David Morison Portillo lleva más de dos años cruzando la frontera México-Estados Unidos de forma ... more David Morison Portillo lleva más de dos años cruzando la frontera México-Estados Unidos de forma inédita: escoge una noche y cruza repetidamente sin parar. En este performance provocador, la violencia del estado –ejercida por los agentes federales– se revela, se enrarece y a veces se subvierte por completo. Este libro bilingüe es una conversación entre Morison y la antropóloga Rihan Yeh, quienes discuten las implicaciones y riesgos de este performance-protesta.
Para comprar el libro, visite la página de Taller California: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Over the last two years, David Morison Portillo has been traversing the U.S.-Mexico border in an unusual way: he chooses an evening and then crosses repeatedly without stopping. In this provocative performance, the state's violence--enacted and enforced by border officers--is rarefied, exposed, slowed, and at times, completely subverted. This bilingual book is a conversation between anthropologist Rihan Yeh and Morison, who discuss the different meanings and risks of this simultaneous performance-protest.
Hand-printed art book available for purchase at Taller California's website: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connec... more Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing, Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana’s communal sense of “we” and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.
Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border.
Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connec... more Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connected with California by one of the busiest international ports of entry in the world. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Passing probes the US-Mexico border’s influence on senses of self and collectivity here. Two publics, it argues, take shape in the shadow of the border. The clase media or “middle class” strives to enact the ideals of liberal publicity: informed, rational debate grounded in an upstanding “I.” The border, however, destabilizes this public profoundly, for as middle-class subjects seek confirmation of their status in the form of a US visa, they expose themselves to suspicions that reduce their projects of selfhood to interested attempts to pass inspection. In contrast, the pueblo, or “the people” as paradigmatically plebeian, imagines itself as composed of actual and potential “illegal aliens.” Instead of the “we” of liberal publicity, this public takes shape via the third person of hearsay: communication framed as what “they say,” what “everyone” knows and repeats. Passing tracks Tijuana’s two publics as they both face off and intertwine in demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, workplace banter, personal interviews, and more. Through close attention to everyday talk and interaction, it reveals how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition together shape Tijuana’s public sphere, throwing into relief the conundrums of self and collectivity born of an age of at once increased transnational flows and fortified borders.
Las categorías de "mestizo", "indígena" y "extranjero" no refieren a grupos estáticos, predefinid... more Las categorías de "mestizo", "indígena" y "extranjero" no refieren a grupos estáticos, predefinidos, son más bien categorías móviles, resultado a menudo de negociaciones entre diversos grupos sociales, y de estos con el Estado. Este libro busca explicar los procesos a través de los cuales se han construido dichas categorías y sus relaciones con el proceso de formación nacional.
Este ensayito es la introducción a un dosier sobre "Burocracia, interrupciones e impasses", que r... more Este ensayito es la introducción a un dosier sobre "Burocracia, interrupciones e impasses", que rastrea en los detalles de la interacción cómo se manifiestan en ámbitos burocráticos algunas dinámicas tradicionalmente asociadas con la soberanía estatal.
Este ensayo examina la narrativa de una joven de ascendencia mexicana, nacida en Estados Unidos, ... more Este ensayo examina la narrativa de una joven de ascendencia mexicana, nacida en Estados Unidos, sobre un interrogatorio al cual fue sometida al entrar a su país natal desde México, donde había crecido. Mediante su fijación en el intercambio de pregun-tas y respuestas, el interrogatorio divide y hasta desaparece a le sujete de la interroga-ción, transformando así un procedimiento burocrático en un lugar de manifestación de la soberanía estatal, clásicamente arbitraria y desmedida. A la vez, el relato del interrogatorio se anida dentro de una narrativa más amplia sobre un intento de secuestro que la narradora experimentó en México. Juntos, las interrupciones lingüís-ticas y los impases interactivos de las narrativas del interrogatorio y del casi-secues-tro dibujan los contornos de un sistema de gobernanza transnacional, que no opera a partir de derechos diferenciados, sino de una vulnerabilidad diferencial a la violencia.
