CULT 320: Globalization and Culture

Kara Heitz, 10/21/2014

Questions:• What are the different ways in which narratives about border

crossings are told in the Camacho article? What are some common themes in these accounts? Why do people tell these stories and why should we listen to them?

• What is “migrant melancholia” according to Camacho? How it is connected to the migration experience across the U.S./Mexico border?

• Camacho speaks of “… the contradiction between market demands for mobile labor and consumable goods and the immobility of rights beyond the bounds of the nation-state” (302). What are these contradictions? How are processes of neoliberal globalization related issues of consumption, labor, and citizenship?

• According to Gardner, what are some of the reasons that South Asian migrant laborers in Qatar tell the stories they do?

U.S./Mexico Border:Stories and Cultural Objects

• How is migration to be narrated and understood by those who undertake it?– Migrant subjectivity

• What cultural objects mark and interpret these stories?

• What are some of the themes in common in border crossing stories and cultural objects connected to the border?

“The material and psychic hungers that propel migrants to abandon the most basic elements of sociality – residence, kinship, language, culture, and landscape – in short, home, for wages exert a violence that immigration and state discourse have yet to fully address” (Camacho, 302)

ABOVE: The international border to Mexico at San Miguel on the Tohono O'odham Nation has a warning sign in Spanish on the U.S. side. It says "Warning! Do not expose yourself to the elements. It is not worth it!" Also, "No potable water."

"I dedicate the present retablo to the Holiest Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos for having saved me from a Texan who tried to carry me off. I hid under a tree by the side of the road with my little borther."Retablo of Concepción Zapata. 1948. Oil on metal.

Connection to Larger Issues• Migrant melancholia

• Mobility of what and whom?

• Contradictions of borders“… the contradiction between market demands for mobile labor and

consumable goods and the immobility of rights beyond the bounds of the nation-state” (Camacho, 302)

• Connections to neoliberal globalization?“… the movement of capital and goods through the region has most often

been tied to the fantasy of a regulated border” (Camacho, 291)

• Who is responsible for the migrant? Who protects them? Who ensures their rights?“… the way government policies continue to displace the burden of

maintaining transnational labor circuits from the state onto private individuals and households” (Camacho, 312)