Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City

Passing

Passing

Two Publics in a Mexican Border City

Rihan Yeh

The University of Chicago Press   CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51188-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51191-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51207-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226512075.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Yeh, Rihan, author.

Title: Passing : two publics in a Mexican border city / Rihan Yeh.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026168 | ISBN 9780226511887 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511917 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226512075 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico)—Emigration and immigration. | Mexican-American Border Region—Emigration and immigration.

Classification: LCC JV7409.Z6 T594 2018 | DDC 304.80972/23—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026168

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Note to the Reader

Methods/Debts

Introduction

I: Passage/Prohibition. Overview

1: The Line

2: Inés’s I

The Assembly Plant

3: The Place Where Anything Can Happen

4: They Say in the Country Club

II: Prohibition/Passage. Overview

5: Clase Media and Pueblo before the Law

The Visa Interview

6: Passes

7: The Street Is a River

8: The Stone

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Interview Excerpts from Chapter 2

References

Index

Footnotes

Note to the Reader

Ethnographic quotes are verbatim unless otherwise indicated. I have tried to be generous in providing the original Spanish (even for many paraphrases, for these are generally quite close to the original), though I have omitted it in shorter quotes where the translation seemed especially straightforward. All transcriptions and translations, including those of works cited in Spanish, are my own. In the extended quotations, commas and periods indicate more rhythms of speech than grammatical units; hence, the omission of capital letters at the beginning of sentences. Question marks often indicate a rising tone rather than an actual question. I have substituted pseudonyms for all names besides those of public figures.

Methods/Debts

My debts in Tijuana run back to the time of my adolescence in the late 1990s, when I was taken in as an awkward volunteer at one of the city’s many orphanages. Over the five summers I spent there, I got into the habit of soliciting stories from the children. One in particular stuck with me: Meño’s story of the man who went searching for his stolen cows. Saddened, the man bought a car to follow them; suddenly, he saw one, but the thief took her away. He crossed a river. He heard their footsteps. He got out of his car and saw them on a hill, and then he walked and walked. Walking, he came upon his grandmother’s house, and he ate there. But again he heard the footsteps and left to follow them. The story ends there.

Like other stories I heard at the orphanage, Meño’s makes an allegory of his abandonment; his tale is saturated by the sense of limits imposed on him and moved beyond, mushrooming up again and moved beyond again in repetitive gestures of loss, searching, discovery of the unexpected, and loss surging up again to drag one on. Meño was only one of the many young people to whom the directors of the orphanage introduced me in these explicit terms: Rihan, there is someone I want you to meet so that you may know another world. Before knowing it, I was already being interpellated as caminando para conocer, walking so as to learn and know, engaged in a search of my own that brought me closer to the people I met even as I verified, over and over, my distance from them.

Meño’s was a good introduction to Tijuana. Later, I began to hear similar gestures—loss, search, discovery, loss—in the narratives of the adults who cared for these children as they explained to me, now a novice anthropologist, their movement toward the border and what they simultaneously found and failed to find there: new attachments that both substituted for old losses and reminded of their irrevocability. As they narrated themselves into the city, and the city into their own lives, I began to hear a throbbing sense not just of the individual I imagining and articulating and presenting itself before me—an other precisely from the other side, as the United States is known here—but also a sense of we, of collective subjectivity, shadowy and implicit but giving all these stories social bulk as part of a mass phenomenon born of migration and inequality and the border as a sign summing up all that was desired, unreachable, inexplicable, or surprising in life. If not the word we itself, something (I could not yet say what kind of cue) framed these stories as the stuff not only of those who told them but of these people as part of some larger whole, and I sensed, dimly, that even in the most intimate depths of their experience, that was how they thought of it themselves.

