Borders are by nature complex. The use of the term "border" can mean an international line or a region encompassing both sides of a political boundary. The vast area that the United States-Mexico border region constitutes complicates discussion of the border culture. There is extraordinary diversity among the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and likewise among the Mexican border states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California. There are striking differences between U.S. border cities and their twin cities on the Mexican side of the political boundary. Generalizations can be risky. Still, sufficient examples of literature, folklore, and art prevail to give characterization and meaning to border society.
The border has had a complicated cultural development with a long history of intermingling of Anglos, Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans. Mexican scholars complain that the cultural history of the region south of the border merits more adequate investigation. One could well say the same thing for the American side of the border. Few texts, for example, credit the U.S. border region as a principal exporter of a unique music, literature, folklore, and popular art. We will explore here the roots of "border culture," and examine how this particular culture has coexisted with American society, focusing upon the Spanish-Mexican legacies of the borderlands and some of the dominant characteristics of border culture.
While defining the geographic boundaries of a border is difficult, equally difficult for the scholar is defining its cultural parameters. Carlos Monsivais, a leading Mexican intellectual, noted that the main problem in defining Mexican culture along the Mexican border was "in separating the real culture from that fabricated by our country's political bureaucracy." Mexican culture along the border, Monsivais concluded, came "to represent, in general terms, a loss of identity (political and cultural force), the dubious mixture of two national life-styles (each at its worst), the deification of technology, and a craze for the new." One would assume that if "real" Mexican culture suffers from corruption and exploitation from the Mexican side of the border, then it had little chance of surviving on the U.S. side.
Monsivais' frustration at defining Mexican border culture is easily understood. The Mexican border towns are Mexico's newest urbanized areas. Our neighbors to the south have yet to discover that the border towns are viable communities rather than giant depots for individuals wishing to go north. Monsivais warned that "in order to lay the groundwork for a critically and imaginatively vital border culture, economic independence and democratic processes will first have to be achieved. These are necessary to destroy in the people of the border region the sense of living in temporary communities at the service of the tourist trade, where they feel they are economically and socially inferior." In recent years the drive for economic security has been stalled by the sharp drop in Mexican oil production and high inflationary rates.
Although stated somewhat differently, another scholar, Juan Gomez-Quinones, argued the same point. Gomez-Quinones, a Mexican-American historian originally of the Mexican border state of Chihuahua and a longtime resident of Los Angeles, commented in a cultural essay that "acute labor exploitation and cultural degradation and disintegration are the principal features of the Mexican border cities which are economically
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