Journal of Borderlands Studies

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An Introduction to the Multiple US–Mexico Borders

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera & Kathleen Staudt

To cite this article: Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera & Kathleen Staudt (2014) An Introduction
to the Multiple US–Mexico Borders, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 29:4, 385-390, DOI:
10.1080/08865655.2014.982473

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Published online: 16 Dec 2014.

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 Journal of Borderlands Studies | 29.4 - 2014

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE

An Introduction to the Multiple US–Mexico Borders

∗
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Kathleen Staudt

Abstract
In this, a thematic issue on multiple borders, our goal is to unpack the lengthy border to explore differences and
similarities from the western industrialized Tijuana–San Diego Pacific coastal region, the de-populated Sonora–
Arizona desert, the densely settled global manufacturing central Paso del Norte site, and the agricultural spaces
and smaller urban settlements of South Texas–northeastern Mexico. This thematic volume includes seven articles
that not only reveal contextual differences at “multiple” US–Mexico borders, but also the overarching themes of
violence and dehumanization from media and policy constructions—that are derived from constant trans-
border flows, both legal and illicit. The relevant differences complicate public policy impacts, social and
environmental issues, and action strategies for the future, posing intriguing new research with implications for
borderlands in other world regions. In unpacking the lengthy US–Mexico border to analyze differences, we hope
to stimulate thinking about other borderlands around the world for which overgeneralizations may have also
been made, just as with the research on the US–Mexico borderlands.

Border studies, born in the field of “political geography” but historically consolidated in “US–Mexico
border studies,” seem to assume that the border zones of two or more nations situated side by side are quite
homogeneous. Such an assumption is inaccurate in certain key cases. Consider, for example, the US–
Mexico border. Almost 2,000 miles long, the US–Mexico borderlands stretch across coastal, desert, and
tropical climatic terrains of varying altitudes (Figure 1). The borderline both divides and joins people of
different nationalities and ethnicities who bring diverse historical backgrounds to the 21st century, its
political economy, its celebrations and problems. In fact, the lengthy US–Mexico border is a region of
multiple contrasts. It can be characterized as an asymmetrical, interdependent border, with the United
States as the more powerful and Mexico as the less powerful in relational perspective. But asymmetries/
inequalities between the north and the south are not the sole features of the US–Mexico borderlands.
Enormous demographic, socioeconomic, political, and cultural differences can be found across the nearly
2,000 mile-long border.

We can certainly argue that there are multiple US–Mexico borders; and these borders differ greatly in
terms of their history, population, climate, economic dynamics and economic development, social
integration, politics, beliefs, art and other cultural expressions, among many other issues. Such differences
are also reflected in the coverage of the various US–Mexico border regions by the academic community,
political analysts, and the media. In fact, there is a considerable amount of literature on the central
borderlands. The Tijuana–San Diego region has also received significant attention by scholars and the
media, but there is a very limited number of studies that focus on the eastern part of the border,
particularly on the Texas–Tamaulipas border.

∗
Associate Professor & Chair, Government Department, University of Texas at Brownsville, One West University
Blvd, MO Building Room 1.126B, Brownsville, TX 78520, USA | guadalupe.correacabrera@utb.edu
Kathleen Staudt, Professor of Political Science, University of Texas at El Paso, 500 W. University, Benedict Hall
303, El Paso, TX 79968, USA | kstaudt@utep.edu

© 2014 Association for Borderlands Studies

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2014.982473
Journal of Borderlands Studies | 29.4 - 2014

Figure 1. The US–Mexico Border

Among studies in the academic literature—both in English and Spanish—on this very diverse region of the
world, it is worthwhile noting that there are very few analyses that have acknowledged the existence of
multiple US–Mexico borders. Brunet-Jailly, Payan, and Sawchuk (2008), for example, document the
existence of four cross-border regions along the US–Mexico divide: (1) Greater California (Baja California–
California); (2) Primería Alta (Sonora–Arizona); (3) El Camino Real region (Chihuahua–New Mexico and
western Texas); and (4) Nuevo Santander (Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas–most of Texas). This
classification was made taking into account historical, geographic, and demographic factors, as well as the
economic, socio-cultural, and organizational aspects of current cross-border regional relationships.