That summer (it was 2003), I was also thrown together with other people, who talked about themselves quite differently and who went about their business in ways that seemed at first glance much more familiar from my US perspective. Edith, who has been for twenty years my closest interlocutor in Tijuana, brought me into Inés’s home and introduced me to her daughter Dara.¹ They too were concerned that I understand Tijuana, not just their Tijuana but Tijuana as theirs and, beyond this, Mexico as theirs, and they took pains to reorient my sense of the city to a world not of improvised shacks and muddy hillsides but of single-family residences on suburban-style streets, with supermarkets and shopping centers close at hand, friends over for lunch, and occasional, measured nights out to a café or for Italian food. But these practices too, I found, and the sense of Tijuana that arose from them, seemed ultimately—though disavowedly—articulated around the figure of the border. The breaches of class and status that my interlocutors seemed to be forever fording were suffused with a strange sense of stymie that flourished into fullest form in the legal border crossing that their US-issued documents (mostly Border Crossing Cards, a kind of nonimmigrant visa that I will properly introduce further on) afforded them. This is a crossing that is always also not crossing, that fears prohibition and holds it present, that must ever forestall itself in the intention of a quick return to Mexico. It is a crossing haunted by the sense that with legal approbation one obtains no real self-transformation, no surety of status and self, but is only passing oneself off as what one really is not quite.

These first, intimate debts opened the city to me as a space formed by intensely felt but opposed images of it. They led me to ask, eventually, this book’s basic question: how Tijuana’s wes—the different publics that lay claim to the city as a whole—are inflected by the border. Beyond these first debts come a flood of others great and small. That summer and the next I spent furthering my contacts: old acquaintances from the orphanage and whomever they might lead me to (people who made one thing or another of me but always welcomed me and fed me and forced me to drink tremendous quantities of Coca-Cola); new acquaintances I became friendly with by such simple accident as the habit of walking by their houses; and also people I met at the Casa del Migrante, a shelter where I volunteered part-time. These habits of visiting and roving, of expanding on chance encounters, continued throughout my fieldwork proper, carried out over eighteen months in 2006 and 2007.² To them I owe as much as to the formal structure of my fieldwork, built around close engagement with a small set of households.

The households were selected to provide contrasting cases of socioeconomic status, of access to the United States (through US citizenship, permanent residency, a Border Crossing Card, unauthorized crossing, or none at all), and of practical relation to that country (work, shopping, entertainment, socializing, visits frequent or infrequent, past unauthorized stints, or again no direct relation at all). I lived in two homes besides Inés’s for a period of two months each, though my regular visits to both extended over a year. I became involved with other households in a variety of patterns, including intensive periods of visiting and of accompanying members on expeditions outside the home, both routine and extraordinary. Some of the most extraordinary included the trip to San Diego to bring seventeen-year-old Q and her newborn baby home from the hospital, the vacation trip south to Mrs. H’s hometown outside Mexico City, and the period spent visiting Tijuana’s public hospital and then its funeral home when Mr. R’s ex-wife passed away. I very, very often had occasion to feel honored by the place so many people allowed me in their lives.

I supplemented my work with the households by observation of all sorts of public events and spaces, by reading the news, watching television, surfing the Internet, listening to music, and so forth. My fieldwork also included several sustained engagements with formal institutions, almost entirely absent from this book and yet essential to my understanding of public life in Tijuana. When I arrived in 2006, presidential elections were imminent, and I spent several months visiting the different parties’ headquarters, attending mass rallies, and eventually falling in with a party subcommittee that welcomed me to observe their weekly meetings and campaign activities; they deserve profuse thanks for their generosity. Originally, the morgue was to have been a major field site, but, in my efforts to gain permission to work there, I learned enough to decide against involvement with an institution that remains intimately tied to the state police. Another focus of research was the movement against insecurity spearheaded by the local business class. Though I did not gain intimate knowledge of its workings, I again spent significant time attending meetings and pursuing interviews. These three sites provided invaluable insight into the major institutions shaping the public sphere: party politics, the state with its legitimate violence, and civil society. One last field site, where I spent all too little time, was an assembly plant. Since it figures in the book, I will say only that I am deeply grateful to all who spoke with me. Again, I have Edith to thank for this opportunity, as well as the plant’s manager.

* * *

My thanks, though, are due not only to the many people who took the trouble to help me on my way. They spiral out, instead, from intimate and long-term debts to ones unnamed and even beyond, to crossings of paths that never figured in my project in any explicit way at all. I do not want to equate people who have known me for years to those with whom I had only a chance meeting on the street, but I owe my sense of Tijuana just as much to those who either refused to help me or had no idea they were doing so. I would like to remember just two of them here.