This essay examines the narrative of a young US citizen of Mexican descent about an interrogation she was subjected to upon entering her native country from Mexico, where she had grown up. Through its fixation on the exchange of questions and answers, the interrogation divides and, even, disappears the subject interrogated, thus transforming a bureaucratic procedure into a site of manifestation of state sovereignty, classically understood as arbitrary and unmeasured. At the same time, the narrative of the interrogation nests inside a larger narrative about an attempted kidnapping which the narrator underwent in Mexico. Together, the linguistic interruptions and the interactional impasses of both the narrative of the interrogation and the kidnapping sketch the contours of a transnational system of governance that operates on the basis not of differential rights but of differential vulnerability to violence.
En la frontera México-Estados Unidos, sucede con cierta regularidad que oficiales migratorios est... more En la frontera México-Estados Unidos, sucede con cierta regularidad que oficiales migratorios estadounidenses maten a ciudadanos mexicanos. Este ensayo explora etnográficamente cómo, desde el lado mexicano de la frontera, los espectadores de esta violencia toman posición ante ella. En Tijuana, ciudad colindante con San Diego, California, muchos residentes se representan como parte de un “nosotros” local que excluye a los migrantes hacia Estados Unidos, pues a diferencia de ellos, gozan de documentos que permiten la entrada legal al país vecino. Frente a la violencia estatal estadounidense, sin embargo, pueden empezar a representarse como posibles víctimas juntos con los migrantes, y la forma en que se posicionan relativo tanto al Estado estadounidense como a los migrantes puede cambiar. Mediante el análisis del uso que tres personas hacen del lenguaje para posicionarse, junto con una lectura detallada de un video que conjunta lo lingüístico con el posicionamiento espaciovisual, el ensayo muestra cómo el “nosotros” tijuanense puede expandirse frente a la violencia, abriendo paso a nuevas solidaridades e identificaciones que, argumento, desestabilizan el orden social transnacional.
International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 2020
Encyclopedia entry on linguistic anthropological approaches to the topic of "immigration." Publis... more Encyclopedia entry on linguistic anthropological approaches to the topic of "immigration." Published online by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118786093
Revista de Antropología y Sociología: Virajes, 2021
En Tijuana, en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, desvencijados camiones conectan la periferia ur... more En Tijuana, en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, desvencijados camiones conectan la periferia urbana con una de las garitas terrestres más transitadas del mundo. Estas rutas conforman los estratos más bajos del sistema de movilidad fronteriza; en ellas, el imperativo de la movilidad capitalista-convertida por la frontera en un valor supremo-lleva la explotación laboral a un extremo y fragiliza la solidaridad entre los trabajadores. Entre ellos, emerge un impulso hacia el "don puro": el don absolutamente desinteresado, que apenas puede reconocerse como tal. Este impulso toma forma en el contraste entre diferentes tipos de tiempo; se manifiesta de manera importante en los actos de comunicación lingüística, que convierte en dones delicados y fugaces. Centrándose en la (no) relación entre la antropóloga y su interlocutor principal, este ensayo usa las complejidades éticas del intercambio etnográfico como punto de partida para explorar la relación entre el tiempo, el don y la comunicación en la frontera.
Review essay in response to Ruben Andersson's No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Inf... more Review essay in response to Ruben Andersson's No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics.
rimentado por la mayoría de los agricultores del sur de Chile. Sin embargo, estos reclamos pueden... more rimentado por la mayoría de los agricultores del sur de Chile. Sin embargo, estos reclamos pueden apoyar esperanzas y prácticas de reactivación de aquellas conexiones con la tierra sobre las cuales se construyen las ontologías mapuche" (200).
