Boundaries and Representation in The Mexico-Texas Borderland: Reflections on Geography,Culture,and Identity

The summer 2017 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, held in Austin, Texas, opened with a flourish: a town hall discussion titled “Race and Borders: Crisis in Contemporary American Identity.” Even twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to frame the meetings with such an overtly political message for members to deliberate and discuss. That it was done now attests the fact that psychoanalysis (and APsaA with it) is growing and changing along with the world around it, a world in which issues of multiple social identities and cultural forces are increasingly being recognized as inescapable dimensions of life and, consequently, of our clinical work.

Psychoanalysis has long been criticized, not always fairly, for being indifferent to the way social reality impinges on psychic life. One is reminded of Bowlby’s description, at a 1987 colloquium at the University of Virginia, of his early work with the child of a psychotic mother (see Bretherton 1992). Melanie Klein, who supervised the case, had been so singularly focused on the child’s fantasy production that she was unable to see what Bowlby saw quite readily—that fluctuations in the mother’s psychosis (which he witnessed in the waiting room) were reflected in the child’s psychic functioning. This difference led eventually to Bowlby’s ostracism from the psychoanalytic fold and the loss to the field of a brilliant mind. One might argue that contemporary psychoanalysis is much more open to the idea that “real” relationships and broader social contexts influence and shape psychological experience and, indeed, identity itself. Our challenge today is to retain our unique interest in deeply explored subjectivity, an interest that has been the hallmark of psychoanalysis, while clearing theoretical space for the conceptualization of these broader social forces and their impact on the psychic life of groups and individuals.

Later that day in Austin, three historians were invited to present papers at the University Forum, titled “The Mexico-Texas Borderland: How It’s Been, How It Should Be.” Chaired by Gabriel Ruiz, the panel included C. J. Alvarez (University of Texas at Austin), “The Alamo as a Rupture in Historical Time and Space”; Nicole Guidotti-Hernández (University of Texas at Austin), “Blood on the Border: Suicide in Early Twentieth Century El Paso–Juárez”; and Raúl Ramos (University of Houston), “Police History on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” The panel’s focus on the border was particularly appropriate given the meetings’ location and the current saturation of political discourse by debates over immigration and “border security.”

Perhaps nothing distinguishes the psychoanalytic sensibility from other therapeutic modalities more than its singular appreciation for the complexities of how the past continues to live within our present. We take it for granted, indeed we consider it axiomatic, that the past is never fully past. Rather, we understand the past as continuing to exist as a powerful, dynamic force in the present, shaping and refracting the elements that form human subjectivity. For this reason, it is always interesting to encounter the work of contemporary historians as they grapple with interpreting and reinterpreting the meaning of historical events, monuments, and personalities. The parallel with psychoanalysis is inexact, but the shared elements include substantive points of intersection, which made this University Forum especially interesting.

In “The Alamo as a Rupture in Historical Time and Space,” Alvarez set out to “disempower” the Alamo as a symbol from the past. Alvarez argues that the Alamo has been and, in its contemporary cultural function, continues to be used as a marker for the identity of Texas as an independent territory. It is a powerful myth that accomplishes its aim through a severing of the present from the past. Focusing on the Alamo as a site of martyrdom announcing the birth of Texas separates that land from its historical indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican roots. The Alamo was a Spanish mission within the Spanish borderlands and, in this context, is dense with signification that points to a very different reading of what the mission represents, one that goes far beyond its meaning in popular culture as a mythic site of origin for Texas independence.

Alvarez reminds us that the “Alamo,” as iconic, mythic representation, has a role in the American imperial expansion of the time; it is part of a strategic colonialism bent on tearing this territory away from Mexico. Alvarez argues that by eliding these contexts from the “Alamo Epic,” popular culture “excludes Mexican and indigenous people from civic membership and cultural citizenship.” Thus, far from being a quaint, nostalgic icon of popular culture, the Alamo becomes a cultural tool that disconnects earlier-arriving inhabitants from organic connection to these lands once Texas is assimilated into the American nation. It is a move that facilitates the marginalization of Mexicans and indigenous people as “other” and renders them powerless and voiceless in lands that were once theirs. Ethnic Mexicans, Alvarez tells us, become “a permanent foreign class” within this space.

