Moral Entrepreneurs and Moral Geographies on the US/Mexico Border
| Author | Lawrence J. Taylor |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910372182 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Social & Legal Studies
19(3) 299–310
Moral Entrepreneurs and
ª The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission:
Moral Geographies on the
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910372182
US/Mexico Border
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Lawrence J. Taylor
National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of
Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland
Abstract
This article explores the difference and interplay between the border as legal/political
fact and the borderland as complex social/cultural reality through the development
and application of the theoretical concepts of moral geography and moral
entrepreneur. I argue that these concepts provide a bridge between macro, structural
views of ‘the production of (borderland) space’ as used by critical geographers and
the more experiential orientation suggested by geographers and anthropologists in
studies of cultural landscapes and ‘place-making’. My particular concern is to apply and
illustrate this argument through the ethnography of the desert borderlands straddling
Arizona (USA) and Sonora (Mexico), but it is potentially useful in other contexts.
Keywords
border theory, borderland ethnography, borders, moral entrepreneurs, moral
geography, US/Mexico
Everyday Life on the Border
Here’s the latest street kid scam on the border.
As you approach the Mariposa crossing in Nogales from the Mexican side, the road
divides into lanes separated by movable concrete barriers. The trucks go to the right and
the cars to the left. If they take the correct lane, the car drivers will soon grind to a halt
and take their places in a long queue. But their time will be put to good use, for while
they inch their way toward the border they will be approached by any number of men,
women and children selling everything from sacks of food to pirate CDs, to foam maps
of Mexico. Crippled men roll their wheelchairs or limp on crutches from vehicle to vehi-
cle asking for money, as do a number of street kids – teens who have come to the border
from states all over Mexico and are, or pretend to be, at the end of their resources.
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Social & Legal Studies 19(3)
However, most of the teenaged boys (there are very few girls) will work for their wages,
performing the classic street kid routine of leaping out in front of your windscreen wield-
ing spray bottle and rag, and washing your windows for whatever you feel moved to pay
them. But here’s the new twist. If you are new to the crossing you might easily miss the
dividing lanes and find yourself on the wrong side of the barrier, a car among a line of
towering trucks loaded with grapes or avocados and heading for the customs inspection.
A couple of young kids, no more than 12 or 13 years old, will jump out in front of you
furiously waving flags (or maybe they are only rags) and if you lower your window, an
older kid, maybe 17, will approach you with a fist full of paper tickets and a very con-
cerned frown. ‘You are on the wrong side, sen˜or, and if you continue into the customs
inspection, you’ll get a very big fine. But if you have your ticket (which turns out to
be the receipt given to you at the toll a couple of miles back) and a 110 pesos, I can lower
the chain and let you back into the other side with the cars’. I saw a confused driver fall
for this, handing in his receipt and the required pesos to the kids who efficiently lowered
a chain and waved him grandly through to the other side of the barrier. The street kids
had invented this system the day before and had been chased away by officials who per-
haps saw them as so many flies. But, like flies, they had buzzed around and returned to
their posts as soon as possible.
Borderland Ethnography
There are two general views of the US /Mexico border discernible in the anthropological
and related literature (see Alvarez, 1995; Anzaldua´, 1987) and both are visible in this
vignette. In one the legal/political border is the focal point, with all its consequences
in the lives of those who live near it or need to cross it. From this perspective, the implac-
able and often punishing reality of that line is the central fact, creating and maintaining
distinctive political and economic regimes on either side. The global-scale effects of the
border are fore-grounded: massive flows of goods, legal and illegal, money, and of
course people. And as for the local impact, we are reminded that every year hundreds
of immigrants die in the attempt to reach the US and hundreds of thousands are arrested,
most of whom are repatriated and will try again, but an increasing number of whom are
deported through a formal legal process and hence face far more dire futures if caught
crossing again. The other, apparently contrary view of the border celebrates and explores
the cultural hybridity and creativity of ‘la frontera’, a dynamic third space of creolized
meaning and experience. As contradictory as these two views might seem, they are both
true, and to a significant extent interdependent; as interdependent as power and meaning
generally are.
The two views are based on two senses of that, or potentially any, international
border. On the one hand, we have a line, recognized in law (though of course frequently
subject to dispute), separating two sovereign nations, two jurisdictions, two economies,
and so on. On the other hand, we have a borderland zone in which people from many (not
just two) cultural contexts meet, often creating novel social and cultural forms. This
dichotomy corresponds to some extent to that between macro and micro perspectives
generally, as well as to theories based on political economy privileging structure versus
those in cultural theory that assume more human agency. In the realm of approaches to
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space in particular, on which this article will focus, the related opposition might be that
between ‘the production of space’ as defined by Lefebvre (1974/1991) and ‘the making
of place’ as understood by some cultural geographers and many ethnographers. In the
former, political economies produce major spaces – regions of production, consumption,
leisure, etc. In the latter, individuals and groups construct meaningful and emotional ties
to specific landscapes (see Feld and Basso, 1996).
If evidence of both sides of all these oppositions can be located in our border vignette,
both may be true and, further, they may be inter-related. Certainly in the case at hand the
very conditions and disparities created by the legal/political line, as harsh as they might
be, invariably create opportunities, legal and illegal, that if economic at base always
include strikingly creative cultural elements, elements that include ‘place-making’
among their repertoire. This interaction between large-scale productions of space and the
local making of place can be located in a cultural process we can call ‘moral geography’.
Moral Geography
Various, though ultimately related, senses of the term ‘moral geography’ have been
developed by geographers, historians and anthropologists over the last two decades.
Exploring the emergence of the social sciences in Victorian England, geographer
Felix Driver used the term ‘moral geography’ to identify the theoretical/moral interven-
tionist position of Victorian social scientists. That is, early sociologists subscribed to an
environmentalism which held that individuals and societies were profoundly shaped by
both the natural and built environments in which they lived. In the rise of urban sociol-
ogy in particular, according to Driver, the back alleys and rookeries, the dark and
impenetrable corners of the city, were understood to breed crime and moral turpitude,
hence ‘the mapping of the moral geography of the city, in particular, provided a basis
for social intervention’ (Driver, 1988: 279). That interventionist practice was of course
based on the corollary position that social engineering could be accomplished by manip-
ulation of those same environments, bringing light into the dark corners of the city and
hence the soul. One might make a distinction between a general cultural sense of the term
that refers to the collective attribution of meanings and moral valences to landscapes and
the more active, ‘moralizing’...
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