The Guerrillero wears his hair in an Aztec knot. He lives on a plot of land without water, and he is not on speaking terms with most of his neighbors. It was not until I returned to Tijuana in 2009 that I found the courage to ask for permission to write about him. During my fieldwork proper, he surprised me more than once. The first time was when he found out I spoke English. Like many, he immediately remarked that he too spoke it very well. I was just nodding my usual deference when he winked and said, with a surety with which I have not heard the language used in Tijuana before or since, I was an English major. So you can just imagine. And then, after inhaling deeply from his joint: I’m sharp, you know. Very sharp. A second time, when I was again sure the marijuana was filtering reality, he backed up his stories about his time in San Quentin (California’s famed maximum-security prison) by pulling out binders full of photographs, clippings of the newspaper he ran on the inside, all the sonnets he wrote teaching himself correct literary Spanish, and the full-length sociological treatise (on the benefits of organizing among inmates) he presented to the governor of California.³ Deported to Mexico, he turned to labor organizing in the assembly plants, but with a flair for trouble that landed him in prison more than once. The result, forty years later, is almost complete isolation and extreme poverty—the Guerrillero rarely dares to leave his home, and he survives on as little as two or three dollars a week, earned from the sale of junk outside his front door. He grew up in Tijuana, and he plans to die there.

Like the Guerrillero, Mr. L believes the government has deliberately corralled him into his scarcely solvent way of life, and even that it is slowly poisoning him to death. My next-door neighbor for several months, he summarily dismissed any anthropological engagement by refusing to read my consent form, waving his hand and saying, I already know exactly what you’re doing. He then explained how my work would be used by the CIA. But despite thus foreclosing any research relationship, he became an inevitable fixture of my daily life, with his long harangues on politics and society, his pride, his gentleness with his grandson, and his endless generosity in the face of my automotive difficulties, even when I was not particularly disposed to accept it—Estás terqueando (You’re being stubborn), he would tell me before resuming exposition of his (highly idiosyncratic, I thought) theory of electricity. As with the Guerrillero, I eventually found, with surprise and shame, how wrong I had been to follow Mr. L’s neighbors in their inclination to be just a bit dismissive of him. Watching videos of the settlement of the neighborhood, with its initially violent battle with the authorities, I saw Mr. L turn his tongue to political use, speaking into the microphone, rousing the crowd, playing a truly active role in the movement. Also as with the Guerrillero, it took two years of absence on my part for Mr. L to decide to speak to me of his own history as a labor organizer.

Both these men are testament to the obstacles Tijuana presents to any political or social project that would include the marginalized on their own terms. These obstacles are simple, but they are fundamental to the picture of public life I present here; I saw the other side of them in my work with the institutions mentioned above. One, the unity of the assembly plant industry means that many people fear not only losing their jobs and being blacklisted but prejudicing employers against their entire neighborhood. This fear goes hand in hand with another: where large portions of the city have been settled by squatters’ movements, land ownership takes years (often over twenty) to be formalized, and people fear the loss of their homes in retributive action by the state. Lastly, straight-up police violence is a far more routine fact for the marginalized than someone living a middle-class life in Tijuana is likely fully to realize. It was only very late that I understood how vividly present these fears are for so many and their true import for public life in Tijuana. All my respect is due those who go forward in the face of them.

The Tijuana of the colonias, the working-class districts such as those the Guerrillero and Mr. L inhabit, is only one side of the city. Another Tijuana, the Tijuana of established, middle-class society, appears also in these pages, and I owe much to those who took the trouble to teach me about it. It is no less deserving of my or the reader’s sympathetic understanding—but the facts of repressive social control mentioned above must not be forgotten. Of all the places where I was grilled about my research, I most dreaded being put on the spot in the colonias. In one of those uncomfortable interviews, I told a man that I was interested in life at the border. And what do you make of life at the border? my questioner returned, dry with skepticism. Nervous, I blurted out: ¡Está cabrón! (It’s a bitch!) Ain’t it though? he replied, chuckling wryly; the ice was broken. My thanks to him for clarifying that I had indeed understood something of his world—though it is an understanding denied by dominant discourses, which insist on Tijuana as a city of prosperity and opportunity and call its roughness but a stereotype imposed from without.

