomes mainly a matter of front-stage ritual and backstage rumor. This back stage is, like Habermas’s incipient public sphere, limited to the elite and a select few others like Inés and Gil, whose footing there is not, in the end, all that clear— despite her claims to membership and respect, Inés was only a sewing teacher at the DIF. Considered as front stage, Habermas’s “sphere of public authority” is missing a crucial part, which Inés would likewise omit but cannot: the spectating public excluded from the back stage and reduced to circulating hearsay about its possible machinations. Habermas deliberately sets aside the “plebeian public sphere” at the beginning of his analysis, but in Mexico the idea that the public sphere is split is commonplace.18 Within Inés’s narrative, the wider public of hearsay is the seed that ends up turning her entire enterprise— and her “I” itself— inside out. As I have emphasized from the start, Inés’s narrative takes shape only under provocation: it is an effort to performatively reestablish her “I.” My first error, which spurs all, is to address her as a potential repeater of hearsay. If she has recourse to the mythos of rational debate, it is as a small fortress against the dispersions of this form of popular publicity. When Inés reacts to me, she reacts against hearsay as the degraded form of public communication proper to those whose status should, she insists, be kept clearly inferior to our own. But the interruption of hearsay remains the raison d’être behind her whole performance. In this simple sense, her “I” depends on and remains embroiled in all it would deny. 18. This idea may be complicated by pointing, for instance, to old practices such as reading newspapers aloud in village plazas, thus communicating elite and popular publics. Piccato (2010b:97– 156) offers a sophisticated treatment of the feedback loops between different genres of public communication in the late nineteenth century, ranging from parliamentary debate to riot.

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Inés’s “I” Table 2.2 Private Realm

Back Stage

Front Stage of Political Ritual

Conjugal family’s internal space

Political gossip

State (public events at DIF)

Lettered exchange of conversation and books

Elite clique (photography contest) [Spectating public, excluded from back stage, that engages in hearsay]

Clubs (Masons)

Like a classic Freudian fetish, it is an illusory object of attachment, ever vulnerable to goads reminding of its lack of self-sufficiency. This denial of hearsay runs deeper than it might seem. With her portrayal of Tijuana’s communicative economy, Inés wards off all that would disperse her “I,” that would leave her with no words of her own but only those of others to report.19 She would not let her “I” be reduced to citing. But this fear is an existential one, a fear of something that menaces from within all language, though it may manifest to different extents and in different ways under different historical circumstances.20 The fear of seeing one’s “I” infected by citations is, at root, the fear that “I” might itself be a citation— as it undeniably is, in the sense that all language comes to us from outside ourselves. Hearsay embodies the specter of citationality, and it is citationality that Inés speaks, hopelessly, to exorcise. Her enterprise, adrift in its own failure, inscribes itself into the classic aporia of the bourgeois subject, which strives, impossibly, to guarantee its own solidity, to set itself up as its own origin, and to generate its own grounds for being and self-articulation.21 With Inés, we see this project falter; as the chapters progress, we will see such slippage pervading public life in Tijuana. If “I” turns to rational debate, it is as a supplement filling a lack that threatens to hollow “I” out irrevocably: a “metaphysics of presence” (Derrida 1974) is at stake, finally, in our conversation as in the larger battle 19. Hymes uses communicative economy to argue for an approach to “communities organized as systems of communicative events” (1974:17). 20. Chapters 3 and 5 elaborate on these circumstances: above all, Tijuana’s relationship to the collapse of Mexico’s national project from the 1980s on, under pressures of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. 21. In his famous critique of Austin, Derrida (1988) argues that Western metaphysics has required a “tethering to source” (20) of communication that denies what he calls “iterability.” He asks whether the risk of failure is not performative speech’s “internal and positive condition of possibility [ . . . ] the very force and law of its emergence” (17).

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against hearsay. As a fetish, rational debate— and the whole communicative economy in which it is embedded— shores up the sense of the self as indivisible, unique, and founded only on its own volition. But it can do so only provisionally, in an unendingly renewed performative project. Inés institutes herself in a profoundly repetitive project of fixity, and the basic gesture shaping her narrative and the communicative economy she portrays as Tijuana’s is warding off dispersion. Fixity, though, has a tendency not just to slip into unmooring but to feed it actively. As Emily Apter notes of the fetish, “A consistent displacing of reference occurs, paradoxically, as a result of so much fixing” (1993:3). Consider Rafael Sánchez’s (2016) analysis of the role of republicanismcum-liberalism in post-Independence Venezuela. The violence of that period, he argues, should be understood as an effect of the abrupt disappearance of the king that anchored the colonial order.22 Subaltern subjects, freed from their corporative niches, were “bent not just on killing their white rulers but on ‘democratically’ seizing their identities” (6).23 In response, the nation’s founders raised the liberal Law as a mirror that would reflect these homicidal masses back to themselves as “the people,” freezing them in place. Sánchez extends this analysis to contemporary Venezuela, where, he argues, governmental efforts to trap the masses in spectacles of liberal order alternate with renewed disorderly impulses.24 Sánchez writes of this dynamic as temporal, but the tendency to oscillation is also differentially distributed throughout the population. As a good middle-class subject, Inés is caught in the mirror. Middle-class Tijuana is caught in the mirror— a mirror that only becomes more brittle as neoliberal reforms make all walks of life in Mexico more precarious. Inés’s pretensions have their roots in her past, in a world much different from today’s Tijuana, but they stem too from the stimuli and disappointments of the present. Whether on billboards, the Internet, or in TV ads (Inés is an avid TV watcher), Mexicans are deluged by discourses addressing them as disciplined subjects, happy consumers, and responsible citizens. 22. Independence movements in Latin America began in response to the forced abdication of Ferdinand VII. For an overview of events, see Bakewell (2004:382– 406). 23. Piccato notes that in postindependence Mexico, “The state no longer [  . . .  ] provided a stable framework for social difference” (2010b:14). The public sphere emerged out of citizens’ attempt to defend their honor (and consolidate their social position) upon uncertain terrain. 24. Sánchez focuses in particular on the performativity of constitutionalism. Compare Hale’s (1968) argument that strong, nominally liberal states have alternated with radical constitutionalism and even social revolution in Mexico.

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People like Inés take up the images they see there as their own— with plenty of twists, to be sure. Twists aside, though, even the middle classes do not take these images up whole: they too exhibit the tendency to flight that, for Sánchez, remains the prerogative of the subaltern. How long can they fool themselves? For the left-leaning middle classes (I mention them as an example, though Inés is a die-hard conservative, and the left is generally paltry in Tijuana), in recent years the spectacle of electoral fraud perhaps sharpens most the sense that consumer citizenship is not an avenue to political power and that the (surprisingly wide) swath of those who consider themselves clase media (which is a way of saying they consider themselves more fortunate than others) are ruled and kept relatively quiescent by palliatives just as much as are the poor.25 Even so, that sudden pang in the gut, that sudden fright and anger, is mostly funneled into the demand for more transparent governance.26 The Law should be real and immediate, directly accessible, not a thin mirror with a bunch of elites huddled behind it. Finding the Mexican State but a brittle mirror, Tijuana’s clase media turns northward— but that move undermines “I” in other ways. Whatever actually happened in the scenes Inés recounts, they become in retrospect emblematic. And pragmatically potent— just as Gil forces recognition by means of his public speech, Inés uses her stories to recalibrate our interaction and enforce her own moral sensibility. Weaving links between speech genres, she redefines what goes on between us in relation to an idealized image of the power of liberal publicity. Inés’s story is itself a spectacle of liberal order, a mirror in which she tries to trap us both, and her call to inhabit it is no simple summons but is actively and artfully brought home by her narrative. Thus, however much it desires to fix itself in itself, Inés’s “I” remains profoundly dialogic. It is shot through from its very inception with the voices of others, which she is constantly adopting as her own, polemicizing against, or taking a subtle in-between posture toward (see Bakhtin 1981a; Hill 1995). Think only of the complexity and contrariety of the way she uses no me consta or fíjate que te digo. Even these simple phrases bear traces of the scenes through which they circulate; with them, Inés takes a stance with regard to these contexts and the figures that inhabit them. 25. One recent study found that 81 percent of the population identifies as “middle class” (Verdusco 2011). At the same time, the third-highest-income decile averaged less than US$9 per capita per day (INEGI 2011). 26. We might note with Rosalind Morris that “transparency” as a value emerges where class and politics per se disappear. It is allied to the rise of “middle class” as a blanket term under which, it is hoped, “we” can all fit (2004:227, 238–39).

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Narrative representations like Inés’s are a kind of “poetic world making” (Warner 2002:114); through them, “I” comes to life on the go, in shreds and glances, always differently, always according to the exigencies of context as, in engaging others, one comes to inhabit one role or another. But liberal publicity is not for all that some facile construct flitted through as people race on to other commitments. Inés shows it as the object of long-standing and heartfelt personal investment, the painstakingly constructed retrenchment of her most cherished sense of self. In the intimacy of her dining room, she rebuilds piece by piece what I so carelessly tear down: Tijuana’s communicative economy as a concerted, coherent, and profoundly moral whole. The respect she demands is as much for her authority in representing Tijuana as for the authority of that representation, of the boundaries that traverse Tijuana’s communicative economy as she would have it and that, finally, define her very self. Inés dwells on the domestic, on words spoken between mothers and sons; she dwells on a wider circle bound by the exchange of readings and of educated debate as much as of favors; she dwells on the properly public sphere in which political authority may be challenged. This is the picture of public communication she reflexively posits as the necessary worldly support for her “I,” and she enjoins me to recognize and address her in its terms. Facing both north and south, Inés gathers her “I” against hearsay’s dispersal by projecting a virtual topography of publicity within which it can find a place. The contradictions that surge up from this particular topography are classic, historically bound to projects of fixity much like Inés’s— once bourgeois projects, now even more unstable as the promise of a universal middle class erodes globally (Fehérváry 2013:22). I should point here not only to the necessary silence of the man from the South, but also to Inés’s ambivalence before me, her all too young, all too American interlocutor.27 I am a junior in need of schooling, but also one whose recognition must be assured. Before moving on to chapter 3, the following section takes up the contradictions of liberal publicity to bring them back, again, to the border.

27. While acknowledging the politicized nature of American as a term many feel should refer to the Americas as a whole, I use the term much as americano is used in Mexico, to designate racialized US cultural citizenship.

The Assembly Plant

In 2007, I conducted a series of interviews in one of the transnational assembly plants for which Mexico’s northern border cities are well known; my questions centered on the process of application for the US laser visa. Given this innocuous topic, the plant manager granted me access on the basis of a request from my friend Edith, an engineer at the factory, and, on my first visit, we exchanged but a brief handshake. When I asked him for an interview some weeks later, though, he consented affably. First, however, he had a bit of work to finish up. To pass the time, he invited me into a boardroom to sit with him and four other men as they transferred files on their laptops. Two I knew and two I did not; they ranged in age from their late twenties to their midforties, the Manager being the oldest of the bunch.1 Only mildly occupied, the men had time for chitchat. They began, courteously enough, with a topic that might well interest me: a gringo, an American, regularly sent down by the company’s US headquarters.2 They recommended I interview him: a colorful character and a good Spanish speaker, remarkably familiar with Mexican culture. He fulfilled well, they seemed to judge, his formal role as cultural mediator. “When we get like, ‘Fucking gringos!’” one man explained, “he tells us, ‘No, the thing is, it’s like this, it’s like that . . .’” He paused. “And when they get like, ‘Fucking

1. In an industrial city like Tijuana, upper-level assembly plant employees are a core component of the clase media. They form a diffuse network; like this one, many managers begin as engineers (Hualde 2002). 2. Gringo connotes Anglo ethnicity and is synonymous with americano. It is a standard analogue of mexicano, though it can also refer to US citizenship: se hizo gringo, he became gringo, i.e., he obtained US citizenship. Gabacho is both more common and more derogatory. On my use of American, see note 27 of chapter 2.

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Mexicans!’”—“Bastards!” another voice chipped in, in English—“He also says to them, ‘No, the thing is, it’s like this . . .’”3 The real inequality between interlocutors is of course the underlying theme of the anecdote: “Fucking gringos!” coming from the plant is, in its effects, in no way symmetrical to “Fucking Mexicans!” coming from corporate headquarters. But the anecdote sets the two parties up as equivalent. The dramatic pause between its two halves heightens the contrast between the expected asymmetry and the perfectly symmetrical punch line. In portraying both sides as equally reaching a breaking point that is resolved in exactly the same way, the anecdote posits an equality free from the power differential not only between headquarters and plant, but also between the United States and Mexico. Addressed to an American (me), it is both a reminder of the equivalence of interlocutors under the principle of equivalent national sovereignties and an enactment of egalitarian address, a generous extension of the men’s in-group camaraderie to the outsider (note the use of fucking and of bastards). The gringo, as a figure, functions metapragmatically to shape the interaction at hand. The men interpellate me into a role parallel to his own; a stricture of sorts is placed on my future action by force of the goodwill entailed by the men’s convivial mode of address. My future academic writings (including this book), they effectually hint, should provide an American public with an explanation as patient and understanding as that of the good gringo. In the men’s banter, however, the gringo emerges not just as a mediator, but as the defender of Mexican national sovereignty against internal assaults. The men recounted an incident between him and a taxi driver, delighting in his display of cultural savvy in avoiding being ripped off: my notes record an admiring “¡Ya se la sabe!” (He knows all the tricks). The punch line was that, when the taxi driver insisted on being paid in dollars, the gringo threw his pesos at him, shouting, “¡Mexicano, estás en México!” (Mexican! You’re in Mexico!) His inexperienced companion was supposedly alarmed at this behavior, crying out, “¡Estamos en otro país, nos van a matar, estás loco!” (We’re in another country, they’re going to kill us, you’re insane!) But the gringo “Nos tiene bien medidos” (He’s got our number). “We” here refers, of course, to “we Mexicans.” In another context, the phrase might rankle; it might imply a superior foe who knows just how far to push in what the other American, at least, perceived as a life-or-death struggle. But the men used the phrase almost affectionately, smiling as they said it, for the gringo had found a fault in “us” that they too 3. “Cuando nos ponemos que, ‘¡pinches gringos!’, nos dice, ‘no, es que, así y asá . . .’ y cuando ellos se ponen, ‘¡pinches mexicanos!’, también les dice, ‘no, es que así. . . .’” Quotations from this interaction are paraphrases.

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recognize as such. What the gringo says to the taxi driver is only what a Mexican nationalist might have said; the driver is shamed into accepting payment in pesos. By laughing at him, his countrymen in the boardroom draw themselves a little nearer to righteousness, a little further from the figure of the dollar-desiring traitor. The gringo here is not the arrogant American lording it over the poor Mexican, as the stereotype would have it; rather, he is admirable (if amusing) insofar as he can deploy a Mexican nationalist discourse of equivalence: America for the Americans, and (hopefully) Mexico for the Mexicans. The authority of that discourse, however oddly, is confirmed by the gringo’s use of it. The convivial in-group mode of the men’s address to me subtly undoes itself; I am interpellated as that most problematic of interlocutors: the American, the third person who in some remote, offstage location explodes, “Fucking Mexicans!” This figure is all too quick to abuse a very real power, which yet remains all too necessary in authorizing its own restraint. That is, the men deploy a reminder of the equivalence of national sovereignties as a way to defuse potential conflict and assure equal footing in the interaction at hand, but they end up invoking and thus re-creating US power. This conundrum, the tension between egalitarian address and subtly resuscitated distinctions, was repeated as the discussion turned to regional differences and an explicit mobilization of debate among equals as a model for communication capable of resolving Mexico’s internal schisms and consolidating it as a nation. The talk wandered; before I knew it, a tall, dark-skinned man (the rest were notably lighter) was adamantly declaring, “In Mexico City, they really are spicy; here they aren’t. There they really are enchiladas. Here your mom takes the seeds out, and there they stuff more chilies in.”4 With “your mom,” this man addresses his fellows as native tijuanenses, people from “here,” which at least two of them were. When soccer came up a moment later, this same man spoke with equal gusto as the sole defender of the Mexico City team.5 With beaming smiles the men exchanged insults. As they hammed up verbal flourishes of politesse before delivering their barbed witticisms, they addressed each other universally as Ingeniero (Engineer), the title they all rightfully bore as holders of advanced educational degrees. The Manager, next to me, glanced in my direction 4. “En el DF sí pican, aquí no. ahí sí son enchiladas. aquí tu mamá les quita las semillas y ahí les meten más chiles dentro.” Enchiladas literally means “en-chili-ed.” 5. The national panorama of teams as seen from Tijuana is more or less reduced to the opposition between América (Mexico City) and Chivas (technically Guadalajara, but here representing everyone else). Since my fieldwork, Tijuana’s Xolos have achieved prominence, reconfiguring allegiances.

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more than once and finally took it on himself to do some explaining. “Here in the North,” he told me, “they don’t come to blows [over these things]; it’s peaceable. Here, to each his own opinion”— he made little hand motions toward each participant—“and talking, and that’s it. But there in the stadium, with the beers and the heat . . .”6 The exchange is clearly ludic, yet the Manager reframes it as debate, the core genre of liberal publicity. The men’s joking insults become “opinions” to which each is entitled; the speaking of one’s mind appears as a right to be respected. This type of interaction, he says, is characteristic of the North. The South, in contrast, is represented by the stadium, where plebeian passions rise to blows. The feisty provocations of the darker man do not, however, represent an element of the stadium in the midst of rational debate. The North’s emblematic mode of interaction is more robust than that. Instead, the southerner’s contributions both provide the opportunity for and cinch the Manager’s claims. Like my own status as American, the color of his skin is a difference both at issue and suppressed in the interaction. It must be there to be ignored. If the North is the place where all parts of the republic can represent themselves equally in the public space of free rational debate, if the North wins because it represents a future and a model for national being as a whole, this is thanks to the presence of the South, covertly summoned up in the interaction. The exchange as a display of egalitarianism is anchored in the vocative, Engineer. Everyone addressed everyone else as Ingeniero; the term is a reminder of equal status in debate. It clears a space within which “opinions” will be respected. In this space, the Manager is willing to shed his status and assume equality with his subordinates— but this equality depends on the exclusivity of the boardroom. Ingeniero is also a reminder of relative status, of one’s position in the plant as in society. It is a reminder of those who are not present, who are not ingenieros, and who, perhaps, could not contribute so elegantly to the virtuosic tendering of “opinion.” The exchange repeats liberal publicity’s oft- noted tension between utopian openness and de facto exclusivity. The man from the South is, before all else, an engineer like everyone else. But even within the boardroom equality has its limits, for it is the Manager’s status that licenses the whole performance— which is why he retains the right to explain it. The North wins because, in redefining the interaction, the Manager remained unchallenged. In contrast to the confrontational banter moments before,

6. “Aquí en el norte no llegan a golpes; es pacífico. aquí cada quién su opinión y hablar y ya. pero allá en el estadio, con las cervezas y el calor . . .” That is, disagreements are worked out verbally in the North.

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once he began his explanations to me, the rest allowed him the floor in silence. As an image of rational debate, the banter in the boardroom may fall rather short. And yet the Manager holds it up in all seriousness as an image that typifies Tijuana and underlies social relations in the plant. In our interview, he brought up the debate on soccer twice as an example of his personal ethos (“ese es lo que soy yo,” that’s who I am), carried out in his relationships with his “buddies buddies” (camaradas camaradas) as in his service as a volunteer emergency responder. This personal ethos translates into a managerial style that, he claims, underpins daily interaction in the plant and, ultimately, its productivity. “So if you treat your companions like people, or as equals? There won’t be any problem. For example, in the discussion we had just now. A supervisor, a, uh, clerk from Materials, coordinator, plant manager. I mean, within the social structure in Mexico. No, how [could this be]?!”7 “¡¿No, cómo?!” is the Manager’s impersonation of the South’s shocked reaction before the egalitarian North. But his ethos is not merely a matter of local identity; as he imposes it on his plant, he creates the possibility of a different Mexico, a Mexico of equals. Multiple dimensions of hierarchy sublimated and resuscitated undo the egalitarianism of liberal publicity. My interview proper with the Manager began, like the banter, with a reminder of national sovereignty deployed to assure equal footing. Entering his office, I noticed a Mexican flag obtrusively displayed on the corner of his desk, such that, sticking up in the air, it would come directly between his seated self and anyone entering the room. He did not use the flag this way with me. Instead, ushering me in before him, he bade me sit at a small round table, where he joined me. When I asked about the flag, he chuckled and explained that he put it there to remind visiting gringos to cool it, for they are now in Mexico. It was not between us, yet the possibility of its intervention very much was. Thus national difference continued to frame our interaction, though obliquely. Instead, we sat at the round table— this being just the metaphor (mesa redonda) the Manager drew on to describe rational, egalitarian debate in the plant. Just as the flag oversees our conversation, though, so state recognition ultimately backs egalitarian communication between Mexicans. The Manager is not just licensed by US headquarters to make his plant 7. “Entonces, si tú le das un trato de gente a tus compañeros, o de iguales, no va a haber ningún problema. por ejemplo, en la discusión que tuvimos ahorita. un supervisor, un, este, un clerk de Materiales, coordinador, gerente de planta. o sea, dentro de la estructura social en México. ¡¿no, cómo!?”

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a model of liberal publicity. His status as tijuanense, and the public of rational debate that he animates as Tijuana’s, are underwritten by the US state in the form of his laser visa. As is common among tijuanenses, he has held one since childhood. When he renewed it as an adult, “I had no problem [ . . . ] The information you have to present is that you have [ . . . ] to be economically solvent, and that it’s not your idea to have the visa to go work in the US.” With this casual explanation, redolent of the surety that he would never have such an idea, we are back to the laughter of the men in the boardroom, as they sided with the gringo in ridiculing the taxi driver. The taxi driver is a traitor to the nation in the same way the unauthorized labor migrant is; both figures degrade “us” in real economic terms (many people erroneously believe) and in foreign eyes. The “we Mexicans” of “he’s got our number” conceals a more select “we” within it— those of “us” free of such turncoat desires. Our laughter assures us we are not traitors, as do our casual assertions before an American like me— or the fact that we had “no problem” obtaining the visa. Though the Manager expressed himself mildly to me, I have heard that his judgment can be far harsher. Indeed, if I use the word traitor, it is because (I am told) he does. My friend Edith described the Manager to me as “one of those people who think you’re betraying Mexico if you go work in the US.” A “dyed- in-the-wool nationalist” (mexicano de hueso colorado), she called him, and went on to assert through gritted teeth that if she didn’t have a college education she certainly would go try her luck in the United States. Having been among the first of her peers growing up to attend high school, her aging father still making ends meet as a day laborer, the possibility is, perhaps, imaginable for her in a way it is not for the Manager. In her remarks, she makes explicit that socioeconomic status underlies his moral claims for Tijuana’s documented public. Edith went further, though, complaining of the Manager’s hysterical (as she depicted them) desires to equal his homologues in the United States: returning from meetings with higher-ups in the company, he screams, “Get me Bluetooth! I want Bluetooth now! Everyone in there had it! I feel like a dinosaur!”8 The fantasy of equivalence between national sovereignties, as between Mexican and American interlocutors, finds its footing in the restricted ambit of international managerial meetings and at the highest level of consumerist status competition. Moreover, the very fact that this competition can be engaged in rests, as Edith represents it, on just the opposite of the egalitarian relations the Manager claims pervade his plant. She can only obey his orders to scurry in search of 8. See Salzinger (2003) on the ambivalent position of managers in the transnational corporate hierarchy assembly plants are part of.

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the latest technology, and she could never openly disagree with him on precisely this issue of hierarchy, nationalism, and moral community at the border: the Manager’s opinion of who “we” should be. As he told me in our interview, “I prefer to be a first- rate citizen in my own country than to live better in another country where I won’t be treated the same.”9 With a salary twelve times that of the line operators in his plant (also, stereotypically, migrants from the South), the Manager could not very well live better in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. If he likes how he is treated in Mexico, this is only because he can accede to the protected sphere of “first- rate citizenship.” Tijuana’s public of rational debate is the “everybody” who has a visa, the “first-rate citizens” who know they are such because the impossibility of their becoming “illegal aliens” has been embalmed for them in the form of a visa. In the boardroom, as the Manager explained the differences between North and South, he went on to tell me that baseball is the region’s true sport. He traced a map in the air, signaling soccer and baseball states: “When I was little, soccer . . .” He squinched his face and shook his head. “We watched it on TV. Baseball we did follow, here in San Diego”— he gestured northward, casually—“because of the Padres.” His gestures in the air, little pats toward separate regions on an imaginary map of Mexico, parallel the ones he made earlier, signaling the participants to debate: “to each his own opinion.” “We” who first took shape as children, as a sportsviewing public, are the ones who offer the possibility of grasping as equivalent all those regional and personal differences that make up Mexico. This tijuanense “we” articulates itself through an attempt to instantiate a classic communicative genre of liberal publicity: rational debate among equals, the formation of “opinions” in a protected sphere where status is shed. But this “we” is anchored in the last gesture of the Manager’s, pointing even farther north, across the border. It is the same gesture that evokes the gringo as authorizer of a Mexican nationalist discourse of equivalence; it is the same gesture as this entire performance before me as yet another figure for the United States, from which recognition must, in the end, be obtained. The collective subject of liberal publicity, which seeks to extend itself from Tijuana to all Mexico, emerges between, on the one hand, a map on which “we” can be located and, on the other, the anchoring gesture, “here in San Diego.”

*** 9. “Yo prefiero ser ciudadano de primera en mi país, que vivir mejor en otro país donde no voy a ser tratado igual.”

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The Manager not only crafts a narrative situating him as stalwart defender of rational, egalitarian debate; he also stages debate directly, both in the boardroom and in his office. The public he thus animates as Tijuana’s represents a national horizon of possibility. This vision is mobilized by an actor deeply invested in his own status as an upstanding Mexican citizen: a territorialized citizenship ultimately ratified by the US state in the form of a visa. The visa confirms, “I am not an illegal alien,” and so this project for the nation remains bound to US state recognition. In our interactions, however, this is but one of numerous contradictions in the management of difference: mine as American, the dark-skinned man’s as southern, Edith’s as female junior. Ultimately, we are all culled from the core group even as the Manager invites us in. Thus the public he evokes remains bound to a nest of binary distinctions— gringo versus mexicano, North versus South, patriot versus traitor, visa holder versus “illegal alien,” economically solvent versus not— all articulated within the logic of liberal publicity. These binary distinctions, however, never delineate stable groups but form instead a hash of fault lines flashing in and out of focus. Indeed, the assembly plant is saturated with the border as a metaphor. Lining up to check out, line workers jostled and ribbed each other: “No SENTRI here!”10 Every day at the front gate, the guard would meticulously collect my ID and issue me a visitor’s pass. Once, some young men teased him by shouting to me to interview him, calling him a pollero (polleros smuggle migrants across the border) and a wanted man. He seemed embarrassed but later asked me what I was doing. I explained I was doing research for my dissertation. “Oh,” he said with a pleasant chuckle, “I thought you were studying to work with [US] Immigration.” When I asked him if he had a visa (though I could guess he did not), he merrily replied (confirming the young men’s allegations), “If I applied they’d have to send to Washington for special papers.” He had been deported from the United States fifteen years before, a fact that implies a felony conviction.11 Over the past weeks, when this guard had taken my Illinois driver’s license and smiled and waved to me, he had believed he was interacting with a future representative of the US state. “Hello!” he would say. “How 10. The Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection is a program for expedited border crossing. Those enrolled enjoy dedicated lanes and undergo minimal inspection. 11. On the global rise of a veritable “deportation regime,” see De Genova and Peutz (2010). Since my fieldwork, US deportation policies have become immensely more draconian, and Tijuana now has a highly visible population of homeless deportees (Velasco and Albicker 2013).

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are you today?” When he finally told me what he had thought I was, he must have found me hasty to correct him, for he instantly reassured me, “Don’t think that I’m angry, I’m not angry at all [ . . . ], it’s a job after all.” A job just like his own, nothing personal, doing his duty with a smile. He glances at my ID, lets me in and out just as the guards at the border do. He gives me a little tag to pin to my shirt, a pass like the visa, and he calls the higher-ups so that they can give the word to let me in. Their authority runs through him. Of course, he does not call once he knows me and my business, but he is thorough about having me sign in, and, when I look up toward the clock, he is quicker than my glance and tells me the hour before my eyes find it. As private property, the plant gives him the opportunity to replay in reverse his own circumstances as deportee. Outside, on the plant’s margins, he enacts his own version of the principle of equal sovereignties and egalitarian address that the Manager is busy developing in the seclusion of the boardroom. One does not need literal doorkeepers, however, to see the logic of the border permeating the plant. At the most basic level, the plant is divided by the same sort of black-and-white binary that the documented public is bound to. Employees of all ranks spoke of two groups: Support (office workers) and Production (line workers). The plant’s layout and decor mirrors the hierarchical relation between them: white floor tiles versus painted cement, stained wood doors with fake brass fittings versus industrial steel doors, single- user versus multiple-user restrooms. The plant was even fitted, like an old English mansion, with two separate staircases. Closer inspection, though, revealed a series of flexibilities, permeabilities, structural contradictions, and small transgressions. Engineers and buyers had their offices in the production area and moved easily back and forth. A former line worker who had moved up into Support had to endure ribbing to the effect that she would not use the multiple-user, industrialstyle restroom located in Production. She was the one who first showed me the shop floor, noting that the atmosphere at work was “bien curada con que no te metas con nadie de Producción” (really cool as long as you don’t tangle with anyone in Production), for they stick together and are quick to take offense. Yet this enforcement of the boundary was precisely a response to the fact that she had personally succeeded in crossing it for good. In contrast, one accountant made a point of always eating in the cafeteria (most of Support went out for lunch), and, though it was not their preferred entrance, line workers sometimes did stroll through the reception area. The technicians, a band of young men, roved in their work throughout the factory and roved as well in protocol— they were the ones who teased the guard and were constantly committing other clownish excesses. Finally, the Manager was not the first to invite me into a board-

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room. While most of my interviews with line workers were conducted outside, in the smoking area, the janitor arranged for us to speak in the main boardroom at a long solid table with black leather executive chairs. Production and Support are the most basic categories of recognition and belonging in the plant; they represent the roughest cut of social distinction, and they betray a language of status that is at its root about class: one’s part in industrial production as the most relevant criterion for defining groups. But as the plant’s flowchart of employee positions intimates, status in the plant is actually much more complicated. First, it is not divided into two departments but four. Second, each of these includes a full range of pay levels. To see the plant as split, then, depends on chronically erasing both the lower end of Support and the upper end of Production. However well the flowchart’s fixing of status serves its own purposes, it remains in basic tension with the pervasive language of binary status. This tension is very much the tension underlying liberal publicity at the border. To participate in the Tijuana of rational debate, “I” must know where “I” stand (as the phrase goes too in Spanish). At the same time, liberal publicity demands an incessant interactional acrobatics, razzing the Manager as an equal one minute and deferring to him in silence the next. A host of social distinctions flow in and out of play, each marking an apparently momentous divide: race, class, gender, nationality, regional origins, legal status vis-à-vis the United States, formal position in the plant, or cultural capital and economic status in the bluntest sense. The more sharply these boundaries spring up between people, the less stable they seem. This is the social space within which the boardroom’s banter must be situated: a space that mimics the border not only in the metaphoric language that flourishes within it, but in its physical and social structure. It is shot through with the play of passing, the rub between fixity and mobility that sets Production and Support up against each other only to tear that division down continually. The border’s dynamics of desire and disavowal cut across the plant’s full range of social positionalities. If the security guard puts himself in the place of an immigration officer in an effort to feel power moving through him, the Manager does much the same. Suddenly more of a rioting subaltern than a wholesome citizen, he buys Bluetooth not exactly to move up, but to steal the identities of the gringos (cf. Sánchez 2016). Some time later, Edith recounted an incident she was evidently quite shaken by. After the plant shut down, the Manager and a friend of his had apparently stolen an inordinate amount of valuable equipment. They showed up at night, loaded their SUVs, and drove off. From his exalted position at the head of the plant, the Manager flips to

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deploy one of the classic “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985). Edith cannot stomach the reversal. One of her main paragons of moral order, who berated her for years with lessons of uprightness, had suddenly, as if in a disappearing act, sent himself up in a puff of smoke. As the logics of liberal publicity pervade the assembly plant, Tijuana, or Mexico and the United States, they play into and give rise to practices of passing. Sometimes passing is tense, while other times it is a game; sometimes it is accomplished in laughter. Its flux, however, is the basic context for the ambiguous, contentious formation of groups like Support and Production, documented and undocumented, or even the United States and Mexico.

3

The Place Where Anything Can Happen lunch at home with dara and inés April 23, 2007 inés picking up her bone and chewing the meat off it this is not to be done, eh? [a habitual joke of hers while eating in intimate company and that signals that she is about to take some liberty] dara says something about how one must eat like “decent folk” inés a bit piqued, no longer chewing but looking solemnly at Dara I am decent folk. dara busy with her food I had a friend who was high-class [de la high]; he lived in La Chapu. “in my house we eat with silver forks,” he’d say, and I don’t know whatall. but he ate like a pig! “uy,” I’d say to myself, “though it be with a plastic fork, but I close my mouth to chew.” inés heartily, agreeing even if all one has is a tortilla!1 1. The conversation quoted in the text has been paraphrased. inés: esto no se hace, ¿eh? dara: hay que comer como gente decente. inés: yo soy gente decente. dara: yo tenía un amigo que era de la jai, vivía en la Chapu. “en mi casa comemos con tenedor de plata”, decía, y no sé qué tanto. ¡pero comía como cerdo! “uy”,

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During my first summer of fieldwork in 2003, Inés’s daughter Dara (then in her forties) quickly proved an eager guide— as the friend who arranged our meeting put it, she was “puestísima,” most disposed. Dara soon proposed a tour of the city. Driving downtown from Inés’s house, we began the tour proper in La Chapu, Tijuana’s posh residential district.2 Next, we covered a neighborhood Dara described as clase media alta (upper middle class), and then one where, she explained, Tijuana’s original clase obrera (working class) had established itself. These, she said, were people who had earned their money in the United States but made their homes in Tijuana. We ended with the red-light district downtown, a quick jaunt from the port of entry (see figure 3.1). As we swung up the curving tree-lined streets of La Chapu, Dara told me how, as a young teenager in the 1970s, she had been initiated into knowledge of Tijuana’s elite by her older stepsister, who was set on marrying into that circle. Just as she was doing with me, her sister would enlist her on long aimless drives about the neighborhood. Pointing out the houses where eligible young bachelors lived, Dara’s sister would speculate endlessly about them and their families, parties where she might meet them, her own intangible prospects for the future. Though Dara distanced herself firmly from the wildness and impropriety of her sister’s desire and though she shared stories also of these families’ absurd wealth, which she had glimpsed as an English tutor, she nonetheless evinced longing for the time when such dreams of intimacy were possible. Back then, Dara told me, Tijuana was small enough that everyone knew everyone else. The implications of this statement run directly contrary to the tour’s organization of Tijuana into neatly separable and spatially divided socioeconomic groups. The statement, and the image of her sister cruising the streets (not so much in search of a groom as in an obsessive exercise of imaginative approximation, talking herself nearer and nearer to the world behind the mansions’ walls), show Tijuana as a place of social possibility, where the boundaries between classes are not neat and where one is not restricted to one’s place, either social or spatial. That Tijuana of possidecía yo, “yo aunque sea con tenedor de plástico pero cierro la boca para masticar”. inés: ¡con la tortilla que uno tenga! The use of forks versus tortillas has long been a salient marker of status in Mexico (Redfield 1930:51); once framed this way, Dara’s opposition of plastic to silver sketches only a modest range of social distinction in which both parties remain recognizably modern. 2. Chapu is short for Chapultepec. The name echoes that of Mexico City’s famously upscale Lomas de Chapultepec.

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Figure 3.1. Map of Tijuana. The gray area in the inset represents urbanization. Map by Marco Antonio Hernández Andrade.

bility lies in the past, as Dara repeats her place in the present and denies any desire to rise (she is a tutor, she is a teacher, she works for a living and will have none of this outlandish fantasizing), but at the same time that past is still in her, making her who she is, and she literally repeats it, driving me up and down the streets of La Chapu, pointing out the houses where important people live, and telling me these stories. Her being tijuanense has itself become a matter of her proximity to these families and her distance from others: Tijuana’s colonias populares, or working-class districts, were neatly excluded from the tour, although they constitute the bulk of the city.3 Dara is in the middle, between the excesses of the 3. Indeed, the tour was inspired by the fact I was spending much of my time in the colonias; it was meant to show me, gently, that that is not the real Tijuana. Almost half of the urban area was settled irregularly (Alegría 2009:176).

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rich and the insufficiencies of the poor, and she knows her place because she is neither one nor the other. She is suspended between them, and the talking and the traversing of these streets keep her so. It is not the spatially compartmental organization of Tijuana that anchors who Dara is (at no point does she locate herself in the landscape by saying where she has lived or worked); what anchors her is the tour’s double grain of mobility and fixity, desire and disavowal, the possibility and fending off of either becoming or being mistaken for something one is, yet, not. When Dara narrates her sister’s drives around La Chapu, the image of another’s fantasizing, another’s fictions, substitutes for her own. Dara did not marry up. She has worked all her life (before teaching English she was a secretary), and the small freedoms of her lifestyle demand careful measurement against her salary. She likes to display her knowledge of the elite, but on our tour this display took place literally from the street as a space of marked exclusion. More than mansions, we saw the solid walls around them. As Dara told me what lay beyond, I craned my neck to snatch glimpses through gates and brief openings. However authoritative the voice she musters, the tour itself constructs the street as the public place outside the walls, from whence we, the parties to discourse, attempt to grasp what goes on beyond them. Dara’s act of making a place for herself in Tijuana— as tour guide, as cognoscente, as senior initiating a neophyte— was at every instant an act of stretching her narrative to peer beyond those walls. Making the spatial city a static icon of a fixed social order, the tour charges it with ambivalence, turning it into a world of crisp divisions laid out only to be breached and broken and reerected in the selfsame gesture. Despite all my guide’s efforts, though, the walls remain far more prohibitive than permissive. She tries to forget her own exclusion by placing others (those of the colonias) even more definitively outside. But though she showed me glimpses onto the back stage, for instance, in stories about the families she tutored for, they remain glimpses from the street. Unlike her mother, she can make no bolder attempt to sweep aside the curtain, step behind the walls, and admit me to the circle. This chapter traces passing and fictionality through a variety of materials drawn from my time with Dara and Inés. In all, middleness emerges as an issue. On the one hand, the idea of Tijuana as a “middle-class” city is essential to liberal publicity and its upstanding “I.” On the other, middleclass identities emerge in elaborate and deeply ambivalent gestures of suspension— not least, in the fictionalities (citationalities) of passing. Chapter 2 explored how, when narratives lose their capacity to command recognition, “I”s inherent performativity comes to the fore as a problem. This problem is existential, but it perturbs subjectivity to different degrees

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under different historical circumstances. If Tijuana’s new clase media is plagued by the unmooring of “I,” not just in relation to the United States but (less intensely though more pervasively) in the minutiae of everyday existence, this unmooring must be read in historical light. For Dara, the 1980s are the decade in which Tijuana’s population exploded and the city was fully Mexicanized. This common narrative locates the origins of today’s Tijuana in the economic crisis that began in the late 1970s and that precipitated Mexico’s technocratic turn: the reforms that today we call “neoliberal.” The economic crash, though, was also the crash of the national narrative of progress that, during Mexico’s postwar years, seemed believable reality (Lomnitz 2003). With successive currency devaluations, the promise of the Mexican Miracle was outed as a fiction; despite recurrent neoliberal optimism, the country has never recovered. The contrast between Inés and Dara reflects this historical shift: Inés came of age as the economy boomed after World War II; Dara came of age as the first wave of crisis hit. By locating the 1980s as central to what Tijuana is, Dara defines Tijuana as the promise of escape from the economic crisis, a place people went because, thanks to the transnational assembly plant industry, there were still jobs there. But in this moment, promises had already been devalued, appearances made hollow. As a result, Tijuana is full of heady flips: it offers upward mobility in its brightest form while at the same time threatening disorder and even violence, perhaps maximally expressed in the figure of the drug trafficker.4 Though I start with the fictions involved in upward mobility, by chapter’s end we will see how they bleed into much more uncontrolled forms of passing that pervade the city and indeed define— as Dara’s tour foreshadows— the public space of its streets.

The Country Club On the way home from another ethnographic outing, this time in 2006 to town hall for some routine paperwork, Dara discovered that I had never been to the Tijuana Country Club. Much in the same vein as her tour proposal, she declared that we must go sometime, in the interest of my project. The restaurant, she explained (I likely evinced hesitation), is open to the public; she had lunched there before, and there was no impediment to her doing so again with me. As she alluded to her repeated 4. On our tour, Dara explained how the local elite lost control of the drug trade. During these same years of crisis, the country’s illicit economy transformed, turning the trafficker into a strange and fearsome figure, no longer domesticated as part of local society (cf. Mendoza 2008).

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access, the invitation (which unfortunately did not materialize) in itself displayed Dara’s familiarity with and ease in such realms. At the same time, the invitation took place again from the street, as we drove past the country club, visible on a slight rise behind a low and principally decorative wall. If the walls lining the streets of La Chapu (much taller, more prohibitive, and clearly functional) were at once barrier and grip for a kind of imaginative scaling, the token walls of the country club appeared here with a similar double function. They exist to be crossed; the distinction between each side is evoked only to be surpassed in the same gesture. The walls literalize the social barrier even as the invitation bluntly states, “There is no wall.” It is just an illusion, it flaunts, it is only real if you think it is. The lines between fantasy and reality blur. Just as we could have eaten at the country club, so Dara’s sister could have married up— as she in fact did. Both propositions are, equally, imaginative projections of social possibility. Performatively, the invitation helps cement our longstanding asymmetrical relationship. As local expert but also as senior woman, Dara lends me a hand, shows me the way. She is my mediator; I am her dependent.5 But to pass the wall is also to pass socially for something one is only just possibly on the verge of becoming. Like her stepsister’s fantasizing, the invitation paves the way for the actual physical move into a new realm and, with luck, a new life. Attending a party in La Chapu might lead to marriage; one never knows. The country club, as Dara depicts it, is a pregnant scene of social mixing in a ludic space of elite consumption.6 The real members are eating at my elbow; do they realize I am not one of them? Sliding between deception and self-transformation, this is a mimesis that leaps ahead of actuality. Knowing itself a tremulous performative, it flings itself out over the abyss of its own failure. In the stories about her sister, Dara’s “I” hovers in the vicarious citation of others’ fantasies. In her invitation, it dares to slip into the fiction.7 5. A strong patronage pattern, which will remain a theme in this chapter and subsequent ones, inflected my relationship with Dara and Inés, countervailing (though not eliminating) the cross-border dynamic between us. 6. This is an old trope characterizing Tijuana; the dizzying pleasure of racial and class mixing on an international scale was one of the main allures of the worldfamous Agua Caliente Casino. In 1930, a visitor wrote that the crowd there “represents democracy at its densest” (Vanderwood 2010:366). 7. At stake in fiction’s importance for social climbing is just the possibility that Austin argues has been overemphasized in studies on pretending: “The action he has, in pretending, actually to perform is one which will be up to a point genuinely like the action he is pretending to perform [ . . . ] and might, but for precautions, pass

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*** Inés also emphasized the openness of the country club’s restaurant. When I asked her about differences between Tijuana and her native Tapachula, located on Mexico’s southern border, she answered me with the illustrative example of the country club. Here, she told me, anyone can be a member, anyone can walk in and have lunch. Here, she could be a member.8 Surprised, I reminded her that the cost of a share was high: US$10,000, I had heard, astronomically beyond Inés’s means. But the dollar amount was not the issue. In Tapachula, Inés explained, the club kept a list of family names. If your name was not on the list, it never would be. The list as mechanism of social exclusion was literal: there was a registry at the door and a doorkeeper who looked up the names of those entering. If a person was not accompanied by someone whose name was on the list, he or she could not even go in to lunch. Needless to say, Inés’s family name was not on the list. Her father, though well-to-do, was not a landowner but merely the mechanic on a hacienda (though he had been supervisor on others). He was a Frenchman whose family had once owned a silverware factory in their home country. Though raised in Guatemala, he returned to France to fight in World War I and eventually died of poisoning from a bullet he had carried in his body since. After the war, he married into one of Guatemala’s wealthy landowning families. His own parents, however, had left him nothing, and the couple moved to Tapachula, Mexico to make their home. All I know of Inés’s history comes from her routine reminiscences during nearly two years of rooming with her. They constitute a life history told in bits and pieces, a fairly coherent attempt to construe a consistent self across the vagaries of eighty years of life and an amalgam of traditions of distinction. Her telling is piecemeal, but, across the variety of these traditions and of her life trajectory, Inés draws a single, sure arc: from Tapachula to Tijuana, all that matters in that enormous span of space and time is the single comparison, closed versus open, fixity versus mobility, blood versus money, the principles of the aristocracy versus those of the bourgeoisie, and the certainty of her own identity in this opposition, her own movement from Tapachula toward Tijuana, in which the need for Tijuana was ever prefigured in her father’s own irremediable exclusion. Inés’s father was not on the list, but the fondness of her childhood over into it” (1961:258). The limit one might “pass over” here is only, Austin points out, a matter of what is “socially permissible” (265). 8. In the 1930s too, the Agua Caliente Casino distinguished itself from “the exclusive clubs back East and abroad” (Vanderwood 2010:221).

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memories is overwhelming. She never snubbed her nose at a meal but sat on stones to eat and ran barefoot with the (probably indigenous) children on outings to her father’s rancho in the country.9 Her mother taught her to treat everyone alike, just as she says she taught her son hay que reconocer (one must recognize/give due). But it is without irony that Inés reports her playmates called her amita, “little mistress.” Nor is there any irony in her recollections of the orphans her mother took in, also to be treated equally, “just like” brothers and sisters— though she chuckled over how she would physically torment her little “brother” to tears.10 It is thus with a complete lack of self-consciousness that Inés evokes one of Mexico’s most notoriously racist and hierarchical societies, the plantations of Chiapas’s Soconusco, as the original setting of her own deeply authentic personal orientation to egalitarianism. She likes to talk of the rancho, but she lingers on the grandeur of the family home, the thick curtains and matching furniture upholstered in red velvet. “Of those of middling position (mediana posición) as was my father,” she told me one day, “he was the only one who had a car.” Inés’s use here of “middle” has nothing to do with income brackets or lifestyles. Instead, the term bears all the weight of the social conflict she sketches in the opposition between the country clubs described above— all the weight of her struggle to assert her honor, of “hay que reconocer” as a family project handed down (she hopes) to her children, inherited (she claims repeatedly) from her mother. “Clase media” means not on the list in Tapachula, but admissible in Tijuana, if not without a fight. The arc of this conflict, the arc of having always been middle-class, wavers not only in face of the luxury of Inés’s childhood and her privileged background on both parents’ sides, but also in face of the fluctuations in her fortune. Inés’s father died when she was only seven or eight years old. After that, her mother was obliged to take in boarders, primarily men connected with the railroad. Inés thus began working at an early age. Just as, when the local priest jumped into their patio running for his life, her father’s word was enough to keep his pursuers from searching the house, so Inés was trusted by the railmen to carry their sacks of money to the station. She grew strong with this, she says, and accustomed to work. 9. The theme of the master’s eating with the servants is one of Inés’s favorites; she performs it (as does Dara) in her meals with a former neighbor who fixes things around the house. Inés and Dara play the role of benevolent patrons, but this man’s wife, at least, seems to see Inés instead as an old friend they are helping. 10. One of these “siblings” lives in Tijuana; her class habitus is that of the colonias populares. Upon mentioning her, Inés would always add in a lowered voice: “But you know she’s not really my sister.”

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When she was a teenager, the family moved to Mexico City, and Inés took jobs as a seamstress and a salesgirl until, already with a failed marriage and a baby daughter (Dara) on her hands, she hit on her next great stroke of luck: Mauricio, the father of her sons. Mauricio was Colombian, and, though he too abhorred ossified status systems, he held papers proving his descent from Spanish aristocracy. He had, moreover, some money. As Inés told me, in Mexico City “we were, as they say, gente bien.”11 Their marital bliss included a well-appointed apartment with servants and constant contact with the cultural elite, for Mauricio was an editor with the national publishing house. Before long, though, he sickened, and the doctors recommended a change of climate— hence the move to Tijuana. Here, Inés became the family’s economic mainstay. The situation worsened after Mauricio’s death, and Inés raised her three boys a widow; Dara quit school to help support her half brothers. Today Inés lives comfortably but modestly on a weekly allowance from Gil, her oldest son. She supplements her income by giving sewing lessons and selling handicraft projects to her circle. Her sedan is secondhand; she rents her home. She has the full complement of appliances (though even quite humble shacks here can usually boast a few), but all the valuable furniture was lost in a flood long ago. In the mornings, she waters her plants and sweeps the street. If she does not have to go out on some errand, she will spend the day at work in her sewing room. Puttering about her house, Inés reminisces. She rummages the past to gather it into the single swift, sure arc she traces from Tapachula to Tijuana, the arc that defines what it means to be in the middle. Behind this arc lurks the paradigmatic contrast “here in Tijuana” / “there in the South”— Inés’s arc implies a national geography of value within which she can locate herself. This geography is also temporal. Inés banks on her ability to frame Tijuana as a future she had, in retrospect, always anticipated. Never mind that for the family the city should represent a move down instead of up, as it is generally supposed to; never mind that Inés is descended from estate owners and manufacturers, or that Gil carries the blood of Spanish nobility. Tijuana gives the chance to remake the past in its own idiom, as middle-class. Inés’s stories, however, burst beyond their framing. In the arc, Tijuana seems predestined; in the puttering stories, it is apparent that nothing was assured. Reaching back to her childhood, the arc sustains stories like that of the photography contest examined in chapter 2; hooking each into a web of memories, it deepens them, gives them biographical flesh. But it 11. Gente bien is similar to the gente decente of this chapter’s opening vignette; both refer to society’s upper crust. Neither term is common in Tijuana.

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remains a tenuous gesture. Inés amasses wildly discrepant signs of status: not just Spanish aristocracy, bourgeois capitalism, Guatemalan hacienda ownership, and pan–Latin American cultural elitism, but also consumption (from cars in the 1930s to Target and Walmart in the 2000s), the humble distinction of her craft (she is still most widely addressed as “Profe”), and even the dignity of the lowliest manual labor. Inés gloats over how her most successful son, a corporate accountant, got his start mopping floors at a mini-mall. When Mauricio died, many people asked Inés whatever would she do. Her proud answer: “What I’ve always done. Work.” In that statement, the continuity of her “I” appears unflinching. In perspective, though, it papers over a tremendously varied history. Inés has persevered in life, and she has every reason to be proud. One particularly crucial aspect of her story that her upstanding “I” papers over, however, is the way it is marked by the comings and goings of men, from father to husband to son. Despite her emphasis on her own independence, it was only under economic duress that her “I” could test its mettle. It emerges to fill the gaps, to tide her over, but it was never enough to guarantee the next upswing. If the family line is traced through Dara instead of the boys, it becomes a story of stark downward mobility. The middle-classness that mother and daughter have found in Tijuana is not the middle-classness of upright prosperity redeeming the tribulations of the past, but the middle-classness of insecurity and shattered hopes often considered typical of Latin America ( Jiménez 1999). It is in this context— structural insecurity accented by gender— that fictionality comes to the fore. The attempt to construe others as dependents is a classic technique for claiming full citizenship in Mexico (Lomnitz 2001:13), and Inés does her best to play the part of the good patron, for instance by tipping generously and thus securing extra attentiveness from the service people in her life. But when it comes to cultivating more intimate clients (mostly young women, like Edith or me, whom she tries to take in as her mother did), their vision of the relationship is seldom in sync with hers. Mother and daughter both, finally, hover at the edge of an identity not their own.12 It is Dara herself who most deliberately shows up the element of passing in her mother’s stories, for she literally calls out their lies. “Are you kidding me?” she asked me with a snort one day. Though, like her mother, she had originally told me the family moved to Tijuana for Mau12. This problem of a masterfully defended but not-fully-inhabitable “I” assails Inés’s public speech as well, for the intensely masculine ideals of liberal publicity exclude her even as she strives to appropriate them. One effect, seen in chapter 2, is that, in Inés’s own story, the ultimate defender of rational debate is not herself but her son.

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ricio’s health, now she said that was a smokescreen: they were broke. “In Mexico City, we never would have made it,” Dara told me. “That’s why I’m so grateful to Tijuana.” If Inés dwells on Tijuana as the epitome of social openness, Dara shoves forward the bluntly economic side of things. In doing so, she outs her mother’s stories as fictions. Next to Dara’s related but profoundly more uncertain performative project, Inés’s concept of middleness begins to appear— just like the liberal publicity that is itself, it turns out, a performance of middleness— as a fetish shoring up a sense of self that history has not assured. “Clase media” emerges as a convenient tag standing in for a whole project to anchor a social position on the body of the nation and in the individual self. As the failures and shortcomings of this project become evident, it loosens into passing’s deliberate skating over ambiguities. But that which mother and daughter can make of Tijuana is very much a function of what everyone else comes here to do as well. This city is, after all, the American Dream within Mexico: the place where fiction becomes reality.

