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Liminal Zones

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 10 months ago

 

 

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Liminal Zones: La Frontera y El Chamizal

 

 

Introduction

 

The Chamizal National Memorial is situated near the bustling downtown area of El Paso, Texas, a few steps away from the Border Highway and the Bridge of the Americas, one of the many commercial and cultural links between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Historically, the Chamizal area was a quintessentially liminal space, stemming from a border dispute that ranged from 1848 to 1963, when the path of the Rio Grande shifted on multiple occasions, physically and ideologically flexing the border southward. The Chamizal Convention of 1963 re-established boundaries, re-channeled the river, and created a static public space on the U.S. side of the border, resettling inhabitants and disrupting agency; in the process, the border itself was literally and figuratively concretized and reified, creating a new liminal space just south of the Chamizal.

 

This study explores the Chamizal and the border (la frontera) from a rhetorical perspective, not strictly as a historical site of struggle (though that context is essential), but in terms of the ways in which these spaces are made to speak today in both dominant and counterhegemonic terms.  One of the fundamental assumptions of this project is that visual and spatial rhetorics are coterminous and overlapping, and that the construction of any place, or the analysis thereof, must always consider both aspects simultaneously.  Consequently, I examine the Chamizal and the physical border as spatio-discursive locations, specifically exploring the ways in which their material reality is used as a site of ventriloquism for competing interests in liminal and formerly liminal sites of struggle.

 

At one time an area claimed by both nations yet regulated by neither, part of the Chamizal was known as Cordova Island, an ostensibly Mexican land mass “floating” inside what was technically U.S. territory.  The Chamizal area was, for many years during the dispute, a true “space of ambiguity” (Sibley, 1995, p. 33) that became a haven for sub-altern groups such as smugglers and those seeking to transgress locational and territorial boundaries.  As a result of the 1963 Chamizal Convention, the area remaining in U.S. territory has become sanitized, reconstructed as a space no longer liminal or ambiguous, a kind of non-place.  With struggle erased by international treaty, the space has been repurposed by the U.S. government, reflecting the kind of hegemonic order characteristic of the official historiography.  More importantly, the re-channeled river just south of the Chamizal area resulted in a concrete edifice of separation and exclusion, 167 feet wide and 15 feet deep.  This new space is both real and contingent (Johnson-Eilola, 1997), materially formidable and ideologically pervasive.  In the wake of the sanitization of the Chamizal, the liminal zone, like the river itself, has once again moved south.  The border, trafficked in heavy numbers daily by citizens of both countries, has become a discursive site of struggle, especially for the Mexican sub-altern.

 

Rhetorics of struggle are visually striking and readily apparent, for in both locations the politics of placement are alternatively ventriloquized by overlaid rhetorics of either sanitization or resistance.  The Chamizal’s murals, for example, reflect the multicultural vision of hegemonic historiography, expressing the settlement of the Borderlands of the El Paso/Juarez region as the peaceful commingling of disparate cultures.  These paintings reinforce the commonplaces of melting-pot ideology, erasing struggle and diminishing difference.  The visual and the material combine to produce a place that avoids the liminality of the past, that scrubs the area clean of its tenuous and disputatious history.  In contrast, the border itself has become an arena of political struggle, especially on the Mexican side of the boundary.  Like the Chamizal, this space has also been repurposed, this time by a counterhegemonic discourse of resistance to U.S. imperialism and capitalist domination.  The graffiti overlaid on top of the concretized border is almost wholly political, and it is viewed daily by thousands of pedestrians and motorists moving across the border by way of El Paso/Juarez’s two downtown bridges.  Ultimately, this project examines the impact of these visual and spatial rhetorics from both sides of the divide, with particular attention to how space is used to both reify and counteract the dominant discourse.

