Alternatives 34 (2009), 1–16Bordering on the Ridiculous: MexAmerica and the New RegionalismMarcela Alvarez Perez and Mark T. Berger*This article examines contemporary concerns about citizenship,security, and development against the backdrop of an emergent“MexAmerica.” It seeks to de-routinize the idea of the nation-state and de-naturalize the history of North America in order tomove beyond the influential technocratic and quantitative ap-proach to border security and development, and thus to definethe current crisis manifested in practices of border security, citi-zenship, and economic integration. KEYWORDS:“MexAmerica,”citizenship, security,borders, developmentIf you start at the south end of Avenida Revolucion (which begins justbelow the ridge over which a huge Mexican flag flaps in the coastalbreeze) and walk more or less due north toward the US border youmove from the more sophisticated clubs and massage parlors, as wellas a seemingly unending number of stores selling the usual collectionof souvenirs, towardthe increasingly cheap and straightforward barsand brothels. There is a double irony here. First, one of the most fa-mous streets in Tijuana, which is named after the Mexican revolutionof the early twentieth century, runs through (and at its north endfeeds directly into) the city’smain red light district. Second, thecloser you move toward the US-Mexican border the more down-mar-ket the city’sthriving sex industrybecomes. Meanwhile, if you turneastwardat the bottom of Avenida Revolucion, and follow the fencethat runs from the ocean, and move inland along the border, and de-pending on the time of day eventually make it through the traffic jam*Alvarez Perez, Colégio de México, Mexico City. Email: marcela.alvarezperez@gmail.com; Berger, Visiting Professor, Department of Defense Analysis, Naval PostgraduateSchool, Monterey, California. Email: mtberger@nps.edu12Bordering on the Ridiculousthat regularly snakes back from the border crossing at San Ysidro/SanDiego, into downtown Tijuana, the air quickly becomes more and morepolluted. Every breath you take confirms that the greater Tijuanaarea is now the single most industrialized area of North America, ac-counting for about 25 percent of industrial output for Canada, theUnited States, and Mexico, combined.The border here is only really a border in one direction. If youenter Mexico on foot, it is unlikely that anyone will ever check yourpassport or identity papers. However, the process of crossing to theUnited States (el otro ladoas the Mexicans call it) requires that youpossess a passport (if you are from Canada or the United States: Amer-icans have until the end of 2009 for this to become mandatory). If youcome from Mexico or somewhere else you will require an entry visaof some sort ahead of time as well as your passport. Despite the for-mal border, however, Tijuana is arguably a key nexus of the phenom-enon of MexAmerica and a central node of the new regionalism andregionalization that has, in some respects made the border betweentwo sovereign nation-states increasingly antiquated if not ridiculous.If thereisone point on which scholars who study the “new regional-ism” agree it is that one of its main characteristics is the participationof a range of actors other than the nation-state in the regionalizationprocesses that arecurrently taking shape across the globe. In this con-text, we identify regionalization, following Frederick Söderbaum, as“the process of regional interaction creating a regional space,” thatneeds to be recognized as a political project that is not necessarilystate-led.1Thus, we can distinguish between state-centered regionalisms andnon-state-led processes of regionalization that actors other than thegovernments of nation-states arebringing about, either consciouslyor unconsciously.Just as the new regionalism embraces a variety of ac-tors, it is also possible for a distinct geographic region (such as theUnited States–Mexico border zone) to include different regionaliza-tion processes that complement and collide with each other. Theseprocesses, which can be formal or informal in character, generateand follow dynamics of their own and create new modes of social, po-litical, and economic interaction. The US-Mexican border region,which has been increasingly characterized as MexAmerica, provides aparticularly marked example of the rapid and dynamic character ofregionalization.Over the past fifteen years, in the wake of the regionalist projectknown as North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA (amongthe Canadian, Mexican, and US governments)—which came into forcein 1994—there has been a dramatic increase in an already dynamicprocess of regional integration. By 2008 there were close to a millionMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger3legal border crossings of the US-Mexican border every day. Upwardof 600,000 US citizens live in Mexico, and there are over 26,000 US-based companies operating south of the border. Fifty-five percent ofdirect foreign investment in Mexico comes from the United States,while the total amount of trade between Mexico and the UnitedStates is more than twice as substantial as it was in 1994. After Canada,Mexico is the