The Line

The court wants nothing of you. It receives you when you come, and it dismisses you when you go.

FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial

The Line is a busy place. This is where people wait to enter the United States through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the most traveled port, it is said, in the world. At the time of my fieldwork, San Ysidro saw on average 110,000 crossings daily: 110,000 presentations of visas, passports, green cards, IDs; 110,000 mostly muted exchanges, sometimes nothing more than a nod from the officer to pass one through (Blum 2007). Even with twenty-four lanes for vehicular traffic, the wait to cross could take hours and still can today, despite a massive expansion undertaken in 2011. The hustle is stifled but relentless. Cars idle at a standstill, pedestrians shuffle forward, but all attention is on the opportunity that could save or make another moment of waiting. Women in heels run to beat others to the end of the line. Behind the wheel, with her big glasses and curly gray hair, Inés signals to the young man in the next lane over, asking if he'll let her merge in before him. His eyes meet hers, expressionless; the slightest shift of his head tells her no. A moment later he is not quick enough to close the gap when the car ahead of him rolls forward, and Inés noses in anyway.

The hustle of the crossers is stifled, but that of the hawkers is not. All sorts of people come and go, and all sorts of people try to make money off them. The teeming crowd, the sheer range of types rubbing shoulders, immediately attracts ethnographic attention: hawkers of blankets and popsicles and newspapers and kitsch, indigenous beggars in their traditional shawls, security guards armed with Mace ("Keep walking, please"), middlemen for dentists and doctors, real estate salesmen, burrito vendors, criers for last-stop liquor shops, and young fellows in smocks darting through traffic to deliver mochaccinos. These characters do their best to divert the attention of the crossers facing north, shuffling or edging their cars forward foot by foot, a more or less orderly crowd of potential consumers. Businesspeople in suits, homeless people with their towering shopping carts, housewives, gangsters, schoolchildren, construction workers, college kids, church groups, competition bikers, families on holiday — the list of crossers runs on as endlessly as the line itself. Even as they edge their way forward, keeping tabs on each other out of the corners of their eyes, they are themselves the spectacle of the Line — as, for instance, on postcards (see figures 1.1 and 1.2), in radio and Internet updates on wait times, or on the Line's own television channel, where surveillance-style takes of crossers are continuously broadcast.

If the crossers at the Line form a public in passage, however, they do so in the first instance in relation to the US state. In Tijuana, legal access to the United States ratifies socioeconomic status within Mexico; the US state becomes the authoritative source in which to anchor social value. This process begins, perhaps, in such simple address as that of the notices Customs and Border Protection issues to "the traveling public." As described above, this public would seem to include a range of social types too various to classify. In fact, however, its members belong to a single basic category. They are the documented: US citizens, permanent residents, or holders of other visas. They are those who have already undergone some prior process of obtaining recognition from the US state. Members of all categories reside on both sides of the border, and they cross in an immense variety of patterns, for an immense variety of reasons. In all their variety, though, they are categorically distinct from their "other" — the undocumented. When the undocumented appear at the Line, it can only be with a certain stigma. They are picked out of the crowd, interrogated, held, and marked, all in front of and as if on view for the "traveling public."

Approaching the booths for pedestrian crossing, the single line splits into several. All eyes are intent on the routine of processing, gauging which officer is moving crossers through the quickest, watching for any peculiarities or setbacks. All eyes catch the flash of the bright orange slip referring a crosser to secondary inspection; all eyes follow the officer as he or she leaves the line unattended to escort the suspect back to the counter where the preliminary grilling takes place. This area is in full view, a backdrop to the officers' booths as crossers wait to show their papers and, with luck, answer just a question or two (Where are you going? What are you bringing with you from Mexico?). As they hurry past, they might hear snippets of the interrogation: "Me no believe you!" exclaims an officer in broken Spanish, with all the bluster of amateur theatricals. Failing this preliminary interrogation, the undocumented are gathered and displayed even more conspicuously for what they are: failed crossers caught trying to pass. It is not uncommon to see lines of twenty or so of them being led back into Mexico, through those waiting to cross north. They are chained together, handcuffed, and they carry behind their backs little plastic bags filled with their belongings. People surreptitiously sneak glances or look away, an uncomfortable audience. Those in cars and buses, more concealed, may stare. One wonders which of them will join the show.

* * *

This chapter consists, at one level, of a fairly elementary exercise. It traces the articulation of "we" through a set of examples involving different communicative genres and different scenes of public sociality. In each, it shows how collective subjectivities situate themselves in relation to the Line and the difference it stages between documented and undocumented passage: a difference at the root of differentiated citizenship (Holston 2008) within Tijuana, between people who are all formally Mexican citizens. Some of these articulations of collective subjectivity are more explicit, some more deeply ensconced in the basic presuppositions of interaction; some are also sure of themselves as others are not. "We" circulates through an uneven terrain of concrete, institutionally shaped contexts to which social actors have differential access and in which they have different parts to play. As more marginal, unformed "we"s move into arenas not their own, their footing slips. For the trespass of introducing an alternate "we," marginal subjects may face literal violence — or, anticipating sanction, they may flail for some more conciliatory voicing. In contrast, the stronger "we"s, secure in their own domain, echo into each other across the contexts and genres central to the regulation of public life in Tijuana....