Anderson and Gerber (2008) also recognize and evocatively describe four US–Mexico borders: the
California border; the Arizona–Sonora border; the Chihuahuan desert (covering New Mexico, West
Texas, Chihuahua and Coahuila), and the border region that goes from Del Rio–Ciudad Acuña to
Brownsville–Matamoros. Another effort to identify different US–Mexico borders is that of Zúñíga-
González (2011). By using a different criterion to classify the US–Mexico borderlands that focuses on the
characteristics of “border societies,” he distinguishes five sub-regions: (1) the “San Diego–Tijuana” border;
(2) what he calls the “agricultural” border (located in the Imperial Valley axis, California–Yuma, Arizona
on the US side; and Mexicali, Baja California–San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora on the Mexican side); (3)
the “quasi-empty” border between Arizona–Nuevo Mexico and Sonora–Chihuahua; (4) the border of the
“twin cities” (El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez); and (5) the “east end” of the US–Mexico border that
includes the cities of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas.

These classifications highlight the many complexities that can be found when analyzing the US–Mexico
borderlands, border relations, and border policies in general. Very few people in academia acknowledge
such complexities. While much research has been produced about the US–Mexico border from different
disciplines, much of that research assumes similarities across this long horizontal line of four southwestern
US states and six Mexican states in two federal systems of government. This view has also affected public
policy in a significant way. After all, border public policies emanate from the national capital cities of both
sovereign countries treating their border as the same, from east to west.

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To treat the relationship between the United States and Mexico as monolithic throughout the borderlands
is to obscure contextual realities with consequences of importance to policymakers, activists, and
researchers. A multiple-borders perspective is then crucial to understand US–Mexico relations and border
relations; economic, social and political dynamics of the borderlands; and specific border public policies.
Moreover, the usage of this perspective can help scholars to understand not only the US–Mexico border,
but other long borders elsewhere in the world.

In this, a thematic issue on multiple borders, our goal is to unpack the lengthy border to explore
differences and similarities from the western industrialized Tijuana–San Diego Pacific coastal region, the
de-populated Sonora–Arizona desert, the densely settled global manufacturing central Paso del Norte site,
and the agricultural spaces and smaller urban settlements of South Texas–northeastern Mexico—what has
been called the “forgotten” border for the paucity of research in this area. This thematic volume includes
seven articles that not only reveal contextual differences at “multiple” US–Mexico borders, but also the
unifying similarities of violence and dehumanization in areas of constant trans-border flows—themselves
born partly from policy and media constructions that emanate from above, not necessarily from border
people. Differences, in particular, complicate public policy impacts, social and environmental issues, and
action strategies for the future, posing intriguing new research with implications for borderlands in other
world regions. In unpacking the lengthy US–Mexico border to analyze differences, we hope to stimulate
thinking about other borderlands around the world for which overgeneralizations may have also been
made, just as with the research on the US–Mexico borderlands.

However, we do not attempt to establish general conclusions that are applicable to every border in the
world and are aware of the limitations of grand theorizing on this very complex topic involving multiple
subjects, issues and methodologies. In fact, border scholars have struggled over the merits of single-case
studies, comparative studies, and/or grand theorizing about borders. In particular, scholars have wondered
whether border studies ought to use common conceptual language and a single theory of borders. In 2011
and 2012, two massive border studies’ compendiums were published on borderlands worldwide.1 In one
of them, with the opening chapter’s pointed question, “A Border Theory: An Unattainable Dream or A
Realistic Aim for Border Scholars?” border scholar Anssi Paasi (2011) answers with analysis, affirming the
former, an unattainable dream. Indeed, these compendiums, with their more than 30 articles each,
contain thematic chapters that—while somewhat interdisciplinary—tend to be grounded in disciplines
like geography, anthropology, and political science. And the chapters speak to multiple literatures and
theories connected to their disciplinary vantage points.