second-largest US trading partner.2Both preceding andalongside this trend there has been a renewed interest in the historyof the border region.3This is accompanied by a long and now revi-talized tradition of writing about the history of Mexicans in theUnited States.4There is also a burgeoning literature on various bor-der issues, from drug trafficking to illegal migration.5Meanwhile,some writers see in NAFTA the basis for some form of deeper politicalunion in the future, in part simply as a result of the acceleration ineconomic, social, and cultural processes of integration over the pastfew decades.6This has, not surprisingly, precipitated a backlash in theUnited States, exemplified by Samuel Huntington’s alarmist concernsabout the “Hispanic Challenge.”7This article, meanwhile, focuses on contemporaryconcerns aboutcitizenship, security,and development against the backdrop of anemergent “MexAmerica,” which is both linked to NAFTA in some ways,but also which preceded NAFTA, and represents a completely differ-ent order of magnitude in spatial terms. Weseek to both deroutinizethe idea of the nation-state and denaturalize the history of NorthAmerica in order to move beyond the influential technocratic andquantitative approach to border security and development. We alsoattempt to define the current crisis that is manifested by the issues ofborder security,citizenship, and economic integration. Tobegin with,we needto analyze the process of formal regionalism, representedunder the establishment of border control and cooperation policiesdesigned to increase and enhance security and the commercial ex-change of goods.At the same time there are a range of less formalprocesses at play in terms of sociocultural factors and the historicalregionalization processes that have been occurring in that geograph-ical area for centuries. We should also be aware of the multiplicity ofactors and issues that contribute to shape both processes, because ac-tors that compete, meet, and interact determine the way in which re-gionalisms evolve; thus, we will employ an actor-oriented approach.It is important then to determine the ways in which both the for-mal and informal processes complement and contradict each other, aswell as the role the different actors play, in defining the MexAmericanregion. In the case of the European Union (EU), there is a consciousattempt to create a European region through a formal process. How-ever, MexAmerican regionalism is being achieved by an informal4Bordering on the Ridiculousprocess of regionalization, that overlaps with but also stands apartfrom the formal attempt to generate the North American Community(of NAFTA), which was formally instituted in 1994, in terms of tradeand security. In order to do this, we will analyze certain particularitiesof the formal process of regional integration between the United Statesand Mexico (and, at least, parenthetically, Canada). We will look at howboth governments have tried to manage the dramatically increasedflow of goods established by NAFTA while at the same time enhancingcrossborder security. By taking an actor-centered approachwe are ableto more clearly see how the formal policies oriented toward regionalcommerce and security are often unable to attain their goals, and inother instances are incompatible with the informal regionalization(such as MexAmerica) that is also taking place. We will then examinethe uniqueness of the idea of MexAmerica and have a general view ofhow social, cultural, and historical factors have helped shape theUnited States–Mexico crossborder region into a bilingual and biculturalsocial construct that transcends governments and frontiers. The notionof MexAmerica has gained such strength that now even local govern-ments have become active participants in this regionalization processthat does not belong to what both central governments have includedin their respective agendas. Finally, we will analyze some specific exam-ples of how the practices of the formal process have been failing andhave collided with informal regionalization.Smart Borders and the Security AgendaOne way of viewing the contradictions between the informal emer-gence of MexAmerica and the moreformal processes of commercialand security-oriented regionalism is to look at the creation of whathas been described by Buzan as “regional security complexes”—“setsof units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization, orboth, are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reason-ably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another.”8Mexico andthe United States are clearly linked in a security complex due to thelong physical border that they share. In this context the volume oftrade between both countries, and the large numbers of people thatdaily cross the border, both legally and illegally, are closely related tosecurity issues. The flow of goods and peoples between Mexico andthe United States is not only one of the largest between nation-statesin the world, but it is bound to keep growing as both economies keepgetting more integrated. Due to the large numbersof people who crossthe border both legally and illegally, the importance of crossbordersecurity for the United States has taken