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Performing Thresholds, Challenging Geopolitical Borders: How a Simulated Border Crossing Experience in Central Mexico is Bringing International Awareness to the Plight of the Undocumented

Fri, May 26, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 2, Indigo Ballroom A

Abstract

This paper converges around themes of performance, memory, and the transnational subject to consider the border practices and migration histories of a subaltern indigenous community who operate a simulated border crossing experience on ancestral lands, 700 miles from the physical U.S./Mexico divide. Led by Hñähñu guides who perform the role of coyotes, narcos, and border patrol, primarily middle class Mexican tourists traverse rocky hills, riverbeds, and brambles throughout the night in an attempt to “burlar” (trick, make fun of, evade) the border patrol, as they journey to cross an imaginary border. Alternately marketed as an extreme sport and a project in consciousness-raising around the plight of the undocumented, the caminata nocturna (night walk) has drawn over 7,000 participants since its inception in 2004. This paper applies methodologies rooted in performance and hemispheric studies, media analysis, and ethnography, to provide insight into the interplay of representations and experiences of the border that unfold at individual and collective levels across geopolitical divides. Blending a fictocritical writing style with transborder social analysis, I address both the physical and imagined geography of the U.S./Mexico border, as well as ways that im/migrant narratives and performance offer counter-narratives of place, identity, belonging, and home. I argue that for the Hñähñu, memory and the work of the imaginary combine powerfully to produce ever-shifting performances of threshold that displace binaristic understandings of the border.

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