Boundary In The Sand The Mexican-U.S. Border Is As Much A Psychological Barrier As A Geographic One

If St. Joseph’s Hospital had been built just a few feet farther south, or if it had been just a little bit larger, Carlos Velez-Ibanez might have been born directly atop the U.S.-Mexico border. Not that anyone would have noticed, or cared. In 1936, the border was just a mark on the map that few paid much attention to. In some places, in fact, the locals weren’t even sure where the border was.

Luz Ibanez Maxemin was among those who paid little mind to such arbitrary lines in the desert sand, driving regularly from her home in Tucson, Ariz., to visit relatives in the Mexican state of Sonora. But on one of the return trips she unexpectedly went into labor, forcing her husband, Adalberto, to stop at the first hospital they saw.

“I was literally born right next to the cyclone fence,” says Velez-Ibanez. So the border was born into Velez-Ibanez just as surely as he was born unto the border. And it’s that birthright that makes the anthropologist’s latest book, “Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States” (University of Arizona Press), important in that it belies many myths and assuages many fears at a time when myths and fears have come to influence political debate about the border.

Velez-Ibanez split his childhood between Tucson and Magdalena, Sonora, a small pueblo about 50 miles south of the border on Mexico’s Highway 15. Aside from becoming bilingual and bicultural at a young age, he was also binational. And that experience taught him that the international boundary was more a mental and psychological barrier than it was a physical or geographic one.

“It’s a political border,” he says. “But it’s also a psychic border. And nationalism on both sides of the border is part of the mental block. Mexicans are very nationalistic because of the border. They wouldn’t be so nationalistic if the border wasn’t there.”

And Americans wouldn’t be so wedded to their nationalism if that border wasn’t there, he says. In other words, without a border there would be very few border problems.

OK, Velez-Ibanez concedes, that may be a simplistic explanation. But it happens to be historically accurate.

For hundreds of years before NAFTA, for example, free trade flourished across the Rio Grande River and workers migrated north to fill the mines, ranches and, later, factories of the region with little concern about citizenship, much less the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But the border changed all that, especially during the Great Depression.

By then Mexicans had become commodities, economic tools to be used, then discarded. Double-wage structures, which paid Mexicans half what whites made for the same work, took root and other abuses followed.

On a hot summer day the week after graduation, there are more squirrels than students on the sprawling University of California, Riverside, campus. Yet Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, 59, dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, is dressed sharply if uncomfortably in a dark blue suit and tie. Tall, thin and ramrod straight, his neat mustache and close-cropped hair speckled with gray, he looks more like a conservative banker or lawyer than an activist who marched for Chicano rights.

At first his spacious office seems to add to the illusion. But a closer look reveals a collection of Latin American artwork worthy of a museum, from brightly painted clay vases and sculpted wood pieces to a large print of Diego Rivera’s “Flower Vendor” and a framed detail from Jose Antonio Burciaga’s “Mythology of Maize,” the same image that graces the cover of “Border Visions.”

The office is new, Velez-Ibanez explains. Modesty prevents him from adding that this office was hard-earned. It took four degrees, three books, countless reviews and studies and two decades of teaching to get him here.

But with “Border Visions,” Velez-Ibanez was hoping to reach a broader audience. And he appears to have succeeded. January’s modest first printing has sold well, and officials at the University of Arizona Press say a second press run is likely.

Written in the detached manner of a social scientist but researched with the emotion of a political activist, the book focuses anthropology, history and personal anecdotes on a subject everyone knows but few understand.

What Velez-Ibanez calls the book’s “continuing search for space and place” covers several centuries, from pre-Columbian times to the present. As the author explains, the “bumping” among Native American, Spanish, Mexican and Mesoamerican populations increased as populations and ideas moved north.

But rather than becoming completely assimilated into the dominant culture of the region, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans have maintained their heritage with the help of strong family ties that extend on both sides of the border.

And by exploring those issues, Velez-Ibanez sheds a unique light on complex and emotional issues such as immigration, the North American Free Trade Agreement, class conflicts and racism.

“I wrote the book because the tale hadn’t been told,” Velez-Ibanez says. “It is my attempt to tell the tale of a population generating cultural patterns and behaviors to survive in a dignified manner.

“This book is an attempt to deal with what’s never been told about the Mexican population of the Southwest - and its forebears and the whys and the wheres and the hows of that whole population.”

And though the pages drip with irony and injustice, for the most part this is a tale of triumph. In it, families, the glue that holds Mexican culture together, form formidable units that are re-created in labor unions, voluntary associations and artistic movements.

It’s a pattern similar to that of small-town America.

“The book sometimes makes you angry because of the tragedy of human waste that we’re involved in,” says Velez-Ibanez.

“For me, it’s not a matter of culture that’s responsible for this stuff. It’s a matter of economics.”

It’s economics that has driven immigration, for example, all the way back to 1849, when 20,000 Sonorans crossed the border during the California Gold Rush. And it’s the same economics that have driven exploitation, set up double-wage structures and preyed on undocumented immigrants.

“For too long Mexicans have been typecast, stereotyped, focused upon as commodities - not as cultural makers, but as commodities,” Velez-Ibanez says. “That’s one definition of this population.

“It’s the other one you have to pay attention to. Because that’s where the history-making and creative and inventive aspects of this population lie.”