on new significance sinceMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger59/11. More particularly there has been an increased concern that ter-rorist groups can take advantage of the porous character of the bor-der and the array of existing facilities for the legal and illegaltrafficking of goods and peoples.The US response to the 9/11 attacks was a dramatic tightening ofborder inspections, and a toughening of policy discourse about bor-ders and crossborder flows. This affected the trade between the threeNAFTA signatories and resulted in millions of dollars in lost revenueand profits. In effect, “security” has become a new kind of trade bar-rier. This situation highlights the dependence of both the Canadianand Mexican economies (if it is still possible to speak about them asdiscrete “national economies”) on their accessibility to the US market.This “dependence” also provided the United States with more nego-tiating leverage on security issues. For instance if, as some US politi-cians have proposed, terrorists were to cross the southern border intothe United States, the Mexican government would find itself upagainst even more relentless border policies than are currently inplace. These would severely affect the flow of goods and peoples, gen-erating much-dreaded bottlenecks and delays with negative economicconsequences for all concerned.The flow of goods and people has acquired then a double im-portance: in terms of economic growth and as a potential vector forterrorism. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2004 it wasestimated that over 12 thousand trucks and an average of 660,000 pas-senger vehicles crossed the Mexico-US border per day.9Additionallytherewereover 20 million pedestrian crossings just in the state ofTexas for that year, not to mention over 200 million dollars worth ofcrossborder trade. The potential for terrorist groups to tap into any ofthese flows to access the United States has become a grim possibility.Todeal with border security the U.S.-Mexico Border Partnership Agree-ment (BPA) was entered into in 2002. It is better known as the “SmartBorders Agreement.” The BPA contains 22 points intended to secureand protect the border in the terrorism era while ensuring and facili-tating the flow of goods and peoples in a commercially integrated re-gion. Its three major areas are to secure/ensure the flow of peopleswhile making it more efficient; facilitate, secure, and make more effi-cient the flow of goods; and to improve border infrastructure.As part of the formal regionalization process, Mexico, understand-ing the need to comply with US security requirements, has further de-veloped its counterterrorism efforts on the basis of border securitycooperation. It has implemented additional screening requirementsfor visa applicants, such as a photo-digitized passport-security system totighten border controls and reduce fraud. The measures and initia-tives undertaken by the US-Mexican BPA require coordination with6Bordering on the Ridiculousthe US-Canada Smart Border Agreement, with the aim to create a secu-rity perimeter for North America as an integrated region. The differ-ence between the two agreements flows primarily from Mexico’s relativelack of modern infrastructure and information-sharing technologies(compared to Canada and United States) that often constrains a higherlevel of cooperation between Mexico and its two northern counterparts.Although improved security measures might help fight terrorism,that doesn’t necessarily imply that the flow of goods and people willbe swifter. In 1998 the US Immigration and Nationalization Servicetested available technologies for land border entry-exit in a simula-tion but was unable to recommend an approach that did not delaycrossborder traffic. Widespread opposition to an entry-exit systemfrom border communities, crossborder commerce business represen-tatives, and many others, including the Clinton administration, thenled Congress to delay implementation until 2001 and again until late2004. It is important to notice that the different actors involved in theregionalization process did come up to the government to discuss thepolicies at hand and tried to get involved, even if the government it-self did not seek them out when formulating the policies that directlyaffected them. Several problems have been recognized, such as therecurrent bottlenecks at some points of entry, and the security mea-sures have been gradually implemented in different points of entry,while specific obstacles arebeing identified and assessed.The US government is more than willing to help the local Mexi-can governments, especially those of adjacent border states, withfunding for security and law enforcement improvement. For exam-ple, in 2002 the Mexican ambassador to the United States announcedthat the US government, through the Mexican Embassy,would com-mit 5 million dollars “over four years to programs in [the border stateof] Chihuahua [to] advance justice reformand assist crime victims.”Similar efforts are pursued along the border with other local author-ities, with the suppression of drug trafficking being one of the mainissues. Yet this requires a high level of commitment from the Mexicangovernment, and