In regard to the US–Mexico border, ‘It is … when the border is condensed to an image, and when this image symbolizes wide-ranging political or theoretical stances, [that] understanding of the border becomes reductive and delocalized’1. The recent interest in theorizing the borderlands of identity, in urban and rural centres and peripheries everywhere, may seem on the surface to be especially relevant at the politico–territorial borderlands, but it does not take us very far unless we also examine how state power is situated in place, space and time.
Although images of frontiers and international borders may further the intellectual pursuit of other metaphorical borderlands of self and group identity, they may indicate a superficial and exploitative use of these borders as metonyms, as plot devices necessary for the furtherance of the narratives of identity elsewhere, in an anthropological equivalent to Hitchcock's ‘McGuffin’ (the thing, event, or moment in the story which gets the plot started, but which is irrelevant to the narrative once it gets going).
Borders are not just good places to study symbolic boundaries; they are places of specific cultural relations which are based on particular temporal and spatial processes, which have been and continue to be significant to their attached and associated nations and states.
Mexican trade barriers were much higher than US barriers so it was perceived that there would be net gains for firms in the United States. Among policy makers in the United States there was a genuine ideological commitment to open markets. Again, this should not be interpreted as implying that the US was seeking absolutely free trade. Rather, in accordance with standard neoclassical economic theory, US policy makers believed that more open and liberal markets would benefit each country through the creation of a more efficient allocation of resources. This translates directly into material wealth and higher growth rates....................