In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy tha... more In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy that played out in public demonstrations as well as social and mass media. In this article, I argue that this episode must be understood as symptomatic of a long-term transformation of Mexico's public sphere. The waves of economic crisis that began in the late 1970s unmoored personal desires and aspirations from the promises of the nation state. The public sphere filled with dispersive tendencies; fiction and fantasy began to take unpredictable directions. To grasp this unmooring, I propose the idea of crowd-texts: circulating texts that interpellate their readers as fundamentally crowd-like in their unruly flight from the narrative teleologies that had sutured the nation. The first crowd-text I examine is a 1982 issue of the comic book La Familia Burrón (The Burrón Family). Set in the year of Mexico's most emblematic currency devaluation, the comic puts an at once ironic and utopian spin on the crisis. In the 1990s and 2000s, similar dispersive tendencies can be found in the narcocorrido, a popular ballad-form dedicated to the exploits of drug traffickers. These songs, I argue, took narrative flight into openly violent terrain, where the rising institution of the cartels could, for many, supplant the expired promises of the nation-state. By comparing comic book and narcocorridos as popular representations of Mexico's economic and public security crises,
FOR A PDF, PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE WITH YOUR EMAIL. In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoi... more FOR A PDF, PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE WITH YOUR EMAIL. In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoing calls to “build the wall” along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump’s campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump’s call to “build the wall,” I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the “we” it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the order exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.
In Tijuana, across the US-Mexico border from San Diego, California, transnational flows precipita... more In Tijuana, across the US-Mexico border from San Diego, California, transnational flows precipitate anxieties over autonomous agency. This essay explores how these anxieties afflict not just individual “I”s but the city’s “we”s as well. Due to pressures associated with different types of traffic—from ideals of citizenship in automotive traffic, to neoliberal demands to economize time in industrial supply-chain provisioning, to efforts to establish sovereignty violently, as drug traffickers seem to—autonomous agency emerges as an object of desire, but one that is difficult to secure. The instability of autonomy came to a head, the author argues, during the years when Mexico’s so-called war on drug trafficking was at its worst. Tracking tropes of the heteronomy of both “I” and “we,” the essay reveals how this period took shape, finally, as a public crisis of agency.
David Morison Portillo lleva más de dos años cruzando la frontera México-Estados Unidos de forma ... more David Morison Portillo lleva más de dos años cruzando la frontera México-Estados Unidos de forma inédita: escoge una noche y cruza repetidamente sin parar. En este performance provocador, la violencia del estado –ejercida por los agentes federales– se revela, se enrarece y a veces se subvierte por completo. Este libro bilingüe es una conversación entre Morison y la antropóloga Rihan Yeh, quienes discuten las implicaciones y riesgos de este performance-protesta.
Para comprar el libro, visite la página de Taller California: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Over the last two years, David Morison Portillo has been traversing the U.S.-Mexico border in an unusual way: he chooses an evening and then crosses repeatedly without stopping. In this provocative performance, the state's violence--enacted and enforced by border officers--is rarefied, exposed, slowed, and at times, completely subverted. This bilingual book is a conversation between anthropologist Rihan Yeh and Morison, who discuss the different meanings and risks of this simultaneous performance-protest.
Hand-printed art book available for purchase at Taller California's website: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connec... more Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing, Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana’s communal sense of “we” and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.
Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border.
Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connec... more Despite the US’s dramatic escalation of border enforcement, Tijuana, Mexico remains deeply connected with California by one of the busiest international ports of entry in the world. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Passing probes the US-Mexico border’s influence on senses of self and collectivity here. Two publics, it argues, take shape in the shadow of the border. The clase media or “middle class” strives to enact the ideals of liberal publicity: informed, rational debate grounded in an upstanding “I.” The border, however, destabilizes this public profoundly, for as middle-class subjects seek confirmation of their status in the form of a US visa, they expose themselves to suspicions that reduce their projects of selfhood to interested attempts to pass inspection. In contrast, the pueblo, or “the people” as paradigmatically plebeian, imagines itself as composed of actual and potential “illegal aliens.” Instead of the “we” of liberal publicity, this public takes shape via the third person of hearsay: communication framed as what “they say,” what “everyone” knows and repeats. Passing tracks Tijuana’s two publics as they both face off and intertwine in demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, workplace banter, personal interviews, and more. Through close attention to everyday talk and interaction, it reveals how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition together shape Tijuana’s public sphere, throwing into relief the conundrums of self and collectivity born of an age of at once increased transnational flows and fortified borders.