political considerations regularly get in the way.These are all examples of formal attempts by the US and Mexi-can governments to enhance security while at the same time advanc-ing the ongoing formal regionalization process that was launched byNAFTA, and it is clear that there are many gaps that prevent the fulloperation of these mechanisms inherent in these processes. For exam-ple,other actors, such as border states and, perhaps most importantly,border cities, have barely been taken into account when deciding onthese issues at the national level. And this is to not even mention theordinary people who live close to the border. The general dynamicsof the region have not been fully taken into account, and as we willMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger7further see, having the frontier protected from terrorists does notnecessarily imply complete security.MexAmerica and RegionalizationThe notion of MexAmerica was born in 1981. Journalist Joel Garreau,in his book, The Nine Nations of North America, described the borderregion between Mexico and the United States as so integrated in cultureand economics that the formal border was becoming increasingly ir-relevant. For Garreau, the idea of MexAmerica was as much a pre-diction of the future as a description of the present. For those whohave now embraced his term, MexAmerica has become a reality thatpermeates the North American Southwest, where the Hispanics, orLatinos, are now the largest minority.The Garreau Group describes MexAmerica as a place “being in-exorably redefined—in terms of language, custom, economics, tele-vision, music, food, politics, advertising, employment, architecture,fashions, and even the pace of life—by the ever-growing numbers ofHispanics in its midst.”10However,we should bear in mind that Mex-America extends both ways: Even if not as many Americans are cross-ing the border southward, their cultureis, and Mexico’snorthernstates arealso being dramatically redefined by Anglo-American cul-ture. The result is a fluid and hybrid cultural formation; MexAmericahas become a place in between identities, being neither herenorthere; not American, but not Mexican either.Just as Hispanics are alarge minority in the US border states, Anglo-Americans travel southof the border in large numbers and with ease.MexAmerica can be seen in the way Anglo-Americans dress andtheir preference for Mexican cotton dresses or sombreros over tradi-tional Texan garments, for example. It can be found in the language,both in the way Spanish is seen in all kinds of signs and advertisementswithin the US-border states and on the widespread Latino newspapersand magazines, as well as the increasing number of Spanish-speaking/Latino music radio stations and a strong presence on television. Onthe Mexican side of MexAmerica, Americanization goes much furtherthan Coca-Cola, Costco, or McDonald’s. You can see MexAmerica em-bodied in the signs in the store windows that are written both in Eng-lish and Spanish, just as the prices of their products are presentedboth in dollars and pesos. Stores on both sides of the crossborder re-gion advertise their currency rate, accepting both currencies. As theGarreau group has noticed, even government officials have becomepart of this silent regionalization process. “U.S. Drug Enforcement Ad-ministration agents in El Paso regularly go to lunch in Juarez, just across8Bordering on the Ridiculousthe line in Mexico, because they think the food’s better. They don’t payany more attention to the ‘real’ border than anyone else does.”This emerging MexAmerica is also particularly apparent in theway in which both English and Spanish are merging into a new lan-guage: Spanglish. It has become so commonplace all over the UnitedStates and Mexico that even Hollywood, in a film by that name, has ex-ploited the idea of the mixing of cultures and depicts the way certainideals and values from one culture can exert a powerful attraction onthe other when a sexy Latina (Paz Vega) teaches her US employer(Adam Sandler) some deep-rooted family values. Even if this is not thefirst movie in which such a bicultural interaction occurs (RememberFools Rush Inwith Salma Hayek and Mattew Perry), the way in whichissues such as language and other problems that Latino families livingin the US confront is becoming more realistically presented.The process of regionalization in MexAmerica does not just in-volve the mingling of cultures, and the comings and goings of peoplethat work across borders. It also encompasses the geographical ad-vantage that entails collaborating with the local US or Mexican neigh-borstate instead of with a central government that lies so far away.The process can also be said to have been bornout of historic circum-stances that not only divided a territory but divided people and rela-tionships that already had dynamics of their own. As the proponentsof the Garreau Group, arguably MexAmerica’s most visible propo-nents, argue, “the conquistadors and the [forefathers] saw this regionwhole, without imaginarylines creating divisions between the state ofSonora and the state of Arizona. The desertwasthe same, the cactuseswere the same, the climate was the same, and the people