UC San Diego

The question posed in this paper is: What are the cultural, political, and psychological processes that change hybrid experience and identity into cultural capital? In order to answer this question, I first examine the history of the US-Mexican border, the development of hybridity at that site, and, utilizing theories of power and practice, how hybridity can become cultural capital. In the second chapter, I look at several recent ethnographies of the US- Mexican border to see how people make use, or do not make use, of their hybridity, and I examine how the three ethnographers' theoretical positions help or hinder their analysis. I eschew the limited discourse-based model of identity in the third chapter, and instead put forth a psychodynamic theory of identity construction that allows for the use of hybridity as cultural capital. Finally, in the conclusion, one of my informants explains his own strategic use of practices and knowledge that he learned while negotiating life in the border zone, and I offer some final thoughts about the situational reasons for the development of hybridity as cultural capital