Global South cosmopolitans: the opening and closing of the USA–Mexico border for Mexican tourists

Abstract

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010.

Keywords:

• USA–Mexico border
• cross-border practices
• cosmopolitans
• global citizens
• tourists
• transnationalism

Notes

1. All the names used in this paper have been changed to protect the identities of the subjects.

2. I use the term GSCs to refer to persons who live in the Global South and have a cosmopolitan lifestyle, namely, a person not limited by nation-state borders and who is able to travel freely across international borders. Because citizens of the Global South are likely to be required to have a visa to travel to the Global North, having a visa is a necessary element of being a GSC.

3. The US government defines a non-immigrant as an ‘alien who seeks temporary entry to the United States for a specific purpose [and who has] a permanent residence abroad (for most classes of admission)’ (USCIS 2012).

4. Responses to migration are not homogenous. For example, in the state of Veracruz, a group of poor women have responded with solidarity by organizing to provide food to Central American migrants passing through their town in La Bestia (the name given to the train that transports these undocumented migrants).

5. In Mexico City, for example, language is one concrete way in which class differences are enacted; those whose first language is indigenous are often portrayed in the media as ignorant, uneducated and poor. My argument is that along the border, one marker of difference is the visa; therefore, along the border migrants are marked as the poor, ignorant and potentially criminal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidy Sarabia

HEIDY SARABIA is Graduate Student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.