The Frontier Myth While Mexico’s border with the United States is known as the frontera, and while one speaks from afar of crossing the frontera, in Tijuana it is more common to say one lives en la frontera, as one lives en Chicago or en California. The word denotes a zone more than a political boundary, and this has to do with its semantic difference from the English: frontera translates “frontier” as well. On the occasion of its fourth anniversary in 2003, the newspaper Frontera (owned by an out-of-state firm) published this back-page spread: i am of the frontera Those who accept the challenge of living here are of the frontera. The dedicated and hardworking ones, the ones who seek to improve this region. The vanguardists and restless ones, the ones who on a daily basis strive to excel. For them, the frontera is not a limit or a fence, it’s the place where anything can happen, because they know they are capable of achieving it. To be of the frontera is to be open and frank, it’s to look each other straight in the eye and converse, exchanging opinions and accepting dialogue. We, at frontera , honestly keep informed those who know that this community writes its history daily with deeds and effort.

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We work for those who are capable of affirming: I am from the frontera.13

Despite the Mexican eagle and serpent in the background, the spread is perfectly modeled on Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 eulogy to the US frontiersman: To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom— these are the traits of the frontier. (Turner 1961:61)

The advertisement in Frontera improves on Turner’s summary by including his idea that “the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy” (56). As Frontera spins it, this frontier brand of democracy is largely defined in the terms of liberal publicity and its standards for individual subjectivity. “To be of the frontera is to be open and frank, it’s to look each other straight in the eye and talk, exchanging opinions and accepting dialogue.” “‘I do know what I’m talking about because I do know about photography,’ Gil said to him. And he set to arguing with them,” Inés told me. She is not alone in associating Tijuana with the upstanding heroism of democratic debate. In Frontera’s commemorative spread, her ideals of honorable, informed debate circulate as a public text. If Tijuana is an “open” society (in the double sense, now, of social openness and of an “open and frank” character), this is because it is a frontier society— or likes to think of itself as such. For Turner, the uniqueness and power of the frontier experience lay in the emergence of a class of freeholders, enterprising souls each working 13. July 25, 2003. “yo soy de frontera / Son de frontera los que aceptan el reto de vivir aquí. Los dedicados y trabajadores, los que buscan mejorar esta región. Los vanguardistas e inquietos, los que se superan todos los días. Para ellos, la frontera no es un límite o una barda, es el lugar donde todo puede suceder, porque se saben capaces de lograrlo. Ser de frontera es ser abierto y franco, es mirarse de frente y platicar intercambiando opiniones y aceptando el diálogo. Nosotros, en FRONTERA, informamos con honestidad para los que saben que esta comunidad escribe su historia diariamente con hechos y esfuerzo. Trabajamos para quienes son capaces de afirmar: Yo soy de frontera.”

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their own private plot of land. These freeholders formed the mythical bedrock of US democracy, and they stand as the forerunners of all the middle class has come to symbolize today. Historically, northern Mexico was not as wildly different as one might think. Friedrich Katz describes how the military colony— an institution unique to the North— created a society of freeholders that “closely corresponded to the kind of U.S. frontier society painted in vivid colors by Frederick Jackson Turner” (1998:13). Indeed, Katz argues, it was closer to Turner’s vision, because the financial and state institutions Turner has been critiqued for ignoring really were absent here. Whether colonial northern Mexico was indeed a society of rugged individuals, however, is beside the point. After all, Tijuana did not partake of this history but was born in a much later frenzy of free-for-all venture capitalism (Vanderwood 2010). Instead, what matters is that in Mexico the frontier did not become the national myth. Tijuana’s dominant society articulates its frontier mythology against a national discourse that has, in contrast to the United States, labeled the frontier barbarous and un-Mexican. In the United States, the myth of the middle class that undergirded the country throughout the twentieth century promised that both economic security and social belonging truly can be universalized. According to this myth, the “I”s that originally made up the nation were not just responsible, agentive individuals; they were also, crucially, property holders. For Turner, the frontier democratized property, so that political democratization was driven by ambition for profit. In Tijuana too, hard work and plump profits are supposed to go hand in hand with the debating disposition: Frontera circulates “honest” information among (in its words) “those who know that this community writes its history daily with deeds and effort.” The spread appropriates the US frontier myth and its formula— merit generates prosperity— as integral to the formation of Tijuana as a middle-class “community.” It sets the scene for upward mobility not just as morally justified but as itself the guarantee of morality for both the individual and the society.

*** In one of our first interviews, Dara crisply articulated the equation between Tijuana and upward mobility. Describing the local economy, she used the term población flotante (floating population) in reference to workers in the assembly plant industry, closely associated with Tijuana’s demographic boom in the 1980s and 1990s. The term usually refers to the flow of migrants to the United States, but Dara was describing unheard-of levels of job mobility— people working for a couple weeks, then quitting

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only to go out and get yet another job shortly after.14 When I asked if she meant floating in the sense that this population had no stability of employment, rather than in the usual sense of residency, she answered: both. lots of those people come from the interior of the republic. they work for a few months, they don’t like it, they go back. again they feel uncomfortable there. again they come back. that’s how they pass their time.15

She conflates the recent migrant to Tijuana, working low-status assembly line jobs, with the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. Indecisiveness becomes this figure’s distinguishing characteristic: they’ve crossed, it took them months of work to save up the money. they’ve crossed, they’re working over there, things are going well for them. their mom gets a toothache and, voom! they jump on the plane and head back to Michoacán. they save up money again [she laughs], they spend another few months working, they pay the pollero16 again, and they cross again. that’s how they pass their time.17

Coming just a few moments after the earlier quote, the repetition of the phrase “That’s how they pass their time” poetically seals the parallel. Returning to our main subject, she explained: so the population of the assembly plants is floating in those two ways. very few people last six months in an assembly plant. when they’ve lasted six months or more, the plant starts considering them for higher posi14. Though Dara was secretary to the personnel manager in an assembly plant in the 1980s, the rates she describes are, even for that time, grossly exaggerated. Canales cites a 1990 study that puts the monthly turnover rate in Tijuana’s maquiladora industry at 12.7 percent (1995:142), though he notes the rate varied wildly from plant to plant. 15. “Las dos cosas. mucha de esa gente viene del interior de la república. trabaja unos meses, no le gusta, se regresa. vuelve a estar incómodo allá. se vuelve a regresar. así se la llevan.” 16. A pollero is a person who, for a fee, takes undocumented migrants across the border. 17. “Ya se cruzaron, les costó meses de trabajo ahorrar equis cantidad de dinero. ya se cruzaron, están trabajando allá, les está yendo bien. le dolió la muela a la mamá y ¡fum! agarran el avión y salen pa’ Michoacán. vuelven a juntar dinero, se pasan otros tantos meses trabajando, vuelven a pagarle al pollero, y se vuelven a cruzar. y así se la llevan.”

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tions, supervisors, things of this nature. so that person, that’s what we call, who’s drunk water from the dam.18 he [or she] stays here, establishes him- [or her]self, etcetera, etcetera.19

In this excerpt, settlement in Tijuana and upward mobility are synonymous. No one who stays in Tijuana for more than six months has any job lower than supervisor. All those sweating away on the assembly line may safely be assumed not to be tijuanenses, even in the most minimal sense of residing in the city. The labor that drives Tijuana’s economy is the labor of a fickle, “floating” population. That is not Tijuana. The line between Tijuana and this “floating population” lies, however, not in the six months but in the fickleness. What can be gauged in six months steady at a single job is your attitude toward work, your development as an intentful person, your abandonment of the indecision that marks the migrant. You are no longer flighty; you no longer shoot wads of money on airplane tickets and polleros. You have developed goals and commitments in life beyond your mom’s toothache. By staying at your job, you have taken the first step toward the upstanding tijuanense “I” and toward distinguishing yourself from the undocumented migrant. When you have thus proven your mettle and your disposition, “we” will welcome you with open arms into our “community” of “deeds and effort.” This community is the community of the middle class— for, recall, there is no one in it who is anything less than a supervisor. Tijuana is generous, as the saying goes, and she rewards justly.

Passing and Placeholders Tijuana’s openness is a myth, but it is not without sociological basis. Upward mobility is borne out by the city’s historically high wages and low rate of unemployment.20 “Aquí no ves pobres pobres” (Here you won’t 18. “El que toma agua de la presa, regresa” (he who drinks water from the dam returns). According to Dara, the saying dates from the time when the road over the dam was the only way into Tijuana from southern Mexico. 19. “Entonces, la población de las maquiladoras es flotante en esos dos sentidos. son pocas las personas que en una maquiladora duran seis meses. ya cuando duraron seis meses o más, la maquiladora ya los empieza a considerar para puestos superiores, supervisores, cuestiones de esta naturaleza. ’tonces esa persona, es lo que llamamos, que ya toma agua de la presa. ya se queda, se establece, etcétera, etcétera.” 20. In the 1920s, Baja California’s governor claimed peons there earned wages four times those paid elsewhere in the country (Vanderwood 2010:121). In the 1960s, the minimum wage was as much as 80 percent above the national average (INEGI

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find any really poor people), a domestic worker noted, qualifying her exposition on inequality and ill conditions in the city. At the same time, Tijuana’s wage earners have had at their disposal a range of commodities unimaginable further south. Not so very long ago, import substitution policies kept a tight guard on foreign products; at the border, however, consumption could never be regulated in quite the same way. Contraband is a venerable tradition here and takes place at the pettiest level— Inés herself boasts of how she used to bring across loads of cloth for her sewing business. The law is both drawn to regulating these flows and obliged to make certain concessions to them, and since the nineteenth century controls on trade have been one of the main mechanisms shaping the border as a distinct region within Mexico (Herrera Ramos 1988; Herrera Pérez 2001). But whether through legal or illegal imports, Tijuana has had at its fingertips the commercial paradise of Southern California, along with its bounteous spillover of secondhand goods. Though market circumstances throughout Mexico are quickly changing, Tijuana remains awash in commodities as most of the country is not.21 As a new and, until recently, rapidly growing city, Tijuana is also the site of a fair amount of anomie.22 In his classic work on migration to Mexico City, Oscar Lewis (1952, 1961) demonstrated the importance of close-knit residential communities, but in Tijuana networks at the neighborhood level are strikingly weak. No Catholic calendar forms them into corporate groups, as is true even in densely urban areas farther south; in the colonias populares, people tend to come together only around the struggle for land tenancy and public services.23 Relations in public are 2009:439–40); average income in the late 1980s was 20 percent higher than in Ciudad Juárez and 60 percent higher than in Mexico City (Zenteno 1995:127–28). In 2009, Tijuana’s unemployment rate surpassed that of other major Mexican cities for the first time in twenty years (Coubès n.d.). 21. Import substitution industrialization did not prevent a flood of foreign goods post–World War II; this is the epoch generally recognized as that in which the clase media came into its own. But even today, twenty years after NAFTA, price and availability can vary sharply both across the border and within Mexico. On consumption in the US-Mexico borderlands, see McCrossen (2009) and Heyman’s (1991, 1994, 1997) pioneering work. 22. From 1990 to 2000, Tijuana’s rate of growth (5.5 percent per annum) still outstripped that of all other large cities in Mexico. Over the next decade, that rate dropped considerably— but it did so everywhere (Consejo Nacional de Población 2012). 23. The colonia I worked in that had the densest relations between neighbors was settled in a violent campaign that brought people together in a lasting fashion very different from other apparently similar areas.

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dominated by anonymity; even at the neighborhood level, the amount of sedimented knowledge that can be brought to bear on the routine task of socially locating those around one plummets. Instead, the immediately perceptible signs of status come to the fore, and people feel sharply the lack of anything else on which to rely. This is a place famed for accruing the scum of two countries; it is a favorite place for wanted criminals to disappear in, and people comment frequently on this fact.24 For residents, the lack of social referents is a source of great anxiety. Historically in Tijuana, masses of people dislocated from quite various contexts25 have found themselves in new social relations (many, for instance, speak of this city as the place where they first sold their labor for a wage), immersed in intensified stranger sociability, amid the accelerated circulation of cash and commodities. This is the context in which the frontier myth must be understood. The grounds for social recognition shift; what seems in hindsight like a rigidly fixed social order feels like it is being unmoored. The status of individuals is in flux; the larger social formations are in flux; and the semiotic standards for marking social difference are also in flux.26 It is no accident that people like Inés or Dara seem to think they can make what they will of this heady mixture. It is no accident they think that here on the frontier the promise of the clase media might finally come true. When, in this chapter’s opening dialogue, Inés and Dara tussle over the chicken bone, their small dispute exemplifies, at an utterly banal level, the unmooring that marks Tijuana. They tussle, essentially, over the signs of status. One must eat like decent folk, Dara reminds her mother—gente decente is a set term for the upper crust. I am decent folk, Inés replies. But for Dara, one cannot embody the standard but only approximate oneself to it mimetically: one can only be like decent folk. With her chicken bone, Inés indulges in a kind of downward passing that, by Dara, they can no 24. A national police database was only created under President Calderón (2006– 2012). Before, an arrest warrant could be avoided by moving to another state. Of drug traffickers, some say that they are easily identifiable, whereas others say not at all. See Muehlmann (2014:171–73) for some examples. 25. Besides migrants from all over Mexico, Tijuana boasts a small but oft- noted number of foreigners: US citizens in the main, but also many Asians and Latin Americans (Alegría 2005). 26. Compare Liechty’s description of Kathmandu: “A rapid influx of distinctive commodities has severely disrupted established codes of display, thereby opening up avenues for persons and groups to either stake claims in higher social categories or, more often, raise the stakes for maintaining membership in groups to which they already belong” (2003:114–15).

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longer afford. Despite the disclaimer, one might be mistaken for a boor. Merit cannot rest on its laurels the way aristocracy rests on those musty old papers with the family shield drawn on them; the claim to being “decent folk” must be defended in the increasingly sharp focus on the details of daily life: how one dresses, how one speaks, how one chews one’s food. Indeed, Dara’s attention to these matters is acute. Whatever recognition she can command hinges on an unrelenting performance, the constant mobilization of a host of subtle signs. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias (1994) locates two historical moments in northern Europe in which manners came into focus as a matter of urgent concern. Both were in-between periods, in which one social structure was dissolving but the next had not yet solidified: the sixteenth century, when the feudal nobility gave way to the aristocracy of the absolutist courts, and the eighteenth century, culminating with the bourgeois revolutions that gave rise to the modern state. The issue was just the sort of semiotic crisis seen in Inés and Dara’s tussle. In Germany, where the nobility and the middle class were both relatively poor, the nobles insisted on the distinction of their ancestry (19)— just the strategy Dara warns against. In France, social mixing was accepted, but status had to be marked obsessively; like Dara, “People moulded themselves and others more deliberately” (68). This molding opened the door to bourgeois imitation of court manners, which were consequently devalued (86). Amid the flux of twenty-first-century Tijuana, Dara’s disdain for the young fellow from La Chapu takes such devaluation one step further. She tries to shift the signs of human dignity to those within her purview: not silver forks but the delicacy with which one chews one’s meat. What makes her friend truly piglike is his gross adherence to a ridiculous notion of status, belied by his sadly mistaken faith in silver forks, and it is a whiff of this old system that Dara perceives in Inés’s overconfidence in eating. In turn, Inés recognizes in Dara’s chastisement her own principles of egalitarianism, and so she is willing, in that moment, to open the floodgates of status even to those who use but a tortilla to eat. Mother and daughter ultimately agree: the real gente decente are not the upper class. We can be the gente decente, but only so long as we eat decently. Only so long as we keep constantly in mind that respect is not given, but earned. At the same time, money and the material means for signaling status remain at issue.27 Elias writes that in a context of social flux, money comes to the fore as a 27. Note how Dara’s theory of distinction clashes with Bourdieu’s (1984), suggesting, with Elias, that it is only under conditions of class stability that habitus can be fully naturalized as proof of social position.

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signifier of status (1994:90); Max Weber claims the same thing (1978:938). But with Inés and Dara, the meaning of money becomes problematic. Certainly Inés emphasizes its purported democracy: anyone can lunch at the Tijuana Country Club; anyone can be a member for US$10,000. When, in my naive ethnographic efforts, I hounded Inés to list for me Tijuana’s “old family names,” this list had its literal corollary in her past, in the list kept at the door of the Tapachula Country Club. A working girl could not go in, she emphasized— but this working girl was also the daughter of her worthy father, the only man in town of “middling position” to own a car. Unlike the wealth of the upper class, which smells of stagnancy and corruption, his money can safely be assumed to signify merit. Depending on the situation, money for Inés can indicate either end of this political spectrum. For wealth to command public recognition as the sign of authentic meritoriousness, the slate of history must be wiped clean. The traces of other meanings must be eliminated; the “old family names” with their lists and silver forks must be put down. But this is exactly what Inés does not ultimately do. She is remorseless in her attack— until it comes to herself. She may reject silver forks and the proverbial silk diapers, but she lingers nostalgically on red velvet and automobiles. All these objects undeniably form a set. Inés tears them apart, trying to devalue some and redeem others. “Clase media” or “middling position,” finally, are nominal forms giving shape to a horde of little performances and objects, a proliferation of the semiotic marks of distinction. These must be regimented into coherence; middle- class status should emerge as if naturally from their coarticulation. The little signs (the authoritative voice of the tour guide, the ease with which an invitation to the country club may be proffered) must be meshed continually into larger narratives and moral projects. If the clase media flies in the face of fixed status, it does so at once in the complex narratives of a person like Inés and in the little gestures that give those narratives lived substance, that anchor them in the present and fill them out as ongoing projects. In the exchange between mother and daughter with which this chapter opens, “clase media” takes on flesh not just in their dispute, but in the greasy joint between Inés’s fingers, the tear of her teeth at the shredding tendons. The two women navigate an endless plethora of signs they hope to loop into a single conceptual whole. Over and over they make their small gestures, patting new and old apart into separate heaps. But as Inés’s life history reveals, the signs in play do not all fit comfortably together under the shifting canopies with which she tries to catch them. There is much work to be done to unhitch and rehitch them to different standards, different life-projects, different regimenting master terms. This is the shifting ground that, it is often noted, the middle

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class must balance on: a ground that is partly shoved under it by such developments as commodification and urbanization noted above, but that is also very much a quicksand of its own making. In Inés’s stories, Tijuana appears as the national scene of confrontation between the principles of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, North and South, the openness of the frontier versus a closed hierarchy inherited from colonial times. These principles attach to Tijuana’s two main interlocutors: the United States and the South. The city is suspended between them just as “clase media” is suspended between the binomial opposition of “rich” and “poor.” Once I asked Inés point-blank if she considered herself clase media. She answered that she did, “Porque no me falta, pero tampoco me sobra” (I don’t want for anything, but I don’t have anything extra either). Her definition is not far from that given me by a young man in a strikingly different but equally ambiguous class position: ferociously attached to his origins as “poor,” he had nonetheless, thanks to his illegal activities, enjoyed for much of his life a fairly high level of consumption. “The middle class is in a limbo,” he derisively pronounced. “It’s just floating.” In these folk definitions, the clase media is imagined as existing only in a balancing act. One indeed “floats” between the poor, defined by their want, and the rich, defined by their excesses. This floating middleness, as we have seen, is a matter of imitation— after all, as Dara puts it, one can only eat like decent folk. In this context, the repetition of little semiotic acts in the hope that they will add up to something— the careful administration of refractory signs, the attempt to regiment them into larger narratives of self— represents an all-too-fragile effort to pin down an “I” that has been set adrift, no longer locked in clear relation to other, established parts of society. The disputes over signs that constitute this uncertain middleness may look petty enough, but, taken together as the overwhelming ambience of status and self in Tijuana, they comprise a veritable crisis of representation.

Unmooring Andrew Apter uses “crisis of representation” to describe the proliferation of fraud after Nigeria’s economic crisis of the early 1980s (Mexico was also an oil-based “miracle” economy that crashed at that time) and a general “unhinging of individual and collective identities from fixed social coordinates” (1999:298). For Apter, the origins of fraud and unhinging lay in the boom period, when a new bourgeoisie overwhelmed the old status system; even then, passing was already widespread, for example, in the popularity of foreign educational degrees of obscure provenance. In an immediate sense, though, the crisis of representation was triggered by

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the abrupt disappearance of oil as anchor for all value. Apter’s argument resonates with Sánchez’s (2016:6) picture of the Independence movement in Venezuela: the removal of the king, Sánchez argues, precipitated flight from set social identities, as subalterns found themselves freed from their colonial niches. Tijuana’s frontier myth likewise sees Tijuana as a city of people set loose from the Mexican state and the society its system of authority holds (however tenuously) in place. But for the clase media, at least, the frontier myth provides a line of defense against the more radical implications of this apparent vacuum of authority: “I.” In 1989, Ernesto Ruffo Appel became the first state governor in Mexico from an opposition party. Looking back on his landmark electoral victory, he explained: Another important factor is that in Baja California there’s a tradition of rebellion; we’re the ones who were run out from the center [of the country]. [ . . . ] Everyone who couldn’t find work, who wasn’t looked on favorably in the center, who had no opportunities in Mexico28 had to leave. So they passed through Baja California and stayed here. There is no basic respect for the political system or for the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]. Baja California is a state that puts its trust in itself, because all of us are from somewhere else and we’ve realized where we made our patrimony.29

In Ruffo’s narrative, “I” comes into its own where the state and the “political system” fade. The Mexican state is by no means absent in Tijuana, but Ruffo’s words do reflect a certain difference from attitudes elsewhere in the country. In Sánchez’s terms, those who come here have found the Mexican state but a thin and brittle mirror, its self- representation as a liberal democracy nothing but a machine of capture to still a restive population, and they have run away. If one reads Ruffo as saying, as many do, that Tijuana is a product of the economic crisis that began in 1976, the parallel with Nigeria echoes even more evocatively. 28. México is ambiguously either the country as a whole or Mexico City. 29. Cited in Amezcua and Pardinas (1997:45). Patrimonio refers to that which one can hand down to one’s children. “Otro factor importante es que en Baja California hay una tradición de rebeldía, somos los corridos del centro [ . . . ] todos los que no podían encontrar trabajo, los que no eran bien vistos en el centro, los que no tenían oportunidades en México, se tuvieron que ir; entonces pasaron por Baja California y se quedaron ahí. No hay un respeto original al sistema político, ni al PRI. Baja California es una entidad que confía en sí misma, puesto que todos somos de otra parte y nos hemos dado cuenta dónde hicimos nuestro patrimonio.”

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Bourgeois revolution always has two faces, unmooring and reanchoring, often tangled in an ambivalent tug of war. The Nigerian bourgeoisie of the oil boom might have established their values as a new social standard, but the crash took their attack on the signs of status in a totally different direction. The good citizen, in such contexts, can slide wholesale into the criminal. Inés and Dara do not go so far. Caught at the edge of being able to inhabit their fictions of themselves as middle-class citizens, they hesitate between fiction as a technique for building or exiting the self. As they play with the latter possibility, they flirt with the citationality of “I,” with mimicry, with the impulse that in Nigeria led to rampant fraud. One can try to prop “I” up with some new external source of recognition— the US State, for instance— or one can abandon oneself to the thrill of unmooring, even if just a little. If Tijuana is the American Dream within Mexico, the place where fictions become reality, it is also a place where appearances, no matter how much stake is set by them (or for just that reason) should always be expected to deceive. Before Tijuana’s anomie and its whirlwind of cash and commodities, Dara feels not anxiety but fascination. Like many, she proudly identifies sartorial informality as an expressly local trait, US in origin, and in sharp contrast to southern Mexico, and Mexico City in particular. As she explains to me the “custom” here, how it appears in public comes to the fore: that’s another thing here in Tijuana, dress. dress here is very informal, everybody goes around in Levi’s. other places, you’ve got money and you dress up a bit, and, with a little necktie. even if you don’t have money you give the appearance that you have a better position. not here in Tijuana. here you, in Tijuana you come across a guy with boots, Levi’s, kinda messed-up hair, some funky shirt like so. and he pulls out a wad of dollars on you! a wad of hundred-dollar bills. [ . . . ] or you see him, he’s eating, he’s eating at [Toro?] Tacos, [?], an appearance such that you wouldn’t give a penny for him. and he gets into a big ol’ brand-new car, a pickup, such that you’re frozen, like this, right? wow.30 30. “Esa es otra cosa aquí en Tijuana, la vestimenta. aquí la vestimenta es muy informal, todo mundo anda de liváis. en otras partes, tienes dinero y te vistes más o menos, y, con corbatita. aunque no tengas dinero das la apariencia de que tienes una mejor posición. aquí en Tijuana no. aquí ten-, en Tijuana te encuentras a un cuate de botas, liváis, el pelo medio mal arreglado, una camisetucha así. ¡y te saca el fajo de dólares! fajo de billetes de cien dólares. [ . . . ] o lo ves, está comiendo, está comiendo en los Tacos [Toros?], [?], la apariencia así que no das un penny por él. y se sube a un carrazo del año, un picáp, que te quedas helada, así, ¿no? guau.”

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In these anecdotes, the opacity of others’ status in public is not a problem, but a precondition for the pleasure of revelation. Inés has comparable stories of her son Gil’s exploits: at photography conventions, his informality may put people off, but his work and way of speaking inevitably garner recognition. Like the truck belonging to the man at the taco stand, his speech condenses his power to command attention. That power is magnified by its unexpectedness, the way it is concealed by appearances. It depends on loosening power and its signs from any fixed basis in inherited status. The anonymity of the street, like the photography convention where participants meet for the first time, appears pregnant with an exciting unpredictability. As in the country club or the parties of La Chapu, one never knows what one might encounter. But the irony of informality is that, while it begins as iconoclastic, it quickly constitutes a new standard. Inés is careful not to take Gil’s impropriety too far beyond the pale: he’s not slovenly, she assures me; he’ll just use khakis and a nice polo shirt instead of the tragically stuffy suit. As when Dara remonstrates with her mother for chewing on a chicken bone, the two set signs loose only to hurriedly retrap them. In these stories of public encounter, Dara’s imagination opens across a social boundary. She feels herself surrounded (she says this is Tijuana’s mark) by people in disguise. Encounter with them does not just hold extraordinary and surprising possibilities, such as marriage up. It is a source of exhilaration in itself, a reveling in pure contact— the sight of money or the truck that seems to impact on its own— that was also present in her invitation to the country club and in our caressing movement along the walls of La Chapu. Dara’s excitement seems innocent and girlish, but it has an evil twin. The anecdotes above are strikingly close to warnings common among Tijuana’s middle classes: you can never know, it is said, if the person next to you is not a drug trafficker. Altercations while driving should be met with calm acquiescence, for such people kill at the slightest provocation. As in Dara’s stories or her invitation to the country club, restaurants are a recurrent theme in these warnings, for they are often the site of shoot-outs. One must know which locales traffickers frequent, and one must search the public for the signs that distinguish the trafficker— though one can never be sure he does not look just like oneself. That Dara finds signs of unexpected wealth in public thrilling rather than frightening perhaps reflects her youth in another Tijuana, where trafficking was, as she told it on our tour, only part of the local prestige system, for the drug trade was still controlled by the local elite. Without the now-menacing association with traffickers, Dara’s reaction to public flashes of hidden wealth resonates instead with popular fantasies about them. Part of the trafficker’s popular appeal, after all, lies in his ability to enter the spaces

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of the elite, acquire the objects of their enjoyment, and appropriate their power without becoming one of them. Like Sánchez’s subalterns, traffickers both kill those above them and mimetically occupy their identities, and to fantasize about being a trafficker is to fantasize about feeling the force of this rioting, this violent unmooring of the social order, move through one oneself.31 Dara’s excitement is tamer, but it springs from the same source. To be awash in commodities, to be admitted to the country club, is not a sign of social revolution. But even this classically timorous and conservative middle class exhibits the tremors of an oscillation that, at other moments and in other strata of society, can take far more dramatic form. This is all the more so because this clase media is no bourgeoisie, however much it styles itself in a liberal language inherited from the original bourgeois revolutions. Inés is a seamstress; Dara is a schoolteacher; even Gil the entrepreneur runs a shop with a handful of employees under him. They do not control the conditions of their existence, and if Inés’s sons have been able to make something of themselves, it is doubtful what patrimonio (to recall Ruffo’s term) Inés or Dara have been able to accrue. As Inés’s best friend Mercedes, a woman of peasant origins, smilingly told me, “They [Inés and her progeny] want to feel themselves patrones [bosses, patrons], [ . . . ] but if you don’t have the capital, you can’t live that life.” Passing begins when the signs of status start to slide. As Sasha Newell (2012) argues, though Western traditions have stigmatized mimesis, its performative magic can be powerfully productive. In Tijuana, anxieties over authenticity versus the overt mobilization of mimesis are socially distributed; Dara and Inés show the tipping point between the two. With Inés’s battle for distinction and attack on fixed status, the slide is set in motion. It accelerates thanks to the anomie and anonymity of urbanization and Tijuana’s rapid circulation of cash and commodities. With Dara, sliding crescendos into a continual performance understood as such. Passing is thus imbued with fantasies of transformation and possibility, even as it is predicated on hierarchy and prohibition. The country club’s restaurant is an emblematic “public” scene (that was Dara’s word) that gets its defining aura from the tangible and yet indefinite presence there of authority: the authority of the country club to admit its members. The club, after all, formalizes elite social networks. Its prestige is theirs. What gives the restaurant its power as a public scene is the possibility of chance 31. I do not mean that traffickers have historically been subaltern, nor that they only kill those above them. Rather, I refer to popular representations of great traffickers, many of whom supposedly rose from poverty.

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proximity to authority’s licensed figures, and through them to social authority itself, consolidated and redistributed through the institutional system of the club. The meaning of the public scene is underwritten by the membership system: social standing formally approved, fees paid, documentation issued, name written onto list. In Tijuana, there is another major figure echoing the country club, echoing its walls with their ambiguous double function of alluring and prohibiting, its door and doorkeepers, its list of those preapproved to enter. This figure is the border. The dynamics of the border and its importance for Tijuana’s middle classes are very like those of the country club walls— low and decorative but of overblown social significance. Tijuana is the street to the United States’ weirdly private-public restaurant, where one can mix with the “members” (US citizens). Who knows what might happen on entering such a rarefied realm.32 As Frontera put it, for “our” public, the tijuanense public, the frontera is not a fence—“It is the place where anything can happen.” The word for “fence,” barda, is the word most often used to refer to the border in its prohibitive aspect. Se brincó la barda (he jumped the fence) is a common and quite literal way to refer to undocumented crossing. Indeed, for Tijuana’s clase media, the border is not the fence but the Line, with its dynamic of passing, of fiction, of imaginative self-transformation balanced against deception, of offering oneself up for recognition to a superior authority. But barda is also a common metaphor for the social boundaries with which Tijuana, as a community founded on upward mobility, is obsessed. Above, I mentioned a young man who had worked for the drug cartels and who denigrated the clase media. As he explained, “Rich and poor, it’s as if there were a wall [between them]. But sometimes you manage to jump that wall, and nonetheless you go on being poor. Because you have money, but you aren’t happy.” With “happiness,” he evokes the American Dream, even as he speaks of class differences within Mexico. The fiction does not become reality. Money is not enough; no matter how much you pass, you never really pass.33 As social rejection ground this young man down, he clung all the more to an idea of authentic appearances. I will not dress up for my job interview, because this is who I am. With the refusal even to try to pass, the wall only gets higher and more solid. Social and 32. Regarding the United States too, of course, marriage is a common fantasy. 33. He had his own restaurant story. Having just delivered a load of drugs, he was toting backpack and skateboard when he decided to eat at a fancy restaurant. Upon being denied admission, he became hysterical and threw some US$800 upon the counter, shouting, “Do you think that would be enough?” The incident, in his eyes, was one of class discrimination. It did not take place in Tijuana.

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economic marginality are exacerbated, and the turn to criminal activity becomes all the more necessary. In comparison, Dara and Inés are, as James Siegel would put it, “dazed by being in disguise” (1997:212). They find in themselves a power to pass that they cannot quite appropriate. This power is shaped at once by Mexican systems of social recognition rooted in the caste hierarchies of colonial times and by the border with its series of doorkeepers. Is one a good visa-holding middle-class citizen, or might one be exposed as a trespasser? They imagine themselves other than what they are; they cling to “I” and undermine it at once. Only passing remains, only performance, only other identities to be moved through serially— only the fascination with fiction. But fiction in Tijuana is in the street. It surprises with unexpected turns of events. One does not know what one might encounter and what effects it might have. Marriage or death. Like Indonesian prerevolutionaries as Siegel describes them, Inés and Dara play at saying, “If I were . . .” But as in Indonesia, they cannot enter this play fully and keep moving in search of authoritative recognition. The doorkeeper at the country club is an immigration officer; the immigration officer at the Line is a doorkeeper punctiliously checking who is on the list. Citizens of the United States are on the list, for sure. But a visa holder is neither on nor off it. With every crossing one is vulnerable again to scrutiny, vulnerable to nonadmittance. One’s attempt to pass might be seen through, even when one has nothing to hide. And yet the visa is spoken of as a guarantee, a matter of course. “Everybody [all the world] has a visa,” a university professor declared to me: “todo mundo tiene visa.” The belief, however ludicrous, is common; it is only a matter of who counts as “everyone”— or who counts as the “anyone” who can buy admittance to the country club. It is a way of saying, “For us, there is no wall.” As a placeholder, middle-class Tijuana foments the very flux of passing, the unreliability of signs, that it establishes itself against. The Line is the point where the US-Mexico border becomes a ritual of prohibition-passage, but this is the dynamic Tijuana is already fixated on. The country club’s restaurant is public; once you have become tijuanense, you can eat there just as you can shop in San Diego. The United States is Tijuana’s country club, and “anyone” can become a member.

4

“They Say” in the Country Club For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. [ . . . ] There I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. carlos castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan

Gerardo’s factory is not one of the for- export-only assembly plants for which the border is renowned. A dilapidated, cement block warehouse, I had passed it many times before we met and always assumed it was abandoned. On the shop floor, most of the machinery stood unused, while a single operator sat at a press stamping out little metal pieces in a slow repetitive rhythm of clunks and tinkles. The only people I ever saw there were a couple of older men working the machines and a dapper young fellow in jeans and black T-shirt jogging in and out. Amid the shambles, Gerardo’s office was hung with mementos from better days: photographs of him with the president of Mexico and a calendar of a nude blonde luxuriating in a pile of the shiny little metal things being stamped out on the floor below. Gerardo arrived in Tijuana in 1953, on his own, at the age of sixteen. He remembers the city as rough in those days, cabrón, drugs and sex shows downtown that were “scary.” He told me how he washed cars at a gas station and held odd jobs, but, by the time he was twenty, he was a company mechanic in San Diego. In 1965, he became an industrial welder, and by 1972 he had saved enough to dedicate himself to his own business— for he had always, he told me, maintained some business in Tijuana, even if just a juice stand. By 2006, he had lived forty years in San Diego but still crossed the border daily to attend to his factory and participate in Tijuana’s business world. We met, indeed, at a business association breakfast, when I ended up next to him at one of the big round banquet tables. On learning I was an anthropologist, Gerardo told me I had run into just the right person (“se me hace que diste con la persona

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indicada”) and went on to explain his prominent history with the association. “I had an interest in the development of industry,” he later told me. “National, Mexican [industry]. Not transnational, not assembly plants.”1 As an industry representative, he had worked with national politicians on development policies for the border region. Thus it was as a professional expert that he invited me to his factory for a series of interviews, and the business association breakfast became the most unlikely entry I could have imagined to popular publicity in Tijuana.

The Entrepreneur as Pícaro On my first visit, Gerardo’s opening remarks hit a hypercorrect note: “Due to its geographic location, it [Tijuana] is unique in the whole world due to the relation that it has [with the United States].”2 In general, his speech is full of the little markers of lack of education commonly noted by the linguistically class-conscious: the final s in the past tense of the second person familiar (for example, dijistes instead of dijiste); even more glaringly provincial, the pronunciation of “you went” as juites instead of fuiste; the use of altered forms like indiosincrasia.3 These are forms Dara meticulously polices, as she tells me that I learned Spanish from people who do not speak the language very well or that, when dating online, the first thing she notices about a man is his spelling. Gerardo’s hypercorrect tone in this opening moment, however, was not only a matter of linguistic detail. He was giving me the interview, he informed me, because of his interest in the relationship between Mexico and the United States; he then made reference to Vargas Llosa’s book Distant Neighbors (Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist; Alan Riding is the author of Distant Neighbors). Like me, he implies, he is a reader of books, an inquiring mind, the cultivated sort of speaker who says things like “due to its geographic location.” This persona is not just readerly but authorial. In our second interview, 1. As “national” capital, Gerardo’s business was severely impacted by the currency devaluations of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The assembly plant industry, in contrast, profited tremendously with the devaluations (Salzinger 2003:41– 42; Lugo 2008:79). 2. “Por su ubicación geográfica es única en todo el mundo por su relación que hay.” I here extend the meaning of hypercorrection, which usually refers to grammatical “errors” by speakers striving to be correct (Labov 1972). 3. Racializing the term, indiosincrasia slants its meaning toward the self-damaging and compulsive “idiosyncrasies” of those who remain, always, on the bottom. Hence, it could be seen as an example of what it refers to.

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Gerardo revealed his desire to write his own book, an analytical treatise aimed at increasing Mexican understanding of the United States and of the bilateral relationship at the border. This authorial, expert “I” is rooted in the ethics of me consta (I vouch for it); he places himself alongside me, the academic, at the illustrated core of a rational public sphere, influencing policy and debating the big issues of common interest. A moment later he went on, “Due to my situation of what I’ve lived, that I live in both countries, I live in the United States, I’ve been living in the United States for forty years, and I’ve had my business here for forty years, so I cross every day. Every day I cross from here to there and from there to here. So I know both cultures very well.”4 After book learning, this statement constitutes a second and somewhat different claim to communicative authority. It rests on the authority of the witness, not to the exclusive realms of policy making, but to the interminable quotidian experience of the border itself. This claim also evokes a contrasting imaginary of authorship: the popular trope of autobiography. My life has been so amazing, you could write a book about it! Though less often acted on, this trope is as common in Mexico as in the United States. What makes a book good is, directly, experience, and experience is all that is necessary to write. Writing is not just democratized; authorship becomes the special province of those who have taken the hardest knocks, lived the most various of lives. It becomes the province of the pícaro: in the Spanish literary tradition, a wandering rogue, characteristically lower class, who by luck and wits has improved his station.5 Gerardo’s explanation of his dreams of authorship came, in fact, out of an exuberant articulation of the commonplace trope: “Man! You spend the whole day here and you’re gonna write a book! About my life, about everything I’ve done.”6 Note the shift away from the hypercorrect tone of “due to its geographic location.” A moment later, though, he tried to return to the ground of expert authority. “I’ve got [ . . . ] a nagging desire 4. “Entonces, por mi situación de lo que he vivido, de que vivo en los dos países yo, vivo en Estados Unidos, tengo cuarenta años de estar viviendo en Estados Unidos, y tengo cuarenta años de tener mi negocio aquí entonces yo cruzo todos los días. todos los días cruzo de aquí p’allá y de allá p’acá. ’tonces conozco las dos culturas muy bien.” 5. The canonical picaresque text, published in 1554, is El Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous 1961); for a literature review, see Pérez-Romero (2005:199–212). Though Pérez-Romero overemphasizes the fact, the picaresque was a genre of social critique at a point when the old feudal order was dissolving. 6. “¡N’hombre! ¡te pasas aquí todo el día y y vas a escribir un libro! de mi vida, de todo lo que he hecho.”

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to write,” Gerardo told me. “Not so much my life as [ . . . ] what I’ve seen, what I think.”7 In contrast to the book he just suggested I write, this one will be “not so much my life.” But in the next breath, he again confounds the two: this book too will be, after all, “what I’ve seen” as well as “what I think.” When Gerardo says “due to my situation of what I’ve lived,” a picaresque persona peeks through the hypercorrect tone of expert authority. In our second interview, Gerardo placed this picaresque imaginary front and center. When I arrived, he told me he had been thinking that perhaps he had been wrong in giving me an “analysis” of Tijuana, and he recounted the conversation he had imagined I perhaps wanted to take place: “She probably wants me to tell her, well, I, well, look, I’m from Zacatecas, and I came here when I was sixteen, and I worked, and then I went over here, and then over there, and then over here.”8 Reframing our conversation, he gave a synthesized image of another genre of interview, a life-history narrative condensed to its essential structure: place of origin, departure, work, and an aleatory series of movements in space. In effect, Gerardo hypothesized that I wanted a migration narrative, structured by the hero’s movements in space, which are just what structure the classic life of a pícaro. And, in exclaiming that I could write a book about it all, he not only hypothesized that I wanted to type him as a pícaro-migrant but also offered up his life as eminently suited to the picaresque genre. Reflecting on the variety and richness of his life, he used classically picaresque rhetoric: “I’ve lived, uh, what you can’t imagine. What you can’t imagine. I’ve lived at very high, very high levels. And at very low levels as well.”9 Instead of the cultivated book-reading persona, quite the opposite has taken its place. Gerardo’s effort to distinguish between the two books is also an effort to manage two incompatible framings of our conversation and, more profoundly, two personae of his own. These personae speak their own languages: hypercorrect versus vulgar, refined versus popular. Gerardo tries to maintain the boundary between them, but it repeatedly breaks 7. “Tengo el, el gusanito de escribir [ . . . ] no tanto mi vida sino, sino más bien lo que. lo que yo he visto, lo que yo pienso.” 8. “Ella a lo mejor quiere que le diga yo no, pues mira, fíjate que yo soy de Zacatecas, y me vine a los dieciseis años, y trabajé y luego me fui p’acá, y luego p’allá, y luego p’acá.” 9. Compare the song “Jefe de Jefes” by the Tigres del Norte (1997), in which the narrator boasts, “I navigate underwater [i.e., under the table], and I also know how to fly on high” (yo navego debajo del agua / y también sé volar a la altura). Presumably he is a drug trafficker.

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down. It is as if the responsible “I” of the expert needed protection from the infectious implications of the pícaro, who exists only in his serial inhabitance of one scene after another through all stations of society. The terms of the pícaro, however, persistently emerge from within the voice of the expert “I” itself. I linger here on the pícaro because the pícaro, broadly speaking, is the narrative trope of self (or, ultimately, absence to self ) at the heart of the hearsay public’s chronotopic world. M. M. Bakhtin (1981b) used the term chronotope to explore the ways in which narratives meld space, time, and subjectivity together. If, in chapter 2, Inés provided a rich and intricate chronotopic take on liberal publicity, Gerardo provides a comparable picture of the spatiotemporal and sociological world the hearsay public projects as its own. The following section lays out the chronotope of the hearsay public through close reading of my first interview with Gerardo, in which he ends up undoing his own discourse of expert authority. Ultimately, he returns to his original framing of all our subsequent communication, at the business association breakfast, when he so casually remarked, “I believe you’ve run into just the right person.” That image of “running into,” of the power of chance encounters that open into the unexpected, is fundamental for the mode of communication and, ultimately, the public world that Gerardo summons up in our interview.10 Gradually, his initial attempt at an authorial, expert “I” crumbles, and the forms of hearsay take over.

The Chronotope of Hearsay Gerardo began our first interview by explaining how his experience as industry representative gave him a learned perspective on the border. “Tengo libros de todo ese trabajo que se desarrolló” (I’ve got books on all that work that was done), he told me in reference to the academic studies his association used to build its political arguments. Discussing different analytic frameworks for approaching the bilateral relation, he told me Tijuana is but a “cell” of Mexico; analyzing its relationship with San Diego can at best yield results (i.e., an improved relationship) at the local level. “You’re gonna analyze Tijuana, you say you’re already analyzing Mexico. No, well, not even as a joke (ni de chiste). Right?” To understand Tijuana, he proposed a division between social, political, and economic aspects and bade me choose between them. 10. Compare Bakhtin’s “motif of meeting” (1981b:98), germane to ancient Greek genres of adventure. This motif is closely tied to “the chronotope of the road,” likewise fundamental for Tijuana’s hearsay public.

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social. alright. look. they say that Tijuana is Mexico, where the fatherland begins and where the fatherland ends. and they say that in Tijuana, Mexico is here. why? because all of us, all of us come from the interior, from some part of the interior. so Tijuana is characterized because it has different cultures within a single city. they come from Zacatecas (I’m from Zacatecas), they come from Jalisco, they come from Chiapas, they come from all parts of the republic, you can find people here. you can find [people] from Yucatán, from Veracruz, from Colima, from everywhere. so it’s, it’s a mosaic, they say, of cultures within this, this city. what kind of people come? all kinds come. [people] of all strata come. from peasants to professionals come. so this makes it more various. the society of Tijuana, uh, you can go to the Chapultepec neighborhood. you can go to the country club. I’m going to invite you to the country club, I’m a member of the country club. and in the country club, well, you’re going to find the crème de la crème of Tijuana. all the rich folks. if you know [who] the rich families [are], well, they’re the Robles, they’re the Villarreals, they’re the Preciados, they’re the Rodríguezes, they’re all those people that are, their parents or their grandparents were the ones who arrived here in the eighteens [sic] and the twenties. when Tijuana was a rancho [hamlet]. and who grabbed up tracts of land and bought, did business [hicieron negocios], and now their sons and their grandchildren, well they’re the, the, the moneyed ones. the ones who move the economy. of society. of society. right? so then you do get a, a high society, and you get a medium society, and you get a low society. except that the high societies, the first ones who arrived here, w— w— were [hard]working people. they made their fortune by working. they didn’t inherit it. instead, they worked it [into being].11 11. “Social. bueno. mira. dicen que Tijuana es México, donde comienza la patria y donde termina la patria. y dicen que en Tijuana, está aquí México. ¿por qué? porque todos, todos venimos del interior, de alguna parte del interior. entonces Tijuana se caracteriza porque tiene diferentes culturas dentro de una misma ciudad. vienen de Zacatecas (yo soy de Zacatecas), vienen de Jalisco, vienen de Chiapas, vienen de todas partes de la república, tú puedes encontrar gente aquí. puedes encontrar de Yucatán, de Veracruz, de Colima, de todos lados. entonces es una, es un mosaico dicen de culturas dentro de esta, de esta ciudad. ¿qué tipo de gente se viene? se viene de todas. se viene de todos los estratos. se vienen desde campesinos, hasta profesionistas. entonces esto lo hace más variado. la sociedad de Tijuana, este, tú puedes ir a la colonia Chapultepec. tú puedes ir al Campestre. te voy a invitar al Campestre, yo soy socio del Campestre. y en el Campestre, pues vas a encontrar la crema y nata de Tijuana. toda la gente rica. si tú conoces a las familias ricas,

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“They say that Tijuana is Mexico,” Gerardo declares. Given that he has just stated that Tijuana is but a “cell” of Mexico and by no means provides an entrée to understanding the country as a whole, the dicen (they say) with which he begins his exposition appears as a mere rhetorical device, the marker of a fatuous commonplace he will controvert.12 Yet he does not. Instead, he proceeds to justify what “they say”: “Why? Because all of us, all of us come from the interior, from some part of the interior.” The repetition of “all of us” and of the last phrase underline the statement’s character as a rule. And with “all of us,” Gerardo includes himself in this first introductory image of Tijuana. Hearsay becomes authoritative truth, and “we” appears first as the subject of “they say.” Gerardo goes on to expand this new “we” of Tijuana in the form of a list, folding himself into it: vienen de Zacatecas (yo soy de Zacatecas), vienen de Jalisco, vienen de Chiapas, vienen de todas partes de la república.

they come from Zacatecas (I’m from Zacatecas), they come from Jalisco, they come from Chiapas, they come from all parts of the republic.

As is so often the case in the paradigmatic contrast between “here in Tijuana” and “there in the South,” “the interior” bloats as a category to include virtually all of Mexico beyond Tijuana.13 The city is a part or “cell” of Mexico and a fragment that refracts the whole— a crystal miniature weirdly appended, neither within nor without the republic but condenspues son los Robles, son los Villarreal, son los Preciado, son los Rodríguez, son toda esa gente que son, sus padres o sus abuelos, son los que llegaron aquí en los años dieciochos y los años veinte, cuando Tijuana era un rancho. y que agarraron extensiones de tierra y compraron, hicieron negocios, y ahora los hijos y los nietos, pues son los, los, los de dinero. los que mueven la economía. de la sociedad. de la sociedad. ¿no? entonces sí tienes una, una sociedad alta, y tienes una sociedad mediana, y tienes una sociedad baja. nada más que las sociedades altas, los primeros que llegaron aquí, e— e— eran gente trabajadora. hicieron su fortuna trabajando. no la heredaron. sino que la trabajaron.” 12. Like se dice (it is said) in chapter 2, it is a figure against which one takes a stand. 13. Once, a security guard I was chatting with mentioned he was from Guaymas, Sonora, not far from the border with Arizona. When I asked what Guaymas was like, the man replied knowingly: “Ah, born in Tijuana. You don’t know the South [no conoces p’al sur].” Even more strikingly, Gerardo himself noted that the people of Mexicali, just a couple hours east, tend to be more southern. “It’s a more united society,” he said. “They have another mentality.”

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ing it. With this rhetoric, Tijuana becomes a kind of viewing machine, an apparatus for observing and coming to know the country as a whole.14 Gerardo’s claim that “Tijuana is Mexico” does not upset the binomial contrast between “here” and “there”; rather, “there” is included in “here,” refracted and thrown back to the listener/viewer in miniature. Gerardo instantly turns his list, both continuing it and repeating its structure from another angle: not only do “they say,” but “you can find.” This impersonal, generalized “you” mediates between the anonymous “they” of “they say” and the “you” that clearly refers to me as Gerardo’s interlocutor. The truth of what “they say” lies out there in Tijuana, to be borne out in the repetition of experience. When “you” have gone through Tijuana yourself, you will know what “they say” to be so— and “you” will yourself be in a position to repeat it. puedes encontrar de Yucatán, de Veracruz, de Colima, de todos lados.

you can find [people] from Yucatán from Veracruz, from Colima, from everywhere.

In the first short list of states of provenance, Gerardo “shows” Tijuana to the visitor, inserting himself discreetly into the panorama. Now, switching to “you can find,” he makes our own encounter into one in a series. As he said on first meeting, “Seems to me you’ve run into just the right person.” Just as I found this man from Zacatecas, so I will find others, from Veracruz, Colima, and so on. The list iconically prefigures “your” movement through the city, encountering people from state after state of the republic. It is itself a tour of Tijuana. In parallel to his first rhetorical question (“They say that Tijuana is Mexico. [ . . . ] Why?”), Gerardo poses a second one: “What kind of people come?” In parallel to the first answer (“From everywhere”), he answers himself, “All kinds come.” se viene de todas, se viene de todos los estratos. se vienen desde campesinos, hasta profesionistas. entonces esto lo hace más variado.

all kinds come. [people] of all strata come. from peasants to professionals come. so this makes it more various.

14. As discussed in the introduction, it is a supplement in the Derridean sense. If the South is the “interior,” Tijuana is a kind of “exterior” within the nation.

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With its three-part form plus concluding coda, this “stanza” nicely parallels the earlier lists of states of provenance. The parallelism makes the argument: state of provenance and social “stratum” are the two main dimensions of social variance that combine to present a full image of Mexico in Tijuana. At this point, Gerardo moves into an excursus on high society. His prime points of reference, tacking up in two neat blows what this “society” is, are the Chapultepec neighborhood and the country club.15 The “you” is again a roving, viewing “you,” moving now in a far more concrete landscape but still with fabulous freedom: “You can go,” as if there were no obstacle to passage. The basis for this unrestrained movement is not a matter of rights and recognized status before authority. It remains, as in the picaresque genre, a matter of serendipity. For just then “I” interrupts again, parenthetically, to provide the key for my own entrance: “I’m going to invite you to the country club, I’m a member of the country club.” The happenstance is undeniably the product of a history of access to privileged realms, my access to the breakfast where we met as much as Gerardo’s membership both in the business association and at the country club. But his narrative does not wrap these facts up in a lifelong project of status. Instead, he seems to twist away from those terms and invites me to do so as well. My projected access to the club remains a matter of luck, thrown up by a chance encounter in public. The “I” that invites me in is the same one that poked itself into the exposition to remark, “I’m from Zacatecas”; it is the same “I” that has absented itself from the interaction to leave “they” speaking through Gerardo. It is the “I” of the pícaro, who has spied inside the club and now asks “you” to join in. The invitation is offered in the spirit of anonymity and of a role that “anyone” might take on. It is an invitation to inhabit, within the walls of the country club itself, the position of “they” that say.16 Gerardo concludes his answer to the question of why Tijuana is (after all) Mexico with a return to the framing statement: “So it’s a mosaic, they say, of cultures within this city.” This time, he openly includes “they say.” The authority of the expert “voice from nowhere” fuses with the authority of dicen. The “I” of the speaker, nothing but an example of an item 15. As seen in chapter 3, these are also Dara’s main references for understanding Tijuana’s elite; she too started her class- compartmentalized tour of the city with La Chapu. Gerardo takes much further the voyeuristic instability of “I” that Dara toys with. 16. Gerardo’s image of Tijuana’s public space is masculine, yet he invites me into it on equal footing. As we will see later, though, in the club he took on a strong chaperoning role.