We know from Vamik Volkan’s work (1997) that group dynamics are often mobilized and put to the service of collective identity. With respect to dominant “Anglo” narratives, the Alamo illustrates Volkan’s concepts of Chosen Trauma and Chosen Glory: it serves to affirm and reinforce the collective identity of the ultimate victors in the Texan war of independence from Mexico. However, in affirming Anglo identity this narrative denies the broader cultural and historical context of the land.

Thus, we might consider Alvarez’s observations as an historian’s rendering of a certain kind of collective defensive process: even as the Alamo itself attests the existence of pre-Anglo Texas (it was, after all, a Spanish colonial mission and bears a Spanish name meaning oak tree), the argument is that the Alamo myth in fact masks inconvenient and thus conflictual aspects of this very reality. Anglos assumed power over the region and its inhabitants and created a mythic narrative that diluted the reality of pre-Anglo Texas and the taking of these lands from Mexico. Alvarez argues that we are left with an heroic mythic construction that insists that we forget the people whose lands were taken and who were henceforth relegated to the social margins in Texan and, later, U.S. society.

In Alvarez’s explication of the meaning and uses of the Alamo as mythic entity we see the invocation of dynamics that resonate with those once observed by Freud in “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) or, say, in Samuel Novey’s On Second Look: The Reconstruction of Personal History in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (1968), regarding the ways in which the past is “used” by all of us, not only our patients, for purposes that are congenial with contemporary intrapsychic requirements, including processes related to defense and identity. We know from contemporary psychoanalytic theorizing (e.g., that of Volkan) that there is an intimate weave between collective history, group processes, and individual identity formation. Whether we are speaking of individual life histories or collective histories, there are powerful dynamics that govern the use to which the past is put, as well as the ways in which the past helps organize collective identity in the present.

Regarding boundary formation and boundary anxieties, Alvarez illustrates how varied these anxieties can be and the different functions they can serve. He argues that while the Alamo myth helped create and enforce a psychological boundary between the colonists who had migrated to Texas primarily from the American South and the Mexican and indigenous peoples who were already there, Spanish approaches to colonization in this same space were markedly different. The Spanish intermarried and used the Catholic Church to absorb indigenous people into Spanish society. Those who acceded became Spanish or, later, Mexican citizens, while those who refused were designated as indios barbaros and hunted down in an effort to destroy them. Thus, the Spanish implicitly embraced the fluidity of group boundaries as a tool of their colonizing project, while Anglo-American colonial efforts were driven by enforced, rigid boundaries that cast the Mexican and indigenous peoples outside the periphery of the collective “us.” Such strategies obviously lay the foundation for racism and other forms of dehumanizing the “other,” as psychoanalysts have long noted (see, e.g., Donald Moss’s Hating in the First Person Plural [2003] or Kimberlyn Leary [2006]).

Raúl Ramos’s “Police History on the U.S.-Mexico Border” is a synthesis of some of the arguments he makes in a book he is currently writing: The Shape of the Border: Policing and Infrastructure on the U.S.-Mexico Divide. His argument might be seen as a variation on the theme that narratives shape and define “desired” realities while masking those that are less convenient. Ramos argues that far from providing protection and security for non-Anglos living along the present-day border, policing and law enforcement have instead “created instability, sorrow, disgrace, injury, and death. In short, border policing has generated far more insecurity than security.” This is especially true for those living on the margins, a population that Ramos has defined to include indigenous peoples, low-wage workers, and other politically weak groups, in addition to other non-Anglo populations. Ramos argues that policing and law enforcement have been used to benefit the rich and powerful, while hiding behind the banner of “security.”

Ramos chronicles a 1947 outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in the Mexican state of Veracruz to illustrate how policing strategies addressing American concerns have visited disastrous consequences on the Mexican population. By 1947 there was significant cross-border commerce in cattle between the two countries. Modernized infrastructure (roads and railroads) had fostered an exponential growth in this binational industry. In this context, the outbreak of a hoof-and-mouth disease epidemic presented a profound economic threat to the agribusiness interests controlling most of this commerce. According to Ramos, the intervention to protect these interests involved “a gory chorus of diesel-powered earthmovers, formaldehyde gas, flamethrowers, and, perhaps most important, the so-called ‘sanitary rifle,’ [which] came together in the summer rains of central tropical Mexico to destroy a million animals in 1947. In the final analysis, the operation was a complete success—the virus never traveled across the U.S.-Mexico border to infect American cattle.”

