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@1 95,.Erik C ~~Alxhts ierved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute
Ugpapera e N~~c iipies of this degument in whole or in part.
JUL 251995
LIBRARIES
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A - sDepartment of Architecture
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Cover images:
Background: Demonstration in Judrez, Mexico (Courtesy of DiarioEl Norte, Judrez).
Inset: From Miller, "On the Border", Geo, Vol. 1, November, 1979, p. 8.
2
Mexico...Space/Nation/Class...US
by
Erik Chia-Kong Mar
Submitted to the Department of Architecture on 12 May, 1995
inpartial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of
Master of Architecture
A
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t
With the much-commented upon shifts inthe global economy and the problematizing of traditional
social, economic, cultural, and political relationships, the role of architecture as a"public" practice
has fallen under scrutiny. The "privatization of public space", resulting from the overt merging
of "public" concerns (typically represented through the State) and "private" interests (in our
society, usually defined by groups with significant power over investment decisions) is often
taken as symptomatic of a general trend towards the breakdown of democracy itself. Here,
however, it isimportant to differentiate between what can be termed the "public sphere", or the
abstract discursive arena where thought is (re)produced and debated, and "public space", or
the actual built spaces of personal encounter among strangers. Certainly, since the
Enlightenment when the terms first acquired widespread currency, the latter has depended
upon some conception of the former. Yet we remain far from a theoretical or philosophical
consensus regarding exactly what constitutes the (necessarily re-formed) public sphere. It
follows, then, that architecture, historically the medium of choice for the public expression of
consensual social paradigms, is,as aprofession, at aloss to define the conceptual parameters
for an appropriate contemporary approach to public design.
This thesis, consisting of two components-a written text and an architectural design-draws
on theoretical debates on the "public sphere" (assuming one still exists as such) inthe definition
of the issues to be addressed inthe contemporary design of "public space". I have used a 1993
design competition co-sponsored by the AlAS and Graphisoft, Inc., entitled "Beyond the Border",
(see appendix 1)as a vehicle for the architectural component of this investigation. The site, a
proposed border crossing near El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, brings into play
many of what I feel to be the central issues-the redefined role of the nation-state, the formation
of community identity, difference, and class-to be addressed in a redefinition of the public
sphere, with consequences for an architecture of public space.
Thesis Supervisor: Ellen Dunham-Jones
Title: Assistant Professor of Architecture
3
a c
k
n
o
w
l e
d
g
e
m
e
n
t
s
to Ellen Dunham-Jones for her interest in and support of this project
and for never ceasing to challenge me with the thorny problem
of reconciling theory and practice
to Stan Anderson for his consistent ability to make me rethink at
the largest level my intentions, method, and results
to Sibel Bozdogan, a constant source of inspiration, for introducing
to me many of the issues raisd by this thesis, and for helping me
find the intellectual framework within which to address them
to Robin Greeley, to paraphrase what someone from the FMLN
once said about the FSLN, porfallarmenunca. For the standards
she sets in work and in life, for her intransigence with regard to
her convictions, for consistently producing the harshest and most
constructive criticism of my work, my gratitude and utmost
respect
to Radhika Bagai, for the photography, inking and unflagging
friendship; certainly without her participation, this thesis could
not have reached its current state of completion
to Tony Olindo Montalto for his advice on presentation/production
and for always keeping a sense of humor alive
to all those in Mexico City and Ciudad Juirez/El Paso who assisted
me in my research, especially Rosa Maria Quir6s, Justo Casillas,
Jose Luis Segura, Cesar Fuentes and the Colegio de la Frontera
Norte, Maria del Carmen Ramos, Alejandro Lugo, and Sergio
Morales and the photographers at the Peri6dicoEl Norte de Ciudad
Judrez
to my parents and grandparents for making my studies possible
to, perhaps above all, my companeros at ODESAR, Nicaragua, for
the inspiration that comes from an architectural practice informed
by issues traditionally considered "exterior" to the discipline.
o
c
n
e
t
n
s
t
abstract.3
acknowledgements
c.sphere...sp
pubi
4
a c e
Late Capitalism.. .and Difference...fragmentation... public/private?... on
totality...on Habermas...the "bourgeois State"...and universal Reason...or the
"politics of ethical difference"
tra
n s...
n
a
tio
n
alm
i
m
23
the border culture...Adorno, the Unconscious, and Identity
(philosophy)...nation-states/uneven development...transboundary flows
'77
..
"othemess"/resistance...difference and the State...official Mexicanness...a
national
identity?.. .vs.
national
character.. .and
"popular
culture"...extraterritorialization/division
J.,
..
mony
m
hhege
(count
er)
Gramsci/Tafuri/Jameson ...hegemony/coercion/private/pubic... alliances and
identification...towards a public sphere and a public space
61
appendix 1: Mais Alli de la Frontera/Beyond the Border
Competition Program (excerpts)
65
"Project Issues"..."Site Issues"..."Program Requirements"...Site and Context
Maps
appendix 2: The Border Condition: Uneven Development and
the Space of Flows (1995)
71
NAFTA and Janet Reno...borders and boundaries..."flows"..."places"...dual
cities...the place of the nation-state...maquiladoras,"free trade" and the
State...wage scales...Juirez...benefits and otherwise...employment...wage flow
northward.. .benefits for Mexico.. .benefits for the US.. .class...uneven
development...(post?)industrialism...split city space and the space of identity
b
i
b
1
i
o
g.
r.
a
a-
h
h
y....................................
5p89
5
All photographs and translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.
6
p u b lic.s
p h e r e...s
p a ce
The continuing demise of (romantically conceived) "public space",
understood as the site of "collective action and collective encounter"'has acquired
an intensified urgency in light of recent global economic and social developments.
New informational technologies which facilitate the spatial dispersion of
production and consumption have increasingly problematized the inherited 19th
century concept of urban public space based on and serving communities
constituted through geographical proximity and linguistic similarity.
Compounding the problem is the related dissolution of the traditional public
sphere, understood as the metaphoric space in which discourses are (re)produced
and debated, (as distinct from physical public space, or the actual built spaces
accessible, at least in theory, to the citizenry as a whole. I differentiate these terms
purposefully, and, while recognizing their very substantial interdependencies,
insist on their specificity.) This latter phenomenon has been attributed to the
spread of the technologies and techniques of what has been termed "late
capitalism"2 into even areas previously only tangentially affected by monopoly
capital,3 resulting in a situation where, according to Fredric Jameson, "the
autonomous languages of separate
cultures are themselves the very
mechanisms by which the world system
reproduces itself and spreads its form of
economic standardization." 4 This
"world system" is, for Jameson, "total"
and
Fig. 1: Roadblock constructed during protest in
CiudadJuarez, Mexico, 9/1993.(Photo courtesy
of DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig.2: Plaza de las Tres Culturas,Mexico, D.F.
(Plaza of the three cultures, Mexico City.)
marked by the dynamism with which it
now penetrates and colonizes the last
two surviving enclaves of Nature within
older capitalism: the Unconscious and the pre capitalist agriculture of the Third
World-the latter is now systematically undermined and reorganized by the
Green Revolution, whereas the former is effectively mastered by what the
Frankfurt School used to call the Culture Industry.5
7
Fig.3: Mexican police on the internationalbridge
between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez during
protestsagainst Operation "Hold the Line" (9/
1993). (Photocourtesy of DiarioEl Norte,
Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig.4: Detailsof mural by Diego Rivera, "The
History of Mexico", Mexico City, 1932.
8
Yet we are at the same time witnessing a shift, dating at least since the 1960's,
in the locus of political struggle from the traditional Marxist category of class to
"difference", that is, on the politicized assertions of social groups that selfconsciously define themselves in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age,
etc., opposing these identities to society's normative counterparts. According
to Jameson's dialectics, these are forces simultaneously released/produced
within the logic of capitalist development but which can also function as
disruptions of that same logic. Consumer capitalism, in its search for constantly
expanding markets, depends upon a certain instability of identity, but only to
the extent that these are integrated within economic processes.6 While, however,
it dissolves the boundaries of the erstwhile autonomous bourgeois subject into
ideally a rapid succession of (consumer) identities, late capitalism also
paradoxically creates the possibility of "resistance" to itself expressed in terms
of the above mentioned identities which often coalesce around the assertion of
competing political and economic demands. In one sense, therefore, the arena
of social contestation occurs around, first, the integration of such identities into
economic circulation, and, second, around the satisfaction of the desires
generated through such integration:
Jameson's, assertion that the
reproduction of late capitalism occurs
through the "autonomous languages of
separate cultures" can therefore be read
not in terms of a "colonization" of a preexisting society by another, but as a
constant struggle on the part of capital
to contain, regulate, and channel the
consequences of its own development.
As Manuel Castells has noted, the fragmentation of society into what he
calls "a variety of social universes" characterized by "the sharp definition of their
boundaries and the low level of communication with other such universes"8 does
not eliminate social hierarchy or, crucially, the category of class.
The social universe of these different worlds is also characterized by differential
exposure to information flows and communication patterns. The space of the
upper tier is usually connected to global communication and to vast networks
of exchange, open to messages and experiences that embrace the entire world.
At the other end of the spectrum, segmented local networks, often ethnically
based, rely on their identity as the most valuable resource to defend their
interests, and ultimately their being. So the segregation of space in one case
(for the large social elite) does not lead to seclusion, except regarding
communication with the other components of the shared urban area; while
segregation and segmentation for defensive communities of ethnic minorities,
workers, and immigrants do reinforce the tendency to shrink the world to their
specific culture and their local experience, penetrated only by standardized
television images, and mythically connected, in the case of immigrants, to tales
of the homeland. 9
Fig. 5: U.S. police on the internationalbridge
between El Paso andCiudadJuarez during
protests against Operation "Hold the Line" (9/
1993). (Photo courtesy of DiarioEl Norte,
Judrez, Mexico.)
fig. 6: Detailof mural by Diego Rivera, "The
History of Mexico.", Mexico City, 1932.
9
Fig. 7: The internationalborderlineof the "Good
Neighbor" Bridge.connectingEl Paso to Ciudad
Judrez. (Photo courtesy of Diario El Norte,
Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig.8: Views from the internationalbridges.
10
What Castells here identifies as the segmentation of the lower tiers of society
into an array of mutually incomprehensible "irreducible differences"10 is, in our
terms, nothing less than the dissolution of the "public sphere" itself. Analogous
to the economic tendency toward a collapsing of the distinction between "public"
and "private" as manifested by on the one hand the assumption of functions of
the welfare State by privately owned companies and on the other by the heavy
corporate presence in the "capitalist restructuring" of the State, the privatization
of the public sphere is for Castells all but de facto both in the space of flows,
heavily dominated by (private) economic interests, and in the space of places,
where Unger's "collective action and collective encounter" becomes a fiction
due to the impossibility of "communication" between those that do happen to
encounter one another. It thus becomes impossible to address in an effective
manner any but the most local of the economic, political, and cultural forces that
structure everyday life; the allegorical extrapolation of the meaning of local
struggle to the level of the social "totality"" cannot occur because even the
possibility of thinking the totality is foreclosed.
Fig. 10: The "Black Bridge" between El Paso and
Ciudad Judrez. (Photo courtesy of DiarioEl
Norte, Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig. 11: The Portsof Entry in El Paso and Judrez.
It is in this sense that, as Adorno
says, that totality "is not an affirmative
but rather a critical category." Whilst the
social totality cannot be grasped or represented, due to the fragmentation of
the social itself into Castells'multiplicity
of irreducibly different micro-universes,
it must be introduced as a concept so as
to give political meaning to the
particulars. It is here that the
coincidence between the (neo)liberal
version of a de-politicized "multiculturalism" coincides with the post-
11
structuralist attack on the philosophical idea of "totality". Yet if the formation
of a social totality among "irreducibly different" communities is impossible
due to the fragmentation occasioned by contemporary socio-economic
processes, then, by extension, the formation of community itself should also
be impossible among individuals, given the "colonization" by late capital of
the individual Unconscious, the seat of Desire." That is, difference at the level
of the individual logically should preclude the epistemological common
ground necessary for the formation of even the smallest community. Such
concerns are, of course, a principal concern of the neo-Kantian philosopher
Jurgen Habermas, to whose ideas we will turn next.
Fig. 12: Protestagainst "Hold the Line" on the
bridges between El Paso and Judrez. (Photo
courtesy of DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig. 13: Entering El Paso, Texas.
12
The Habermasian model of the public sphere relies on a notion of human
agency/Desire necessarily outside of the "system" of economic rationality (late
capitalism, in Jameson's formulation), whose discursive arena can only be one
of what he refers to as "systematically distorted communication".
Nevertheless, the "system", while hegemonic, relies for its maintenance and
survival on the creation of spheres outside of the narrow interests of economic
rationality. In this way, it ensures the
continuous generation of (subsequently
appropriated) ideas and solutions
unthinkable within its limited
epistemological framework. It is in these
liminal yet necessary areas that, by
refusing the instrumentalization of
thought in its appropriation by
application to economic problems that
resistance and opposition to the
"system" itself can occur.
This model, while in its own terms rigorous, encounters difficulties at the
same places as the presumed universal access to public discursive spheres and
of full equality before the public expression of Enlightened Reason, namely, the
Law. Perry Anderson holds that this concept of the public sphere, inherited from
the "bourgeois" revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, while still dominant,
is fundamentally misleading:
The bourgeois State...presents to men and women their unequal positions in
civil society as if they were equal in the State. Parliament, elected every four or
five years as the sovereign expression of popular will, reflects the fictive unity
of the nation back to the masses as if it were their own self-government. The
economic divisions within the "citizenry" are masked by the juridical parity
between exploiters and exploited, and with them the complete separation and
non-participation of the masses in the work of parliament."