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on a list, sequesters itself into inconsequentiality in favor of “they.” The individual voice is, like Tijuana, but a grain in the list of states, a grain that flashes in the chance of our encounter, so that in it I may hear the voice of this weird Mexico: the slowly, surreptitiously authoritative voice of “they say.” Gerardo’s invitation is not out of tune with our roles as anthropologist and informant, but it rests on a cultural concept more specific even than that of the pícaro. The neatest statement I have of it came from a man who lived in a small clutch of shacks on a steep hillside. The houses sat atop an old garbage heap; because the residents were uncertain of eviction, this man explained, they did not bother to build the houses very solidly. Originally from Oaxaca, he had undergone formal deportation proceedings from the United States and was waiting out his “years” (Five? Ten?) in order to return— the “years” being those during which, if caught again in the United States, he would be sent to prison rather than simply back to Mexico. Seemingly confirming pejorative tijuanense stereotypes of the “migrant,” this man was perched in Tijuana as precariously as his house was perched on the hillside. Introducing me to a neighbor, he explained not that I was working toward a dissertation and a career but that I was “caminando para conocer”— walking to meet and learn, to encounter and experience whatever I might happen on along my way. Indeed, we met because I used to walk by on the little trail that passed his house. Generously, this man postulated on my part a walking understood in much the same terms he might apply to his own, all those years ago, when he first set out from Oaxaca on his journey northward. Caminando para conocer is a major trope defining migration among migrants themselves.17 Another statement of this chronotopic ethic comes from Eduardo, a young man newly arrived in Tijuana and already embroiled in his grandmother’s manic and incessant production of plans for his future, from a technical degree in washing machine repair to recruitment with the state police to possible taco stands and pizzerias. When I asked him where he imagined himself in a year’s time, he said only, “I hope to conocer [know/ encounter/experience] something new.” He had his own vague notions of crossing without papers to the United States, rooted not in the careerist plan making his grandmother clung to, but in simple openness to chance. A well-known statement of the trope is the one Carlos Castaneda 17. Recall, from note 13, the guard who patronized me for not “knowing” the South (no conoces p’al sur). It is his migration as caminando para conocer that puts him in a superior position. See Dick (2009:104–5) for the related trope of migration to the United States as a feria de locos (crazy fair), an endless movement for which concrete goals are but pretexts.

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(1968) put in the mouth of his classic don Juan, the brujo or medicine man from Sonora (another border state), which stands as this chapter’s epigraph: “Para mí sólo recorrer caminos, cualquier camino que tenga corazón. [ . . . ] por ahí yo recorro, mirando, mirando, sin aliento.” Note that Castaneda’s book is subtitled A Yaqui Way of Knowledge and that he claims to have met don Juan in a bus station. Gerardo may be far from don Juan’s elegant expression, yet the underlying logic of his speech and its evidentiary claims belong to a very similar regime of knowledge and of a public space of anonymous encounter. It may sound incongruous to speak vis-à-vis the country club of a path with heart. But if “you can go” there, this is because the breathless path of experience admits no barriers. It is a path based, as we will see next, on the idea of the witness.

Earwitness Today, to witness refers to the act of being present, but the first definition of the verb in the Oxford English Dictionary (1971) is actually “to testify”— to repeat, in language, what one has seen or heard. This linguistic indistinction between witnessing and testifying speaks to a deeper link between the two, suggested also by the etymology of testify or testimony, which share their roots with the related Spanish words. According to Benveniste, these words have two distinct roots: the witness is superstis, the survivor who has lived to tell the tale, but also testis, “the one who attends as the ‘third’ person (ter-stis) at an affair in which two persons are interested” (1973:526). The superstis and the testis-terstis may seem separated by the epistemic divide between true experience and the secondorder witnessing of the bystander. But as Derrida (2005) points out, even the survivor of the Holocaust— around which so much of the literature on witnessing revolves— must finally attest to the deaths of others. Witnessing, he argues, is driven by a central aporia: the fact that no one is ever entirely present to the events they bear witness to. Though witnessing seems to presume a self-present “I” (79), one is always, in some sense, a terstis or third party. For Derrida, this essential absence drives the ethical imperative to testify, to pass on what one has seen or heard. It can become, indeed, not just an obligation but “a compulsion to cite and recite, to repeat what we understand without completely understanding it” (87).18 The idea of the earwitness, which erases the epistemic divide between seeing and speaking, between experience and language, under18. Derrida frames in ethical terms what Bhabha, following Guha (1983), calls rumor’s “performative power of circulation,” the “almost uncontrollable impulse to pass it on” (1995:201).

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lines that whether one is exposed to the “original” event or to secondhand testimony, the obligation— or compulsion— remains.19 Elias Canetti describes the earwitness thus: The earwitness makes no effort to look, but he hears all the better. He comes, halts, huddles unnoticed in a corner, peers into a book or a display, hears whatever is to be heard, and moves away untouched and absent. One would think he was not there for he is such an expert at vanishing. He is already somewhere else, he is already listening again, he knows all the places where there is something to be heard. (1979:43)

Canetti focuses on the earwitness as a kind of technology for recording and repetition: “His ear is better and more faithful than any gadget.” As in the OED, the act of witnessing looks forward to the moment of testimony. Here, though, the fidelity of what Canetti’s earwitness repeats depends on the fact that he is not a party to interaction, but, as testis-terstis implies, an overhearer, a third person. He may move near, but he draws away “untouched and absent.” He passes in public, in the sense that he remains unperceived. For him, passing is no risky halfway venture but an enterprise in itself. It is not a way of looking forward to any change of state; the earwitness is simply caught up in what he hears. The stories of others form his center of gravity, and he does not try to master them into his own “I.” He dwells in others’ identities vicariously and repetitively, always moving on, caught up in a compulsion that drags him on and out even of his present moment of listening: “He is already somewhere else.”20 Canetti’s earwitness is a philosophical ideal type, but a similar epistemic stance informs Tijuana’s hearsay public. Conventionally, in the moment of testimony, the witness steps out of thirdness and into “I,” trying to anchor everything there, pushing (impossibly) for the constative (me consta, “I vouch for it”), the certitude that Derrida says testimony always reaches for. But the hearsay public prefers to dwell in the third person. Caminando para conocer is a trope of 19. Though the root of witness is visual, the terms eyewitness and earwitness both date from the sixteenth century. 20. All this depends only on a subtle adjustment of stance in communication. Canetti’s earwitness is not always an earwitness; often he leaves off this role: “This happens quite simply, he makes himself noticeable, he looks people in the eye” (1979:44). So becoming the earwitness too depends simply on a slight looking away, a slight absenting of oneself from interaction, a slight abandonment of responsibility for what is said— as, for example, when Gerardo lets “they say” take over his discourse.

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witnessing in the sense of superstis, but as Gerardo deploys it, it is always already caught up in a second-order witnessing: the hearing of others’ stories. This second-order witnessing underlines the hearer’s absence from the original scene and thus his or her character as a third person. Passing on these stories, the migrant-as-earwitness lets the third person infect his or her own discourse and puts his or her listeners in the same position, foisting on them the compulsion to pass on what he or she only presenced, as it were, in absentia. Tijuana’s hearsay public, grown of this compulsive passing on, deconstructs the whole principle of witnessing as presencing, as a matter of me consta. Instead, it leans into thirdness. Gerardo describes the process of coming to know Tijuana as a process of earwitnessing: wandering through the city, one hears the stories of one’s fellow pícaro-migrants; through these stories, one overhears the absent scenes that constitute that person’s life. As one passes these stories on, depersonalized into the generality of “what happens” (whether in Tijuana or in Mexico), they become hearsay, and, as hearsay, they draw into diffuse and tenuous groupness all those who have been touched by the infectious sense of absence running through them. This process is spatiotemporal as caminando para conocer is. In contrast to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) national “we” with its massive synchronized rituals of newsreading, hearsay is passed on laterally, through instances of encounter spread out in time and space.21 My interview with Gerardo is itself an instantiation of the repetition that overhearing foments: a witnessing chronically passed on, that stimulates an unending and repetitive communication that catches subjects up in its outwardly spiraling circulation. It may seem contradictory to say that the third person, a nonsubject according to Benveniste, could form the basis of any sense of collectivity. And yet “they say” evokes the group within which what “they say” circulates, performatively positing the present encounter as another instance of that circulation. The public imagines the process of circulation that creates it: movement through Tijuana and the encounters this movement gives rise to. Even without the tag “they say,” the whole logic of Gerardo’s speech is deeply reflexive, projecting “they” into the future as the group of those who may be encountered and through whom Tijuana may be heard over and over again. As the passing on of overhearing, hearsay is the basic chronotopic form of the popular, picaresque Tijuana Gerardo sketches. If a sense of groupness emerges via hearsay, this is to the extent that it 21. Overhearing and citation are not, of course, inherently lateral or egalitarian practices. Compare Inoue (2006), who builds on a tradition that has considered overhearing and citation classically colonial techniques of power.

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evokes chains of shadow conversations (Irvine 1996; Paz 2009) through which discourse is imagined to have moved— throngs of absent scenes that haunt it. While Gerardo’s vision remains rooted in the commonsense of what “we” all experience, such imagination can easily turn speculative. Vicente Rafael argues that rumors “displace” the political figures and events they describe into a “current of popular wishfulness” (2000:118).22 They allow one to “adopt a variety of subject positions” (115) and, hence, “to evade received identities and prescribed positions” (114). In particular, the politically positive possibilities Rafael finds in this kind of rumor arise from overhearing— imagining, speculating— across a social boundary otherwise not so easily crossed.23 Tijuana’s hearsay public as Gerardo evokes it may seem fundamentally different, for he concentrates on overhearing between deeply equal subjects. But the stories that make Tijuana’s hearsay public are, all too often, stories of disenfranchisement, of subjugation and exploitation, loss and alienation. They involve too overhearing the doings of the rich and powerful, who are after all a crucial part of “our” conditions of existence, which “we” repeat to ourselves via hearsay. Thus messages from beyond “our” own milieu, not meant for “us,” are as necessary as the stories of “our” own experience. The hearsay public looks in on Mexico’s elites as it looks in on the United States, both powerful others ensconced beyond multiple borders.24 In the introduction, I argued that Mexico’s quasicolonial history with the United States makes for treacherous interactive ground: will “we” be 22. Rafael relies strongly on Heidegger’s notion of Gerede, usually translated as “idle talk,” though “rumor” is also possible. Heidegger has in mind forms of distraction fomented by mass publicity, but he makes clear he means “gossiping and passing the word along” (1962:212) more broadly. Gerede gives “the possibility of understanding everything without making the thing one’s own” (213); in it, Being (Dasein) is “lost in the publicness of the ‘they’” (220), abandoned to the world, “uprooted existentially” (214), never tarrying or dwelling anywhere (217). As with Canetti, this philosophical trope echoes with ideologies of hearsay publicity in Tijuana, though these lack the negative moral charge and the association with mass mediation. 23. Rafael is writing of the Philippines under Japanese occupation. Similarly, Siegel argues that revolution in Java began with overhearing communications that crossed the boundaries of colonial society (1997:14). Conceived of as a language from nowhere, attached to no place, empty of the particularities of regional or class identity, the lingua franca was the medium by which this overhearing spread: “The passing-on of the hearing of those not intended to receive the message” (36). Here too, collectivity emerges out of an emptied “I,” for it was the lingua franca that would become the national language. 24. Chapters 5 and 7 explore at length such unequal overhearing across the boundaries of the back stage of the elite.

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accepted as modern, as equals, or again rejected? Beyond middle-class anxieties, another major response to these conditions exists: hearsay itself. The hearsay public is a case of “third person nationalism” (Rutherford 2008). Because it cannot occupy the authoritative position of the first person to speak in its own name (see also Paz 2009), it ends up framing the nation in the third person, as an object of discourse. This tendency has been historically shaped by the way in which the quasicolonial relation with the United States, made contemporary in the form of the “illegal alien,” has compounded the stigma of socioeconomic marginality within Mexico. But the third person here is not a mere relegation from full subjectivity; it has developed as a subject position in itself. The primary fact the hearsay public circulates to itself is its own existence and its relation to those whom it can never engage in dialogue but only overhear. Circulation itself, with its constraints and possibilities, emerges as the central social fact that is troped, reworked, and put back into circulation in the figural and literal movement of caminando para conocer. The hearsay public is its own medium and its own message; without relying on the first person plural, it is an elaborate collective dwelling in “our” own capacity to mediate ourselves to ourselves. For it, the city becomes a field of serial interactions. When one walks it, one traverses hearsay and becomes part of the “they” that say.

Passing in the Country Club In the country club, then, because I will go, I will find the crema y nata (crème de la crème) of tijuanense “society.” Gerardo’s discussion of this “society” echoes Tijuana’s frontier myth of hard work and upward mobility and dwells on the tension between merit and inheritance as legitimate bases of status and social recognition (see chapters 2 and 3). “To become independent is not so easy,” he told me (I paraphrase). “If you have a rich dad it’s not [hard], but if you don’t, it’s very difficult.” But though Tijuana’s “society” worked for their fortunes as he did, their names nonetheless loom large for him. At first glance, Gerardo might seem indisputably to have gained a place among them: not only is he a member of the country club, he has held office there, as in his business association. At his peak, he told me, he owned nineteen properties. And yet he does not feel himself part of the “society” he describes. When I ask how long he has been a member of the club, he answers only “’uta” (damn), and, by way of explanation, that he owns not one but two shares: “When I had money I bought a lot of things. You have no idea, everything I bought. And everything I lost, but I still have some very nice things left.” His membership emblematizes no diligent social climbing, no rite

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of passage into elite society. The ups and downs of his life history can be told straight out, without any need for complicated maneuvering to integrate them into a coherent narrative of self. Money and what it can buy remain the signs of an aleatory life course, and Gerardo’s share in the club is nothing but a leftover of fortune that came and went, a trace of the gleeful spending of another age. In this same spirit, it was with unrestrained admiration that Gerardo described the club’s embarrassment of luxuries, ending a comprehensive list of its facilities (pool, gym, tennis courts, basketball courts, squash courts, playground, golf course, restaurant, ballroom) with the statement: “That is a lordly club. It is one lordly club.”25 But a moment later he explained: I use it very little because my whole family grew up over there [in the United States],26 so then they didn’t like it. [ . . . ] my daughters didn’t like that bloc. [ . . . ] they didn’t feel comfortable and, and they don’t, and they don’t come. [ . . . ] you don’t know anybody, and the little groups get together, “hey, let’s go to so-and-so’s house,” and “you remember,” and. and you’re like, “well, who might that be?” right?27

Gerardo’s daughters’ exclusion is akin to his own. When I asked my housemate Inés if she knew Gerardo, she took a moment to recall him. “Bit stuck up, huh?” was her only remark: “Medio creído, ¿no?” Creído comes from creer, to believe. Literally, it refers to the fact that one believes one is something one is not. “Thinks he’s really something, doesn’t he?” could be a closer translation. Gerardo is the “pig” who inhabits the sphere of high society but cannot even get a bite of food into his belly in decent fashion, the sorry figure who has grossly misunderstood the 25. “Es que tienes, alberca, tienes gimnasia, tienes canchas de tenis, tienes canchas de basketbol, tienes canchas de raquetbol, tienes canchas de frontén [sic], tienes jardín para niños, tienes, este, el campo de golf, tienes restaurant, tienes un salón para cuando cumples tú quince años o la madre, inmenso. ese es un señor club. es un señor club.” 26. The use of here and there to refer to Mexico and the United States is so commonsensical in Tijuana that these become the deictics’ default referential content (especially in the case of there for the United States). Dick (2010), working on migration to the United States from Guanajuato, notes the same stabilization of deictic reference. 27. “Yo lo ocupo muy poco porque toda mi familia se crió allá entonces luego no les gustó. [ . . . ] a mis hijas no les gustó ese bloc. [ . . . ] no se sintieron a gusto y, y no, y no vienen. [ . . . ] no conoces a nadie, y se juntan los grupitos, ‘oye que vamos a la casa de fulano’, que ‘te acuerdas’, que. y tú, ‘¿pues quién será ese tal?’, ¿no?”

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true nature of status. In this case, Inés’s acerbic remark thrusts not at old status, but at the nouveau riche. Money cannot buy recognition. With his dijistes and his indiosincrasia, Gerardo remains an outsider. Gerardo’s exclusion from high society does not throw him, as it might throw someone invested in upward mobility, into the pursuit of an infinitely regressing standard of excellence in being. Instead, it throws him into the performance of a picaresque life course and the alternate communicative regime of “they say.” Instead of telling me that the country club’s restaurant was open to the public, Gerardo emphasized quite the opposite: “Tú no puedes entrar ahí al campestre si no eres socio” (You can’t go in there to the club if you’re not a member). Though he invited me there in this first interview, nothing came of it until our second interview a month later. When he finally asked what I did for fieldwork, I told him that I wanted to interview people of different economic levels. He asked in disbelief if I was going to interview “el que vive allá en el cerro” (the guy who lives up in the hills), that is, the poor.28 I told him I already had but was having trouble meeting people of higher social standing. Burbling with a new enthusiasm, he exclaimed: “Well, you’ve got to go to the club, because the club is the most high [he used the slang term from English] here in Tijuana. It’s the highest class.”29 Three days later, we met for lunch at the country club.

*** Having taken public transportation, I was disconcerted to find that there was no designated way to approach the country club by foot. I walked up the narrow drive, looking over my shoulder to make sure no cars had turned in behind me, and slipped around the end of the yellow traffic arm. At this point I noticed the guard scrutinizing me. Feeling nervous, I pointed at the large portico directly ahead and asked (though the answer was obvious) if that was the main entrance. He told me it was and asked if I was there to see an employee, because the employee entrance was different. I told him I was not, and he allowed me to proceed. Gerardo was waiting under the portico, sporting shades and a maroon shirt unbuttoned low to reveal a heavy gold chain about his neck. He ushered me upstairs, removing the velvet cords that barred our passage. On the second floor, he showed me the empty ballroom and then took me out onto a large balcony overlooking the golf course. An employee, 28. In Tijuana, hills are the emblem par excellence of the urban periphery. 29. “Pues tienes que ir al Campestre, porque el Campestre es lo más jai de aquí de Tijuana. es la clase más alta.”

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hurrying by, greeted him. We went back in to the main hall, lined with photographs of club officers. On the way downstairs, he gestured toward another wall covered with photographs of the club’s elected princesses. I insisted on his pointing out his daughter, but he did not wish to linger, and I spotted just a couple of the “old family names” before we moved on. Behind a door off the main foyer, we entered a tiny and aseptic anteroom, all linoleum and fluorescent lighting, with a young woman sitting behind a counter. She greeted Gerardo cheerfully by name, and, though she had a computer before her and all the paraphernalia to check membership and register admittance electronically, she buzzed the door open for us without any of these formalities. Gerardo led me back through narrow passageways to the pool, pointing out changing areas, the yoga room, and so forth along the way. Beyond the pool lay a patio, where a children’s birthday party was in progress. We wandered out, Gerardo greeting and being greeted by workers busy setting up the grill. Though Gerardo was universally and warmly greeted by the employees, often by name, he did not exchange a single nod with any of the members we encountered. We walked out to the edge of the patio, where he pointed out the basketball, tennis, and squash courts beyond, and our tour came to its formal end. Here Gerardo made a statement of conclusion. Throughout the tour, he referred constantly to “the tijuanenses” in the third person. Now, he reiterated that this was where I had to come if I wanted to know about “them.” “This is tijuanense society,” he declared (I paraphrase). “Here they meet and get to know each other [se conocen], they get married among themselves, they get divorced among themselves. Here gossip is much fomented.”30 He proceeded to tell me, using names and with great enthusiasm, of the marital indiscretions of Tijuana’s wealthy. But Gerardo’s repetition of gossip neither positions him in the “tijuanenses’” social circle nor admits me to it. Rather, “they” remained firmly in the third person, and Gerardo’s lowered tones (we were within earshot of the birthday party) made the occasion one of illicit communication. Passing me the gossip as contraband, under the very noses of the “tijuanenses,” together we peered in on, or overheard, “their” activities from a position that remained, fundamentally, “outside.” By simple performative finesse (not unlike Canetti’s earwitness), Gerardo framed his transmission of gossip as communication’s transgressive crossing of a social boundary. This whispering ran strangely counter to the ease and privilege he 30. “Esta es la sociedad tijuanense. aquí se conocen, se casan entre ellos, se divorcian entre ellos. aquí se fomenta mucho el chisme.”

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had displayed in removing the velvet rope for us to go upstairs or in opening the door to the backstage locker rooms with a few cheery words to the doorkeeper. At the conclusion of our tour, it reframed what had come before: he was smuggling me, his performance implied, into a space in which he did not belong. Instead of ease, he now underlined his discomfort and alienation: “Se conocen, se casan entre ellos, se divorcian entre ellos.” The repeated reflexivity of “among themselves,” the intensity of all this activity focused back in on the group itself, admits no interlocutor. But his whispering alluded back, too, to our earlier interviews and to the hearsay public as he represented it— and as, three days before, he had happily found my project conformed all too well to. While before the “they” of dicen that he invited me to inhabit took shape in the passing on of migrants’ stories, in the club, Gerardo extended it to include the illicit overhearing of the doings of a different “they,” the “they” of the elite. After the patio, we moved on to lunch in the restaurant, which, unlike the deserted sporting facilities, was reasonably crowded. Again, the waiters greeted him amiably by name, but he made no gesture to the other diners, nor they to him. Indeed, he had not interacted with anyone at the business association breakfast either. In both settings, he was so completely shunned that, were it not all beyond orchestration, I might have suspected he was actually a club employee posing as a member to impress me. In the restaurant, Gerardo gave me his last bit of tour guide information, gesturing toward the bar (I paraphrase): “There are folks who never leave here. Above all, old men. There they are playing cards, chatting. Little groups form. At golf, too, little groups.” Grupito connotes not just a small social circle but an exclusionary clique, and the word conveys the disdain of the snubbed. It is the word he used to describe his daughters’ sense of alienation at the club; now he applies it to the group that should correspond to him: the viejitos, the “little old men” whiling away their last years at the bar. The very fact that Gerardo would call them viejitos underlines his nonidentification with that set. In showing me the country club, Gerardo engaged in a tremendous and unapologetic display of passing. Deliberately, he threw himself into passing as an eschewal of self-transformation. He belongs still, he claims, to Tijuana as a popular world of hearsay. Even as Gerardo displayed to the hilt his privileged position in the club, he insistently marked his presence there and our communication as illicit. No matter how consummately he passes, he insists, he continues to do just that— he will never become a tijuanense. His repetition of their gossip is suffused with the voyeurism of overhearing; it is a way of dwelling in the third person.

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Back to the Border In the club as in our interview, Gerardo slips into citationality, into the dispersion and absence-to-self of hearsay. He allows his “I” to be drawn into an undertow that at once constitutes the peripatetic Tijuana of the migrant-pícaros caminando para conocer (walking about so as to learn and know) and that drags, hidden and strong, at the pillar of distinction that is the club. Gerardo knows (or at least he wants me to believe) he cannot hope for recognition here, and so he turns his passing, at the very pinnacle of “society,” into an exercise in covert transgression. But he does not entirely abandon himself to the lateral slippage of overhearing either. He has another source of authority in which to anchor himself. Gerardo has lived, he told me, forty years in the United States. I do not know how he obtained permanent residency, but it was likely through his work.31 This history of emigration was not part of his disquisition on Tijuana in which he presented himself as a migrant and a pícaro in a city of migrant-pícaros. The day we met, though, Gerardo had lost no time in segueing from my proclaimed research interest in businesspeople into a diatribe against unauthorized immigrants to the United States. Rather frenetically, he distinguished himself from them in no uncertain terms. “Yo hice fila,” he declared, I queued up. He waved his hands, marked lines in the air (I paraphrase): I entered legally. because that’s how things have to be. you go and you get married and you have your kids and all and then they catch you and they want to throw you out, but the thing is you have a family based on illegal foundations. you say they have to have some humanity, well, sure, looking at things from the human standpoint they do, but well, you started your family on illegal bases. that’s how I see it. if it weren’t like that, if it’s not convenient for me to do it legally and so then I do it the same, illegally, I go through the back door, well, good for you, I’ll go through the back door too. but no, because that’s not how things should be.32 31. Beginning in 1927, a special dispensation has allowed Mexican citizens legally employed in the United States to obtain “commuter status,” which allows them to live in Mexico as US permanent residents (LaBrucherie 1969; Balandrán 2010). San Diego’s shipyards, where Gerardo worked, employed many such commuters. 32. “Yo entré legalmente. porque así tienen que ser las cosas. vas y te casas y tienes tus hijos y todo y luego te agarran y te quieren echar p’afuera, pero es que tienes una familia basada en cimientos ilegales. dices que tienen que tener humanidad, pues sí, por el lado humano sí, pero pues tú empezaste tu familia en bases ilegales. yo así lo veo. si no fuera así, si no me conviene legalmente y entonces lo hago igual

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Gerardo speaks in the atemporal terms of the absolute difference between legal and illegal, but his diatribe is historically situated: he speaks in response to the current national hysteria in the United States over illegal immigration. While this hysteria has become particularly acute since 9/11, the first wave that put unauthorized immigration on the United States’ national agenda and that initiated a steep escalation in border policing came out of San Diego in the early 1990s (Nevins 2002:61– 94). Gerardo reacts to a contemporary context that has been at the heart of the push to close the border. When he began working in the United States in the 1950s, undocumented migration was certainly stigmatized, but not the way it is now. His frenetic remarks reflect the hardening of the social distinction between documented and undocumented that the United States’ escalation of border enforcement has precipitated. As a legal resident of the United States, Gerardo is what is known in Tijuana as an emigrado, an émigré. The term has no bearing on personal histories of residence, for there are many emigrados who have never lived in the United States, but it does connote a history of labor there, either one’s own or that of a close family member. The term does not, however, distinguish between an older generation (often, like Gerardo, with long-term legal employment in industry) and a younger generation with a very different history of undocumented labor that obtained permanent residency thanks to the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.33 So when Gerardo insists that he “stood in line,” he attempts to make that distinction himself— he is not one of those emigrados who got “in” through the amnesty, whose illegal past was blanched by a one-time act of Congress. Despite his work history, he still falls on the right side of the line between documented and undocumented. Gerardo’s need to distinguish himself shows that it is still the Border Crossing Card, or laser visa, with its sanction of crossing to consume, that sets the standard for border crossing as social practice. US permanent residency and citizenship may be enviable, but in certain contexts they can also trigger suspicions of a stigmatic history of unauthorized labor migration. If undocumented movement to the United States is entering “through the back door,” then Gerardo entered through the front door. Above, I described my exchange with the guard at the country club’s gate: when I ilegalmente, me voy por la puerta de atrás, pues qué bien, yo me voy también por la puerta de atrás. pero no, porque así no tienen que ser las cosas.” 33. When, on her tour of Tijuana, Dara introduced an “old working- class neighborhood” by explaining that the inhabitants were people who had worked in the United States but built their homes and their lives in Tijuana, she pinpointed the older generation of emigrados as a social type.

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asked for the front door, he offered me the employees’ entrance. As in so many establishments, the front door is for members only; the back door is for the help. In Gerardo’s metaphoric use, as he chastises those who do not use the “front door,” it is clear that the United States receives its help through the “back door” of unauthorized immigration— his segue from my project hinged on how Mexico (according to him) gives the United States nothing but “cheap labor.” When he insists that he “stood in line,” he is not only insisting on his uprightness. He is insisting that, despite sixteen years of wage labor in the United States, he is not the help. He draws on a legal framework— the difference between documented and undocumented, so crucial to social distinction in Tijuana— to vindicate his past and protect a respectability that, between his history of manual labor in the United States and his continued exclusion from tijuanense high society, is vulnerable to puncture no matter how much wealth he may accumulate. Gerardo stood in line; his name is on the list. The “right” side of the line between documented and undocumented is the side not only of those who have legal rights, who are caught up in a process of recognition with the US state, but of those who are morally right. State recognition appears as the ground for the most intimate of relationships and human experience: the family of the undocumented has no right to appeal to humanity because it is “based on illegal foundations.” The distinction between those who cross without documents and those who remain behind blurs again (as in chapter 3 it blurred for Dara) when Gerardo mentions a different kind of illegitimacy, associated with low-status line work in the assembly plants (I paraphrase): girls come from the villages where there’s neither electricity nor running water and they work here but pretty soon all hell breaks loose because they start to have babies because they’re not used to that.34

The migrant family in the United States is illegitimate because it is illegal; the migrant family in Tijuana is illegitimate in the traditional sense of the word. Gerardo’s family, which “grew up over there,” is a true family thanks to the twin facts of his upward mobility and his legal immigration to the United States. A whole discourse of social status in relation to state authority emerges around the border and the problem of US recognition, a discourse of 34. “Vienen muchachas de los pueblos donde no hay ni luz ni agua y trabajan aquí pero al rato empieza un desmadre porque empiezan a tener hijos porque no están acostumbradas a eso.”

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rights absent from Gerardo’s performance of Tijuana as what “they say.” Whereas in the context of “they say” he emphatically identified himself as a migrant, in the context of border crossing he does just the opposite. But these two moments are not separate. If, in his narrative, Tijuana takes shape out of exclusion, the United States seems to offer a surer anchor for “I.” Entering the country club is no rite of passage, but crossing the border is.

Conclusion As Inés’s me consta and the image of liberal publicity she narrates herself into emerge in dialogue with se dice (see chapter 2), so Gerardo’s dicen emerges dialogically. And yet, in keeping with the slanting relation to communication that dicen implies, perhaps “dialogically” is not the right word. However circuitously Inés answered my question, “What is said about the Villarreals?” it was still an answer. The dialogism of me consta and se dice was superimposed directly on the dialogism of our conversation: first and second person as two embodied, concrete individuals responding to each other by turns, caught up in the never-ending shuttle back and forth between “you” and “I.” Gerardo’s dicen, and the chronotope of its picaresque public sphere, emerges in a curious switch within his own speech: he sets up dicen as something to be controverted, but then proceeds to justify its truth. The two voices are not properly dialogical; rather, one emerges out of the other, as Gerardo absents his “I” from his main exposition. It is a fitting entrance for the third person, proffered as a communicative position and a social imaginary to be inhabited— as a public to be participated in. For if I were to come to know Tijuana as Gerardo suggests, by hearing it repeated over and over again, what would this writing be but yet another repetition of Tijuana, yet another call, flung even further afield, to recognize and inhabit its imaginary? Rumor is not always a “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1985), but, in this case, it does lean in this direction, for, as Siegel writes of another context, it “borders on a violation of legitimate power” (1993:61).35 This is because it is informed by an imaginary of the contagious transgressions of the earwitness: “Whoever retails the gossip repeats the scandal, at least imaginatively, of being there when he should not have been.” Such is the relation to language, subjectivity, and power of the hearsay public, which cannot 35. Before Scott, Guha (1983) made much of rumor as inherently subaltern. A problem with approaches following him (Bhabha 1995; Das 1998) is that “rumor” as a metadiscursive label (Paz 2009) is applied by the observer rather than examined as an ethnographic fact.

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inhabit the proper place of the first person. It inhabits subjectivity only in a marginal, sideways fashion, something like peripheral vision. This mode sets it aslant of official representations, letting it, in Rafael’s words, “suggest other sources and routes for signifying the nation” (2000:114). Rafael does not mean to say that rumors are for that reason radical, only that they can provide a space in which alternate imaginaries of the collectivity can circulate. In their “violation of legitimate power,” as rumor looks in speculatively on it, the possibility of other histories opens. In Tijuana, this speculative impulse is knit constantly to hearsay’s confirmation of who “we” are— a “we” stuck in a moment just prior to articulation, subject to the self-absence that makes affirmative voicing impossible. Gerardo is an entrepreneur, but his business connections depend in a very real sense on his peers’ not knowing exactly who he is. Mimicry is embraced; fraud is not far off.36 Only the subtlest marking lets him unmoor himself from his capitalist identity. But not all he says partakes of the morality of se dice, of the shared chronotope of caminando para conocer. If dicen begins as a response to exclusion, if it enters the club as secretly and pervasively as it enters Gerardo’s discourse, if it evolves into an insistent absenting of oneself from a scene in which one wants no part (for one can have no part)— Gerardo is in fact already elsewhere, already caught up in another field of social relations centered on US state recognition. For Gerardo, passing and a project of achieving authentic middle-classness are broken apart. Passing appears in relation to Tijuana, its popular public world, and the tijuanense elite; middle- classness appears anchored in Gerardo’s ability to narrate his passing of the border as legal, and this legality as the authenticating principle of a fully legitimate life. Chapter 5 turns squarely to the intertwinings of legitimacy and legality in recent Mexican history: to the relation of clase media and pueblo to public authority. Though its discussion is more panoramic, it rides on the understanding built in previous chapters of collective subjectivity in Tijuana as embroiled in personal performative projects, shifting epistemic stances, and oscillation between the illusory fixity of “I” and the unmoorings of passing, mimicry, and hearsay.

36. If, for example, Gerardo’s factory were a front, this would not be incompatible with my argument. I did not pursue contacts with the elite that would have shed further light on his strange insider/outsider status.

· II · Prohibition/Passage

Overview The Line, the open door of the Law, is today the spectacle that dominates Tijuana and emblematizes the ascendancy of its documented public. But not so many years ago, far more spectacular scenes of undocumented passage eclipsed the Line. Aspiring migrants used to fill Tijuana’s streets; the open spaces along the international boundary were clogged with people waiting for the opportune moment to dash en masse into the neighboring country (Chavez 1992:41–48). In the early 1990s, these scenes helped fuel a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States that would shape legislation not only in California but nationally (Andreas 2000; Nevins 2002). Faced with this situation, established Tijuana displaces US stereotypes of the Mexican— poor, dark, and “illegal”— onto its own underclass. Like Kafka’s doorkeeper, it looks north to engage (it hopes) the Law. Tijuana’s two publics have fundamentally different orientations to both US and Mexican state authority, but a simple distinction between legality and illegality, observance of the law versus its flouting in crime, cannot capture this difference. Chapter 5 introduces lawfulness and lawlessness as a way of parsing the degrees of a deeper orientation to the Law, or the State, as supreme moral authority. Legality may combine with lawlessness, as in Mexico’s long- standing tradition of recourse to the law as a weapon brought to bear on interpersonal conflicts (Piccato 2001:73–159; 2010:188–219). Or illegality may combine with lawfulness, as in the plaint of the upwardly mobile citizen who “tries to do things the right way” but finds him- or herself stymied at every step. Chapter 5, however, focuses on the other two combinations. The public of me consta (I vouch for it), seeks to further the powerful cross between legality and lawfulness. The public of se dice (it is said), in contrast, seeks to establish an authority that not only remains mired in accusations of illegality but may even exalt it as a way of furthering its own contentious legitimacy. The bulk of the chapter locates clase media and pueblo historically with

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respect to legality and illegality, lawfulness and lawlessness, in Mexico as a whole. It ends by examining this play of footing (Goffman 1979) in a set of encounters with the police. After chapter 5, “The Visa Interview” unpacks the US consular interview for the visa as a rite of passage. Whether it effectively inducts the applicant into the ranks of Tijuana’s clase media depends, however, on the lawfulness with which she or he approaches it: too-blatant efforts to pass end up undoing the rite’s consolidation of identity. Chapter 6 seeks the ethnographic points where, out of a context dominated by lawfulness, lawlessness begins to emerge. Passage and prohibition are exemplified by Port and Wall, but they play out too on Tijuana’s streets, repeating the border’s ambiguous and inflationary logic: even as the cut between legal and illegal opens an abysmal divide, legal is never legal enough. Subtly, perniciously, every legal passage resuscitates the specter of its failure, of being denied admission, of being recognized not as a distinguished citizen of a fellow sovereign nation, but as part of the Mexico that cannot be admitted to modernity. Tokens like the visa (scapularies, business cards, secret passwords) mediate an alienated power to pass, but they are not all equally reliable— they are Derridean-style fetishes, lodged in a chain of substitutions. Often they are effective on their own, but, as they augment the aura of issuing authorities (whether human patrons or the State itself ), they remain vulnerable to resignification as mere semiotic instruments. These tokens generate a hierarchical social system based on the differential distribution of the never-fully-possessed power to pass. Across this panorama of passing, chapter 6 maps the mutable terrain on which Tijuana’s two publics take root: the fetishistic and conflicted relation to authoritative recognition in the shadow of the border, with the constant and often subtle turning it propitiates, now to, now away from, the Law. Chapter 7 focuses on the corrido— a popular ballad genre now almost entirely devoted to the exploits of drug traffickers— as a major communicative form splitting the pueblo from the validating recognition of state authority. Many of these songs revolve around simple illegality, but, in some, lawlessness takes over. With the corrido, the hearsay public articulates itself within an entire “regime of circulation” (Cody 2009:286) traversed by the fetishistic dynamics to which passing as a practical problem gives rise. Both trafficker patrons and religious patrons play a key role in this regime, but, in the last instance, they are eclipsed by the momentum of the hearsay public’s own self-articulation. The sense of collectivity that hearsay builds thus nests between the illegality of trafficking and a deeper lawlessness in which transgression begins to break away from the fetish of the State. Against accusations that they foment criminality, the songs

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make a forceful claim to articulate the authentic pueblo. The power to pass, they posit, is “ours.” Chapter 8 goes beyond collective lawlessness to a more radical form of negativity, a turning away from the positive presence promised by “I” or the State: the hearsay public’s relation to death. The centrality of death is the most numbing implication of the hearsay public’s intimacy with the figure of the “illegal alien,” who could well die in the attempt to cross the border. In this chapter, the border becomes a metaphysical limit separating one from one’s dearest others— or any others from whom and to whom an ethical obligation might arise. Instead of the fetish of legal border crossing, the hearsay public takes shape in relation to a sense of absence. Eschewing the articulation of identity, dwelling in the third person of se dice, the hearsay public is not a selfsame group; it is not a synchronous selfsame “we.” Rather, it is composed of the need to hear one’s own stories through an other, and to pass them on as well. Hearsay in Tijuana proliferates gestures of displacement, of the hollowness of “I,” that amplify and pass on all the abuses, however petty or momentous, that the marginalized face at the border. With hearsay, the clase media’s chain of deferrals, luring one infinitely on to the Law, collapses like a column of smoke. Weighted with the burning ash of loss and grief, disappointment and deprivation, it spreads the fire (the need to communicate, the ethical obligation to bear witness) sideways.

5

Clase Media and Pueblo before the Law He who gives a bribe, call him by his name: corrupt. consejo de la comunicación, Voz de las Empresas, advertisement We hired gunmen love Mexico too, in our own way. pepe gonzález, Lo negro del Negro Durazo

The two quotes above condense two stances regarding law and nation. The first urges the individual citizen to take up the burden of making a better Mexico by rooting out its rotten elements; the second, clearly contestatory, defends the nationalism not just of the corrupt but of the outright criminal. These two stances represent two extremes in what has become a face-off between clase media and pueblo not just in Tijuana but in the country at large. From one hallowed social-scientific perspective, criminality helps constitute the law. Michael Taussig cites Durkheim to this effect: “There can be no spirit of crime without its other, no crime without law” (1993:242). If “the fantasies of the marginated” (240) constitute the State, so the fantasies of those in power constitute the criminal; each feeds the other. This dialectic, however, is self-contained. It leaves little room for anything that might exceed it— little room for revolution or the overthrow of the state, however temporary and failing a project. Looking for a way out, Vicente Rafael turns to the idea of the bandit as “the embodiment of popular fantasies about justice” (1999:15) and of bandits as “proto- nationalists” (12).1 In Mexico, the association between banditry and the revolutionary energies of the pueblo is not just an academic but a popular notion. It is not hard for people to see their own struggles “against the law, against the rich, the powerful” (Foucault 1977:67) dramatized in the criminal; 1. Hobsbawm (1969) is the original proponent of the idea of “social banditry.” Robinson (2009) summarizes the debate on social banditry in Mexico.

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Mexico too has its “nationalist tradition of breaking the law in the name of a morality higher than that enshrined in the law” (Chakrabarty 2007:54). In such a context, the criminal’s violence may become more legitimate than the state’s.2 Against this tradition, Mexico’s clase media has sought in recent decades to align itself with the law. John and Jean Comaroff (2006) have suggested that the “global south” has since the Cold War been undergoing a turn to legality, a process of the juridification of conflicts that in another time might have found political solution. Latin America doubtless participates in this new fetishism of the law, but some contextual specificities are necessary to understand the moment.3 The rise of the clase media as an individually inhabitable political project is at the core of the turn to legality both in Mexico generally and at the border in particular.

The Clase Media versus the Pueblo Recall the remarks from Redfield (1930) and Aguilar Camín and Castañeda (2009) presented in the introduction. For both, modernity and the middle class were inextricably linked figures, together subject to the characteristically fetishistic and originally colonial hesitation of being or “not quite” being (Bhabha 1984:132). While this hesitation bears, in the form of the border, the indelible mark of the United States’ quasicolonial invasion and subsequent appropriation of Mexico’s northern half, the country’s dependent status within the international order makes “not 2. Compare Benjamin’s (1978:281) “great criminal” and the (degraded) lawfounding legitimacy emergent in his violence. The law breaking of crowds (of which Chakrabarty writes) and that of bandits are historically linked by the host of petty illegalities that blossomed, Foucault argues, with the rise of the bourgeoisie: from absenteeism and pilfering to vagabondage and looting (1977:274). More powerfully, they are linked as they articulate a nationalist imaginary of popular resistance, wherein subaltern subjects see the law as furthering bourgeois interests. In Foucault’s narrative, the disciplinary state subsumed these class dynamics, but they remain at the heart of the two publics’ different stances before the law in Tijuana. 3. The Comaroffs mention the “Culture of Legality” classes that in Mexico have, since 1998, replaced the old “civics” approach (25). This program actually began in Baja California. One of its promoters there emphasizes the support and influence of the venerable neoconservative National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and of intelligence and covert operations expert Roy Godson in particular (Muñoz 2007:33–44). The NSIC supports similar programs around the world, which should be understood as continuous with US global security strategies. In Godson’s case, his interest in the “Culture of Legality” arose as he sought to reinvent himself after the Cold War. Thanks to Jane and Peter Schneider for their insights into Godson.

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quite” an ongoing affair. In this context, the anxieties to which middle classes everywhere are prey play straight into larger anxieties over how to posit a fully modern, sovereign nation before the outside world and before the United States in particular. Since the end of the Cold War, conceptions of political modernity that rest on (some version of ) the democratic rule of law have become hegemonic. In response, Mexico’s clase media triumphs legality with renewed industriousness. At heart, to be middle class in a dependent nation-state is to perform this privileged task: to mediate to the nation a (political as much as consumer) modernity that seems always to come from abroad (see Liechty 2003:61–86). Everywhere, the middle class is a doorkeeper, its role sustained by the promise of entry for those below it— the ever-deferred promise of a nation not split by difference.5 Mediating modernity, the middle class appears as a “contact zone” (Lomnitz 2001:125–44) in which “our” modernity is on show for an international audience; middle-class success, from this perspective, is the “avatar” of national progress (Lomnitz 2003:143). To be middle class, one needs a certain kind of nation; one’s own middle-classness becomes the living evidence that such a nation is possible. But if the clase media emerges as “avatar” in Mexico, it does so most forcefully in an odd moment: that of its supposed extinction. In an argument indebted to Maureen O’Dougherty’s (2002:132–66) work on Brazil, Lomnitz argues that, during the economic crisis of the early 1980s, Mexican media interpellated its own middle-class public as the national subject itself, the primary entity suffering through an economic catastrophe that in reality hit everyone. If the middle class emerges as national subject in moments of crisis, this is because crisis threatens not just personal economic stability but the national future heralded by the middle class. The figure of the middle class can thus inspire the most intense identification at the moment of its purported demise.6 Haunted by the fear of failure, debates gauging the relative robustness of the clase media likewise bind it to the national future. “One might ask if Mexico has come of age in 200 years,” boosters write, “the answer lies 4

4. I follow Lomnitz’s understanding of dependency as “a form of historical consciousness” shaped by the era, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when Latin America’s national economies were reoriented toward the United States (2009:1). 5. I have already cited Morris (2004) to the effect that the middle class represents this dream. She too associates the rise of the middle class as a figure of identification with a kind of fetishism of the law for its own sake— public concern focuses on proceduralism rather than politics per se. 6. Compare Muir (2015) on “crisis talk” as a main idiom constituting the middle class in Argentina.

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in its capacity to become a middle-class country” (de la Calle and Rubio 2010). Voices optimistic over Mexico’s “maturation” as a middle-class nation had been on the upswing for a decade by then. They weathered the 2008 economic crisis with a quick round of lamentations and have enjoyed enthusiastic resonance in the United States.7 These voices are not without harsh reply in the public sphere: neoliberalization has brought grief, many contend, not prosperity. The poor are poorer and the clase media is too. The battle over statistics, however, hides a deeper schism, a tectonic shift in the national imaginary. As Mazzarella (2005:1) suggests, interest in the middle class must be taken seriously as a symptom of liberalization in its own right. To explain, let me back up in time. After independence, Lomnitz (2001:64–71) argues, elite representations of the pueblo wavered between a “good pueblo” of potentially redeemable protocitizens and a menacing pueblo lost to criminality and vice. Debates on the pueblo’s status within the nation were rampant until state power was consolidated in the late nineteenth century. As the state pulled together a national project based on progress, order, and foreign capital investment, encroachments on communal lands proliferated (Katz 1998; Eiss 2010). Concomitantly, Lomnitz shows, the “bad pueblo” was neutralized into the “abject pueblo.” That is, the pueblo was no longer a focal point for concerns over the nation’s unity and its international standing; it was simply marginalized from the national project. With the Mexican Revolution, however, the pueblo returned to center stage, not just as the object of upper-class characterizations but as an “insurgent political subject” (Eiss 2010:78) in itself. Revolutionaries did not just violently assert their own emancipation: they claimed the nation as their own (93). The history of the revolution is complex, and indeed the most radical strains did not win out. But with the revolution, the pueblo nonetheless achieved a new legitimacy. As historian Alan Knight notes, new norms emerged: the nation’s leaders now “had to show that they were of the peasantry in terms of culture and mores” (1994:37). This is not to say that the pueblo shed all its negative connotations of economic and moral abjection. The anguished literature on lo mexicano, roughly “the Mexican thing,” which developed in the years after the revolution, continued in the despairing vein of earlier representations. But it now had to deal with the pueblo as the very quintessence of national being. The classic example is Samuel Ramos’s (1934) claim that the pelado, a vicious member of the urban rabble, is the figure in which all of “us,” no matter how civilized, are obliged to read “our” true nature. 7. De la Calle and Rubio were cited in happy chorus by the likes of the New York Times (Friedman 2010) and The Economist (2010, 2013).

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There are of course multiple fallacies involved in the myth of the Mexican Revolution as authentically popular and in the elevation of the pueblo as national subject. Not least of these is, as Lomnitz points out, the fact that social inclusion took the form of a new kind of massified citizenship in which corporative groups establish clientelistic relations with state agencies. As an obligatory point of reference, the pueblo became a “framework for governance and [ . . . ] a political constituency” (Eiss 2010:133). The energy of the revolution was co-opted by a new elite; even admirers of its legacy such as Knight must recognize the growing hollowness of political rhetoric since. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party), as its name suggests, claimed descent from the revolution only to consolidate power into what many perceive as near-dictatorial ossification— it was able to ensure its electoral victories at the presidential level all the way up to 2000. But as Knight points out, “To the extent that the ruling party claims to govern in the name of the revolution, it cannot wholly, blatantly, and consistently flout the popular precepts that the revolution bequeathed” (1994:64). Certain concessions are imperative, especially where, as Knight points out, the postrevolutionary shift to quiescence has never been complete (35). The legitimate status as the true nation that the revolution gave Mexico’s socioeconomically marginal classes is a legacy that should not be underestimated. Alongside the figure of the pueblo, that of the clase media has a more modest history. Various kinds of middling classes played their part in the revolution (Katz 1998:42–43), and though they were on the out for some time, the regime moved decisively to reconcile itself with them from 1940 on (Loaeza 1988:112). Their ranks grew in the boom years after World War II, but prosperity only whetted their desire for political representation.8 Conflict with the state came to a head in the 1968 student movement and the massacre at Tlatelolco. A decade later, the first of a series of devaluations hit, and the cycle of lamentations over the clase media’s demise set in; in 1982 Mexico defaulted on its international loans, and, with deregulation and austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the PRI dove headlong into technocracy. Neoliberal policy making has continued to this day, some of the most noteworthy reforms being the privatization of communal landholdings beginning in 1992 (dismantling the ideological centerpiece of the revolutionary legacy) and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. In Tijuana, particularly palpable shifts have included the withdrawal of political toler8. On the Mexican middle classes during this period, see Coral (2006) and Walker (2013).

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ance for irregular land settlement and the atrophy of public education, making private schools the only option even for many of the poor. Two decades not just of institutional reform but of the construction of a neoliberal “common sense” (Leal 2016) laid the way for the much- lauded “democratic transition” of 2000, when the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), “National Action Party,” won the presidency. Mexico seemed once again on the threshold of political modernity. Throughout all this, the pueblo waned. Alejandra Leal (2013) shows how “civil society” has, over the last three decades, displaced the pueblo as a figure of possibility; Eiss argues that the “attenuation of el pueblo as a framework of collective political mediation” (2010:14) began as early as the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, not the pueblo but the clase media was touted as key to the PAN’s victory (Gilbert 2007), and, indeed, the PAN did its best to articulate a new national project by harnessing the figure of the clase media and the liberal political philosophy that sees it as the necessary pillar of democratic change. This ideology circulates at a global level: the middle classes are supposed to be forward- looking; a middle-class country is supposedly healthy and solid. “Sturdy and unassuming,” the World Bank calls Latin America’s new middle classes, which, it claims, represent 30 percent of the population (Ferreira et al. 2013). Since midcentury, a social scientific literature has enshrined the middle classes as “the principal ideal object of historical change” ( Jiménez 1999:217) in the region. However various and fragmented the middle classes might be objectively, this influential discourse has projected onto them and, eventually, inspired in them a “sense of themselves as the ballast of their nations, [having] corner on the respect for the rule of law and the devotion to the well-being of their fellow citizens.” The clase media appears as the civic class, the law-abiding class, the class of the liberal democratic future. The PAN staked its public rhetoric on the promise not just to represent middle-class interests but to champion Mexico as a middle-class nation. In Tijuana, these claims find ample resonance; many think of voting PAN and being tijuanense as organically linked, and conservative party politics in a neoliberal key dovetail with the frontier myth of upward mobility.9 But Tijuana is not just an important bastion of right-wing politics; many residents situate the city at the very origins of the new “democratic” nation. Local lore traces the PAN’s presidential victory in 2000 back to its first major electoral triumph: in 1989, Baja California, with a third of its population in Tijuana, became the first state to be governed by the PAN. 9. This is not to deny that other parties are electoral contenders here. But even those working with them may frame their constituencies as “southern,” not really from “here.”

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Such narratives are not unrelated to the sense that Tijuana’s public of “rational debate” represents the viable horizon for national becoming. As a purportedly middle-class city, it stands at the very forefront of the future, and the efforts of people like Inés (a die-hard panista) to uphold legality take this sense of promise up at an everyday, individual level. At the time of my fieldwork, right- wing optimism still ran high; in retrospect, the PAN’s victory dealt no mortal blow to the idea of the nation that claims the revolution as its origin. The left- wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), “Party of the Democratic Revolution,” keeps the language of the revolution present. At a national level, a tremendous amount of hope has been attached to it, but it has not been able to win the presidency. Overall, with the consolidation of the imaginary of Mexico as middle class, the pueblo has continued to slowly lose its voice.

Mexico Is So . . . Lawless! In 2006, Mexico’s federal government initiated a major military offensive against organized crime. President Felipe Calderón had just entered office with a crippling deficit in his legitimacy; with only a 0.6 percent lead in the vote, accusations of fraud were rampant, the PRD’s candidate swore himself in as the true president, and mass mobilizations ensued. But despite disillusionment with the first PAN presidency, the confidence that came with the “democratic transition” six years earlier had not yet entirely evaporated. Though the homicide rate skyrocketed in 2008, several years went by before it became clear the state itself was responsible for a staggering number of deaths (Escalante 2011).10 Current perceptions of this wave of violence, along with the sense that the state itself may be the biggest criminal of all, must be understood in relation to older traditions framing Mexico itself as criminal. Before the so-called War on Drug Trafficking, corruption was the watchword articulating fears of a generalized criminality infecting the state itself.11 It was with more than a tremor of fascinated horror that, in the late 1990s, congresspeople in Washington heard testimony to the effect that “Mexico 10. Before 2008, the homicide rate had been dropping steadily and dramatically since the early 1990s (Escalante 2009)— though public concern over violent death gave the impression it was rising. 11. As Azuela points out, statistical research on corruption legitimizes stigmatizing discourses for which lawlessness is a mark of the uncivilized (2006:22). Instead of lending “corruption” further weight as an objective fact, I follow Muir (2016) in asking what sorts of national, classed publics discourses of corruption (or, now in Mexico, criminality) produce.