 

History and Historiography along a Shifting River

 

El Paso historian Leon Metz (1989) has remarked that it is easier to create a country on paper, particularly in the act of mapping, than it is to actually govern and maintain such boundaries.  When international boundaries are drawn along riparian lines, the complications of governance are intensified, for as Mueller (1975) and many others have noted, rivers shift and become “restless.”  Metz (1989) argued that “from social, engineering and geographical points of view, rivers are the worst possible boundaries” (p. 294).  He claimed that rivers “may separate nations and societies, [but] people who live on opposite sides of a river usually have more in common” (Metz, 1989, p. 294) with each other than they do with others living farther away.  Rivers are never permanent, and they change course, flood, and even evaporate (Metz, 1989).  Particularly within the city of El Paso, where just past the downtown area the terrain opens up into plains and former farmland, the Rio Grande becomes impossible to contain by natural means, meandering and creating overlapping bancos that blur the distinctions between territories (see, for example, Figure 1).

 

 

Figure 1: Shifting riparian boundaries (Metz, 1989, p. 316)

 

Since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, governance of the border that separates Texas from Mexico along the Rio Grande has been fraught with issues related to the capriciousness of the riparian boundary.  For example, by 1905 another treaty was needed to establish territorial “ownership” of some 58 separate bancos along the lower Rio Grande, where sections of land were awarded alternatively to either the United States or Mexico depending upon the movement of the river (Mueller, 1975).  By the 1930s, banco disputes in the El Paso/Juarez area had declined, thanks in large part to better flood control and reservoir measures enacted along the river in southern New Mexico (Mueller, 1975).  Interestingly, one of the larger El Paso bancos that was perpetually a source of change and conflict continued to be a problem between 1852 and 1963.  Mueller (1975) explained that

 

A hint of the havoc the River would play in disrupting the international boundary occurred as early as 1852 when two surveys . . . showed a southward shift in the channel’s position.  By 1889 the channel was far south of its 1852 position, in some places as much as a mile.  The tract of land between the old and the new channel, some 600 acres, found itself attached to south El Paso at the expense of north Juarez.  Named for the brush patch that formerly covered the area, the tract was locally known as El Chamizal.  (p. 65)

 

The Chamizal area, gradually shifting and changing shape with the ebb and flow of the river over the 100 years between Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1963 Chamizal Convention (work from which was finally completed in 1967, as discussed below), became an ambiguous and tertiary space between two cities and two nations.

 

At the heart of this ambiguous zone was Cordova Island, a territory “of Mexico inside the United States, an island irritating local and international relations” (Metz, 1989, p. 307).  Cordova Island, one of the larger sections of the greater Chamizal area, was created by the continual shifts in the channel of the Rio Grande as described by Mueller (1975) and others (see Figure 2).  Metz (1989) has argued that the area became a haven for smugglers and criminals during prohibition, and that the area “blocked El Paso’s growth and transportation arteries” (p. 307).  He has also noted that “Mexico retained national jurisdiction as a matter of pride even though it ignored the enclave” (1989, p. 307).  Interestingly, the United States “claimed uninterrupted occupation of Chamizal since 1836” (Mueller, 1975, p. 70), and Cordova Island gradually became another neighborhood of south El Paso, albeit one that remained marginalized, liminal, and poor.

 

Figure 2: Cordova Island (Metz, 1989, p. 308)

 

Lasting solutions to the border dispute surrounding the Chamizal and Cordova Island were finally negotiated in 1962 and 1963, thus inaugurating the “official” history of the area.  As Metz (1989) has shown, the politicization of the Chamizal had become a moral issue, one that required governmental tact and acumen on both sides of the dispute.  President Kennedy proposed a complete solution to the issue, one that would be “resolved on Mexican terms” (Metz, 1989, p. 348).  But the ultimate resolution reflects the power of federal governments and the lack of power and agency maintained by local inhabitants of the area.  President Kennedy and Mexican President López Mateos were at the forefront of negotiations that led to a six-point plan for the Chamizal, which would include a rechanneled and concretized Rio Grande, and the resettlement of all residents occupying the liminal zone.  With 5,600 residents and “hundreds of businesses, homes, apartments and tenements” (Metz, 1989, p. 348) in the area, providing accommodation for displaced inhabitants became a chief concern.  But Metz (1989) has argued that, despite an almost complete diminution of agency for residents of the Chamizal area, the Convention of 1963 was ultimately beneficial: “it amounted to a vast slum clearance, the destruction of nineteen tenements so foul that even New Yorkers would blanch” (p. 350).  Ultimately, Mexico received a total of 437.18 acres (Bowden, 1969; Mueller, 1975; Metz, 1989); 366 acres to the west of Cordova Island and 264 to the east (for a total of 630), minus the 193 acres of the island ceded to the United States that would become the site of the Chamizal National Memorial (see Figure 3.)  Finally, as a result of the 1963 accord, the rechanneled Rio Grande moved docilely along 4.3 miles of concrete (Metz, 1989), an edifice of permanent separation and exclusion.  The project was finally completed in 1967 (see Figure 4).

