UC San Diego

This project is the product of a ten day road trip along the US-Mexican border, from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas and back. It explores experiences of border crossings and citizenship from a highly mobile, North American perspective. Using poetry and prose, this manuscript engages with geographical and psychological boundaries, in an effort to problematize some of the structures of difference and privilege therein. It is also concerned with orientation and manifestations of authority in the touristic narrative. The writing here seeks to draw from a range of creative devices& #8212;documentary poetics, personal essay, rhetorical structures and what may be considered the neo-lyric---as an ethnographic gesture toward holism that remains, above all else, conscious of its own limitations, and optimistic about the generative potentials of failure. Ultimately, this project is interested in reconceptualizing the US- Mexican border as a product of political contestation and contrivance, rather than a marker of innate or finite cultural difference