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and the word ‘corruption’ are synonymous” (US House 2000:53). A decade later, military advisory reports fingered Mexico as a “weak and failing state” (Joint Operating Environment 2008) and even a potential “narco-state” (McCaffrey 2008). By comparison, literary representations of Mexico’s lawlessness seem innocuous. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, Mexico becomes a liminal site of liberatingly loosened mores. The literary trope plays out in US teenagers’ trips south of the border for purposes of partying, at once a productive rite of passage and cause for periodic outbursts of parental and public hysteria in the United States. From news to novels to personal anecdotes, multiple, intertextually linked discourses reproduce the stigma of lawlessness and criminality. These US discourses are not strictly separable from Mexican discourses to similar effect. Parallel to Kerouac or Cormac McCarthy, one might point to such hallowed figures of Mexican literature as Juan Rulfo or Mariano Azuela. As per the “bad pueblo,” Mexican representations of the nation as criminal are nothing new, although the idea that “we are corrupt” only became a standard of public discourse in the late 1980s or so (Antonio Azuela, personal communication). Predictably, the PAN made strenuous efforts to distance itself from the legendary corruption of the old PRI; the campaign with which it first won the presidency prominently emphasized anticorruption. Such public crusades make the repudiation of lawlessness an indispensable part of performing a middle-class subject position. In Tijuana, with its Black Legend of vice and crime, the stakes of this repudiation are that much higher. While friends in southern Mexico timorously ask, “Isn’t it very dangerous there?” many years ago, a college student in San Diego used just the word on which so many middle-class tijuanense anxieties center when she asked me, shocked, how I could possibly live in Tijuana: “It’s so . . . lawless!” The middle-class tijuanense assertion of lawfulness polemicizes with moralizing discourses from both north and south, but it also polemicizes with discourses that patriotically present various sorts of lawlessness in positive light. By now, the criminality of the pueblo is no longer just a discourse imposed from above; representations of the “bad pueblo” may become the very vehicles through which the pueblo imagines itself into existence as a collective subject. Writing of Indonesia, Siegel (1998) provides some suggestive clues as to how. “With the achievement of independence,” he writes, “President Sukarno claimed to speak for the people in continuing the revolution. [ . . . ] When Sukarno was displaced [ . . . ], ‘[t]he people’ became merely a term of reference; it was no longer a term of address, as it had been when Sukarno spoke to them in their own name. Since 1965, the people have lacked a voice to speak for them” (1998:3–4). Cut off from political voicing, “the people” were reduced to

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an “anonymous mass who spread rumors” (27). Though these rumors provide a sort of subterranean form of expression, they also tie this public to state recognition, for they accept the culpability of the petty criminals who are their favorite topic. If the criminals could be seen as innocent, Siegel speculates, then “the people” would “live again, forcing their way on their own” (79). This would be the point of emergence of what I call lawlessness: a turning away from the state as a source of moral authority. In Mexico, there has been a similar shift pushing “the people” from overt political expression, but in comparison it has been gradual and incomplete. Unlike the Indonesian word for “the people,” the term pueblo bears a history not just of dispossession but of sovereignty, for it referred originally to a village as a legal subject (Eiss 2010). Now, official uses of el pueblo as an interpellative category have faded, but insurgent claims to the pueblo have not. Eiss (n.d.) looks at lynchings (on the rise over the last twenty years) and the autodefensa (community policing) phenomenon to show the pueblo disputing the state its status as sovereign through violent and, from many perspectives, blatantly criminal means. Extrajudicial killing may be, as Siegel argues it is in Indonesia, a response to senses of national collectivity in excess of state interpellation, constituting a desperate effort to recenter the political in the state. But in Mexico the “anonymous mass who spread rumors” has much more force, and for it, lawlessness is a position, not an emergent possibility.

*** As an important antecedent to the current situation, take Lo negro del Negro Durazo, “The Blackness of Black Durazo” (González 1983; see also Lomnitz 2003:138–39). An exposé of Mexico City’s chief of police written by his head bodyguard, the book begins in good confessional form: In my life as a professional gunman, I, Pepe González y González, author of the present work, began to kill at the age of 28, and having upon my conscience over 50 individuals dispatched to the other world, am grateful for [agradezco] the intervention of the functionaries thanks to whose efforts I was not left with a criminal record. Note [advierto] that I killed on orders from people like Gustavo Díaz Ordaz [President of Mexico, 1964–1970], Alfonso Corona del Rosal [Regent of Mexico City, 1966–1970] and many more. I only carried out orders.12 12. “En mi vida de gatillero profesional, yo, Pepe González y González, autor del presente trabajo, comencé a matar desde los 28 años de edad, y teniendo en mi conciencia una cifra superior a 50 individuos despachados al otro mundo, agradezco la

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The first person singular juxtaposed with the full name (“I, Pepe González y González”) is only the most blatant way to declare, me consta (I vouch for it); “author of the present work” doubly underlines the assertion of authorial responsibility, and, indeed, González was real enough for Durazo to win a defamation case against him (Ortega Pizarro 1986). González’s authority as a speaker might seem to come from his access to the backstage world of the political elite, but he was not an actor there. He only took orders; he was nothing more than a lackey within a ferociously demarcated class hierarchy. After his declaration of culpability, González’s second act as author condenses the poised duplicity and retributive justice that underlie the book as a whole: agradezco, “I thank.” To publicize the powers of a patron is a classic return gift from the client in the unequal exchange relation that binds the two parties (Wolf 1966). But González’s thanks here are sardonic; his book as gift is poisoned. In a supreme act of vengeance, he will vilify his old patron before the widest public possible— the pueblo itself. Advierto, he writes, “I warn.” This is the first appearance of the pueblo, implicit as the book’s direct addressee. “I feel,” González goes on, “the responsibility as man and as citizen to confess and speak sincerely with [sincerarme con; literally, ‘to sincere myself with’] our pueblo” (18). Publication appears as a sacrifice for the nation, putting a definitive end to the author’s professional career. Thus the assassin emerges as nationalist hero: “We hired gunmen love Mexico too, in our own way,” he writes. Reharmonizing himself with the pueblo, González should be able to speak, again, as one of “us.” But he never does. This tension drives the entire narrative: the tension between the upstanding “I” of me consta and the degraded servitude to which González was reduced. Writing is itself an attempt to regain a status lost. After the confessional foreword, the book proper begins with the author’s birth and background. Noting his parents were immigrants from Spain, González makes explicit what is at stake in this fact: “I believe I have inherited, due to my Spanish origins, the taste for reading and writing” (21). Here, the “I” of me consta leans on its European past to claim the innate qualities that suit one to stand at the public sphere’s literate, enlightened core. From the beginning, González tries to establish a distinction of class and race that would separate him from the pueblo. In contrast to Durazo, who is not only dark and practically illiterate

intervención de los funcionarios por cuyas gestiones no me quedaron antecedentes penales. Advierto que maté por órdenes de gente como Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Alfonso Corona del Rosal y muchos más. Sólo cumplí órdenes” (González 1983:17).

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but of uncertain provenance, González is the güero, “the whitey.” When he speaks of “the poor,” he tends to do so in the third person, as their protector more than as one of them. Durazo, however, does not treat him any better. Before Durazo’s promotion, he and González keep up an egalitarian camaraderie, calling each other pinche flaco (fuckin’ skinnybones) and comandante de cagada (shit commander). On coming to power, though, Durazo underwent a “radical change,” which expressed itself in “the treatment he gave his inferiors” (56). Now, on reencountering González, Durazo pretends not to know him. Later, Durazo makes him wait on him as his manservant (though González is his bodyguard), mixing his drinks for him separately, for example, at a party at which Durazo wants to insult the host (60–63). González certainly wants to vie with Durazo; he certainly wants to claim that where Durazo was a lousy and exploitative patron, he, González, would be generous and understanding. Durazo is a crass parvenu, and, if he had behaved otherwise, the implication goes, perhaps González would not have felt moved to publish such a nasty book about him. Thus Lo negro is not a critique of hierarchy but only of bad patrons. Its nature qua circulating text, however, ultimately undoes this conservatism. At the end of the day, González remains a member of the masses excluded from the back stage, those who are normally relegated to se dice (it is said) within the national communicative economy. Admitted as a servant, González overhears, and his book passes on that overhearing. He speaks to his public, whether he wants to or not, as one of their own. In revealing the secrets of the back stage, González’s me consta does not enjoin its addressees to respect the boundaries that cordon off the backstage world of power and privilege— this is, after all, a published work and a wildly popular bestseller at that. His me consta violently reveals the back stage of politics on the front stage, before the public. The book is an exposé, a tearing aside of the curtain, a trespass, and an indecent exposure. The servant, the hired assassin, seizes the “I” of the front stage transgressively. As the frontispiece blares, “at last it is here! What no one dared to say openly . . . What no editor dared to publish . . .” The back cover goes on in the same vein: “No one had dared to reveal the corruption of the government from the inside [my emphasis].” If González avoids the “we” of the pueblo, his editor does not hesitate to use it: “We common citizens, that is, the poor and without influences, lived for six years at the mercy of a police force that, thanks to Durazo’s pressures, had 13

13. In Mexican Spanish, güero’s connotations are positive; I gloss it with a racist term in English to highlight, by way of contrast, the unacknowledged racism of the pigmentary system González evokes and on which the very title of his book plays.

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become a band of delinquents” (13). At the same time, González’s exposé is no revelation at all. His me consta does not put him above se dice; it depends on and supports it. It only repeats what everyone already knew; as the book’s cover explains: “González confirms what public opinion had already suspected for some time.” The book’s market success is thus framed as an effect of se dice. Its fame comes thanks to its vindication of hearsay, by showing its truth on the front stage. While Lo negro is doubtless unique, the logics of hearsay that shape its circulation as a public text are not. A few years ago, a friend in the United States (once an undocumented migrant, she still makes a living cleaning houses) told me that she had long had her eye out for Lo negro. Subsequently, I lent her a copy. Later, she told me she read it twice because she lived near Durazo’s weekend home “at the time when all this was being commented upon.” That is, she explained her reading as an outgrowth of her participation in the hearsay public. Having positioned herself as part of se dice, she went on to claim the personal connection that ties this public to the back stage of the elite: she herself knew people who had worked for Durazo. González has been admitted to the back stage, but only to carry out orders, whether for cocktails or assassinations. Whatever his crimes (and none of them are, exactly, his own), his allegiance remains with the masses. Hence, his irreproachable nationalism— the pueblo is what constitutes the authentic Mexico deserving of his sacrifice, and it is the pueblo that Lo negro evokes and animates as its public, in explicit rejection of the state with its abusive and grotesque elite. In the text, se dice takes on the guise and power of me consta to destroy the appearances of the front stage and confirm that the communicative economy of the nation (front stage and back stage of the exploitative state/elites; excluded masses as audience) is just what se dice knew it to be all along. Hearsay remains the paradigmatic form through which the pueblo imagines itself into subjectivity.

Petty Bribery and the Clase Media Against discourses and practices like those of both González and Durazo, which would separate (illegitimate) state from (authentic) nation, the middle-class tijuanense project of citizenship seeks to realign them. To be a “first-rate citizen” (the phrase is the Manager’s, encountered in “The Assembly Plant”), one must assume one’s responsibilities before the state. But it is also one’s duty to assure that the state assumes its responsibilities before oneself as citizen. The accountability of the individual “I” and of the state are, for the documented public, two sides of

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the same coin. Projects for accountability, though, go hand in hand with discourses of corruption (Gupta 1995:388; Muir 2016:135). While scholarly studies have focused on political corruption in Mexico (Azuela 2006; Lomnitz 2000), petty bribery provides a far more immediate focus for personal anticorruption efforts. Far from being, like political corruption, a matter of social obligations of confianza, “trust” (see Lomnitz 1975), petty bribery most often takes place in anonymous contexts. The bribe to the traffic cop is the classic example. Because it is so common, and because narratives about it constitute a genre in its own right, petty bribery is an important point at which the tijuanense clase media may not only declare its lawfulness but actually implement it. “Here’s my license, fine me,” the Manager says he tells the cops, after expressing his disapproval of “corruption at all levels.” Such attitudes are common. One must take a stand, break the well-worn interactional ruts, and impose oneself as defender of Law and Nation. Another man, also a US visa holder and an unrelenting nationalist, related how tiresome the trip south to his hometown was: at every checkpoint (I paraphrase), “They see the car has plates from the border, and they think you have money.” He was so annoyed that when a young soldier asked him for change for a soda, he snapped back, “Don’t they pay you a salary?” He reported with satisfaction that his tactic had the desired effect. With, “Don’t they pay you a salary?” this man effectively redefined his own and his interlocutor’s roles; he reminded the soldier that he was a public servant dealing with a citizen. Lomnitz (2001:58– 80) has argued that, in contemporary Mexico, citizenship constitutes a degraded baseline for relations in public, but, in this case, prestige accrues to the individual whose assertion of the law marks his citizenship as a responsibility he has fully shouldered. Citizenship is not a baseline that must be supplemented by bribery; bribery is the devalued form of relation that vaporizes in the face of a forceful claim to citizenship. The exchange between driver and soldier reveals a sense of citizenship more akin to the nineteenth-century one Lomnitz describes, in which full citizenship was the valued privilege of the elites. My elderly housemate Inés’s solution was far more extreme. When I asked what she would do if a cop tried to collect a bribe from her, she did not need even an instant to think. She would pick up her cell phone, dial the equivalent of 911, and say, “I’m here with Officer X, badge number X, who is trying to collect a bribe from me. What do I do?” In effect, she restores the law before its corrupt agent by appealing to a higher authority that, she assumes, will enforce the interest of the nation and the legality that should underlie daily interaction on the street. The officer’s

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corruption remains his own; it is not taken as a token of the corruption of the state as a whole. Thus Inés asserts her me consta before the state. Though I did not see Inés implement this anti-bribe strategy, the example shows the continuity between the “I” of me consta and not just a law-abiding but a law-defending self that must be realized in practice. The narrative she provides is not a nostalgic reminiscence but a pattern for future action: I was explicitly asking her advice for such situations. Edith too had lived with Inés as a young woman and, like me, was long subject to her educational efforts. One day when we met for coffee, she was livid over her boyfriend’s attempt to weasel out of paying a speeding ticket. (A young woman he had met at a party, a municipal employee, had offered to erase the fine on the city’s computer system.) Quite indignantly, Edith told me she would never stoop to pay a bribe— it was lo más bajo (the lowest thing). When I asked her why, she said, “Well, supposedly, you’re feeding corruption.” Edith’s proposed solution was not as confrontational as Inés’s; she used the tactic suggested by the Manager (not coincidentally, her boss). Instead of turning the officer in, she would simply insist on paying the fine. This is, again, to insist on dealing with the officer only as an agent of the state and, at the same time, to own up to one’s faults (what the law says is a traffic violation is indeed something I should not do). Thus Edith, like Inés, stakes her sense of her own morality on her ability to relate to the state as a moral authority. This is both a matter of her good citizenship and of her and others’ esteem of herself. She is humiliated by her boyfriend’s behavior. Unlike his temptress at the party, she would “never” stoop to something so “low” as a bribe, so she is willing literally to pay, holding both herself and the state accountable in the same gesture.14 What my middle-class interlocutors ignore with these self-righteous proclamations is the reality of the threat by means of which an officer would typically extract a bribe. The threat is the legal fine that could be applied instead of the more lenient bribe, and it is, obviously, more or less coercive depending on one’s financial resources. The $1,500 speeding ticket (about US$140 at the time) would have cost Edith the better part of a week’s salary, but it would crush a family struggling to get by on $800 a week (not a few of whom here do have cars). Moreover, bribery works best where infractions and irregularities are not the exception but the norm (recall Foucault 1977, on the host of petty illegalities with which the lower classes have been criminalized), and, in Tijuana at least, police do 14. I once unwittingly implemented this strategy; my failure to grasp the officer’s hint that I bribe him was enough to derail the exchange (cf. Gupta 1995). Thus my interlocutors’ proposals may well work in practice.

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tend to target the most marginalized for such extortions. Thus, bribery affects most substantially that part of the population for whom the legal fines represent a disproportionate burden even as irregularities are unavoidable for socioeconomic reasons. The clase media tends to present its legalistic morality as a standard all should live up to, but “first- rate citizenship” is simply not accessible to all. 15

Petty Bribery and the Pueblo To say that the burden of petty illegality would be even heavier if the police followed the letter of the law is not to say that bribes should be considered a favor done society by the police. If those least prepared to bear this burden consider the police a parasitic plague, this is because they perceive the police to prey disproportionately on the poor, who have neither the financial nor the social means to protect themselves. It is not the illegality of the bribe that is perceived as immoral but its unfairness where some solidarity should exist instead. One morning, the police picked up a teenager I knew in a colonia popular immediately after he had purchased a dose of crystal meth. They handcuffed him to the back of their pickup and drove him to the corner of the block where he lived. A long bout of negotiations with his household, where I too was staying, ensued: Dorotea was not a relative but had taken the boy in some years before. Several of us stood looking on from a distance and occasionally walking down to listen in. The main negotiator was Eduardo, Dorotea’s grandson, in his twenties. “No sean culeros” (Don’t be assholes), he pleaded with the police, who remained inside the pickup’s cab. The fee of $2,500 pesos (some US$230) was too steep; exorbitant, Eduardo said, considering going rates. The cops drove away, returned. When negotiations finally broke down, some household members were concerned, but Eduardo assured them it was too much trouble for the police to press charges; they would drive their captive around for a few hours and then release him— which is exactly what happened. In this case, the bribe was beyond what those pressured could pay. The law is reduced to leverage for the officers in an extralegal transaction. 15. The following events vividly brought home to me the difference in police behavior between districts. One day in a colonia popular, small talk revolved around two young men shot dead by a policeman for urinating on his patrol car. Upon returning to Inés’s, I found several patrol cars and police motorbikes outside. Her daughter Dara had just phoned in some suspicious activity (which turned out to be entirely innocent) and within minutes had some six or seven officers at her beck and call. For her, the police mostly work as they should.

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Though beyond the state, this transaction is by no means beyond any morality: “Don’t be assholes!” Eduardo tells the cops, and, though the plea does not bend them, it is not out of place. The same man who, above, shamed the soldier into retracting his demand for a bribe by asking, “Don’t they pay you?” later took me on another trip south. Driving a van marked with the logo of the orphanage where he worked (instead of the private car he used on the earlier trip), he was not once asked for a bribe and was instead treated jovially by soldiers at the checkpoints we crossed, who invariably asked about the orphanage and his work there. Closer to Tijuana, some of them turned out to know one of the orphanage’s graduates, who had joined the military. Both the plea “don’t be assholes” and the soldiers’ reluctance to ask the driver of an orphanage van for a bribe are based on the recognition of socioeconomic conditions understood as shared by “us.” They are both based on the idea of the pueblo. The implication that the police are being “assholes” has nothing to do with the illegality of their demanding a bribe. It concerns, rather, the meanness of demanding money from people who cannot afford it and who are, after all, not unlike oneself. The very use of the word asshole underlines that the officers are not figures deserving of any delicately respectful language and have no call to be offended by the vulgar address of equals on the street (and indeed I saw no sign that they were). The distinction between legality and illegality falls out of the picture as a relevant moral criterion. “If they were policemen, I’d respect them,” Eduardo fumed in another context, which is as much as to say, if there were a legitimate state, everything would be different. Instead, the police are “pigs” (cerdos), as he often called them, and by this he meant, I believe, something not so different from what Dara, Inés’s daughter, meant when she called her rich and uncouth friend from the upscale Chapu district by the same name: they have a distorted sense of status, in which the power of the badge leads them to believe they are above the pueblo when they are not.16 What is at stake in these interactions is national, class solidarity, the same assumptions that underlie the idea of the pueblo. These interactions are not only a matter between “you” and “I”; they involve an implicit “we” that both officer and offender should recognize as the legitimate ground for interaction. The state falls out of the picture, and, instead, the pueblo as authentic nation takes shape in the commonplaces that assert its victimization. As a teenage girl with whom I lived in another colonia popular told me, the political class “steals the money of the pueblo [ . . . ] that’s why Mexico has stayed at the bottom.” She explained the criminalization 16. Pigs is not slang for policemen in Mexican Spanish.

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of the poor with the illustrative example of a person from “around here” locked up for stealing milk to feed his or her children and contrasted this hypothetical case with the properties she said ex-president Vicente Fox bought himself: “Who paid for that? We did.” As represented here, both pueblo and elite are criminal, but one is justified and the other is not. The pueblo evoked here is lawless, not just because its socioeconomic condition means that its daily life is full of the illegal and the irregular. It is lawless because its morality is not centered on the determinations of the state, which is reduced to an unequally available and much- abused resource. To enact the pueblo is thus to keep state and nation, as the seat of moral legitimacy, fundamentally split. To be middle class, in contrast, entails realigning the two through an ideology of the upstanding “I” of me consta. From this perspective, the payer of a bribe is not a victim coerced by the police but a willing participant, an autonomous individual who chooses to engage in morally reprehensible behavior. “Al que de mordida llámalo así: corrupto” (He who gives a bribe, call him this: corrupt) exhorted a widely disseminated ad in the mid-2000s. For this “I,” the relation between self and society runs through the state. Inés’s commitment to me consta is at the core of a range of citizenship practices the importance of which she often emphasized to me, from her habit of watching the evening news to her declaration that “I always vote” (which she does). In the context of an onslaught of stateand civil society–sponsored anticorruption campaigns,17 lawfulness in the 2000s gained ground as a way to claim the kind of patriotic citizenship that goes along with proper middle-class status. The examples I have given show the resonance of such propagandistic discourse as individuals such as Inés or Edith take it up and rearticulate it. They do so both in their declarations to me and in a host of daily practices. This project— for the nation-state, for the clase media, and for oneself— is caught in multiple dialogic relations with both foreign and national discourses that brand Tijuana as lawless. But the most important and most easily overlooked social position against which the middle-class public takes shape is that of the lawless pueblo whose status as national subject the clase media would dispute— by refusing to recognize it as a subject at all. If paying a bribe is “the lowest thing,” to refuse to do so is not just an affirmation of proper “first-rate” citizenship, it is also an unqualified affirmation of distinction from those who cannot but pay, and whose only recourse in 17. The administration of President Fox (2000–2006) launched a media campaign urging citizens not to pay bribes. Governmental propaganda is complemented by privately funded efforts, such as those of the Consejo de la Comunicación, “The Voice of Business.”

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the face of abusive authority is the increasingly delegitimized language of the pueblo. The stances toward the law reproduced in the encounter between policeman and citizen are those of me consta and se dice: the social imaginaries of the nation as clase media or as pueblo inform the encounter. Whether lawlessness should be understood as the equivalent of criminality or as containing a moment in which another moral authority may be established depends on which public one reads the phenomenon through. In this second sense, lawlessness is the fullest form of the unmooring, dispersal, or flight from the theater or mirror of the Law described in earlier chapters. In such impulses toward consolidation or flight, clase media and pueblo dispute the true nation and its relation to the state. As publics, they do not live only in explicitly self-reflexive genres of rational debate and hearsay; they also take shape in such quotidian contexts as the encounter on the street with the representatives of the Mexican state.

The Visa Interview

The US laser visa underpins middle-class Tijuana and its me consta (I vouch for it). How, though, does it actually work to ratify middle- class selfhood, and what are the limits of the confirmation it seems to grant? Running the gamut from lawful to lawless, the range of stances in relation to the US state may be tracked in the details of the institutional process of obtaining a visa. In this section, I rely mostly on ethnographic material from a factory (introduced in “The Assembly Plant”) where I spent a few weeks conducting interviews. Because the plant was closing, numerous employees were applying for visas— stability of employment is a crucial criterion, so delaying application would mean waiting several years to build up a new record. To get a visa, one must undergo an interview with a US consular officer. This rite of passage institutes in the successful applicant a status that every crossing through the port of entry merely reconfirms. It secures, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, “a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain” (1991:117). If one is not successful, one receives a little piece of paper explaining that “The Immigration Law of the United States presumes that every applicant for a nonimmigrant visa is a possible immigrant.” The interview sorts people into these two categories: the “nonimmigrant,” or territorially rooted Mexican citizen, and the “possible immigrant,” in whom a future as an “illegal alien” remains a legible potential. Quite literally, the visa certifies that one is not an unauthorized labor migrant in potentia. To be classified as a nonimmigrant, one must provide what the consulate calls “guarantees” of one’s return to Mexico: letters of employment, paycheck stubs, educational diplomas, property deeds, electricity bills, water contracts, relatives’ visas, and even marriage certificates. The list is not finite, nor is any item specifically required; instead, one takes to the interview any and all documents one can amass. In a country in which access to state institutions has been a central idiom of social status since

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colonial times (Lomnitz 2001), there is no ritual that sums up a lifelong relation to formal institutions the way the visa interview does. But documents in themselves are never enough. Indeed, applicants warn that to lay them all out before the officer means failure. An engineer in the assembly plant described the advice he gave his subordinates: “take it with you in a folder like so,” I tell him, “all orderly. bills, don’t take all of them. in sight. take a month’s. if he asks for two months’, [have them ready] someplace else.” [ . . . ] I think when they should go there they shouldn’t, they should take everything ready with them just in case, but. not show anything until they ask you for it? and not show everything. [ . . . ] so, why take all of them, I mean. it’s like showing all your cards, it’s . . . for me personally, it’s . . . a sign of desperation.1

This analysis projects an apex of success in the interview. The ideal applicant is the one who presents the fewest documents, whose status is simply evident in his or her person: in bearing, dress, tone of speech, and the color and softness of skin and hair. The engineer was no amateur in the art of self-presentation. He showed up to his interview without his federal voter’s ID, the one indispensable document of basic identification. But when he explained with a shrug he had left it in the scanner at work, he was given his visa anyway. In the brief minutes the interview lasts, the best evidence of a lifetime of self-fashioning is the easy restraint of the bourgeois subject. As Bourdieu points out of all such rites of institution, the interview’s basic message is, “Become what you are.”2 “You and I know it’s about class [clase],” the engineer told me.3 Though his point was critical, his statement reflects the belief that US state rec1. “‘Llévatelo en una carpeta así’, le digo, ‘ordenadito. recibos, no te lleves todos. a la vista. llévate un mes. si te pide dos meses, [jalos] otra parte’. [ . . . ] yo pienso que cuando deben de ir ahí no deben, deben de llevar todo preparado por si acaso, pero. no enseñar nada hasta que te lo pidan? y no enseñar todo. [ . . . ] entonces, para qué llevar todos, o sea. es de enseñar todas la cartas, es . . . para mi caso es . . . señal de desespero.” 2. Compare Chu on the “interweaving of paper evidence and embodied performance” (2010:131) in US visa interviews in China. Here too there is a dialectic between internalized identity and official identifications (62), though state recognition does not transparently confirm personal senses of self. 3. In context, it was clear he meant social class and not classiness; that is, he meant to expose distinction rather than naturalize it.

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ognition in the interview is a straightforward evaluation of the individual applicant’s authentic identity— a belief that is crucial if the visa is to be understood as a simple validation of social status and full Mexican citizenship. Thus, the visa draws distinctions not through simple possession, but according to whether one believes the US state indeed functions as a transparent machine of legitimation. Indeed, office workers at the factory insisted without exception that the visa was a matter of course for them. They denied any nervousness about their impending interviews, for they knew, they said, they were the sort of people who get approved. Line workers, in contrast, told me the outcome of the interview was a matter of luck. As one woman put it, “I like to gamble.” When I repeated remarks like the engineer’s, their rebuttals were adamant. Quite rightly, they would point out that there were line workers with visas and office workers without. In their small talk, line workers spoke of the interview much as a game, along the lines of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, with lengthy discussions and regrets over the last question asked each failed applicant, understood as the one that disqualified them. For them, success reflects not the grooming of a lifetime but a combination of luck and quick-wittedness. In contrast to the office workers’ theory of transparent recognition of authentic identity, line workers project the interview as a matter of facade. Indeed, even as the engineer explained his own success in the interview as a natural outcome of his class status, he advised his subordinates in their terms, providing them with a tidbit of class habitus as if, appropriately manipulated as part of a calculus of appearances, it might secure their success. The distinction between those who believe in the interview and those who seek to game it, though, is unstable. Two technicians in their midtwenties, one of whom received the engineer’s advice, explained to me how they prepared for the visa interview. Besides taking the advice about the folder, they said they had held off applying for several years until they felt they had fully transformed themselves into desirable candidates. “I waited until I knew for myself I didn’t want it in order to go work in the US,” one of them said. He staked his performance in the interview on his own confidence that he was no longer a “possible immigrant”; he expected his inmost impulses to be legible to the state and carefully modified them over the course of years. At the same time, the two friends changed outwardly too: they slowly shifted their sartorial habits from cholo (gangster) style to khakis, button-down shirts, and dress shoes. Indeed, on my first visit to the plant I was shocked to see one of them in his technician uniform, for we had met first at an office workers’ party, and I had had no idea he was not one of them. The two had taught them-

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selves by conscious effort to dress “presentably” (their word) on a daily basis. This strategy is consonant with the wisdom frequently repeated by successful applicants: one must dress as one would any other day. Like the office workers, the technicians treated the visa as the finishing touch to the profound process of inward and outward self-transformation that upward mobility entails. The very care they took, however, bears the traces of a pragmatic approach in which the visa is not a simple confirmation of social distinction. They said they waited until they had accumulated a respectable number of years at the same job, until they had bought homes, until they had married. Both of their wives were native-born tijuanenses; both already held visas that their husbands presented at the interview. One does not do all these things just to get a visa. Yet the two friends’ coworkers raucously teased, “This guy got married just for the visa!” It thus remains ambiguous to what extent their efforts of the last few years were a project of self-transformation and upward mobility or of strategizing to increase the chances at a visa. The very objectivity with which they described the advantages they had taken so long to accumulate suggests the latter. Those who advise wearing everyday dress to the interview, after all, never verbalize what was obvious to the technicians: everyday dress must be acceptable by the standards of business casual. Edith is another in between case, in which the visa’s power to institute a documented, middle-class identity seems to slip. As an engineer at the factory, she is, like her office peers, invested in the visa as an emblem of status. Like the technicians, though, she worked her way up in the world through diligent self-fashioning as well as study, and so occasionally she expresses, sotto voce, a similarly ambiguous attitude toward the visa. Sometimes, she tells me, she thinks about using her visa to work illegally in the United States. Immediately, though, a vivid image pops into her head of her fellow engineers sneering at her, “Ugh, is that what you went to college for?” Away from them, she can more openly muse, “I think the best way to go to the United States is to make your life here in Mexico, appear to be well-off [aparentar estar bien], and cross with papers to work.” Amid a generally thoroughgoing orientation to lawfulness, lawlessness reemerges as a stubborn trace. The woman who said she liked to gamble protected herself; rejection was for her no deep disappointment, for it was no reflection on her self. A couple in their forties (he a technician; she a line worker) were not so well prepared. The wife bitterly remarked that “in my case, for example, you want to do things the right way and they don’t give you the chance.” She had made the mistake of trying to show too many documents at once and had found herself reprimanded by the interviewing officer: “Me no

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ask for documents!” “It’s like they close up more,” she observed, “They don’t give you the opportunity to show that you have goods [bienes].” She was referring to the fact that she and her husband own their home. Their situation, she feels, is not so different from that of his two younger coworkers, and the interview should have reflected that. For this couple, however, the visa was no simple confirmation, but a bid to rise socially. They wanted their son to be able to go on school trips to the United States; they wanted him to join the ranks of the tijuanense documented. Their lengthy discussions over whether a try at the visa would be worth the US$200 they spent on it revealed the intensity of their own feeling of not belonging to the “we” for whom the visa is but the finishing touch to status. Tellingly, when I asked the husband what he wore to the interview, he exclaimed (shocked that I would ask something so obvious) that it was, of course, his “Sunday best.” Describing to me his outfit that day, Edith rolled her eyes: its centerpiece was a screeching (chillante chillante) yellow shirt. “He’s a good guy,” she remarked drily, “but he’s got the look [facha] of someone who wants to go work [illegally] on the other side.”4 For her, his visa rejection merely reconfirmed his social type—“possible immigrant,” not respectable citizen— obvious long before he even tried for a visa. Betty, a young professional from beyond the plant, is another case of disappointment, worse because she comes from a social background in which the visa is taken for granted. As is common among Tijuana’s clase media, she held a visa since childhood. Her father, however, is a native US citizen, and, in preparation for graduate school in the United States, Betty applied for citizenship herself. The decision, she explained, was purely practical (she thought it would be simpler than getting a student visa every year), and so she was not particularly concerned when her application was rejected. It was not until she sought her student visa that the reasons for this rejection came to light: and then, then, then my interview was over. so then they were accusing me [I found out later] of, of fraud against the government of the United States for not having declared that I was adopted. but I didn’t know I was adopted. but they didn’t, didn’t believe me. [ . . . ] so then what with that, I can’t, I can’t get a visa anymore. ever. so then that happened after the family trauma . . . [creaky voice, dragging low in the throat], because my parents didn’t want me to know, I mean, they had made the decision that I not know they had adopted me, 4. Facha emphasizes exterior appearances, though pejoratively (to be fachoso is to look slovenly). Its root is the same as that of face or facade (fachada).

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and, because they [the consulate] told me . . . that [that she was adopted], and also because they were accusing me of fraud when I didn’t know.5

The “trauma,” Betty says, involved both the personal revelation and her literal criminalization. Her life plans had been charted on the assumption of legal access to the United States, and the shattering of that assumption had far-reaching effects. She described both a long process of emotional recovery and a twin institutional process of appealing her case. Her birth certificate may have been inauthentic, but her self-presentation was sincere, and the state should recognize her authenticity as a good, middle-class Mexican citizen. The officer’s accusation—“You just want the visa to go live [illegally] in the US!”— outrages her. To explain the gravity of the situation, Betty goes a step further: if the officer decides to say, “you’re not, I’m gonna put down that you’re a drug trafficker, don’t ever enter the United States again,” you don’t enter again, because she has the power, they have the power to put things on there? [on your file], and we don’t know who has the power to take them off.6

Betty evokes the trafficker as the extreme of criminal branding, illustrating both the absoluteness and the ludicrousness of the US state’s classifications. The state, she has discovered, is not a rational machine of class legitimation but a source of arbitrary violence. At the same time, the officer only has “the power” because the hypothetical applicant really is an upstanding citizen and neither a drug trafficker nor a potential “illegal alien” (note how she brings the two together), who might well find another way into the United States. In stark contrast to the technicians or Edith, such crossing simply has no place in Betty’s imagination of her 5. “Y ahí, ahí, ahí terminó mi cita. entonces me estaban acusando de [que ya] supe, de, de fraude en contra del gobierno de los Estados Unidos por no haber declarado que yo era adoptada. pero yo no sabía que yo era adoptada. pero no me, no me creyeron. [ . . . ] entonces ya con eso, yo ya no, ya no puedo obtener una visa. nunca. entonces ya pasó eso después del trauma . . . familiar, porque mis papás no querían que yo supiera, o sea ellos habían tomado la decisión que no supiera que me habían adoptado, y, porque ellos me dijeron, eso, y además porque me estaban acusando de fraude cuando yo no sabía.” 6. “Si el oficial decide decir, ‘tú no, voy a poner que eres traficante de drogas, no vuelvas a entrar a Estados Unidos jamás’, no vuelves a entrar, porque ella tiene el poder, ellos tienen el poder de meter cosas ahí? y no sabemos quién tiene el poder de quitarlos.”

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future. Her “trauma” results from reading a social system of distinction through a bureaucratic system that does not ultimately match it. As Betty recovers, she sees the United States demystified. Its fetish nature revealed, it appears now as an absolute and arbitrary power in all its ignominious glory— much as it does for those who were excluded to begin with. Now, she says, all the petty injustices of the US state, which she never noticed before, leap to her attention and choke her with outrage: in line for the interview, the elderly must stand in the sun for hours; people are not permitted to lean against the wall, turn sideways, or chat, but must remain in military posture; a woman carries her handicapped daughter through this ordeal because wheelchairs are not allowed. The line for the interview prefigures the line at the port of entry (it is often remarked that the consulate is sovereign territory of the United States); with her experience of rejection, passage gives way to prohibition in her very perception of the border’s reality. Still attached to legality, Betty took action in another form. Instead of getting her master’s, she told me, she decided to have a baby. Because her old visa was, ironically, never cancelled, Betty’s son was born in the United States completely legally, for Betty paid all medical expenses out of her own pocket. Indeed, she even made an issue of her status to the officer when she first crossed after her visa denial, and he assured her she could keep crossing until her old visa expired. In emphasizing the legality of all this, she again drew her distinction from the undocumented: “I never went as a wetback [mojada] or anything.” A stigma has been laid on her, and she bears the burden of disproving it. Her son’s citizenship is a joke on the state, “una manera de chingarles” (a way to screw them), as Betty put it with a laugh. She conceives of it as a retaliation, a response that allows her to reestablish her own “I.” Cut off from the state, she discovers in herself a power to pass she never knew she had. Her son is a living transgression; in him, she possesses that power in a form that is no longer naive. She turns legality inside out, making it but a shell concealing her rebellion. But Betty does not ultimately exemplify lawlessness. To begin with, she has assured for her son a relationship with the US State that, unlike her own, can (she hopes) never be denied. “I won’t let him go through what I went through,” she says. Four years later, in 2010, she had just obtained his first passport; she was still appealing her own case through a lawyer. At the same time, she regaled me with stories meant to reveal the state’s secret motives: it cancels people’s visas at random in a scheme to make money off them, for it knows they will reapply; though the state knows who uses their visa to work without authorization in the United States, it will never clamp down on those individuals, for it wants their vulnerable, cheap labor. Even as Betty reminds

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me how her visa was not cancelled, thus rubbing in the state’s fallibility, this vengeful and triumphant unmasking (Abrams 1988) depends on a simultaneous attribution of power and omniscience. As the practical power of the State over her life is confirmed, the fetish shows itself more monstrously huge than ever, reborn from the ashes of her “traumatic” break from it. Betty’s turning to the Law is angry, but it is stronger than ever. With their blunt descriptions of strategizing, the technicians may still, delicately and despite their new status as visa holders, maintain themselves outside the law-abiding play of recognitions with the US state. Wilma’s case, in contrast, is clearly beyond the pale. Many years ago, she tricked the consular officer into granting her a visa by doing just the opposite of what the engineer advised. In this excerpt, the officer has just asked her for an electricity bill. then I said [to myself ], “oh lordy.” and then I put everything out for her, all the papers I put out there. I said to her, “tell me what you want me to find for you.” [ . . . ] “and your marriage certificate?” I said, “here it is.” “your husband’s check. the letter from [indistinct].” “oh, yes.” and that was it, she skipped over it. so then, uh, “ah, well, very good,” she says, “you do have all your papers,” she says. “at twelve noon they’ll give you your visa right here.” “oh,” I said, “thank you, okay,” but [inside] I [was like] “whew . . .”7

Wilma did not have an electricity bill because she lived in a squatters’ colony. Her status as a respectable citizen is not at stake in the interview; like the gambler, she believes the outcome is “luck.” Thus, her visa instituted no social difference in her; it did not make her part of the group “to whom the rite pertains.” Rejection, for Wilma, would leave behind no “trauma” as it did for Betty, or even the disappointment it did for the woman who said she was given no chance to “do things the right way.” Her social capital is far too low to make such a bid for status viable. It is too low, even, for her to have used her visa either to migrate illegally to the United States, as she says she originally intended, or to work without authorization in San Diego, as she appealed to me for help in doing. Wilma remains a “possible immigrant,” a possible “illegal alien,” and the visa does not change her status in anyone’s eyes, much less her own. 7. “Ya dije, ‘ay diosito’. y ya le puse todo, todos los papeles puse ahí, le dije, ‘dígame lo que le busque’. y ya le dije [?] ‘y su acta de matrimonio’. dije, ‘aquí está’. ‘el cheque de su esposo. la carta de que [?]’. ‘uy, sí’. ya no se hizo, le pasó. entonces, este, ‘ah no, está muy bien’, dice, ‘sí trae todos sus papeles’, dice. ‘a las doce del día, le van a dar aquí su visa’. ‘ah’, le dije, ‘gracias, ’ta bien’, pero yo, ‘uy . . .’”

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This is not to say that the United States is not a site of fetish desires for Wilma. She describes her limited sallies to the swap meets and the stores immediately across the border. She appeals to the commonplace that certain goods are cheaper in the United States: she lists chicken, beans, coffee, and bread. But Wilma could not afford to buy in bulk; the cost of the trip would not balance the meager savings made on small purchases. The only item she mentions actually buying are some cookies she says she used to bring home to her children. But she repeats multiple times that she likes to go, that she likes to look at what is offered for sale there, that the things are very “pretty,” that “sometimes I even get dizzy from going around walking, looking [ . . . ] because there are very pretty things.” In the United States’ consumer goods she can expose herself to something that might be called sublime (Kant 2000)— an overwhelming aesthetic experience to which she can only abandon herself. Indeed, even with Inés I often noticed that consumer goods in the United States held a fascination that similar objects in Tijuana’s shopping malls could not. Whether at Macy’s or Target, Inés and her friends touch the goods on display, run their fingers over them, pick them up and put them down, as they never do in Tijuana. In the swap meets and stores catering to Tijuana’s working class, Wilma shares with Inés this sense of the ineffable in the commodities available to be seen (if not purchased) in the United States. The difference lies in that Wilma does not see the state as a path to these objects. And she does not see her access to that world as either justified or as a confirmation of who she truly is. Without the mediation of patrons, the only possibility that world holds for her is dizziness. The border’s rite of legal passage only institutes a new status in the crosser thanks to the wider social system in which it is embedded— the set of institutions that bolster conceptions of middle-class, embodied respectability and authenticity. In fact, the United States depends on that system, on a local idea of status that ties one territorially to Mexico, to seeing one’s life possibilities only within the scope of what is legal. Conversely, it is thanks to the specific mechanics of the visa interview that social distinction is enmeshed with US state recognition, so that one may bear the stigma of the “illegal alien” without ever having crossed the border. Maintaining distinction, though, is never just a matter of passing the visa interview. Betty shows the effects on individual subjectivity of the US State as ultimate arbiter of status. But the limits of state interpellation and fetishization are also palpable— slidingly in the case of the technicians and Edith or absolutely in the case of Wilma.

6

Passes

Dara loves to boast of her intimate familiarity with the United States. Her trips there to pick up her mail, make a purchase at Kmart, or stop by the public library appear as the living continuation of practices she, like many others, nostalgically claims were general in her youth: “everyone” used to cross the border just to get their milk and eggs and do their laundry. But the everyday nature of her relation to the United States has been threatened by the growth of the border as a security apparatus, not because Dara’s formal status as a “nonimmigrant” is at risk, but simply because the long lines make such jaunts across the border impractical. She has therefore submitted herself to what many describe as a particularly intense, and therefore odious, regime of surveillance— though it is also intensely admired as a status symbol. She has enrolled herself in the Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI), open to citizens of any country. SENTRI crossers are preapproved to use dedicated lanes; their vehicles, equipped with radio frequency identification cards, need barely slow as they roll across the border. For them, the border is maximally transparent; their power to pass is at a peak. Before Dara’s yearly renewal interview in 2006, she told me numerous times how nervous she was, laughing at herself, for she well knew the interview was routine and she had nothing to hide or fear. In explaining her anxiety, she reframed several of her quotidian activities as performances for the state’s benefit. She is sure to arrive early to her SENTRI interviews with a book, for “They’re watching your every move, that’s those people’s job, psychology and all that”— though Dara is both generally punctual and an avid reader in any case. Her expensive private postal box in the United States, she said, was worth keeping because “te da una imagen y una estabilidad ante los gringos, lo cual me conviene” (it gives you an image and a stability before the gringos, which is in my interest). Here the SENTRI appears as the rationale for her mailbox, where she receives but some magazine subscriptions; more frequently, she speaks of the mailbox

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as an important rationale for getting the SENTRI. She can explain neither her anxiety before the state nor her own desire for its recognition. Instead, she reduces the very practices essential to her upstanding “I” (her identity as cultured member of a reading public) to the sham performances of an ambiguously disciplined subject, nonetheless irresistibly attracted to the authority that keeps it under surveillance. At the interview, I was shocked by the officer’s open flirtations with Dara, who played along charmingly. I was not exempt from his jovialities. Observing my indigenous shoulder bag, he told me that he knew my type: young and idealistic. Soon I would wake up to the reality of having to earn a living. In his fifties perhaps, single (as he made clear), he struck me simply as a lonely man in a rather thankless job, willing to break protocol for a bit of personal contact.1 But Dara’s interpretation was entirely different. Safely out in the parking lot, we were having a laugh over her smooth handling of his attentions when she struck a more serious note: “Entre broma y broma esta gente te están averiguando todo” (Amid joke upon joke, these people are investigating everything about you). With this remark, Dara neatly reestablished the absolute authority of the US state operating seamlessly and with singular disciplinary intent through its agents— just where, to my eyes, it revealed itself as fallible and fragmented. Even with the SENTRI, even with the mastery of a laugh and a giggle and a light flirtation, the power to pass is not her own.

*** Consider the laser visa. It is a little biometric card, laminated, sturdy, often kept carefully wrapped in its original protective sleeve. On the front, photo and thumbprint along with the usual personal information; on the back, an impenetrable black strip that, slid through a card reader at the port of entry, pulls up on the officer’s computer another dimension of one’s legibility, beyond one’s reach or comprehension— the screen is always gently tilted so as to be just beyond the crosser’s range of vision. At once extending and withdrawing the power to pass, the visa is a fetish and a supplement in the Derridean sense. One holds it in one’s hands only to find one does not possess it at all— it is a sacrum belonging to the gods to whose rites it appertains.2 This chapter will examine a range of tokens 1. Heyman (1995b, 2001b), who studied the port of entry when visa interviews were still conducted there (as SENTRI interviews still are), notes that the officers found these a relief from the monotony and impersonality of line duty. 2. Note that many IDs, including the US passport (but not the visa), bear a small legend to the effect that they remain the property of the issuing authority.

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that precariously assure safe passage in different contexts in Tijuana, from the border to the street. To grasp the ambiguity of these passes, however, let us dwell a moment more on the visa. If the visa underpins a middle- class “I,” this is thanks to a basic assumption: self-presentation before state authority should be eminently authentic. No fake documents assuring nonexistent property or employment; no lies or half-truths disavowing an intention to work in the United States; nothing hidden in my papers or on my face. I am who I say I am. Me consta, I vouch for it, and so does the State. But as Dara shows, the US state injects a paranoid note into the search for personal authenticity. Lionel Trilling (1971) famously described the bourgeois exigency, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to dig ever deeper within in search of one’s true self; in Tijuana, the US state amplifies middle-class anxieties over authenticity. Every crossing plays out Louis Althusser’s “little theoretical theatre” of interpellation (1971); as Michael Taussig points out, to pass through a port of entry is “a ritual, but more precisely a literalization, as if staged, of the mystique of sovereignty” (1997:18). It is because of the part the visa plays in larger dramatizations of state fetishism that it both assures and destabilizes authentic selfhood. In Dara’s flirtation with the officer, as in the visa, prohibition suffuses her successful passage. The two are poles of the same dynamic, built into the border as its most basic structure: Wall and Port, two components of a single state apparatus, the prohibitive markers and portals of which, as Arnold Van Gennep (1960) long ago pointed out, any border elementally consists. Port and Wall distinguish between sacred and profane, those admissible to the nation’s territory and those not— or those admissible, like the “illegal alien,” only in transgression of the official rites. But just as the Wall offers its own possibilities of passage, the Port bristles too with prohibitions. However differently, documented and undocumented are both caught up in this maddening admixture. The contrast between them is far from absolute. Treacherously, the visa underwrites the consolidation of Tijuana as a class community distinct from the migrant, the poor, the dark, the “illegal”; it underwrites the middle-class project that nests itself, polemically, in the crux between legality and lawfulness. This project derives from and reformulates questions of national being that plague Mexico as a whole and that come to a head here where the United States looms at every turn. The undocumented who were so visible in Tijuana twenty-odd years ago, when images of them spurred Operation Gatekeeper (Andreas 2000; Nevins 2002), have not disappeared; they are present as the other Mexico that must be tamed, transformed, or simply done away with. They are present as a potential in every person who populates the city without hav-

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ing acceded to the status a visa consolidates and who thus might, perhaps, whether they see themselves doing so or not, pass on into the United States without papers. They are present, even, among the visa holding themselves, for it is well known that many use their visas to facilitate unauthorized work in the United States (Chávez 2016). These people are “illegal aliens” not only as they cross the border but in their own country as well; established Tijuana conflates “the poor” and “the migrant,” applying to its marginalized population much the same prejudices that sustain the figure of the Mexican as the iconic “illegal alien” in the United States. But as Dara reveals, this gesture can only be provisional, for every legal passage bears the traces of an abject relation to an alienated and fetishized source of authority.3 At the port, middle-class subjects are revealed not as liberal citizens but as clients attempting to construe the US State as their patron. It remains, however, a highly refractory and undependable one, that keeps the threat of violence hovering over even the most routine transactions. All along the border, the killing of Mexican citizens by US officers is a regular phenomenon (Del Bosque 2012), sometimes spectacularly executed within view of legal crossers and thus a vivid object lesson for them.4 The Mexican state too, however, plays its part in making the border a “violent political landscape” (Gordillo 2006:166; Rosas 2012), especially since military deployment here in 2006.5 Similar to middleclass use of the visa in the port, rampant police harassment on Tijuana’s streets can be managed by presenting evidence of one’s connection to a patron. The power to pass, generated by the ambivalent dynamics of prohibition, is possessed in alienated form, in the little tokens (an ID, a business card) through which some higher authority extends his or her amparo, or sheltering protection.6 Such tokens become necessary where 3. In this chapter, I extend discussions of abjectivity among unauthorized immigrants in Israel (Willen 2007) and California (Gonzales and Chavez 2012). 4. During my field research, Tijuana was galvanized by the point-blank shooting of a suspected trafficker amid traffic at the port (Repard and Zúniga 2006); in 2010, a large group of officers tased and beat Anastasio Hernández Rojas to death in front of the crowds crossing into Mexico (Costantini 2012). 5. In the 1990s, Mexican policing of the border escalated sharply in tandem with US efforts (Rosas 2007:89), to which militarization was nothing new (Dunn 1996). Policing practices in Tijuana should be located in relation to zero tolerance strategies for containing the urban disorder produced by neoliberalization (Smith 1998; Wacquant 2001), strategies imported wholesale to Mexico City in the early 2000s (Leal 2011; Becker and Müller 2013). So should the reliance on the military for policing, despite its human rights violations. 6. Roush (2009) examines amparo in Mexico City as part of broader practices of obligating dependency by indicating an impending menace. As the patron-client

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spatial mobility appears as a scarce good among others, requiring as those other goods do the plying of patrons (often, state institutions) to acquire; even as they deliver the desired goods, though, the tokens function fetishistically, drawing power near and absenting it in the same gesture. The documented clase media, which has staked social mobility on spatial mobility as its master metaphor, thus presents but a variation on a theme.

Passing in a Violent Political Landscape In Tijuana, lack of US citizenship begins to appear as an exclusion, for it is all too evident that it entails a whole series of rights and advantages with which Mexican citizenship cannot compete. But neither, as we have already seen, is Mexican citizenship homogenous or complete. I cannot say what portion of the population is without any form of basic documentation, but one does meet people who have never been registered or whose birth certificate is but an old photocopy of a nearly illegible handwritten entry in some remote village’s records. Even if they had such documents in the past, many people live under conditions in which these objects cannot be adequately safeguarded and in which replacement in case of loss is not easy— the challenge increases the lower one’s resources, for obvious reasons. That Tijuana’s population hails overwhelmingly from out of state can only contribute to what must be a comparatively high rate of lack of documents. A whole battery of papers is crucial for formal employment— including jobs as humble as line worker in an assembly plant— for access to many state programs and services, and for basic protection from state authority as one moves about the city. Thus, not only the US but also the Mexican state provides an important idiom of status, for the most basic rights of citizenship it offers are not democratically available. As a teenager once told me, “In Mexico, without papers you are nobody.” Abandoned as a toddler, unaware of his father’s name, he might well feel close to being “nobody.” Formal recognition may not constitute full citizenship (really being “somebody”— the idiom is common in Spanish as well), but it is a significant step up from being “nobody.” The “somebodies” here, though, are not just those who can pass with impunity and obtain full access. They are those whose power is such they can vouch for others. Acting as partial sovereigns (Roitman 1998), patrons can offer protection against state violence by bestowing relation veers into extractive modes of negative reciprocity (Sahlins 1972; Lomnitz 2005b), amparo may turn into a protection racket, where the patron is him- or herself the source of the threat referenced. This is very much the logic of the US state at the border.

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their own power to pass, alienated and reified, on their subservients. The state stands behind them, of course, but murkily.7 In Tijuana, documents indicating a patronage relation may be used to obtain safe conduct on the street. A simple business card can be shown as proof of employment and good behavior— only thieves, it is supposed, have no one to vouch for them. In this case, business cards are tokens of a perduring patron-client relationship that may be mobilized in case of need. The difference between those who bestow and those who receive such tokens may seem absolute. But the “somebodies” are vulnerable at the port of entry in much the same way as the “nobodies” are vulnerable on Tijuana’s streets: will I be recognized as a respectable actor and be allowed to pass, or will I be confused with the undocumented or the criminal? Two contrasting cases follow. Normally, an infraction is necessary for police to demand a bribe. Pulling a car over for one infraction, or even none at all, they will set to an assiduous search for any others that might bolster their negotiating power. One afternoon, I gave a ride to three young construction workers. We were pulled over for no discernible reason other than their appearance, which the police apparently noticed when I imprudently passed their patrol vehicle. The officers checked my US driver’s license and the car’s papers at length before letting us go. As we sped off, one of my passengers declared with glee, “They thought there’d be something there, but there wasn’t!” By “something,” he meant an irregularity that could form the basis for an extralegal transaction. Having papers to show our legal status (the car’s, mine, and by extension theirs), we were not vulnerable. The young man did not mention that my papers were issued in the United States; nationality was not as important an axis of distinction, in his analysis, as legality. The citizen with documents to prove legality is the one with the right to pass unmolested. From the perspective of these youths, this figure occupies an exalted position of privileged invulnerability. The young man’s glee was of having passed where his everyday circumstances 7. Compare Gordillo (2006), writing of Argentina’s inland frontier. Gordillo locates indigenous people’s extreme fetishism of their federal IDs— used, like in Mexico, as tokens of political patronage to access state-controlled resources— in the context of a long history of violence. In the late nineteenth century, letters of safe conduct written by local notables were these indigenous people’s only defense against military depredations; by the mid- twentieth century, they were using documents of employment in similar fashion. As Gordillo notes, “Those who legitimized these notes’ power were still the armed agents of the state, and those who had the authority to pen the texts were actors deemed respectable according to state-sanctioned notions of belonging in a civilized moral community” (167).

