Event organized by the CMS. *Hybrid Event*
“La Línea” is the vernacular term used in Tijuana to refer to the San Ysidro border port of entry, often described as the busiest border crossing in the world. At the same time, La Línea is also the name of the street marketplace that has developed since the 1950s along the lines of cars and pedestrians waiting to cross into the United States.
The historical reconstruction of its political-economic transformations, together with prolonged ethnographic observation, portrays the market as a social microcosm through which to understand, from below, the encounters, frictions, and articulations between U.S. border policies and the development of the Mexican state-form. The former establishes the temporal framework within which market actors devise everyday strategies of work, getting by, and entrepreneurship: the lengthening of border-crossing lines, the proliferation of experiences of “waiting” among vendors (including deportees, young migrants, and former smugglers) and the decline of “formal” economic opportunities. The latter shapes the political-economic possibilities through which relationships of confianza, dependency, solidarity, and hierarchy among old and new vendors, unions, local government, and criminal actors are periodically reorganized.
Drawing on an approach of economic anthropology and an ongoing ethnographicfieldwork, this lecture critically examines how “traditional” models of reciprocity and economic confianza at La Línea have evolved into organized networks of extortion sustained by violence. I argue that this transition from confianza to extortion represents an extension of earlier forms of institutionalized reciprocity underpinning Mexico’s “corporatist” labor relations; forms that have been “poisoned” by the temporal and human upheavals produced by the evolution of the U.S. border regime over the past twenty years.