Who We Are

It might be counter-intuitive, but still worth re-stating: there are thousands of things yet to be said, written, thought, imaged, deconstructed, invented, embodied, represented, known, or debated about the borders along the US-Mexico national divide.

Although multiple bodies of work anchor the intellectual project of representing, knowing, and understanding the border and the various forms of gendered, political, sexual, economic, folkloric, historical and expressive cultural productions and consumptions that it generates and that in turn generate "it," for every well-honed metaphor or empirical assertion, dozens of surreptitious acts, words, images, stories, schemes, and other inventive re-workings of borderland experiences and meanings appear and re-appear across the elastic geo-cultural landscape in which the border "happens" -- namely the Southwest, Aztlan, el norte de Mexico, the southern boundary, the frontier, the desert country, an open wound, the third country, the margin, la línea, etc.

Alternatively illuminating and burdening, these happenings of border-life and consciousness can be apprehended as "performances" of everyday life (at panaderias and curio shops, at the movies, in the evening news, at immigration detention centers, at cantinas and taco stands, through deportations and appropriations, in classrooms and bookstores, across make-shift art galleries and storefront cabarets, at tire shops and backyard barbeques, by means of helicopters and legislation). These border-line performances (pace marginal or peripheral) can be examined, as Javier Duran among others has recently suggested, as tools to tease the paradoxes and tensions of nationalist projects ("repensar el centro") and not in the typical direction that so many core-to-periphery readings of the border region have promoted.

Faculty and students at the University of Arizona, in a variety of disciplines and under a wide range of theoretical orientations, have been involved for decades in documenting and theorizing these cultural exchanges. The immediacy in Southern Arizona of a nexus of state operations that Timothy Dunn has called a "military-like machine of low-intensity conflict" makes such inquiries ever more earnest, desirable, necessary, and instructive. The social sciences have yielded their fair share of data to help us unpack these complex dynamics: from geography, anthropology, history, psychology, education, and economics we have learned how to apprehend borders as thickly-layered formations. The humanities weight in, as well, to this critical project. It is through language, aesthetics, stories, memory, beliefs, sounds, crafts, rituals, and imaginations - in other words, by paying attention to the symbolic raw material of which all forms of representations are made-that anything and everything border-linked and border-engendered "makes sense" or militates against "reason," as the case may be.

The purpose of the Border Cultures and Performances Working Group is to create a space, among U of A faculty and students, to extend and deepen these dialogues - first, among ourselves as an intellectual community, and secondly, with others outside the University who have much to contribute to the critical project.