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had accustomed him to quite the opposite. Having grown up in the United States, he had been deported several years before on completion of a prison sentence. If his lack of US citizenship has thus been most definitely impressed on him, his Mexican citizenship is not complete either. Note that while the word ciudadano, “citizen,” is perfectly germane to middle-class projects of self-making, for others, a ciudadano is not a Mexican but a US citizen. Another of my passengers that day was Eduardo, whose grandfather had acquired US citizenship just a couple years before, after a lifetime of legal employment in the United States. When I asked Eduardo’s grandfather if he was still a Mexican citizen, he did not understand my question. After several abortive tries, I finally asked if he still voted in Mexico, to which he exclaimed (rather annoyed by this point) that of course he did. Without even documents to rely on, the construction workers find themselves continually vulnerable to police harassment. Inés, dealing with similar circumstances, does much better. One day when I came home, she informed me that two police officers had been asking after me. They had seen my car parked out front with its New Mexico license plates. Inés told them that the car was the property of a young woman who lived in the house and was a US citizen. That is, she made the point that the vehicle did not need to be registered in Mexico, but she simultaneously opened the door to questions about my immigration status— Tijuana is full of US citizens who reside there without authorization. Before they could react, though, she firmly yet politely assured them that all my papers were in order and that if they came back later, I would be happy to show my documents. She was pleased to report that they had refused her offer: “No, ma’am, it won’t be necessary. We can see straight off who’s telling the truth.” Again, the bribe (and all of Inés’s answer is designed to forestall against the bribe) is for those beneath full citizenship. The best defense is to be legal; this goes hand in hand with the full legitimacy of one who can speak without prevarication before the state— of one who is truly lawful. The predatory police, who themselves belong to the rabble, can have nothing on one. But in this case, it is not the document that proves my status. It is Inés herself, with her proud and courteous manner. Her bearing and speech make evident her respectability: “We can see straight off . . .” Inés vouched for me; she put her me consta on the line and saw it work. She was happy, telling me the story, to be recognized; the incident represents a small triumph. By speaking for me, she acted as my patron, extending her word and her honor on my behalf. Unfortunately, I failed to respond appropriately. “How do you know my papers are in order?” I teased and jokingly accused her of having lied to the police. She was, unsurprisingly, miffed, and with injured pride declared that she “knew

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me.” Just as her character was transparent to the police, so mine was transparent to her. Just as she with the police, I do not need to show my papers to prove I am the sort of person to have papers. I too, she insists, am respectable like she is. The parallelism, of course, cuts the other way as well: if I am not an “illegal alien” in Mexico, neither would Inés be one in the United States. The entire incident is a comment on our shared distinction from the Mexican “illegal alien” in the United States. Inés insisted too, here, on the ability of the police to judge character, to “see” whether one is telling the truth. She echoes the popular idea that US immigration officers are psychologists with special training allowing them to read thoughts. One passes on the basis of the signs one is able to muster about oneself, but one must reach with these signs deep into oneself to be ready to meet the penetrating gaze of the State. The document appears only as the finishing touch in this orchestration of signs; preferably, it should not be necessary at all. Thus, neither Inés nor I need show any papers, thanks simply to the delicately convincing way in which Inés was able to offer that I would show mine “with pleasure.” This is the weird circularity of documents: they prove you are not the sort of person who needs them. To show them too readily would be to clutch at status; it would reveal one’s proximity to the “nobody” for whom papers are crucial. When stopped with the construction workers, I most likely had to show my papers because of the company I kept— obvious “nobodies” in this economy of recognition. To prove status, papers must enter interaction only after the most careful preparation, if at all. On another occasion, I asked Inés what she thought of the military checkpoints that had recently been set up around the city. She said she thought they were a good thing. “Ah, but you’ve never had to go through one,” I observed. “Yes,” she replied, “but they’re no bother.” She described the interaction: soldier: do you have your documents, ma’am? inés: yes, but of course. soldier: please pass, ma’am.8

“They see one’s face, right?” she explained. “And since they saw I had the face of one who doesn’t cheat [la cara de que yo no tranzo] . . .” One needs the ID to prove that one does not need the ID. Inés speaks for me before the state as my patron. With me consta, by vouching for me, 8. soldier: ¿tiene usted sus documentos, señora? inés: sí, cómo no. soldier: pase usted, señora.

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she tries to locate evidentiary power in her own “I.” But this is not sufficient. In the end, Inés can only try to appropriate the power to pass, the power of the fetishized ID, as her own. By dispensing with documents and locating credibility in her speaking self, she attempts to erase an alienated source of authority and absorb the power of the fetish back into her own body and her own “I.” In the end, she does not need to show papers because the papers themselves have a peculiar power that radiates through one. This ever-negated dependency on a fetishized source of authority lies behind the strange indispensability of the US laser visa in Tijuana.

The Fragmenting of Sovereignty Recall Dara at her SENTRI interview. Seated across a low counter, she faces the officer. For her, his jokes are riddles, like the Sphinx’s. She must answer with the right password, with the shibboleth. In return, he will give her the pass— literally, in Spanish, le dará el pase. He will let her through, though of course Dara is not going through just now and the officer will give her instead, for future use, a material congealment of his word, pase usted (please pass). Repeating the encounter, perhaps even with this same man, one may abbreviate the whole procedure. Dara faces the officer, but in him and behind him she perceives the State. As an ID, the visa should institute a dyadic relation between the individual and the State, only lightly mediated by the issuing or inspecting officer. But IDs are also essential to the workings of a clientelistic and corporativist imaginary that, contrariwise, tends to spread out the chain of influences and substitutions. The State may be the fetish supreme, but intervening patrons emerge too as partial sovereigns who share in at least some of its mystique.9 So do the tokens they pass out, which people may seek to help assure safe passage or gain access to resources. As they do so, authority begins to fragment. The tokens are little material chunks of sovereignty; detached, they can float off on their own. People begin to move fluidly between state fetishism and a search for mediators that decenters the demand for authoritative recognition. The power to pass peels off from the social system centered on the Law; unabashed efforts to seize it for oneself poke their way through the layers of delegation. It becomes, by degrees, unmoored. 9. It may seem counterintuitive to speak of the patron, a human being, as a fetish object. Relying on Marx, Žižek discusses patron fetishism in terms analogous to the fetishism of the sovereign: “One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine that they are subjects because he is king” (Marx in Žižek 1989:20–22).

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Eduardo’s grandmother Dorotea is a retired cabaret singer. The district she lives in was founded in a highly contentious land seizure in the early 1990s. She remembers the dirt kicked up at her feet by gunfire as she stood in a line facing the state police; she remembers engaging them in handto-hand combat; she remembers, especially, the dead. Though water and electrical service have been regularized, Dorotea’s street was only paved in 2007, and sewer lines had not yet been installed. These sorts of colonias populares form a large portion of Tijuana’s urban sprawl, and their material conditions provide the basis for intense community involvement with state agencies and political parties. When I lived with her, Dorotea was working hard to position herself as a mediator, making trips to town hall, cultivating her ties to a political party, advising neighbors on how to get enrolled in government programs, and so forth. Lomnitz writes that, in Mexico, the full citizen frames him- or herself as “a potential broker between the national state and weak, embryonic, or part citizens who he or she can construe as dependents” (2001:13). By just such construal, Dorotea moves up a step in the hierarchy— but not far enough to claim anything like full citizenship. Even as she throws all her (quite prodigious) energies into playing her new part, she both is and presents herself as one of many in need; she can aspire to be but the lowest of the doorkeepers. For Dorotea, whatever social standing may accrue to her as a broker is inseparable from the material benefits she can obtain for herself and others. In chapter 5, I noted that the Mexican Revolution gave rise to a new mode of citizenship for the disenfranchised pueblo, in which the formation of clientelistic relations with organized collectivities is a standard mode of operation for state agencies and political parties. In this context, to jump-start a patronage relation from below, one must show one represents a group of others. Tijuana is a city notoriously weak on corporate groups, and yet the language of corporatism in its colonias populares is as rife as anywhere else. At a mass event organized by the state government, I witnessed Dorotea’s success in getting a functionary to make a phone call on the spot to enroll her husband’s ex-wife in a social security program. When I asked how she knew him, she told me she did not: “They have to help us, because we’re community leaders.” Indeed, she wore about her neck that day an ID verifying her status as such. Dorotea certainly cultivates the personalistic ties considered typical of patron-client relations, but IDs like the one she wore that day are crucial in assuring political relations that still follow a patron- client logic even amid the dispersive tendencies of urban anonymity.10 10. Indeed, the importance of IDs to the PRI-era corporate system is legendary. By means of their IDs, it is said, even the dead were called out to vote.

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The event that day was for the “Delivery of Economic Stimuli to Senior Adults,” but it was a major political spectacle at which to see and to be seen. The guest speaker was then-president Vicente Fox, and the event was a chance for the local PAN to show off its organizing skills (cf. Lomnitz, Lomnitz, and Adler 1990). Dorotea is economically not much better off than her neighbors (we were there, after all, to collect her husband’s “stimulus” check), nor is her standing with the party very solid.11 But at this event she did her best to play the part of mediator or minor patron, busily networking, connecting clients to benefits— even when these “clients” were in fact her own family. The sticker shown in figure 6.1, boldly labeled “Beneficiary,” was stuck on me in response to Dorotea’s insistence that “These people are with me”—“these people” being her husband, me, and a neighbor who had just walked up to us. Just as she had approached the functionary to obtain social security for her husband’s ex-wife, here she framed us as her clients and herself as our patron in order to obtain for us the token of state recognition. Her logic of operation was the same as when, on another occasion, she explained how to gain material benefits for the colonias by jockeying political power: one cultivates one’s supporters until, during campaign time, one can confidently approach a party and tell them, “Hey, I’ve got three hundred votes, what’ll you give us?” Gentes (folks), she explained, was a synonym for votes; it was the word she applied to her husband, their neighbor, and me on the day of the stimuli distribution, and it is generally the word used to refer to clients: mi gente (my people).12 Note that the layout of the sticker roughly imitates that of an ID. At the bottom is the word beneficiado (beneficiary): the bearer’s official status with respect to the state authority granting the “stimuli.” The fact that Dorotea was so intent on obtaining these stickers reflects on the general value of such small tokens of recognition. The uselessness of this particular sticker to command further exchanges shows up the fetishistic tendency underlying the attempt to consolidate a patron-client relationship under 11. Several years later, Dorotea became part of a group of “leaders” protected by a lower-level functionary, distributing public resources to assure their party’s electoral successes and their patron’s rehiring. 12. Earlier at this same event, for example, I was mistaken for the patron of Dorotea and her husband when the parking lot attendant told me where to drop off tu gente (your people). Just so, those aspiring to move up in the party schooled each other on the politically correct lingo, where clientelism has been labeled retrograde: “¡Nunca hay que decir ‘mi gente’!” (One must never say “my people”!) one woman interrupted another in the backseat of my car one day, before providing a list of rather wordy synonyms.

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Figure 6.1. Propaganda sticker for social program.

relatively anonymous mass conditions;13 however, the sticker is also part of a chain of such exchanges and tokens bestowed— if the tag Dorotea wore that day had anything to do with her ability to command resources running from the useless stickers to the functionary’s phone call. As her grandson Eduardo noted of her religious proclivities (we speculated as to whether the Baptist woman who visited her on Fridays would not be scandalized by Sundays’ spirit possessions), Dorotea works according to the principle of donde pegue el chicle (wherever the gum sticks). With God as with the State, she does her best to extend her patronage connections, as well as to hike herself further up the chain. If the sticker emerges as a minor fetish object, this is an effect of the chain of substitutions in which it is caught up. In a classic essay, anthropologist George Foster discusses the concept of the palanca, which he glosses as “lever.” The palanca, he says, is “a way of access to a patron, someone with ‘leverage.’” One asks one’s palanca to ask someone else for a favor: the palanca is a “go- between [ . . . ] helpful in getting to the real patron.” But Foster immediately notes, “A palanca, perhaps, is a semi-patron as well as a patron” (1963:1292). He then argues that saints are palancas to God, the “real” patron. Though Foster demonstrates this underlying logic, it remains inadmissible for most of the villagers— for them, the saint remains the primary fetish object. What Foster misses, though, is that the palanca is the logic underlying all patron- client relations. There is always a further source of power projected beyond the patron. He or she has access to things one does not, including higher pa13. Wolf cites Michael Kenny to the effect that behind the material advantages supposedly motivating patron-client ties there lies “a fight against anonymity (especially in an urban setting)” (1966:16). That is, the relationship takes on urgency in a context of mass social relations in which it has especial difficulty finding purchase.

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trons, all the way up to God or the State. No patron-client bond can work exclusively on a dyadic model, because it is based on the principle of a receding source of authority. The fetish is the emergent logic behind the impetus to establish a relationship with a patron: one sets oneself up with intermediaries; one obtains access to power by locating it elsewhere. Taussig writes that state fetishism begins with the fantasies of the marginalized about the secret at the center (1993:240), and it is around marginality that Foster builds his own argument. The villagers he writes of are at the “bottom of the Mexican socioeconomic pyramid.” They express this position by putting life and survival in terms of defensa, “defense”: “When asked how things are going, a man may reply, ‘Pues, me defiendo,’ that is, ‘I am managing to defend myself ’” (Foster 1963:1280). Security is obtained by entering into relations with patrons who help to “defend” one— roughly, just the types literally known as patrones, including but not limited to “employers, politicians, and government employees” (1282). Eric Wolf extends the idea, observing that in Mexico the patron “provides economic aid and protection against the legal and illegal exactions of authority” (1966:17). As mediators, though, as palancas, these characters are not always desirable for what they themselves can offer. They are but doorkeepers. Fetishes, it is often remarked, bear the burden of mediating between incommensurable orders (Pietz 1985). Like the visa holder before the US State, the marginalized attempt to secure the tokens through which goods (like the good of passage) may flow. In the attempt to get hold of power, one abjects oneself to some intermediary, but one’s attitude toward that minor patron remains ambivalent. The patron gives access, but also blocks the way. Within this system, one comes to possess social authority (in whatever small measure) by means of a sign that indicates, at the same time, one’s irrevocable distance from it. Behind the Pass, the Patron; behind the Patron, the State. In different contexts, one or the other may emerge as the primary fetish object. But all function, primordially, by linking to each other to form a chain that at once draws power near and absents it. As Emily Apter notes, for classical psychoanalysis, “Virtually any object [ . . . ] can become a candidate for fetishization once it is placed on the great metonymic chain of phallic substitutions” (1993:4). The instability of the fetish is an effect of this positing of substitutability— ultimately, it does not work. The problem is, of course, more acute in some cases than in others. The sticker is not a proper ID, and yet it is expected to work in the same way, similar to the ID about Dorotea’s neck. And yet that ID is not terribly proper either. It is good only in the context of prying palancas, of turning oneself into a palanca in order to access even higher palancas. It

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is treated as something that might provide access to resources controlled by the state, just as a birth certificate or a federal voter’s ID might. The ID thus stands within a range of semiotic objects of varying potency that help boost into being a patron-client relationship.14 Like any token given by a patron, an official ID establishes recognition of the individual by the state, a recognition that may later be mobilized to the bearer’s benefit. An ID, however, should do more. It should signify a perduring relation to authority the foundational nature of which is re-marked every time the ID comes to mediate a new social relation (as, for instance, when it is required for employment). But to the extent that it is put to work within a patron-client logic, its ritual/legal basis is undermined, for the patronclient contract exists, as Foster argues, where a pattern of exchange is ongoing. Where no exchange pattern is in place, the ID symbolizes at best a dormant relation. Thus, while people may eagerly seek this kind of state recognition, the hegemonic projects generally associated with documentation are eroded, for the ID does not represent the individual’s permanent status within a fixed social order. IDs are, instead, valuable tokens among many. With the language of “defense,” the necessity of patrons becomes a routine presupposition; they supplement not just specific needs but a generalized lack. The proliferation of tokens propitiates a parallel proliferation of the sources of authority, obscured behind their available media. While the fantasies of the marginalized certainly project a sense of secret power, it is not clear that this is located at a single central point. As Dorotea’s grandson put it, “wherever the gum sticks.”

The Business Card as Pass The tarjeta de presentación (business card), also a small printed object carried on one’s person, is another common token of patronage. On one of Dorotea’s treks through a series of government offices, she showed me the cards she had collected on the way. The name of the person she was being recommended to was written on the back of the card of the recommender. “Without this you don’t enter,” she explained. Used this way, the card serves as a pass— but this kind of passing is only part of the quest for access to resources within a thinly spun web of patron-client relations in the context of largely anonymous state-society relations (cf. Hull 2012:80–86). Observing the district branch of a political party during campaign season, I witnessed similar use of the local candidate’s business card. Attending to those who came in with petitions for help, campaign workers 14. The tokens are treated, not unlike classic African fetishes, as objects that can secure contracts (Pietz 1985).

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would give them a card: “Take this to X government office and ask to see Pati.” On the back would be scrawled: “Pati. Please help this person out with a grant. Thanks in advance for your attentions. Malena.” When the candidate went door-to-door, he and others would hand out the card with the campaign office’s number handwritten on the back. They would do so, often, after listening to residents’ concerns and complaints; the card constituted a promise to address those issues personally. When those in hope of aid came in, they would bring the card with them. Leaning on the counter, they would casually fiddle with it, lightly turning it or tapping it against the counter distractedly as they framed their request, so that the person attending to them could see it. Like the campaign T-shirts and baseball caps that petitioners always wore on their visits to the office, the card indicates a prior contact and, however thinly, an established relationship between patron and client. The candidate provided important insight into the crucial role in his campaign of material pieces of propaganda— images of himself that can be physically possessed. Unlike other local candidates, he dispensed entirely with television advertisement. What the people of his district (in his estimation, an especially poor one) want, he told me, is to see you on their street, to shake your hand. Not only that— they want posters and banners hanging on their houses and walls. The printed image becomes a way of getting close to the candidate, of possessing his power materially. Less fetishistically, it could be said that one possesses a claim on him. And yet the desire for material images surpasses that explanation, for without the printed image and its concrete distribution, the candidate himself as a locus of desirable power would be nothing. One quite literally seizes the object by means of its image (Benjamin 1968:223), but without the image there would be no object at all to be seized (Weber 1996:90). As the items given out on the campaign trail help bring into being a patron-client relation, they simultaneously create the patron as a locus of power. The business card is thus a potent index not just of the patron-client relationship, but of the fact the patron exists as a fetish object at all (see figure 6.2). The card is the reminder that a promise has been made, however insubstantially, and that the candidate is expected to make good on it. His “I” is that of me consta; his card stands for his ability to vouch for what he says. Those without their own business cards are reduced to making appeals to those who have one. It is just what they lack; they supplement their own inability to pass, to appear as respectable citizens, with the sign of another’s ability to do so. Used this way, the business card begins to appear as a fetish; it stands at once for a delegated power to pass and one’s dispossession of it. It was one of the men working on the campaign, as a “volunteer” in exchange for a substandard weekly financial “bonus,” who

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Figure 6.2. Business card of a politician on the campaign trail.

first explained to me that, as someone without a valid ID, frequently unemployed, and of a physical aspect that invites attention from the police (small, dark, obviously working- class), he always carried a politician’s business card. As he explained, man: so they gave me this card because I didn’t have an ID, because every little while the, the cops would stop me. ry: so, of what use is that, that card to you? man: this card is of use to me in case they stop me, who do I work with, no, well, I work for him. ry: ah. man: and in case they stop me again, who do I work for, well, I work for [he gestures with the card].15

When detained on the street (a routine event), he shows a business card. It intervenes between himself and the police— even though, as he explained, he has never even met the man on it. Nonetheless, the fact 15. man: ’tonces esta tarjeta me la dieron porque no traía yo una identificación porque cada rato me paraba la, la patrulla. ry: entonces, ese, ¿esa tarjeta de qué le sirve? man: esta me sirve por si en caso de que me paran, con quién trabajo, no pues, yo trabajo para él. ry: ah. man: y en caso de que me vuelvan a parar, para quién trabajo, pues yo trabajo para.

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he was given the card is “the reason why, one way or another, I have to support the party.” The card is a gift obligating reciprocity, as is the work he has found through the party’s channels of paper notes, as a petitioner like the ones described above. In the party, rather than in the individual whose card he carries, he has found a patron. He is confident that his patron will come through for him, both for work and for protection against the police. With the police, however, it has apparently never come to that; they seem to be satisfied with the card itself. That is, they recognize its validity as evidence of a patron-client relationship. It is thus effective on its own: it does not just stand for the patron, it stands in for him. The politician’s business card is only one strategy of self- protection against the police. In Tijuana, police harassment of working- class, working-age men is rife. I cannot say that it is worse than in other parts of the country, though I suspect it is, especially after military patrolling began in 2006. Harassment depends on the stereotype of the malandro, a kind of criminal tough— but this stereotype blurs with that of the migrant or the poor in general.16 Especially in the evening, but not only then, and not only in working- class neighborhoods but also on major thoroughfares, men can expect to be questioned, searched, and temporarily detained. Dorotea often advised her grandson not to go out, even to the corner store, unless accompanied by a woman or child. Her neighbor complained that her preadolescent son had been taken in to the station on his way home from school. Such stories are common, despite the fact that Mexico has no compulsory federal ID and the constitution guarantees freedom of movement “without the necessity of a letter of assurance, passport, safe-conduct, or any other such requisite” (Secretaría de Gobernación 2014).17 The boy tried to show his school ID to prove his story: he was only a harmless student on his way home. The ID should work as the business card in such situations. It vouches for and locates one socially; it proves one’s connection to a source of authority. Both business card and ID are “defenses,” in the terms of Foster’s villagers— without an ID, one’s chances of being taken down to the station increase greatly. Migrants and deportees are often without documents; lack of documents makes their 16. A comment from Edith reveals its racialization. Her dog “doesn’t like malandros; she doesn’t like dark people [morenos] [ . . . ] Almost all malandros are morenos, though not all morenos are malandros.” 17. Rosas (2012) describes how in the late 1990s, in the border town of Nogales, police demands for IDs gradually pushed street youths into criminal practices. On police harassment of marginalized youths in Tijuana, see Valenzuela Arce (2009).

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stay in Tijuana that much more difficult. A shelter for migrants where I volunteered issued each guest an official letter, with which they could obtain a temporary local ID. The men staying at the shelter explained that this ID was essential in avoiding detention as they moved about the city looking for work, trying either to settle in Tijuana or save for a further voyage. In this chain of recognitions embodied in documents, the local government recognizes the migrant because the shelter has vouched for him. It is his palanca to the government, and it acts as his immediate patron during his time in the city. The business card, like the ID, demonstrates the carrier’s personal connection to authority. But as we have seen, it can be ambivalent as to whether authority is located in the person of the respectable citizen whose name is printed on the card or in that person’s institutional affiliation. The fetish nature of the individual patron may be deflated; he or she may bluntly appear as but a palanca to the institution, the true seat of authority. Early in my fieldwork, I thought that a business card might be a handy way to convey my personal information. I was taken aback when, on showing it to a woman I knew, she upbraided me angrily. Unfamiliar with the phrase “PhD candidate,” she assumed I had invented it and accused me of pretending to a status not my own. “Here,” she stiffly informed me, “people only get these things when they’re already doctors.” A working-class housewife, she was not herself one to have a business card. Revealingly, she said (shaking my card at me), “This is an ID, right?” The word she used was credencial— a credential, a document that accredits, that vouches for the individual. As a credencial, a business card merits belief in great part because of its institutional issue. This was a problem with mine, though she did not point it out. Unwilling to pay University of Chicago prices, I had not succeeded in pirating its logo. My card was therefore plain. Inés’s son Gil helped me print my business cards; he had much to say about their representational logics. He showed me some examples, including one belonging to a minor bureaucrat in the state government. In all, the institutional logo was visually overwhelming, and the individual’s name barely discernible. He criticized the plain design I had settled on: “Only a person who doesn’t give a shit [que le vale madre] can have a card like that.” Normally, one’s me consta, the validity of one’s word, rests on the authority of the institution; to bear a plain card is to claim to be an institution unto oneself and to have an “I” capable of standing absolutely on its own. The only plain card I have seen is, indeed, that of Inés’s late husband. Gil remembered it clearly. It was evident that he considered his father, unlike me, the worthy bearer of such a card. The business card is, thus, precisely a credencial. The woman who

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chastised me for calling myself a “PhD candidate” was not the only one to conflate the two. I also heard the politician whose campaign I followed tell a woman as he gave her his business card, “This is my campaign credencial.”18 His own was much like the card shown in figure 6.2, strikingly similar in layout to a regular ID. The credencial, conversely, functions in much the same way as the business card: though it is not alienable, as the business card is, it works as a pass by authenticating one’s position within a system of authority and power. When I mentioned to Gil that I felt uncomfortable with the way some people seemed to take my card as if it would “connect them to something,” he nodded distractedly, occupied with something else: “Como si fuera un pase” (As if it were a pass). That all these objects are in fact the same is to him a routine presupposition, barely worth commenting on. A plain business card is the ultimate proof of me consta; for those below that status, the card is a pass not only for their clients but also for themselves. The visa is self-evidently a pass for crossing the border. But it is also a version of the business card. It is the best credencial, for what higher authority or power could one situate oneself in relation to than the US State. The passing of the middle class and the marginalized are doubtless different, but they share some basic dynamics. On the street, the poor need a business card from a patron in the same way the middle- class person needs the visa to pass at the port of entry. He or she who is visibly and audibly Mexican (and this is a matter not only of phenotype or accent but of dress and demeanor) requires documents to enter the United States, while the visibly and audibly American (i.e., Anglo) may pass with a simple nod: “US citizen?” “Yeah.”19 And the difference between the middle-class man who may pass safely on Tijuana’s street and the man who must risk being typed as a malandro is the same difference, at another level, as that between the person who can present without fear a plain white business card and the person who must wear his or her institutional affiliation on his or her sleeve, that is, on the face of his or her 18. Another example of the patronage use of ID-like tokens was “la credencial de Felipe” (Felipe’s ID, in reference to Felipe Calderón, president of Mexico, 2006– 2012), handed out during door-to-door campaigning. “This is for you to keep,” the simpatizantes or “sympathizers” were told, “so that when Felipe comes he’ll know you’re with him.” 19. Until recently, a large sign hung at the port of entry declaring that foreigners were required to show documentation. Once, after showing my US passport, I asked the officer if I could cross with just my driver’s license. With jolly confidence, he told me I didn’t even need that— as if did not occur to him that my citizenship might not be self-evident. Since 2009, US citizens are supposed to show their passport.

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business card. The anxieties around passing before the state are the anxieties attendant upon the recognition of social status generally. For both the malandro-looking man and the person with the gaudy business card, ties to patrons, personal or institutional, are a necessary supplement to more embodied ways of communicating one’s status and guaranteeing safe passage. The question is not exactly one of interior versus exterior signs, but of the extent to which an external supplement appears as such. Like the malandro-looking man stuck bearing on him bodily the (often phenotypical) signs of his degraded status, the middle-class Mexican, who orchestrates around his or her visa as many signs of status as possible, does so to contend with a stigma that cannot be erased. The visa, of course, is hardly of use in assuring safe passage on Tijuana’s streets. One who holds it should be above needing that. But it is very much of use not only at the port of entry but beyond, on the United States’ streets. There it indeed functions much as the business card in Tijuana. While the ideal of established Tijuana might be to project a persona that would on its own guarantee against any untoward brushes with immigration enforcement officers, the visa is highly desirable for people who work without authorization in the United States not only because crossing the border is made safe and simple (and one can return to Mexico as often as one pleases), but also because it lets one move about securely in US public space. If, for the United States, Tijuana is a city of suspects who must be screened for admittance, it reproduces the same logic of suspicion internally. The maxim “innocent until proven guilty” is reversed in US immigration law, as it is widely (though mistakenly) believed to be reversed in Mexican law generally. The onus of proof is on the “suspect,” and forestalling against suspicion becomes paramount. Middle-class Tijuana’s obsession with the signs that promise to secure passage and the lower class’s obsession with the tokens of patronage both devolve from a system in which classification by appearances is swift and sure, and with significant consequences.

Dispossession The northwestern-most edifice in Mexico is a public restroom: it stands along Tijuana’s beach, right at the fence that marks the boundary with the United States. When I visited in 2006, two men were tending it; the one I spoke with was middle-aged, with ponytail and baseball cap. The restroom, he said, is owned by a woman who lives in the United States, where he used to work for her. He and his companion keep watch twentyfour hours a day; indeed, the inside of the very new and modern-looking establishment was rather incongruously hung with their blankets and

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laundry. While at their post, he claimed, the police do not bother them, for they know the power of their employer. He boasted of running the police off a patch of asphalt beside the bathrooms, marked off by some short poles, and told me three times over how one of the officers accused him of being prepotente (overbearing), a word usually used to describe the police themselves. On the street, though, it is a different matter. There, he boasts of a secret power: a clave (password) that wins him immediate release when he is accosted by the police. With this he claims to be part of the back stage of private connections: claves are usually associated with the drug cartels. They are a kind of ID as well; often they are spoken of as a belonging, as in the song “Clave Privada” by Los Tucanes de Tijuana (1996), in which the narrator boasts of being in on the business, of having his “private password.” The Caretaker’s story about the clave, however, reveals less his access to power than his vulnerability on the street, his propensity to be taken for a malandro. Indeed, while we chatted, the only people who came by were a series of down-and-out-looking men paying personal calls on the Caretaker. Later I saw a couple of them panhandling. Like the mafiosos to whom the Caretaker likens himself with his clave, he and his companions are not differentiable from criminals— though of a much less prestigious sort. To impress me with the power he commands with his clave, the Caretaker related how his companion was picked up by a policeman as he went to buy some food down the block. The policeman was new and did not recognize the clave. When they got to the station, the companion called their US employer. The upshot, the Caretaker triumphantly told me, was that the newbie was ordered to chauffeur his companion first to the grocery store and then back to the restrooms. The Caretaker’s boastful narrative follows closely the plot of another song by the Tucanes. In “El Águila Blanca” (The White Eagle, 2007), several traffickers approach a highway checkpoint.20 Though the driver assures the others all has been prearranged, they wait for the officers to discover the drugs for themselves. Just as the man who carries the politician’s business card reports the police asking him “Who do you work for?” the first question asked by the officers in the song is, “¿A qué se dedican, compas?” (What’s your occupation, fellas?) Despite the traffickers’ statement that they are “entrepreneurs,” the police proceed to make a search anyway based, as is commonly the case, on appearances: “Tienen 20. Although the song is registered with Broadcast Music, Incorporated as composed by Mario Quintero Lara of the Tucanes, I have not found it recorded by them before 2007. Explosión Norteña (1998) recorded it a decade earlier. I attribute it to the Tucanes not only because of BMI, but because their version is better known.

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finta de mañosos, bájense pa’ revisarlos” (You’ve got a tricky look about you; get out so we can check you). The “tricky look” is an explicit reference to the Business, for la Maña is also slang for the drug trade. The officers quickly find their evidence and are about to handcuff the men when the driver declares, “Mire, señor oficial, mejor vamos arreglando, / porque si hago una llamada, se va a quedar mirando” (Look here, Mr. Officer, we’d better cut a deal, / because if I make a phone call, you’ll be left gaping). It is the same phone call that the Caretaker’s companion made. The officers in the song are not as dumb as the newbie cop and avoid similar humiliation by asking the name of the “business” these “entrepreneurs” belong to. They give it “with pleasure” (just as Inés said that I would show my papers)— it is “Carrillo Tours,” literally “Carrillo Trips,” the family name being that of a famous trafficker. Viaje is also slang for trips north, carrying drugs across the border. The officers respond with a flood of congeniality appropriate to their own humble status within la Maña’s hierarchy: ¿Para qué tanto relajo? ¿Porqué no habían avisado? Déjenme la contraseña Y váyanse con cuidado, Dígale al Águila Blanca Que ojalá y viva cien años.

What was all the fuss for? Why didn’t you let us know? Give me the password And be on your way. Tell the White Eagle, May he live a hundred years.

Like the man who presents the police with the business card of a politician he has never met, the traffickers simply give the name of their employer. They are believed; the password becomes a formality. Instead, it is the proper name of the patron, Carrillo, that unlocks the officers’ conviviality and the gate of the checkpoint. Like Inés, the traffickers have the clave to prove that they do not need it. In the end, they pass on the basis of their finta, their appearance— but only in combination with the proper name of the real trafficker, discreetly held in reserve until the last moment. The Caretaker, in contrast, does not just reveal how his outraged companion indecorously insisted on his privileges all the way down to the station but spends more than an hour regaling a complete stranger (me) with stories meant to illustrate precisely his (pre)potencia: the same kind of potency or power that, in the police, he finds overbearing. One needs a person of standing to vouch for one, a person whose me consta works where one’s own does not. Given that, one may try to erase that person to varying extents and claim his or her power as one’s own. The Caretaker is far both from Inés and from the traffickers of the Toucans’ song, and yet their encounters with state authority all play out as

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variations on the same logic. Inés attempts to have the state recognize her on the basis of her own speaking self— and yet the state’s prior authorization remains an indispensable presupposition. The Caretaker gloats as if he had put the police to shame— and yet it is clear that without his patron he would be nothing before them. The Caretaker’s mishmash of fantasized connections to power make all too evident his abject status. Whether in the case of the clave or the telephone call, the men at the restrooms are not to be believed on their own; it is their employer’s word that releases them. But the fetish nature of these tokens (passwords, cards) demonstrates that of the “I” of me consta as well. Power functions through a chain of substitutes, and even the most well-established “I” may need to demonstrate that there is a true source of authority behind it. That is, the fetish is always vulnerable to re-signification: it exists to substitute for something that is perceived as missing; a greater power may always emerge behind it. The Caretaker attempts to do away with his marginality by boasting of his clave; Inés attempts to do away with her downward mobility by narrating the success of an encounter with the police. The need for a true source of authority haunts projects to affirm the self-sufficiency of “I”; real vulnerability stimulates the wild magnification of authority’s fetish powers. It matters little whether the immediate fetish object is the patron’s token, the patron him- or herself, or some authority beyond; once the fetish logic is in place, all of these sites of power are haunted by its absence. Status is determined by one’s position within this chain of fetishizations: can one attempt to speak as “I,” with a plain business card and the surety of passing without problems? Or must one display constantly the tokens of personal and institutional patronage in order to get by? In Tijuana, the last object in this chain is the US State; relations with it are riddled with all the ambiguity, all the desire and detestation, all the wrenching necessity and denial with which the fetish is loaded. The Caretaker spends his days watching (with binoculars, no less) a spectacle very different from that of the Line. The fence of the international boundary was, at that time, a rusted metal affair some eight feet high. On the other side is a desolate park, where the SUVs of the Border Patrol prominently keep watch. Even as we chatted, a small group of men walked along the fence, touching it, peering through its cracks, discussing: migrants, the Caretaker told me. The literal presence of the Wall and the social barrier it represents could not be blunter. But when I protested that one could no longer cross at that point, the Caretaker replied: “Sure you can. Lots of people cross here. I cross here. There’s lots of ways to cross. If you want wet, then wet. If you want dry, then dry [Si quieres mojadito, pues mojadito. Si quieres sequecito, pues sequecito].”

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While his words refer literally to crossing by sea versus land, they imply also a choice between illegal and legal passage—mojado (wet), though not commonly used in Tijuana, is slang for “illegal alien,” as in the English wetback. Like middle-class Tijuana, the Caretaker too insists on his ability to pass. At the same time, I can only suspect that his presence in Mexico is not exactly voluntary.21 The Wall is the flipside of the Port, integral to it, a fact established Tijuana does its best to ignore. Prohibition and passage together make the border, though the Port emphasizes passage while the Wall makes evident prohibition. One always wishes the Line to be quicker, more osmotic. It is usually overlooked that US governmental actors share this desire and that the fortification of the border in recent years has gone hand in hand with a variety of programs and plans to facilitate legal crossing.22 If the Line evokes fantasies of unrestricted access and the unlimited social possibilities that spatial mobility might bring (rubbing shoulders with the wealthy, who knows what could come of that), the fence evokes in the Caretaker fantasies of the absolute and terrifying nature of a violent authority needing no legitimation beyond the fact of its own existence. The two are flip sides of each other. Next to the restrooms stands a lighthouse. A family, the Caretaker says, lives there; the man is a retired Mexican marine. If the Caretaker rejoices in his connections to an authority (his employer) located across the border and if he rejoices in exercising the power of those connections on the representatives of the Mexican state, it is not entirely clear in his stories where ultimate authority is located. Once, he told me, a drunk driver ran his vehicle into one of the posts around the patch of asphalt by the restrooms. A few meters behind this sacred marker of private property stands the sacred marker of the border: a stone obelisk that the fence must skirt and that bears a legend warning against its defacement. The ex-marine, licensed still to carry a gun (weapons are illegal in Mexico), rushed out to demand reparations. The offender, though, ridiculed him for threatening to pull his gun. “You wanna bet I can’t?” snarled the ex-marine, and he reached to his hip in the classic Western gesture to draw . . . not his gun but his credencial, his military ID, which he brandished before the offender. As he told the story, the Caretaker mimicked 21. I suspect the Caretaker is a deportee. He may have a variable number of years to wait before reentry into the United States would not be punishable by a prison sentence. 22. For example, Tijuana’s Otay Mesa crossing was the first in which the SENTRI program was implemented in 1995, on the heels of Operation Gatekeeper, Proposition 187, and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in California.

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first the swaggering, manly gestures of the ex- marine and then the reaction of the offender as he cowered defenselessly before the credencial, raising his arms to protect himself. The Caretaker fantasizes a moment in which one cannot pass, one cannot escape, one grovels before an authority absolutely present in all its terrifying glory. The offender is frozen in place, helpless, stupefied. But his abjection comes down not to the Mexican state that validated the officer, but, again, to the border as the most compelling figure in this context for the gulf between oneself and authority. The Caretaker snidely relates his boss’s reaction when the offender eventually managed to offer her one thousand for damages: “I don’t take pesos; I’m on the other side. Yeah, you’ll pay me a thousand, but it’s gonna be a thousand dollars.” With his binoculars, the Caretaker puts himself in the place of the Border Patrol sitting on the other side of the Wall.23 He does the same by identifying with his US patron in this anecdote. But he does not succeed in possessing the power he feels himself so proximate to. As witness, at one remove from the incident, the Caretaker is caught up in its fascination. If the sign of the offender’s subjection is the cowering lack of a linguistic response, the sign of the Caretaker’s is his telling of the story. Power obliges him to repeat; he is caught up in a scene he cannot fully inhabit. His narration is ambivalently that of one whose relation to power is abject and one who may boast of his proximity to it. As he bodily mimics both sides of the confrontation between ex-marine and drunk driver, he plays out this duality. He tries to appropriate in his body a power (the power of the credencial, the power of the sacred boundary marker, the power of his patron and of the United States with its dollars) that exceeds the mere facts as given. Though it would seem to come from the state, the credencial’s power is direct: the ex-marine holds it out at arm’s length before him, and the offender’s reaction is immediate and physical. It is a power that fixes the offender in place and that fixates the spectator; it is a power from which there is no escape. It is prohibition with no possibility of passage, and it holds the Caretaker captive as it does Tijuana’s clase media, however much they would deny it. Middle class and marginalized are caught together in a single system of desire and fear in which vulnerability magnifies fetishism. Behind every middle-class self-presentation at the port lies the whole weight of the US history that has branded Mexico as poor, dark, and “illegal”: the hope of controverting that history and the threat of seeing it reasserted. But the attempt to establish social status and legitimacy through legality is undone when the nature of the fetishized State emerges— not a rational 23. Compare the guard in “The Assembly Plant.”

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machine of authentication at all, spitting one out as the reliable middleclass person one already knew oneself to be, but the very seat of absolute power, which remains, just as one feared all along (and this is, of course, at the heart of its attraction, its original, inexplicably potent imposition of “illegality” on “us” and its marginalization of us from the good life we can see and touch and purchase in small doses in San Diego), utterly arbitrary and indecipherable. At the same time, other possibilities emerge. Amid claves and credenciales, dollars and patrons, the US State runs through the Caretaker’s narrative, but it is also obscured. The power to pass remains, finally, a force on the loose, generated by the system but never wholly recuperable by it. Chapter 7 shows how the power of the free fetish, unmoored from the state, can become the hearsay public’s own.

7

The Street Is a River

Red border, they call it, for all the running blood. los tucanes de tijuana, “Frontera Roja”

According to Américo Paredes’s classic 1958 essay (1993), the corrido— a popular ballad genre— has its roots in the US-Mexico border region. In the mid-nineteenth century, Paredes argues, “Border conflict, a cultural clash between Mexican and American, gives rise to the Texas- Mexican corrido” (140). The form then spread to Mexico, he speculates, enjoying its high point during the revolution (132). Border smuggling and prerevolutionary banditry are the themes at the corrido’s historical root, but the illegality of the smuggler and the bandit is only part of the classconsciousness that, Paredes emphasizes, was with the genre from the beginning: “It was the rebellious peon, the transported Indian, and the city lépero [guttersnipe] who swelled the ranks of the outlaw bands [in the prerevolutionary period], and the Mexican corrido began not with a heroic period but with a proletarian one” (137). Narcocorridos, dedicated to the topic of drug trafficking, only emerged as a subgenre in the 1970s, but they bear the imprint of this early history.1 As discussed in the introduction, reflexive markers such as se dice are crucial to frame hearsay as such and remind that a broader public is at stake in the present communication. In the case of corridos, Paredes considers a framing reference to word-of-mouth circulation such a genre standard that he uses it as a criterion to track the corrido’s historical emergence. Originally, this opening reflexive marker looked rather like the header of 1. Herrera-Sobek (1979) dates their emergence a bit earlier. They were not, however, called narcocorridos until the 1990s (Ramírez-Pimienta 2011). Since my fieldwork, a new and grotesquely violent subgenre of corridos alterados (twisted corridos; see Ramírez-Pimienta 2013, Muehlmann 2014) has taken over the shock value earlier accorded the kinds of narcocorridos I analyze in this chapter.

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a newspaper; the near-obligatory initial reference to the date and place of events served as a reminder of the corrido’s life as a circulating text. In 1930, Robert Redfield wrote, “The corrido is a news organ [ . . . ] It informs what comes to be a public of the events which concern it [my emphasis]” (9). He describes the performance of corridos in the town square of Tepoztlán (in southern Mexico), where newspapers would also have been read aloud, and the existence of notebooks in which songs were recorded. Corridos were, and to some extent still are, popularly and anonymously composed2 and were an important vehicle for news of all sorts among Mexico’s popular classes. At first glance, the public of early corridos seems connected through the face-to-face performances of a relentlessly oral tradition. However, corridos were also published in penny broadsheets beginning at least by the late nineteenth century— that is, almost since the corrido developed as a recognized genre. As a form, it has moved between the face-to-face and the mass-mediated since it began; even with the genre’s current commercial boom, driven in great part by a US market and US recording companies, it makes little sense to search for an earlier, more authentic version of the genre. As María Luisa de la Garza (2008) points out, the much-vilified narcocorrido is closer to the much-eulogized “traditional” corrido than many would like to believe.3 The songs sanctify face-to-face hearsay as the authentic medium of the pueblo and type themselves as further instances of the same circulation, but they did this through different media both in the nineteenth century and today. The mass popularity corridos enjoy today depends on the fact that they construct their public through devices that keep the public ideologically centered in the word-of-mouth circulation of hearsay, to which the mass media appear as but a way of access. The songs featured in this chapter are not necessarily the most popular, but they were in circulation in Tijuana at the time of my fieldwork, and 2. When a presidential candidate in the 2006 election visited Tijuana, a neighbor of Dorotea’s (my hostess in a colonia popular) composed a corrido praising him and enlisted a musician friend to compose and record a guitar part. Too ill to work, she hoped to obtain party sponsorship to make and sell taped copies. 3. The problem of commercialization versus authentic popular expression plays into the question of narcocorridos’ politics, upon which point the academic literature has been ambivalent from the beginning (Herrera-Sobek 1979). Simonett is perhaps the strongest critic of the songs’ “commercial mystification of the drug trafficker” (2001b:332), whereas other authors (Edberg 2004; de la Garza 2008; Herlinghaus 2009; Muehlmann 2014) see the genre to greater or lesser extent as a site of political critique.

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songs like them can still be heard regularly today. Dating mostly from the 1990s, they speak to a time of intensive neoliberal reform, predating the violence of the so-called War on Drug Trafficking. This was a moment, as I argued in chapter 5, of sharp devaluation of the pueblo as a figure of political possibility in Mexico. But while the state was abandoning the pueblo as a term of interpellation, another institution just on the rise— organized crime— was, in the highly public discourse of the corridos, taking the pueblo up as its own. Before launching into the songs themselves, I should note that, if the linguistic details of the corrido bear the kind of analysis I submit them to, this is because of how the genre showcases narrative.4 The voice is not cultivated in the same way as, for instance, in baladas románticas: Chalino Sánchez, a famous corrido singer of the 1990s, supposedly remarked that he did not sing, he barked, and, though Los Tigres del Norte (generally considered the greatest interpreters of all time) have smoother voices, I have never heard this quality commented on. Indeed, the “uncultivated” sound can be quite deliberate, as with the exaggeratedly raspy tones of Exterminador, or the peculiarly nasal voice of the Apomeño— a minor singer who was nonetheless recommended to me precisely because of the anti-aesthetic quality of his voice. For the man who sold me his disc, there was apparently nothing contradictory about recommending something that “many people don’t like.” The rough flatness of the voice and the patent lack of any attempt to shape it in the ways usually understood to be musically pleasing do not, however, detract from the lyrics. Instead, they put the spotlight on the story. So does the music’s melodic structure. As a ballad, the corrido is tightly repetitive. Rhymed stanzas succeed each other with barely a pause for the accordion’s confirming flourish; no refrain interrupts the narrative’s momentum. Across the quick cycles of neatly contained melodic form, what shifts are the words, and indeed this is, in my experience, how people listen: for the stories, and much less while on the dance floor than while passing time at home, at work, or in the car.5 When one hums along to these rough-hewn melodies or when one cites fragments of them in other contexts, one takes up, inhabits, and passes on the “they 4. Indeed, the literature on corridos focuses overwhelmingly on the lyrics (e.g., Valenzuela Arce 2003), though for the most part on their thematics rather than their performative poetics (but see Herlinghaus 2009). 5. People do dance to corridos. Muehlmann mentions this (2014:61, 85– 86) but focuses on practices of singing along. Mendoza (2008:113) writes that corridos are mostly for listening to in the car; both authors describe rural communities further east along the border.

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say” that these songs offer in compellingly embodied— and compellingly democratic— form.

Malverde Is Miraculous Writing of the confluence of spiritual and stately power, Taussig has noted the similarity between ID cards and the cards of saints, bearing their images and names on the front and prayers on the back (1997:37). In Mexico, such cards are commonly carried in one’s wallet, mixed in with IDs, business cards, and little scraps of paper with phone numbers (valuable contacts) scribbled on them. It is not far, either, from the saint’s card to the scapular, worn about one’s neck as IDs and other official pass cards sometimes are, or to the crosses and images of saints that may be worn there as talismans. When the images of saints begin to function to ensure safe passage, to navigate the violent political landscape of the border, we may begin to discern a politics that is as much a struggle over cosmologies as over the movement of goods, money, and people (cf. Chu 2010; Bernstein 2012). The corrido “La Imagen de Malverde” (Malverde’s Image) opens with a description of a young man fashionably decked out in cowboy hat, gold jewelry, and an “image of Malverde”— a scapulary— hung about his neck. His pickup holds a substantial stash of methamphetamines and cocaine. As he approaches the port of entry connecting Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, Texas, he lifts the image to his lips and kisses it: “Aquí es donde has de ayudarme y, de antemano, muchas gracias. Sé que no has de abandonarme” (Here’s where you’re to help me, and in advance, many thanks. I know you will not abandon me). The lyrics describe blow by blow the ensuing interaction with the officer at the port. The officer asks for the young man’s papers; he shows them. The officer asks where he is going; the young man answers that he is headed for San Antonio, where he lives. “Pass, may God bless you,” the officer tells him, and the trafficker passes— and, “discreetly,” he again kisses the image. The last two stanzas run thus: Mientras, allá en Culiacán, Una madre lleva rosas A la imagen de Malverde Y su fe es muy poderosa;

Meanwhile, back in Culiacán,6 A mother takes roses To the image of Malverde, And her faith is very powerful.

6. Culiacán is the capital of Sinaloa, a state famed for its long involvement in drug trafficking. More people in Tijuana come from Sinaloa than anywhere else.

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Ella pide por su hijo Que le salgan bien las cosas.

She petitions for her son That things may turn out well for him.

Que Malverde es milagroso Otra vez se ha comprobado, Pues la carga en San Antonio Ya se encuentra en el mercado Y el joven en Culiacán Otro viaje ha preparado.

That Malverde is miraculous Has again been proven, For in San Antonio the load Is already on the market, And the youth in Culiacán Has prepared another voyage. (Los Incomparables de Tijuana 1999)

Jesús Malverde was, supposedly, a bandit operating in the state of Sinaloa; legend has it he was killed by the government in 1909.7 As a historical figure, he may thus be connected to the social energies that soon after his death took the form of revolutionary violence. Now he is popular as the patron saint (unrecognized by the Church, of course) of drug trafficking— though not only traffickers have recourse to him. As a saint, he is precisely a patron.8 But if the young trafficker of the corrido maintains a fructiferous exchange relationship with Malverde, he gives him much more than just a respectful kiss. Wolf cites Michael Kenny on worldly patron-client relationships: “The client has a strong sense of loyalty to his patron and voices this abroad. By doing so, he constantly stimulates the channels of loyalty, creates good will, adds to the name and fame of his patron and ensures him a species of immortality [my emphases]” (1966:17). Fame and reputation are the main currency that clients generally pay patrons in exchange for favors granted; “demonstrations of esteem” come first in Wolf ’s own list of things that flow from client to patron. Broadcasting Malverde’s powers, the song participates in the very logics it depicts. When the last stanza declares, “That Malverde is miraculous  / has once again been proven,” these words are not a simple constative statement belonging only to the plane of events narrated. In common usage, to say that a saint is milagroso does not mean just that he or she has special power but that he or she is a faithful patron, reliably fulfilling requests. The proof of miraculousness lies in the fact that the saint is honored, and this proof is had in the song— for it is itself the “demonstration of esteem” paid the patron. Thus the statement “Malverde is miraculous” functions as a point of contact between the world narrated and the world in which 7. On music, Malverde, and drug trafficking in Sinaloa, see Wald (2001) and Simonett (2001a:201–25). 8. In his classic work on patron-client relations, Foster (1961) examines supernatural and human patrons alike.

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the act of narration takes place.9 The saint’s shrine may be the principal site to offer thanks for favors granted, but evidence of the saint’s holy power must circulate beyond. As it does so, the act of thanks opens up an infinitude of small and momentary shrines. The saint is present in these as he is in his original shrine; through these sites as well, others, overhearing the exchange between patron and client, may enter into relations with the former. Examples of the circulating song as shrine may be found on the Internet site YouTube. As with many genres of music, users frequently assemble homemade video tracks to accompany favorite narcocorridos. In the space for comments beneath one such video of “La Imagen de Malverde,” a user compliments the video, adding that he or she also made one to thank Malverde. The assumption that the video was made and posted in thanks indicates that the practice is common. This act of thanks, though, turns the website into a place to initiate or confirm other exchange relations with the saint. Amid the usual banter between users, several comments on another such video address Malverde directly: eta chido este corrido en ti confio malverde r.i.p. this corrido is cool; in you I trust, Malverde, R.I.P. ¡¡¡ gracias malverde x los favores e.a.z.r. desde uruapan michoacan con honore te llevare en micorazon ¡¡ thank you, malverde, for the favors [granted]. e.a.z.r. from Uruapan, Michoacán. with honor I will bear you in my heart!! x fvr prtgnos y consedenos la ptcion hecha please protect us and grant us the petition we have made10

Compare these to the graffiti on the walls of Malverde’s shrine on a highway south of Tijuana, depicted in figure 7.1. The writing prominent next to the Virgin’s face reads, “5/5/07 Thank you for helping us sell the pericaso [sic, cocaine] in the United States.” Two notes are about the reunification of family or lovers; another asks for “protection on the road so that we may return safely”; most are simply names and dates, and an occasional “Thank you, Malverde.” In this sense, the electronic website of 9. What I call here two “worlds” or “planes” correspond to Jakobson’s (1984) distinction between narrated event and speech event. At stake in contact between the two is the relationship between narratively represented chronotopes and what Bakhtin called “real-life chronotopes” (1981b). 10. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR0P63g9ws8&feature=related.

