"This book is a great contribution to different fields: sociology
of culture, identity theories, border studies, multiculturalism,
gender studies, religious studies, cultural studies, and postmodern
theory. It is also an important critique to a current within
postcolonial theory that uses hybridity as a central concept." --
Eduardo Barrera, Associate Professor of Communication, University
of Texas at El Paso
From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on
the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and
"hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture-- neither Mexican
nor American, but an amalgamation of both-- has arisen in the
borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side
of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity,
as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders,
Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative
Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near
the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on
a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional
identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race.
In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he
began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how
religion, gender, and class also affect people's identifications of
self and "others" among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants,
Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Jua
rez-El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are
how the perception that "all Mexicans are Catholic" affects Mexican
Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse aboutproper gender
roles may feed the violence against women that has made Jua rez the
"women's murder capital of the world"; and why class consciousness
is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of
wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of
social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of
"hybridity" is only partially adequate to define people's identity
on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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