In recent years Mexico has found itself at the center of the drug ?war? as powerful criminal organizations have destabilized the region by engaging in this illicit, multi-billion dollar trade that allows drug lords emerge as powerful political actors. Violence and corruption are having a devastating effect on the new and struggling democracy as the weak institutions put in place during the reign of the PRI have not been replaced with a workable system. The judiciary and law enforcement continue to be ineffective as President Calderon chose to mobilize the military to help combat drug trafficking. Mexico is also experiencing the challenges of drug addiction as the competitive trade drove dealers to open up local markets for cheap and highly addictive drugs. Mexico has found itself fighting the drug war on all fronts and this article seeks to explain the circumstances that led the nation to this vulnerable position. This article is a historical look at the processes by which Mexico transformed the economy to capitalism, developed and industrialized, and then transitioned to democracy, and found itself here in the eye of the drug storm.

In this dissertation, I theorize that the Mediterranean, broadly conceived of as a geo-cultural-political entity and experience, is a locality for the investigation into the processes through which representations of continents and civilizations come into focus. A fundamental argument in this dissertation is that borders (like the Mediterranean) do not represent the limits to territorially fixed entities, but are rather continually ongoing projects that come to be negotiated and reified through political practices that are focused, in this instance, on asserting where the outside of Europe begins. The arguments of this dissertation are twofold. First, the Mediterranean is theorized as a fluid and porous space. Secondly, and more importantly, the Mediterranean is a key site for an investigation into the (re)production of politically and culturally saturated discourses of belonging and otherness. Thus, this project takes into focus three distinct, yet inextricably interrelated, processes of the borderization of the Mediterranean. These processes work to maintain the space as a global axis of sorts, upon which academic and popular discussions and representations of the East versus the West or the North versus the South emerge. It is an underlying argument of this study that links the examples of the Barcelona Process, discussions of a migration crisis, and Turkey's accession to the EU as processes of borderization of the European Union. While they are often analyzed as separate phenomena, all are indicative of these spatial and temporal borders represented by the Mediterranean, seen together they have the capability of highlighting the interconnectedness of the varying threads of Mediterraneanism. To understand how categories like European, Asian, or African come to have such salient political suggestiveness and meaning, one must bring into question how the borders that divide these imagined spaces are complex sites of the convergence of practices and discourses acquire their fortitude and who gets to tell the stories that outline their parameters. / Ph. D.

Ce travail porte sur le territoire mythique de la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis, à l’aune de la littérature romanesque. Produit d’une histoire conflictuelle, la zone frontalière est au coeur d’une actualité terrible et spectaculaire. La violence des narcos, les milliers de migrants risquant leur vie à travers le désert, les féminicides innombrables et impunis : tout exprime la violence et l’excès. Prenant pour point de départ ce constat d’une réalité extrême et spectaculaire, cette étude montre la complexité d’un lieu mêlant différentes représentations. Ce phénomène est nommé hypertopie. Le corpus romanesque composé d’écrivains étatsuniens (James Carlos Blake, Cormac McCarthy), mexicains (Yuri Herrera, Eduardo Antonio Parra) et plus largement latino-américains (Roberto Bolaño) sert de contrepoint critique à cette hypertopie, conçue comme un débordement romanesque de la fiction sur le réel. L’étude de ces romans dévoile une représentation paradoxale de la frontière, mobile, qui s’efface et disparaît. Le travail définit le « roman total » ou roman de la porosité, capable d’accueillir en son sein une interrogation inquiète face au chaos du monde, contre lequel la littérature tente de faire front. Pour aborder un tel lieu, l’étude se propose une approche non seulement comparatiste (par des emprunts à la géocritique et des références à l’imagologie) mais plus largement interdisciplinaire, croisant géographie, histoire, anthropologie et arts plastiques. / This work focuses on the mythical territory of the border between Mexico and the United States, in terms of novelistic literature. As the product of a conflict history, the border area is at the heart of an actuality terrible and spectacular. The violence of the narcos, the thousands of migrants risking their lives through the desert, the innumerable and unpunished feminicides: every fact expresses violence and excess. Taking as a point of departure this observation of an extreme and spectacular reality, this study shows the complexity of a place mixing different representations. This phenomenon is called hypertopia. The fictional corpus composed of American writers (James Carlos Blake, Cormac McCarthy), Mexicans (Yuri Herrera, Eduardo Antonio Parra) and more broadly Latin American (Roberto Bolaño) serves as a critical counterpoint to this hypertopia, conceived as a romantic overflow of fiction on the real. The study of these novels reveals a paradoxical representation of a mobile border, which disappears and vanishes. The work defines the "total novel" or novel of porosity, able to contain a worried questioning about the chaos of the world, against which literature tries to confront. To approach such a place, the study proposes a method, not only comparatist (by borrowing geocritics and references to the imagology) but more broadly interdisciplinary, crossing geography, history, anthropology and plastic arts.

