The Portable Border
Site-Specificity, Art, and the U. S.-Mexico Frontier
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11280669 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire F Fox (0000-0003-1795-0304, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Issue | 41 |
| Pages | 61 |
| Publication date | 1994-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Text (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/466832 |
| OpenAlex | W2317638158 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Today, and are commonly used critical metaphors among multicultural and postmodernist artists and writers. According to Chon Noriega, these terms were first employed in the 1960s and 1970s by Chicano and Mexican scholars to refer to the experience of undocumented workers from Mexico crossing to the United States.3 Indeed, in Chicano arts and letters, Borderlands has replaced Aztlhn as the metaphor of choice to designate a communal space.4 But even though the U.S.-Mexico border retains a shadowy presence in the usage of these terms, the border which is currently in vogue in the U.S., both among Chicano scholars and among those theorists working on other cultural differences, is rarely site-specific.5 Rather, it is invoked as a marker of hybrid or liminal subjectivities, such as those which would be experienced by persons who negotiate among multiple cultural, linguistic, racial, or sexual systems throughout their lives. When the border is spatialized in these theories, that space is almost always universal. The Third World having been collapsed into the First,6 as the argument goes, the border is now to be found in any metropolis-wherever poor, displaced, ethnic, immigrant, or sexual minority populations collide with the hegemonic population, which is usually understood to consist of middleand upperclass WASPs
Archaeology · Frontier · Geography · Latin American and Latino Studies
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2004 - 2023 (20) |
| Highly cited | No |