 

 

    Figure 3: 1963 Chamizal Convention Settlement (Bowden, 1969, p. 40)                                    Figure 4: 1968 Photo of Rechanneled River (Mueller, 1975, p. 104)

 

At this point, I’d like to make a distinction between history and historiography, seeing the former as a naturalized artifact imbued with the license of the dominant culture, and the latter as the inherently rhetorical process of history-making (which sometimes reinforces the naturalized view of history, but that sometimes does not).  I do not dispute the general history of the Chamizal area, but I lament the fact that potential border historiographies of dissent have also been plowed under the silt, buried under a new and permanent concrete boundary that marks the official and natural history of the area.  Speaking of the broader problems of the United States appropriation of land in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Martinez (1996) has argued that Mexicans have remained “deeply distrustful of the United States,” of the potential of losing more territory “to its land-hungry neighbor” (p. 1).

 

This distrust was surely in play at the time of the 1963 Chamizal Convention, and it also persists in some forms today.  Truett and Young (2004) have suggested that recovering borderland histories is contingent upon the investigation of regional, and I would argue, micro-historiographies that contest or at least supplement official histories.  While Metz (1989) and Gomez (1998) have noted some of the potential benefits of the massive erasure of a liminal area like the Chamizal, many questions remain about the ways in which historiographies of local inhabitants were also erased or suppressed.  At the Chamizal and la frontera, the ways in which historiographies are constructed spatially and visually bring the fundamental issue of territorialization into relief.  Truett and Young (2004) have cogently argued that “national borders are where territorialization becomes real, where physical markers and barriers are erected, and agents of the state regulate the movement of people, goods, and information” (p. 2).   I will turn now to an examination of the ways in which territories and barriers are spatio-discursive constructs at these sites.

 

Territoriality—Meaning—Rhetorics

 

Foucault has argued that “space is fundamental in any exercise of power” (1984, p. 252), and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the territorial spaces that accompany international borders.  Delaney (2005) has detailed the principle of territorial integrity, which holds so long as borders are not violated or transgressed, and this principle plays a key role in social meaning-making and official historiographies along the El Paso/Juarez border.  He has noted that “there are innumerable complex territorial configurations and assemblages that shape human social life, relationships, and interactions” (Delaney, 2005, pp. 4-5), and at the heart of such interactions is discursive particularity.  Meaning and territory are interdependent, especially in liminal and formerly liminal zones like the Chamizal and la frontera, where external structures of the built environment dominate culture and become internalized as an overarching spatial component of subjectivity and rhetoric.  Delaney claimed that “territoriality is . . . implicated in the creation, circulation, and interpretation of meaning” (2005, p. 17), and more specifically, discourse is shaped in no small measure by the territories that delimit and/or enable its circulation.  Finally, territory is always relational, and interactions between those inside, outside, or in-between territorial boundaries will affect discursive conventions in both liminal and reified zones.