The 49th parallel border dividing the Great Plains region has been described since its delimitation as an artificial construct, as no natural features distinguish the Canadian and American portions of the landscape. While the border subjects the landscape to different political, legal, philosophical, and sociocultural regimes on either side, the regions contemporary and emerging environmental problems span jurisdictional boundaries. Their mitigation requires new forms of environmental management capable of transcending these borders. In this dissertation, I examine the prospects for implementing ecosystem-based approaches to environmental management in the Frenchman River-Bitter Creek (FRBC) subregion of the Saskatchewan-Montana borderland. First, I interrogate the extent to which residents perceive the FRBC region as a borderland. Then, I examine the range of implications of ecosystem-based management approaches for institutional arrangements, environmental governance, and traditional property regimes and livelihoods in the region.<p> The research methodology includes an extensive literature review; multiple site visits to the FRBC region; a series of semi-structured interviews with employees of government agencies and environmental nongovernmental organizations, and with local agricultural producers; the analysis of historical maps and of selected ecoregional planning documents; and attendance at public meetings in the FRBC region. The research results are presented in a series of four manuscripts. The first manuscript describes perceptions of the border and the borderland through time. The second manuscript examines changes to the border and the relationships across it instigated by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2003 BSE Crisis. The third manuscript examines the extent to which a shared landscape transcends the border, and describes how the different regimes across the border create divergent visions for landscape and species management. The fourth manuscript investigates the ways in which incorporating a broader range of actors and disciplines could reconceptualize environmental management as an inclusive processes that is cognizant of local history and values.<p> By examining the imbrications of the fields of environmental management, border studies, and political ecology, this research advocates adopting an historical approach to environmental geography research so that contemporary problems may be understood within their local contexts. It emphasizes the importance of including a range of stakeholders in environmental management processes. It identifies the difficulties inherent to adopting ecosystem-based approaches to management, and stresses the practical value of transboundary collaboration for goal setting so that the tenets of ecosystem-based management may be achieved under the existing jurisdictional frameworks in place. It provides significant insights for policy makers, in that it presents residents reflections upon their involvement in environmental management processes, and upon the impacts that recent changes to border and national security policies have had upon borderland residents. Moving forward, this research uncovers the need for continued investigations of the impacts of border security policies and legislation on borderland communities and species, for more study of the ability of state agencies to meaningfully incorporate local actors in environmental management, and for investigations of trinational environmental management efforts in the North American Grasslands.

The 49th parallel border dividing the Great Plains region has been described since its delimitation as an artificial construct, as no natural features distinguish the Canadian and American portions of the landscape. While the border subjects the landscape to different political, legal, philosophical, and sociocultural regimes on either side, the regions contemporary and emerging environmental problems span jurisdictional boundaries. Their mitigation requires new forms of environmental management capable of transcending these borders. In this dissertation, I examine the prospects for implementing ecosystem-based approaches to environmental management in the Frenchman River-Bitter Creek (FRBC) subregion of the Saskatchewan-Montana borderland. First, I interrogate the extent to which residents perceive the FRBC region as a borderland. Then, I examine the range of implications of ecosystem-based management approaches for institutional arrangements, environmental governance, and traditional property regimes and livelihoods in the region.<p> The research methodology includes an extensive literature review; multiple site visits to the FRBC region; a series of semi-structured interviews with employees of government agencies and environmental nongovernmental organizations, and with local agricultural producers; the analysis of historical maps and of selected ecoregional planning documents; and attendance at public meetings in the FRBC region. The research results are presented in a series of four manuscripts. The first manuscript describes perceptions of the border and the borderland through time. The second manuscript examines changes to the border and the relationships across it instigated by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2003 BSE Crisis. The third manuscript examines the extent to which a shared landscape transcends the border, and describes how the different regimes across the border create divergent visions for landscape and species management. The fourth manuscript investigates the ways in which incorporating a broader range of actors and disciplines could reconceptualize environmental management as an inclusive processes that is cognizant of local history and values.<p> By examining the imbrications of the fields of environmental management, border studies, and political ecology, this research advocates adopting an historical approach to environmental geography research so that contemporary problems may be understood within their local contexts. It emphasizes the importance of including a range of stakeholders in environmental management processes. It identifies the difficulties inherent to adopting ecosystem-based approaches to management, and stresses the practical value of transboundary collaboration for goal setting so that the tenets of ecosystem-based management may be achieved under the existing jurisdictional frameworks in place. It provides significant insights for policy makers, in that it presents residents reflections upon their involvement in environmental management processes, and upon the impacts that recent changes to border and national security policies have had upon borderland residents. Moving forward, this research uncovers the need for continued investigations of the impacts of border security policies and legislation on borderland communities and species, for more study of the ability of state agencies to meaningfully incorporate local actors in environmental management, and for investigations of trinational environmental management efforts in the North American Grasslands.