Ramos argues that the “success” of this intervention came at great cost to Mexico’s rural poor: “the vast majority of the slaughtered animals were not cattle destined for export to the United States. Rather, they belonged to small-scale farmers dependent on their animals as beasts of burden, sources of energy in the absence of mechanized equipment.” The slaughter campaign meant “catastrophic disruption of their lives, dismantled local and regional economies, and ongoing personal and social calamity.” Ramos presents this illustration to underscore the notion that border policing initiatives have “produced and maintained inequality and insecurity” in racist and classist ways.

There is a perverseness in the fact that American-driven security needs and agendas can have a profound impact on Mexico while remaining generally hidden and obscured on the American side of the border. This might be seen as an early version of what we are currently witnessing in Mexico’s present-day drug war violence, where tens of thousands of people have been murdered in Mexico as the country is pressed to rein in the organized crime groups servicing insatiable American drug habits (see my The Fight to Save Juárez: Life in the Heart of Mexico’s Drug War [Ainslie 2013]). In both the drug war and the hoof-and-mouth epidemic described by Ramos, there is a collective denial north of the border of the catastrophic consequences on the Mexican side of the border.

It might be argued that not only is there a collective denial at work in such actions but also that they play upon a psychodynamic process in which national boundaries serve a purpose not unlike interpersonal boundaries whereby unwanted contents are extruded and located in the Other, where they are acted upon as if they bore little connection to the self. Americans are thus largely impervious to the costs of what is taking place south of the border, even when the catastrophic actions are carried out in significant measure to “protect” the American public. For this reason Ramos is skeptical of the construct of the “cartographic border,” which has been the centerpiece of most border policing initiatives: “where the border is depends on the social point of reference, on the reach of commercial activity, and on the landscape of punitive and bureaucratic infrastructure.” Certainly the fervent agitation to build a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexico border—the point of the sword in Donald Trump’s discourse related to Mexico—is relevant to this discussion: the wall is a symbolic artifact meant to reassure a segment of the American population that “evil” will be safely contained beyond and outside the (collective) self, thereby maintaining the safety and integrity of individual and collective identity. Rigid boundaries are required to prevent the infiltration of disavowed contents.

In “Blood on the Border: Suicide in Early Twentieth Century El Paso–Juárez,” Nicole Guidotti-Hernández focuses on one of approximately fifty case studies of Latinx ¹ suicides that form part of a projected book illustrating how suicide continues to be “an escape from the material realities of detachment and displacement in economic systems that are compounded by class, racial, and sex-gender status.” Guidotti-Hernández argues that while we can never know precisely the nature of an individual’s motives at the moment of commiting suicide, the decision to do so is a complex meaning site within the context of systems of power and alienation environing the subject. Thus, Guidotti-Hernández explores the phenomenon of Latinx suicidality in the early twentieth century from the perspective of her identity as a feminist researcher studying the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where intersectionality among racial, class, and sex-gender factors figures prominently as a lens of analysis. She also brings a Marxist analysis to the study of suicide, leaning heavily on Marx’s view that suicide reflects the failure of society itself, mirroring a host of social ills, including economic inequality.

In this context, Guidotti-Hernández’s analysis is congenial with the movement within psychoanalysis in recent decades toward an increasing understanding of how social forces, including race and class, impinge on psychological experience and help shape the subjectivities explored in psychoanalytic work. Neil Altman’s groundbreaking book of 1995, The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture through a Psychoanalytic Lens, stands as an early effort in that regard. Later contributions of note are Lynne Layton’s elaboration of the “normative unconscious” (2006); a recent collection edited by Layton, Nancy Caro Hollander, and Susan Gutwill (2006), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting; and Donald Moss’s 2003 collection, Hating in the First Person Plural: Psychoanalytic Essays on Racism, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Terror. These are but a few of the many contemporary psychoanalytic contributions addressing the ways in which powerful and complex social factors structure subjectivity, works that resonate with Guidotti-Hernández’s feminist-Marxist analysis.

