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United States Mexican Border
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Mexico border culture: the frontera culture, stretching from the shanty barrios of Tijuana and San Diego to the rich surf and turf of Santa Barbara (dominated by the megaspace of Los Angeles in the middle),[ is]. . . . a two-thousand-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border. It produces millions of undocumented workers from Central America and Mexico who are essential to the economic machines of North American agriculture, tourism, and industry. The U.S.-Mexico border thus produces not only masses of agricultural farmworkers, low-tech labor rs (mostly women), dishwashers, gardeners, and maids but also a military machine of low-intensity conflict: INS helicopters, Border Patrol agents with infrared camera equipment used to track and capture the border-crossers from the South, and detention centers and jails designed to protect the Anglocentric minority in California who fear and even loathe these scores of indocumentados. Moreover, this desiring machine also comprises an enormous bureaucratic, political, cultural, and legal machine of coyotes (border-crossing guides for hire), pollos (pursued undocumented border- crossers), fayuqueros (food peddlers), sacadineros (border swindlers), cholos/as, notary publics, public interest lawyers, public health workers. . . . The U.S.-Mexico border machine . . . [denies border-crossers] their human rights and by designating them "illegal aliens"; administratively, the migrant border-crossers who desire amnesty must petition a bureaucratic institution created under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) to receive identification papers (including a social security card); and, finally . . .migrant border-crossers in their shantytowns in canyons throughout California have to grapple with various county health departments and Environmental Health Services offices. For instance, at one shantytown called El Valle Verde (Green Valley) in San Diego County, the Environmental Health Services director shut down the migrant border-crosser's camp "for violations dealing with lack of potable water for drinking, building-code violations, [and] fecal material on the ground" (quoted in Chavez 1992, 108). . . . Moreover,] the JAT border machine [dehumanizes the border-crossers]. It often personalizes them as "illegal aliens," "cases," "dirty," "amoral," and disease-ridden and so militates against their collective identity. José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (California: University of California Press, 1997), 95-96.
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