were thesame. And the descendants of the conquistadors arestill here.” In thiscontext, “therearegreat numbers of Hispanics in the Southwest whocan’tbetold . . . to go back wherethey came from. They arewherethey came from.”The potency of this notion of belonging to the border territorycan be seen in different expressions of popular culture, but particu-larly in norteño music, which is widespread across MexAmerica andisbecoming popular even further north and south of the region. Asong entitled “Somos más Americanos”on Uniendo Fronteras (UnitingBorders), by the famous Mexican group Tigres del Norte,expresses apoint of view that resonates with many Mexican immigrants and theirdescendants in the United States:Athousand times they have shouted at meGo home, you don’t belong hereLet me remind the GringoThat I didn’t cross the border,the border crossed meMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger9America was born free—man divided herThey drew the line so we had to jump itAnd they call me the invader.11But MexAmerica is becoming apparent in more than popular cul-ture or relationships between border societies. MexAmerica has per-meated local and state governments, which have now become activein the regionalization process. At the same time, this can still be calledinformal regionalization because these activities are not part of thenational governments’ regionalism project. State governors on bothsides of the crossborder region have begun to conduct their own “for-eign policy” grounded in the needs of their electorates and whatseems to them to be most suitable in terms of cooperation with mu-nicipal and state governments in the region.Further on, in a recent study of performance trends in the bor-der city economies in Texas and California, the Federal Reserve BankofDallas explained that economic expansion in at least four Texasborder towns was directly related to the dynamics of the Mexicaneconomy.12According to the US Census Bureau, the cities of Laredoand McAllen, located on the Texas-Mexico border,arenot only grow-ing in population twice as fast as Texas as a whole, but already areamong the ten fastest-growing cities in the United States. In particu-lar,the concentrated industrial production, especially the maquilado-ras, on the Mexican side of the border, and retail shopping in theUnited States by Mexicans, was deemed crucial to a number of Texasborder economies. When it comes to California, the Federal ReserveBank’s report emphasized that economic integration can be seen inthe increase of shared infrastructure.At the same time, the reportexpressed reservations about the fu-tureof the border region. Noting an earlier optimism,exemplified byaTimemagazine article that had brought the idea of MexAmerica tothe general public a few years ago—calling it “a place with a vibrantand brilliant future”—the report lamented that the main issues at pre-sent were crime, illegal migration, and poverty.13What the reportdoesnot take into consideration is that these three issues are aggravatedto aconsiderable degree by the more stringent immigration and securitypolicies that both national governments are implementing in thecontext of the wider formal regionalism project.The Contradictions of Regionalization and RegionalismIt is in the area of immigration and security that the contradictions ofthe regionalization and regionalism processes become most apparent.10Bordering on the RidiculousAs mentioned before, security against terrorism, which is the mainconcern of the US-Mexico security agreements, does not lead to bor-der security measures that are actually effective. Nor is border inse-curity simply about terrorism. Insecurity is also related to crime,poverty, and human rights violations that affect the crossborder soci-eties and affect “national security” as a whole. In the context of theidea of a regional security nexus it is important to remember that theexisting relations between states and individuals are so intertwinedthat we cannot think about security as a phenomenon solely of na-tional states.When it comes to the security of individuals, the most vulnerablegroups are the illegal immigrants who try to keep crossing the borderdespite tougher border security. Hardened immigration and bordersecurity policies have helped increase the grip of criminal networkson these immigrants and have helped to enhance the position of powerof these networks at the crossborder region in general. We can seethat not only is the safety of immigrants safety put at risk by trying tofind a way through increasingly dangerous crossing places, but also bythe enhanced power that smugglers of human cargo aregaining as aresult of the new policies. Loreta Bondí, from Johns Hopkins Univer-sity, has correctly assessed that crossing the border “has become in-creasingly difficult due to better surveillance, but also to the activitiesof the rings that control illegal migration.”14These “coyotes,” as thesmugglers are known, now charge up to $1,500 a person for their ser-vices, three times as much as the pre-9/11 rate. Coyotes have also be-come even moreruthless in exposing their “clients” to increasinglyarduous treks and even death.Individual insecurity issues areby no means new