ABSTRACT

Immigrants into the United States recurrently resort to what we would like to call here the rhetoric of cutting, to represent the initial break as a clean cut that suddenly opened and then sutures, or else, as Anzaldua would have it, a continuous open wound that needs to be grappled with. The open wounds at the border, as Anzaldua, Cantu, and others have made clear, are far from aseptic worlds; rather, they betray the fear of contamination and pollution. The incontestable distance between the self-enclosed classical body and the inviting corporeality and openness of the other in Renaissance representation looms large on modern efforts to seal and suture international borders. However, the transformation of international boundaries into smooth spaces, empty intervals, minuscule scars easily traversed by some, or tall scars illegally transgressed by others does not capture the full complexity of the contemporary border experience.