Abstract

KRAMSCH, Olivier Thomas. Crossing the Topographies of Modernity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Towards an Ethnography of "Out of Place" Ideas. Frontera norte [online]. 2002, vol.14, n.28, pp.7-19. ISSN 2594-0260.

As the national economies of Mexico and the United States intertwine more tightly under NAFTA, the role of the U.S.-Mexico border as a catalyst: for wider: economic development: has emerged as a central preoccupation of the administrations of Vicente Fox and George W. Bush. Yet, the sociocultural and intellectual contexts for successful cross-border development are riven by discrepant visions of the political possibilities inherent in achieving authentic transboundary integration. Drawing on recent key English-and Spanish language works, the author attempts to account for this discrepancy in the transboundary spatial imagination by rooting observed discourses in diverging traditions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, focusing on the Latin American intellectual negotiation of the postmodern condition. Rather than celebrate the U.S.-Mexico border as a postmodern space of radial openness or defend its position as a vital bulwark against the dissolution of "heroic" nation-state building projects, the article attempts to view both sets of discourses from a fragile middle-ground, hinting at possible linkages /and solidarities) with other, non-Western, "peripheral" modernities.

Keywords : modernization; de-territorialization; postmodernit(ies); United States; Mexico.

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