 

The overriding functions of place and space, therefore, have an inescapable effect on the discourse and culture of those living under such conditions.  The conflation of materiality (in the form of places, spaces, and physical boundaries) with semiosis (discursive and extraverbal signifying) impacts the ways in which histories are composed and recomposed.  A complex interrelation exists between bodies, discourse, and space that undergirds the meaning produced and disseminated in any rhetorical context.  Fleckenstein (2001) has termed such interrelations bodysigns, a conflation of materiality and semiosis that is present in all rhetorical contexts.  Essentially, meaning cannot be separated from the physical context in which it occurs; moreover, one aspect of meaning cannot be subordinated to the other.  She has suggested that our modern Western tradition “increasingly strips us of a sense of our materiality and translates us into pure discursive patterns, into exclusively semiotic beings” (2001, p. 765).  Particularly crucial to an understanding of the relationship between materiality and rhetoric is the notion that “we cannot escape place, although we can deny it and redefine it” (Fleckenstein, 2001, p. 766).  In this sense, meaning is not material, and neither is it semiotic; it is both at the same time—it is mutually constitutive (Fleckenstein 2001).

 

Delaney (2005) argued that territoriality is not wholly comparable to other spatial forms, and I argue here that its effect on discourse and historiography is particularized, as territoriality always already includes significant and constant issues of power.  Territory, and the border in particular, is often viewed from a distance as a two-dimensional issue, where space on one side of a boundary is distinct from that on the other.  However, Delaney (2005) pointed out that verticality is a further component of territories and borders:

 

In a modern social order characterized by the comprehensive global regimes of state sovereignty . . . every physical location . . . is located within a dense matrix of multiple, overlapping territories or territorial configurations.  The ‘meanings’ of each of these territories (and the power relations that these meanings imply) are established in relation to other territories across heterogeneous ‘levels.’ (p. 31)

 

This view of territory merges with the complex view of discourse theorized by Bakhtin (1973) in a confluence of spatio-discursive meaning-making.   Bakhtin (1973) found that utterances involve the complex imbrication of socio-discursive factors, previous utterances, and vast strata of social meaning and control.  When a theory of territorial verticality is combined with Bakhtin’s theories of language, we can begin to approximate the rhetorical complexity that accompanies both hegemonic and counterhegemonic discursive situations along the border.

 

A more fully articulated notion of territory and its relation to discourse must be accompanied by investigations into overriding relationships of power.  Power circulates up and down the levels of verticality theorized by Delaney and Bakhtin, in relationships between the built environment and people along the border, in the relationships between dominant and sub-altern groups, and in the spatial and visual histories that inhabit the landscape, to name but a few.  Sack noted that territory has a “place-clearing function” (1986, p. 33), that accompanying territorialization is the power to disrupt and remake places and spaces, as we have seen clearly in the case of Cordova Island.  And Foucault (1984; 1995) has argued that the built environment is especially attuned to power relations, to the ordering and spatialization of discursive and relational potentialities between human beings.  Sack (1993) extended Foucauldian arguments about the conflation of space and power, where “territorial rules about what is in or out of place pervade and structure lives” (p. 326).  Sack (1993) also introduced notions of proximity and scale into the exploration of territory and power; he argued that emphasizing the interrelations between distance and power can be articulated in the following manner: “the specific place does not have power but rather [. . .] it resides in spatial relations, especially the distances, among things” (p. 327).  The rechanneled Rio Grande, of course, reinforced spatial and discursive distances, refashioned the actual scale of the border itself, and emphasized the power issues accompanying territoriality.

 

Spatial practices, De Certeau (1988) claimed, structure social life, inclusive of rhetorical meaning-making; territorial practices not only structure, but dominate social life in some locations.  Such is the case of the history of the Chamizal area, where territorial norms have impacted discursive particularity for over 100 years.  Sibley (1995) suggested that individuals socialized in a territorial environment would feel anxiety in the presence of liminal zones, and the physical and ideological reconstruction of the Chamizal and the border were no doubt meant to appease some of those cultural anxieties.  The Chamizal Convention reinforced power relations, delimiting inside vs. outside, us vs. them, our space vs. their space.  The Chamizal agreement “define[d] the contours of normality and … eliminate[d] difference” (Sibley, 1995, p. 40), at least in terms of the erasure of liminality.  As Sibley (1995) explained in his chapter on “Border Crossings,” the territorial assertions of both governments in the Chamizal Convention are representative of what he refers to as “the defense of spaces and transgressions” (p. 46).  More importantly, he argued that exclusionary spaces are a key feature of territorial control, that “spatial purification” (1995, p. 77) is integral to the ordering of social space.

