Voices of Mexico no. 59

Our Voice

In today’s world, borders are entities in which time and space coexist with an intense simultaneity of flows. As a cultural category and as a political and social reality, they are entities that in and of themselves transcend national sovereignties, ethnic groups, macroeconomic variables, political traditions, etc. Their complex and at the same time fascinating cosmogony make them confront day by day an endless movement whose temporality does not accept a mathematics of their traditional timing. Additionally, they are spaces that change rapidly due to the fact that social, political and economic circulation is both vertical and horizontal; that is to say, they trace an elastic and dynamic regional geometry and produce local phenomena which are unique, to a great extent because they are a-national, a-binational or a-trinational, and even if this becomes cultural “foreignness” in which the universal and the particular dialogue but also confront each other, naturally it also means events that have diverse similarities with the sociopolitical and economic realities that are close to them. Thus, borders dialogue but also confine themselves to themselves and make use of a language that is unique to them and that they inevitably extend to their closest synods, even more when emergencies demand it of them. This is even more common in a transnationalized world like ours in which the construction of bridges toward development and survival are both rational and emotional needs. It is here where the “symbolic reality” of borders paves the way to the “real” and coldly objective reality of nations.

With globalization, the boundaries between the global and the regional blur. The national becomes part of the international; the particular is somehow incorporated into the universal; homogeneity threatens to substitute itself for —and sometimes annihilate— the universal; and sovereignties reoccupy a different conceptual space. This is how borders are submerged in times marked by national discourses and needs and become the integrating —and often disruptive— space for the inevitable interaction between two or more societies and states that design their own strategies and define their own discourses.