UC San Diego

This dissertation explores questions of global and diasporic process, and the physical and imagined geography of the US/Mexico border. My project uses ethnographic methods to study a simulated border crossing experience 700 miles from the physical US/Mexico border, operated by the Hñähñu, an indigenous community from El Alberto, Mexico. I make a case for understanding the border as both a structural impediment to transnational movement and an imaginary signifier that can generate liminal spaces, like in my study, where cultural play, experimentation, and resistance intertwine. I also explore questions at the forefront of border studies: how to join conceptions of the border as symbolic, with an understanding of the border as materially situated, as a bio-political force that is a point of entrance and exclusion. Culling from fieldwork that traverses Arizona, Nevada, and El Alberto, Mexico, I explore the border as a site that produces both national identities and transnational communities