On any given day, I might speak with someone like the Guerrillero or Mr. L in the morning and then rush to Inés’s to change for an interview with a lawyer or businessperson or to attend an academic event or press conference. My sense of Tijuana is cobbled out of my own constant movement, not only across the border but also across social barriers that were sometimes dizzying to traverse so quickly. It is cobbled, too, from my physical movement—my driving along Tijuana’s thoroughfares, from the Vía Rápida (Tijuana’s version of a freeway), to the neat neighborhood streets of the older parts of town, to the potholed mud messes of the newer areas, all the way out to the long dusty roads reaching into the hills, where little improvised houses are just beginning to appear. It is cobbled not only from my driving, but from my riding of collective taxis and buses, the customs of courtesy on them, the quick exchange of hand signals between driver and potential passenger, the abbreviated body language between travelers and its sudden flourishing into conversation. These are all lessons through which the city is learned and for which I feel no little gratitude. It is as part of a public that I learned to walk and talk in and understand Tijuana in the ways it demanded of me: the city itself had its say in how I might make its terms, both personally and analytically (though of course only ever partially), my own. However differently from other people, Tijuana’s streets bore for me, too, a gift. This book is only the feeblest attempt to return it.

Even this street of cars and buses, the interactions that make the most basic texture of daily public life, is too formal, perhaps, for a complete understanding of the city. Tijuana is not a hospitable place for walking; it is too sprawled out, too industrial; its main arteries, like those of a Western US city, are lined by mini-malls; even the downtown, minuscule by comparison with the rest of Tijuana, is not easy to manage, and I never learned it well. But along all the highways are little footpaths traced out in the dirt and refuse; they weave and split and merge like the lines of a hand in all the forgotten spaces that might be used to move from one place to another. They are not always very safe to walk on, and they are usually very lonely. They run along the train tracks, where druggies make nests for themselves in the grass, and they run along the river to the tunnels near the border that are inhabited, too. I imagine these paths once running not only along but across the border itself, as they do in the mountains to the east. They go through empty lots and hang along overpasses, where one thinks that surely one of the trucks roaring by will sweep one into oblivion at any second. When they turn through a sheltered stairway, they reek of piss. In the colonias, they run in the narrow spaces in between houses, up endless staircases made of old tires and lined by scrap-wood shacks, where dogs lunge and cower at every turn. They plunge straight down hills that turn to mudslides in the rain, to reach homes that cannot be gotten to any other way. They emerge shyly, surreptitiously, inevitably, the ghosts of improper and sometimes illicit passages through spaces not made to welcome them. They rub themselves into the landscape of even the neatest new developments, where they insinuate themselves into the edges of embankments, along sewage canals, and through small holes in chain-link fences slowly widened by fleeting use. The people who make them are already gone before they arrive; they are already disappearing in the moment of their passage. To these paths and backways, where I so often felt myself a trespasser, even to these what has been written here owes a debt. Thank you.

Introduction

In Tijuana, Mexico, the International Line is not the border per se. Rather, la Línea is the area just south of San Ysidro, the city’s main port of entry to the United States—Línea Internacional is actually the name of the street where the line forms to cross north. Properly, línea could refer to the international boundary, as in la línea divisoria (the dividing line), but in Tijuana the word is not commonly used in this sense. As a loan from English, it refers to the lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to cross. People do ask of the border, "Is there a lot of línea? meaning, Is the line long? or they say, Hice dos horas de línea" (I did two hours of line). But in other contexts, the usual Spanish term for a queue is preferred.

The two meanings of línea, neither of which stands on its own, run perpendicular to each other: an east-west line signifying prohibition and a north-south line signifying passage. The Line is the point at which they cross. When elderly Inés drew me a map of the port of entry and its environs, I got confused about where the international boundary was. Let’s see, I asked her, but then stumbled, not finding the word: "Here where the border (frontera) runs, the line (línea), the line of the border? Of the border, she echoed. Well, that’s this, right here, it’s where they check your papers . . ." and she circled the row of tiny rectangles she had made to represent the one-man booths at which US immigration officers sit.¹ For many, the meaning of the border may be condensed to this point: the Line, prohibition and passage, a momentary confrontation staged over and over, the perpetually repeated surrender of oneself and one’s documents to the representatives of the United States.