Yet, it is still universal Reason, necessarily metaphysical and also transhistorical, that, in the spheres of resistance referred to generically by Habermas
as the "lifeworld", provides the taxonomic rules governing the production of
discourse as well as the semiotic structures permitting the reception of meaning.
That is, the "lifeworld" rests, perhaps paradoxically, on the same episteme (to use
Fig. 14: The current border crossingnear Santa
Teresa, New Mexico, at the site of the
architecturaldesign project. (Photo courtesy of
DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig. 15: Conceptualmodel showing the "layers"
of textual information: written, photographic,
andgraphic (Photo by Radhika Bagai).
13
Fig. 16: Initial sketch model of relationships
between programmaticelements (Photo by
Radhika Bagai).
Fig. 17: Aerial photo oriented north-up of two of
the one-way internationalbridges linking Judrez
and El Paso (Courtesy of Department of
Plannin, City of El Paso. Texas).
Foucault's term) as that of the "system" which it attempts to resist; more
disturbing, however, is that this episteme remains above and outside of the
influence of the discourses it generates. 4 It therefore implicitly posits equal access
to an abstract Reason on the part of all social actors, regardless of the material
circumstances within which they live, and irrespective of their very real
differences at the level of lived experience. It consequently condemns itself to
political irrelevance in its failure to address the generation of the recent
movements of "difference" which, to a large degree, emerge precisely because
of unequal access to basic social goods, such as education, jurisprudence, and
the means of production, which represent Reason at the material level.
A public sphere appropriate to contemporary lived experience needs, it
would therefore seem, to address both the increased and perhaps increasing
globalization and universalization of economic processes as well as the
fragmentary, particular assertions of difference engendered by those processes.15
Given the dialectical relationship between these two categories, it is likely that
the constitution of the term/phenomenon "public" (and conversely, of its
dialectical opposite, "private") will more resemble a contested process of
becoming, to use contemporary parlance, than a once-and-for-all event or
14
occurrence. This does not imply the rejection of a tentative new normative model
as such for the public sphere; rather, as Simon Critchley has suggested, "Political
discourse must be both a language of justice [understood as a universalist
discourse of Enlightened consensual social contract] and a language of critique,
legitimizing the polis while simultaneously letting the polis be interrupted by that
which transcends it: a politics of ethical difference." 16 The constant
(re)constitution of the term "difference", and its ambiguous political functioning,
that occurs under late capitalism means that this "interruption" of the polis is
mobile, not fixed. "Difference" cannot be thought in essentialist, stable terms,
even when it founds itself on an oppositional rhetoric of Place: it results from
and are always already relative in the constant late capitalist process of, as
Deleuze and Guattari once said, "deterritorialization with one hand and
reterritorialization with the other."
1Roberto Unger, quoted in a faculty colloquium entitled, "Public Space: From Public to Social
4
Space(s)," GSD News, Winter/Spring, 1995, p. .As suggested by the title, the very term "public"
(as opposed, we assume, to "private") space is problematic. It suggests a broad universality
outside the narrow interests of particular individuals or groups that, in late capitalism, can no
longer be sustained. Nevertheless, given the term's wide acceptance within current theoretical
debates, and my intention to contribute to those debates, I will continue to use it, although
Fig. 18: The current Mexican immigration
checkpoint at the site. (Photo courtesy of Diario
El Norte, Judrez, Mexico.)
Fig. 19: Aerial photographof the site, showing
roads to varying degrees of completion,the two
completed immigrationstations, and the extent of
the project (inside rectangle). The border runs
horizontally.
with misgivings.
2Following Jameson, I will prefer this term to the more common "post-industrialism" to refer to
the changes and shifts occurring at the largest levels of society and economy. "Postindustrialism", in addition to its association with the facile "end of ideology" thesis advanced
by Daniel Bell, Francis Fukayama, et al, implies that we have managed to supersede previous
"industrial" or "Fordist" social organization, now finally conceded to have been top-down
and authoritarian. The US-Mexican border, however, represents in many ways an ambiguous
territory organized simultaneously according to the verticality of Fordism and the putative
horizontality of post-Fordism/post-industrialism.
3The indigenous/peasant rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico is a case in point. Timed to coincide with
the implementation of NAFTA, the armed uprising was accompanied with simultaneous press
releases on a worldwide scale. One can, by subscribing to Zapatista mailing lists, receive detailed
information, complete with names of "disappeared" militants, via the Internet, presumably
part and parcel of the very structures they fight to dismantle. This ambiguous political interrelation between "relatively autonomous" communities and globalized and globalizing
technologies is a theme which will continually be developed in this thesis.
4
Fredric Jameson and Michael Speaks, "Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society,"
Assemblage 17, April, 1992, p. 37.
15
5 Fredric Jameson, "Architecture and the Critique of Ideology," The Ideologies of Theory: Essays
1971-86, Volume 2: The Syntax of History, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
p 47.
6 This is why Jameson conceives of the "postmodern" celebration of heterogeneity and
fragmentation as, while perhaps a salutary response to the ossified monumentality of High
Modernism, entirely at one with the pervasive effects of late capital.
7
Jameson cites as an example late capitalism's integration of domestic labor into its economic
cycles, "thereby in contradictory fashion unbinding and liberating that enormous new social
force of women, who immediately the post an uncomfortable new threat to the new social
order." ("Architecture and the Critique of Ideology", p. 47.)
8 Manuel
Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring,and the
Urban-RegionalProcess, (London, Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 226.
9 Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p. 227.
10
Castells uses this term, apparently in spite of its common usage in essentialist discourses very
far removed in conception from his own, as, infamously, in Kristeva's notion of "foreignness".
11Jameson describes this process as one in which, "the local issue is meaningful and desirable in
and of itself, but is also at one and the same time taken as thefigure for Utopia in general, and for
the systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole." ("Pleasure: A Political Issue",
The Ideologies of Theory, p. 73.)
See below for a short discussion of the Unconscious as the repository of Desire.
Earlier versions of this essay included a section of Julia Kristeva's notion of the inherent
"foreignness" to be found at the psychic level of the individual, as an allegorical figure for the
construction and denial of foreigners at the national level. (Strangersto Ourselves, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.) While extremely problematic due to its
ahistorical conception of the Freudian Unconscious, it represents, for me, a worthwhile attempt
to address the public realm with a consciousness of the impossibility of either returning to the
Enlightenment or to a "multicultural" nominalism.
I am indebted to Robin Greeley for her scathing attack on my use of Kristeva for forcing
a rethinking of this major part of my thesis.
13 Perry Anderson, "The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci,"
p. 28.
1 This is one reason why Habermas must insist on the term public space, presumably in
contradistinction to private space. For him, the terms represent the opposition between,
respectively, the objective, universal social consensus exemplified by Reason expressed, as he
says somewhere, by the "peculiar force of the better argument", and subjective, narrower
thinking ruled by particular interests.
1
scf., for example, Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community, Homi Bhabha's The Location of
Culture, or Simon Critchley's The Ethics of Deconstruction:An Argument. "Difference" in this
text will stand for that which "escapes the cognitive powers of the knowing subject" (Simon
Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction:An Argument, London: Blackwell, 1992, p. 5), or, in
Jameson's simpler formulation, the Unconscious.
1
sCritchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction:An Argument, p. 236.
12
Fig. 20: Diagramsof the different relationships
possible between the complex and the (future)
urban context (to the right) and the overall
relationshipto El Paso-CiudadJudrez (to the
left).
Fig. 21: Sketch Model showing international
crossing parallelto office bars and gallery spaces
weaving throughout (Photo by Radhika Bagai).
I
t!
rq
L
i r
--
-
-I-.
-
-
~~~~~-1
Fig. 22: PreliminaryScheme, Parking Level Plan.
17
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I
Fig. 23: PreliminaryScheme, Entry Level Plan.
18
day laborers,
illegal and legal
shoppers
local Mexican businessmen
maquinaaoramanagers
and technicians
tourists
international businessmen
1-Ht......................
Fig.
24:
Preliminary
Scheme,
Upper
level
Plan.
19
1
i tin Aeicnsrfer to
the demographic
of the
the US as the "silent
ixpansion
..atino/a populion in
:urrent trendIs in
growth, Latins will
>vertake
Afrcan-
the
....
a can
lation'smost
numnerous "mitnority" in.
few deades.
.
-
exrsintruhteipleitneftecmlx givenisupoandfiities
enter.Th~e&flw of labor and
a s an international "trade and cultural exchane"
more invisible
immgtshin the opposite direction, however, is ofenpraoical
_______________________than
Fig. 24: PreliminaryScheme, Roof Plan.
20
~
even the abstract mnovemet of
iii~*
ptal in spite of the equally central role itplays
cnm'$espnf
Fig.25b: PreliminaryScheme, PartialLongitudinalSection.
Fig. 26: PreliminaryScheme, Transverse Sections.
21
22
t r a n s . . . n a t i o n al
i
s m
The traditions that develop...cannot be simple impositions by centers of
economic power, either national or foreign, since they necessarily must include
cultural conceptions and practices that respond both to the needs of each
individual to relate to the world surrounding him/her and to his/her personal
and public experiences, all of which are inalienable elements of his/her own
cultural identity.'
Beatriz Mariscal Hay,
Neoliberal Context"
in
the
Identity
"National Culture and Cultural
Mariscal here foregrounds a central component of any discussion of the
Mexican-US border region, namely, the interplay between the construction of
"identity", which, in the context of the border is necessarily addressed in some
way in national terms and "economic power" which, in late capitalism, operates
on a largely inter-national level. The implications of her particular posing of the
problematic, however, raises several questions. In demanding that "traditions"
be developed in line with "cultural identity"-comprised, we are told, of
"personal and public experiences"- and not only "economic power", she
postulates a point of separation between the latter two. Jameson, for one, would
question this premise. "Public
experience", by now not only in and of
itself a problematic presupposition,
given the already discussed
disappearance of the "public" sphere,
depends for its construction on its .
opposition to/differentiation from the
interior experiences of the perceiving
subject. By noting that even the
Unconscious has, under the "world
system" of late capitalism, been "colonized", Jameson postulates the conflation
Fig. 27: Illegalimmigrants being deportedby the
INS (from Miller,"On the Border",Geo, Vol.1,
November, 1979, p. 16)
Fig. 28: Scenes of Downtown Judrez.
23
NOW
of Mariscal's categories of, on the one hand, the "individual" and
his/her "personal experience" and, on the other, "economic
powers".
Fig. 29: At the borderline, Judrez-El Paso (from
Hall, The Border: Life on the Line, p. 15).
Fig.30: NAFTA building and Tourism in Judrez.
24
Understanding the Unconscious as the repository of (sociallyconstructed) Desire, Jameson sees, under late capitalismprefigured, he would argue, by Adorno's conception of the Culture
Industry-"subjective", individual Desire as constituted in terms
of accumulation and therefore as entirely coincident with
"objective", extra-individual economic forces. Adorno, for his part,
saw the very concept of something like "identity" as itself part and
parcel of capitalist relations, specifically, of the laws governing the
production of value. Referring to "what cannot be subsumed under
identity"-difference, otherness, or the Unconscious, for example-as "what
is called in Marxian terminology use value" 2 Adorno suggests the association
of the Marxian converse, exchange value, with the (psychic) construction of
Identity.3 His materialism mandates that these relations of economic exchange
be thought of as the necessary
epistemological precondition for the
process of psychic abstraction that
allows identity to be constitutedindeed, and more disturbingly, as the
precondition for the very possibility of
abstract philosophical thought as we
know it. If, to paraphrase Marx, life
precedes consciousness and not the
other way around, then there is no way
to think beyond or even without either
Identity or the abstraction of the Concept in spite of Adorno's, and
subsequently, and more vehemently, the post-structuralists',
condemnation of both as totalitarian and dominating.
Mariscal's opposition of "cultural identity" and "economic
powers" then, is, in her formulation, unsustainable What the border
dynamic teaches us is that in order to conceptually approach what
Adorno refers to as "peace", namely, "the state of distinctness
without domination, with the distinct participating in each other,"4
in the end similar to Critchley's "politics of ethical difference", the
formation of identity paradoxically must first take place.
The economy of this region, while on several levels a product
of the developments occasioned by the socio-economic shifts of
post-Fordist accumulation, simultaneously exemplifies the nationally-oriented
Keynesianism paradigmatic at least until 1973. That is, while linked to the
larger trajectory of late (consumer) capitalism, the specific productive processes
in the border region remain by and large within earlier capitalist paradigms,
6
characterized by some urban geographers5 as "uneven development". Capital
here, far from ignoring national
boundaries, relies on the political (and
psychological) division of populations
into discreet nation-states for the
establishment of wage differentials and
to a lesser extent, for the speculative
opportunities produced by the
Fig. 31: The end of the borderat the Pacific
Ocean (from Hall, The Border: Life on the
Line, p. 101).
Fig. 32: The approachto the internationalbridge,
Judrez.
fluctuation of national currencies.7 The
most obvious result is vertiginous
growth of the maquiladora8 industry
dating from the late 1960's but rapidly increasing in the 1980's and 90's,
culminating with the passage of NAFTA. 9 Yet, in spite of the fact that the
25
overwhelming majority of the Mexican laborers are recent or first generation
immigrants from other areas of the country, border analysts have detected
significant signs of their assertion of regional identity and the initial (re)formation
of community. In this context, "regional" refers to the trans-national border zone
as a whole,10 implying the formation of a spatial identity rooted in a specific,
fixed geographic area but self-consciously defined against the space of the
nation-state.
