Historian and anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez famously stated that the U.S.-Mexico border is only two grandmothers old. Those grandmothers would recognize many things about the 21st century border, but other aspects would seem as strange to them as the technology, slang, and styles of their great-great-grandchildren. Yet the border is, as Gloria Anzaldúa and Homi Bhabha have both written, a third space unto itself, not fully of either country, but fully participating in both cultures, lifeways, economies, histories, foodways, and facing the shared challenges that arrive from distant capitals.
Dr. Jennifer Jenkins talks in this episode with Colin Deeds, a lifelong Arizona resident and longtime interpreter of the U.S., Mexico borderlands. He holds degrees in anthropology and Latin American studies from the University of Arizona and has studied in Argentina, worked as an archaeologist for the National Park Service, and has conducted research in Mexico on politics and migration for many years. Colin is the Assistant Director and Director of Graduate Studies in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona.
Music: Somos Más Americanos, by Tigres del Norte
Hosted by Jennifer Jenkins, produced by Carlos Quintero
Notes and Resources
Work referenced in the episode
• Andreas, Peter. Border Games : Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2022.
• Bowden, Charles, and Julián Cardona. Murder City:Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. New York: Nation Books, 2010. Web.
• Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Trans. by Lisa Dillman. London ; & Other Stories, 2015.
• Miller, Todd. Border Patrol Nation : Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. New York: City Lights Publishers, 2014.
• Slack, Jeremy et al. The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border. Ed. by Scott Whiteford, Jeremy Slack, and Daniel E. Martínez. University of Arizona Press, 2018.
• Soto, Gabriella & Raquel Rubio Goldsmith. “The Border Enforcement ‘Funnel Effect’: A Material Culture Approach to Border Security on the Arizona-Sonora Border, 2000-Present.” (2018).
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