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YouTube is no different from the shrine by the side of the road. Both are sacred portals by the wayside; both are points at which an act of thanks (building the shrine, posting the video) broadcasts the saint’s miraculousness and makes him available to others. The act of thanks is addressed to the saint, but it is essential that it be overheard by anonymous others. In the thanks, the saint’s miraculousness erupts within the circulations of the general public, forming a node where the attentions of the devout coalesce. Ultimately, Malverde’s holiness is inseparable from the movement of the public at large, whether on the road or in cyberspace, into which his devotees imperceptibly blend. Corridos commissioned in thanks to Malverde are part of a broader tradition of performing music before saints’ altars, especially on their feast days; the songs’ commercial circulation thus complements live performance at the shrine. Such songs are “musical ex- votos” (Flores and González 2006:33), not unlike the retablos painted in thanks for miracles granted and hung by the niche of the patron saint.11 At Malverde’s main chapel in Sinaloa, Enrique Flores and Raúl Eduardo González report, not only are songs performed live, but a CD labeled Tribute to Malverde may be purchased, which includes the same commercial version of “La Imagen de Malverde” transcribed above. The ex-votos on YouTube take up ex-votos already in circulation; there is thus no hard line between performance of the corrido at the shrine, its reproduction via pirated copies sold at the shrine or elsewhere, and its distribution through the formal institutional circuits of the mass media. In fact, these different sorts of reproductions are mutually interdependent in terms of the imaginary of circulation they evoke: the token of the patron-client relation, the very object exchanged, is the medium through which a mass public takes shape. And yet in each of these sites in which evidence of Malverde’s miraculousness is made available to third persons, his miraculousness is also made absent. The site of his miracle is always elsewhere. One gets close to it through the thanks— the shrine, the song, the videos— all sites that hold out the possibility of further miracles by indicating a prior, perhaps 11. Retablos are also texts reflexively addressed to a public. Thus reads one dated 1938, from the state of Michoacán: “María Soledad Salinas, finding herself in imminent danger in a shootout and hiding herself between the legs of the horses, fervently invoked the Holiest Virgin of Health and remained safe and sound, for which she offered to make public [hacer público] her gratitude and immense faith.” Another, dated 1953, ends, “and with this retablo I publicly [públicamente] give thanks.” The first is at the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares de Pátzcuaro; the second at the Posada Mandala, also in Pátzcuaro.

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Figure 7.1. Shrine to Malverde.

secret one. The propagation of miraculousness depends on a communicative structure that makes power available in a particular way, thanks to the listener’s stance: one must put oneself in the place of the third person in relation to an existing patron- client relationship, which one seizes through its aftereffects. Ambivalently, the corrido’s public becomes privy to something by standing outside it: by overhearing it. It is a hearsay public, a public of se dice (it is said), in which what is said is that the saint is powerful. Here, however, the act of saying this is a token of exchange

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with the fount of power. Like other fetish objects we have seen, these tokens bring the saint close while locating him elsewhere. “La Imagen de Malverde” does so most overtly, perhaps, in the register of visual representation, for the song is named in honor not of Malverde but of his image. “La Imagen de Malverde,” however, spatializes and temporalizes the tension between proximity and distance in highly particular form. Malverde’s rites of passage include not only the kiss before and after crossing and the mother’s roses “meanwhile,” back in Culiacán, but also, of course, the diachronic seeping spread, a posteriori, of the song’s circulation itself. The simultaneity of the trafficker’s acts of devotion and his mother’s undergird the saint’s miracle; the word “meanwhile” synchronizes them in the saint’s omnipresence. Unlike the novelistic “meanwhile” Benedict Anderson (1983) saw as essential to the emergence of the modern national “we” moving stolidly forward through homogeneous, empty time, however, Malverde’s chronotope (or narratively projected spacetime) is jumpy. It clutches together points posited as disparate: shrine and port, mother and son, intimate homeland and faraway place. These disjunctures remain disjunctures even as they are bridged, so that Malverde extends himself through space and time in an inchworm process, his tokens (scapular, song) flung afield and then knit back to him and his main shrine in these scattered moments of devotion. If “meanwhile” is the key to the Andersonian public, Malverde’s chronotope hinges on the word ya, “already”: the youth does not petition the saint but thanks him before the miracle is accomplished. As we hear the song, the trafficker is “already” back in Culiacán. From Culiacán to the border to San Antonio, over the course of the song Malverde repeatedly splits himself, defers himself, only to have “already” drawn himself together again. He opens gaps in time and space only for them suddenly to appear miraculously sutured. His holiness and its public do not come together in a satellite view of their totality but in the small, startling pop of disjuncture bridged. “Already” also describes the circular logic that, through the public, produces the saint’s power. In logical terms, “One worships a god because it is powerful; one knows a god is powerful because it is worshipped” (Sangren 1991:70). In terms of practice, collective worship charges a god with the group’s power, which individual acts of petition can then siphon off for private ends.12 Malverde collapses these two poles of logic and practice into each other. The song narratively represents the private 12. This circuit is especially clear in the Taiwanese case Sangren describes, which includes mass rituals in which strangers circulate testimony of the goddess Ma Tsu’s miraculousness by word-of-mouth.

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siphoning; through this representation, we join the anonymous public of the devout. Each point is, miraculously, “already” the other, and Malverde “already” in each. In general, worshippers cannot acknowledge that the god’s power is an effect of collective devotion, just as the marginalized could never conceive that their fantasizing constitutes the state’s mystique. But the religious public can draw close to attributing the god’s efficacy to itself, for example in the platitude (which “La Imagen de Malverde” repeats) that qualifies as “powerful” not the saint himself but the devotee’s faith. However, if Malverde’s power feeds off the circulation of his image and if this suggestion comes at all close to the surface, this is thanks not so much to suppositions underlying the circulation of “musical ex-votos” as to suppositions underlying the corrido genre as a whole. Secular patrons (traffickers) can also appear, like Malverde, as secondary figures, little more than a moment in the economy of power whereby the public comes into being. The trafficker is powerful because we listen; his power is ours; in the end, we listen to the evidence of our own miraculousness.13

Worldly Patrons Only a small subset of corridos are ex-votos, but the logics whereby they can constitute tribute to a saint shed light on the genre as a whole. To understand “La Imagen de Malverde” as an ex-voto, one must imagine a patronage transaction not just between saint and trafficker, but also between trafficker and musicians. In this particular commercially recorded song, such connections remain inexplicit, and there is nothing to indicate the story is not but a fiction made up for a mass audience. Discretion, however (recall the trafficker’s discretion as he kisses Malverde’s image), is essential; it may be the very index that something is there to be hidden. In fact, the suppositions that connect traffic and music bolster narcocorridos into popularity regardless of their veracity.14 Every claim of connection between musicians and mafioso patrons (often by minor groups doing their best to promote themselves) spurs speculation about even such an eminent group as Los Tigres del Norte, with their fifty-year international career and multiple Grammies. A news article on an up-

13. Corridos let the hearsay public approach a Durkheimian moment of social totalization— yet still predominantly in the third-person mode of “they.” 14. While Simonett (2001b) distinguishes between commissioned and commercial corridos, my point here is that the blurriness of the distinction is productive for the corridos’ mass public.

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and-coming group in Tijuana, Explosión Norteña, shows how the stir of speculation helps constitute the genre. A shooting attempt against the band made the front page of the Tijuana weekly Zeta, legendary for its reporting on organized crime as well as for the violent reprisals it has suffered. The attack could be due, Zeta proposes, to the band’s affiliation with the Arellano Félix Cartel, with which Zeta has its own longstanding feud.15 The reporter adds: Zeta has knowledge, even, of a CD recorded in a well-known discotheque [ . . . ], where comments and greetings of prominent members of [organized] crime may be heard. The corridos, most of them recounting real events, may be a point of departure [in surmising a motive]. Given that it is presupposed that these [corridos] are written by commission, although the author commented to a reporter that he obtains the information from newspaper articles. (Zeta 2006)16

Zeta reports that the band has “practically become the ‘spokesmen’ [voceros; literally, voicers]” for the cartel’s operating cells. According to the weekly, Explosión Norteña began by playing private concerts sponsored (patrocinados) by younger traffickers; later, its songs “began to circulate clandestinely” among high school students. Only after informally produced recordings had circulated widely did the band make the leap to commercial recording. This plot is one that, true or false, it would be in the band’s interest to promote. Not too openly, of course— the lead singer emphasizes multiple times that Zeta is not just their source of information but their “main inspiration”; their motives in publishing the activities of organized crime are no different from Zeta’s and are shaped purely by the economics of popular demand: “If you sell, so do we. It’s just marketing.” With due deference to Zeta, this argument should not be dismissed as disingenuous. Los Tucanes de Tijuana (for many years the Tigres’ main rivals), accustomed to such questions from the press, give the same answer: “There 15. In 1988, Zeta’s editor Héctor Félix Miranda was shot dead; in 1997, his coeditor Jesús Blancornelas survived an attempt on his life by the Arellano Félix Cartel. In 2004, another editor, Francisco Ortiz Franco, was killed. 16. “Zeta tiene conocimiento incluso de un disco grabado en una conocida discoteca [ . . . ], donde se escuchan los comentarios y saludos a destacados miembros de la delincuencia. Los corridos, en su mayoría relatando hechos reales, pueden ser un punto de partida [para buscar un motivo]. Dado que se presupone, son escritos bajo encargo, aun cuando el autor comentó a un reportero que la información la obtiene de las notas de prensa.”

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are always sectors of the population that ask them [the Tucanes] for them [corridos] and ‘one must satisfy them’” (Herrera 2009). The answer is as standard as the notion of a career based on the patronage of traffickers, but it has older roots: part of the ideological essence of the corrido is that it is an authentically popular genre. The idea that the listening public has a core of traffickers, with their private parties and their patronage power, actually complements the idea that the genre’s true listening public is the pueblo. Instead of the ideology of individual responsibility for one’s words and their effects— the ideology of me consta (I vouch for it) with which reporters confront performers, the ideology that communication must be backed by a stable “I”— the musicians answer with an image of circulation, a structure of power and communication in which one is, inevitably, caught up. Behind the banal language of marketing that they ironically use (the same ironic rationale for selling drugs that the songs put in the mouths of traffickers), another argument emerges. The ethical basis of their communication, they seem to argue, is quite different from that proposed by the journalists. Judith Irvine (1992) writes of the Senegalese xaxaar ceremony, a part of wedding rituals in which a griot, or professional orator, insults the bride and her family. In their introduction to the volume in which Irvine’s piece appears, she and Jane Hill summarize the situation: The employers of the griots evade responsibility because the words of the insults are not theirs. The griots avoid responsibility because they perform only for hire. Audience members who repeat the insults later evade responsibility because they only report what they heard. The locus of responsibility for insult, then, is diffused or distributed, laminated away from individual human beings into an intersubjectively constituted realm of community consensus. (12)

Responsibility for insult is hard to pin down because of the structure of participant roles inherent to xaxaar as a genre (Irvine 1992:128). Something similar happens in the case of corridos. The confusion and suspicion over whether they are commissioned is paralleled in xaxaar. Beyond Hill and Irvine’s explanation, responsibility is diffused because the source of specific utterances cannot be traced. One knows that some verses are composed by the griots and others by their employers, but one does not know which are which. This is precisely the case with narcocorridos. Zeta attempts to pin responsibility to organized crime as the principals of the message and to Explosión Norteña as its animators (Goffman 1979). But which corridos reflect the authorial will of specific traffickers and which are simply the inventions of musicians seeking to please a mass public?

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The attempt to allocate responsibility is as doomed to failure as the attempts Irvine describes to punish griots and repress xaxaar. Employers are high caste while griots are low. The employers represent a social authority one can hear in the griot’s verses without being able to locate it precisely. The obscured connection to figures of social authority lies behind xaxaar’s capacity to define the community. Thanks to the griot’s lowly position, her words bear a special relation on the one hand to authority and on the other to the community at large. As Irvine notes, a griot’s insults can only damage a noble when she can “manage to imply that some wide public [my emphasis] is involved, as source and/or audience for the message” (114). Just as Zeta accuses Explosión Norteña of being “spokesmen” for organized crime, so griots “are spokespersons for others virtually by definition.” This communicative hierarchy means that the public, a third-person audience witnessing the struggles between the rich and powerful, is not just crucial to xaxaar’s role structure but is in fact its strange and denied protagonist: the “source and/or audience of the message.” Finally, the xaxaar public is never just an audience— it can be counted on to repeat, for years, the griot’s verses word for word and, through these repetitions, re-create itself and its relation to social authority. The mass-media format through which commercial narcocorridos circulate leeches on the imagined relations behind another sort of circulation: hearsay connected to the back stage of power, here not of the state (necessarily), but of traffic. How this happens is not unlike how the bestselling paperback Lo negro del Negro Durazo reproduces the public of se dice (it is said) through the institutions of mass publicity (see chapter 5). Indeed, the insistent imagination of personal connections between traffickers and musicians is part of a “regime of circulation” (Cody 2009) that relies on picking up overlooked shreds of evidence, overhearing through them the relations of power, and setting those overhearings into circulation via the vast echo of the amplifying machine that is the hearsay public. The media format of hearsay and of corridos hijacks the mass commercial circulations of modern publicity to perpetuate its own logic and its own public: the pueblo.

Se Dice In corridos, hearsay colonizes the mass media. Into the concrete circuits of sales and distribution, YouTube clicks and pirated CDs, it introduces the dynamics of the third person. These are dynamics, essentially, of nonsubjectivity— and yet collectivities do articulate themselves in the third person’s peculiarly self-undoing terms. In Rafael’s words, “The cir-

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culation of rumor calls forth an anonymous and ephemeral community,” bound above all by its “common imaginings of scenarios which might otherwise remain hidden or unknown” (1997:281). Recall Benveniste (1971a, 1971b). By virtue of “you” and “I,” people posit themselves and their interlocutors as subjects; the third person stands outside this dialectic, mediating it as the parties to discourse refer to the world beyond them. If “we” remains incipient for the hearsay public, if the certainties of the first person remain unavailable to it, this is because the third person, refusing to be located, impedes mediation between “you” and “I,” between the members in common of the hearsay public. Where public transparency and accountability are taken to be nonexistent, signs are read as obscuring shreds of an object beyond the possibility of secure reference: the back stage of the elite, populated (it is imagined) by politicos and mafiosos. The power of the back stage interrupts and distorts the communications of the hearsay public; in response, it puts itself in the position of the third person that, excluded from dialogue, may thus overhear the doings of the powerful. The song “Boletín de Prensa” (Press Release), recorded by Los Tucanes de Tijuana (1997), is not a particularly popular corrido, but it reveals with special clarity how hearsay can evoke groupness in this genre. “Boletín de Prensa” begins: Se dice que las fronteras Es nido de traficantes; Tal vez sí tengan razón, Pero, ¿quién va a comprobarles? Si yo fuera de la ley, Tal vez pudiera informarles.

It is said that the borders17 Is a nest of traffickers; Perhaps they/you are right, But who will prove it for them/you? If I were with the law, Perhaps I could inform you.

There is no need to specify by whom, nor to whom, the opening statement is made. The subject of the next couplet is ambiguous, either “they” or plural “you” (though leaning strongly toward “they”), but by the fifth line, the singer-narrator’s use of “I” firmly sets the song in the context of its presentation. Framing himself as addressor and his audience as addressee, he makes clear they are all among those who say that “the border is a nest of traffickers.” At the same time, he obliquely characterizes his own communication: whatever it is, it will not be “information,” 17. Las Fronteras is a town in Chihuahua, a reference that could explain why the verb is in the singular (thanks to Natalia Mendoza for pointing this out). However, the song paints a picture of border life more germane to a city like Tijuana than a village.

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and its truth will not be any more verifiable than the initial statement, “the border is a nest of traffickers.” Step-by-step, the stanza brings into play a set of assumptions around se dice and develops them into a set of recognitions. The first assumption is that the idea that “the border is a nest of traffickers” is already in circulation, and that the mode of that circulation is popular talk. The second assumption is that the audience will accept the claim that this statement is in circulation because the audience itself has already heard it said. In recognizing itself as the addressee of “I might be able to inform you,” the audience (ideally) recognizes itself, as well as the singer-narrator, as part of the larger group of those who talk about trafficking at the border. Thus, the song’s opening stanza postulates both singer-narrator and audience as participants in the circulation of common knowledge, and the song itself as an instance of that circulation. The recognitions that grow out of se dice are particular to the corrido as a genre, but they are based on a general capacity of reported speech. Besides being used as a distancing mechanism (to allow an upstanding “I” to voice hearsay otherwise beneath it), reported speech can also be used to signal that it rests on collective authority (Besnier 1992). Whether reported speech is used to deny or to claim responsibility, Hill and Irvine (1992:6) suggest, has much to do with social hierarchy. Of the Tohono O’odham of Arizona, for instance, they note that “narratives that ‘distribute’ responsibility across a social field of reported speakers are very common (especially among working-class speakers) [my emphasis]” (16). Se dice works as an evidential marker; it does so by its reflexivity, by appealing to the diffuse authority of the group among whom “it is said.” It can thus be used either to set the speaker above that group (as a source of unreliable hearsay) or to locate the speaker within the group (as a legitimate source of truth). Without mentioning “we,” “Boletín de Prensa” calls into full force a social body that coheres only in its own imagination of itself. Surely and swiftly, in the first stanza, it reframes the present communicative event (whether live or recorded) as an instance of se dice. The “you” drawn into the circulation of hearsay, though, is not an individual but a mass audience with no particular limits beyond those of the song’s circulation. This public imagines itself constituted by shared knowledge of a particular object (the border as nest of traffickers), circulated via a particular medium: hearsay. It may well seem a leap to frame a mass- mediated song as an instance of face-to-face hearsay. But if such a pretension can successfully evoke a public, this is due not to se dice itself but to the broader cultural imaginary in which it is imbricated. It is due, essentially, to the historical legitimacy of the corrido as a popular genre of realist reportage. In the context of this history, the title “Boletín de Prensa” (Press

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Release) appears as a joke, mocking the falsity of the official news release and claiming authority for a popular media format of long legitimacy.

*** While the assumptions that construct singer and audience as membersin-common of a public are unexamined, “Boletín de Prensa” makes an issue of the object of discourse around which the public is conceived of as coming together. As stated in the song’s opening lines, the fact that the border is a nest of traffickers will never be proven. The object of discourse is contradictory in nature: the more surely it emerges as something to be talked about, the less definitely can it be known. Reports of arrests and investigations must be taken not as exposures of criminals but as coverups for even bigger mafiosos, orchestrated by a weak state trying to save face— or perhaps taking orders directly from the cartels. The more we seem to know about drug trafficking, the clearer it is that we know nothing but that its practitioners are well hidden in full view. The following stanza summarizes that simultaneous omnipresence-concealment, the presence-absence of traffickers all about in public space: A los verdaderos narcos Es peligroso enfrentarse; Se les topan en la calle Y hasta suelen saludarse. Nadie se quiere morir, Hay que entender por qué lo hacen. Sólo el que está en la jugada Sabe de qué son capaces.

It’s dangerous to confront The real traffickers; They [the law] run into them on the street And they even usually say hello. Nobody wants to die; One must understand why they do it. Only he who is in on the game Knows what they’re capable of.

In this stanza, nothing marks the encounter between lawman and trafficker as anything out of the ordinary; both figures move about freely on the street and address each other in the most platitudinous way possible. They are imagined circulating anonymously within the general public— by implication, part of the very public that imagines their circulation. The street is privileged as the site of encounter and as the site of a public circulation within which the object of knowledge moves about unperceived. If the border is a nest of traffickers, traffickers only nest there in a manner peculiarly both overt and covert. As touched on in chapter 3, they make Tijuana’s public space unpredictable in ways both terrifying and exhilarating. While traffickers are responsible for shootings and such, they may also bring odd windfalls of luck. For example, a young man

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renting from my hostess Dorotea’s sister, very poor by all accounts, with three small children and a wife working the night shift in an assembly plant, turned up one day in a four- wheel drive. He had been working at a carwash, and a customer had simply given it to him. All speculated that it was stolen and had surely been used for something illegal. That is, the event fit within and confirmed a mythology about the possibilities of public space in Tijuana, and I was the only person surprised. The manner in which traffickers nest at the border thus depends on the nature of public sociality there: it depends on an imaginary of the possibilities anonymous encounter holds. The imagination of public space in Mexico’s border cities is crucial to the formation of the broad, transnational public of hearsay projected by “Boletín de Prensa.” The song sets up the general public that inhabits the streets of Mexico’s border cities as the core of its own listening public, and that listening public as synonymous with the much vaster group of those among whom “it is said . . .” But this circulation only takes shape in relation to its counterpart, mass mediated news, the unreliability of which is more than a matter of falsity— instead, it arises from the fact that each report is itself a token of the world of trafficking. Journalists, the Tucanes suggest, are, like the lawmen, “in on the game,” but not as principals. The Tucanes posit the trafficker as a figure that comes between the producers and the audience of mass media news: a third person that distorts communication without being a party to it. In fact, there are no parties to dialogue in the world the Tucanes depict. The brief exchange on the street between lawman and trafficker is a farce; the trafficker likewise has no need to contact the media directly, and communication between the state and the media is reduced to the farcical press release. Neither are singer and audience really addressor and addressee. Both are simply overhearers, third person earwitnesses to the goings-on of power, and the communication is nothing but a directionless repetition of what everyone already knows.

La Pura Verdad del Pueblo In evoking their public, the Tucanes re-create the imaginary of the border as a nest of traffickers, an imaginary made of a massive system of repetitions, shreds of uncertain evidence put back into circulation to foment further re-instantiations of the very statement that se dice. The world of trafficking, the Tucanes propose, is everywhere, in the news as on the street, and yet “the border” cannot be known as such but only through the web of hearsay. What certainty one finds in that circulation is the structure of exclusion from the communications of the powerful— an exclusion that “we” all share. Rather than the ability to say “we,” being

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caught up in this circulation is the mark of membership in a social world ultimately rooted in the border itself. As the Tucanes would have it, Tijuana has the (dubious) distinction of being the place where one can get close to traffickers— that is, where one can get close to the figures of the back stage, where one may brush against their power. One can get close to what is “really” happening not just in Tijuana but in Mexico as a whole. This claim as to Tijuana’s distinction is not far from the claim Gerardo made in chapter 4: that Tijuana is a place where, by circulating on its streets, one can hear Mexico as a whole, Mexico as a nation of migrants caught up in the vigorous transnational circulation that their economic circumstances impose on them. Tijuana as a place of traffic or as a place of migrants are variations on the theme of what Mexico is and what can be known of it, of those caught up in it as a system. Consider how the following statement synthesizes the chronotopic regimes of circulation projected by “Boletín de Prensa” and “La Imagen de Malverde”; it shows how widespread, how rooted in everyday intuitions, this sense of public belonging is. “The street is a river,” Dorotea’s grandson Eduardo (a recent arrival in Tijuana, bouncing through odd jobs) told me enthusiastically. “What happens over here”— he stretched one hand out demonstratively, wiggling it a little—“is already known over here”— and he stretched out the other, in the opposite direction, to make the same motion. Recall how, in “La Imagen de Malverde,” already bound the United States and Mexico together in the saint’s miraculous spatiotemporality (the drugs “already” on the market in San Antonio; the youth “already” back home preparing another trip). This “already” takes place in the moment of the song’s circulation; every re-enunciation reenacts Malverde’s space-time. It thus applies also to the listening audience: we are “already” part of what we hear. As in Eduardo’s remark, the river of the street is the river of hearsay, the river of connection between all those who share the circumstances of the pueblo and the fleeting notice, as well as the perduring effects, of powerful political decisions made out of view, on the back stage. Eduardo made the statement, tellingly, after having discussed with neighbors the nearby assassination of an acquaintance. They could not figure out why such an apparently insignificant person had merited so many bullets; in any case, “Se fue como uno de los grandes” (He went like one of the greats). His death was one befitting a trafficker, and its spectacularity was behind the running of the news in the street. Without any need to say “we,” Eduardo evoked the image of a community, the group of those caught up in this river of news that is the street, at once the place where such a terrible and unexpected event as a shooting may occur and where the indices of that event spread and flow and unite

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all those who hear of it into one moving, living being. Though the interest of this particular event was limited, the group that takes the shape of a river is not bounded but merges with the more general national and transnational circulation of news in forms like corridos. That is, once the statement “the street is a river” has been made, talk of this particular shooting does not bind one only to a local community but also to a much broader public. The temporality of the river of hearsay is punctuated by events, but in contrast to the Andersonian public, which is formed in the periodicity of print news, these events have no order or regularity to them, and the public is made not in the simultaneity of reception but in its diachronic rush through a chain of overhearings. Though this chain is spread out in time, its bond is nonetheless so powerful that its simultaneity is even greater than that of Anderson’s newspaper public: what happens “here” is “already known over here.” With his gestures, Eduardo makes his own body the symbol of the body public, the river. The corrido runs like a river, as in the commonplace corre la noticia, spread the news (literally, run the news). Indeed, this is what the word corrido means: that which is run. For the genre, the song’s ability to concretize a patron-client tie ultimately matters less than its function in constituting this public body of hearsay— as suggested, for example, by the quantity of corridos about migration (Herrera-Sobek 1993; de la Garza 2007; Ragland 2009). The patron-client relation is central as a speculation, as the possibility of overhearing something, rather than as confirmable reality. If hearsay is a river, corridos bring notice both of the powerful and of the world that surrounds one. One overhears oneself, differentially linked to the back stage, to which one may have access for different reasons and in different capacities. Indeed, the authority of the back stage of the elites may be done away with entirely, leaving only “us.” So, for instance, a young man who had formerly been in the employ of organized crime in his home state performed without prompting the same kind of suture between narrated and real-life worlds discussed earlier in this chapter. After listening to a corrido that mentions the trafficker-hero’s state of origin and last name, which coincided with the young man’s own, he remarked: “There’s a ton of us over that way!” The family name becomes the point at which narrated events are sutured to the present context of listening; the young man takes the events narrated in the corrido as historical facts, and the protagonists as historical figures. Through the song, he overhears his own blood. From this perspective, trafficking is the activity of the pueblo, legitimated by the mechanism of hearsay and the truth it claims to tell. The truth of corridos presents itself as the truth of the pueblo, a faithful realist reflection of its entire social world. The corrido as enunciation is both an effect of power and part of a

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circulation that, while it conceives of itself as marginalized, nonetheless grants itself the full legitimacy of national truth. Dorotea provides a more benign example of the practice of reading corridos for ties between the world narrated and the world in which the corrido is sung, thus reaffirming the songs’ legitimacy as representations of social reality broadly. At a composers’ reunion attended by older musicians like herself, she performed a corrido about Tijuana, a simple praise song for the city. When she came to the part about the “international” crowd parading on the street, including even individuals “from the Far East,” Dorotea made eye contact with me, smiled, and raised her arm in a gesture of exposition (she was well aware of my ethnic background). Nothing more was needed to make my presence evidence of the song’s truth and of the Tijuana it narratively displayed. As a performer, it is her job to accentuate such resonances.18 This knitting together of events narrated with the context in which narration takes place is not restricted to instances of listening. Short citations of corridos are often used to reframe or comment on ongoing interaction. They are quoted in the same way folk sayings (dichos) are— no distinction in particular is made, for they rest on the same authority. For example, while Eduardo was using a kind of shoulder bag known as a morral to carry his lunch to work, he delighted in singing just a snippet of a song, “Sólo el que carga el morral” (Only he who carries the morral). The rest of the verse runs as follows: Sólo el que carga el morral Le sabe su contenido, Por eso la federal Quería llevarlo al presidio. No se le comprobó nada, Se les bajó en el camino.

Only he who carries the morral Knows its contents; That’s why the feds Wanted to take him to prison. Nothing was proven of him; He got off on the way there. (Los Cachorros de Juan Villarreal 2007)19

He would then flash a mischievous grin. Indeed, he eventually did turn to the petty resale of marijuana to supplement his meager and irregular 18. Compare Fox (2004) on the rich array of techniques used to tie country music lyrics to their context of performance or reproduction. For Fox, the songs’ political import for consolidating a working-class lifeworld comes from the feelingfulness such practices evoke. 19. This is not the best known version of “La muerte de Baltazar” (or “Se les peló Baltazar”), but Juan Villarreal is the composer. The song is much older than 2007; I have been unable to find out its original date.

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income, and the playful reframing of his humble lunch bag as the secret site of contraband became a literal truth. The hit song “Jefe de Jefes” (Boss of Bosses), by Los Tigres del Norte (1997), begins with a spoken dialogue between two male voices: man 1: I like corridos because they are the real facts/events of our pueblo. man 2: yes, I like them too, because in them is sung the pure truth. man 1: well, put them on, then. man 2: alright, here goes.20

The song is a boast; the first stanza gives its flavor: Soy el jefe de jefes, señores, Me respetan a todos niveles Y mi nombre y mi fotografía Nunca van a mirar en papeles Porque a mí el periodista me quiere Y si no, mi amistad se la pierde.

I, gentlemen, am the boss of bosses; I am respected at all levels [of society], And my name and my photograph You will never see in the papers Because the journalist loves me And if not, he loses out on my friendship.

The protagonist, it may be inferred, is a drug trafficker. According to the popular belief that even such prominent groups as the Tigres are actually in the employ of some cartel or other, one might think the song addressed to the sponsoring cartel’s rivals (not to mention journalists, for whom this jocose stanza constitutes a death threat). But rumor has it that this is not the case at all: the song, I am told, is addressed to Los Tucanes de Tijuana and was meant to put them in their place as young upstarts. “Everyone knows that!” Eduardo declared to me. The narrator, according to this theory, would be the lead singer himself, disguised narratively as a trafficker. If this interpretation is carried to its conclusion, then la pura verdad del pueblo, “the pure truth of the pueblo,” becomes the musical dominance of the Tigres and the manifest popularity of their songs. The truth of the pueblo is that it exists, and that it exists through these songs. The entire play of inferences on which the corrido genre is based 20. man 1: a mí me gustan los corridos porque son los hechos reales de nuestro pueblo. man 2: sí, a mí también me gustan, porque en ellos se canta la pura verdad. man 1: pues, ponlos, pues. man 2: órale, ahí va.

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is here— not in the song, but in the circulating rumor that “everyone knows”— brought full circle into a total reflexivity that ultimately has nothing to do with traffic or the politically powerful but simply with the pueblo hearing itself into existence through its spokesmen, its greatest bards, the Tigres. Though the hearsay public may seem to submit itself to its object in the grammatical structure of se dice, it is ultimately only said through and thanks to “us.” Even as the hearsay public dwells on its own social marginality, it claims to represent the full sociopolitical reality of the nation and thus, paradoxically, eliminate the importance of those it believes itself subject to.

Illegality and the Pueblo The point of tracing the evocation of the pueblo through songs about drug trafficking is not to say that the marginalized endorse traffic. Rather, traffic finds the communicative forms of the pueblo the most convincing way to legitimize itself. On the one hand, this fact testifies to the force of the hearsay public as an institution. On the other, it is inseparable from the question of the pueblo’s relation to state authority. If corridos represent the pueblo as dominated, they also validate the act of listening itself as a contestatory response to this situation. Let us turn to “Los Tres de Zacatecas” (The Three from Zacatecas) by Los Tigres del Norte (1996): Había un cargamento de trescientos kilos Que los migra atoraron, Y cuando de pronto escuché la noticia, Tan sólo de cien hablaron. Oí el comentario porque estaba preso; Por ilegal fui cautivo. Mientras que los gringos hacían el reparto, Yo estaba haciendo el corrido.

There was a load of three hundred kilos That [US] Immigration held up, And, suddenly, when I heard the news, They only spoke of a hundred. I heard the remark because I was imprisoned; For being illegal I was captive. While the gringos divvied up the spoils, I was making the corrido.

The narrator starts with the facts, but, by the end of the first stanza, he has traced the twist in information that news, according to “Boletín de Prensa,” invariably undergoes. What is at stake is not simply what happened, but what happened to “what happened.” In the second stanza, the narrator explains his position as witness. Held captive for unauthorized border crossing, the agents of the state consider him inconsequential. As

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“illegal alien,” he thus enjoys a privileged position as witness. His testimony (not before authority but before his equals, the pueblo) is governed by the temporality of “the street is a river”: even as events developed, the very corrido that one hears now was already being composed, was already on the verge of circulation. It began its circulatory life at the source of events. The only remove is the remove of overhearing. Immediately, the narrator dedicates a stanza to the names and provenance of the traffickers arrested. This nugget of information links to the closing stanza, which describes a “poor mother” anxiously awaiting her sons back home and suggests that someday, perhaps, she will find out what happened to them by means of this selfsame song.21 The names and origin of the detainees make this more than a rhetorical flourish. But by placing this information so late in the song, the narrator subtly sets the constative level of the news (that these particular men were arrested for trying to smuggle three hundred kilos of cocaine into the United States) on a secondary plane. What occupies the first plane, the real subject of the corrido, is the twisting of news in the first stanza and the “I heard . . . meanwhile” of the second: the nature of the communication itself as hearsay and as part of an entire chronotope to which the border is central, defining as it does both the trafficker and the “illegal alien.” After the names, the following stanza describes the officers’ threat to the traffickers: you can consider yourselves dead mean if even “half of a word” about the divvying-up of the drugs gets out. The threat reveals the power that twists events and sets the terms of the corrido’s circulation. Though it is not worth making directly to such a lowly figure as an “illegal alien,” it must apply to the narrator as well. Note that it is not trafficking for which the three brothers are so viciously threatened— not drugs but talk is the dangerous stuff that, transported to the wrong places, could get one killed. Singing becomes dangerous, but not for the reasons of patronage and rivalry described earlier. The very root of the genre, the circulation of trustworthy news, here appears as an act inviting violent reprisals by those in power. The reproduction of the corrido thus appears as a transgressive act. It does not just mock the officers’ death threat and provocatively display the futility of prohibition. The corrido has run out under the very noses of the officers; it circulates, like “illegals,” like drugs and like traffickers, without regard for borders. It is itself the contraband that the narrator has smuggled out of his confinement, out of the closed bounds of the port of entry where he, like the traffickers, was detained. 21. Compare this quote from eighteenth-century France, which Foucault presents in connection with the broadsheet, a historically related genre: “One day a family hears at its door the story in song of the crime and execution of its sons” (1977:310).

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Dorotea, ever aware of my status as ethnographer (and American), made the status of narcocorridos as contraband evident in our everyday dealings. “¡Matones!” (Thugs, murderers), her husband would growl of the teenage couple across the street, who liked to begin their days at 6:00 a.m. by blasting their narcocorridos at full volume. When Eduardo asked Dorotea why she did not perform narcocorridos—“Es lo que más está pegando ahorita” (It’s what’s hottest now)— she simply shook her head and made some moralizing remark, repeating the commonplace that only thugs and traffickers listen to that kind of music. But more than once I caught her humming tunes I recognized as narcocorridos or singing to herself the opening line of a song, just a few words; if I had not known the specific songs already, I could never have guessed they were narcocorridos. Thus, she would casually smuggle before me the corridos that, when asked explicitly, she would only speak of as the most morally devalued music possible. The idea of corridos as contraband is, indeed, a constitutive cliché of the genre. One of the Tigres’ classic albums, for instance, is titled Corridos Prohibidos (Prohibited Corridos, 1989). Efforts to censor the songs feed this mythology.22 When an emcee tells his California audience the singer has brought them from Mexico “un cargamento pesado de [ . . . ] corridos” (a heavy load of corridos), he makes a playful reference to trafficking (El Apomeño de Sinaloa 2006). The joke reflects a complex idea of the genre: a complex idea of a social world spanning the United States and Mexico and a communicative economy within which the pueblo situates itself. In “Los Tres de Zacatecas,” the three brothers may be imprisoned, but “I” the narrator am not, and neither is the news embodied in the corrido. The entire song is a comment on its own circulation. Not unlike the rumor that “Jefe de Jefes” is actually addressed to Los Tucanes de Tijuana, “Los Tres de Zacatecas” bends itself into an almost complete circle of reflexivity, in which the only thing really at stake is the communication itself: where it is born, what boundaries it transgresses, and how far it might travel. The three hundred kilos are a literary pretext to sketch out the relations of power that restrict and give impetus to that circulation— the complex chronotope in which the hearsay public takes shape.

*** 22. Attempts to censor narcocorridos have mostly consisted of agreements between local governments and radio stations; efforts to legislate censorship have been ongoing since 2001, though the first dates to 1987 (Astorga 2005).

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According to Cathy Ragland (2009), drug trafficking and migration to the United States developed apace as the two major themes of corridos over the last few decades; she relates their thematic evolution to the development of the border. But while the migrant may be understood as a minor trafficker of sorts, smuggling his or her labor across the border, the importance of the trafficker in corridos should not be reduced to the audience’s identification with him as an exaggerated version of the migrant’s more modest engagement with illegality.23 Instead, trafficker and migrant represent two poles of a tense but complementary relation, internal to the corrido’s regime of circulation, between a hidden power of patronage and a public of hearsay. Different corridos handle this tension differently and lean more one way or the other. But even in “La Imagen de Malverde”— a song that wears its patronage logic on its sleeve— the power of the hearsay public remains fundamental. It is not distinguishable, in the end, from Malverde’s own. Calling on Malverde for a miracle and thus opening a shrine to him (a rent in time and space through which the saint is made present), the trafficker deliberately dislocates himself before the shrine of state authority. If he escapes the state, however, he does so by entering the space-time of the hearsay public itself: the miraculous, transnational space-time in which “here” can be “already” someplace else. Thus the supersession of state authority that the song glorifies is not reducible to the criminality of trafficking; rather, lawlessness here is made possible by the very chronotopic structure of the hearsay public. Its contraband is smuggled daily— not across the border, but in the heart of two national societies that censor its truth. “Los Tres de Zacatecas” postulates its listening public as a pueblo of “illegals,” but less because it includes traffickers and “illegal aliens” than because its communications transgress the boundaries set up by a system of power that would isolate and exclude the pueblo. Unable to extricate themselves from this system, corridos totter between praise of the patron and an augmented reflexivity that would reduce the trafficker to a literary pretext, nothing more than a topic of interest and a moment in the public’s self-constitution. Sometimes, corridos augment the patron’s fetish power; sometimes, they wrest it from him for the pueblo. Illegality here becomes an effect of marginality. It may be countered— turned into a veritable source of social authority— by the system of overhearing, the massive circulation of repetition in which the pueblo takes shape in its criticism of the state, its subversion of power, or, simply, the legitimacy of 23. Herlinghaus, for instance, argues that the narcocorrido helps people “act out a fantasy” (2009:55). Though his field study is limited, Edberg (2004) explores ethnographically the attraction the figure of the trafficker exerts.

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its own claims to the truth of its self-representation. Illegality is the effect of the prohibition of passage in multiple senses and spaces, where the border imposes it on the marginalized not just as individual subjects, as actual or potential “illegal aliens,” but as a collectivity and as a public. In this sense the border is at the root of the pueblo— not as a ritual passage consolidating membership but as the literalization of a limit imposed by power on what can be said.

8

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My law [ . . . ] is the text of the other. jacques derrida, Acts of Literature

When I asked Mrs. E how she came to Tijuana, she took the question literally, and began with her bus ride.1 On the bus ride, and on arrival in Tijuana, she was solicited by coyotes. Coyotes ferry the undocumented across the border; in the sense that they smuggle not the migrants themselves, but their labor, they too are traffickers. Mrs. E’s narrative soon transformed into an invective against coyotes and all the horrible things they do, luring folks out into the desert only to rob, rape, and kill them. Her remarks were general, and the sources of her knowledge equally general. As she put it, “Todo el tiempo oyes lo mismo, lo mismo” (All the time you hear the same thing, the same thing). Earlier, to justify having assumed the role of expert regarding coyotes, she said, “Porque yo al cabo del tiempo yo ya, he aprendido mucho de aquí” (Because I, with time, I have by now learned much of [this place] here)—“here” being, of course, Tijuana itself. Her authority, her right to speak and to represent the city, lies in her participation in Tijuana’s system of repetitions, coming to know Tijuana by hearing “all the time the same thing, the same thing.” This chapter will explore Mrs. E’s take on Tijuana’s hearsay public— a take that, through the problem of migration and the border, pushes its ethics to an existential extreme, to address questions of death, otherness, and the limits of meaning. As with Inés in chapter 2, Mrs. E and I spoke over her dinner table. But Mrs. E’s home lacks the niceties of Inés’s: the walls are old plywood, the floor bare cement. Not much light comes in here, for theft is common in the colonias, and the fewer windows to secure the better. Like Inés, though, Mrs. E defends her place in the city by proposing a particular vision of it, by making an argument for Tijuana as 1. The interview took place in 2003. For the full transcript, see Yeh (2009).

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a place in which she can find herself, speak as part of a larger collectivity, and make narrative sense of her past. Her first step in this project is to evoke Tijuana as a public of hearsay— the “here” where one hears “all the time the same thing.” In effect, she replaces the story of how she came to Tijuana with the demonstration of her participation in Tijuana’s hearsay public, by making the interview a re-instantiation of se dice (it is said). Mrs. E’s tragedy as well as her strength, though, is that the story of her life, made part of the hearsay public, cannot be made to make sense.

The Coyote In the following anecdote, Mrs. E provided detailed proof of her legitimacy as a speaker and her real participation in Tijuana’s face-to-face circulation of discourse. In a pattern that should by now be familiar, her use of the hearsay public to frame her personal story of migration depends on a theory of movement in public space, the chance encounter it produces, and what may be overheard through that. I tell you because I . . . the other time, uh, on the bus a lady was coming along crying. and I say to her, uh . . . “what’s the matter, lady, why are you crying?” she says, “ay,” she says, “would that you would see that I’m going to . . . I went to, to recognize2 my daughter.” I say to her, “what for, did she graduate, or what?” “no,” she says, “see . . . uh, there at the DIF.3 uh, she wanted to pass to the other side. and, since I live on the other side, I sent for her. I paid the . . . coyote. to pass her over. but that one that passed her raped her and killed her.” and her daughter had already been lost for like a month, two months, she arrived neither there, nor here did she return. so then she was going around looking for her in all the . . . the morgue. and she went to identify her [recognize her] finally here at the morgue of the DIF. there she had already been lying for who knows how many months, dead.4 2. Reconocer, besides to recognize, means also to identify or acknowledge, as one publicly acknowledges the recipient of a prize. 3. Mexico’s social program agencies are known by the acronym for Integrated Family Development (DIF) at all administrative levels. 4. “Te digo porque yo . . . la otra vez, este, en el camión una señora venía llorando. y le digo yo este . . . ‘¿qué tiene usted señora, porqué llora?’ dice, ‘ay’, dice, ‘viera que yo voy a . . . fui a conoc— a reconocer a mi hija’. le digo ‘¿de qué, se graduó, o qué?’ ‘no’, dice, ‘fíjese que . . . este ahí en el DIF. este, quiso pasar al otro lado. y como yo vivo al otro lado, la mandé a traer. les pagué al . . . pollero. para que la pasara. pero

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As I repeat this story, you hear through it to the encounter between Mrs. E and me, and through that to the one between Mrs. E and the distraught mother on the bus. Beyond that can be heard the meeting in the morgue between mother and murdered daughter, and beyond that the originary encounter, out in the desert, between the daughter and the coyote. In each encounter, an absent party mediates between “I” and “you,” most powerfully in the encounter between mother and daughter. Between them, the coyote interposed himself as the very personification of agency, wreaking the ultimate transformation of death. The daughter appeared neither here nor there; she was lost for “who knows how many months.” If deictics situate the spatiotemporal world around the speaker as subject, the daughter was utterly unsituable, simply not a subject any more, nor in relation to anything in this world. Death appears as this unsituability. When the mother finally finds her daughter, she can only recognize her as completely other. At this point, in voicing the woman on the bus, Mrs. E makes a revealing slip— instead of reconocer, “I went to identify her,” she begins to say conocer, “I went to meet her [for the first time].” It is as if mother and daughter had been made strangers. Indeed, the mother did go to meet her daughter for the first time, as dead. She finds no more “you” to be addressed, nor to call her “you” in turn; between herself and her daughter no “we” can be had. The mother’s “I” will be haunted, not by the daughter, but by the coyote. His spectral figure runs through the entire chain of overhearings to infect the lone “I” Mrs. E leaves hanging over her anecdote: “I tell you because I . . .” Quite literally, Mrs. E interrupts the articulation of “I,” which might anchor her authority in speaking, to replace it with the repetition of what has come to her from elsewhere.5 The “elsewhere” from which it comes, though, is not just another woman on the bus. The bereaved mother is a channel through which Mrs. E can hear the coyote’s negative agency and the death he brings. He reveals an unproductive power, alien to social institutions; he reveals that the chain of patronage (for he is a patron and a middleman, granting access to realms beyond one’s reach), of one fetishized source of authority behind another, may run not to some reified ese que la pasó la violó y la mató’. y su hija ya tenía como un mes, dos meses perdida, no llegó ni allá, ni acá regresó. ’tonces la anduvo buscando en todo las . . . la forense. y la fue a reconocer hasta aquí la forense del DIF. ahí ya tenía quién sabe cuántos meses . . . muerta.” 5. Recall how, in chapter 2 and at a similar point in her narrative, Inés did just the opposite. Refusing to repeat hearsay, she settled her “I” down into the surety of me consta (I vouch for it).

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State or God, but to nothingness. This is the fearsome possibility to which Mrs. E submits her narrative. Her “I” is the hollowed-out “I” that middleclass Tijuana does its best to suppress. The chain of encounters that leads to the coyote is also the chain of interdiscursive links through which Tijuana’s hearsay public takes shape. Death runs through this chain. For this public, “I” cannot recuperate agency from the third person and so remains divorced from “you” and incapable of forming a “we.” The third person has absolute effects on the relation between “you” and “I,” at the same time that the circulation of those effects in public is problematized by their unknowability (compare the song “Boletín de Prensa” in chapter 7). In the case of the mother on the bus, though, what is unknowable is death itself, and the death of “you” is perhaps the most radical distortion communication can undergo. Urban (2001) describes the modern “we” as a conglomeration of agentive “I”s, but in Mrs. E’s Tijuana, that kind of agency, and the kind of collectivity that depends on it, are unimaginable. Rather, Tijuana’s hearsay public arises out of a moment of loss. The stories through which the public takes shape as a social space cohere around the figure of the trafficker, of the border, of Tijuana as something that represents that loss. They are the third person that appears at the moment of loss and substitutes for it. The third person impels discourse by indicating an originary moment in which there is something that cannot be told: the daughter’s death as her own experience, the depth of the mother’s loss as personal. Insofar as interest in the story is motivated by an interest in Tijuana, the mother’s loss in itself, as an individual experience, is beyond the story’s scope or capacity to comprehend. The loss only becomes interesting when it becomes recognizable as a tijuanense loss, when it is appropriable by the public. Loss here is very much part of the idea of the pueblo as socioeconomically marginal, as in need of defense. The value of the characters involved (mother, daughter, coyote) is as typifications. And yet, it is the actual death that motivates all subsequent telling, not simply as an event the story narrates and that thus makes possible the circulation of common knowledge, but as the element in the story that demands telling. The fact of death remains, in all its immediacy, the displaced aim of the story; the discourse of the public indicates something that remains outside discourse. In Mrs. E’s Tijuana, stranger sociability arises not just from the point at which familial relations are broken but, more particularly, from the point of confrontation with death. The third person indicates a loss or lack it cannot fully signify and gets from that loss its power to compel discourse, to erupt forcefully between “I” and “you,” and to refuse subordination to the speaking subject. Rumor may not provide an epistemological basis for identity, but it

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does not for that reason fail to be political. The destabilization of identity that haunts the hearsay public takes place through a historical event, the killing of the girl by the coyote, an event that is not unique but a condition of life on the border. Under such conditions, rumor may be the only way to hold collective subjectivity in the presence of its own impossibility. The State, US or Mexican, is not at issue in Mrs. E’s anecdote— instead, what is at issue is the possibility of we-ness in the face of death, that is, in the face of a point at which identification is impossible. We may observe that the story she tells is about unauthorized border crossing and that the story of her own bus ride north to Tijuana blends national and international migration. Though Mrs. E has never been to the United States, she seems to say, she well might have. But this is the same as saying she might well be dead. In this conflation, the question of states and of illegality disappears. Rather, “illegality,” being undocumented, becomes a way of speaking about proximity to death. This is not to say that illegality loses its political content but that it exceeds it. The difference between Mrs. E, solicited by coyotes, and the dead girl in the morgue collapses. The difference between crossing and not crossing collapses. Mrs. E knows she is not dead, and she cannot believe it. The stranger she encounters on the street tells her a story she not only already knows, but already knows as her own. In effect, Mrs. E is trying to find a way of saying, “I am dead.” This is what she hears in Tijuana, “all the time, all the time,” and it is a motivation underlying her repeating her story to me. The chain of encounters and repetitions at once obscures and propagates the singular confrontation with death. The most evident displacement is the absence of the mother from the scene of her daughter’s death: she can only witness it secondhand, as it were, in confrontation with the dead body, death’s material remainder or effect. In Mexico, the dead are often believed to linger in their bodies, but miraculous stories confirming this belief underline the corpse’s more usual reticence in serving as a medium of communication.7 In the corpse, the mother must recognize that her daughter’s death is not her own and she cannot share it— though it is this not-sharing she is compelled to share with Mrs. E, and Mrs. E with 6

6. Rafael writes, “Unlike the rhetoric of nationalism [ . . . ] rumor cannot serve as the basis for consolidating social identities to the extent that it does not allow for an accounting of the epistemological and ethical basis for identification. Put another way, rumor and gossip give rise to the prospect of a politics divorced from identity” (1997:281). 7. For example, Macarena Flores Villeda describes hospital workers talking and singing to corpses to reassure the dead, and the physical relaxation they sometimes achieve (personal communication).

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me. The telling of the story becomes a movement around this power of death to make other.

Death as Limit Tijuana’s clase media feeds on stereotypes of the frontier as a space of social and economic possibility, but possibility is only the flipside of catastrophe. Both danger and possibility are general traits of liminal spaces, and the borderlands as a space of death is an old cliché in Mexico as much as in the United States. From colonial violence to the deaths that mark the border today— of migrants in the desert, of women in Ciudad Juárez, of the victims of organized crime and of the state— death and the border have a long and well-worn association. Even as the hearsay public takes up the trope, though, the relation it posits between the border and death is far more exact and profound than these widely circulating figurations might suggest. Maurice Blanchot provides an entry to the problem of death for the hearsay public. Writing of the novels of Flaubert and Kafka, he describes an alteration in the personal voice whereby it becomes “spectral, ghostlike” (1999b:459). This happens when the voice confronts the impossibility of referring, for instance, to death, for the word is always articulated from the perspective of life. In the effort to speak of what lies beyond life, meaning and language, the voice “tends to absent itself in its bearer and also to efface him as center” (467). When this happens, the “other” begins to speak through the narration— except that “when the other speaks, no one is speaking” (466). For Blanchot, direct reference to this central absence would automatically destroy the alterity of its nonmeaning. It must manifest by means subtler than, say, symbolism. Yet the absence at the center of the hearsay public does take symbolic form: “The border as a nest of traffickers,” for instance. When the hearsay public speaks, an unlocatable “other” speaks. Emergently, something unspeakably other makes itself felt. The cliché of the border as a space of death makes possible the circulation of essentially unshareable individual experiences of death’s alterity. “The border,” too, indicates a limit of meaning (for on the other side of it is death); it too involves an alteration of the personal voice: principally but not exclusively, the dropping out of “I” and its replacement by “they.” The voice of the third person witnesses the “other” as the center of narration even as the narration holds it absent, on the other side of a line that discourse and language maintain as not quite crossable. Mrs. E articulates this impossible witness with all the urgency that death in the literal sense can lend, but the extremity of the story she

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tells highlights the emergency within a situation that can be quite banal. When Wilma, a visa holder of scarce socioeconomic resources, ventures into the United States, she usually stays close and, she says, only where “my friends invite me.” That is, she does not set foot on the other side without a patron. Her bus trip to central California to see her brother was for her a fearsome experience. When I remarked that a safe trip should involve nothing more than getting off at the right stop, she ignored me and merely reiterated her fear: “Me pierdo y entonces sí” (I’ll get lost and that’ll be it). With her cryptic entonces sí, Wilma evokes the worst, the unspeakable, something as bad, perhaps, as what befell the young woman Mrs. E heard about on a much more routine bus ride within Tijuana city limits.8 Without naming a thing, she evokes not death itself but an unspecifiable negativity that might even surpass it. As Blanchot notes, “Death was only a metaphor to help us crudely represent the idea of a limit to ourselves, while the limit excludes any representation, any ‘idea’ of the limit” (1992:52). In representing itself as a “they” no longer potentially inhabitable as “I” or “you,” but permanently “dead,” permanently retreated from deictic locatability and secure reference, the hearsay public in Tijuana continually laps against this limit that ever escapes naming. In the story of the woman on the bus, the coyote presides over this limit. He stands as a placeholder for nothingness. No one can vouch for the dead, though this is what the mother on the bus had to do, and it is what Mrs. E tries to do in turn, bearing witness to a death she cannot reach. As chapter 4 intimated, the hearsay public confronts an ethical problem of survival: of having come close to the limit without having been annulled by it. The third person responds to this problem with a degree of responsibility that the first person could never muster: to bear witness, finally, means letting the unassimilable death of another hollow out one’s “I.” The effort to bear witness sets in motion the passing on of the story as an impossible striving toward an originary loss (which however unique and historical, is of course never really originary). For Blanchot, this movement is one of wandering and exile, and it moves back toward the source only by moving out and away from it (1992:33). His analysis is consonant with Cathy Caruth’s (1996) take on trauma’s repetition compulsion: the impossibility of being present to one’s own trauma as such does not ultimately isolate but draws one into relations with others through the trading of narra8. By typing travel as dangerous for a lone woman in particular, Mrs. E and Wilma mark public space as male and private space as female (see Gal 2002). They also align this division with the split between the United States and Mexico. Yet Mrs. E at least positions herself squarely within the hearsay public.