Fig.33: Photo by Rafael Valencia,from Cultura
Norte, Aio 6, #23, p. 8.
Fig.34: PublicBuildings in Judrez.
The interdependency of globalizing late capitalism and the political form
of the nation-state produces, in the first instance, labor flows" which disrupt
previous structures of identification based on stable patterns of geographical
contiguity and linguistic continuity. Benedict Anderson has detailed the
importance of "particularlanguages and their association with particular
territorial units" 2 in the formation of identity, in his case, national identity. For
us, the interesting interplay occurs as late capitalism, relying on the political fact
of the nation-state, engenders processes of identity-formation that, at their most
fertile points of intersection, bring together concepts of class and ethnicity within
what has been termed "transboundary
space". 3 The "deep, horizontal
of
(Anderson)
comradeship"
community constituted in transnational or even non-national terms
makes the production of identity on the
border an ongoing process that must
constantly be re-imagined and renewed.
I Beatriz Mariscal Hay, "National Culture and
Cultural Identity in the Neoliberal Context", in
Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel, ed., Decadenciay
Auge de las Identidades: CulturaNacional,Identidad Culturaly Modernizaci6n, Tijuana: Colegio de
la Frontera Norte, 1992, p. 79. The original text reads:
26
Las tradiciones que surgen.. .no pueden ser meras imposiciones por parte de
los centros de poder econ6mico nacionales o extranjeros, ya que necesariamente
han de incluir concepciones y practicas culturales que responden tanto a las
necesidades de cada individuo de relacionarse con el mundo que lo rodea
como a sus experiencias familiares y de trabajo, todos elementos inalienables
de su propia identidad cultural.
Cited in Jameson's Late Capitalism:Adorno, or, the Persistenceof the Dialectic,
(London and New York: Verso, 1990), p. 23.
The relationship established between two disparate objects is, in capitalism,
through the creation of a third, abstracted term such as money; this term
mediates the worth of the thing-in-itself, that is, of its use value, and its worth
within the social network of commodity production, or its exchange value.
4 Cited in Martin Jay, Adorno, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984),
p. 65.
5
eg., David Harvey, Edward Soja, Derek Gregory, Manuel Castells, or Neil Smith,
to name a few of the most prominent.
6 See appendix 2 for a more complete exposition of the ambiguous positioning of
the border region within the context of the shifts and transformations of the global economy
from one stage of capitalism to another.
7 This latter observation is empirically supported by the recent increase in the already substantial
profit margins of US investors in Mexico due to the peso's severe devaluation in December of
1994. (Chris Kraul, "Foreign owners benefited from huge drop in peso", San FranciscoChronicle,
8 April, 1995, p. A12.)
8 Originally referring to the quota of grain traditionally given to the grinder in exchange for his
service, the term now describes the foreignowned plants that hire Mexican labor to
assemble typically US-made components for
re-export to the primarily the US market.
While the overwhelming majority of the
transactions are still between Mexicans and US
citizens, the Japanese and Germans are
increasing their presence on the market,
especially in the automotive sector.
9 NAFTA, rather than heralding a new era,
distinct from its predecessor, could be
understood instead as the expansion into the
rest of Mexico and the US of processes already
at work in the border region, where many of
its clauses and provisions have been in effect
since the 1960's.
10The precise geographical definition of the "border zone" is historically variable, ranging from
the metropolitan areas of the typically paired towns occurring on either side of the divide to as
2
Fig. 35: The borderbetween Nogales, Sonora and
Nogales, Arizona, c. 1940. (From Arreola and
Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities, p. 210).
Fig.36: Publicbuildings in El Paso and the view
across the border looking towards Judrez.
27
far as more interior state capitals such as Chihuahua in Mexico
and Albuquerque, New Mexico. For our purposes, the term refers
to those areas significantly integrated into the major economic
(and therefore social) processes of the trans-national economy.
u The movement of labor occurs from the interior of both nations
to the borderlands in addition to the more remarked-upon
migration from Mexico to the US.
2
1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1991,
p. 4 3 .)
1
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and
Politics on the US-Mexican Border, (Austin: Center for MexicanAmerican Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1990), p. 135.
Fig.37:Volleyball game between borderguards,
(from "Miller,On the Border", Geo, Vol. 1,
November, 1979, pp. 20-1).
Fig.38: Street scenes, Judrez.
28
Fig. 39: The de facto open border (from Hall,
The Border: Life on the Line, p. 76).
Fig. 40: Institutional Buildings in El Paso.
29
p
..
......
Idedee
PI 17ee e
yy
...
. I
..
....
...
...
...
...
....
......
......
I
...
...
...
...
.....
...
...
I
K............
....
-~
Fig.~ ~
30
~
~~
priar diretio
--
of movmen
~galr 41siatesgEtyLeers isrbto iagapNosoScl)
* A landscapingstrategy.
The desert isinhospitable toamost varieties of vegetation. Yet this region, ironically,
produces asignificant percentage of (still largely agrarian) Mexio's foreign earnings.
The recognition of the productive, artificial character of the border economy will be
expresd throuh the importation offfetile soils and through theirtreatment as tectonic
mterials. Playingoff the constructioni of the "cultural tandscaptoftthe gallery bands,
combinations of water, desert, and "roof greenscape" gardens will act as "natural
landscape".
....................
........
...
open "dedicated" spaces
closed "dedicated" spaces
garden strips
I
US immigration
Mexican immigration
The "dedicatedlspaces of the Architectural
Promenade constitute the nodal links
between the gallery strips and the office bars
according to the following spatial
arrangement (moving from West to East):
Spaces of Meeting, of Pleasure; and of
Information.
Fig. 42: Final Scheme, Promenade Level Use Distribution Diagram(Not to Scale).
31
iEEm
F---
IEEE
IEEE
I..!
IEEE
i111IEEE
011111
IEEE
loon
IM!! office/conference bars
Fig. 43: Final Scheme, Office Level Use DistributionDiagram (Not to Scale).
32
~~~1
0
0
M
S
0
Electronic Circulation (Horizontal):
Information
NN
User Circulation (Vertical):
People
Fig. 44: Final Scheme, CirculationField Diagram (Not to Scale).
33
ago=
v7.t !.Cr5 OP
-47 ........
Fig. 45: Final Scheme, Landscaping DistributionField (Not to Scale).
I
-
slow
own
wo
wo
-
-
- -
~1
M
|[---::.--.-
-
--
L
--
-
Fig. 46: FinalScheme, ArchitecturalPromenade Diagram(Not to Scale).
35
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Fig. 47: Final Scheme, Occupation plotted against Time Diagram
36
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23 24
r e la tive...identity.(itself)
Jorge Bustamante, the director of the Colegio de la FronteraNorte (COLEF),
a Mexican research center with offices along the length of the border, sees
"Mexican" identity there as one among many in a field of sometimes
contradictory discourses. Citing with approval Benito Juarez's aphorism that
the best defense for militarily weaker nations is recourse to an Enlightened
international law based on universally applicable concepts of Justice, Bustamante
also recognizes the role of identification oriented (at least initially) along national
lines. Defined in this case as an "otherness" (otredad)with respect to the US,
"Mexican" identity is always (already) relative: "The US neighbor is the other,
or, that which I am not. Confronted with the otherness of his neighbor, the border
resident recurs ...to the values of his own definition of Mexicanness..."1
Furthermore, this "Mexicanness", in the face of US military and economic
superiority, demarcates a fluctuating site of resistance within the asymmetry of
the border condition:
What at the micro-level translates into a cultural response to the otherness of
the neighbor, at the macro-level
manifests itself in terms of a political
reaction which at base is a cultural
creation. Here the cultural translates
......
g..
into a political dynamic that moves
corresponding to the economic dynamic
represented through unilateral actions
by the actor with greater power. If one
accepts that it is generally in economic
terms that the asymmetry of US power
Fig. 48: Tomds Mondrag6n, Alegoria de la
Muerte, 1856. Oil on canvas.
Fig49: Anonymous, Arnerica, Asia, Europa,
18th century. Oil on canvas.
with respect to Mexico isexpressed, one
can also appreciate...that the Mexican
state has responded to this asymmetry,
in general, with ideological-political reactions, which are really nothing other
than cultural creations.2
37
iNOW
Bustamante, continuing, identifies the "ideological-political reactions"
primarily as the governmental "exercise of national sovereignty": 3 he interprets
the State as an agent of corrective reform within the trans-national dynamic
(which, I have argued, it played a central role in creating). In the slippage
between "cultural creations" at the individual level and the "political reaction"
at the level of the Mexican State, he implies a forcing of the recognition of
difference on the State.
Fig. 50: Joside Ribera I. Argomanis, Verdadero
Retrato de Sta. Ma. Virgen de Guadalupe,
Patrona Principal de Nueva Espafna Jurada
en Mexico, Oil on Canvas, 1778.
Fig. 51: Anonymous, Pira Funeraria de Santa
Prisca, Temple on canvas, date unknown.
Within the official Mexican imagination, the northern border has occupied
a contradictory position: at once reviled for its purported capitulation to nonMexican values, it has nevertheless been the subject of countless myths of
"Mexicanness", typically conflated with masculine fantasies of individual
autonomy and heroism in the face of a recognized marginality with respect to
the US. 4 This, arguably more "popular" version of "Mexicanness" 5 has
coexisted uneasily alongside a more official "high" version, developed under
consistent governmental patronage dating from the Revolution of 1910
through figures such as Rivera, Orozco, Tamayo, Barragin, etc.
This latter discourse contained a
substantial indigenous component
within a larger framework of mestizaje,
understood as the racial, cultural, and
ideological mixing of both indigenous
and foreign (typically European)
influences. Often, indigenistic myths of
national origin tended to take center
stage over the more "European"
universalist pretensions. Contemporary
debate on the theme of "Mexicanness" takes issue with this discourse, usually
in terms of its hegemonic reduction of the wide range and variety of indigenous
38
communities in its privileging of those located historically around Mexico City.
Many critics, such as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla and Carlos Monsivdis, go so far
as to declare that the very concept of a nationalidentity in fact does not exist,
only a multiplicity of irreducible identities, whether local, as with the former,
or class, as with the latter. Yet these criticisms, however geographically or
historically accurate they may be, prematurely jettison, in my opinion, the notion
of "Mexicanness", thereby abdicating the political arena within which it operates.
They deny the ambivalent political functioning of discourses of national essence
or origin, as contradictory signs of opposition to the trans-national economies
they also sustain. That is, taken as a whole, a borderland discourse of
"Mexicanness" self-consciously locates itself in Castells' "space of places",
opposed to the further subsumption of the border into the "space of flows", by,
for example, demanding greater integration of Mexican nationals into the ranks
of skilled technical labor in the maquiladoras.7
Bustamante asserts that empirical studies carried out by COLEF
demonstrate a higher degree of adhesion to what he considers "national
Fig.52: House in El Paso, Texas.
Fig 53: Aztec artifactsfrom their capital,
Tenochtitldn, including the Piedra del Sol, the
solarcalendar(center).
character" (cardcter nacional) on the part
of border populations than on the part
of Mexicans living in the interior
regions, thus contradicting the
commonly alleged "de-nationalization"
of the Mexican border. He observes that
the "greater integration of border
residents with their foreign neighbors
has come to reinforce their cultural
identity as Mexicans."9 , which does not,
incidentally, prevent them from rejecting the specific model of national identity
promoted by Mexico City through the cultural components of governmental
border programs. He also notes that, "the majority of [Mexican] border residents
39
have found that the US citizen tends to respond positively toward the Mexican
who maintains his/her cultural identity and to respond negatively or
disrespectfully toward (s)he who tries to imitate US ways." 0 That is, the
recognition of the creation of social and cultural difference within what is in
many ways a unitary trans-national economy on opposite sides of the border.
Fig. 54: Joaquin Villegas, El Padre Etemo
Pintando a la Virgen de Guadalupe, Oil on
Canvas, 1774.
Fig. 55: Mural by Jos Clemante Orozco,
Hospicio de las Cabaiias,Guadalajara,Mexico.
40
Also noting the correlation between his idea of "Mexicanness" along class
rather than geographic lines, (ie., that resistance to assimilation into "US
cultural norms" is inversely related to wealth), he advocates a redirection of
governmental support away from programs of the "Mexicanness" of Rivera
or Orozco toward those that promote what he calls "popular culture"." The
political effects of such action, then, would occur on two levels: at the intranational, given the class composition of "Mexicanness", and at the international, given its specific function at the border. Extending the logic of his
findings, he concludes by noting that support for such culture should not
necessarily respect existing national boundaries, given the intensity of Mexican
emigration into the US, but rather should consider the "extraterritoriality of
the demands for cultural services." 2
This proposition acquires
additional interest when one considers
the state of Mexican cultural production
on either side of the divide. According
to Maria del Carmen Rimos, director of
the Juarez Municipal Academy of the
Arts,
local
artists/cultural
representatives are still in their
"formative stages". More concerned with rejecting "official" culture from the
capital, they have not yet elaborated a coherent position with respect to their
specific (border) condition.' The Chicano community in El Paso, on the other
hand, in much more daily contact with its "others", has developed an advanced
mural movement which even sustains an independent school of mural
painting. 4 The Chicano socio-economic position within North American
society parallels Bustamante's conception of the "popular" classes in the
Mexican context. That is, Chicanos, although constituted as a community in
predominantly ethnic/cultural terms, also constitute a class in economic
terms." As such, their assertion of cultural identity plays a similar culturalpolitical role within the US as does the assertion of "Mexicanness" within the
context of US-Mexican relations as a whole. When Bustamante therefore calls
for official (and extra-official) support for a trans-national "Mexicanness", he
implies a politicization of Chicano identity which cannot remain at the level
of a simple affirmation of an "extraterritorialization" of "Mexicanness" to
which he appears to limit himself. On several levels, therefore, Bustamante
locates oppositional political effects precisely within the maintenance of the
national division indicated by the border itself.