This book asks how the border, as it blends enticements to passage and stern prohibitions, splits Tijuana. At a basic level, half the population has papers to cross, half does not (Alegría 2009:86).² In Mexico, Tijuana used to be known as a ciudad de paso (city of passage), in reference to the unauthorized labor migrants who came through here in substantial numbers. But while incipient illegal aliens do still pass through the port (hidden in the trunk of a car or with false documents or visas to be overstayed), it is legal border crossing that San Ysidro spectacularizes.³ Though crossings have gone down since the time of my fieldwork, when they reached 110,000 daily (Blum 2007), San Ysidro continues to be known as the busiest port of entry in the world. In addition, the Otay Mesa Port handles all cargo as well as a considerable amount of regular traffic, and yet another port, just for air travelers, opened in 2015.

The border splits Tijuana, though, not just in terms of having or not having papers, but as it splits the city’s very sense of itself and of Mexico as a collectivity. Two wes will be this book’s protagonists. On one hand, Mexico’s clase media or middle class has been increasingly invested with promises of political and consumer modernity. In Tijuana, legal access to the United States validates and bolsters the dream of the clase media and of Mexico as a middle-class nation. On the other hand, the pueblo, the people as paradigmatically plebeian, was enshrined by the 1910 Mexican Revolution as the national subject proper. Decades of neoliberal reform, however, have pushed it toward the margins of recognition.⁴ Now, in the view of many, the need to migrate, to expose oneself to the risks of unauthorized border crossing and of living in the United States as an illegal alien, evocatively condenses the broader economic marginalization and political delegitimation of the pueblo. Like passage and prohibition at the Line, though, clase media and pueblo are both starkly opposed and intimately, inseparably entangled.⁵

Passing is a term US readers will associate with the lived dilemmas of race—the ambiguities, tensions, and anxieties that come of trying to get by in a system in which law aspires to fix identity all too clearly and with all too obvious advantages and disadvantages for those to whom one or another racial label sticks. Race is, of course, a basic factor at the border, though racial hierarchies in Mexico work much differently from US ones, and mapping their confluence is no simple task. Beyond race, though, passing highlights the vulnerability of identity in general, how it must be risked and reestablished in the vagaries of self-presentation and moment-to-moment recognitions (Goffman 1963). Discourse is crucial here: the simultaneous malleability and straitjacketedess of language, of narrative, of which stories about oneself do or do not stick from one situation to the next. When the police knock on Inés’s door to ask who owns the car out front, she tells them its US license plates are legal, for the car belongs to a young citizen of that country whose papers are all in order. In my absence, she helps me pass before their scrutinizing gaze. Telling me the story, she shows me how she did it: by showing herself as what she is, a respectable old lady. To grasp the intertwining of passage and prohibition and show how clase media and pueblo emerge from them means tracking the vicissitudes of performance in moments like this one, as people interact.

Inés’s encounter with the police does not take place at the border, but the border’s distinctions are at stake in it: limits of national belonging as well as limits of legality. As Inés upholds her respectability, limits of class and status are at stake too. Each of these limits runs through this book. The most extreme limits, though, without which the border’s importance for Tijuana and for Mexico cannot be grasped, are the limits of life that unauthorized crossers confront on passage through the desert. The risk of death became central to unauthorized passage when, in 1994, Operation Gatekeeper shifted migrant flows away from urban centers like Tijuana (Nevins 2002; De León 2015). Though protracted desert crossings are rare in local experience, migrant deaths are the most poignant and terrifying expression of the wider society’s—not just the United States’ but also Mexico’s—disregard for those without access to the privilege of legal passage. Ethnographic focus on passing shows how these disparate limits play into each other, how they are tied to the border, and how they shape the very possibility of we-ness in Tijuana.

