“We’re Mexican Too”: Publicity and Status at the International Line
The Public at the Line
In Tijuana the “International Line” is not the border per se. Rather, la Línea refers to San Ysidro, the city’s main port of entry between Mexico and the United States, and to the area just south. It refers to the area that borders on the border, where the line forms to cross north. I have heard it speculated that la Línea is a bilingual pun summing up the border condition: two meanings sharing one word, one in Spanish and one borrowed from English. Neither meaning quite explains the name. Properly, la Línea could indeed refer to the international boundary, as in the phrase la línea divisoria, “the dividing line” — but in Tijuana the word is not commonly used or even understood in this sense. As a loan from English, it refers to the lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to cross. People ask, for example, if there is a lot of línea: is the line long? But I have never heard the word used to speak of a queue in any other context. Línea’s two meanings, 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 two are reduced to the point where they cross, as when my elderly roommate drew me a map of the port of entry and environs. “Let’s see,” I said, confused about which way the boundary ran and then, stumbling, not finding a word for it: “Here, where the, 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-person booths at which the U.S. immigration officers sit. For one who dwells here, the meaning of the border may be condensed to this point: the Line, prohibition and passage, a momentary confrontation, the perpetually repeated surrender of oneself and one’s documents for inspection to the representatives of the United States.
The Line is a busy place. The 110,000 crossings daily (110,000 presentations of visas, green cards, IDs; 110,000 of these muted exchanges, sometimes nothing more than a nod from the officer to pass one through) make San Ysidro likely the most-traveled port of entry in the world ( Blum 2007). The port is designed to handle twenty-four lanes of crossing vehicular traffic, and even so the wait can be longer than two hours. The hustle is relentless and stifled. Cars idle, pedestrians shuffle forward, but all watch for the break that could make up another moment of waiting. Women run to beat others to the end of the line. A split-second laxity and another car has merged in front of you. In this dull tension, one would seem to rub shoulders with every social type imaginable: businesspeople, homeless people, housewives, gangsters, schoolchildren, church groups, construction workers, competition bikers, families on holiday, and so on indefinitely. Even as the crossers edge forward, keeping tabs on one another out of the corners of their eyes, they are themselves the spectacle of the Line — for instance, on postcards (see figs. 1 – 2), in hourly radio reports on their numbers, or on their own television channel, where surveillance-style takes of them are broadcast twenty-four hours a day.
To understand the Line’s significance for public culture in Tijuana, though, this essay does not focus on the colorful everyday sociality there. Instead, the ethnographic examples are drawn from one unprecedented day on which the Line was left virtually desolate, the lanes of traffic empty, the pedestrian crossers straggling through: May 1, 2006, when local involvement in the U.S. movement for immigrants’ rights succeeded in briefly shutting down the port of entry (see figs. 3 – 4). This conflictive act brought into relief a number of deeply rooted notions about the social world of the border. The Line emerges not just as the emblem of an entire vision of Tijuana but as the key site where that vision makes itself institutionally real — the version of “the public” able to establish relative dominance over and via this site also orders society far beyond the Line itself.
This dominant version of the tijuanense public reproduces itself, interpellates individuals into its imaginary, across a range of sites and genres of public communication, from the circulating texts of the mass media to the public thoroughfare of the Line itself. Michael Warner (2002: 90) has advanced the notion of a public as “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” But discourse circulates only through concrete, institutionally shaped contexts of interaction to which social actors have differential access and in which, given that access, they have different parts to play. For M. M. Bakhtin (1981,1986), the idea of genre indissolubly unites spatiality, temporality, and subjectivity. Thus an understanding of publics as constituted through systems of genres may offer the possibility of a bridge between lines of thought on political public spheres, on physical public space, and on publics as audiences and readerships. The meeting in Town Hall where public authority is disputed is obviously linked to the newspaper that reports on it, which is in turn linked to the talk on the plaza. Each communicative form, in the site to which it is germane and with its correspondent parties to interaction, reproduces variations on a logic of publicity that ultimately is fundamental to the consolidation of a social group: “the public,” however divided by dissent and disagreement, is still the basis of “the people,” a “we” that engages in these particular forms of public communication and interaction.1
The dominant tijuanense public is buttressed by multiple institutionalized practices; it constitutes a standard for public interaction. But as a standard, it is forever engaged in establishing itself against all that is nonstandard, other, “not Tijuana,” because its models for public coherence are precisely those against which Tijuana defines itself. In this, the tijuanense public reproduces conundrums central to the bourgeois public sphere Jürgen Habermas (1989) described: its socioeconomic exclusivity and its conflicted relation to a national state. At the Line, these two conundrums come together with painful force — it is precisely the Habermasian legacy that makes the Line so central to the tijuanense public. But this public depends also on the capacity of circulating discourse to evoke a sense of participation and, eventually, a response. Because the Habermasian model is just that, a model, it is reproduced in situated interaction, in texts, in dialogue, on the street. This makes it vulnerable to contestation. The normativity with which Habermas would endow it appears as an ongoing project, as various actors try to establish its logics of publicity as standard.
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Notes
Versions of this essay were presented at the Internal Seminar of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte’s Department of Cultural Studies, Tijuana, June 4, 2007, and at the Politics, Communications, Society workshop at the University of Chicago, January 23, 2008. I thank the participants at both. I also thank Yuridia Patiño and Ricardo Gradilla for obtaining for me at the last moment the postcards that appear as figures 1 – 2. All errors remain my own.
- I use the term publicity, as a more accurate translation of Habermas’s Öffentlichkeit, to slant understanding away from the spatial metaphor of public sphere and back toward the modalities of publicness.