The heart of Guidotti-Hernández’s presentation is the case study of a young Mexican couple who died in 1901 in a murder-suicide that took place in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso. Andrés Garcia, twenty-three, shot his new bride, Anita Terrazas de Garcia, before killing himself. Drawing from journalistic accounts, Guidotti-Hernández traces the couple’s social position as part of northern Mexico’s elite (Terrazas was from one of the wealthiest families in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua; Garcia was the son of a wealthy Spaniard who owned Juarez’s exclusive, limited-membership Jockey Club). The couple occupied the highest stratum of Mexican border culture. Educated in the United States and traveling at will and frequently across the border, they were among the first families of Chihuahuan society (for a psychoanalytic discussion of social class and migration, see Ainslie 2011).

Newspaper accounts in Mexico and across the border in Texas and New Mexico diverge from one another meaningfully. Reminiscent of psychoanalytic theorizing on the relationship between memory and defense, Guidotti-Hernández argues that the journalistic accounts are shaped by underlying, unacknowledged motivations, such as an interest in protecting or preserving the reputation of the powerful Terrazas family (e.g., in some accounts she was murdered in front of witnesses, in others in a separate room; she is sometimes depicted as valiantly struggling for her life as she reached for the gun, etc.). The analysis that Guidotti-Hernández deploys in these accounts is infused with meanings of class, race, and power, rather than with the psychodynamics analysts are more accustomed to, but their impact (a distortion in memory driven by unacknowledged motivations and desires) is ultimately similar.

The specific circumstances that led Garcia to kill his wife and then himself center on two themes: a family crisis in which he was estranged from his father, who refused to give him his maternal inheritance (no information is provided regarding the time or context of the mother’s death) and Garcia’s mismanagement of the family business in his father’s temporary absence. It is also asserted that Garcia was an extremely jealous man, and in some accounts the precipitating factor in Garcia’s psychic break was that Terrazas was said to have danced with several other men at the ball held in their honor the night of their arrival in Juárez. Thus, in Guidotti-Hernández’s telling, the murder-suicide moved along two narrative lines. In one, the psychological implosion of a young man of high social status was fueled by the emotional crisis of a man who had no way of supporting his family and who was experiencing a deep conflict with his father over his inheritance and business dealings (the possible contribution of maternal loss is not explored). The other line situates Garcia and Terrazas in a societal context where their race and class figure prominently; members of an elite, their lives are wrapped in the forces of social and economic power, power that nonetheless fails to protect or insulate them from the ravages of emotional conflict and distress. Guidotti-Hernández concludes that “the role of racialized forms of capitalism, when intersecting with personal and economic losses, set the stage for a kind of chaos that propelled male assailants to assert control over their love objects with violence.”

The three formal presentations were complemented by Gabriel Ruiz’s personal reflections (as the panel’s chair) of growing up on the El Paso–Juárez border. Border crossings to visit family were a matter of course and not always pleasant, as Border Patrol agents often accosted people they viewed with suspicion (Did you have an accent? Did you “look” like an American citizen?). Ruiz noted the resonance between the historian’s work and the interest of psychoanalysts in “the deeper story or history that yearns for expression. . . . This deeper narrative is continually revised through remembering, repeating, and working through.” Ruiz also drew parallels between the unique power conferred on Texas by virtue of its location at the intersection of multiple empires, peoples, landscapes, and climates, and the “collusions” that occur within these, and the psychoanalytic process, where “we deal with our patient’s internal collusions within their borders of experience.”

The three contributions to the University Forum at the Austin meetings provided a rich and thought-provoking view of the current work of borderlands scholars regarding the meaning of the border as both a “cartographic” space and a psychic space infused with individual and collective meanings. There were interesting points of resonance with psychoanalytic ideas, if most often implicitly so. Judging by the attendance and the engaged exchanges during the ensuing discussion, the session was successful in fostering dialogue between academia and psychoanalysis, which, of course, is the aim of the University Forum. However, in my view it is not simply about creating connections with academics. Rather, it is also about reflecting on the intersection of psychoanalysis, society, and culture. This is the new frontier in our theorizing, as psychoanalysis becomes increasingly aware of the powerful ways in which these forces, once regarded as “external reality,” and therefore as peripheral to our concerns, insinuate themselves into self- and other representations in rich and interesting ways. We increasingly recognize these forces as inseparable from the self and how it is constituted. In other words, we have come to appreciate social and cultural material as being of critical concern. This represents a significant shift in our understanding of psychoanalysis as a discipline, and with this shift has come an appreciation for the power and utility of addressing social and cultural factors within the consulting room.