We are both political scientists who have specialized in comparative politics. We recognize that
comparative politics, too, once dreamed of grand theorizing to embrace all nation-states, whether that
involved the older “structural functionalism” of Gabriel Almond and his successors, ultimately dismissed
with its western, teleological biases; or the Marxist and dependency approaches which began to set nation-
states into global economic contexts, sometimes at the cost of attention to institutions and societies within
those states (for a good overview, see Randall 2011). As political scientists turned to institutional analyses
and as post-structural analysts criticized overgeneralized grand theorizing, comparative scholars began to
pursue middle-range theorizing connected with their discipline(s). For us, as examples, the US–Mexico
border became a comparative site to analyze informal economies (Staudt 1998), cross-border civil society
activism (Staudt and Coronado 2002; Staudt and Méndez 2015), security, undocumented immigration,
and economic development (Correa-Cabrera 2013), the media and public discourse (Correa-Cabrera
2012), the construction of national identities (Rippberger and Staudt 2003), and changing gender power
relations (Staudt 2008).

Nevertheless, border theorists have begun to develop models with common conceptual language that
relates to multiple borderlands around the world, as well as to the US–Mexico borderlands. Newman
(2006), for example, highlights the need of a common understanding of terminologies and the creation of
a shared glossary to study borders. With the same idea in mind, Brunet-Jailly (2005) proposed a model

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with four analytic lenses that highlight markets and trade flows, cross-border policy governance at multiple
[vertical] levels,2 borderlanders’ civil society, and cultures at borders. Chávez (2012) enriched Brunet-
Jailly’s model with a call for attention to the media. By analyzing the areas of security and trade, Konrad
and Nicol (2008) argue that the US–Canada border offers a model for future borderlands, in particular, in
conflict border zones.

In this thematic issue, our contributing authors give special attention to three of the five “lenses” that
Brunet-Jailly and Chávez propose: policy governance (or lack of it), civil society, culture and the
media. The area of border security is also widely examined here. In this volume, authors cover, through
different lenses, the multiple borders in the US–Mexico borderlands. By using different
methodologies, well-known border experts address the contrasting dynamics present at multiple
borders in different ways. Four articles of this thematic issue focus on one of the multiple US borders
(Correa-Cabrera, Payan, Ruiz, and Vélez-Ibáñez & Szecsy); two pieces (Coronado and Staudt) analyze
one theme (the environment and border films/culture, respectively) and show its multiple
manifestations in the different US–Mexico borders; the last article (Shirk) compares two borders:
center and west.

Social anthropologist Olivia Ruiz of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (COLEF)/Tijuana analyzes the topic
of immigration and recent massive deportations in the western Tijuana–San Diego Pacific coastal region.
In particular, she explores the problem of forced separation of parents from their children. For Ruiz, the
issue of forced separation “speaks to wider social and cultural issues that lie at the heart of debates about
immigration.” In her view, the resulting apprehension, detention, deportation and destruction of family
and home, make “this fact of immigration—one affecting families every day—a fundamental and
compelling issue of life at the US–Mexico border.”

The Arizona–Sonora border region is covered by Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and Elsie Szecsy of the School of
Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. These authors explain socio-cultural tensions and hate
relationships in Arizona. In their article, Vélez Ibáñez—director of the School—and Szecsy analyze the
development of anti-Mexican nationalist ideology among Arizona’s extreme legislative body and the
development of counterpoints of action. In particular, they identify the emergence of a variety of anti-
immigrant and especially anti-Mexican measures leading to the development of SB 1070, which,
according to them, result from “external and internal political and social pressures emanating largely from
anti-immigrant and sometimes racialized sources which have penetrated the body politic of parts of the
Arizona legislature and in many parts of the United States.”

