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Introduction: Borders and Borderlands
It is quite an experience to cruise down the southern California highway, from Santa Barbara, the orderly, floral-perfumed heartland of middle-class America, toward Tijuana, the chaotic third-world city lying on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is an extraordinary five-hour drive. Immediately immersed in the heady, zigzag flow of integrated freeways that run the length of the coast, one can only marvel at being part of the car culture phenomenon, what Baudrillard calls a "collective propulsion--a compulsion of lemmings plunging accidentally together" (Baudrillard 1989, 53-54).
This freeway network carries you magically along, speeding through the outskirts of Los Angeles, the epitome of the postmodern global city (Davis 1990; Sassen 1994). In a sense, Los Angeles acts as both a buffer and catalyst between cultural times, places, and perspectives. Among other things, it is a city of negotiated, permeable frontiers between Santa Barbara's wealthy hillside suburbia to the North, and Tijuana's commercial frenzy to the South. It spatially divides Santa Barbara's evocation of quiet homes, Latino gardeners, well-behaved children, college, beach, lawns, Range Rovers, and sushi from the Mexican borderland's chaos of foreign day shoppers staggering, laden with cheap goods and strong margaritas, back home over the concrete bridge dividing Mexican poverty from American authority.
Driving south toward the Mexican border, through Malibu and Venice Beach, Disneyland and Sea World, Irvine and San Diego, places and theme parks merge together in a blur of strip malls, fast-food chains, giant cinema complexes, techno-glass offices, and immensely expensive beach shacks. Soon a new Disneyland will feature California as a themed land composed of Hollywood, beach and wilderness.1 Yet despite beckoning distractions, the freeway keeps you on track. Five lanes of cars peel off and merge each way into an endless flow of traffic. The freeway's sense of order and collective purpose is mesmerizing and peculiarly comforting, making it easy to overlook the changes occurring in the scrubby wasteland dividing north-south travel. Almost imperceptibly, a wire fence appears in the center of the highway that grows higher and higher for the 40 miles it takes to reach the official U.S.-Mexico border. Glimpses of patrol cars, signal boxes, railway lines, and if you're lucky, a hovering police helicopter, raise the alert. Suddenly an official road sign explains what you do not want to see. It is a yellow plaque, reminiscent of those outside schools and pedestrian crosswalks, cautioning drivers to proceed carefully. But instead of the usual image of walking children holding hands in a black silhouette, this road sign illustrates a man and a woman running, pulling behind them a small child with arms outstretched and hair streaming. I, as do others, find this juxtaposition of imagery most disturbing.2 In the very ambiguity of the sign's meaning, underscored are the worlds of difference between staid, suburban school-board respectability and the desperate plight of illegal Mexicans prepared to run against the "propulsion" of the freeway in pursuit of a Hollywood-packaged dream.
Eve Darian-Smith, Review essay of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1995), Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. (My essay is followed by a response from Santos). Law and Social Inquiry (1998) vol. 23(1):81-120.
Notes
1. This merging of illusion with reality takes a horrifying twist in the latest plans of Disneyland to open a new $1.4 billion theme park dubbed Disney's California Adventure, which will "condense the California mystique into three theme lands centyered on Hollywood, the beach, and the state's wilderness areas" (LA Times, 18 July 1996). Interestingly, a historical show devoted to the peoples of various nationalities and their role in building California is planned, but the diversity of ethnic grouping that make up today's political tensions, such as Latino, Korean, and black communities, will be neatly avoided.
2. "The graphic indicates people on foot. Desperate to escape the destiny of poverty, they cut or crawl through the border wire and, dodging the speeding automobiles, scamper across the concrete in a dash to flee from the past and in-state themselves in the promise of the North" (Chamber 1994, 1). For a discussion of road signs as constituting official graffiti, see Hermer and Hunt (1996). While I disagree with their claim that modern highways are all alike in that they share standardized road signs and billboard advertising, the authors make interesting points about road signs and the insidious significance of their regulatory intervention into the everyday (Herment and Hunt 1996, 477).