'Bustamante,, Jorge, "Frontera MCxico-Estados Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico",
in Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel, ed., Decadenciay Auge de las Identidades: CulturaNacional,
Identidad Cultural y Modernizaci6n, p. 100: "El vecino estadounidense es lo otro o, lo que no
soy yo. Frente a esa otredad del vecino, el
fronterizo recurre a...los valores de su propia
definici6n de mexicanidad..."
2
Bustamante, "Frontera M6xico-Estados Unidos.
Reflexiones para un marco te6rico", p. 101:
Lo que en la dimensi6n microdimensional se
traduce en una respuesta cultural frente a la
otredad del vecino, en la dimensi6n
macrodimensional se manifiesta en terminos
de una reacci6n de caracter politico que en el
fondo es una creaci6n cultural. Aquilo cultural
se traduce en una dindmica politica que se
mueve en correspondencia con la dinamica
econ6mica representada por las acciones unilaterales de la parte con mayor poder. Si se
accepta que es el orden econ6mico donde por lo general se expresa la asimetria de poder
de Estados Unidos hacia Mexico, se puede apreciar...el Estado mexicano ha respondido a
Fig. 56: Joe Isais,Alex Castro,Mario Barrozo,
JorgeAparicio, Alfredo Carmona,CarlosLuga,
Guardian Angel and Two Children Crossing
a Bridge, El Paso, Texas, 1988.
Fig.57: Mural by Jos6 Clemente Orozco,
Hospicio de las Cabanlas,Guadalajara,Mexico.
41
Fig.58: Arturo Avalos, Che Guevara Head, El
Paso, Texas, 1975.
esta asimetria de la relaci6n bilateral, por lo general, con reacciones ideol6gico-politicas,
que en el fondo no son mds que creaciones culturales.
3 Bustamante, "Frontera Mexico-Estados Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico", p 102.
"...ejercicio pleno de nuestra soberania nacional."
4 These values were personified, with slight variations, in norteflo bodies/characters such as
Antonio Aguilar or Vicente Fernandez, through the figure of the charroand the musical form
of the corrido.
5
M6nica Lavin, "Cantos Entre Mareas," Memoria de Papel, Ano 4, Nidmero 11, Sept. 1994, pp.
63-90.
6 cf:, Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, "Sobre la ideologia del mestizaje", and Monsivais, Carlos, "La
Identidad Nacional Ante el Espejo", in Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel, ed., Decadenciay Auge
de las Identidades: Cultura Nacional,Identidad Cultural y Modernizaci6n, pp. 35-48 and 67-80.
7 As reported by the NAFTA and Inter-American Trade Monitor,Volume 2, Number 6, publication
of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade policy, Washington, D.C., 10 March, 1995.
8 Bustamante, Jorge, "Identidad nacional en la frontera norte: hallazgos preliminares",
manuscript from the Colegio de la FronteraNorte, Tijuana, 1982. The typical rhetoric emanating
from Mexico City holds that border residents are in grave danger of losing their identity as
Mexican due to prolonged exposure to the Anglos. The frequent use in border and Chicano
Spanish of anglicismos,or English vocabulary modified for Spanish use, allegedly testifies to
such cultural erosion.
9 Bustamante, "Frontera M6xico-Estados Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico", pp. 110.
"...la integraci6n de los fronterizos con sus vecinos extranjeros ha venido a reforzar su
identidad cultural como mexicanos."
10
Bustamante, "Frontera M6xico-Estados Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico", pp. 103.
...la mayor parte de los fronterizos han [sic] encontrado que el estadounidense tiende a
responder positivamente hacia el mexicano
que mantiene su identidad cultural, asi como
a responder negativamente o sin respeto para
el que trata de hacer una imitaci6n de lo
estadounidense.
" Note here the maintenance of the historically
constituted class implications of the term
popular", as opposed to other possible terms,
say, "everyday" or "ordinary". Michel de
Certeau, for example, opts for the latter, precisely
Fig. 59: Josi Clemente Orozco, (from left)
MAscara con Mariposa, Oil on Canvas, 1947;
Piel en Azul, Oil on Canvas, 1947; Craneo
Recortado, Oil on Canvas, 1947.
42
to avoid the former's connotations of selfconsciously politicized opposition. Bustamante's
position here coincides with that of Jos6 Manuel
Valenzuela Arce, who goes further and discards
the term "Mexicanness" for "popular" ("El M6xico Proscrito," Memoria de Papel, Afto 4,
Ndmero 11, Sept. 1994, pp. 91-95.
2 Bustamante, "Frontera M6xico-Estados Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico", p. 115.
"...la extraterritorialidad de la demanda de servicios culturales." He subsequently takes care
to clarify that he does not advocate "political" action on the part of the Mexican government,
but "cultural" action. Exactly where the dividing line between the two areas is drawn, however,
appears uncertain, especially in light of his argument as to the political effects of the assertion
of Mexican cultural identity on the border. Additionally, it suffers from perhaps too simplistic
a formulation: exactly how would the Mexican government or even private groups initiate
programs of support for "popular Mexican culture" on any relevant scale in the US?
1
Interview with Maria del Carmen Rdmos Arredando in Ciudad Juirez, 17 January, 1995.
14 One should not conclude, however, that the primary inspiration for mural painting in this
region derives from the tradition established by Rivera et al. In terms of content as well as
intent, they relate more strongly, in my opinion, to the Baroque allegories of the Viceregal New
World. The majority of the murals in El Paso's Chicano barrio do not attempt to construct a
discourse of national origin as in the indigenistic rhetoric of a Rivera. Rather, they, like the
Viceregal allegories, sift through signs of the past, attempting to construct "truths" appropriate
for the contemporary moral crises.
15 cf., Butler, Edgar W. and James B. Pick, "Socioeconomic Inequality in the US-Mexico
Borderlands", FronteraNorte, Vol. 2 #3, Enero-Junio, 1990, pp. 31-62.
Fig. 60: Carlos Rosas and Felipe Gallegos,
Memorial to Manuel Acosta Mural and War
and Peace Mural, (fragment),El Paso, Texas,
1990.
Fig. 61: Manuel Acosta, We, the People,
(fragment), El Paso, Texas, 1988.
43
El
Fig. 62: Anonymous, Ligrimas/Tears,
(fragment)El Paso, Texas, 1975.
Fig. 63: CarlosCallejo and students, AIDS
Mural, (fragment)El Paso, Texas, 1988.
Fig. 64: FinalScheme, Key to Sections
44
w
EI
5r~~
W
LL
-- I r-T
i
R=LLL
-L
ik Nil-
0
45
-LL
L
3ITF
4 6I
M
-
------....
------
Fig. 69: FinalScheme, Landscape/PromenadeLevel Plan (Scale: 1:2000).
47
(
X
Ff1 -:2000).
Fig. 70: Final Scheme, Office Level Plan (Scale: 1:2000).
48
KX'
Fig.71: Final Scheme, Transverse Section A-A through center office bar looking East (Scale: 1:800).
49
S-F-
Fig. 72 Final Scheme, Transverse Section B-B through Entry path from Mexico to the US looking West (Scale: 1:800).
SIE
F73nSi
irr p
f.
.
is
Elm MINII=
aM E11
Fig. 73 FinalScheme, Transverse Section C-C through Entry pathfrom Mexico to the US looking East (Scale: 1:800).
51
Fig. 74a: FinalScheme, Longitudinal Section D-D through central gallery strip looking North (Scale: 1:800).
52
Fig. 74b: Final Scheme, Longitudinal Section D-D through centralgallery strip looking North (Scale: 1:800).
53
54
Fig. 77 Final Scheme, Perspective through central gallerystrip looking West.
Fig. 78: FinalScheme, Model view of gallery roofs looking West with
education tower in foreground.
55
Fig. 79: Isometric Detailof Western office wall
(Scale 1:40).
Fig. 80: Isometric Detail of gallery closure system
(Scale 1:40).
Fig. 81: Isometric Detailof drainagecanal between gallery and
garden (Scale 1:40).
Fig. 82: Isometric Detailof Eastern office wall
(Scale 1:40).
57
Fig.83: Perspectivealong landscapingstrip looking westward towards cafi.
58
Figs. 84-85: Views of model from West and East showi
59
60
(c
o u n t e r )...
h e g e m o n y
One of the many subtexts that has continued throughout this discussion is
that of Antonio Gramsci's writings, particularly his Prison Notebooks.'Jameson,
writing against the "closure" of the possibility of a politically oppositional
Architectural practice posited by Manfredo Tafuri, at one point advocated what
he called the "Gramscian Alternative", or, the formation of "counter-hegemonic
enclaves" in advance of complete social transformation.2 More recently, however,
he repudiated this "optimism", observing that "given the force of the world
system today, it becomes harder and harder to imagine this alternative, or
utopian, space concretely. The various enclaves that one can imagine...are part
of the system, and in this they are corporate." 3 Yet we have seen that the border,
in its ambiguous positioning in-between Castells'"space of flows" and his "space
of places", and in the consequent political, spatial, economic, and cultural
ambiguities, represents in many ways the breakdown of the systematic
operations of each. Moreover, many of our key terms- nation/politics/
identity/culture-are also central elements in the constitution and maintenance
of what Gramsci calls "hegemony", understood as "rule by permanently
organized consent," 4 and reinterpreted
KC A
!
SO
A
by Chantal Mouffe as "the ability of one 2
class to articulate the interests of other
social groups to its own."5 Hegemony
must, for Gramsci, be differentiated
from the more direct exercise of State
power. Thus, he delineates two major
spheres of society:
Fig. 86: Protest in CiudadJudrez (Courtesy of
DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico.
Fig. 87: Maquiladoras in CiudadJudrez.
We can now fix two superstructural
levels-one that may be called 'civil
society', that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called 'private, and the
other that of 'political society' or the State. These two levels correspond on the
one hand to the function of 'hegemony' which the dominant group exercises
61
m1
throughout society and on the other hand to that of 'direct domination' or
command exercised through the State and 'juridical government'.6
In other words, what Chomsky refers to as the "manufacture of consent"
occurs in the "private" sphere, specified at a later point as, for example,
churches, schools, and trade unions; the "public" sphere is restricted to the
more overtly coercive activities of the State. We, however, cannot, given the
"colonization of the Unconscious", maintain such a clear-cut distinction
between the two increasingly undifferentiable spheres. Yet, at the same time,
the dynamics of Identity and Difference as played out at the border in many
ways re-assert the separation of the two spheres. This is of some significance
with regard to Gramsci's agenda for the achievement of political change,
namely, the formation of "counter-hegemony".
Fig. 88: Mexicans paying the international
bridge toll before crossing into the US. (Courtesy
of the DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico.
Fig. 89: Details of maquiladoras in Judrez,
Mexico.
This by now well-worn term has typically been read as implying the
possibility of the emergence, as in Jameson's initial formulation, of the
"superstructural" values and concepts of a new social order in advance of
material transformation at the "base" of the actually existing one. Anderson,
however, demonstrates that this is not in
fact Gramsci's conception:
The'hegemonic activity' which'can and
must be exercised before the
assumption of power' is related in this
context only to the problem of the
alliances of the working class with other
exploited and oppressed groups; it is
not a claim to hegemony over the whole
of society, or the ruling class itself, by
definition impossible at this stage.7
"Counter-hegemony", then can be interpreted as the
establishment of relations of Identification between different social
groups and the articulation of their (perceived) common interests.
That is, it is the coming-together of disparate "private" ways of
interpreting lived experience at the "public" level of the
individual's relation first, to community, and, second, to the social
totality. Since the maintenance of hegemony, according to Mouffe,
relies on a conflation of class interest with national interest--"a class
is hegemonic when it has managed to articulate to its discourse...in
particular the national-popular elements which allow it to become
the class expressing the national interest" 8 -the border, as a point
where the political, psychological, and economic limits of the
nation-state are asserted and interrogated, becomes a testing ground for the
formation of the social relations necessary for the generation of a public sphere
of different values.
Fig. 90: Graffition the Mexican embankment of
the Rio Grande/Bravo.(Courtesy of the DiarioEl
Norte, Judrez, Mexico).
Fig. 91: Scenesfrom Judrez, Mexico
Exactly what the public space of this re-formulated public sphere might
look like is "by definition" unknowable
at this moment; what may be possible,
however, is an investigation that
foregrounds the mechanisms, the
techniques, and the processes through
which such public space could begin to
take form. That is the terrain of
architecture.
1Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds.,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio
Gramsci, (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
2
In "Architecture and the Critique of Ideology", Jameson writes:
"Counter-hegemony" means producing and keeping alive a certain alternate "idea" of
space, of urban daily life, and the like...the essential would be that [architects in the West]
63
Fig. 92: Morning crossinginto the US (Courtesy
of the DiarioEl Norte, Judrez, Mexico).
Fig. 93: Scenes from El Paso, Texas.