 

El Chamizal and Sanitized Rhetorics

 

Sibley’s (1995) notion of spatial purification, then, is at the heart of the Chamizal National Memorial, a 55-acre park situated at the northern end of the former Cordova Island, replete with monuments, a cultural center, and the clean and welcoming ethos of the National Parks Service.  Delaney (2005) echoed Sibley when he noted that territory provides a means of security to those “inside” the boundary from those “outside,” and the purification of the formerly liminal zone of Cordova Island through the construction of the National Memorial is a spatial and architectural practice that reinforces that security.  Delaney (2005) has suggested that a “quantum of meaning” (p. 29) accompanies territorial/spatial practices such as the built environment of the Chamizal Memorial, including (but by no means limited to)

 

treaties, international agreements, constitutions, statutes, regulations, ordinances, contracts, deeds, work rules, and innumerable other texts.  Any territory can draw upon these texts for a portion of its meanings.  More accurately, the meanings of any given modern territory or territorial complex can be derived from a multitude of texts.  (p. 29)

 

This concept echoes the previously mentioned conflation of territorial verticality (with its material social constructs) and the dialogic discourse theory of Bakhtin (a semiotic social construct).  In essence, then, the National Memorial is a spatio-discursive representation of the official history of the Chamizal dispute, an argument in architecture and painting for the hegemonic representation of a quintessentially liminal area.

 

Figure 5: Former Boundary Markers at the Memorial

 

De Certeau (1988) suggested that spatial practices order social possibilities, and I would argue that the built environment also orders discursive practices at a site like the Chamizal Memorial.  The Memorial has removed almost any semblance of the daily socio-discursive practices that once took place on this stretch of land, where people lived, cooked, made love, argued, played, owned business, and raised children.  Today, access to the site is available between the hours of 5 a.m. and 10 p.m., and the park is closed on major holidays.  A 1.8 mile long walking trail (the “Cordova Island Trail”) orders visitors around the edges of the park, most of which is covered with gently rolling hills that are dotted intermittently with large trees.  Textual, monumentalized representations of the history of the area are concretized, and the official government historiography is reified.  In short, this is not a place where alternative discourses are welcomed or enacted; an area that was often in flux, existing between territorial boundaries, has been purified, sanitized, and concretized.

 

Anthropologist Marc Augé (1995) has suggested that sites like shopping malls, airports, and train stations are indicative of what he called non-places.  He stated that “if a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (1995, pp. 77-78).  While the Chamizal National Memorial might initially seem to meet all the criteria of Augé’s definition of “place,” I would like to complicate this definition a little further (as Augé himself does) and argue that the Chamizal tends more toward the definition of non-place.  Specifically, Augé (1995) noted that non-places “do not integrate … earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory,’ and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position” (p. 78).  This is certainly the case with the Chamizal, where histories of the area have become classified and canonized, relegated to “places of memory.”  One of the other essential characteristics of Augé’s (1995) theory of non-place is the idea that no organic social life is possible in such a location; at the Chamizal, social life is ephemeral, as people visit the park (at most for the day) and leave it as it was when they arrived, static and concretized.

 

Ultimately, the visual representations that merge with the spatial and architectural rhetorics of the Memorial further cement the dominant perspective on the history of the area.  Murals act as a rhetorical means for the official semiotic historiography of the Chamizal.  When they are overlaid on the monumental, static, and purified spaces of the built environment at the site, they give the space a discursive “voice,” a ventriloquized history of the Chamizal that is in actuality not the Chamizal, but the classified and circumscribed non-space of territorial place-clearing.  Mitchell (1986) has shown that painting and other visual arts are differentiated from textual works by their reliance upon space; painting, especially murals and graffiti, are spatial practices, actions that exemplify the mutually constitutive nature of materiality and semiosis.  The murals at the Chamizal are dependent upon the built environment for their rhetorical meaning, as meaning in this context is dependent upon both factors in the equation, on the spatial and the visual simultaneously.

