Border Narratives: The Politics of Identity and Mobilization

Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2003 by Navarro, Sharon

Border Narratives: The Politics of Identity and Mobilization

Louie, Miriam Ching Yoon. Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory. Cambridge: South End Press, 2001. Photographs, bibliography, index, 266 pp.; cloth $40, paperback $18.

Ruiz, Vicki L., ed. Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family. Reprint ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2000 (1993). Tables, figures, 325 pp.; paperback $19.95.

Saldivar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Photographs, bibliography, index, 226 pp.; cloth $50, paperback $18.95.

Vila, Pablo. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Photographs, appendix, bibliography, index, 304 pp.; cloth $42.50, paperback $19-95.

The books discussed in this essay engage what Anthony Giddens calls "life politics," a politics that concerns "issues which flow from processes of self-actualization in post-traditional contexts" (1991, 214). According to Giddens, life stories play a significant role in the formation of identity. Stories (through narratives) may represent challenges to power relations that are inscribed in social institutions and cultural practices, including aspects of everyday life. They may be constrained by oppressive cultural conditions and institutions; they-and the lives to which they relate-may be liberated by critical insight and engagement.

When people tell life stories, they do so according to models of intelligibility specific to the culture. Stories or "accounts" are always produced and told under particular social conditions and constraints; historical, institutional, and biographical contexts are always critical to the intelligibility, believability, and relevance of stories. These models are consonant with the conventions that stabilize the given organization of society. Stories that comply with such cultural models are generally recognized as sensible. Their formal compliance with these models goes unnoticed; they simply make sense. By contrast, stories that fail to conform to the models leave themselves open to questions, challenges, or resistance from any given society (Gergen 1990).

Personal accounts or narratives may communicate a speaker's beliefs and commitments to others (Mitchell 1981). They may also reflect those beliefs and commitments back to the speaker and thereby add to the speaker's convictions. In this way, accounts bind individuals to the arrangements of the society enforcing the models, whether the accounts feature circumscribed reactions to situations or an entire life course (Harre 1989). The political and other arrangements typical of a society are implicated in the conventions of discourse. These arrangements come to seem natural and inevitable, to the extent that they allow people to communicate (Berger and Luckmann 1966). These arrangements, furthermore, are renewed and strengthened each time they become manifest in a narrative. Narratives bring people to the point of wanting what they must want in their society and regarding that want as reasonable (Greenspan 1992). The works under review here provide an excellent opportunity to examine the important use of narratives, accounts, and stories in the sociopolitical construction of identity, gender, and globalization.

NARRATIVES, IDENTITY, AND GENDER

Pablo Vila's ethnographic study, conducted from 1991 to 1997, charts the social categories and metaphors that inhabitants of the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez use to define their group identity and distinguish themselves from "others." He draws on more than two hundred group interviews with more than nine hundred area residents to describe how Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Anglos make sense of themselves through narratives.

"I know a lot about the ways some people narrate their identities to make sense of themselves and others on the border," Vila writes (p. 107). While he advances these ideas, he is

aware that not all of those constructs are the products of the individual's own imagination. They may be borrowed from other sources, most obviously from popular culture. And here appears . . . Gramsci's hegemony, because sometimes they are not merely borrowed but actively imposed on us by others in order to preserve power, (p. 238)

This research uncovers the regionalism by which many northern Mexicans construct their sense of identity, the nationalism that often divides Mexican Americans from Mexican nationals, and the role of ethnicity in setting boundaries among Anglos, Mexicans, and African Americans. Vila also looks at how gender, age, religion, and class intertwine with these factors. He concludes with excerpts from repeat interviews with several informants, who modified their views of other groups when he confronted them with the narrative character of their identities.