Since Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) foundational work exploring her own hybridities as a border-crossing subject, the border has been regarded as a metaphorically potent figure where different limits converge. This approach, however, stalled methodologically as critics pointed out that it had deterritorialized the border beyond recognition (e.g., Heyman 1995a). Moreover, Pablo Vila (2000, 2005) showed that at the border itself, limits were not always crossed but could also divide invidiously. Slowly, academic emphasis shifted from the promiscuity of transnational flows (Kearney 1991, 1995; Alvarez 1995) to violent practices of policing (Andreas 2000; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Fassin 2011; Rosas 2012; De León 2015). Thus, the larger question of how borders as state institutions shape multiple social boundaries (Sahlins 1989; Heyman 1991, 2001a; Rutherford 2003; Pelkmans 2006) has, in the US-Mexico case, largely shrunk to examination of the border’s role in instituting the illegal alien in the United States (De Genova 2002; Ngai 2004; Gonzales and Chavez 2012). By picking apart passage and prohibition both at the border itself and in the many border inspections (Lugo 2008) of class and race Mexicans impose on each other, this book shifts the focus to the border’s influence on Mexican society. It asks, fundamentally, how a shared sense of collectivity—a we that can hold a city or country together—can take root in face of the border's challenge.

Out of the uncertainties of passing, two wes emerge, two collective subjects diametrically opposed in their relation to the border, both as state apparatus and as marker par excellence of national limits and limitations. As they dispute between them not only their rights to the city but also their status as national subject proper, the border both undergirds and deeply destabilizes them. The two divide Tijuana, but each is also divided within itself. Like the individual Is that compose and inform them, Tijuana’s wes must pass inspection whenever they are spoken, and so they too are shot through at every step with hesitations, feints, and contradictions. They do not hold together, even as they are what holds Tijuana together. But it is not just Tijuana that is at stake in them. The United States is the world’s foremost imperial power today, and Mexico is the country that has lain closest and longest in its shadow. The ways in which the border unsettles Tijuana speak broadly to the ways in which Mexico, given this history, does not hold together either.

The rest of this introduction unfolds in three sections. First, while fleshing out clase media and pueblo in Tijuana, I explain the conceptual anchoring of my ethnographic and argumentative method. Next, I sketch the dynamics of desire and disavowal that have shaped this border historically. Finally, I turn to the lessons Tijuana offers about public life in general and the forms of we-ness this city foreshadows for the world.

Two Publics

Sometimes people hammer on their wes; sometimes we-ness shows in small ways. Everybody has a visa! a university professor exclaims, revealing just who she thinks everybody is. ALL MY SUPPORT FOR TIJUANA’S POLICE. [ . . . ] Tijuana is with you, a participant in an online news forum writes, presuming to speak for the city as a whole (Andrade 2009). In the same discussion, someone else insists the police are no angels, for WE ALL KNOW THAT THOSE WHO DIE DO SO BECAUSE THEY OWE SOMETHING—but this voice is quickly run out of the forum. Here we is explicit, but the sense of Mexico this phrase posits and defends is akin to subtler formulations. The phrase It’s said that the border is a nest of traffickers, for instance, from a popular song (Los Tucanes de Tijuana 1997), likewise conjures up a sense of all those who share this knowledge as a collectivity. The first two examples resonate with the assumptions of Tijuana’s documented, law-abiding clase media; the second two are charged with the assumptions of the pueblo. In each case, language provides a strong clue to which group is at stake and how it is being imagined.

In unpacking the border’s effects on Tijuana’s wes, I rely on the concept of publics. As developed in recent linguistic-anthropological work (Cody 2011), publics trains attention on the micromechanics of interaction through which collective subjectivity comes to life.⁶ Moving firmly away from the liberal tradition of thought on the public sphere, it plunges us into the ethnographic nitty-gritties of communication, the details of the discursive genres through which we becomes (or does not become) articulable: participant roles, institutional contexts, narrative representations of lived worlds. Understood as constituted by the reflexive reiteration of we-ness, publics provide a close-up lens on passing, pinpointing it in the performative successes, slips, and forceful derailings of the attempt to establish we or I amid a shifting complex of constraints and possibilities (think of the failure of we all know on the web forum). Groupness here is a discursive achievement.⁷ Only through their perpetual evocation, embedded in the give and take of interaction and the risks of recognition it implies, do publics become taken-for-granted social realities, presupposable referents within which individuals may routinely locate themselves. Only through it do they become not just imaginable but inhabitable.