 

Figure 6: Chamizal Mural

 

The Chamizal murals depict an ordered and harmonious hybridity, for example in the racial and cultural construction of the idealized Mexican male in Figure 6.   Native and Conquistador merge in the presence of the Mexican man, a design joined visually by the Mexican flag that acts as a background.  The striking snake juxtaposed against an aggressive jaguar acknowledges some of the cultural animosity; but again, harmony, order, symmetry, and nationalized presence are foregrounded.  Not surprisingly, the image of the idealized American citizen (Figure 7) is even more blatantly purified and

 

Figure 7: Chamizal Mural

 

ordered.  An indigenous male and an African-American (slave?) female recede behind the piercing blue eyes of the dominant white male.  Historical conflict is erased, and the three are joined harmoniously by the United States flag in the background, and the presence of the eagle in the foreground.  Finally, the juxtaposition of murals is most striking, as in Figure 8.  Carlos Flores, the artist behind the two main murals that dominate the primary Memorial building, titles a second mural “Nuestra Herencia” (“Our Heritage,” Figure 9).  At the left edge of this painting, the blue eyes of the idealized white American male peer over the scene, indicative of the ways in which histories and heritage are impacted by the hegemonic gaze of U.S. territorial policy.

 

 

Figures 8 and 9: Chamizal Murals

 

La Frontera—Liminality and Counterhegemonic Rhetorics

 

In stark contrast to the sanitized non-place of the Chamizal Memorial stands the concrete edifice that controls the rechanneled Rio Grande (see Figure 10).  After the 1963 erasure of the liminal zone that was Cordova Island, liminality shifted south, to the actual border itself.  Delaney (2005) has argued that “the life of territory is to be seen in the crossings-over, into and out of … meaningful spaces” (p. 27).  As we have seen with the Memorial, social life has been extinguished, and boundaries and “crossings-over” have shifted to the rechanneled river.  The riparian border, once a shifting and natural boundary, has become what Sibley (1995) termed a “strongly classified spatial system, consisting of a collection of clearly bounded and homogenous units” (p. 80).  More importantly, the rechanneled and concretized border between El Paso and Juarez exemplifies the “abjection” (Sibley, 1995, p. 80) that accompanies a strongly classified environment.  For the Mexican sub-altern especially, this monument to separation and exclusion has clearly become a site where feelings of abjection are reinforced (Sibley, 1995), and such feelings become manifest in the rhetorics attached to the border itself.

 

Figure 10: Rechanneled Rio Grande, 2007

 

Mitchell (1994) pointed out the ways in which violence often accompanies public art, and in the case of the border, histories of violence and struggle are foregrounded in counterhegemonic rhetorics that take advantage of the architecture of the border itself, that seek to deface and repurpose the monument.  As Foucault (1984) has noted, and as recounted in Fleckenstein (2001) above, even in the face of dominant and potentially terrifying spatial and territorial practices, the possibility for resistance remains, especially in liminal areas.  For example, Villa (2000), in his discussion of real-life and fictional Chicano resistance, suggested ways in which individuals and counterhegemonic collectives can refigure landscapes of power.  In examining graffiti in the new liminal zone of the border, then, spatial and visual rhetorics are again coterminous and interdependent.

 

Figure 11: Graffiti on the Border

 

In contrast to the harmonious, professional murals that ventriloquize the static space of the Chamizal Memorial, reinforcing the official history of the region, graffiti in the liminal zone of la frontera is bold, clear, and above all highly political.  The border as canvas becomes a large part of the rhetorical equation, as artists make this space speak in ways that reflect the abjection and violence of this strongly classified environment. Figure 11 is indicative of the kind of spatio-discursive rhetorics found in the new liminal zone, where Che Guevara is an iconic figure of resistance accompanying messages of political struggle such as “PINCHE BUSH” in bold capital (white) letters.  These rhetorics indicate the particularized micro-historiographies that occur in this liminal environment, the types of voices that were erased and recapitulated by the place-clearing sanitization of Cordova Island.  Figure 12 is exemplary of the violence that accompanies the abjection reflected in the public art of the border.  An armed figure stands above a message that states “WELCOME TO JUAREZ” in English, while messages in Spanish reflect themes of governmental assassination (“gobiernos asesinos”) and punishment (“EL MERECENSER CASTIGADOS”).  In short, this is a very different environment than the Chamizal Memorial, one that embodies some of the effects of territorialization in the form of liminal discursivity.

