Around Here

This week’s readings contained an intensely difficult chapter from a work by Homi Bhabha, a postcolonial theorist. This is a new field for me, and I found myself loathing Bhabha intensely in the same way I loathed Friedrich Hegel as an undergraduate: I can appreciate a complex idea, and I can even understand one on occasion with enough time to ruminate on it, but what I have difficulty with is when the complex idea is not to be found at the sentence level. It seems discourteous to me to communicate something meaningful in language that, if it were a plant, would be brambles grown compactly in tight layers around an enigma wrapped in another dimension called “I Told You It Was Too Complex For You.” I burned a Hegel book once, but I won’t—can’t—burn Bhabha because it’s a no-burn day in the neighborhood.

Not quite true. I disliked Hegel and did burn one of his books out of frustration but that was an error on my part. In time, I understood that I didn’t have enough experience of the world to really care about what Hegel knew. I still don’t, but he’s not to blame. Bhabha will survive, as will I, in part because my colleagues have helped translate his idea for me, and in that idea is something of merit. (He can still stand to be courteously clear, however. Time is money, sir.) As one of my colleagues wrote in her summation, “Bhahba defines cultural discourse as the ‘agency of a people’ to write their own history to include voices from the margins of the ‘culture’ through their experiential narratives. Basically, Bhahba suggests that by questioning the ideological belief of Western culture being a ‘people-as-one’ and a static construction based on tradition, a new picture of culture will emerge and a new historical narrative will be created.” I can work with this.

Bhabha’s concerns are to do with the postcolonial. Not being a Brit, I have a difficult time feeling guilty about colonialism since, if my sense of my own heritage is on target, I come from the colonized: French-Canadian, Scottish, Cornish. My blood is hot with being pushed around by the English. I’m not exactly India, but a lawyer might take my case.

I'm not naive either--my privilege is costing someone somewhere something. Sort of my point. Where Bhabha’s questioning resonates with me is in my own possible complicity in taking for granted the cultural discourse of the American Southwest. This was a narrative of my people—the suburban Arizonan—that laid claim to the narrative of another people—the bordertown Mexican. Growing up in Arizona, you learn early on that a time will come when you and your friends will travel to Mexico to live it up. It doesn't matter which one, precisely, since any border town will do, and the border towns are allegedly where the action is. Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez: these places, so the narrative goes, were created just for the party-bound youth of America on the hunt for cheap kicks.

Last week, I mentioned finding a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac in a Salvation Army store in Iowa. That was the end of one story but the beginning of another. When I finished the book, I decided I had exactly the same reasons for hitting the road as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (or whatever; I was bored) and so, goaded by Kerouac and a paycheck, I finally made my way south of the border on what promised to be a weekend to remember.

Sadly, Mexico, the Mount Everest of Teenage Iniquity, didn’t exist. Instead, I found Tijuana to be alot like Phoenix--a little unkempt in places, but nowhere near what I’d been led to believe. It was basically a Western urban center, a little more aromatic than Phoenix because of the many food carts, and teeming with Mexicans and Americanos doing a pretty fair amount of cash business—food, clothes, rugs, pharmaceuticals of all types, and, as one of my traveling companions claimed, plenty of pot.

We didn’t spend the night in Tijuana, but we did drink the night away. It began on a rooftop bar around noon. They had drink specials and a volleyball court, so we felt right at home. For most of the afternoon, we played in an ad-hoc tournament against other tourists, but around dinnertime, some local kids showed up and challenged us to play. At night, the place turned into a disco, and so we stayed and made many new friends. Around midnight, things changed drastically when a local crew—unnamed but very clearly the owners of this particular spot—showed up and stared at us until we got the picture and left. Just as well—we were out of money anyway. As we drove off for San Diego, the feeling was the same as if we'd overstayed our welcome in a locals-only surf spot across the border. No hard feelings, and thanks for being so accommodating.

The takeaway, as you can imagine, isn’t an awesome story about getting wasted in Mexico, nor is it about a North American's sudden appreciation for a marginalized people. It’s this: I know these places better than I think. Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad de Juarez--these places are more my country than anywhere north of here. I'm desert through and through. Where I’m from, the narrative of the border towns of Mexico is sorely misunderstood as only a story of vice and want. Since 9/11, the story has been revised to include the ongoing drug war and increased ultraviolence, neither of which helps, but neither do they alter the moral of the story. Border towns are places where they have brothels and drug wars. Life is cheap in a border town. You can die in a border town. That’s what we say around here, anyway, and some of it may be true. But it's a little too easy to say these things if we reduce all of the negative traits to necessary conditions of some imaginary, inherent bordertownness. No place can survive a beating like that. If even one person calls it their home, it deserves something more complex, a reinstatement back into the world as more than a fiction.

Bhabha’s ideas have made me consider what would happen if I reimagined the border space and points just north and south as something else, neither U.S.A. nor Mexico, maybe more like Kurdistan, which exists in all senses but the one that matters--autonomy. Geographically and culturally, and to an extent economically, Sonorans, Chihuahans, and Bajans have far more in common with each other than we do with, say, people on the East Coast or in Mexico City. We live in the same place, we eat the same food, swat at the same terrifying desert insects. For me (and maybe it is only me), there is an untold narrative here, an opportunity to reconstitute a meaning based on the fact that we are in-betweeners, people who know the national discourse that points south and says “Great place to get drunk, but totally violent” is false. We can have a different story if we want it.

For now, these are just thoughts, things I can’t do much with. They’re also poor shadows of what academics have been doing with border studies for awhile now, but the academics weren’t around the last time I went south. Maybe next time I’ll bring Bhabha and see what he thinks. I know a great bar in Tijuana.