Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe

Abstract

This article engages critically with the proposal that flow, fluidity, and mobility are the central and organizing features of globalization. By focusing on the growing obstacles that people- most of them from poorer nations- encounter as they attempt to cross national borders, I explore global interconnection and mobility as stratified and highly regulated. My adoption of crossing borders as a central analytic grows out of a broader discussion within border studies about the problematic way in which "crossings" have been used, namely in cultural studies and Border Theory. This article therefore explores crossing borders as moments in which differences can be powerfully reinforced and opportunities for transnationality systematically denied. Here, I attempt to look at the transnational as occurring within established structures of power (a militarized border) and probe the politics of "border crossings" by focusing on a group of social movement actors as they contest the state's authority to organize and manage movement across its southern border. In this analysis I attempt to frame the United States-Mexico border as a "diagnostic" site where anthropologists can study the dynamics of power and flows across global landscapes in the context of specific political fields and histories. Consequently, this line of analysis leads to a different set of metaphors for globalization-one rooted not so much in an iconography of a world in ceaseless motion, but in an image of a "gated globe."