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tives. Something very similar happens with Mrs. E. For if she repeats the story of the woman on the bus, it is because she too has, impossibly, survived a death she must bear witness to. The story of the mother is actually her own, returning to her across a distance that cannot be surpassed. 9

The Stone Mrs. E is like the mother whose daughter has been murdered not only by virtue of being her peer, another woman on the bus and another member of the general public of Tijuana’s streets (note that public transportation is strongly marked as working-class, as of the pueblo), but because Mrs. E has also lost a child. The bulk of our interview, ostensibly dedicated to the question, “How did you come to Tijuana?” actually focused on what Mrs. E called her “martyrdom,” culminating in the death of her baby son. Though this entire drama took place in southern Mexico, six years before Mrs. E’s migration to Tijuana, it did not actually constitute a change of topic. For Mrs. E, the meaning of Tijuana and her migration can only be explained in light of her experience of her baby’s death, for Tijuana represents for her a return of sorts. If in Tijuana she encounters the traces of that which lies beyond the limit of meaning and if through these traces she approaches that limit, the death and otherness she hears here “all the time” is not new to her. It is a repetition of an originary otherness she first encountered in the South. In Mrs. E’s narrative, two major voyages departing from Mexico City stand out against each other: the one south, on which the baby died, and the one north to Tijuana. The second voyage is in the opposite direction from the first and, it was hoped, would be of opposite value in Mrs. E’s life. As she put it, “Vine a rehacer mi vida bien, cuando yo me vine p’acá” (I came to redo my life right, when I came here). Like the mother of the murdered girl, Mrs. E came to Tijuana to look, in some sense, for her son. A striking repetition makes clear that in Tijuana Mrs. E confronts again her baby’s death. Speaking of the practical difficulties of adjusting to Tijuana, a desert city without water and, moreover, a new life without the conveniences she had been used to in Mexico City, she said, “No me podía yo acostumbrar” (I couldn’t accustom myself ). This phrase became the turning point at which Mrs. E began talking about the death of her baby. Moments later, she described how she felt on arriving in Tijuana: “Pero sí, yo me sentía . . . sola, una por la pérdida de mi niño que yo no quería . . . cómo te diré . . . no, no me podía yo acostumbrar a . . . a per9. I bring trauma to bear not to posit Mrs. E as a traumatized subject but to illuminate the aporetic structure animating the hearsay public.

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derlo, que lo perdí” (I felt . . . alone, firstly because of the loss of my boy that I didn’t want . . . how shall I tell you . . . I couldn’t accustom myself to . . . to losing him, that I lost him [my emphasis]). Her inability to get used to Tijuana is itself her inability to get used to the death of her son. In the story of the murdered daughter, the coyote brings death to interpose himself between “you” and “I.” In Mrs. E’s larger narrative, however, a different figure appears as the seat of agency, the “other” to whose demands narrative must respond. What Mrs. E gets used to in Tijuana, what she confronts there, is this original “other,” which remains mysterious in a way the coyote does not. The root cause of what she calls her “martyrdom” Mrs. E tells thus: when I . . . got pregnant by him, I fell down on my way to his homeland there,10 and a stone buried itself in me [se me clavó; literally, it nailed itself into me] over here, it made a hole here [she indicates her knee]. I was four months pregnant when I fell down. “Well, nothing happened to me”— everything happened.11

There is no medical connection between this fall and Mrs. E’s subsequent trials. Because of the baby’s size, she had to have a cesarean, which became infected. The baby was, however, quite healthy. Its death from disease several months later was not related to either the botched cesarean or the fall, except by Mrs. E’s narrative, in which all three events are linked together as the story of her “martyrdom.” It would probably not be wrong to say that Mrs. E blames her husband for her suffering and for the death of her child: she falls on the stone on the way to his hometown, and her tone in reference to him is often recriminating: for example, when he leaves her alone after the baby dies in order to find work. She says elsewhere that “de en ese momento fue un sufrimiento que no tienes idea, desde en el momento que yo salí embarazada” (from that moment on it was a suffering you can’t imagine, from the moment I got pregnant). Mrs. E’s husband is indeed the fundamental other in her life, and it is appropriate that this third person, who reappears throughout her narrative and dominates much of her life, has also been literally absent for a substantial part of it. But the kind of blame she wants to lay on him arises 10. Mrs. E and her husband are from small towns in Oaxaca several hours apart, though they met and made their life in Mexico City. The baby died in 1981, and Mrs. E moved to Tijuana in 1987. 11. “Cuando yo . . . salí embarazada de él, yo me caí yendo allá a su tierra de él y se me clavó una piedra por aquí, hizo un hoyo acá. tenía yo cuatro meses de embarazo que me caí. ‘bueno no me pasó nada’, pasó todo.”

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from an impossible situation, since it seems to come not from anything he did but simply from being her husband. From procreation comes death. In the narrative, the stone takes the place of this conundrum. Its role is parallel to that of the coyote: it is the source of death and misfortune, whose effects are unpredictable and absolute. Mrs. E does not use the word martyrdom casually. The wound made by the stone is the first of a collection of stigmata inflicted over the course of her suffering— scars on her lower arms, her feet, and her upper abdomen. At the climactic moment when she is operated on after the incision for her cesarean becomes infected, Mrs. E said that the nurses laid her out “like Holy Christ,” and she spread her arms out demonstratively. Even without this explicit comparison, the scene is clearly typed on the Crucifixion. Rushed to the hospital, delirious, she was received by the nurses, who threw her down, hurt her, took her blood, stuck her full of IV needles (these are the scars on her arms and feet that she still bears), and laid her out in the shape of the cross. When the doctor came, he slit the stitches of the rotting cesarean with a razor, and pus and blood leapt from the wound and splattered on him. The stone that buried itself in Mrs. E recalls healing and witchcraft practices common in southern Mexico, but her use of Catholic references and Biblical plots allows comparison of her fall during her pregnancy, which caused all her suffering, to the fall that Paul took, which caused his conversion. The crucial difference is that, while Paul recognized the voice of God and responded to it, Mrs. E recognized nothing. But the comparison to Paul is not necessary to see the absolute nature of what she failed to recognize in the stone. When she says, “‘Well, nothing happened to me’— everything happened,” she repeats her own words to herself at the time from her stance now, knowing and having suffered all the effects of the stone’s “nailing itself ” into her. But this brief sentence is the only indication she gives of relation between the stone and her suffering, besides the place of the anecdote at the beginning of the martyrdom story. The contrast between “nothing happened to me” and “everything happened” may be absolute, but, in terms of interpreting the accident, the source of “everything” exceeds signification just as much as the source of “nothing” fails to enter signification. The stone remains outside any capacity of Mrs. E’s to give it meaning. What she recognizes in retrospect is that in the stone was something inexplicable, a power that bore no relation to appearances and that, from beyond the limit of meaning as given by Mrs. E’s life, nonetheless exerted a horrific and absolute power over it. By not saying anything about the stone except that it made a hole in her and then “everything happened,” Mrs. E avoids Blanchot’s conundrum. She does not need to speak of the limit of meaning or life in order to indicate

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something beyond it, the effects of which she has felt materially, in her body bursting with pus and rot, as she underwent a crucifixion that, despite its pain, did not redeem her.

Migration to the Underworld Mrs. E’s narrative is full of Christian emplotments, some explicit, some implicit: the Crucifixion scene; her arrival in Tijuana, typed on the temptation of Christ, with Mrs. E in the main role and a coyote as the devil; the fall on the road, in which echoes may be read of Paul’s conversion; or the unspoken comparison of Mrs. E to Mary in her son’s death. Yet this plethora of religious emplotments fails to make sense of Mrs. E’s life— it only points up the incomprehensibility of her suffering. As she says, “No sé por qué sería mi suerte, por qué sufrí así” (I don’t know why it should be my luck, why I suffered so). Her vision while she was being operated on is especially clear. High on oxygen, she saw herself floating up through fields of beautiful flowers to a large gate where a bearded old man energetically chased her off, shouting, “Go away! I don’t want you here!” and shaking his stick at her. St. Peter had no gentle, “It’s not your time yet” for Mrs. E; she will not be welcome later either. Instead of giving her suffering meaning as an expiation of sin, Mrs. E uses the interview to perform the failure of Christian narrative to place her life in a greater scheme of things, to bring her into relation with God, or even the devil. In pilgrimage, the subject moves toward a holy center, a place that anchors God to this world and that, through the subject’s spatial approximation to it, orders the universe around the subject’s confrontation with God. In migrating to Tijuana, Mrs. E accomplished the inverse. In effect, she moved back toward the stone. But she achieves by this no ordering, no anchoring of her subjectivity. Instead, migration merely compounds a lack that constitutes Mrs. E’s life from outside any scheme of meaning. Mrs. E states that when she came to Tijuana to “redo her life,” it was because in Mexico City she would compulsively imagine her baby boy, something she described as unbearable. In effect, she was haunted. The image that tortured her by its constant presence arose from a lack. Mrs. E desired something that would fill that lack and make the “ghost” go away. She desired to replace the dead baby at the same time that she felt the baby was irreplaceable. That there was something impossible in this desire is evidenced in her relationship with her daughter, born some years after the move to Tijuana. but . . . yes . . . when she was born, when I saw her, I . . . I swear to you that I cried. because . . . I remember my boy, and yes, I still remember

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him because I say [to myself ], “my son would be so many years old. my son . . . what would he be like now.” that is, yes, I have memories of him and . . . in my heart . . . I don’t know, I . . . I sometimes say, “what if I had, why didn’t my son grow up, why didn’t I stay in Mexico City, I shouldn’t have gone off to,” I mean, sometimes I do remember. and sometimes [clears throat] I do . . . I do feel like crying, but [I say to myself?], “I’m not gonna cry, I’m not gonna get sad because . . . I have my daughter.” and like so, little by little . . . but forget forget no. I can’t. because . . . well, it was my first child and . . . and well, I don’t know, I . . . to what point must I forget. I can’t, can’t, can’t think to what point. if I say to myself, “no, I’m not gonna remember him anymore. I’m not gonna remember him anymore.” and I, all by myself, am going around just thinking like that and then she says to me, “Mommy, if I had my little brother he’d be big by now.” I say to her, “yes, my daughter, but God took him from us and what can we do.”12

When she looked at her daughter for the first time, she saw that the new baby was not a resurrection of the first. At the same time that this new baby appeared irrefutably in the place of the first (“I’m not gonna get sad, because I have my daughter”), she did not substitute for the dead baby. When Mrs. E looks at her daughter, she remembers her son. Even when she decides to forget, her daughter reminds her. When she interrupts her mother’s reverie, it is as if to say, “I am not him, and you cannot forget him because of me.” As with the woman whose daughter was murdered, an absent third person disrupts the relation between “I” and “you.” Mrs. E is ultimately haunted not by her son but by the stone. Her response to her daughter, however much a platitude, is perfectly apropos: it is not the dead baby that comes between us, but God, the ultimate absence represented also by the stone on the road. 12. “Pero . . . sí . . . ya cuando ya nació, ya la ví, yo . . . te juro que sí lloré. porque . . . yo me acuerdo de mi niño y sí, todavía me acuerdo de él porque digo, ‘m’hijo tuviera tantos años. m’hijo . . . cómo fuera ahorita’. o sea, sí, tengo recuerdos de él y . . . y en mi corazón . . . no sé, yo . . . yo a veces digo ‘hubiera yo, por qué no crecería mi hijo, por qué no me (hub?) quedé mejor en México, no me hubiera ido pa—’, o sea, a veces sí recuerdo. y a veces sí . . . sí me dan ganas de llorar, pero, (me digo?) ‘no me voy a llorar, no me voy a poner triste porque . . . tengo a m’hija’. y así poco a poco . . . pero olvidar olvidar no. no puedo. porque . . . pos, era mi primer niño y . . . y pues no sé, yo . . . hasta dónde . . . debo de olvidar. no, no, no puedo yo pensar hasta dónde. si me digo ‘no ya no me voy acordar d’él. ya no me voy acordar d’él’. y yo solita me ando así pensando nomás y luego ella me dice, ‘mami, tuviera yo mi hermanito ya ’tuviera grande’. le digo ‘sí m’hija pero Dios nos lo quitó y, qué vamos hacer’.”

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One of the most famous dreams analyzed by Freud is that of the father who, having fallen asleep while watching over the body of his dead son, sees the child approach him to say (reproachfully), “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” He awakes with a start to find that, indeed, a candle has fallen and his child’s wraps have caught flame. Working through Jacques Lacan’s reinterpretation of this dream, Caruth notes that not only does it repeat his inability to save his son from the fever that consumed him in reality, but also that the father’s own life is now forever “bound up with the address of a dead child” (1996:102). The urgency of the awakening to which the child calls the father is that of an ethical responsibility— not to recuperate the past but to face the present more fully. In Lacan’s words, the child’s sentence “is itself a fire- brand— of itself it brings fire where it falls” (1977:59). It is this address that Mrs. E receives from her daughter: not just a reminder of her dead son but an insistence that, in the living child, the same ethical command she faced and missed in her son is burning still. In Mrs. E’s case, however, there is no dream from which to awaken and go on living, as Caruth claims the dream child’s words urge the father to do. No matter how much of a model parent she may try to be (and she does, feeding her daughter, doing homework with her, defending her against other children— not just doted on as an only child, but as one whom death has preceded), Mrs. E seems to have found no way for such ethical survival. Her case contrasts sharply with trauma in the classic sense, for there repetition is always a surprise and the subject does not consciously dwell on the past. Instead, Mrs. E’s entire life has become an effort to face the ethical fire of otherness, missed in her son as in the stone by the wayside. It would be better if she could dream, for her life in this sense is a nightmare. Tijuana is her nightmare; it confronts her at every turn with this vanishing object of desire, this command she can neither face nor awaken from. In Mrs. E, what Caruth calls the “enigma of survival” (1996:58) takes full-blown form, and it does so in relation to Tijuana as to her daughter. For if every time she looks at her daughter she loses her son again, a new baby is also part of what she sought in coming to Tijuana to “redo” her life. The entire idea that life can be “redone” should by now appear deeply problematic. The depth of the problem is that the aim of Mrs. E’s desire, which motivates her migration, her procreation of a second child, and her narration of this whole history to me, remains a confrontation with the “other” beyond the limit of meaning. Though the stone represents something beyond the limit of meaning, it still has a place within the narrative. Negativity (otherness, death) has a particular place of appearance. It appears first in the South, by the side of the road, on the way to Mrs. E’s husband’s tierra (native land)— precisely

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no place in particular. Travel is typed as dangerous. The baby contracted his fatal disease on a trip south from Mexico City, and Mrs. E’s mother made quite clear that she considered all this moving about the source of death: “Mira, hija de la chingada, tu hi—, tu hijo se te murió por andar de ahí p’acá como judió errante y no te estuviste en un lado” (Look here, hija de la chingada [daughter of the fucked one; a common curse], your son died on you for going around from there to here like a wandering Jew and you wouldn’t stay in one place).13 Tijuana itself has often been portrayed as a “non-place” (Augé 1995), where people go simply to cross the border. It is thus not by chance that Tijuana should be the place where Mrs. E would seek to confront otherness and death. Her use of the city in her narrative and in her life exploits the old stereotype of Tijuana as a ciudad de paso (a city of passing), which the clase media seeks so desperately to refute. At the same time, it repeats and reinforces the clase media’s declarations that the poor are migrants, that they have no place here, that they never put down roots. The place of appearance of the stone is the wayside as the site of miracles, of exchange with supernatural powers, of the unexpected chance that could transform a life. It is the site of accidents as well as encounters. Tijuana’s street (where one day there may be a shooting and the next someone may give you a four-wheel drive) generalizes the potentiality concentrated in stone and shrine. But unlike the shrine, the miracle of the stone is extraordinary enough, its power holy enough, to scarcely bear naming: “Everything happened.” Even recognized, it remains unrecognizable. Mrs. E bears a token of her encounter with the stone, a token that ties her to the side of the road back in Oaxaca. It is not a scapulary worn about her neck; it is the scar on her knee. She came to Tijuana to set things right, but this way she only set things permanently wrong, in the very midst of family restored, her relationship with her husband renewed, a daughter finally born. The stone and its scar, its living image, dislocate her permanently, as she wanders about the house thinking or as she wanders on the street, hearing of others’ disasters. With her stone and her scar and her daily passage on Tijuana’s streets, Mrs. E sketches the city as a chronotopic world of dislocation that enables Mrs. E to dwell in a nonplace and a nonbeing that brings her that much closer to the stone and all the unspeakable power that lies behind it.14 13. Recall the mothers encountered in chapter 7 who stayed in place. 14. Recall, from chapter 7, the momentary dislocation before state authority that the young trafficker undergoes thanks to Malverde, as he kisses the saint’s image. Mrs. E dwells in this dislocation without respite.

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*** Mrs. E is not the only woman I have met who explained her migration to Tijuana as, quite literally, an attempt to escape the compulsive mistaking of a stranger in Mexico City’s public space for a dead family member. A stereotype of Tijuana is that it is short on ghosts in the conventional sense, whereas southern Mexico, and especially the rural South, is frequently described as saturated with them. The mistaking of a stranger for a dead person, an event that in Mrs. E’s story is proper to Mexico City, is a kind of haunting not named as such; it already represents a transformation. Stranger sociality is shot through by the shock of reencounter with one’s own dead. The fact that one would think of escaping the ghost by moving physically might suggest that the ghost, tied to its place, could be left behind. Instead, Mrs. E’s narrative implies that the ghost is simply substituted. What replaces the ghost is Tijuana’s hearsay public, with its narrative approximation to otherness through the stories of one’s peers. Tijuana is not a way of escaping the ghost; it is a way of remaining haunted, albeit in what one hopes to be a more bearable form.15 In her recollection of how she felt immediately after the baby died, Mrs. E gave a succinct description of what she desired and, I argue, sought in coming to Tijuana: yo no pensaba, no, no, yo lloraba, yo quería agarrar el vicio, yo quería fumar, yo quería tomar, yo no sé, yo quería ponerme loca. [ . . . ] yo a escondidas, quería yo en un cerro así quería yo irme lejos, sin, donde nadie me conociera, donde nadie supiera quién era yo.

I didn’t think, no, no, I cried, I wanted to take up vice, I wanted to smoke, I wanted to drink, I don’t know, I wanted to go crazy.16 I, secretly, I wanted on a hill like so; I wanted to go far away, without, where no one would know me, where no one would know who I was.

15. Tijuana and the border at once stand outside of and compound the history that has converted death into a national “totem” (Lomnitz 2005a). 16. Mrs. E does not refer here to permanent madness but to a temporary state. Ponerse loco is slang for using drugs, which would work well in the series Mrs. E has been building. It is also widely recognized that ponerse loco in this sense can lead to one’s permanently losing one’s mind.

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She desired two things in apposition: to go crazy and to go far away. The two are equivalent. In the hills, in madness, she would not only lose her identity but also all ability to say “I.” The desire to annul “I” begins in a death that has thrown her into an “I” without interlocutor and without any object of desire except its own extinction. This is the repeated “I” of “I wanted . . . I wanted . . . I wanted”— accentuated because it is not necessary in Spanish to articulate it as a separate word— and it is the “I” she left hanging over the story of the woman on the bus whose daughter had been murdered: “I tell you because I . . .” The “I” that Mrs. E clings to in this passage is a rhythmic marker regulating a reenactment of her original impulse to madness. Each phrase gains in speed and volume to the climax—“yo no sé”— each syllable marked and independent, three beats, to fall away in the last phrase, “Yo quería ponerme loca.” This momentum that plays itself out is a momentum gained by the “I” in its desiring, in its movement toward madness and exhausted collapse at madness’s unattainability. It is the momentum of an “I” attempting to establish itself not dialogically but in itself, which can only mean, in its own death, otherness, or madness. Again, the excerpt expresses a desire that cannot properly be said because it indicates the limit of meaning and of the speaking self in madness. In the Greek myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice. His music wins him admittance and the promise he can bring her back to life— but only if, on the voyage, he refrains from looking at her. Again, Blanchot’s reading of this myth resonates with Mrs. E’s situation. When Orpheus sings himself down to Eurydice, Blanchot writes, he “wants to see her [ . . . ] not as the intimacy of a familiar life, but as the strangeness of that which excludes all intimacy; [ . . . ] [he] does not want to make her live, but to have the fullness of her death living in her” (1999a:438). This impulse, according to Blanchot, is madness. Just so, in her son, Mrs. E (madly) desires death itself. But she is not heroic. She does not look and lose herself all at once. She just looks at her daughter and walks around the house wondering to what point she must forget. But if Tijuana lets Mrs. E dwell, even if only to a certain extent, in an otherness or death that she first encountered in the stone by the wayside, it does so through her narrative, which weaves places and trajectories together and gives them value. As Blanchot writes, “It is in his song that Orpheus really descends to the underworld” (1999b:461). Tijuana was the faraway place where Mrs. E could lose herself, where no one would know who she was. Her only other reference to “hills” is to the hills of el otro lado (the other side, the United States) where coyotes rape and dump their victims. What Mrs. E desires in “the hills” is what she was unable to recognize in the stone. In the hills, she imagines, she

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would come face to face with something outside language, subjectivity, and social relations. In Tijuana, Mrs. E returns to the nonplace where her misfortune began. She does so, however, not in her physical voyage to Tijuana in 1987, but through her narrative. It is in her narrative that the hills echo the road on which the stone lay, and it is by means of her narrative that Tijuana is refigured as the place of confrontation with a negative power outside of social relations, outside of meaning and life, outside the hierarchy of social centers that makes up southern Mexico and that had structured Mrs. E’s life. It is in her narrative that Mrs. E, however short she falls of Orpheus, attempts to descend to the underworld.

Suffering Mrs. E journeys to Tijuana as Orpheus journeys to the underworld. If, through Tijuana, she reaches back into her past toward the “other,” this is because her story places Tijuana in relation to a meaningful geography of southern Mexico. In her recounted voyagings, she traverses nearly the full span of the republic, from Tabasco to Tijuana, from small-town, peasant Oaxaca (both Mrs. E’s family and her husband’s are ejido17 members) to the metropolis to the industrial border city of Tijuana. Her narrative endows this national space with differentiated value, so that if Tijuana appears in her story as a nonplace, just movement and traffic on the verge of nothingness, it only appears as “outside” in relation to a scheme of meaning mapped by Mrs. E’s narrative. In this chronotope, Tijuana stands for death and otherness in relation to the world of constituted social relations embodied in the geography of southern Mexico.18 It functions as an organizing absent center of Mexico just as death is the absent center of Tijuana’s hearsay public. As Mrs. E moves toward it, this absent center organizes her personal “suffering.” In this, she has neatly captured the essence of a paradox in the situation of the migrant. In working-class Tijuana, a cliché of migration as suffering is widely voiced. People evoke classic images of travail on the frontier, transposed to a contemporary urban setting. Tijuana is unbearably hot and then unbearably cold; there is no water; sudden rains may be fatal to houses perched on the treacherous hills. When Mrs. E 17. The ejido, a legacy of the revolution, is a legal community in which lands are held in common. 18. Compare the chronotope described by don Gabriel in Hill’s (1995) masterful analysis, in which the side of the road is the site of death and negative social relations against the space of the village. Tijuana, as Mrs. E tells it, is one big “space by the side of the road” (Stewart 1996).

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spoke of not being able to “accustom herself ” to Tijuana, she referred to material hardships she experienced on arrival: sleeping on the floor on pieces of cardboard, not having even a hotplate to warm the tortillas, lacking dishes and utensils with which to prepare and eat food as is properly human. The difficulties of coming to an unfamiliar place and of establishing oneself through years of hard work are common themes, and a statement of interest in migration stories on my part would almost invariably produce the response, “Oh, you mean you want to know about suffering.” In this sense, Mrs. E’s narrative fell squarely within the local type of migration narratives. As in her story too, but on a more banal level, the suffering of the frontier is generally the consequence of an earlier, originary suffering that drove the migrant from his or her home. Insofar as migration arises from a desire not just for upward mobility but for a narrative that will place one’s poverty in the past, the second suffering ultimately repeats the senselessness of the first. For the clase media, Tijuana is a figure that aids in sense making: it helps frame reliable, upwardly mobile “I”s. In these narratives of self, poverty undergoes a miraculous transformation: in the present, it is cause for shame, but in the past it is cause for pride. In contrast, though Mrs. E has likewise left the initial hard times behind, this does not palliate her suffering. Her inability to “accustom herself ” to Tijuana’s hardships is bundled together with her inability to accustom herself to her baby’s death. She does not reserve the vehemence of her disbelief for her “martyrdom” per se but speaks with the same incredulous anger of having been driven, even, to eat her tortillas cold, with nothing but raw tomatoes. When the first suffering of these comparatively trivial material hardships disappeared, it left the deeper problem of the baby’s death, but in a new and different way. It is thanks to Tijuana that Mrs. E suffers as she does. When she suffered in her early days in Tijuana, Mrs. E certainly desired material improvements to her life. When she describes her home in Mexico City, she describes an eminently middle-class living arrangement: her words hover lovingly over her home’s completeness, “Su cocina, su sala, su comedor, todo lo necesario yo tenía” (Its kitchen, its living room, its dining room, I had all the necessities). It is hard to tell what her living situation then was actually like. Her home now consists of a single large room, but a corner has been walled off for her daughter, the double bed for herself and her husband stands in a nook with a curtain before it, and kitchen and dining area are divided by a low separation. That is, their house gestures toward the ideal; it too contains, in a technical sense, “all the necessities.” They own a refrigerator and a television, and her husband drives a beaten-up old pickup. And yet most families own re-

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frigerators and TVs here, and neither are cars the status symbol they are in southern Mexico. The house shows that it was built by her husband (a construction worker by trade) of secondhand wood; scrap lumber is piled about outside. It is typical of working-class Tijuana and is indeed located in an area that, while not squatted, was irregularly sold, so that the deed to the house has not been formalized. Electricity is tapped from the main lines, and, up the street, some neighbors live under tarpaulin roofs, a state only the worst off here must endure. Mrs. E and her husband think of the future; they are proud that their daughter does well in school; they speak of selling the property in Tijuana to assure their retirement in Oaxaca. But these elements are not assimilated to a narrative trajectory of upward mobility. They are mired in the paradox of poverty here: a material excess of consumer commodities (fridges, televisions, cars) that should signify a change of state, and yet does not, for all these objects are already waste for someone else (they are bought secondhand from the United States). On one hand, Mrs. E’s material conditions are insufficient for any bid to enter the clase media. On the other, her narrative keeps suffering present regardless. Putting suffering in the past, the move into the clase media follows a secularized conversion narrative. In Tijuana as a city of upward mobility, the genuine migration to Tijuana that the clase media lauds depends on this secularized conversion, the remaking of the self as a responsible “I.” Mrs. E’s narrative failures, the compulsively repeated failure of Christian emplotment, are the inverse of the triumphalist middle- class narrative. Mrs. E dramatizes the failure of this narrative of upward mobility; more often, it manifests in subtle paradoxes. One migrates because one suffers; in Tijuana, one goes on suffering, in a different way. People agree that the suffering of the South is greater, but their current situation cannot justify their migration. The two sufferings cannot meaningfully cohere into a single life narrative, for the new suffering assures no rupture with a “backward” past that would definitively cast one as a modern subject. This situation leads to a kind of temporal suspension that is also a suspension of presence. In Mrs. E’s daughter, her son is both eternally present and eternally absent; in that sense, the daughter is a shrine of sorts. As Mrs. E sees her son’s absence in her daughter, she draws near not just to death and otherness, but to annulling time. When she answers her daughter, “God took him from us and what can we do,” she returns to the present, but barely in time. Catching herself, she plays out temporally the dislocation with which the stone has imbued her life. This play echoes the temporality of the hearsay public. If the street is understood as a river of hearsay in which “what happens here is already known over here” (see chapter 7), the hearsay public is split by the surprise of finding

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that, in the time of its own self-enunciation, it is “already” everywhere. It imagines itself as a single body in that moment in which the gap of time and space is sutured. But the surprise of appearing where not expected also implies that the subject was already absent from its first site of appearance. You can only be part of this public if you “already” know what “everyone” says— if you are already not “you” but “everyone,” and therefore everywhere at once, or, rather, nowhere, not locatable, already moving on, already elsewhere. As a way of speaking without speaking, making oneself a mere medium, the third person of se dice emblematizes this presence-absence. Mrs. E tells her story before a tape recorder set on her kitchen table. At the end, she tells me she has never told it before, because she does not want it repeated by gossipy neighbors. The tape recorder takes her story to another plane of circulation. Before the recorder, her most intimate life history can transcend neighborhood relations to become “what happens in Tijuana.” She tells it to a stranger, me, as she herself was a stranger to the woman on the bus. When I repeat her story, it will be at once the same and completely different. The story is “already” something else, already moving on, already not what it was when Mrs. E told it to me. It is “already” everywhere, spiraling at once outward through the public and inward toward the depths of personal experience: the stone by the side of the road, otherness, death. The pueblo is caught in this double movement, public and private furthering and deepening each other mutually in opposite directions. The truth of my most intimate reality comes back to me from a stranger on the bus. The hearsay public has become Mrs. E’s technique for dwelling in absence.

Repetition The year after our interview, I returned in order to give Mrs. E special thanks, for her words had formed the basis of my master’s thesis at the University of Chicago. I also wanted to press her on the issue of the stone— without mentioning it directly, I wanted to know if she believed witchcraft had been involved. But she seemed not to understand and, showing me again the scar on her knee, simply repeated that “everything began there.” This repetition led into a repetition of her story in compressed and less coherent form, as she mixed different scenes, dropped some, and expanded others, all on the basis of certain phrases that were word-for-word the same as those she had used a year before. One of the scenes she expanded on had appeared originally as a single phrase I had not troubled myself about, though I did not understand it:

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“Me tiraron así [ . . . ] y [ . . . ] empezaron a me—, a medir de aquí p’acá” (They threw me down like so and started to measure from here to here). The phrase was part of the story of her operation. This time around, her narrative focused on this episode, which constituted a direct response to my thanks. The measuring, it turned out, was done by a young nurse who told Mrs. E she needed her measurements in order to complete her thesis. “Little mother,” the nurse appealed to her, “help me get out of here quick.” But Mrs. E was not in a condition to respond and so was flipped about in great pain as the medical student measured her. In our first interview, she had spread out her arms to demonstrate how she had been laid out “like Holy Christ” for her operation. Now, again, she drew the same lines across her body with her hands as she mimicked the nurse pulling the measuring tape briskly out, horizontally across her chest and vertically from throat to belly.19 Like the medical student, I crucify her. My interview with her, this story suggests, was a self-interested measurement that only inflicted suffering. An appeal for help by the student disguises a cruel power and reveals Mrs. E’s utter helplessness. I used her to graduate, to get out of here quick, to propel myself beyond the world in which Mrs. E, this story implies, is stuck. The act of narration itself, Mrs. E suggests, is a repetition of her suffering and an attempt to reach back to its source. If I provided the opportunity for Mrs. E both to narrate and to relive a “martyrdom” without specifiable origin or meaning, this is because I appeared both within her Tijuana and from beyond it. I had known Mrs. E before I began to study anthropology, though only superficially. During my first summer of fieldwork in 2003, I was standing by the side of the road near her house, waiting for the bus, when another one pulled up, and Mrs. E descended. We had not seen each other for several years. When I told her what I was doing in Tijuana, she reflected for a moment and then invited me to go to her house later. Though we had known each other already, the interview was directly the result of this chance encounter in public, not quite on a bus, but literally by the side of the road.20 I said previously that I was to Mrs. E as she was herself to the woman on the bus; the events leading up to our interview support this interpretation. In the interview, she performed the flipping of roles that 19. One of Lewis’s Mexico City informants mentions “measuring someone with a tape” as a way to let “a devil or evil spirit [ . . . ] get control of a person’s body and [ . . . ] kill him” (1961:172). 20. Wilma did, in fact, meet me on a bus. As a possible patronage connection to the United States, I represented the positive and productive side of chance encounter.

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the hearsay public depends on: she heard from a stranger, and she repeats to me. By addressing me as a fellow member of the hearsay public, she set up the imperative for me to repeat what I had heard. In this sense, I come to her through Tijuana and as part of it, the unexpected chance encounter that one may always expect there. Our later meeting, though, would seem to be all about hierarchy and power. By delicate poetic parallel, she portrays herself as the utterly passive victim of my self-interested and pain-inflicting probing. The difference between us would seem absolute: I will leave Tijuana, graduate, go on to have a career (the only point of studying, it is generally assumed). Though she does not mention it, I will return to the United States. This accusation is commonplace; it was consistently leveled at me throughout my fieldwork and is routinized in the affectionate exclamation of welcome after long absence: “¡Te olvidas de los pobres!” (You forget the poor!)21 Subtly calquing the trope of migration as upward mobility onto me, Mrs. E rejects it violently— or rather, claims it has rejected her. The political problem the United States presents for Mexico (like the everyday economics of “suffering”) is, however, just one condition of possibility for the more total emergency in which the pueblo constitutes itself here. Mrs. E’s narrative by which she descends toward otherness and death is the movement for which the hearsay public gives up the ability to say “we,” to figure itself as an agentive collectivity. This movement arises out of historical circumstances: the death of a young woman at the hands of a coyote, or Mrs. E’s own migrations, both writ large as prevalent social phenomena. In general, the hearsay public is paradigmatically undocumented, but, in Mrs. E’s story, to identify with the “illegal alien” is to identify as dead. Her extreme formulation brings out how, on a collective scale, the historical circumstances in which the pueblo must articulate itself in Tijuana appear as a limit to that self-articulation. Mae Ngai (2004) calls the “illegal alien” an “impossible subject,” in practical terms part of US society and yet definitively excluded from it. Her “impossible subjects,” though, are such not just in relation to the United States, but in Mexico and as Mexico, as a national subject, a public or people, in its own self-enunciation. In face of the social, political, and economic circumstances that confront it, the hearsay public as pueblo repeats its own impossibility. Instead of narratives that might locate the speaking subject, this public circulates the figure of the border as emblem of an 21. Since 2010, I have resided in southern Mexico, a fact that contradicts the expectations of almost everyone I know in Tijuana. Reactions range from a pleased, “¡Estás al revés!” (You’re backward!), to insinuations of perversity, to genuine consternation.

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endemic unsettling, of the limits of life and subjectivity, of their point of breakdown. Loss becomes interesting when it becomes recognizable as a tijuanense loss. But tijuanense is perhaps not the right term, because of the way it has been appropriated by the better-off.22 Tijuaneros, the youth of the colonias populares call themselves instead; the term has spread since the time of my fieldwork. Inés did not recognize it and flat out told me it was incorrect. It connotes the roughness of the city; it echoes with images of Tijuana’s particular brand of urban decay— decay that is not decay because the city for so long grew at a fantastic rate, eating up the bare hills with houses made of refuse brought from the United States. Tijuaneado is another word in common usage in the colonias. It describes cars brought secondhand from the United States, beaten up and broken down by Tijuana’s unpaved streets, but still patched and mended only to be driven further into the ground. Cars do not last in Tijuana, I am told— my own, accustomed to the fine gasoline of the otro lado, will surely not endure my year of fieldwork. Punning between brazos (arms) and baches (potholes), a woman joked, “In our colonia, we welcome you with our potholes wide open.” The damaging material evidence of “our” substandard condition, shortly to bring “you” to the same beaten-down state, substitutes for proper social relations. “Tijuana is going to eat me,” a recent arrival shivered. As with Wilma and her mysterious entonces sí, his words are charged with an unspecifiable menace to which only the broad label “Tijuana” could attach. Indeed, his fears balled together the pressures of organized crime, self- defense on the street, regular police abuse, family issues, and his inability to find steady work. One day I crossed the border with seventeen-year-old Q, born a US citizen, raised in Tijuana as a ward of the Mexican state. Only recently had she obtained her birth certificate; only recently had she visited the United States for the first time since an infancy beyond her memory. She lived in a tiny hut perched on a hill, in “la peor miseria” (the worst misery), as her neighbors called it. Looking back at the city from San Diego, she smiled and said, “Tijuana, baches; baches, Tijuana” (Tijuana, potholes; potholes, Tijuana). She has no desire to leave, to emigrate to the United States as her older sister pushes her to do, as her neighbors mock her for not doing. “Yo soy de Tijuana” (I am from Tijuana), she told me, and then (I paraphrase): “I wish I had been born in Mexico, so that people would not be telling me all the time how stupid I am.” Like Mrs. E, she will dwell in Tijuana, which she equates with the potholes of its streets. She will

22. In chapter 2, we saw the clase media dispute the elite its right to this term.

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dwell in their quotidian battering but also in the fascinating possibility they offer of encountering in them the “other.” Mrs. E finds me one day standing by the side of the road; I am the stone and in me she can repeat the crucifixion it submitted her to. On Tijuana’s streets, one encounters two things: others who are like oneself and who repeat one to oneself, and others who are not like oneself, and through whom a mysterious force moves. Mrs. E shows that the difference is only a matter of emphasis; hidden within one is the possibility of the other. The public is full of the “other.” You can never know who you are talking to. “We” are the site of irruption of the “other.” In making me her tormentor, Mrs. E brings together the death and otherness of the stone in Oaxaca and the death and otherness of el otro lado (the other side) that was behind the story about the woman on the bus. In me, she brings together the coyote and the stone and shows that the same thing lies behind them. It is not surprising that she should frame me first as her peer, another member of the public, and then as the source of a terrible and utterly foreign (both literally and figuratively) power. In crucifying herself again, through me as a figure for the United States, Mrs. E makes herself an “illegal alien”— one who could be dead. It is not a permanent status but one that must be re-created constantly. Despite all the figures her narrative makes use of (the coyote, the stone, God, me), it centers the “other” in herself, turning her voice, as Blanchot said, “spectral.” Mrs. E’s abrupt, dry expulsions of breath that punctuate the interview— snorts of disbelief— echo with the jaded laughter of someone who has confronted, and confronts once again, the fascinating spectacle of her own death and yet continues to live.23 “It is because the mind cannot confront the possibility of its death directly,” Caruth writes, “that survival becomes [ . . . ], paradoxically, an endless testimony to the impossibility of living” (1996:62). If Mrs. E accuses me, if she narrates herself as a victim, this is also because she cannot quite accuse herself. Her own (missed) responsibility for her baby’s death presses into articulation only once, in the reported speech of her mother: “Hija de la chingada . . .” Taking her baby where she should not, exposing him to danger and bringing on his death, Mrs. E was herself his coyote. Death runs through her agentively, and there is no particular distinction between that responsibility and the enigma of her own survival. The confrontation with otherness, with one’s own death as with the death 23. According to Derrida (1978), Hegel’s foundational allegory of reason undoes itself at the impossible moment in which he pretends we can “supersede” our own death. This moment, he argues, produces laughter, an energy that exceeds and escapes reason’s totalizing drive.

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running through one and one’s unassumable responsibility for it, is— in reference to this chapter’s epigraph— the hearsay public’s law. Instead of isolation, this law breeds a compulsive effort toward encounter. At its lower depths where death and lack and loss take over, the empty structure of the fetishized Law (doorkeeper after doorkeeper) generates a thirdness that exceeds any gesture of totalization, any pretense of presence as such. Having missed one’s own encounter with death, one finds oneself led “to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (Caruth 1996:8). This echoing of missed encounters makes Tijuana, as the hearsay public conceives and lives it. It passes on to itself, repetitively, infinitely, an otherness that pervades and transmogrifies all essences, all identities, from beyond the limits of comprehension or articulation. The words of the burning child, spoken in a dream, belong to no one, but they bear in them “the father’s encounter with the otherness of the dead child” (106). That otherness in them demands not just the father’s awakening, but their own retransmission in an act that “passes the awakening on to others” (107). They are words that bring, as Lacan writes, fire where they fall. Mrs. E and her Tijuana burn in such a fire. Just how they might awaken is a question beyond this book.

Conclusion

The opposition between “we” and “they” is a simple aphorism, but, as people step into one or another of the two, the aphorism flowers with the fullness of their lives, their desires and disappointments, and the histories that charge each speaking and make “we” or “they” necessary. As publics, the clase media and the pueblo are full of histories that begin far from the border and that cannot be reduced to it. But as they take shape in the shadow of the United States, their existential struggles— the effort to posit “we” as a positive presence, the succumbing to or embracing of nonsubjectivity that “they” emblematizes— resonate with special force, speaking to situations beyond the border and, also, beyond Mexico. In the first place, they speak to a global reconfiguration of social hierarchies currently under way (Balibar 2002; Ong 2006; De Genova 2010). As border apparatuses grow, as they become more technologically sophisticated, legal and illegal flows are increasingly divided. In this emerging system, borders mark new lines of social difference not just between large zones (such as the European Union) but often between fellow nationals: those who can move legally and easily on an international scale and those who cannot. Because of its territorial proximity to and historical relationship with the United States, Mexico is a dramatic case study in this reorganization of social difference. Nowhere is this new system crisper than at the border. In the second place, if clase media and pueblo speak to this emergent global system of social differentiation, they do so by showing the intimate mechanics of US imperial power: they show how fetishistic dynamics of desire and disavowal animate this system and join it together as such. In Mexico, the fetishism of “I” comes out of long liberal-cum-republican traditions; in Tijuana, the US state extends itself into people’s sense of themselves insofar as state fetishism conjoins with the fetishism of “I”: insofar as US recognition seems to offer or impose confirmation of social standing and personal authenticity. This influence, this modality of power through

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recognition and through the intimate shaping of subjectivities, is as fundamental for the pueblo as for the clase media, though in different ways. In the third place, because they resituate the question of mass weness within a transnational, fetishistic system of social differentiation, clase media and pueblo both point to ways beyond liberal publicity as a model for collective being. Caught in eternal ambivalence over its own propriety, the clase media underscores liberal publicity’s fundamentally recursive structure; because it is itself a fetish, it is by nature unattainable anywhere. In response, “I” turns into a project, a premise, that fragments into fiction and slips between possibilities as much as it seeks to consolidate them. Inés, Dara, Gerardo, and others speak to a multiplicity of self and life that is not guaranteed by liberal publicity and selfhood but that subverts them. The pueblo takes this subversion further: as a public of hearsay, it deconstructs liberal publicity, with its territorialized nation-state and individualized citizen, to replace them with its ethics of encounter. I have not explored the hearsay public’s articulation with political and social organizing, but its imaginary of class solidarity and its bid to represent the nation are basic for mass politics in Mexico. As a hearsay public, the pueblo provides a first footing on which strangers approach each other in common terms. Finally, Mrs. E and the hearsay public as she reveals it bring us back to the concerns of this book’s opening meditation, “Methods/Debts.” If I hear the accusation from Mrs. E’s dream, I must repeat it. Even as I strive to ground her story in the social world of the border and the problems of Tijuana’s underclasses, Mrs. E— and not only Mrs. E— turns the genre of the anthropological monograph into an answer and retransmission, a passing on of her call. She has a theory of what this book should be and of the obligations of the anthropologist: to spread fire from a nightmare that condenses and amplifies all the different origins history has provided. Amid its thematic preoccupations with inequality and injustice both across the border and within Mexico, the hearsay public leads, in Mrs. E’s extreme formulation, to a barren and despairing point from which, nonetheless, ethical commitments must grow. These commitments are at once personal and political; part of their richness lies in how they address themselves indiscriminately to people as different as Mrs. E (or other women on the bus) and the readers of this book. For this book as a passing on of the hearsay public, the main limit to be shared is the border as a line separating one from the whole problem of life elsewhere— a line that demands, impossibly (like the line between Mrs. E and her stone), to be crossed. At the same time, the hearsay public remains open, moving forward, seeking to pass itself on. At the limit of the text, it asks the reader to awaken to his or her own reality.

Acknowledgments

Those who deserve deepest thanks for their part in this project are the people I met in Tijuana and whom this book directly concerns; I cannot name names, but I make my acknowledgments to these individuals up front, in the opening section “Methods/Debts.” As I explain there, this project began in a sense when I was still a teenager. On the academic side, the teachers who in those years set me on this path were Val Daniel, Aaron Fox, and John Pemberton— with whom I first read Jim Siegel. Siegel’s writing has exerted a force on my thought ever since; I hope that these pages do not do him too great a disservice. At the University of Chicago, Danilyn Rutherford, Claudio Lomnitz, and Michael Silverstein were an exemplary set of mentors. Claudio has helped me along in innumerable ways, and whatever conceptual transparency this book achieves is due largely to his urging. Michael likewise has been a constant and corrective inspiration. Danilyn, however, sets an example I still have trouble believing is humanly replicable. No one has worked harder to help me see this book through. Other fundamental influences during my graduate years (and after) include Diana Bocarejo, Nusrat Chowdhury, Susan Gal, Marilyn Ivy, Alejandra Leal, and William Mazzarella. Jean and John Comaroff, Maria José de Abreu, Paul Eiss, Kriszti Fehérváry, Daniella Gandolfo, Mark Geraghty, Joe Hankins, Rachel Heiman, Miyako Inoue, Jeremy Jones, Rocío Magaña, William Mazzarella, Sasha Newell, Mae Ngai, Alejandro Paz, David Pedersen, Pablo Piccato, Rafael Sánchez, and Mick Taussig all gave critical feedback on different chapters. Nitzan Shoshan slogged through an extraordinarily long version of the manuscript; Lily Chumley likewise gave careful comments on the whole thing. Near the end, she and several others helped the text toward its final shape in a daylong workshop: besides Lily, these brave and generous readers were Celina Callahan-Kapoor, John Collins, Cassie Fennell, Natalia Mendoza, and

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Sarah Muir. Sarah also read a substantial set of chapters separately and was a constant source of critical support in the final stages. I should back up, though. The National Science Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays program funded both a good portion of my graduate studies and the fieldwork for this book. In Tijuana, the Colegio de la Frontera gave me an institutional home, and I enjoyed the assistance of many people there. José Manuel Valenzuela Arce always made time for me; Humberto Félix Berumen gave me a leg up with writing and teaching as well as research. My last months of dissertation writing took place at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where I had the great fortune to have Antonio Azuela as my host. Besides him, José Carlos Hesles and Fernando Escalante were crucial interlocutors at this stage. After I had finished, the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, provided time and a place to find my feet as a fledgling PhD. Here, the Department of Anthropology, in particular Kit Woolard and John Haviland, also gave me a warm and much-appreciated welcome. At the Colegio de Michoacán, my colleagues have patiently supported me in every way, awaiting this book with astonishing forbearance; they contributed directly to it, too, through our faculty workshop series. My closest interlocutors and friends here have been Paul Liffman, Gaby Zamorano, and Laura Roush. I had the privilege of living three years with Gaby and her growing family (Mateo, Martina y Elías: me aguantaron admirablemente). I would also like to thank Carmen Moreno for research assistance, Mago Martínez and Alberto Flores for their administrative support, and Santiago Gutiérrez (aka Blue Star, or El Padre Trampitas) for all-around uplift. While writing, I enjoyed two extended stays at Columbia University, one hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the other by the Institute of Latin American Studies. These stays were essential in bringing this book to fruition. While renewing relationships from when I was an undergraduate, I also found new interlocutors. Mae Ngai warmly assumed a mentorship role I could never have expected. Though they are mentioned above as readers, I would like to name again Sarah Muir, Cassie Fennell, Lily Chumley, Daniella Gandolfo, and Pablo Piccato as people whose ideas and encouragement on these trips played no negligible part in making this book happen. I also owe huge thanks, of course, to David Brent at the University of Chicago Press for sticking with this project, to Priya Nelson for seeing it through, and to all the other people at the press who worked on it, especially Dylan Montanari. All these years, my most constant interlocutor has been my father Max Yeh, a scholar of comparative literature. I did not just grow up within

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and watching how he and my mother Carol Yeh both found in Mexico a world that transformed and fed their own very different intellectual and artistic projects; I saw the effects on them of the Mexico City earthquake of September 1985. We left the year after, for our own reasons, but at the same time as did massive numbers of other people too. Not a few went to Tijuana, where twenty years later they described to me exactly where they were and what they did when the earth began to move under them. Back in the United States, my father eventually went on to other projects; my mother’s work until her death revolved around the quake. In Mexico, the force of political change that came in the wake of the disaster settled finally to the right rather than the left, as it seemed it would at first. This settling is, of course, basic to the story this book tells of clase media and pueblo in Tijuana and in Mexico at large. In a roundabout way, I have written it in remembrance of everything that my mother, my father, and so many others believed might have happened instead.

*** An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “‘We’re Mexican Too’: Publicity and Status at the International Line,” Public Culture 21, no. 3 (2009): 465–93. A reduced version of chapter 7 appeared as “‘La calle es un río’: El público de los (narco)corridos como ‘el pueblo,’” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 51, no. 1 (2015): 79–107. Other portions of the book have appeared in “Two Publics in a Mexican Border City,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2012): 713–34; “A Middle-Class Public at Mexico’s Northern Border,” in The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography, edited by Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012); and “Visas, Jokes and Contraband: Citizenship and Sovereignty at the Mexico-US Border,” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 59, no. 1 (2017): 154–82.

Appendix: Interview Excerpts from Chapter 2 Excerpt 1 ry: mm. ¿y qué fue el chisme con, con los Leyva? inés: ah, pos los Leyva no, este Xicoténcatl fue buen presidente, y después, era buen gobernador, pues. nada más que . . . cuando . . . este, Salinas fue. él . . . lo quitaron. porque, dicen. a mí nada de esto me consta, por supuesto, porque, yo trabajé con la esposa, con María Elena Leyva, trabajé en el DIF, porque yo era maestra de corte ahí. y . . . María Elena era una . . . señora. que pues había en pa—, había nacido en pañales de seda ry: mm inés: no sabía nada, ella era una gente que pues no sabía nada. y la que la manejaba era Susana Salazar. Susana Salazar toda la vida ha sido política. ry: ¿cómo se llama? inés: Susana Salazar. ry: Susana. inés: es de los Salazar. ry: ¿es otra familia de aquí? inés: sí. de los Salazar.

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ry: van los inés: los Leyva, ry: los Leyva, los inés: los este que me acabas de decir este ry: los Villarreal inés: Villarreal ry: los Robles inés: los Robles, Salazar, sí. hay varios. y . . . Susana Salazar es una mujerota así gorda. que es este . . . [she flips her wrist] ry: [laughter] ¿qué quiere decir ese movimiento de . . . [mutual titter] inés: es este, lesbiana. ry: ah, es lesbiana. okey. inés: y vivía con su secretaria. con Pati. y Pati lloraba y no sé qué tanta cosa porque luego Susana era media groserita con ella, ¿no? ry: oh. inés: conmigo nunca me hi—, siempre me respetó mucho Susana. y e—, y todavía hasta la fecha ella es la que organiza las fiestas del Parque Teniente Guerrero. ry: ah inés: cuando es el aniversario de Tijuana y todo eso, sí. ry: ah inés: y escribía en una revista y bueno. y . . . fuimos muy amigas, quién sabe ahora si me vuelve a ver me reconoce otra vez o quién sabe, ¿no? las gentes cambian. y en ese entonces yo trabajaba en el DIF. y María Elena decía, “Profe, Profe. usted hable por mí”. entonces yo siempre ah, porque ella le tenía uno que ver el papelito y leía.

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lo que uno le decía pues se ve muy mal eso, ¿no? de que, pues la presidenta del DIF y leyendo su papel ahí de plano, ¿no? y . . . yo cogía y, siempre me nombraban maestro de ceremonias. la presentaba y “la señora María Elena Leyva esposa del Presidente Municipal de Tijuana” y toda la cosa, y ya me seguía hablando. y ella se paraba y saluda y todo, ¿no? y ya se sentaba y yo ya seguía diciendo el discurso. lo que me salía porque yo nunca, nunca he escrito nada para poder hablar, ¿no? siempre lo que, lo que me sale, eso hablo. ry: ei inés: eh. y fui maestro de ceremonias muchisisísimas veces. allá en el DIF y en otros lados. y entonces este Susana me decía, cuando veía los fotógrafos o así, decía, “Profe, Profe, órale, véngase”. y nos salíamos las dos [laughter] porque ni a ella ni a mí nos gustaba salir en los periódicos. a mí no me gusta salir en los periódicos. una vez me fueron a entrevistar al DIF y me di—, y decían ahí que la señora, que no sé qué, que no sé cuánto y que. todas las cosas, le digo, “ay, pero para qué publicaron eso”.

Excerpt 2 ry: ¿entonces qué, qué se dice de, los Villarreal [in stage whisper]? inés: fíjate que te digo yo no sé bien cómo está la cosa, para qué te miento. los conozco y todo, así, pero no es que yo sepa mucho de ellos. si los que saben son mis hijos pero yo sí no. yo sí no. [silence] para qué te digo lo que no sé. ry: ei. inés: porque sé una que otra cosita pero no bien.