To expose the senses of collectivity informing Tijuana’s two publics, I follow a cumulative method of argumentation. Though I often hone in on pronouns, my case does not rest on statistical patterns of language use. Instead, the concatenation of carefully analyzed ethnographic examples shows the strength of the cultural assumptions that sustain these two publics, just as my interlocutors drew me in by their mutually resonant yet always unique address. The examples I have chosen to include are of course but a handful among many. Often, I picked them not to stand in for typical uses but for their idiosyncrasy, to demonstrate, time and again, the ease and expertise with which radically different people tailor common senses of we-ness to their own circumstances (whether lifelong or momentary). In this approach, I am guided by a linguistic anthropological tradition potently summarized by Michael Silverstein (2004). Silverstein shows how cultural categories as basic as gender or as erudite as taxonomies of wine or Jesuit colleges can and must be evoked—and thus continually reworked—in situated human interaction. As cultural concepts, clase media and pueblo can be indexed by subtle cues; that is, they are more often assumed than named. The ethnographic labor here is to unpack those assumptions in the heat of their conflictive mobilization.

Michael Warner has called publics the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse (2002:90), but this space is never homogeneous; to sketch its contours with any precision, to grasp its depth and bulk as a social form requires attention to the subtle divergences between articulations of we-ness in all the various contexts of their appearance. Every time a claim is made to voice the public (Tijuana is with you), a story about who we are is also at stake. Linguistic representation is key to publics in the sense of both political delegation (who speaks for all) and depiction; public-making interactions are rich in narratives that, performatively mobilized, produce a fiction of premediated existence (Mazzarella 2004:357) that includes not just we but the spatiotemporal and sociological world in which it finds its place. These projections of we and its world sometimes echo into each other, while other times they shove and thrust among themselves. By looking at how they knit together dialogically (Bakhtin 1981a), this book pushes thought on publics beyond the examination of particular, often media-delimited (counter)publics and back to the question of the public sphere as a problematic and always provisional whole.

Given stereotypes of Mexican border cities, readers may be surprised to hear of a substantial middle class in Tijuana.⁸ Those who would occupy a middle-class identity there face this issue daily. Like the person who declared, ALL MY SUPPORT FOR TIJUANA’S POLICE, they are often deeply invested in defending, against widespread stereotypes of vice, crime, and poverty, Tijuana’s decency and commitment to civic values. These people consider liberal publicity a requisite for modern societies, and so they do their best to model its autonomous, upright I (a point chapter 2 develops). In tune with classic liberal theories of the public sphere, they like to debate matters of common concern and aspire to build a rational consensus that will influence state policy (Habermas 1989; Calhoun 1992; Mazzarella 2010). At root, however, the I that liberal publicity relies on is that of the legal subject and full citizen, signing its name before the state as before the public at large.

In the quest to consolidate this I, many in Tijuana turn to the US Border Crossing Card, or laser visa. This document sums up past achievements (education, employment, property, and self-presentation are all potentially reviewed in the application interview) and allows access to crucial realms of consumption in San Diego and beyond, thus feeding further performances of status. Most importantly, the visa underlines one’s rejection of unauthorized labor migration to the United States, a rejection crucial to middle-class morality here.⁹ But the visa’s confirmation of self and status is tenuous at best. Aside from the fact that many people use it precisely to facilitate unauthorized work in the United States (Chávez 2016), in the port of entry everyone is a suspect. Under the unabating surveillance of the US state, the upstanding citizen must constantly displace the fear of suddenly finding themselves nothing but another marginal, excluded subject in relation to US authority.

For Tijuana’s popular public, in contrast, the border puts a finishing twist on a whole series of exclusions seen as arising within Mexican society, which have long pushed a significant part of the population into the United States. As archaeologist Jason De León argues, the Sonoran Desert has been recruited by the US state as part of a complex killing machine (2015:3) aimed at unauthorized border-crossers. He shows, to devastating effect, how the devaluation of their lives is a political fact quite literally inscribed upon the bones of the dead (2015:72). This devaluation, though, is only the most radical affront of many that, I argue, deny subjectivity to the undocumented and all those who identify with them. Lacking recognition, we can become very thin indeed. At an extreme, one may not even voice it; at an extreme, subjectivity may turn inside out and we may become, at once holding on to and eschewing recognition, the third person of such commonplace forms as they say, "it