64
are able to form conceptions and utopian images of such projects, against which to develop
a self-consciousness of their concrete activities in this society...such utopian ideas are as
objective as material buildings: their possibilities-the possibility of conceiving new spacehave conditions of possibility as rigorous as any material artifact. Those conditions of
possibility are to be found, first and foremost, in the uneven development of world history
and in the existence, elsewhere, in the Second and Third Worlds, of projects and
constructions that are not possible in the First: this concrete existence of radically different
spaces elsewhere (ofwhatever unequal realization) is what objectively opens the possibility
for the coming into being and development of "counter-hegemonic values" here. (pp. 512)
3
Fredric Jameson and Michael Speaks, "Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil
Society," Assemblage 17, April, 1992, p. 37.
Cited in Perry Anderson, "The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review, Vol. 100,
Nov., 1976-Jan., 1977, p. 70.
Gramsci, coding his writing under the eyes of his Fascist imprisoners and attempting
to elaborate new concepts with old vocabularies, cannot be read in any singular manner:
there are several Gramscis. My own reading of his thought has therefore necessarily been
heavily influenced by his interpreters, primarily Anderson and Chantal Mouffe. Anderson's
project, attempting to locate the various "slippages" in Gramsci's thought within his historical
and political context, seems to me especially appropriate.
-Mouffe, Chantal, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Mouffe, Chantal, ed., Gramsciand
Marxist Theory, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1979), p. 183.
6 Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds., Selectionsfrom the PrisonNotebooks of Antonio
Gramsci,p. 12.
7 Perry Anderson, "The Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci," p. 45.
"Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,"
p. 195.
p
a
e
p
d
n
i
x
P
r
o
j
e
c
t
I
s
s
u
e
s
"The Esplanade will address issues of function, symbology, global and local trends.
Some issues may be contradictory due to our early stages of understanding the
nature of a free market economy, as individual nations, and our responsibility within
the economic block.
e "Security will create a unique design challenge using the potential variations
available within the international zone created by the Esplanade.
* Growth is a major concern affacting the design. Periodic expansion and update of
the overall complex is expected.
e International cooperation is the spirit of the facility. There is an opportunity to
reflect the interdependent and synergetic aspects of this new dual community.
" A dual-community image will be present due to separate political and cultural
histories. Since the sovereignty of each country will be maintained, the identities of
each country will be an architectural issue.
* Different economies have created significant differences between the US and Mexico.
Ironically, this powerful difference also creates the mutual attraction for business
opportunity and may result eventually in a unique architectural style to reflect
border issues.
e Environmental awareness is a concern shared by all communities world wide and
will be a strong influence to the development of the complex and the community
regardless of the political and competitive forces surrounding NAFTA.
e Geographic location will dictate a response to the climactic conditions of the arid
desert territory.
" Cultural diversity within today's communities is a signature of this era of global
civilization. Architectural sensitivity to the new cultural influence from other
nationalities will be as important as preserving the historic culture of Native
American, Mexican and American heritage."
S
i
t
e .
I
n
f
o
r
m
a
t i
o
n
"The terrain is predominantly flat with mesquite and desert vegetation throughout
the site and the community. Desert vegetation grows easily with minimal irrigation.
Prevailing winds are from the west-northwest with an occasional reversal for rarely
longer than one day. Wind velocities are usually gentle: 2 to 8 knots with gusts up
to 20 knots during the monsoon (rainy) season, in August and September.
65
"Yearly temperatures range from summer highs up to 1000 F to winter lows near 200
F. Relative humidity is dry, about 15% year around with the exception of the rainy
season where humidity may reach 60% for brief periods.
"The nearby community of Santa Teresa on the US side will provide immediate
regional serevices to the participants of the complex including housing, schools,
hospitals and airport.
"Being located in the southwest sunbelt, the Esplanade will receive generous direct
sunshine over 340 days a year from the usual sun angles available at 320 latitude
and 108' longitude. Temperature swings during a 24 hour period may shift 30'
between the hottest time of the day, about 3:00 p.m., to the coolest, about 4:00 a.m.
Architecturally, the southwest is characteristically perceived as a climate which
promotes outdoor activities and open air spaces."
P
ro
g
ra
m .
R
e
q u
ire
m
e
n
ts
Esplanade Starter Complex
Esplanade Pedestrian Space - minimum 50,000 sq.ft. (4645 sq.m.) - maximum 100,000
sq.ft. (9290 sq.m.)
30% landscaped area - 15,000 sq.ft. (1393 sq.m.)
15% rest room and related facilities - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
15% storage and maintenance - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
35% circulation - 17,500 sq.ft. (1625 sq.m.)
5% immigration and security (2-1/2% each side) - 2500 sq.ft. (232 sq.m.)
Auditorium - 10,000 sq.ft. (929 sq.m.) total (added to pedestrian space requirements)
75% seating - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
25% support (bathrooms, storage, misc.) - 2,500 sq.ft. (232 sq.m.)
Education and Exhibit Space - 50,000 sq.ft. (4645 sq.m.) total (added to pedestrian
space requirements)
40% gallery - 20,000 sq.ft. (1858 sq.m.) total (added to pedestrian space
requirements)
50% education - 25,000 sq.ft. (2322 sq.m.)
10% support (bathrooms, storage, misc.) - 5,000 sq.ft. (464 sq.m.)
Private Offices (approximately 100) - 50,000 sq.ft. (4645 sq.m.)
50% office space - 25,000 sq.ft. (2322 sq.m.)
15% conference space - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
15% administrative - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
20% support (bathrooms, storage, misc.) - 10,000 sq.ft. (929 sq.m.)
Government Offices (approximately 30) - 15,000 sq.ft. (1393 sq.m.)
50% office space - 7,500 sq.ft. (697 sq.m.)
15% conference space - 2.250 sq.ft. (209 sq.m.)
15% administrative - 2,250 sq.ft. (209 sq.m.)
20% support (bathrooms, storage, misc.) - 3,000 sq.ft. (288 sq.m.)
Parking (approximately 200 cars per side) - 60,000 sq.ft. (5574 sq.m.) per side
Site Preparations - The remainder of the site will be planned and landscaped for
vehicular and pedestrian access, as well as for the enhancement of arrival and
departure sequences.
Year 2000 Expansion
International Offices (approximately 100 offices) -50,000 sq.ft. (4645 sq.m.)
Parking addition for US side only (200 cars) - 60,000 sq.ft. (5574 sq.m.)
Year 2015 Expansion
Esplanade Pedestrian Space - additional 50,000 to 100,000 sq.ft. (4645 to 9290 sq.m.)
Educational Space - additional 50,000 sq.ft. (4645 sq.m.)
Office Space - additional 125,000 sq.ft. (11,612 sq.m.) (equally distributed among
private, government and international offices)
Parking - additional 60,000 sq.ft. (5574 sq.m.) for US side and 100,000 sq.ft. (9290
sq.m.) for Mexico side.
67
Fig. 94: Location Map relatingthe project
site to the twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad
Judrez. (From Brinchmann, "Sante Teresa,
#y
BSEMAP PMkPANKY
Dep"MnEW
68
or
etA*4eWnG REEC ma
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MYC Of CL PAO,
TEXA&
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Mexamerica", p. 6.)
&W.-PIWOEIGN
PONM
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4"-
-ft.
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Fig. 95 (Above): Conceptual Master Planfor
industrialcity at Santa Teresa, prepared by
Paul Schwan and Randy Ewers,from
Brinchmann, "Santa Teresa, Mexamerica: A
Northamerican'sPrimer",p. 10.
Fig. 96 (Right): PreliminaryMaster Plan,
Santa Teresa,from Brinchmann, p. 9.
69
70
a
p
p
e
n
d
i
x
The Border Condition: Uneven Development and the Space of Flows
Throughout history, the power of the city equals its authority over
traffic.
Wim Nijenhuis, "City Frontiers and their Disappearance" 1
NAFTA and Janet Reno
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in November of 1993
announced the continuation of a model of economic development whose implications
extend to several social spheres, including that of urban form. While NAFTA's effects
are felt within both the US and Mexico throughout their respective national teritories,
these effects intensify at the national border between the two countries. "Free Trade" in
this context does not imply "free movement", excepting US capital, a fact made evident
with Attorney General Janet Reno's visit to El Paso in September of the same year.
Intending generally to demonstrate US political will, to serve notice to the Mexican
government and to the local population on both sides of the border that the US
government, in spite of the likelihood of NAFTA's ratification, would not lessen
immigration restrictions, Reno specifically went to inaugurate Operation Blockade, a
crude clampdown on "undocumented" workers and other "aliens". The operation's
implementation provoked violent confrontations on the bridges joining the two cities,
primarily between Mexican commuters/workers and the state apparatuses of,
surprisingly, both nations, mobilized in support of legal policies decided upon by only
one.
Economically interdependent for several decades now, both cities suffered in the
short term from the operation's implementation: Juirez, from decreased access to certain
products unavailable on the Mexican side and from the sudden elimination of a major
market for undocumented labor; El Paso, from decreased Mexican consumption and
the reduced supply of cheap labor, implicitly recognized as central to the health of their
economy. Yet we can also read the periodic governmental interventions into immigration
controls as a necessary element in the very structuring of the economic relations at the
border and thereby to the national interiors as well. That is, the inter-national economy
generated at the border region depends on the regulation-as-containment of the
'Wim Nijenhuis, "City Frontiers and their
Disappearance", Assemblage, Volume 16,
December, 1991.
David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic
Writings, (New York: Harper and Row, 1977,
p. 332.)
3Henri Lefebvre, La Rivolution Urbaine,trans. David
Harvey, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 25.
2
4
72
This "larger scale" begins to involve a quantity
and complexity of inter-relations determined
in national, class, gender, and ethnic terms
such that it no longer makes sense to discuss
the phenomenon as a totality. Yet, it is
imperative to attempt some representation of
as large a picture as possible, if only in the
attempt to construct a model with increased
explanatory power. I will, therefore, refer in
this paper to entities such as the "US" or
"Mexican" economy as if one could talk about
such things, traversed and split as they are by
all of the above mentioned factors. I feel
justified in doing this because the border can
only begin to make sense through a series of
reframings at different levels, some of which
are comprehensible only through the
abstraction that inevitably erases the finer
gradations of difference that characterize every
social phenomenon.
migrational flows of people, as opposed to the regulation-as-flow of capital: boundaries
are to be maintained for the former but eliminated for the latter. On the other hand, this
regulation-as-containment historically has not, and furthermore, cannot, be total.
Recognizing the necessity for controlled yet continuous entry of Mexican labor into the
geographic space of the "national" economy, the US government moved first to rename
the operation more euphemistically, "Hold the Line", and later, its purpose
accomplished, to abandon it altogether.
borders and boundaries
A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks
recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its
essential unfolding..spaces receive their essential being from locations and
not from "space."
Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking." 2
Space and the political organization of space express social relationships
but also react back upon them.
Henri Lefebvre, La Rivolution Urbaine.3
From the relations of power that became manifest through the political and
economic dynamics that accompanied the operation's implementation, we can trace at
once a continuation of by now entrenched political and economic tendencies within
both Mexico and the US and an intensification of those same tendencies. That is, the
locus of the determination of the social, political, and economic relations that occur
along the length of the border clearly extends well beyond the border zone itself. Yet, as
Heidegger seemed to recognize of boundaries in general, it also acts, perhaps not so
much as a starting point, but certainly as a necessary condition, for the establishment
and maintenance of consumer capitalism on a larger scale.4 The dialectics between the
border-as-presence and the border-as-product imply, as Lefebvre suggests, that its local
spatial arrangements, considered under "vulgar" Marxism part of the "superstructure",
can also dialectically produce inflections at the level of the economic "base".
I will examine these relationships at two levels:
1) Between the regional border economy itself, in many ways relatively selfsufficient, and the larger phenomenon of what Manuel Castells terms "capitalist
restructuring" and Fredric Jameson calls "late capitalism",5 now widely held to be the
paradigmatic mode of production for the major growth sectors of the so-called First
World and, increasingly, for those of the Third as well.
2) Between the specific urban form of the Ciudad Judrez and El Paso paired cities,
in many ways paradigmatic of the major forces likely to determine the border condition
in the foreseeable future, and the regional border economy to which they act as center.
"flows"..."places"
Manuel Castells models the changes in the spatial distribution of the world
economy as a shift from a "space of places", paradigmatic under monopoly, or industrial,
capitalism, to a "space of flows" resulting from advances in informational technologies
that, under the specific logic of "capitalist restructuring", permit the creation of a
variable geometry of production and consumption, labor and capital,
management and information-a geometry that denies the specific
productive meaning of any place outside its position in a network
whose shape changes relentlessly in response to the messages of unseen
signals and unknown codes. 6
This new space, however, is not for Castells one of universal unproblematic access.
Rather, the upper tiers of society are typically the ones best positioned to benefit most
from the effects of the new technologies and modes of production, making this space
one "characterized by differential exposure to information flows and communication
patterns." 7 With regard, therefore, to political problems of unequal access to social goods
and opportunities, that is, the existence of such a thing as class, now at last recognized
as such if only for the period, purportedly now superseded, of industrial capitalism,
this new mode does not provide a solution.
Ultimately, then, Castells is pessimistic with regard to the socio-political effects of
these developments. Far from heralding them as the first signs of an emerging
decentralized, democratic, and inclusive public sphere, as the ideologues of postindustrialism assert, he warns:
5 Jameson prefers this term to the more
common (in the US) "post-industrialism"
due to the latter's associations with the
teleological and triumphalist thesis of the
"end of history/ideology" advanced,
notably, by Daniel Bell. (See, for example,
Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994.) The results of my
own investigations into the border justify
Jameson's preference.