or relevant justto the post 9/11 era. Through the years, several studies have madeclear that the situation that the Mexican immigrants face at the USborder has been, is, and will continue to be dangerous and uncertain.Thereare numerous violations of the immigrants’ rights, such as ex-tortion, abandonment, deception, as well as direct violence. The gov-ernment authorities on both sides of the border regularly carry outviolations of basic human rights. At the same time, the treatmenthanded out by the coyotes, or “polleros,” who allegedly help the illegalimmigrants to cross over, is often brutal and even deadly. There areother risks such as deportation, the risks associated with crossing theborder at geographical dangerous and remote places, the vulnerabil-ity of women and children, racism, xenophobia and discrimination,as well as the conditions under which illegal immigrants are often de-tained by private security agencies.As a result, circular immigration to the United States has changed,and we can now see a clear preference to remain and settle perma-nently in the United States to avoid crossing the border again, with allMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger11the attendant dangers the process involves. This situation has led to anincrease in family reunification, which typically involves women andchildren traveling to reunite with male parents, as a report fromGabriela Rodriguez, a special UN envoy to the US-Mexico border,shows.15Far from diminishing the flow of illegal immigrants, the hard-ening of US immigration policy has turned temporary immigrants intopermanent residents and has promoted a rise in the flow of women andchildren, a group that had been excluded from traditional immigra-tion flows.Illegal immigrants are now, more than ever, vulnerable to trans-national organized crime. There have been numerous cases in whichthe immigrants fall prey to criminal organizations that engage inhuman trafficking by deceiving the immigrants and making them be-lieve they are being recruited for a regular job, when in reality theyare being sold into slave labor. The situation generated by higher in-security and crime rates at the border region on the Mexican side hasforced local authorities on both sides of the border to create agree-ments on the conditions for the deportation of women and children,to avoid placing them in situations prone to violence, which includesetting special times and places wherethey aredeported, avoidingnight hours and places in which women and children have a higherrisk of being assaulted or attacked.16Once the immigrants aredeported back to Mexico—generally atthe same crossborder region or within the northern states of thecountry—they areleft in poverty and marginalized by local authori-ties, public security agents and the society in general. Rodriguez’sre-port shows that in most of the municipalities that she visited, the localauthorities recounted the dilemma that the presence of this popula-tion of immigrants presents due to their precarious situation andtheir demand for basic services. They stressed that immigration de-termines population growth in the area and its resultant effects in thegeneral weakening of living conditions in their municipalities.17Marginalization and poverty turn the immigrants into an unde-sired group for local citizens, who consider them more likely to be-come paupers or turn to illicit activities, exposing them to the localauthorities and even leading to cases of extortion and human rightsviolations. Certainly, waiting—without jobs or services—for anotherchance to cross the border, at times does lead immigrants to crime,enhancing the notion that all illegal immigrants are potential law-breakers, in turn increasing the feeling of insecurity of the border re-gion. In this context there is an ever-growing pool of people waitingfor another chance to try and cross the border into the United States,some of whom meanwhile may engage in prostitution, alcoholism,and crime. As a group, local governments cannot adequately serviceor police them.12Bordering on the RidiculousCriminal activities have also increased with the need for the “ser-vices” they provide as a result of the hardening of immigration andborder security policies. According to Glynn Custred from the Centerof Immigration Studies, as they find new routes to smuggle peopleinto the country, criminal networks also realize the potential profitsof smuggling drugs too.18The two activities have become “intertwined,adding to corruption” in communities on either side of the border.This exacerbates many other problems, such as confrontations be-tween Mexican and US authorities and protests at both the local andfederal levels in both countries.Now that US security policies have been hardened, the Mexicangovernment, in an attempt to appear actively engaged in fightingdrug trafficking, is taking actions that the border-state societies re-gard as undermining both human rights and commerce. Such is thecase of the Federal Office of the Attorney General (PGR) checkpointthat has been set up south of Ciudad Juarez. Both entrepreneurs andhuman rights advocates argue that this checkpoint not only dupli-cates the function of a previously installed