This dissertation brings critical visual culture studies to bear on mediatized representations of borders and migration in U.S. and Mexican contexts. In particular, this study examines how the human price of the North American Free Trade Agreement is represented and/or disappeared in popular visual culture. I deploy an eclectic methodological framework whose elements emerge from the confluence of Border Studies, Visual Cultural Studies and theorizations of neoliberalism in order to study how television, print media and narrative and documentary film serve as sites for both the visual constitution and critical contestation of neoliberal agendas. For example, I view objects of visual culture such as the Border Wars television program, Backpacker magazine and films Sin dejar huella and AbUSed: The Postville Raid as powerful and privileged sites for the analysis of political discourses.

This dissertation is about the category of hybridity in the discourse of Latinamericanism. In particular, it undertakes a critical interrogation of mestizaje as the grounds for the thought of politics in Latinamericanist critical thought. It advances a set of analyses centered on my claim that mestizaje was never the felicitious grounding of politics it was once thought to be. And given that perhaps the most widely circulated and cited form of Latinamericanist thought today, decoloniality, is premised upon the terms and conditions of mestizaje, this is indeed a timely subject for critical reflection. The central argument of Atopic Peripheries is that Latin American rhetorical and cultural criticism has fundamentally misread the narrative of race across Latin America, and as such, has developed an understanding of the concept of politics that subverts itself. It is widely presupposed that the originary event of colonialism—the clash of Amerindian and European groups in the 15th century and the process of cultural and racial miscegenation that unfolded from this clash—obtains in an identity that is inherently resistant to what Walter Mignolo, for example, has identified as the matrix of modernity/coloniality. This process of cultural, racial, and conceptual mixture, or hybridization, is often identified by writers and critics as mestizaje, an exceptionally unique form of Latin American hybridity. The figure of the mestizo, and the process of mestizaje, is the figure of this mixture between incommensurate ethno-racial groups and the source material for a politics of counter-hegemony. This project attempts to develop a preliminary response to the thinking of politics at the limits of identity. In chapter 1, I suggest that the question of non-Western difference has come to feature prominently across the field of comparative rhetoric, where it is often presupposed that an irreducible difference separates Western from non-Western rhetorical and cultural production. It is from this presupposition that critics have established a politics of comparative inquiry, whereby restituting the pure consciousness of a non-Western subaltern subject is understood to subvert the hegemony of Western thought. I examine the recent turn toward Latin America to argue that this presupposition serves as a constitutive topos—that the object of Latin America is invented rhetorically in the very act of comparison—and that this presupposition obtains in an impasse that the field has yet to think through. I draw upon recent work in Latin American studies to argue for a rearticulated notion of subalternity as a methodological approach for dealing with this impasse. In chapter 2, I return more explicitly to the question of hybridity by arguing that the way critics think the site of the US-Mexico border as the grounds of an identity of resistance produces the very same problems concerning mestizaje that I briefly outlined above. In chapter 3, I continue my reading of mestizaje through Emma Perez’s The Decolonial Imaginary. I conclude with a reading of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance art as a posthegemonic thought of politics at the limits of the category of identity.