Manuel Castells, The Informational City:
Information Technology, Economic
Restructuring, and the Urban-Regionat
Process, (London, Basil Blackwell, 1989)
7Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity, p.227,
Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity, p. 349.
6
The emergence of the space of flows actually expresses the
disarticulation of place-based societies and cultures from the
organizations of power and production that continue to dominate
society without submitting to its control...People live in places, power
rules through flows. 8
dual cities
Detailing some of the spatial social effects of these developments within (mainly
US) urban centers, he notes the emergence of what he refers to as the structurally "dual
city". This city is marked by "bipolarization", or "the simultaneous growth of the top
and the bottom of the occupational spectrum at a rate such that there is an increase in
the relative shares of both extreme positions in the overall population distribution."9
73
9 Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity, p. 184.
cf., Manuel Castells, The Informational City, pp.
30-32.
" Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity, p. 226.
12
Gay Young, "The Development of Ciudad Judrez:
Urbanization, Migration, Industrialization,"
GayYoung, ed., The SocialEcology and Economic
Development of Ciudad Judrez, (Boulder and
London: Westview Press, 1986), p. 11.
10
This results from the stratification of the economy into, on the one hand, a corps of
what Robert Reich refers to as the "symbolic analysts", the managerial elite with
significant access to the global networks of information and communications, that is,
the "space of flows", and on the other hand, the workforce, primarily comprised of
women, ethnic minorities, and immigrants, who take the low-level, unprotected jobs
generated as a result of large-scale shifts in the forms of production and who occupy
the re-formed "space of places".10
Spatially, the occupational dichotomy expresses itself in the simultaneous
fragmentation of the social totality into an array of "irreducibly different" communities
well in excess of the seeming binary nature of economic distribution:
In fact, structural dualism.. .does not result in two social worlds, but in
a variety of social universes whose fundamental characteristics are their
fragmentation, the sharp definition of their boundaries, and the low
level of communication with other such universes ...What results is a
spatial structure that combines segregation, diversity, and hierarchy.1 1
This phenomenon, the description of which Castells limits to the level of the
individual city or urban center, has its analogue in the context of the US-Mexican border
both at the scale of the paired cities the hug the length of the border and at that of the
nation-state as well. Just as Castells insists on the seemingly paradoxical interrelationship between globalizing developments at the level of the economic totality
and the fragmentary reterritorializing of social groupings, I will demonstrate, through
a study of the El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juirez metropole, the interdependence of the
political division of territory into discreet nation-states and the generation of a regional,
semi-autonomous, economy, which in turn serves to "maintain the political status quo"12
both at a local and, more indirectly, at a national level. As Castells locates a tension
between the politicized reterritorializations of fragmented Places and the "space of
flows", whose needs, according to Castells, now largely determine the constitution of
Place in the first instance.
the place of the nation-state
We are witnessing, therefore, the disappearance of Place as (romantically)
conceived initially during the Enlightenment, and under whose laws industrial
capitalism arguably operated, as a bounded territory with pre-existing characteristics
which determined the degree of that space's attraction for capital. The abundance, for
example, of certain types of labor power, natural resources, or infrastructure, combined
with the need for production to be organized vertically and in linear time to produce
74
capital's attraction to those areas, either as sites of production and/or of consumption,
and its subsequent territorialization. Now, informational technologies make the
dispersion, or horizontal organization, of production possible and dissolves the fixity
and linearity of the spatial and temporal progression previously necessary.
The contemporary selection of places for the consumption of capital, consequently,
is based overwhelmingly first, on land values and, more importantly, on a "symbolic
capitalization" that often, supported by the State, occurs beforehand. We will see that
the border region, specifically the El Paso-Judrez metropole in many ways do not redefine
the previous production paradigm, yet in other ways could not exist as such outside of
the context of larger scale economic changes. What this study in fact demonstrates is
that the space of the nation-state is the last representative of the "residual" conception
of Place; the differences and uneven rate of development between discreet bounded
national territories still constitute, for capital, an attraction that cannot be reduced to
the "simulacrum" of "symbolic capitalization."
maquiladoras,"free trade" and the State
A central impetus for the border's growth in economic, populational, and spatial
terms has historically resided in the US military. The historical under-development (in
terms of its lower rate of industrialization compared to other regions of the country) of
the US South and Southwest produced, among other effects, relatively lower land values.
Military bases, such as Fort Bliss in El Paso, and related facilities were consequently
often located in these regions. This led to the typical effects of US military bases
everywhere, namely, an immediate increase in the immediate environs in social "ills"
such as prostitution, drinking establishments, gambling, etc., and an overall decline in
the standard of living over a longer period of time. That legal constraints prevented the
establishment in the US itself of most of this unofficial infrastructure of military bases
meant that much of the initial economic growth of the border towns on the Mexican
side, in addition to deriving from the usual "coyote" economy based on the transfer of
illegal immigrants across the border, came from the twin industries of tourism and "sin
city" activities.
The military, however significant, is not the only mode through which the State
apparatuses of both countries have played, and continue to play, a defining role in the
construction of the contemporary border economy, now defined largely by the
preponderance of the maquiladorallindustry. In 1962, the US government passed the
Tariff Classification Act, Sections 806 and 807 of which permitted the export of US
components and their subsequent duty-free entry of US-manufactured components
assembled outside the country, charging a tariff only on the "value added" to the
assembled product. The Mexican State, for its part, responded three years later with the
" See, for example, Kevin Sullivan's MCP
thesis on Times Square, MIT, 1995.
14Oscar Martinez, Troublesome Border, (Tuscon,
University of Arizona Press, 1988), p. 128.
15
Originally referring to the quota of grain
traditionally given to the grinder in
exchange for his service, the term now
describes the foreign-owned plants that
hire Mexican labor to assemble typically
US-made components for re-export to the
primarily the US market. While the
overwhelming majority of the
transactions are still between Mexicans
and US citizens, the Japanese and
Germans are increasing their presence on
the market, especially in the automotive
sector.
75
Following the Second World War, the labor
shortage in the US prompted the government,
in 1948, to initiate the Bracero Program,
reducing immigration and work permit
requirements and flooding the Southwest with
cheap Mexican labor, subsequently deported
in 1960 when the regional economy began to
slow.
16
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South:
Cities, Space, and Politics on the US-Mexico
Border,(Austin: Center for Mexican-American
17
18
Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1990),
p.163-4.
Haring, Henk A., Sunbelt Frontier and Border
Economy: Manufacturing in El Paso-Ciudad
Judrez. (Utrecht, Netherlands: Department of
Geography, University of Utrecht, 1985), p. 117.
19
2
As Noam Chomsky and others are quick to point
out, the historical record does not provide us
with a single example of significant national
industrialization without protectionist policies.
The major contemporary promoters of "free
trade" were without exception heavily
protectionist during the period of their own
industrial development; even as late as the
1980's, the Reagan administration restricted
foreign competition with certain key
industries, in fact to a greater degree than all
previous post-WWII administrations
combined, as James Baker once boasted.
Jorge Carrillo V. and Alfredo Hualde, Empresas
Maquiladoras y Tratado Trilateral de Libre
Comercio:Empleo, Eslabonamientoy Expectativas,
2
(Tijuana, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1992),
p. 2 5 .
Jorge Carrillo V. and Alfredo Hualde, Empresas
Maquiladoras y Tratado Trilateral de Libre
Comercio, p. 14.
Border Industrialization Program (Programade Industrializaci6nFronteriza). Initially
intended as a response to the ending of the Bracero program16 in the US and the
subsequent overpopulation of the Mexican border states, the program quickly was reoriented toward the ostensibly longer term goal of developing national industry
through "twin plants" sharing capital-intensive US technology. Stipulating in part that
Mexican nationals comprise 90% of the labor force and also establishing some minimum
wage and work condition laws, the Program permitted the duty-free importation of
the machinery, equipment, and raw materials necessary for the establishment of the
maquiladoras.7 Explicitly oriented from the start toward the exterior so as not to compete
with nationally-owned industry their products are required to be exported by law.18
As we will see, this "enclave" mentality on the part of the Mexican State, while arguably
correct as an overall strategy in the promotion of national industrial development,19
has led to the almost complete divorce between the border and the rest of the Mexican
economy.
Dating from the mid-1960's, the maquiladorashave become the overwhelming
source of employment, whether directly or indirectly, for border Mexicans and the
major economic attraction for both sides of the divide. This sector of the Mexican
economy currently provides direct employment in around 2300 plants for some 600,000
workers and indirect employment via support industries for hundreds of thousands
more. Overwhelmingly, the majority of those workers, virtually 90% in Ciudad Juirez
as of 1990, directly employed in the plants work in the "macro" scale plants almost
exclusively owned by foreign capital. 20 The industry is surpassed only by that of
petroleum as the primary source of Mexico's foreign exchange, earning US$1.5 billion
in 1985, although mostly in the form of wages, and consequently not subject to State
control (excepting that in the form of income taxes).2 1
wage scales
The historical record justifies the assumption that the key to foreign
investment in assembly plants is the maintenance of as wide a gap as
possible between wages in Mexico and wages in the US.
Gay Young, "The Development of Ciudad Judrez: Urbanization, Migration,
Industrialization" 2 2
That the borderline itself is an essentially political division is not disputable. Its
raison d'8treresides precisely in Young's observation cited above and demonstrated in
the following table2 1 showing the spatial Wage Scale distribution as one moves from
the interior of the US to the interior of Mexico:
US National
US Border City
Mexican Border
MOexican Nat.
Average
Aerage
City Average
Ae rage
Gay Young, "The Development of Ciudad
Juirez: Urbanization, Migration,
Industrialization", p. 15.
23 Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets
South, p. 47. Herzog also adds that there
is a strong correlation, along both the
North-South and East-West axes, between
Hispanic population and low income.
2
The reading, to be discussed below, of the border economy as a unit, or as a semiautonomous system largely independent of the national economies that surround it,
therefore can only be justified in terms of its relation to those latter economies. That is,
it is not merely coincidental that the particular circuits of capital and labor that
characterize the border economy arise precisely where the wage differential shifts from
5x to x in the space of a few kilometers.
The municipality of Ciudad Juirez (latest population estimate, 1.5 million) in
particular has, since the Border Industrialization Program, developed into the border's
major center for maquiladoraassembly, with most of the economically active population
connected either directly of peripherally to the circuits of the plants. The table below
shows the growth of the industry in Ciudad Juirez in absolute and relative terms, with
breakdowns of the labor force based on class and gender.
rian
opratnnR
_Person el Employed
Men
oren
T
Jorge Carrillo V. and Alfredo Hualde,
Empresas Maquiladorasy Tratado Trilateral
de Libre Comercio, p. 17.
5Haring, Henk A., Sunbelt Frontierand Border
Economy, p. 134.
24
JudArez
Iorkers
hnicians
ou rs -worked
I
19,775
124,386
16.50
3,640
13,663
17,303
1,370
45,001
54,740
99,741
15,713
30.02
9.97
15.99
19.86
3,270,000
18,073,000
14.98
According to surveys done by the Department of Geography at the University of
Utrecht (Holland), the proliferation, well beyond that of other border cities, of the plants
in this area is due to first, its location halfway between California and the major Texan
cities, mostly in the eastern half of the state, and from there to the rest of the eastern US,
and second, to the large reserve of labor, relatively educated and skilled, yet docile, due to
the absence of strong unionism.2s Geographical location, of course, takes on meaning only
when constituted through the development (or lack thereof) of infrastructural links the
growth of the "Sunbelt" economy in the Southern and Southwestern regions of the US
during this period therefore relied heavily on the implementation and continual
maintenance of certain fiscal policies and incentives established by both States.In the case
of Juirez/El Paso, the overwhelming majority of these nodes are located North of the
border. Here, the historic separation between the border towns and Mexico's financial,
77
26
"Investment status" also depends on, in addition
to a "stable" currency, a "stable" political
situation. The Mexican State's record here falls
equally on the side of the interests of foreign
investment, as demonstrated, notoriously
(depending on one's view on Human Rights),
by the recent exposure by Alex Cockburn in
Counterpunch of the Chase Manhattan
Memorandum to the Zedillo Administration
recommending a swift "elimination" of the
Zapatista "problem".
27 The partnership between the two governments
in maintaining the links between their two
currencies is revealed even more clearly by, for
example, the Federal Reserve's intervention
during the Mexican Debt crisis of 1982 and the
US Treasury's brokering of the threatened
Mexican default on its debts to US banks in
1987,
cultural, and political center of gravity, namely, Mexico City, is if anything reinforced
by the defacto exclusion of national industry from the competition for Mexican consumer
pesos (rapidly, in the "dollarized" economy of the border, converted into the US
currency). Due to the underdeveloped infrastructural connections even to the Northern
interior, the traditional Mexican industrial heartland, border residents develop first a
certain ressentiment towards their compatriots living in the center, and also end up
transfering most of their disposable income across the divide. That these precipitous
rates of foreign investment implied by the overall growth of the industry occurred
primarily during the 1980's is not coincidental. During this period, the successive PRI
regimes, following the monetarist policies then in vogue, borrowed heavily in order to
maintain a strong peso, seen as a necessary condition for the export-oriented model of
economic development promoted by multi-lateral lending institutions such as the IMF
and World Bank. The peso, pegged to the dollar, was not devalued until, disastrously,
December of 1994, when the situation could no longer be maintained. The artificial
strength of the peso resulted in several effects directly important for the border economy:
1) It increasedthe purchasing power, relative to their US counterparts, of
Mexicans living in or near border towns, increasing the flow of consumer dollars
northward into the regional economy of the US Southwest. Thus, even though
maquiladorawages were inflated in absolute terms, much of these earnings were
immediately transfered back to the US by Mexican consumption there. This is
a central element in the circuit of capital flow within the border economy, and
is directly related to the regulation of population transfer from Mexico to the
US. From the pressuring of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service
immediately preceding the ratification of the Bracero Program to the immediate
local recession brought about by the peso's devaluation in 1972, to the lower
expectations for growth following the recent devaluation, the merchants and
other sectors of the US border economy have always at least implicitly
recognized their dependence on especially Mexican consumption.