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ry: mmhmm. mmhmm. inés: en cambio Gil y Martín ellos sí. convivieron con ellos y Gil en una ocasión les . . . tuvo fuerte discusión con Villarreal. ry: pero no sabe cuál. inés: no. no, no sé. ry: ¿no se acuerda de qué se trató ni nada? inés: no no no no. no, si yo no estuve ahí, nomás supe. ry: mmhmm. inés: también en otra ocasión que Gil tuvo discusión fuerte, teníamos un amigo eh, que ya en paz descanse, Castillo Luna. el doctor Castillo Luna. un muy buen médico aquí en Tijuana. muy amigo de nosotros. y como sabía que Gil pues no trabajaba y que, todas esas cosas, pues íbamos a consulta y nunca nos cobró la consulta. era hermano masón. y entonces un día hubo una exposición y un concurso de fotografía. y, eh, venían de varias partes de la república. y había un muchacho, que venía no sé de qué parte, pero era tipo . . . tipo indígena. así, moreno, de pelo parado, así, tipo indígena. pero dice Gil que traía muy buenas fotos. y, entre paisajes y cosas así que traía muy buenas fotos. y fue la exposición y todo. y pasaron los jueces. y entre los jueces estaba Castillo Luna. y luego, eh, pues ya dieron el primer lugar a un muchacho de aquí de Tijuana que no tenía buena iluminación en sus fotos. y algunos otros defectitos que tenía, ¿no? y le dan el premio a él. y s—, pidió la palabra Gil. y dijo que él no estaba conforme con ese premio, porque este . . . los jueces no sabían de qué estaban hablando. dice, “a ver”, dice, “ponen como juez, al doctor Castillo Luna. que es un gran cirujano”,

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porque él para las anginas era la maravilla del mundo, “muy buen médico. muy tijuanense muy todo. pero de fotografía no sabe nada”. porque él conocía a Castillo Luna tal cual era, ¿no? había platicado muchas ve—, era un historiador, nada más, porque a él le gustaba mucho pues la historia. y se quedó con libros de Gil pues, él. porque se murió y no los pudimos recuperar. y luego este, dice, “y el ingeniero fulano, y el doctor sutano”, dice. “que me digan qué saben de fotografía”. y entonces un doctor le dijo. este, masón también. le dijo, “mira chamaco. tú no sabes de lo que estás hablando” y le dijo, “sí. sí sé de lo que estoy hablando porque sí sé de fotografía”, le dijo Gil. y se puso a alegar con ellos. y pos ya ni modo. y que le habla Castillo Luna a Gil y me dice, “óyeme, tu hijo me puso una”, con perdón tuyo, “una cagada”, dice. “a todos ahí. que luego, no sabíamos ni qué hacer”, dice. “porque nos discutió y nos discutió y ‘déjenle el premio al muchacho porque ya no se lo van a quitar. pero quien se lo merece, es fulanito de tal’”. Gil también estaba concursando. pero como dice Gil, “yo reconocí que el muchacho tenía mejores fotos que las mías”. dice, “mejor iluminadas, y . . . y, hay que reconocer”, dice, “porqué no”, dice. “que porque vienen de, un pueblo, porque vienen de cualquier otro lado”, dice, “no, hay que reconocer”, les dijo. y se puso a alegarles y pos ya no hallaban si quitarle el premio al otro y dárselo a éste o, o qué, y se, puso a discusión y entonces pues  . . . le dieron el premio al muchacho.

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Index

Agua Caliente Casino, 92n6, 93n8 Aguilar Camín, Héctor, A Future for Mexico, 14–15 All Mexico movement, 13. See also Mexican-American war “already.” See ya (already) Althusser, Louis, 173 American Dream, in Tijuana, 97, 107, 108, 111. See also Tijuana amparo (protection), in Mexico City, 174–75n6 anarchists, 47 Anderson, Benedict, 125, 205, 215 Anglos, 11, 16. See also gringos; United States anomie, in Tijuana, 102–3 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 4 Apter, Andrew, 106–7 Apter, Emily, 72, 183 Arellano Félix Cartel, 206 aristocracy: vs. bourgeoisie, 106; European, 104. See also gente decente (upper class) assassin, as hero, 152 assembly plant, 75–85, 114n1; blackand-white binary within, 83–85; described, 113; employees in, seeking visas, 161–66; social structure of, 75–85. See also assembly plant industry; Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); maquiladora (assembly plant)

assembly plant industry, x, xi, 7n8, 91; Dara on workers in, 100–101, 100n14. See also assembly plant; maquiladora (assembly plant) authenticity: anxiety over, 173; vs. mimesis, 110. See also citizen(s); citizenship; identification (ID) autodefensa (community policing), 151 Azuela, Mariano, 149n11 back stage, of politics and elite, 54–60, 61n12, 66, 69–70, 71t, 152–54, 209– 10, 214–15. See also front stage, of politics and elite Baja California, 18, 148; rebellious tradition in, 107. See also Tijuana Bakhtin, M. M., 117, 117n10 barda (fence): Line vs., 194; meaning “border,” 111; metaphor for social boundaries, 111. See also border (frontera); Line, the (la Línea) baseball, 47, 81. See also soccer; South (of Mexico), opposed to Tijuana Benveniste, Émile, 5n6, 22, 123, 210 Bhabha, Homi, 14, 15 Blanchot, Maurice, 228, 229, 238, 246 “Boletín de Prensa” (corrido by Los Tucanes de Tijuana), 210–14, 226 border (frontera), 4; ambivalence and, 15; closure of, 32–33, 41–42, 41n17, 44, 49; and corrido, 197; creation of,

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Index

border (frontera) (continued) 13; crossing, as rite of passage, 135; and death, 8, 174, 227, 228; elicits social boundaries, 12, 13, 35, 40, 43– 44, 46, 132–35, 249; and exclusions, 8, 10–11, 22; as fetish, 13–19, 22, 49, 190–96; importance for Mexico, 12, 214; and the Law, 49; and limits on communication, 221–22; as the Line, 111, 112; meanings of, viii, 1; as metaphor, 4, 15, 82, 84; as nest of traffickers, 210–11, 212, 213, 228 (see also drug trafficking/traffickers); parallels with country club, 111; quotidian crossing of, 115; violence at, 174–75 (see also violence); as Wall and Port, 173, 194. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); clase media (middle class); drug trafficking/traffickers; elitism; fetish(es); Line, the (la Línea); migrant(s), unauthorized; pass/passing; pueblo (the people); Tijuana Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”), viii, 33–34, 34n7, 50, 133; as fetish, 15, 80, 81, 112, 171–72, 173, 179; interview to obtain, 161–69; and social status, 7–8, 30, 33–34, 34n7, 80, 81, 133–34, 164, 165; as useful in United States, 190. See also pass/passing; visa, and right to enter United States Border Industrialization Program (BIP), 7n8. See also assembly plant; assembly plant industry; maquiladora (assembly plant) Border Patrol, 193, 195. See also US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) boundaries, social, 4. See also barda (fence); clase media (middle class); country club, in Tijuana; elitism; mobility, upward; pueblo (the people); wall(s) Bourdieu, Pierre, 161, 162 bourgeoisie: vs. aristocracy, 106; “easy

restraint” of, 162; in eighteenthcentury Europe, 104; in Habermas’s schema, 68, 68t, 69; and identity, 173; not clase media, 110. See also clase media (middle class); middle class boycott. See immigrants’ rights movement, 2006 bribery, petty: and clase media, 154– 57, 177; and the pueblo, 157–60. See also illegality broadsheets, 198, 219n22 business card (tarjeta de presentación): as credencial, 188–89; as fetish, 185–86, 186f; and “I”/me consta, 185, 188; as pass, 176, 184–90, 186f; as protection against police, 187–88; as token of patronage, 174–75, 176, 187, 189n18. See also pass/passing “Cachorros de Juan Villarreal, Los” (corrido), 216–17. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) Calderón, Felipe, 149, 189n18 caminando para conocer (walking to learn/experience), vii, 122, 124–25, 127, 132, 136 Canetti, Elias, 124, 124n20, 126n22 Caretaker (of restroom), 190–96 Caruth, Cathy, 229–30, 235, 246 Casa del Migrante (shelter), ix, 188 Castaneda, Carlos, 122–23 Castañeda, Jorge, A Future for Mexico, 14–15 Chapultepec (“La Chapu,” neighborhood in Tijuana), 88, 89, 92, 109, 158. See also elitism; Tijuana Chiapas, 10, 93–94 chronotope: of hearsay public, 117–23, 219, 220; Malverde’s, 205 (see also Malverde, Jesús); and narrative, 117. See also hearsay public Chu, Julie, 162n2 citationality, fear of, 71 citizen(s): Mexican, 50; responsibil-

Index

ities of, 154–56, 180–81; as “somebodies,” 175–76. See also citizenship citizenship, 9, 10, 10n13, 177; application for US, 165–68; consumer, 73; corporative, 147, 180; differentiated, 20, 32, 81, 96, 155, 157, 175, 176–77, 180, 185; Mexican, 46, 50, 175; moral imperative of, 72, 108, 139, 143, 154, 156, 159; tijuanense ideal of, 7, 33– 34, 82, 163, 174; US, 75n2, 112, 189, 189n19, 245; US, as compared with Mexican, 175, 177. See also citizen(s) ciudadano (citizen), meaning of, 177. See also citizen(s); citizenship clase media (middle class), viii, 2–3, 3n5, 10, 14, 94, 97, 101, 136, 148, 240; as conservative, 110, 148–49; Dara as part of, 89–90, 97; defined, 105–6, 148–49; as doorkeeper, 145; historically, 147–48; and “I,” 7, 106, 107, 159, 173 (see also “I”; “we”); Inés as part of, 94–95, 97, 105, 106; and liberal law, 72; marginal status of Inés and Dara within, 96; material conditions of, 110; me consta of, 161; as national subject, 145–46, 148; not a bourgeoisie, 110; petty bribery and, 154–57; and the pueblo, 5–12, 23, 73, 144–49, 159–60, 240–41, 249–50; and the pueblo, before the law, 143–60; self-concept of, 7, 148; and US frontier, 98–99. See also middle class; poor; pueblo (the people) clase obrera (working class), 88. See also poor; pueblo (the people); Tijuana clave (password), 191–93. See also identification (ID); patron(s); token(s) Cody, Francis, 21 Cold War, 144, 145 colonias populares (working-class districts), x–xii, 10, 90, 94n9, 102, 102n23, 180, 181, 245; irregular landholding in, 11, 89n3, 145, 168, 241.

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See also poor; pueblo (the people); Tijuana; urbanization Comaroff, Jean, 144, 144n3 Comaroff, John, 144, 144n3 commuter status, 132n31. See also emigrados (émigrés); United States: permanent residency in contraband, 102, 217; of hearsay public, 221; narcocorridos as, 219–20. See also drug trafficking/traffickers Corona del Rosal, Alfonso, 151 corporativism, 20, 41, 72, 102, 147, 179. See also patron(s); state, Mexican corrido(s) (ballad[s]), 197–222; meaning of word, 215. See also narcocorrido(s) corridos alterados, 197n1. See also narcocorrido(s) corruption, in Mexico, 149–50; among police, 155–56. See also bribery, petty; drug trafficking/traffickers Cota, Jaime, 47–48 country club, in Tijuana, 91–93, 109, 110–11, 121 (see also elitism); accessibility of, 123, 129; description of, 123, 128, 130, 131; exclusion from, 133–34; parallels with border, 111, 134; passing in, 127–31. See also Tijuana coyote(s): as the devil, 233 (see also religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering); Mrs. E as, 246; as murderers, 146–47, 224–25, 231, 246 (see also death; violence); as traffickers, 223. See also mediator(s); polleros (smugglers) credencial (ID), 195; business card as, 188–89. See also identification (ID); paper(s) crime, organized, 215; Zeta on, 207. See also drug trafficking/traffickers criminal: pueblo and elite as, 159; and state, 143, 144, 144n2; state as, 149– 54, 149n10. See also illegality Culiacán (Sinaloa), 200–201, 200n7, 205 “Culture of Legality,” 144n3

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Index

Dara (daughter of Inés), viii; on exaggerated sense of status, 158; fascination with encounter in public, 92, 108, 111; on language, 114; on manners, 87, 103–4, 106; on migration and upward mobility, 99–101, 103; SENTRI interview of, 171–73, 179; as tour guide of Tijuana, 53, 88–93, 89n3. See also clase media (middle class); Inés; mobility, upward; Tijuana death, 112; border and, 8, 228; of children, 223–47; confrontation with, 227–28, 246–47; desire for, 238; hearsay public on, 23–24, 223–47 (see also hearsay public); as limit, 228–30; as metaphor, 229; as national “totem,” 237n15; otherness and, 235, 236, 244, 246–47; threats in corridos, 217, 219; of unauthorized border crossers, 3, 8, 23–24, 141, 223–30, 244–45; as unknowable, 226; witnessing, 123. See also border (frontera); coyote(s); migrant(s), unauthorized debate, rational, 7, 78; at the assembly plant, 77–82, 84; Gil skillful at, 62, 65–68; and hearsay, 8–9; and liberal publicity, 65–74, 68t, 71t, 80, 81, 82, 96n12, 98; in Tijuana, 114–15, 149. See also democracy; publicity, liberal Declaration of Independence, US, “we” vs. “them” in, 37, 47, 77. See also “we” defense (defensa), way of life for the poor, 183. See also poor De León, Jason, 8 democracy, 44n23, 60; Tijuana as a, 107; Tijuana at origins of, 148; Turner on, 98–99 demonstration: defined, 43–45, 44n23; police presence at, 42, 44. See also immigrants’ rights movement, 2006

demos (the people): and demonstrations, 44; as outsiders, 66–67. See also pueblo (the people) deportation, to Mexico, 10, 82, 82n11, 83, 122, 177, 187, 194. See also migrant(s), unauthorized Derrida, Jacques, 18, 48, 49, 50–51, 71n21, 120n14, 123, 123n18, 246n23 dialogism, 6–7, 21–22, 213; defining social groups, 43, 67–68, 159; of first and third person, 28, 135, 210; impossibility of, 127; Inés’s “I” and, 73. See also interview; and individual names Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 151 dicen (they say), 58–59, 124n20, 125, 127, 129, 135–36; as perspective framing corridos, 199–200. See also hearsay public; se dice (it is said); third person (in grammar) documents, 11, 30n2, 82, 161–96; of ancestry, 95, 104; birth certificate, 43n21, 166, 175, 184; business card, 176; fake, 2, 45, 173; to guarantee return to Mexico, 161–62; migrants’, in Tijuana, 187–88; to obtain employment, 175; and US visa, 46n24, 162, 168; utility bills as, 168; venues where needed, 175. See also identification (ID); and individual categories doorkeeper: clase media as, 145; of country club, 112, 130; Derrida on, 50–51; Kafka’s, 49, 139; law as, 48, 49–50, 49n27, 51; Mexican state as, 49n27; security guard as, 82– 83, 129–30. See also mediator(s); officer(s); palanca (mediator); patron(s) Dorotea (Eduardo’s grandmother), 11n17, 180–82, 187; citizenship practices of, 180–81, 181n11; hums narcocorridos, 219–20 (see also narcocorrido[s]); sings corrido about

Index

Tijuana, 216 (see also Tijuana). See also Eduardo (grandson of Dorotea) dress (sartorial): in Tijuana, 108, 129–30; for visa interview, 163–64, 165. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”) driver’s license, 82. See also identification (ID) drug trafficking/traffickers, 111–12, 111n33, 197–222; brings luck, 212–13; compared to migrants, 166, 220–22; coyotes as, 223; in public space, 212–13; and pueblo, 215–16, 218–19, 221–22; religion and, 200–206 (see also Malverde, Jesús); in Tijuana, 91, 91n4, 109–10, 110n31, 174n4. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); narcocorrido(s); Tijuana Durazo Moreno, Arturo, 152–53, 154; Lo negro del Negro Durazo, 151, 209 earwitness(es), 123–27, 213. See also hearsay public; third person (in grammar) Edith, viii, 75, 80, 96, 187n16; ethics of, 84–85; on getting visa, 164; as responsible citizen, 156, 159; social status of, 82. See also Dara (daughter of Inés); Inés; Manager, of assembly plant Eduardo (grandson of Dorotea), 122, 157–58, 182, 187, 214–15, 216–17; grandfather of, 177. See also Dorotea (Eduardo’s grandmother) education, 80, 122, 244; privatization of, 147–48; as status marker, 66, 66n14, 77, 152, 164. See also elitism Eiss, Paul, 2n4, 148, 151 elections, 9, 11–12n18, 73, 147–48, 148n9, 181n11, 198n2; voting in, 148, 159, 177, 181. See also politics Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, 104 elites: in Mexico, 126; in Tijuana, 118, 127–28, 129–32; in Tijuana, photog-

[ 283 ]

raphy contest judges as, 65–67, 69; United States as, 126. See also gente decente (upper class) elitism: law and, 77; signs of, 82, 83–85, 92, 103, 104–5, 152; in Tijuana, 65– 66, 93, 103, 110–11, 133–34. See also elites; Mason(s); money; Tijuana emigrados (émigrés), 133, 133n33. See also United States: permanent residency in Engineer (Ingeniero; professional title), as status marker, 77, 78. See also education; elitism equality: among classes (in Inés’s childhood), 93–94, 94n9; Dara and Inés on, 104; in debate, 78–79; table as metaphor for, 79; between United States and Mexico, 14–16, 76. See also elitism; publicity, liberal; race/ racism evidentiality, 59, 60, 64, 123, 178–79, 211. See also dicen (they say); language; reflexivity; se dice (it is said) Explosión Norteña (musical group), 207, 208, 209 ex-votos, musical, 203, 206. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); Malverde, Jesús Fanon, Frantz, 14 fetish(es): border as, 13–19, 22, 49, 190–96; business card as, 185–86 (see also business card [tarjeta de presentación]); clase media as, 97, 250; ID as, 176n7, 179; Inés’s “I” as, 70–71, 192–93; the Law as, 48–52, 144, 247; Mexico as, 23; patron as, 179n9, 183, 185; rational debate as, 72; saint as, 182–83; sticker as, 181– 82; United States as, 167, 168, 169, 195–96; visa as, 81, 140, 172–73. See also border (frontera); Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); fetishism; state; substitution(s); supplement

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Index

fetishism: and public sphere, 19–24; of state, 173, 179, 183, 193. See also fetish(es); token(s) first person (in grammar): vs. second person, 134; vs. third person, 22, 127, 135–36. See also “I”; third person (in grammar); “we”; and individual pronouns fixity: social, lacking in Tijuana, 103; triggers disorder, 68–74, 84, 90, 93 Foster, George, 182, 183, 184, 187 Foucault, Michel, 144n3, 219n22 Fox, Vicente, 159, 159n17, 181 France, 93, 104, 219n22 fraud, 136; in credentials claimed (education), 106–7; electoral, in Tijuana, 73 Freud, Sigmund: on father’s dream, 235; on fetishes, 15, 15n24, 16 Frontera (newspaper): anniversary ad, 97–98; on border, 111; on May 1 demonstration, 39–40, 41 (see also immigrants’ rights movement, 2006). See also mass media; newspaper(s) frontier, myth of, 97–101. See also democracy front stage, of politics and elite, 54–60, 61n12, 71t, 153–54. See also back stage, of politics and elite gender, 6, 82, 84, 96, 121n16, 229n8 gente decente (upper class), 103–4; of Tijuana, 118. See also elites Gerardo (impresario), 28, 113–36. See also country club, in Tijuana; Tijuana ghost(s), 235, 237 Gil (Inés’s son), 61–69, 70, 73, 95, 98, 188; Inés’s perspective on, 109. See also Dara (daughter of Inés); Inés God: confrontation with, 233, 234, 241 (see also religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering); as patron, 182, 183

Godson, Roy, 144n3 González González, José, Lo negro del Negro Durazo (The Blackness of Black Durazo), 151–54, 209 gossip (chisme): about elite, 130–31; eliciting in interview, 53–74; and hearsay, 57n8, 61, 63, 126n22; refusal of, 61, 63. See also hearsay public; rumor(s) Great American Boycott, 43–44. See also immigrants’ rights movement, 2006 gringos, 75–77, 75n2, 82; interaction with Mexicans, 76–77, 80; as mediators, 75–76; and right of crossing, 46; stereotype of, 77 Guatemala, 93, 96 Habermas, Jürgen, on bourgeois public sphere, 68–70, 68t, 69 harassment. See under police hearsay public: appropriates power to pass, 197–222; chronotope of, 117– 23, 219, 220, 221; corridos as medium for, 197–222; corridos’ public as, 206n14, 209, 215, 218; as dead “they,” 229; and death, 223– 47; and earwitness, 123–27; ethics of, 23, 122–23, 123n18, 141, 208, 223, 227n18, 229, 235, 246–47, 250; as everywhere, 241– 42; frames interview, 224– 47; and Inés’s “I,” 70–72, 74; and limits, 222, 229 (see also limit[s]); pícaro and, 117; as pueblo, 8– 9, 8n10, 209, 218, 250; street as river of, 214–15, 241– 42; and third person, 22, 56–57, 58– 59, 124– 25, 126, 209– 10; Tijuana’s, 223–47; as unreliable, 58; vindication of, 154, 218; and “we,” 136. See also dicen (they say); pueblo (the people); rumor(s); se dice (it is said); third person (in grammar) Hegel, Georg, 17, 246n23 Heidegger, Martin, 126n22

Index

here/there (binomial contrast). See Tijuana: in contrast to southern Mexico Hill, Jane, 208 hills: described, as emblem of urban poverty, vii–viii, xii, xiii, 122, 129n28, 239, 245; as site of migrants’ death, 42–45, 43n19, 43n20, 51, 238–29. See also colonias populares (workingclass districts); death; poor honor, 58, 69, 72n23, 94, 177. See also citizenship; “I”; publicity, liberal households, ix “I”: becomes “they,” 121–22, 228, 229; as a citation, 71; of clase media, 7, 11, 22, 106, 107, 159, 173, 226 (see also “we”); of Dara, 92, 108; death annuls, 238; desires madness, 238; empty or hollow, 9, 126n23, 132, 226, 229; of expert vs. pícaro, 115–17, 135; fetishism of, 70–71, 192–93, 249–50; of frontier myth, 99; independence of, 107, 108, 188; of Inés, 53–74, 96, 96n12, 108, 193; of me consta, 58, 124, 152, 153, 156, 159, 193, 208 (see also individual pronouns); and the Mexican state, 154–55; politician’s, 185; as status marker, 84, 115, 152; tijuanense, 101; vulnerability of, 59–60; and “we”s, vii–viii, 4, 12, 21; of witness, 123–24; and “you,” 134, 158, 225. See also dialogism; me consta (I vouch for it); subjectivity; “we”; “you” identification (ID): as defense, 187; driver’s license as, 82–83; as fetish, 179, 180, 193; functions of, 187–88; lack of, among poor, 175–76; sticker as, 183–84; voter’s, 184. See also border (frontera); documents; fetish(es); fetishism; identity; poor; and individual categories identity: destabilized, 227; and passing, 2, 171–96; in visa interview, 162–

[ 285 ]

63. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); identification (ID) “illegal aliens” (mojados), 2, 2n3, 193– 94. See also migrant(s), unauthorized; migration illegality: and death, 227; and lawfulness, 139–40; and lawlessness, 140–41; migrant’s, 221–22; and the pueblo, 218–22. See also bribery, petty; drug trafficking/traffickers; lawlessness “Imagen de Malverde, La” (corrido), 200–202, 203–6, 214, 221. See also Malverde, Jesús immigrant(s), undocumented. See migrant(s), unauthorized immigrants’ rights movement, 2006: boycotts, flyer announcing, 35– 39, 40–41, 40n16; boycotts, poll preceding, 39–41; demonstrations (“mega-marches”), logic of, 44–45; demonstrations, opponents of, 34–35, 39, 41–46; demonstrations, participants in, 41–42, 48. See also Frontera (newspaper) Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 133 Indonesia, comparison with pueblo, 150–51. See also pueblo (the people) Inés, viii, 1, 2, 29, 53–74, 87–112, 223– 24; “I” of, 53–74, 178–79, 225n5; life story of, 93–97; me consta of, 155–56, 159, 177, 178, 192–93, 225n5; on nouveau riche, 128–29; as panista, 149; and police, 3, 177–79; as responsible citizen, 155–56. See also Dara (daughter of Inés); Edith; “I” Informer, 45–48, 50–51 Ingeniero (Engineer; professional title), as status marker, 77, 78. See also education; elitism International Monetary Fund (IMF), 147 Internet, 5, 114, 202–3. See also mass media

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Index

interview: Dara’s SENTRI, 171–72, 172n1, 179; for visa, 161–69. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); ports of entry Irvine, Judith, 208, 209 Jakobson, Roman, 202n10 “Jefe de Jefes” (corrido), 217–18 journalists. See press Juárez, Ciudad (Chihuahua), and Tijuana, 7n8, 18–19. See also Tijuana Kafka, Franz, parable by, 48–50 Katz, Friedrich, 99 Kenny, Michael, 182n13, 201 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 150 Knight, Alan, 146, 147 Lacan, Jacques, 235, 247 language, 5–6; hypercorrect vs. vulgar, 114–17; of marketing, 207, 208 (see also narcocorrido[s]); metaphoric, in assembly plant, 84; as status marker, 5, 84, 114, 160. See also evidentiality; metaphor; narrative(s); performativity; reflexivity; responsibility, for speech; and individual pronouns laser visa. See Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”) Latin America, 9–10, 9n11, 13; independence of, 72n22; liberalism in, 20–21; liberal publicity in, 19–20, 21, 22; vs. United States, 14. See also liberalism, in Latin America law, 72–73, 139, 143–60, 168, 179; clase media and, 144; as fetish, 49, 144, 247; as instrument of elites, 73, 144n2, 156–57; and the Line, 48–52. See also clase media (middle class); fetish(es); fetishism lawfulness, vs. lawlessness, 143–60. See also illegality; lawlessness lawlessness: of corridos, 197, 221; defined, 151, 160; in getting visa,

163 (see also Border Crossing Card [“laser visa”]); vs. illegality, 140; vs. lawfulness, 143–60; and legality, 139; of pueblo, 158–59, 160; in Tijuana, 159. See also drug trafficking/traffickers; illegality; law; Tijuana Leal, Alejandra, 148 legality, and Mexican state, 177. See also law; lawfulness; lawlessness liberalism, in Latin America, 20–21. See also neoliberalization; publicity, liberal limit(s), 3–4; absence of, 211, 215, 219; border and, 3–4, 15, 17, 222, 250; death as, 3, 228–30; of equality, 78– 79; hearsay public and, 244–45; of meaning, 223, 228, 230–31, 232, 233, 235, 237–39, 243, 247. See also border (Frontera); boundaries, social; death Line, the (la Línea), 1, 29–52, 31f, 40; border as, 111; and the law, 48–52; metaphorical, in workplace, 83–84; and status, 30, 34, 133–34; and Tijuana, 46, 51–52. See also border (frontera); San Ysidro Port of Entry Lomnitz, Claudio, 70, 145n4, 146, 147, 155 lynchings, in Mexico, 151. See also lawlessness; pueblo (the people); violence malandro (criminal tough), as stereotype, 187, 187n16, 189–90 Malverde, Jesús: death of, 201, 214; as miraculous, 200–206, 204f, 221, 236n14. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); narcocorrido(s) Manager, of assembly plant, 75–85, 154–55. See also assembly plant; Tijuana; tijuanense(s) maquiladora (assembly plant), 100n14, 101n19. See also assembly plant marketing, language of, 207–8. See also language; narcocorrido(s) martyrdom, 232–33, 243, 246. See also

Index

death; religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering; violence Mason(s), 61, 61n12, 66. See also elitism mass media: coverage of May 1 demonstrations, 41; and cult of Malverde, 202–3 (see also Malverde, Jesús); and face-to-face settings, 21; power of, 209; printed word in, 58. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); Frontera (newspaper); Internet; narcocorrido(s); newspaper(s) Mauricio (Inés’s husband), 95, 96–97. See also Dara (daughter of Inés); Gil (Inés’s son); Inés May 1 boycott. See immigrants’ rights movement, 2006 May 1 demonstrations. See immigrants’ rights movement, 2006 Mazzarella, William, 146 McCarthy, Cormac, 150 me consta (I vouch for it), 152, 153, 156, 159, 161; business card proves, 189; of patron, 190–94; politician’s, 185; vs. se dice (it is said), 139, 154, 160. See also “I”; Inés; publicity, liberal mediator(s), 179; Dara as, 92; Dorotea as, 180, 181; gringo as, 76; Manager as, 75; patrons as, 180, 183. See also Manager, of assembly plant; patron(s) metaphor: barda (fence) as, 111; border as, 4, 15, 82; death as, 229; table as, for equality, 79; wall as, 92, 110–12. See also language Mexican-American war, 13, 15, 17. See also Mexico; United States Mexican Revolution, 2, 2n4, 146–47, 180 Mexico: border as, 12; “cheap labor” from, 134; as of clase media or pueblo, 144–49; corruption in, 149–50; geography of, 239; income in, 10n15; as “lawless,” 149–54; neoliberalism’s effects in, 72–73, 91, 147–49; in relation to United States,

[ 287 ]

13–17, 23, 77, 126–27, 195–96; split public sphere in, 70, 70n18; Tijuana and, 107, 118–20, 214; violence in, 149, 151. See also clase media (middle class); poor; pueblo (the people); South (of Mexico), opposed to Tijuana; United States Mexico City, 95, 97, 107n28, 174n5; amparo (protection) in, 174–75n6; compared with Ciudad Juárez, 18; compared with Tijuana, 77–78, 101– 2, 101–2n20, 108, 109, 230–31, 237, 240–41; corruption in, 151; exposé set in, 152–54; and ghosts, 237; Inés in, 95, 97; intellectuals from, 18; Mrs. E in, 230, 233–34, 240; as South, 77–78, 77n5; US occupation of, 13. See also Mexico; Tijuana Michoacán, 100, 203n12 middle class: easily obtain visa, 169; as floating, 106; meaning of, 145; passage into, 240–41. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); clase media (middle class) migrant(s), unauthorized, 2n3, 33n6, 40–41n16, 80, 100, 154; at border fence, 193; as death, 246; death of, 8, 228 (see also death; Sonoran Desert, migrant deaths in); distinction from, 81–82, 132–33, 178; vs. documented, 22, 27, 32–33, 35, 40, 41, 43–44, 43n19, 45, 47, 49, 50, 132–34; and drug trafficker, 220–22; as earwitness, 125; hostile treatment of, 16–17, 30; identification with, as death, 227, 244, 246 (see also death); as illegitimate, 134; Mexican Americans mistaken for, 16; Mexicans stereotyped as, 15, 15n25, 50, 174; within Mexico, 81, 99–100, 101, 103n25, 127, 134, 214; “not Tijuana,” 47; as pícaro, 116, 125, 132; the poor as, 10, 236; in potentia, 139, 161, 163, 165, 168, 169, 173–74; as pueblo, 11, 218–22, 226–27, 244; rejection of, at

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Index

migrant(s), unauthorized (continued) border, 7–8n9, 32, 169; stereotyped, 43, 81, 122, 173, 174, 187–88, 236; stories of, 28, 124–25, 223–47; and trafficker, 221. See also caminando para conocer (walking to learn/experience); death; pueblo (the people) migration: as caminando para conocer, 122, 122n17; and death, anecdotes of, 223–47 (see also death; violence); as suffering, 239–40; as upward mobility, 244. See also border (frontera); caminando para conocer (walking to learn/experience); migrant(s), unauthorized; pass/passing mimicry, 103; vs. authenticity, 10; in Mexico, 14–15, 14n22, 17, 136, 195 mobility, upward, 145; of Dorotea, 180–82, 181n11 (see also Dorotea [Eduardo’s grandmother]); migration as, 244; in Tijuana, 89–90, 91, 92–93, 92n7, 96, 101–2, 129, 164, 165, 180–82, 240–41. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); clase media (middle class); middle class; pass/passing; Tijuana mojado (“illegal alien”), 193–94. See also migrant(s), unauthorized money, 127–28; Inés and Dara on, 105, 128–29; and status (Elias, Weber), 104–5; and status, fails to deliver, 111, 111n33 morality: Edith’s, 84–85, 156; Inés’s, 73, 155–56. See also Edith; Inés morenos (dark people), 187n16. See also race/racism Mrs. E, 223–47, 250 Muir, Sarah, 149n11 musicality, of corridos, 199–200. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) musicians, and traffickers, 209. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); narcocorrido(s) myth: of frontier, 97–101, 107; of Mexican Revolution, 147; of middle

class, in United States, 99; of Orpheus, 238, 239; of public space, 213. See also clase media (middle class); United States narcocorrido(s), 197–222; parallels with xaxaar, 208–9; and religion, 200–203. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); hearsay public; pueblo (the people) narrative(s), 6; of children’s deaths, 223–47 (see also death); corridos showcase, 199–200; death as aim of, 226, 228–29; Inés’s, 53–74; lifehistory as, 116; Mrs. E’s, 223–47. See also hearsay public National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), 144n3 nation-state, 12n19, 13, 159, 250; middle class and dependent, 145. See also clase media (middle class); hearsay public; publicity, liberal; pueblo (the people); state; state, Mexican; state, US; “we” negativity, 9, 16–17, 20, 22–23, 141, 223–47. See also death; fetish(es); “other” neoliberalization, 2, 72–73, 91, 147–49, 199 New Mexico, 16, 16n26 news: corridos as source of, 198, 215, 218–19; mockery of, 209–12. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); Frontera (newspaper); narcocorrido(s); truth, of the pueblo; Zeta (newspaper) newspaper(s), 60, 39n14, 215; poll, 39– 41, 39n14, 70n18, 197–98. See also Frontera (newspaper); mass media; news; Zeta (newspaper) Nigeria, crisis of representation in, 106–7, 108 nonimmigrant, 161, 171; vs. possible immigrant, 161–62. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”)

Index

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 147 Oaxaca, 10, 122, 231n10, 239, 241 officer(s): as doorkeeper, 112; immigration, 1, 1n1, 30–32, 46n24, 50; immigration, in corridos, 200, 218–19; immigration, shootings by, 174, 174n4; police, 155–60, 156n14; as psychologists, 171, 178; at SENTRI interview, 172–73, 179; US consular, 164–68. See also doorkeeper; police; shooting(s); soldiers, military Operation Gatekeeper, 3, 173, 194n22 Orpheus, myth of, 238, 239. See also myth Otay Mesa Port of Entry, 2, 194n22 “other,” 228, 246; death and, 235, 236, 242, 244, 246–47; undocumented as, 30. See also individual pronouns overhearing, 169, 215–16, 224–25; of corridos, 202–4, 209, 210; within corridos, 221; of gossip, 130–31; and third person/earwitness, 124–27. See also earwitness(es); hearsay public; third person (in grammar); witness palanca (mediator), 182–83, 188. See also mediator(s); patron(s) paper(s). See documents; identification (ID) Paredes, Américo, on roots of corrido, 197–98 Partido Acción Nacional, National Action Party (PAN), 148, 149, 150, 181 Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), “Party of the Democratic Revolution,” 149 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), “Institutional Revolutionary Party,” 147–49, 150 pass/passing, 85, 110; card as, 184; earwitness and, 124; as a good, 174–75, 183; and identity, 3, 84, 136; liberal

[ 289 ]

publicity and, 84; meaning of, 3; onset of, 110–11; of poor vs. middle class, 189–90, 236, 240–41; power to, 140, 167, 175–76, 179, 193–94, 196; prohibition of, 221–22; before state, viii, 1–5, 171–96; Tijuana as city of, 46, 236 (see also Tijuana); and upward mobility, 87–112, 127–31 (see also mobility, upward). See also clase media (middle class); poor; pueblo (the people); state; state, Mexican; state, US passport, US, 167, 172n2, 189n19. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); business card (tarjeta de presentación); identification (ID) password (clave), 191, 192. See also identification (ID) patron(s): as fetishes, 179n9, 183, 185, 188 (see also fetish[es]; fetishism); relations with client, 180, 181–84, 182n13, 185, 203, 204, 215; religious, 201–2 (see also Malverde, Jesús); as sources of security, 183, 190–94. See also corporativism; fetish(es); fetishism Paz, Alejandro, 8n10 performativity, 5–6, 6n7, 70, 72, 90– 92, 136; of hearsay, 123n18, 125, 130. See also language photography: exhibit/competition, 61–62, 64–67, 68; exhibit/competition, as political ritual, 69; as hobby, 47, 48, 98; of the Line, 31f pícaro(s), 125, 129, 132; entrepreneur as, 114–17; “I” of, 121. See also hearsay public; migrant(s), unauthorized police, 154–60; as corrupt, 155–57; defenses against, 176–79, 185–88 (see also business card [tarjeta de presentación]; identification [ID]); as delinquents, 151–54; at demonstration, 41, 42; discriminate against lower classes, 11, 156–58, 157n15, 174; in Habermas’s schema, 68t;

[ 290 ]

Index

police (continued) harassment by, 187, 187n17, 190–92; Inés deals with, 3, 177–79; killings by, 151–54, 174n4; as pueblo, 158, 177; violence of, at border, 174–75. See also state; state, Mexican politics: campaigns for office, 184–87; partisan, ix, x, 11n17, 107, 148–49, 180–81, 181n11, 184–86, 198n2; tijuanense, 58, 59. See also back stage, of politics and elite; elections; front stage, of politics and elite; and individual party names poll, 39–41. See also newspaper(s) polleros (smugglers), 82, 100, 100n16, 101. See also coyote(s) poor, 10, 11n18, 129; conflated with migrants, 174, 187, 236; criminalization of, 158–59; lack official IDs, 175; as “nobodies,” 175–76, 178; target of police extortion, 156–57; victimization of, 157–59. See also pueblo (the people) ports of entry, 1, 1n1, 2, 30–32, 189n19, 200; corrido in, 219; as scene of ritual, 173; SENTRI and visa interviews conducted at, 172n1; vulnerability at, 176, 189; wall as flipside of, 194. See also San Ysidro Port of Entry; and other port names Povinelli, Elizabeth, 68 prejudice(s). See poor; pueblo (the people); race/racism; stereotypes press: dispute with hearsay public, 207–8, 213, 217; indiscretion of, 57–60, 66n16. See also Frontera (newspaper); hearsay public; “I”; mass media; newspaper(s); Zeta (newspaper) Proposition 187 (CA), 194n22 publicity, liberal: contradictions of, 75–85; and fetishism, 19–24; in Latin America, 20–21; and middleness, 97; and passing, 85; as “performative dispensation,” 68–69; and rational

debate, 68–74, 80, 81, 82, 98; ways beyond, 250. See also clase media (middle class); liberalism, in Latin America publics: defined, 5–7; two, in Tijuana, 5–12, 35, 160, 249–50. See also clase media (middle class); hearsay public; publicity, liberal; pueblo (the people); “we” public sphere: and fetishism, 19–24; Habermas’s theory of, 68–70, 68t pueblo (the people), 2–3, 2n4, 3n5, 20; and clase media, 2–3, 9, 144–49, 159–60, 249–50; and clase media, before the law, 143–60; criminalization of, 158–59; and drug trafficking, 215–16 (see also drug trafficking/ traffickers); González as member of, 153–54; as hearsay public, 8–9, 8n10, 209, 218, 250; historically in Mexico, 144–49, 151; and petty bribery, 157– 60; splits state and nation, 159; takes shape through corridos, 197–222; target of police extortion, 156–57; victimization of, 157–59; “we” of, 153–54. See also hearsay public; migrant(s), unauthorized; poor race/racism, 3, 10, 11, 11n16, 14n23, 16, 65, 67, 152–53, 153n13, 187, 187n16, 189–90; in assembly plant, 78, 82–85; and “illegal aliens,” 7–8n9, 139, 173, 195; indiosincrasia, 114n3; in plantation society, 94. See also status: social; stereotypes Rafael, Vicente, 23, 126, 126n22, 136, 143, 227, 227n6 Ragland, Cathy, 220–21 Ramos, Samuel, 146 Rancière, Jacques, 43–44, 66 recognition, social, 67, 73–74, 132, 176, 190; grounds of, 103, 105, 127; imperative to, as maxim, 62, 67–69, 94; in interaction, 3, 6, 23, 27, 90, 104, 109; of pueblo, 2, 8, 159, 211;

Index

search for, 112; by US actors, 74, 81. See also status recognition, state, 11, 13, 23, 112, 175–76, 186, 190; demanded by undocumented, 44, 50; desire for, 172, 179; eschewed, 8, 121, 151, 168; ID and, 184; ratifies social status, 30, 82, 134, 136, 163, 168; tokens of, 181 (see also token[s]); in visa interview, 161– 69. See also state; state, Mexican; state, US Redfield, Robert, 13–14, 15, 19, 198 reflexivity, 6, 39, 45, 63, 74, 131, 160, 203n12; of hearsay, 160, 197, 211, 218, 220, 221; of “we,” 5, 37–38. See also dicen (they say); evidentiality; language; se dice (it is said) reinvention, of self, to get visa, 163– 64. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”) religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering, 232–33, 243, 246. See also God; Malverde, Jesús; saint(s) reported speech, 211. See also dicen (they say); evidentiality; reflexivity; se dice (it is said) responsibility, for speech, 27–28, 58, 117, 124n20, 152, 208–9, 211. See also “I”; publicity, liberal retablos (paintings at religious shrines), 203, 203n12. See also Malverde, Jesús Rosas, Gilberto, 187n17 Ruffo Appel, Ernesto, 107, 110 Rulfo, Juan, 150 rumor(s), 8n10, 136, 151, 226–27; as agent of wishfulness, 126; power of, 123n18; as repetition, 135. See also gossip (chisme); hearsay public saint(s): as fetish, 182–83; as patrons, 201–3, 221. See also patron(s); religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering; shrine(s) Salazar, Susana, 54–55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66n15

[ 291 ]

Salinas, Carlos, 54 San Antonio, TX, 200, 205 Sánchez, Chalino, 199 Sánchez, Rafael, 72, 73, 107, 110 San Diego, CA, 9, 17, 47, 47n25, 113, 150, 168, 245; affluence of, 17n27, 18–19; and border policing, 133; commuting to, 132, 132n31; consumption in, 7, 169, 171; relationship with Tijuana, 117; and status, 81, 112, 168, 196. See also status: sign(s) of San Ysidro Port of Entry: described, 29–30, 30n2; May 1 demonstration shuts down, 41; photographs of, 31f; privilege to cross, 46, 46n24; as spectacle of legal passage, 2. See also ports of entry scapular, 200, 205, 236. See also fetish(es); religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection (SENTRI), 82, 82n10, 171–72, 194n22. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”) security: patrons as source of, 183; public crisis in, 149, 151. See also patron(s) security guard(s), 29–30, 84, 119n13. See also doorkeeper; officer(s); police se dice (it is said), 242; in corridos, 209–12, 218 (see also corrido[s]); corridos’ public of, 204 (see also Malverde, Jesús); frames interview, 224–47; vs. me consta (I vouch for it), 139, 154, 160. See also dicen (they say); third person (in grammar) Senegal, xaxaar ceremony in, 208–9 shooting(s): by officers, 174, 201; on street, 207, 212, 214–15, 236. See also officer(s); police shrine(s): daughter as, 241; song as, 202–3; various forms of, to Malverde, 202–5, 204f, 221. See also religion, Catholic, supplies plots for suffering; saint(s)

[ 292 ]

Index

Siegel, James, 112, 134, 150–51 Silverstein, Michael, 6 Sinaloa, 200n7, 201, 203, 220 soccer, 46–48, 77, 79, 81 social climbing. See mobility, upward; Tijuana soldiers, military, 158; at checkpoints, 178, 187, 191–92; ex-marine, 194; as police, 174. See also officer(s); police songs, 140–41. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) Sonoran Desert, migrant deaths in, 8, 23, 122–23. See also death; migrant(s), unauthorized; state, Mexican South (of Mexico), opposed to Tijuana, 18, 19, 47, 64–65, 66–67, 78, 79, 95, 106, 108, 119, 119n13, 150, 230, 237, 241. See also Tijuana state, 12n19; and criminal, 143–44; fetishized, 173, 179, 183, 193; in Habermas’s schema, 68t; in Inés’ narrative, 70t. See also nation-state; recognition, state; state, Mexican; state, US state, Mexican: accountability of, 154–55; authority of, 139, 140, 193; and corporativism, 20, 41, 72, 102, 147, 179; as corrupt, 19, 149–50, 154– 55, 158; and criminal(s), 143–44; as doorkeeper, 49n27; as “failed,” 150; fights corruption, 159; “I” and, 154–57, 193; as issuer of fetishized tokens, 140, 195; legality and, 177; “papers” essential in, 11, 175; and political mediation, 180–84; pueblo and, 144–49, 151, 154, 157–60, 199, 218, 221; and social difference, 72n23, 183; as source of violence, 151, 166, 174, 175–76; Tijuana and, 73, 107, 108; ward of, 245–46. See also citizenship; nation-state; police; recognition, state; state; state, US; Tijuana state, US: abuse of visa applicants,

167; as arbiter of status, 30, 80, 82, 149–50, 163, 169, 175; authority of, 139, 172, 173; evaded, 218–22; as fetish, 22, 22n33, 48–52, 179, 193, 249; as grantor of visa, 161–69; intimacy with Mexican citizen, 50; “I”s and, 11, 22; as patron, 174 (see also patron[s]); as source of commodities, 102, 102n21, 169, 241; as source of violence, 8, 174, 174n4. See also border (frontera); Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); nationstate; recognition, state; state; state, Mexican status, 16, 103–4, 193: within assembly plant, 84–85; business card as sign of, 176, 188–89, 190; citizenship as sign of, 175; class, 9–11, 84, 87–88n1, 162–63; as community leader, 180; companion as sign of, 176–77; country club as sign of, 110–11, 127–29 (see also country club, in Tijuana); documented vs. undocumented, 43, 43n19, 51; driver’s license as sign of, 82; education as sign of, 66, 66n14, 152; equal, 78–81; falls away, 65–67, 81; fixed, 61–68, 104–5 (see also fixity); in flux, 103; ID as, 184; legal, 34, 34n9, 176–77; within mafia, 192; material possessions as sign of, 240–41; as Mexican citizen, 82; middle-class, 105–6, 159 (see also clase media [middle class]); mixed, 95–96, 105–6, 132–35; money as sign of, 104–5; as nonimmigrant, 171; profession as sign of, 77, 78, 162, 167, 218; sign(s) of, viii, 103–5, 190; slide, 109; social, 11, 12, 34, 109, 135, 161– 62, 163, 190, 195; socioeconomic, 29–30, 53; striving toward, 178 (see also mobility, upward); tijuanense, 67; visa as sign of, 7–8, 30, 33, 34, 133–34, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 171, 174. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); elitism; identification

Index

(ID); recognition, social; recognition, state stereotypes: of gringos, 77; of Mexican, as “illegal alien,” 14–15n25, 50, 139; of migrants, 43, 81, 122; of the poor, 187, 236; of Tijuana, 7–8, 7n8, 9, 17, 157, 157n50. See also malandro (criminal tough), as stereotype; Mexico; migrant(s), unauthorized; myth: of frontier; poor; race/ racism; Tijuana sticker, as token, 181–82, 182f. See also fetish(es); fetishism; identification (ID) St. John, Rachel, 18 stone, as martyrdom, 230–36, 242, 246 subjectivity: collective, 22, 32, 68, 154, 227; defined, 5, 5n6; individual, 98, 169; and publics, 5, 5n6, 8, 9; third person and, 127, 135–36. See also clase media (middle class); “I”; pueblo (the people); “we” substitution(s), 7, 23, 226, 234, 237; chain of, 48, 140, 179, 182, 183, 193. See also fetish(es) supplement, 18, 20, 22, 120; “I” as, 71; patrons as, 184–85, 190; visa as, 34, 46, 172. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); fetish(es); patron(s); state survival, as ethical problem, 123, 229– 30, 235, 246. See also death; hearsay public Tapachula (Chiapas), 93, 94, 95, 105 Taussig, Michael, 143, 173, 183, 200 Tepoztlán (Morelos), 198 Texas, annexation of, by United States, 13 “they say.” See dicen (they say) third person (in grammar): becomes “us,” 119; dwelling in, 131; and hearsay public, 23, 56, 119, 121, 210, 226; “I” becomes, 121–22, 134, 228, 229; power of, 221, 226, 229; pueblo

[ 293 ]

as, 209–10 (see also pueblo [the people]); and subjectivity, 22, 48, 125, 127; as witness, 123, 124, 125. See also dicen (they say); hearsay public; “I”; se dice (it is said); “we” Tigres del Norte, Los (corrido singers), 199, 206, 217, 218, 220. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) Tijuana, xii–xiii; as American Dream, 97, 107; anomie in, 102–3; appearances in, 109; as bicultural “third nation,” 34n9; capitalist origins of, 99, 118; La Chapu (wealthy district of ), 88, 89, 92; as city of passing, 236; and Ciudad Juárez, 7n8, 18–19; colonias populares (working class districts) of, 10, 89, 94n9, 102, 102n23, 180, 245; in contrast to southern Mexico, 18, 19, 47, 64–65, 81, 150, 230, 237, 239 (see also South [of Mexico], opposed to Tijuana); country club in, 91–93, 109, 110–11, 121 (see also elitism); country club in, accessibility of, 123, 129; country club in, description of, 123, 128, 130, 131; country club in, parallels with border, 111, 134; and democracy, 107, 148; described, 18, 118–21; documented vs. undocumented in, 49–50, 51 (see also migrant[s], unauthorized); dress (sartorial) in, 108; drug traffickers in, 91, 91n4, 103n24, 109–10, 110n31, 174n4, 211–12, 214, 226 (see also drug trafficking/ traffickers); floating population in, 100–101, 239–40; as frontier society, 98, 107; hearsay public of, 223–47; high income in, 10n15, 88, 89, 91–92; as lawless, 150, 159, 245; map of, 89f; as Mexico, 119–21, 214; migrants in, 99–101, 103n25; migration to, 239– 40; military checkpoints in, 178–79; as North, 78 (see also South [of Mexico], opposed to Tijuana); old families of, 53–68, 105, 118; police

[ 294 ]

Index

Tijuana (continued) practices in, 174n5, 177–79 (see also border [frontera]; violence); printed word in, 58; repetition in, 223–24, 227; right to represent, 45–46, 57; stereotype of, 7, 17, 17n27, 150; as supplement, 18, 120; suspended between United States and the South, 19, 106; symbolizes death, 230–31, 239 (see also death); as target of vituperation, 17, 18, 19; tour of, 88–93 (see also Dara [daughter of Inés]); two publics in, 6, 10, 23, 35, 67, 77, 78, 80, 246; and United States, 193, 245, 249–50 (see also United States); and upward mobility, 99–102, 241; wages in, 101–2. See also border (frontera); clase media (middle class); pueblo (the people) tijuaneado, 245 tijuanense(s), 77; challenged, 53–74; dominance of, 29–52, 65, 66, 245; Manager as, 80; privileges of, 112; society described, 130; as “we,” 81. See also clase media (middle class); elitism; Tijuana tijuaneros, 245 Tlatelolco, massacre at (1968), 147 token(s), 179; assuring safe passage in Tijuana, 173–96; business card as, 184–90, 186f; corrido as, 204–5 (see also Malverde, Jesús); as fetishes, 140; and identification, 184, 189n18, 193; sticker as, 181–82, 182f; stone as, 236. See also fetish(es); fetishism; identification (ID); pass/passing “Tres de Zacatecas, Los” (corrido), 218–19, 220, 221–22. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) Trilling, Lionel, 173 truth, of the pueblo, 215–18. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]); pueblo (the people) Tucanes de Tijuana, Los (corrido

singers), 5, 191, 207–8, 210, 213, 217, 220. See also corrido(s) (ballad[s]) Turner, Frederick Jackson, as source of frontier myth, 98–99 United States: access to, ix, 81, 163–68; access to, Dara’s (SENTRI), 171–72; anti-immigrant sentiment in, 139, 174n5; concern with authenticity, 173 (see also visa, and right to enter United States); as fetish, 167, 168, 169, 173, 193, 195–96; and Mexico, 4, 13–17, 50, 51, 76–77, 81, 85, 126–27, 128n26, 194, 195, 244, 249–50; on Mexico, 149–50; as object of overhearing, 126; permanent residency in, 34n9, 40n16, 132–33, 132n31; power of, 77, 112, 168–69, 194, 195, 196, 249; as source of commodities, 102, 102n21, 169, 241. See also border (frontera); Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); Line, the (la Línea); Mexico; state, US upper class (clase alta), 105. See also aristocracy; gente decente (upper class) Urban, Greg, 37 urbanization, 10, 10n12, 102–3, 245. See also colonias populares (workingclass districts) US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 1n1, 30. See also Border Patrol; doorkeeper; officer(s); police US Department of Homeland Security, 51 US Department of State, 46n24 Van Gennep, Arnold, 173 Venezuela, independence movement in, 72, 107 Vila, Pablo, 4 violence, xi, 16, 166; at border, 174– 75; in Mexico, 143–44, 144n2, 149, 151, 214–15 (see also Mexico);

Index

of police, 11n17; in settlement of colonia popular, 180. See also border (frontera); police; state, Mexican; state, US visa, and right to enter United States, 46n24. See also Border Crossing Card (“laser visa”); United States: permanent residency in wages, in Tijuana, 81, 101–2. See also money; Tijuana; wealth wall(s): instituting class divisions, 11–12, 92; and Port, border as, 173, 194–96. See also barda (fence); border (frontera); boundaries, social Warner, Michael, 6, 8n10 “we,” viii, 4, 6–7, 17, 23, 30, 32–52, 81, 119, 126, 136, 165, 244, 246; becomes third person, 8, 48, 210 (see also third person [in grammar]); of clase media and pueblo, 2, 249; and death, 227; in Declaration of Independence, 37, 47, 77; documented and undocumented, 43, 51; implicit, 214–15; in liberalism, 21; marginalized, 8, 12, 17, 37–39, 45, 158; massmediated vs. face-to-face, 21; vs. “them,” 37, 46, 47, 77, 80, 81, 249; of Tijuana, 51, 119; tijuanense, 81. See also clase media (middle class);

[ 295 ]

publicity, liberal; and individual pronouns wealth, 104–5. See also elites; money Weber, Max, 105 Weber, Samuel, 15, 15n24 Wilma: attitudes toward United States, 169, 229, 229n8; “entonces, sí” of, 229, 245; and visa, 168–69 witness: of death, 229–30; Gerardo as, 115; impossible, 228; “I” of, 124–25; meaning of, 123; “second order,” 124–25; and third person, 125. See also earwitness(es) Wolf, Eric, 183, 201 World Bank, 148 ya (already), in Malverde’s chronotope, 205–6, 214, 221 “you,” 242; death of, 226; generalized, 120, 121; and “I,” 134, 158, 210. See also language; third person (in grammar); and individual pronouns YouTube, as religious shrine, 202–3. See also Malverde, Jesús Zacatecas, 116 Zapatistas, 47, 48n26 Zeta (newspaper), 206–7, 208, 209. See also mass media; newspaper(s) Žižek, Slavoj, 179n9