checkpoint run by theMexican military,but also increases delays in commercial traffic andviolates “Mexicans’ constitutional right of free travel.”19Antonio Andreu, head of the Ciudad Juarez branch of the Na-tional Chamber of Commerce, has expressed the business commu-nity’sconcernabout the way in which trucks are inspected and goodshandled, which results not only in delays but sometimes also in dam-aged goods and monetarylosses. He voiced the community’sconcernby questioning the efficiency of undergoing double inspections andrequested that the authorities coordinate their actions instead of du-plicating functions. Andreu also complained about the treatment atboth checkpoints, which tends to be heavy-handed and even despotic.20If it is true that the militarycheckpoint has confiscated huge amountsof drugs, the new checkpoint hasn’t been as effective, even though itis equipped with high-tech x-ray machines. Its main reason to exist,therefore, seems to be an attempt by the Mexican government to pla-cate the US government’s sense of insecurity.Meanwhile, north of the border in the lead up to the 2006 con-gressional elections, President George W. Bush and the RepublicanParty shifted the immigration reform debate to a concern with bordersecurity. Although the Republicans did not do well in the elections, Pres-ident Bush managed to get an amendment passed that mandates theextended construction of border walls and provides for an increase inthe number of National Guard troops stationed at the US-Mexican bor-der.21Reaction in Mexico toward the Bush administration’s new policywas negative. Newspapers like El Universal(Mexico City) have regularlyprinted stories warning about “threats posed to civilians by a milita-Marcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger13rization of the border.” Meawhile state governors, like José ReyesBaeza from Chihuahua, have expressed their concern about the neg-ative effect this decision would have on US-Mexican relations.The Vi-cente Fox administration (2000–2006), however, backed up Bush’sdecision and argued that these changes should be regarded as a log-ical step in the US immigration security reform that would be benefi-cial to Mexican nationals. His intentions were to keep pushing for animmigration accord, and in order to do so there were certain issuesthat the Mexican government had to concede in order to keep theimmigration talks going.However, when looking at the actors immediately affected, in thiscase the local authorities and communities, this decision created evenmore controversy because the variables, perspectives, and conse-quences for each actorwere diverse. Some states on the US side of theborder were against the measure, rejecting the idea of having Na-tional Guard troops stationed in their territories, while others weremore concerned with security issues than federalism and fully ap-proved the measures. Meanwhile, immigrant advocacy groups andhuman rights defenders on both sides of the borders wereappalled.They emphasized the negative implications of the militarization ofthe border and the consequent dangers for immigrants trying tocross at places with no wall but with greater physical and geographi-cal risks, and with the help of criminal gangs.22Conclusion: Bordering on the RidiculousAsstriking as the cultural mingling in the MexAmerican region mightappear therearestill those who believe that Garreau’s projections,though accurate, fall shortof what the futuremight bring. For peoplelike RichardRodriguez, author of Days of Obligation, abook about Mex-ico and California, the Mexicanization of the United States and theAmericanization of Mexico are logical processes that are well under way.They make the fortification of the border beside the point, since “Mex-America now includes vast sections of Chicago and blocks along MainStreet in Kansas, as well as the Baptist Church in North Carolina.”23On the other hand, thereare people who see the future in a na-tivist light. For example, Pat Buchanan, a well known Republicancommentator and journalist, has regularly expressed his disdain forthe “millions of law-breakers and gate-crashers” that are crossing intothe United States and has made clear his apprehension that the restof the country will become an extension of MexAmerica.24In a slightlyless strident fashion, as mentioned at the outset, Samuel Huntingtonhas expressed concern that one of the biggest threats to US national14Bordering on the Ridiculousidentity comes from the “Hispanic Challenge,” particularly from Mex-ico.25However, MexAmerica, whether regarded as an unadulteratedperil or a beneficent promise, distracts both states and societies fromthe importance of informal regionalization processes, formal region-alism, and the power of socially constructed identities that can over-come borderlines and develop dynamics of their own.Thus, borders are not just actively constructed demarcations orfixed lines on a map. Rather, borders are being constantly redefined bysocial change and cultural and political perceptions. In the case ofMexAmerica these crossborder societies are engaged in a dynamicprocess that has taken on a life of its own and the multiplicity of actorshas to be taken into account