The U.S.-Mexico border as a model for social-cultural theory: A brief discussion

Abstract

The US–Mexico border has influenced social-cultural theory by drawing attention to hybrids that stand apart from supposedly cohesive wholes. This point, albeit important, does not exhaust the lessons to be learned from the US–Mexico border region. It also displays highly unequal power relations. Adjacent, interactive, but profoundly asymmetrical border city pairs are key sites for analyzing unequal relationships between the so-called global South and global North. This social relationality of apparently contrastive endpoints, and the cultural frameworks and practices that mediate the connections, is yet another lesson from the US–Mexico border. Culture occurs in a matrix of often highly unequal social relationships. Culture is made and reproduced at relational meeting points between differentiated positionalities, even when there is an apparently exclusionary border in between.