2) It boosted investor confidence with regard to the overall stability of the
Mexican economy, a confidence reflected in the gradual upgrading of Mexico's
"investor status" ranking in the business press throughout the decade. 2 6
The (super)profits to be made in the maquiladoraindustry and, indeed, much of
the growth of the "Sunbelt" economy in the Southern and Southwestern regions of the
US during this period therefore relied heavily on the implementation and continual
maintenance of certain fiscal policies and incentives established by both States. It is in
this sense that the border economy, due also the locus of its primary form of profit
generation, namely, in industrial production, represents a continuation of the industrial
Keynesianism perhaps more paradigmatic previous to 1973, when the Bretton Woods
agreement regulating currency exchange was all but officially scrapped.27 This continuity
occurs in spite of the border economy's generation as a result of the emergence of a new
overall paradigm, termed by David Harvey "flexible accumulation", or the opportunistic
international mobility of capital. The border, consequently, can be read, in the same
way as its primary and most obvious reading as an ambiguous "third" area in-between
two different political, cultural, social, and economic communities, as a temporal point
of transition between what Raymond Williams might have called an "emerging" mode
of production and a "residual" one. It also confirms Edward Soja's observation that
capitalist restructuring does not completely erase older forms of economic relations,
but instead adds another "layer" to the methods of capital accumulation, both reinforcing
basic economic trajectories and producing new opportunities to inflect those trajectories.
benefits and otherwise
Originally intended by the US to provide significant wage savings over US labor
(estimated in 1985 by the business press at over $14,500 per person, per annum 2 ) and
by Mexico as the point of transfer of advanced US technology southward, the border
economy has produced rather uneven economic benefits. The concentration on the
assembly of objects either difficult to assemble by machine or those subject to rapid
obsolescence such as clothing and electronic apparatuses has led to a counter-incentive
to automation, hence to fixed capital investment. The Mexican government,
underwriting the plants with indirect subsidies in the form of provision of necessary
physical infrastructure and social services2 9 receives in return neither the anticipated
technological transfer nor the economic multipliers and linkages generated routinely
on the US side due to the greater degree of integration between its border economy and
its interior. The following table shows the characteristics of suppliers to different sizes
of maquiladoraplants in Ciudad Juirez in 1990. The "Just in Time" program signifies a
governmentally guaranteed level of reliability both in terms of product quality and in
efficiency of delivery. More broadly speaking, it is taken to indicate a transfer of
technology from the US to Mexico, as higher standards are demanded by the
maquiladoras.This would hold especially true in the case of the establishment of relations
between Mexican suppliers and the "macro" plants which, typically foreign owned,
tend to utilize more advanced manufacturing technologies.
Average # of
Suppliers
Ave. %suppliers
from Mexico
%of JIT*
1
Suppliers
17
17
23
95
28.2
6.1
7.2
6.2
40.7
49.7
66.4
55.6
28
Cited in Oscar Martinez, Trouhlesome Border,
(Tuscon: University of Arizona Press,
1988), p. 128.
2 The State provides social security,subsidized
medical care, and even day care facilities
for the still largely female working
population. (From an interview with
C6sar Fuentes Flores, researcher at the
Colegio de la Frontera Norte, in Ciudad
Juirez, 16 January, 1995.)
30
Jorge Carrillo V. and Alfredo Hualde,
Empresas Maquiladorasy Tratado Trilateral
de Libre Comercio, pp. 36-46.
* Registered with the "Just in Time" Program
79
31
Gay Young, "The Development of Ciudad JuArez:
Urbanization, Migration, Industrialization," p.
13.
3
Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity, pp. 30-2.
33
Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p. 324.
The data from this table indicates that, in spite of the significant number of suppliers
subcontracted by the "macro" plants (which, we recall, employ nearly 90 percent of the
total maquiladoraworkforce in Ciudad Juirez), only around 6 percent of those suppliers
are Mexican. Of those suppliers, on average, about half, or 3 percent, can be considered
beneficiaries of any direct technological transfer.
The lack of technological transfer also results from an inherent counter-incentive
to automation within the maquiladora plants themselves, typically attributed to two
factors:
The type of products assembled, overwhelmingly electronics such as television
receivers, conductors and circuitry, clothing and apparel, and automotive
components, especially the "harnesses" used in vehicular on-board electronics.'
These goods, with the exception of the automotive components, share in common
the characteristic of rapid turnover and obsolescence within the consumer markets
for which they are destined, primarily that of the US. Castells describes the
contracting of low or unskilled labor instead of investing in fixed pieces of machinery
for the performance of repetitive assembly tasks as a tendency toward "flexibility"
characteristic of the "informational" economy.32 It both enables production to shift
rapidly with a minimum of time or money lost to reconversion in terms of the
particular objects to be assembled and in terms of the location of their assembly.
Should more "competitive" conditions for production arise outside of Mexico, in
terms of labor requirements (ie., lower wages and less collective bargaining) and/
or in terms of national investment incentives (eg., tax abatements, capital repatriation
laws, etc.), the plants are more readily abandoned.
*The presumed lack, in "developing" nations in general, both of the industrial
infrastructure needed to support and of the skilled labor available to handle more
sophisticated pieces of equipment, especially those pieces which would appear to
be particularly well suited to maquiladora production, given the requirements
described above, namely, microelectronics-based "flexible manufacturing
technologies". These technologies, according to Castells, "make possible short
production runs without lower productivity, enabling swift responses to market
demand through constant redesign of the product, as well as by reprogramming
the production process." 33 Yet they remain largely unintegrated into the border
economy. This is the case in spite of the evidence provided by the few times where
attempts have been made to incorporate it into maquiladoraproduction. For example,
in the mid 1980's, a Ford plant in the Juirez area outfitted with such equipment,
the plant reached, in spite of a young workforce encountering such machinery for
the first time, 80 percent of the machine efficiency of Ford's US plants, 75 percent of
their labor productivity, and a level of quality between that of Canadian and that of
US plants within the space of 18 months. Given the drastically lower level of its
operating costs, both fixed and variable (environmental restrictions being less
stringent and labor costs amounting to one tenth those of typical US counterparts),
the Mexican plant turned out to be more profitable than those of either the US or
Canada. 4
3
employment
If the Mexican economy does not benefit from the technological transfer or the
establishment of economic linkages necessary for mid or long-term industrialization, it
does receive other benefits at the national level from the maquiladoraindustry The major
incentive for continued Mexican participation in this economy resides in the enormous
demand for labor generated by the assembly plants. From 1984 to 1988, for example,
they provided employment to more than 18 percent of the economically active
population in the sector of manufacturing.35 As a whole the industry brings in far more
foreign exchange in the form of wages than it does in terms of investment. The table
below details, in millions of dollars, the various outlays assumed in the operation of
the maquiladoras around Juirez from 1975 to 1989.
Cited by Manuel Castells, The Informational
City,pp. 328-9. He attributes the successful
implementation of the technologies to
three factors: 1) the high levels of
motivation and education of the work
force, 2) the organization of the workforce
into team-work and control groups,
emphasizing the importance of work
procedures in the use of new technologies,
and, 3) managers and engineers brought
in from Ford plants around the world for
training and supervision.
2.44
National Products
Wages&Salaries
Various Expenditures
Utilities&Other
3.2
58.9
20.4
15.3
2.4
57.9
|I 32.3
23.2
23.2
439.1
|I 244.0
113.3
|I
(2.5)
6.8
6.1
|I
38.3
33.6
33.5
25.4
In absolute terms, wages and salaries account for almost 200 times the expenditures
as the purchase of nationally manufactured products: clearly, Mexico's benefit takes
place at the short term, individual or at most family level. Prospects for the development
of long term or even mid term growth resulting from more structural transformations
wrought by the presence of the maquiladoras appear to be few.
wage flow northward
Yet Mexico does not manage to retain within its borders the bulk of these wages
earned by Mexican labor: in 1982, for example, $ 0.91 of every wage dollar earned on
the Mexican side of the border ended up back in the US 3 6, and typically, around $600700 million annually are transferred northward.3 7 From 1976-1985, an estimated $53
billion left Mexico, mostly destined for US banks located on the borderlands.3" By
comparison, Mexico's entire external debt after a decade of massive international
Jorge Carrillo V. and Alfredo Hualde,
Empresas Maquiladorasy Tratado Trilateral
de Libre Comercio: Empleo, Eslabonamientot
y Expectativas, (Tijuana, El Colegio de la
Frontera Norte, 1992), p. 14.
3 Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets
South, p. 58.
3 Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets
South, p. 147.
38 Martinez, 1988, p. 123.
33
39
Ben B. Boothe, "Texas and Mexico,
Immediate Impact of the Mexican Crisis,"
unpublished paper, Fort Worth, Texas,
1995, p. 2.
borrowing currently stands at around $160 billion. 39 This form of repatriation of US
81
capital is not insignificant, for it accounts for much of the economic expansion
experienced by the South and Southwestern US in the past few decades. David Harvey
reminds us that while capital's liquid flows through financial circuits generate apparently
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South, p. limitless economic multipliers, at some point in time and space it must solidify and be
consumed: in the border context, this Place is located in the immediately North of the
146.
41 Fuentes Flores, 16 January, 1995.
line. The Mexican State, recognizing the capital hemorrhage, intermittently has
attempted to slow it with legal measures such as the 1971 Articulos Ganchos Act which,
hoping to retain Mexican consumers in the national territory, permitted the duty free
entry into a fixed northern zone of select US-made commodities. Also attempting to
stimulate the establishment of shopping centers through tax subsidies, the Act in the
end produced the opposite of the desired effect, discouraging even further local
competition with foreign products and driving small and medium sized businesses
into bankruptcy while encouraging the larger Mexican businesses to enter into
partnerships and joint ventures with US multi-nationals where they were sure to play
the junior role."0 While the net movement of capital within the circuit of maquiladora
production in the end statistically favors the Mexicans, in spite of the significant losses
to US retailers, it is just as undoubtedly is at the cost of the longer term development of
national industry.
0
benefits for Mexico
This link between the provision of immediate employment and the postponing of
indigenous industrialization goes a long way toward explaining the continuous, if at
times half-hearted Mexican State support expressed in legal and financial measures, of
the maquiladoraindustry. Through the massive labor requirements of the plants, it diffuses
the periodically explosive effects of structural unemployment, consequently
guaranteeing its short-term political survival.' Sometimes, as when Jaime Bermudez,
head of the largest Mexican conglomerate operating in the Juirez region, the Grupo
Bermudez, was installed as the mayor of Judrez for the ruling Partido Revolucionario
Institucional(PRI) from 1982 to 1985, the extent of the State's dependence on the border
status quo, and the border's dependence (or at least certain sectors of the border) on the
political status quo, becomes particularly explicit.
benefits for the US
The benefits for the US are in some ways more ambiguous. Clearly, the North
American consumer benefits from the lowered production costs of at least the products
assembled in the maquiladoras,assuming, that is, that the savings are passed on to the
public. The local populations of the border states benefit both from the availability of
cheap labor and the flow of Mexican consumer dollars northward. Why then do they
experience some of the highest rates of unemployment in Texas, a state already notable
in the US for its high rates? Why are the indices of infant mortality, influenza, pneumonia,
tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases 125-250% higher than the national average
in the border cities? Why are the rates of unionization lower there than in the rest of the
US, where they are in any case already at levels barely perceptible within the context of
other industrialized nations?
class
One can respond satisfactorily to these questions only be taking into account the
role of class in the socio-economic dynamic between the border and the rest of the
national economies. The moment one asks exactly who it is in the US (or in Mexico, for
that matter) that experiences the deleterious effects of the border condition and who it
is that benefits, it becomes clear that in many ways the "elites" of both nations, namely,
those that in Castells' schema access the "space of flows", moving capital around the
globe in search of greater accumulation, share ore in common with each other that with
their respective compatriots confined to the "space of places". If Castells is correct in
his locating within the latter space simultaneously the worst effects of the fragmentation
of contemporary society and the greatest possibilities for its transformation, then the
border comes to be seen as an ambiguous middle zone at yet another level: as the testing
ground for new social relations that necessarily re-assert the primacy of community,
necessarily operating on several levels, one of which undoubtedly must be Place, or
geographical fixity, but with a full consciousness of its inter-dependence with its "other"
almost literally on the opposite side of the tracks. Empirically, the rationalizations usually
put forward for the much-reported conflicts between the disparate groups in the "space
of places" are unfounded. A 1980 study in San Diego, for example, demonstrated that
the heavy Mexican pressure on the local labor market increased unemployment only
0.5%; 0.1% of total county welfare payments went to illegal immigrants, who also
impacted hospitals only in terms of 1-2% of their total operating costs, and 2-4% on the
public education systemn.4
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets
South, p. 207.
"David Harvey, The Condition of Postnoernity
An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, (Cambridge, MA and Oxford;
Blackwell, 1990), pp. 295-6.
42
uneven development
The less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of
capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the
incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital.