Las categorías de "mestizo", "indígena" y "extranjero" no refieren a grupos estáticos, predefinid... more Las categorías de "mestizo", "indígena" y "extranjero" no refieren a grupos estáticos, predefinidos, son más bien categorías móviles, resultado a menudo de negociaciones entre diversos grupos sociales, y de estos con el Estado. Este libro busca explicar los procesos a través de los cuales se han construido dichas categorías y sus relaciones con el proceso de formación nacional.
Este ensayito es la introducción a un dosier sobre "Burocracia, interrupciones e impasses", que r... more Este ensayito es la introducción a un dosier sobre "Burocracia, interrupciones e impasses", que rastrea en los detalles de la interacción cómo se manifiestan en ámbitos burocráticos algunas dinámicas tradicionalmente asociadas con la soberanía estatal.
Este ensayo examina la narrativa de una joven de ascendencia mexicana, nacida en Estados Unidos, ... more Este ensayo examina la narrativa de una joven de ascendencia mexicana, nacida en Estados Unidos, sobre un interrogatorio al cual fue sometida al entrar a su país natal desde México, donde había crecido. Mediante su fijación en el intercambio de pregun-tas y respuestas, el interrogatorio divide y hasta desaparece a le sujete de la interroga-ción, transformando así un procedimiento burocrático en un lugar de manifestación de la soberanía estatal, clásicamente arbitraria y desmedida. A la vez, el relato del interrogatorio se anida dentro de una narrativa más amplia sobre un intento de secuestro que la narradora experimentó en México. Juntos, las interrupciones lingüís-ticas y los impases interactivos de las narrativas del interrogatorio y del casi-secues-tro dibujan los contornos de un sistema de gobernanza transnacional, que no opera a partir de derechos diferenciados, sino de una vulnerabilidad diferencial a la violencia.
This essay examines the narrative of a young US citizen of Mexican descent about an interrogation she was subjected to upon entering her native country from Mexico, where she had grown up. Through its fixation on the exchange of questions and answers, the interrogation divides and, even, disappears the subject interrogated, thus transforming a bureaucratic procedure into a site of manifestation of state sovereignty, classically understood as arbitrary and unmeasured. At the same time, the narrative of the interrogation nests inside a larger narrative about an attempted kidnapping which the narrator underwent in Mexico. Together, the linguistic interruptions and the interactional impasses of both the narrative of the interrogation and the kidnapping sketch the contours of a transnational system of governance that operates on the basis not of differential rights but of differential vulnerability to violence.
En la frontera México-Estados Unidos, sucede con cierta regularidad que oficiales migratorios est... more En la frontera México-Estados Unidos, sucede con cierta regularidad que oficiales migratorios estadounidenses maten a ciudadanos mexicanos. Este ensayo explora etnográficamente cómo, desde el lado mexicano de la frontera, los espectadores de esta violencia toman posición ante ella. En Tijuana, ciudad colindante con San Diego, California, muchos residentes se representan como parte de un “nosotros” local que excluye a los migrantes hacia Estados Unidos, pues a diferencia de ellos, gozan de documentos que permiten la entrada legal al país vecino. Frente a la violencia estatal estadounidense, sin embargo, pueden empezar a representarse como posibles víctimas juntos con los migrantes, y la forma en que se posicionan relativo tanto al Estado estadounidense como a los migrantes puede cambiar. Mediante el análisis del uso que tres personas hacen del lenguaje para posicionarse, junto con una lectura detallada de un video que conjunta lo lingüístico con el posicionamiento espaciovisual, el ensayo muestra cómo el “nosotros” tijuanense puede expandirse frente a la violencia, abriendo paso a nuevas solidaridades e identificaciones que, argumento, desestabilizan el orden social transnacional.