 

Figure 12: Graffiti on the Border

 

Conclusions

 

The history of the Chamizal area is still in flux, despite the attempts of the United States government to construct some kind of fixity, both spatially and rhetorically, to the official version of the region.  While the liminal characteristics of Cordova Island were erased and sanitized in the form of the National Memorial, voices of dissent and counterhegemonic rhetorics persist in the new liminal zone, the strongly classified environment embodied by the massive concrete border just south of the area.  Both places are made to speak, and both hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses rely on the spaces of territorialization to make meaning.  This investigation of these spatial rhetorics is by no means exhaustive, and I certainly want to be clear that I do not portend to speak for either discourse community.  Instead, this study provides one window on the ways that spatio-discursive meaning is made in highly politicized territorial locations.

 

Figure 13: Public Mural Near the Downtown Santa Fe Bridge

 

 

For additional images from this project, please go here.

 

References

 

 

Augé, M.  (1995).  Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity.  (J. Howe,

Trans.).  New York: Verso.

 

 

Bakhtin, M.M.  (1973).  From Marxism and the philosophy of language.  In P. Bizzell & B.

Herzberg (Eds.), The rhetorical tradition (pp. 1210-1226).  New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

 

 

Bowden, J.J.  (1969).  The Ponce de Leon land grant.  El Paso: Texas Western Press.

 

 

De Certeau, M.  (1984).  The practice of everyday life.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

 

Delaney, D.  (2005).  Territory: A short introduction.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

 

 

Fleckenstein, K.S.  (2001).  Bodysigns: A biorhetoric for change.  JAC, 21 (4), 761-790.

 

 

Foucault, M.  (1984).  Space, knowledge, and power.  In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader

(pp. 239-256).  New York: Pantheon Books. 

 

 

Foucault, M.  (1995).  Discipline and punish.  New York: Vintage Books.

 

 

Gomez, A.  (1998).  A point of honor: The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its legacy.  In

Proceedings: Speaker series treaty of Guadalupe~Hidalgo1998 (pp. 129-138).  Washington, DC:

United States Department of the Interior/National Park Service.

 

 

Johnson-Eilola, J.  (1997).  Nostalgic angels: Rearticulating hypertext writing.  Norwood, NJ:

Ablex Publishing.

 

Martinez, O.J. (Ed.).  (1996).  U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and contemporary

perspectives.  Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources. 

 

Metz, L.C.  (1989).  Border: The U.S.-Mexico line.  El Paso: Mangan Books.

 

 

Mitchell, W.J.T.  (1986).  Iconology: Image, text, ideology.  Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

 

 

Mitchell, W.J.T.  (1994).  Picture theory.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

 

Mueller, J.E.  (1975).  Restless river: International law and the behavior of the Rio Grande.  El

Paso: Texas Western Press.

 

 

Sack, R.D.  (1986).  Human territoriality: Its theory and history.  Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

 

 

Sack, R.D.  (1993).  The power of place and space.  Geographical Review 83 (3), 326-329.

 

 

Sibley, D.  (1995).  Geographies of exclusion.  New York: Routledge.

 

 

Truett, S. & Young, E.  (2004).  Making transnational history: Nations, regions, and Borderlands. 

In S. Truett & E. Young (Eds.), Continental crossroads: Remapping U.S-Mexico borderlands history (pp. 1-32). 

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 

 

Villa, R.H.  (2000).  Barrio-logos: Space and place in urban Chicano literature and culture.  Austin: University of Texas Press.

 

Brian J. McNely, May 2007

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