The result has been the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and
ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified global space
economy of capital flows.
43
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
83
"4Ernest Mandel, "Capitalism and Regional
Disparities", Southwest Economy and Society 1,
41-47. Cited in Edward Soja, Postmodern
Geographies,(London: Verso, 1989), p. 81.
4s Haring, Henk A., Sunbelt Frontier and Border
Economy, p. 115.
* Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p. 318.
Ben B. Boothe, "Texas and Mexico, Immediate
Impact of the Mexican Crisis," p. 2.
4 Boothe estimates, on page 3 of his report, that,
due to the recent devaluation of the peso, the
state of Texas will suffer a decrease in exports
to Mexico of 20% or more, in addition to a
reversal of the trade imbalance in Mexico's
favor and an increase in the amount of illegal
immigration into the US.
47
84
The unequal development between regions and nations is the very
essence of capitalism, on the same level as the exploitation of labor by
capital.
Ernest Mandel, "Capitalism and Regional Disparities" 4 4
The separation on various levels-of technological transfer, of economic linkages,
both forward and backward, and therefore of economic multipliers-between the border
economy and the economies located spatially in the interior of Mexico implies the de
facto functioning of the border region as a "relatively autonomous" economic entity
within the overall functioning of the national Mexican economy. The converse situation,
that is, the separation between the border economy and the US interior, takes place to a
lesser degree. Most of the corporate headquarters for the maquiladora plants, for example,
are located in the traditional manufacturing centers of the US, such as New England
and, increasingly, California.45 Yet, most of the direct economic linkages between the
plants occur within the geographic zone of the Southwestern US, particularly, the state
of Texas. From 1967-80, the era of the maquiladora program's early growth and
consolidation, Texas experienced, in absolute numbers, the largest growth of any state
in manufacturing employment.46 During the 1980's, this state alone exported some $1618 billion annually across the border and sold more goods there than any other nation.47
Most of the wage money spent by Mexicans in the US also stays within the Southwest,
making that area of the US structurally dependent on the fluctuations of the maquiladora
economy, on the continuation of the movement (heavily regulated, to be sure) of Mexican
labor into the regional economy and, to a lesser degree, on the cycles of the Mexican
economy in general."8
Moreover, the specific items assembled in the maquiladorasthemselves function,
both at a metaphoric and at a very real level, as important components of a "throwaway"
US consumer society. The rapid introduction and replacement of consumer articles,
referred to in another context by Harvey as the "revolutionary" quality of capitalism in
its constant and simultaneous creation/destruction dialectic, demands the continual
varying of those articles, over increasingly shorter periods of time. The operative mode
of the assembly plants provides one solution to the problem of the need to constantly
retrofit industrial production: by reducing automation to a bare minimum and relying
instead on a steady and replenishable supply of cheap labor, the maquiladoracorporations
demonstrate the dependence of consumer capitalism on historically established "uneven
development". It is paradoxical but instructive that the electronic parts assembled under
low-tech conditions in so many of the plants are in part responsible for facilitating the
spatial dispersion of hierarchies of production, a phenomenon of which the maquiladoras
themselves are emblematic.
(post?)industrialism
The border scenario describes one link in the long series of connections between
the supposed globally homogenizing tendencies of late capital and the maintenance of
what amount to irreducible political boundaries that guarantee the wage differential
"as wide as possible" between US workers and their similarly-skilled counterparts in
Mexico. That is to say, the division of territory into differentiable political and economic
units constructs one attraction across inter-national space for the re-investment of surplus
capital from the North. This is not to discount the unequal international distribution of
production and consumption that took place under colonial industrial capitalism; the
so-called post-industrial variety, however, signifies a shift to a different regime. Whereas
the former relied on the exercise of administrative control emanating from a metropolitan
center to a subjugated (typically Third World) territory, that is, on the elimination of
political difference, the latter, in cases such as this, relies precisely on the nominal political
autonomy of the (nevertheless, still) subjugated territory.49
It is important to note that this dynamic occurs only in the case of First-Third
World relations, which take on a cast strongly analogous to inter-class relations within
national boundaries: in other words, the division of labor so central to traditional Marxian
discourse is analogous to the international division of labor that must play a similarly
central role in any accounting of late capitalism, without abandoning class analysis at a
more "micro" level. With respect to inter-national relations within the First World itself,
the by now cliched "world without borders" appears to be empirically justified, almost
entirely in the case of capital and increasingly in the case of labor. Whereas both systems
demanded the free movement, both nationally and internationally, of capital, industrial
capitalism also placed a premium on the maximum mobility, both intra-nationally and
at times inter-nationally as well, of the labor force. The need to augment the worker's
ability to commute to and from work on a daily basis as well as on his/her ability to
migrate according to the demands of the market drove, according to David Harvey,
many of the advances, not nearly so much in evidence today, made in transportation
technologies under industrial capitalism. Also, the wholesale urban transformations of
the 19th century, as per Haussmann, in addition to their more commonplace reading as
facilitators of State military mobilizations, can be read as a rationalization of the mobility
of labor power. The mass migrations at different times during the same century also
seem to indicate a structural necessity for relatively free labor flow on the part of
industrial capitalism.50 It is indicative of the Eurocentrism of most economic analyses
that the entire system is held to be represented through what is in fact only the EuropeanUS-Japanese sector of its operation. What the border economy teaches us, however, is
that the totality of the system in reality depends on not only on the networks established
among the capital surplus nations but also on their "other", namely those nations
categorized as "developing".
49 "Political
50
autonomy", however, is always
relative, as the Guatemalans (1954),
Brazilians (1964), Chileans (1973),
Nicaraguans (1982), Panamanians (1989),
etc., to name only some recent examples,
can readily attest.
cf., David Harvey, The Urban Experience,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1989), pp. 18-19.
85
Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p. 310.
32Cited in Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies,p.
167.
51
86
Another difference between the spatial patterns of capital flow under monopoly
capitalism and the contemporary model consists of the current greater degree of financial
restructuring that occurs among developed nations. Manuel Castells has pointed out
the correlation between "offshore" investment (such as that represented by the
maquiladoras)by US corporations and the largely foreign financing of those same
corporations within the US itself. This singular phenomenon characterizes contemporary
economic shifts in two ways:
1) As an example of the increasing "interpenetration" of national economies, a process
described by Castells as moving "toward equilibrium", presumably because US
capital does not now flow exclusively in one direction. This "equilibrium", however,
will apparently be enjoyed only by the nations of the North as the symmetry of
capital flow has not materialized along the North-South axis. Instead, the US has,
unlike its Western European counterparts, experienced a rapid increase in the entry
of immigrant labor.5' This general pattern clearly intensifies at the border where
the physical movement of people into the territory of the US is facilitated by
geographical proximity.
2) As a demonstration of what Soja describes as another "layer" in regimes of
accumulation. If industrial capitalism depended to a large degree on "uneven
development" both at the scale of subnational regions as well as at the inter-national
scale in terms of the "international division of labor", exemplified to some degree
by the structure of productive relations between the US and Mexico, then "late"
capitalism, while not entirely eliminating accumulation through older spatial
paradigms, realizes greater profits through uneven sectorialdevelopment. That is,
as Ernest Mandel puts it, rather hermetically, accumulation occurs through "the
overall juxtaposition of development in growth sectors and underdevelopment in
others, primarily in imperialist countries but also in the semi-colonies in a secondary
way."5 2 For example, the explosion of financial speculation in the 1980's and the
delirious conversion of, say, New York from its not so distant industrial past to its
current status as a financial node in a much larger network of speculation in a
series of monetary and financial markets delineate a "growth" area over-developed
in the generation of value no longer based on production per se.
As we have seen, the net results of these processes are not always favorable to the
Mexican economy at a national level, at least in terms of its prospects for long-term
industrial growth. If the maintenance of the maquiladoraindustry is motivated, in Mexico,
in large part by the short-term political interests of the ruling party, then similarly, it is
motivated, in the US, by equally the short term need, on the part of the corporations
involved, to maintain competitiveness in the world market through offshore investment.
Yet, as Castells notes, "By emigrating to low-cost locations or sub-contracting production
internationally, instead of automating and upgrading the production process in the US,
American companies have created the conditions of their own demise."s3 It is this sort
of dialectical reversal that in the end is perhaps the border's most interesting and
significant product.
5
split city space and the space of Identity
The meaninglessness of places, the powerlessness of political
institutions are resented and resisted, individually and collectively, by
a variety of social actors. People have affirmed their cultural identity,
often in territorial terms, mobilizing to achieve their demands,
organizing their communities, and staking out their places to preserve
meaning, to restore whatever limited control they can over work and
residence, to reinvent love and laughter in the midst of the abstraction
of the new historical landscape. But, as I have shown elsewhere in my
Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p.
313.
* Manuel Castells, The Informational City, p.
349-50.
cross-cultural investigation of urban social movements, these are more
often reactive symptoms of structural contradictions than conscious
actions in pursuit of social change. Faced with the variable geometry
of the space of flows, grassroots mobilizations tend to be defensive,
protective, territorially bounded, or so culturally specific that their codes
of self-recognizing identity become non-communicable, with societies
tending to fragment themselves into tribes, easily prone to a
fundamentalist affirmation of their identity. While power constitutes
an articulated functional space of flows, societies deconstruct their
historical culture into localized identities that recover the meaning of
places only at the price of breaking down communication among
different cultures and different places. Between ahistorical flows and
irreducible identities of local communities, cities and regions disappear
as meaningful places.. .The globalization of power flows and the
tribalization of local communities are part of the same fundamental
process of historical restructuring: the growing dissociation between
techno-economic development and the corresponding mechanisms of
social control of such development
Manuel Castells, The InformationalCity5 4
In this further characterization of the contemporary "dual city", Castells addresses
the relationship between what he terms the "space of flows" and the "resistance",
problematic in its tendency to descend into a hermetic and uncomprehending
essentialism, on the part of those excluded from that space. Yet, the politics of Identity
and Difference that play themselves out on the border cannot be so clearly reduced to
87
Bustamante, Jorge, "Frontera M6xico-Estados
Unidos. Reflexiones para un marco te6rico",
in Valenzuela Arce, Jose Manuel, ed.,
Decadencia y Auge de las Identidades: Cultura
Nacional, Identidad Cultural y Modernizaci6n,
(Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1992),
p. 100: "El vecino estadounidense es lo otro o,
lo que no soy yo. Frente a esa otredad del
vecino, el fronterizo recurre a.. .los valores de
su propia definicidn de mexicanidad..."
56 This discussion is based on an interview with
Maria del Carmen Ramos Arredando in
Ciudad Judrez, 17 January, 1995.
57 This paper is not the place to attempt to
substantiate my claims, which are at the
moment very preliminary. For visual
documentation of the various murals
encountered in "Chihuahuita" juxtaposed
with analagous paintings from the Virreynal,
see my M.Arch thesis, 1995.
58
Recall the generally lower standard of living in
the US border cities combined with the overall
correlation between indices of that sort and
Latin population densities.
59
Klaus Theweleit has convincingly demonstrated
how antipathy toward that which is
amorphous, liquid, uncontrollable, is
inextricable tied to "Male Fantasies" in a book
of the same name (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983).
5s
88
the series of binary oppositions postulated by Castells. While most border theorists,
particularly those associated with the Colegio de la Frontera, posit the assertion of
"Mexicanness" on the part of their border population as a political tactic of disavowal
and even resistance in the face of overwhelming and palpable US economic hegemony,
they do so under terms very different from those of Castells. Jorge Bustamante, the
director of the Colegio, writes, "The US neighbor is the other, or, that which I am not.
Confronted with the otherness of his neighbor, the border resident recurs.. .to the values
of his own definition of Mexicanness..." 55 In other words, Mexican identity, the
groundwork and precondition for the formation of "community", at the border is always
already relative to the "otherness" they encounter daily in their contact with the residents
of the other side.
The assertion of border "Mexicanness" also locates itself in self-conscious
opposition to the versions of "official" mexicanidad promoted by Mexico City.5 6 Often
foregrounding Mexico's indigenous Pre-Colombian past, revalorized and re-imagined
through the works of Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, Octavio Paz, Rufino Tamayo, et
al., this mexicanidad is perceived as coincident with the bureaucratic insensitivity
historically displayed by the national center with regard to its northern extremities,
and hence is rejected.
Another assertion of identity occurs within the community of Chicanos and recent
immigrants in the El Paso barrio of "Chihuahuita". This identity, as constructed through
the numerous murals painted on the walls throughout the city and outlying areas (but,
curiously, not significantly in Ciudad Judrez itself), relates, in my opinion, not so much
to the tradition established during the Revolution, but to the Baroque allegories of the
Viceregal New Spain, 57 themselves self-conscious responses to, on the one hand, a crisis
of confidence in the certainties of the Renaissance, and on the other, the need to will
stability onto an uncertain position in the New World. It is precisely here, in this
community that occupies a space liminal at several levels-as neither (officially) Mexican
nor "American", but relatively homogeneous in terms of class 8-that one can perhaps
locate the possibility of a non-essentialist resistance to the hegemony of an anonymous
regime of flows. Not, as Castells suggests in the above passage which verges on the
mysoginistic, 9 by simply reasserting the Presence and fixity of Place, but by situating
that and other identities relative to dominant, normative ones and thereby postulating
the formation of community as a process, as becoming. By interrogating the simultaneous
"deterritorialization and reterritorialization" occasioned by capital, that is, the
simultaneous fragmentation of the old and reconstitution of a new social totality, the
communities self-consciously "on the border" question the workings of those global
forces that rely on the existence of borders everywhere for their operations.
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