International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, 2020
Encyclopedia entry on linguistic anthropological approaches to the topic of "immigration." Publis... more Encyclopedia entry on linguistic anthropological approaches to the topic of "immigration." Published online by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118786093
Revista de Antropología y Sociología: Virajes, 2021
En Tijuana, en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, desvencijados camiones conectan la periferia ur... more En Tijuana, en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, desvencijados camiones conectan la periferia urbana con una de las garitas terrestres más transitadas del mundo. Estas rutas conforman los estratos más bajos del sistema de movilidad fronteriza; en ellas, el imperativo de la movilidad capitalista-convertida por la frontera en un valor supremo-lleva la explotación laboral a un extremo y fragiliza la solidaridad entre los trabajadores. Entre ellos, emerge un impulso hacia el "don puro": el don absolutamente desinteresado, que apenas puede reconocerse como tal. Este impulso toma forma en el contraste entre diferentes tipos de tiempo; se manifiesta de manera importante en los actos de comunicación lingüística, que convierte en dones delicados y fugaces. Centrándose en la (no) relación entre la antropóloga y su interlocutor principal, este ensayo usa las complejidades éticas del intercambio etnográfico como punto de partida para explorar la relación entre el tiempo, el don y la comunicación en la frontera.
Review essay in response to Ruben Andersson's No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Inf... more Review essay in response to Ruben Andersson's No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics.
rimentado por la mayoría de los agricultores del sur de Chile. Sin embargo, estos reclamos pueden... more rimentado por la mayoría de los agricultores del sur de Chile. Sin embargo, estos reclamos pueden apoyar esperanzas y prácticas de reactivación de aquellas conexiones con la tierra sobre las cuales se construyen las ontologías mapuche" (200).
In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy tha... more In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy that played out in public demonstrations as well as social and mass media. In this article, I argue that this episode must be understood as symptomatic of a long-term transformation of Mexico's public sphere. The waves of economic crisis that began in the late 1970s unmoored personal desires and aspirations from the promises of the nation state. The public sphere filled with dispersive tendencies; fiction and fantasy began to take unpredictable directions. To grasp this unmooring, I propose the idea of crowd-texts: circulating texts that interpellate their readers as fundamentally crowd-like in their unruly flight from the narrative teleologies that had sutured the nation. The first crowd-text I examine is a 1982 issue of the comic book La Familia Burrón (The Burrón Family). Set in the year of Mexico's most emblematic currency devaluation, the comic puts an at once ironic and utopian spin on the crisis. In the 1990s and 2000s, similar dispersive tendencies can be found in the narcocorrido, a popular ballad-form dedicated to the exploits of drug traffickers. These songs, I argue, took narrative flight into openly violent terrain, where the rising institution of the cartels could, for many, supplant the expired promises of the nation-state. By comparing comic book and narcocorridos as popular representations of Mexico's economic and public security crises,
FOR A PDF, PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE WITH YOUR EMAIL. In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoi... more FOR A PDF, PLEASE SEND ME A NOTE WITH YOUR EMAIL. In 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoing calls to “build the wall” along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump’s campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump’s call to “build the wall,” I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the “we” it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the order exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.
In Tijuana, across the US-Mexico border from San Diego, California, transnational flows precipita... more In Tijuana, across the US-Mexico border from San Diego, California, transnational flows precipitate anxieties over autonomous agency. This essay explores how these anxieties afflict not just individual “I”s but the city’s “we”s as well. Due to pressures associated with different types of traffic—from ideals of citizenship in automotive traffic, to neoliberal demands to economize time in industrial supply-chain provisioning, to efforts to establish sovereignty violently, as drug traffickers seem to—autonomous agency emerges as an object of desire, but one that is difficult to secure. The instability of autonomy came to a head, the author argues, during the years when Mexico’s so-called war on drug trafficking was at its worst. Tracking tropes of the heteronomy of both “I” and “we,” the essay reveals how this period took shape, finally, as a public crisis of agency.
