Notes from the Field
Everyday Performances of the Guatemala-Mexico Border in the Selva Lacandona
Crossing the Guatemala-Mexico border. Marqués de Comillas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2022. Image by Alicia Barceinas Cruz. Copyright Alicia Barceinas Cruz 2022.
Early one morning in June, I joined a group of volunteers to work on a potrero (a piece of land with cattle pasture) neighboring the Guatemala-Mexico border. We spent the previous afternoon carefully packing seedlings of tropical trees in a rustic nursery in the Selva Lacandona, in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Conservation biologists identified a stream in the potrero as a priority site for restoration to establish a biological corridor connecting ever smaller fragments of the Maya Forest and allow populations of large and medium-sized mammals—like tapirs and howler monkeys—to persist. The potrero landowner agreed to restore the stream to secure shade and water for his cattle. We planted seedlings for as long as the hot summer sun allowed us and then convinced Alejandro, a young forest engineer leading our restoration efforts, to take us to Guatemala just for fun. The noise of our pick-up truck interrupted the silent landscape of large potreros divided by barbed wire. A white landmark indicated the limits between the two countries. We opened a gate and “entered” Guatemala. It felt like we were really going elsewhere, even though we barely moved from where we worked all morning. Excited, we took pictures on both sides of the border, a straight line inscribed on the land 140 years ago (Tamayo Perez 122). The volunteers seemed delightfully surprised that we could cross the border “just like that,” así nomás. They jokingly discussed how to prove we are Mexican to an imaginary migration agent so we could “go back” without papers.
My research bridges theory and methodological approaches focusing on embodied everyday actions to interrogate geopolitical borders. Reflecting on this scene in the Selva Lacandona—where I work and do my research—I wonder what makes us expect being policed by migration agents when crossing borders? Borrowing from Sylvia Wynter, I think about the “rules that govern our human perceptions” and make us see borders as normal (12). In other words, why shouldn’t we cross just like that? Wynter’s analysis of a social reality post-1492 in which indigenous lands were legitimately expropriable and African people were legitimately enslavable reminds me of the need to challenge the rules of perception making us see a specific reality as normal. In this case, a reality with borders. As a reality with borders involves political, economic, social, affective, cultural, and ecological, to name a few, aspects of human and more-than human life, questioning this reality requires transdisciplinary thought.
I am interested in everyday performances of geopolitical borders. That playful morning in the potrero contrasts with what I have read in newspapers and observed in other places, where reality conforms to the volunteer’s expectations of borders. People identified as “migrants” by agents of the Mexican state cannot cross the Guatemala-Mexico border “just like that.” According to official reports, only this June, a little more than 40,000 people requested recognition of their condition as refugees by the Mexican federal government and are waiting for a resolution in Chiapas. Clashes between migrant caravans and the National Guard are recurrent since 2018 (E.g. Redacción La Jornada, “La CNDH”; Henríquez, “Chocan”; Henríquez, “La GN”). Risking oversimplifying the situation, I read these clashes as conflicts between different performances of the border. While people in the caravan collectively perform an open border, they encounter the violence of the National Guard’s enactments of closed borders. Complex power relationships are at play, but I suspect that the violence is justified by a sedentary bias governing state-centric notions of citizenship and territory that present the movement of migrants as aberrant (Hyndman 248).
When migrants cross the porous parts of the Guatemala-Mexico border, migration agents follow them via checkpoints throughout the Mexican territory (Vogt 4). In May this year, these checkpoints were ruled unconstitutional by Mexico’s Supreme Court after three indigenous Tseltal-Maya siblings from Chiapas—with Mexican citizenship and the papers to prove it—were detained and tortured by immigration agents in a detention center in Queretaro, in central Mexico, until they signed a statement confessing to being Guatemalans with fake papers (Lakhani, “Mexico’s Migrant”). One of my interlocutors in Selva Lacandona described to me how a few years ago they were almost not allowed to board a domestic flight in Cancun airport because a migration agent did not believe they were Mexican. These racist practices are now illegal because they violate the rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant Mexican citizens. However, federal judges ruled that it is legitimate to request documents from foreigners to prove their legal entry to Mexico, as they considered that this measure is only based on citizenship and does not discriminate against people based on their appearance. Deciding who is required to show their documents remains at the discretion of migration agents. The border thus continues to be performed to follow migrants.
Physical appearance, citizenship, ethnicity, class, and other intersecting identities determine which kind of performance of the border people can enact and encounter. Reports of people moving across borders from Venezuela to Mexico, desperately crossing the Darien gap in Panama on foot, contrast with the hypermobility of others with access to planes and papers (See Turkewitz et al., “Perilous”). In Chiapas, foreigners identified as migrants are stranded at the border or clandestinely travel under potentially deadly conditions (e.g. Reina and García, “Al menos”), while foreigners identified as tourists, travelers, digital nomads, expats, or academics, fill hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals in downtown San Cristobal de las Casas. Most people in the latter group are white and/or have US or European citizenships. In contrast to the experiences of foreign migrants, foreign travelers live a reality without borders because migration agents do not enact a closed border for them.
How do border performances relate to each other? How are these power-saturated articulations experienced by different persons? Going back to that morning in the potrero, we performed a non-border and met no resistance. Furthermore, we planted seedlings to construct corridors, so animals encounter no borders as well. Some of my interlocutors in the Selva Lacandona imagine and try to perform a reality with no borders where everyone, including the more-than-human, can freely and safely move across territories. But their actions unfold and interact with other performances of the border in complex ways. For instance, the movement of migrants often happens under the canopy of the forest that communities in the Lacandona work to preserve and connect. However, the state-sanctioned illegality of migrant movement brings to the region an increased presence of the Mexican military commissioned to hinder migrant movement and smugglers seeking to make a profit of that movement. The presence of both groups in the area results in episodes of insecurity, acutely felt and feared by people living and working in this region, particularly women.
I keep reflecting on the “rules that govern our human perceptions” in which constructed human differences like those around citizenship are perceived as legitimate reasons to perform a closed border depending on who is moving. I wonder if the geopolitical imaginaries performing open borders can inform and change such rules to construct a reality where we all can freely and safely move across territories “just like that”.
About the Author
Alicia Barceinas Cruz is a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Geography. She works as a conservation biologist in the Selva Lacandona region in Southeast Mexico since 2010. Her research examines how borders shape landscapes of (im)mobility and (in)security for humans and more-than-humans.
Works Cited
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