in order for formal policies and actions tobe effective. The study of MexAmerica presented here has sought to re-veal that by failing to take into account the diverse actors and condi-tions present in this particular geographic region, nationalgovernments actually generate further problems related to the contra-dictory character of both informal regionalization and the more for-mal and newer regionalism reflected by NAFTA. Both formal andinformal regional processes can coexist, as they do in the case of Mex-America. However,the contradictions between and within the informalregionalization processes and more formal regionalism can lead to theopposite of what is intended, laying the groundwork for MexAmericaas a zone of crisis rather than a zone of opportunity.The present ap-proach by national governments is bordering on the ridiculous.Notes1.Frederick Söderbaum, “Introduction: Theories of New Regionalism,”in Frederick Söderbaum and Timothy M. Shaw, eds.,Theories of New Region-alisms (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 7.2.David W. Dent, Hot Spot: Latin America(Westport, Conn.: GreenwoodPress,2008), p. 59.3.For example, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); and Jeremy Adelman andStephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States andthe Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Re-viewvol. 104, no. 3, June 1999.4.Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Em-pire: A History of Latinos in America(New York: Penguin Books, 2000); LauraA. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race(NewYork: New York University Press, 2007); Gregory Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bas-tards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Futureof Race inAmerica(New York: Pantheon, 2007); and Jorge G. Castañeda, Ex Mex: FromMigrants to Immigrants(New York: New Press, 2008).5.For example, see Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-MexicoMarcela Alvarez Perez & Mark T. Berger15Divide(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Peter Andreas andThomas J. Biersteker, eds., The Rebordering of North America: Integration and Ex-clusion in a New Security Context(New York: Routledge, 2003); Joan B. Ander-son, James Gerber, and Lisa Foster, Fifty Years of Change on the U.S.-MexicoBorder: Growth, Development, and Quality of Life(Austin: University of TexasPress, 2007); and Fernando Romero, Hyper-Border: The Contemporary U.S.-Mex-ico Border and Its Future(New York: Architectural Press, 2008).6.Guy Poitras, Inventing North America: Canada, Mexico and the UnitedStates(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001); Robert A. Pastor, “The Future of NorthAmerica: Replacing a Bad Neighbor Policy,” Foreign Affairs,July/August 2008.7.Samuel P. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign PolicyMarch/April 2004. Also see Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Chal-lenges to America’s National Identity(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).8.Söderbaum, note 1, p. 7.9.Migration Policy Institute. “The US-Mexico Border, 2006,”http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=40710.The Garreau Group, “MexAmerica,” http://www.garreau.com/main.cfm?action=chapters&id=43Translation by Allan Wall in Glynn Custred, “North American Borders:Why They Matter,” in Backgrounder Center for Immigration Studies, http://www.cis.org/articles/2003/back803.html11.Robert W. Gilmer, et al., “Framing the Future: Tomorrow’s BorderEconomy,” Business Frontier4(2004), http://www.dallasfed.org/research/busfront/bus0404.html12.Ibid.13.Loretta Bondí, Beyond the Border and Across the Atlantic: Mexico’s Foreignand Security Policy Post–September 11th(Washington: Center for Transatlantic Re-lations, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, 2004): p. 78.14.Gabriela Rodríguez, “Misión a la Frontera entre México y los EstadosUnidos,” in Grupos e Individuos Específicos: Trabajadores Migrantes, Informe pre-sentado por la Relatora Especial Gabriela Rodríguez Pizarro,30 January 2003(E/CN.4/2003/85/Add.3/Corr.1), www.cinu.org.mx/prensa/especiales/DHmigrantes.htm15.Ibid., p. 12.16.Ibid., p. 7.17.Glynn Custred, “North American Borders: Why They Matter,” Back-grounder Center for Immigration Studies, 2003: 7, http://www.cis.org/articles/2003/back803.html18.Frontera NorteSur (FNS): U.S.-Mexico Border News Center for LatinAmerican and Border Studies, 14 June 2006, “Ciudad Juarez News: MexicanBorder Checkpoint Criticized,” Frontera NorteSur (FNS) NewsLetter,New Mex-ico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.19.Ibid20.Frontera NorteSur (FNS): U.S.-Mexico Border News Center for LatinAmerican and Border Studies, 18 May 2006, “Immigration News: The Border,Mexico Speak Out on Guards, Gates and Gauntlets,” Frontera NorteSur (FNS)NewsLetter,New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico.21.Ibid.22. Richard Rodriguez, “What a Wall Can’t Stop,” The Washington Post, 26May 2006. 23. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601613.htm16Bordering on the Ridiculous24.Patrick J. Buchanan, “Mexamerica, Here We Come,” WorldNetDaily,2004. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=3658825. Huntington, note 7.