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera of the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) and Tony Payan, Director of
the Mexico Center at Rice University’s Baker Institute and professor at the University of Texas at El Paso
(UTEP) and Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (UACJ), focus on the topic of security in two very
conflictive US–Mexico borders, where extreme levels of drug violence have been at the center stage of
political, social and economic life. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera explains the high levels of violence on the
Mexican side of the Texas–Tamaulipas border, a region that she calls the “forgotten border” due to the fact
that it has been overlooked by scholars, political analysts, and the media until recently when violence in
the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas reached unprecedented levels. In her article, Correa-Cabrera
explains the situation of extreme violence in Tamaulipas, “where the State seems to have lost the
‘monopoly’ of the legitimate use of violence.” According to her, “the violence levels that are currently
afflicting the territory of Tamaulipas are indicative of the degree of control and coercion that organized
crime groups exert over this region of Mexico, at times even substituting the State as the legitimate
purveyor of violence.”

Tony Payan analyzes the case of Ciudad Juárez. He explains the collapse of a city that was once
progressive, liberal, tolerant, modern and economically dynamic. Payan explains the actors, variables,
decisions and moments that broke the city’s equilibrium and generated what he calls “the perfect storm.”

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In particular, he refers to: (i) the war between drug cartels, (ii) the strategy of Mexico’s federal government
to fight organized crime, and (iii) the external financial crisis. But he also proposes ways to reestablish
order or generate a new post-violence equilibrium. He acknowledges the new stage that it seems to be in
the city with (now, ex-) police chief Julián Leyzaola, the recent national elections, and other factors that
might be conducive to a more favorable and stable situation in what was once the most violent city of the
world.

Irasema Coronado, professor of political science at UTEP, focuses on environmental issues and NGOs at
multiple borders in the context of governance infrastructure. Coronado examines what has happened to
environmental NGOs (ENGOs) since NAFTA was implemented, and what is the state of ENGOs on the
border today. She also explains the variables that have led to the demise of some ENGOs in the multiple
US–Mexico borders. By analyzing the ENGO community, Coronado finds that “the small informal
NGOs are struggling both because of governmental restrictions and requirements and competition from
larger ENGOs.” She finally argues that the “ENGO examples of cross-border civil society organizing need
to be revived and strengthened.”

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, UTEP professor Kathleen Staudt analyzes the cultural
production of the multiple US–Mexico borderlands via historical and contemporary films about the
border from both Mexico City and Hollywood, asking whether “othering” works in both directions.
In this work, she also examines how globalization figured into representation, and explores whether
films reflect cultural hybridity, polarized, or nationalist sentiments in the multiple US–Mexico
borderlands. Staudt’s overarching argument is that the film industry itself brings out the “worst” of
countries in the US–Mexico borderlands, that is, lawlessness, violence, chaos, danger, drugs, and the
exploitation of working people, including immigrants who face deadly dangers in their journey to the
United States. This article finally reveals that “films from Mexico and the US have become more
nuanced and complex, portraying Mexicans and Americans with diverse identities, heroes and villains
alike.”

Finally, David Shirk of the University of San Diego examines the tale of the two largest Mexican border
cities, Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, with the aim of understanding, to some extent, the nature of organized
crime and violence in Mexico. Through this comparison, Shirk acknowledges the relevance of
socioeconomic challenges—particularly of economic underdevelopment and political-social anomie of the
border region—when explaining drug violence, but finds that these conditions are not deterministic. For
the author, violence may also be a sign of government efforts to eradicate organized crime, or simply the
failure to do so. According to Shirk, the “splintering of existing organizations and seemingly unpredictable
shifts in alliances over time have been the primary determinants of violence in Mexico.”

In sum, in a violent and dehumanized environment of constant licit and illicit trans-border flows, these
seven pieces, by using a variety of methodologies, depict the multiple issues in the multiple US–Mexico
borders.

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to María Fernanda Machuca for her valuable help editing this special issue.

Endnotes
1
See Wastl-Walter (2011), and Wilson and Donnan (2012).
2
On cross-border policy governance see Brunet-Jailly, Payan, and Sawchuk (2008). In this study, the
authors analyze the emergence of cross-border regions along the US–Mexico border and in Europe, and
then compare these experiences to the US–Canada context.

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Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel, Tony Payan, and Gary Sawchuk. 2008. The Emergence of Cross-Border
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Chávez, Manuel. 2012. Border Theories and the Realities of Daily Public Exchanges in North America.
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