The identities of people residing in the vicinity of national borders are complex and affected by many factors, especially by narratives imposed by national governments through the national education system. The European Union, as a supranational organization, also provides narratives that expose individuals to globalized, versus national, ideals. This ethnographic case study asks how individuals living along the Macedonian-Bulgarian border, sharing strong ethnic and cultural ties, view their regional, national and European identities. The study finds that individuals have developed a strong attachment to their national identity. Many Bulgarians hold a strong vision based on historic claims to the Bulgarian Kingdom. Many Bulgarians see Macedonian as having been carved out of the ancient territory and therefore refer to the people as Bulgarians, thus denying their right to self-identify. Macedonians, on the other hand, choose not to refer to the 'other' as part of their own population, but rather as neighbors. They view their national identity is based on the idea of the country being 'attacked' by its neighbors and having to struggle for recognition in the world. The E.U. does not currently offer an alternative, as individuals have little attachment to their European identity related to E.U. membership. / Ph. D.

The border between Russia and Estonia has undergone significant changes in the past two and a half decades from a border between two Soviet republics to an international border and external EU border. In the public discourse and the scholarly literature, this border has been characterised as a battlefield shaped by divergent geopolitical visions and evaluations of the shared past. While Estonia has sought to distance itself from Russia and condemns the Soviet past as an occupation, Russia derives pride from its historical role in liberating Europe in World War II and continues to hold on to positive memories of the Soviet past and its role in the Baltic states. The thesis looks at how these official narratives have been negotiated locally in the once united border towns of Narva and Ivangorod in the Russian-Estonian borderland. Based on an extended fieldwork stay and the analysis 58 life-story interviews with people living on both sides of the border, it examines how people living in the borderland position themselves in the context of shifting narrative and structural frameworks. How do they re-evaluate the relations to the other side and reconsider their memories of the shared past? In examining these questions, the thesis seeks to make two general contributions to existing literature: it brings together the fields of border studies and memory studies to explore the reconfiguration of both temporal and spatial orderings in the making of a border. Secondly, it outlines a model for studying border change that focuses on the interrelations between the vernacular and the official level. The first part of the thesis looks at the politics of temporal orderings in the borderland and explores how people belonging to different ethnic groups and generations remember the past in the context of changing borders. It shows how people in part reproduce the polarised narratives mobilised at the official level but also how local experiences and generational change lead to a diversification of temporal orderings. The second part of the thesis explores the politics of spatial orderings in post-socialist memories. It looks at how by remembering the past people both reproduce and undermine borders; it demonstrates that it is not simply the memories of a shared past but also new inequalities following the establishment of the border that shape the ways in which people relate to their cross-border neighbours. Overall, the thesis provides a complex and differentiated account of border change in which different temporalities and spatialities at the vernacular and official levels can interact, interrelate and stand in opposition to each other. It shows that although people living in the borderland experience constraints and even powerlessness in the face of changes in the border, they have an active role in negotiating the changes and develop multiple responses to official narratives. It demonstrates how by appropriating official narratives and relating them to their own purposes, people articulate local concerns and make claims for belonging, recognition and state care in the face of the changes.

The National Border Patrol Museum (NBPM) in El Paso, Texas presents a view of the history, culture and life along the U.S.-Mexico border that no other museum in the world can offer. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to study and understand people and life in the border through the different forms in which they are representing themselves and how others view them as well. Mean Green: A Visual Cultural Analysis of the National Border Patrol Museum is a visual cultural analysis of the museum that deploys theoretical approaches in the disciplines of visual and cultural studies, Border Studies, Ethnic Studies, discourse analysis, museology, and spatial theory. The objectives of this dissertation are: 1) to study the varied representations, i.e., the hypermasculine white American male and the disenfranchised "illegal" immigrant, that reinforce and challenge the dominant discourse present in the hegemonic state and which are deconstructed when rearticulated in everyday border life; 2) to analyze why the museum represents a homotopia within the limits of a heterotopia; 3) to learn how the museum creates imagined communities through the use of its historical patrimony; 4) to observe the practices in relations of power by employing the notion of panopticon in their design and impose power over its visitors; and finally 5) to understand how the museum is providing a commodification of symbols to promote the hegemonic state. I reference historical events to frame the research for this project: history of the border, especially the El Paso border region, the creation of The Fraternal Order of Retired Border Patrol Officers, the history of the Border Patrol and the NBPM. Altogether, this work shows how the National Border Patrol Museum's exhibits and artifact displays are a reflection of what is happening in the border region.