In Tijuana, Mexico, middle-class desires for an open border with neighboring San Diego, Californi... more In Tijuana, Mexico, middle-class desires for an open border with neighboring San Diego, California, are riddled with tensions and contradictions that derive from the way in which local ideals of citizenship are entangled with securitized US entry protocols: legal access to the US is basic for local belonging. This article examines the limitations that haunt both these tijuanenses' nostalgic memories of free passage in the past and their projects to reestablish it in the future. The most glaring contradiction, I argue, lies in the forgetting of the predicament of those without authorization to cross the border, even as expedited legal passage is invested with political hopes for a more just future. The article focuses on young, highly binational professionals, whose socioeconomic and legal privilege puts them in the vanguard of the tensions of an emerging global regime of citizenship to which "flexible" borders are key.
Perched at the edge of California, Tijuana occupies a strategic location for capitalist mobilitie... more Perched at the edge of California, Tijuana occupies a strategic location for capitalist mobilities of all sorts. This essay examines how the violence of drug trafficking and the speed of the transnational assembly plants came into resonance during a period often known locally as the racha, or streak, of violence, when Mexico's so-called war on drug trafficking was perceived by many to be at its worst. The semiotic underpinnings of the racha, I argue, lie in the qualia of speed and slowness as these are valorized in supply-chain provisioning of the assembly plants and then calqued onto automotive traffic in the city. Speed and slowness here, though, are bound up with a highly equivocal sense of individual agency. By tracking these qualia across spheres of practice and, finally, into narratives of violence, I show how the racha took shape as a public crisis in the ability to assign individual agency securely.
This article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico–U.S. border through jokes told ab... more This article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico–U.S. border through jokes told about and around checkpoint encounters—most centrally, those staged at the main port of entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California. In Tijuana, I argue, U.S. state recognition validates the proper, middle-class citizenship of Mexicans resident in Mexico. Attitudes towards the United States, however, remain ambivalent. I begin by exploring the checkpoint jokes of drug-traffickers as represented in several narcocorridos (popular ballads about drug-trafficking). Though this music is disapproved of by most people invested in U.S. state recognition, I show next how middle-class jokes build on the trope of the trickster-trafficker to parry state interpellation. The jokes work as performative arguments where people begin to articulate the tensions that constitute citizenship and sovereignty at the border. Finally, I examine the consular interview for the U.S. Border Crossing Card, a key site knitting together U.S. and Mexican regimes of citizenship. Folk theories of how the interview works anticipate the jokes’ bald thematization of duplicity, explaining why middle-class people would turn to jokes that frame them as traffickers. Understood in the context of the BCC interview, middle-class checkpoint jokes reveal Mexican citizenship as embedded in an international system organized not by principles of authentic identity, but by ambivalence, contradiction, and undecidability.
This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of a concept of commensuration that goes be... more This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of a concept of commensuration that goes beyond issues of metrics per se, but without diffusing itself into a general metaphor for cultural difference. Commensuration, we argue, is not just a basic psychosocial process, but has also emerged, in the context of “globalization” with its multifarious and wide-ranging flows, as an ideological value in its own right. Explicit negotiations of commensuration, then, have become increasingly fraught, increasingly pivotal practices as group boundaries of all sorts—separating ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, nations, or “civilizations”—are relentlessly reerected and re-arranged on the miniscule ethnographic scale of everyday engagements with semiotic forms marked as coming from beyond those boundaries. After laying out the nuts and bolts of our approach, we explore commensuration (and introduce the subsequent collection of essays) via three topical foci: commensuration’s role in securing movement as a semiotic effect; how sovereign power authorizes commensuration and thus comes to be at stake in it; and, finally, the destabilizing and yet productive ways in which failure haunts commensurative projects.
In Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, dollars and pesos, English and ... more In Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from San Diego, California, dollars and pesos, English and Spanish, US and Mexican commodities circulate apace. Moving beyond both the old fascination with transnational flows and the emphasis on enforcement and prohibition in current research on international borders, this article examines the everyday pragmatics involved in engaging these disparate forms. In multiple contexts and for varied reasons, actors draw them together as sets of commensurables, attempting to claim equivalence between two national regimes of value and thus consolidate their own standing with respect to a range of interlocutors. But even as they do so, their forceful assertions of commensurability feather apart in the face of a persistent remainder which they themselves evoke: the excess value that may attach to US forms, a qualitative difference that seems to fly in the face of comparability. As this inequality emerges in moments of circulation (display, exchange, ascription of possession to others, and so on), it disrupts even the most quotidian attempts at arithmetic conversion, literal translation, or the seemingly straightforward practicalities of purchase. Not all, however, are equally positioned to reap the interactive benefits of either commensuration or the sense of disproportion that interrupts it. By tracking how different subjects move between these two possibilities, the article opens a novel perspective on the complex interweaving of social difference across the border and within Mexico.
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Books by Rihan Yeh
Para comprar el libro, visite la página de Taller California: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Over the last two years, David Morison Portillo has been traversing the U.S.-Mexico border in an unusual way: he chooses an evening and then crosses repeatedly without stopping. In this provocative performance, the state's violence--enacted and enforced by border officers--is rarefied, exposed, slowed, and at times, completely subverted. This bilingual book is a conversation between anthropologist Rihan Yeh and Morison, who discuss the different meanings and risks of this simultaneous performance-protest.
Hand-printed art book available for purchase at Taller California's website: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border.
Papers by Rihan Yeh
This essay examines the narrative of a young US citizen of Mexican descent about an interrogation she was subjected to upon entering her native country from Mexico, where she had grown up. Through its fixation on the exchange of questions and answers, the interrogation divides and, even, disappears the subject interrogated, thus transforming a bureaucratic procedure into a site of manifestation of state sovereignty, classically understood as arbitrary and unmeasured. At the same time, the narrative of the interrogation nests inside a larger narrative about an attempted kidnapping which the narrator underwent in Mexico. Together, the linguistic interruptions and the interactional impasses of both the narrative of the interrogation and the kidnapping sketch the contours of a transnational system of governance that operates on the basis not of differential rights but of differential vulnerability to violence.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118786093
Para comprar el libro, visite la página de Taller California: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Over the last two years, David Morison Portillo has been traversing the U.S.-Mexico border in an unusual way: he chooses an evening and then crosses repeatedly without stopping. In this provocative performance, the state's violence--enacted and enforced by border officers--is rarefied, exposed, slowed, and at times, completely subverted. This bilingual book is a conversation between anthropologist Rihan Yeh and Morison, who discuss the different meanings and risks of this simultaneous performance-protest.
Hand-printed art book available for purchase at Taller California's website: https://tallercalifornia.cargo.site/Libros
Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border.
This essay examines the narrative of a young US citizen of Mexican descent about an interrogation she was subjected to upon entering her native country from Mexico, where she had grown up. Through its fixation on the exchange of questions and answers, the interrogation divides and, even, disappears the subject interrogated, thus transforming a bureaucratic procedure into a site of manifestation of state sovereignty, classically understood as arbitrary and unmeasured. At the same time, the narrative of the interrogation nests inside a larger narrative about an attempted kidnapping which the narrator underwent in Mexico. Together, the linguistic interruptions and the interactional impasses of both the narrative of the interrogation and the kidnapping sketch the contours of a transnational system of governance that operates on the basis not of differential rights but of differential vulnerability to violence.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118786093
flows, as an ideological value in its own right. Explicit negotiations of commensuration, then, have become increasingly fraught, increasingly pivotal practices as group boundaries of all sorts—separating ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, nations, or “civilizations”—are relentlessly reerected and re-arranged on the miniscule ethnographic scale of everyday engagements with semiotic forms marked as coming from beyond those boundaries. After laying out the nuts and bolts of our approach, we explore commensuration (and introduce the subsequent collection of essays) via three topical foci: commensuration’s role in securing movement as a semiotic effect; how sovereign power authorizes commensuration and thus comes to be at stake in it; and, finally, the destabilizing and yet productive ways in which failure haunts commensurative projects.