ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the collaborative work Turista Fronterizo of 2005, by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez, and analyzes how this work closely engages with the border as both material locality and as representative of particular practices. The historicity of the border has constantly been evoked by successive generations of Mexican Americans and Chicano/o activists in their attempts to express their identity and fight for their rights; struggles over the meaning of the border have been a constant in Mexican-American thought, commencing with the first waves of Mexican immigrants. The border thus is exemplary of both the state-sponsored militarization of the border region, and of the logic of late, corporate capitalism. On one hand, the border represents the new spatialities in which US domestic and foreign policy, and corporate capitalism are played out: the increasing militarization of the border, the neocolonial conditions of production in the maquiladoras, and the role of the US in classifying and policing racial others.