Reviewed by Nurri Kim, Do Projects

My first significant personal exposure to Mexican culture (and Mexican people) was after I moved to the United States in 2003. As a Korean educated in Japan, and with no previous experience of America beyond what I knew from popular media, I remember wondering what these bright yellow “Piso Mojado” signs were supposed to mean and, from there, slowly unfolding the enormous significance of this culture for Californian and American life. I was especially fascinated by those Mexican men with big cowboy hats I saw standing in groups by the side of the highway, waiting stoically for day jobs that might or might not come.

Five years of living in New York have taught me that these men and the millions of other Mexican men and women in similar positions are an indispensible part of the American economy. The flows of the city are hugely dependent on their delivering, making, operating, or fixing things, in a way that reminds me of Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture series. It’s hard to imagine passing through any commercial service in New York that doesn’t depend on these efforts in some way. You name it: even the most downhome-looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, with the ajumma cooking handmade tofu in the storefront to show off its authenticity, has a line of Mexican guys busy in the steamy hot back of the kitchen cooking and delivering the bulgogi and kimchijigae to the tune of salsa music. But especially as compared to their ubiquitous contributions to the culture, they’re virtually invisible in it — the mainstream, anyway, will never help you understand who these people are, where they’re from, how they got here and how they survive on the interface of two (or more) cultures.

[cc image credit: Nathan Gibbs]

That’s why I was so curious to discover Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez’s “Here Is Tijuana!” Of course, Tijuana is literally and figuratively an edge case within Mexico, but as a node of transition between cultures and the first place on Mexican soil physically encountered by many visitors, I thought a book about the city would be an excellent place for me to begin my investigations, its title announcing the reader’s arrival like a tollgate traffic sign at the borderline.

The format of the book and the content

“Here Is Tijuana!” is organized in three chapters (”Avatars,” “Desires,” and “Permutations”) written by authors from three disciplines (an anthropologist, an architect, and a writer/psychotherapist) with three different relationships with the city (having either been born, studied, or currently living there). I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this book. From the preface:

“One afternoon three friends were discussing nothing else, but Tijuana. The three of them conducted one of those discussions that ultimately tend to abolish friendship. At the end of the discussion, there were two very clear issues: one, that the three of them would never be in agreement about Tijuana; and the other, that it was necessary to produce a book that would reunite the different postures about the city in order to extend the conflict to others as well.”

And so it seems that the process of making the book itself reflected the nature of its subject. Instead of writing an anthology with separate signed contributions, they apparently decided to let the city tell its own story through a succession of static images juxtaposed against quotations, statistical data and other figures, short interviews, and correspondence (e-mail, letters, notes, etc.). It’s very ambiguous as to whose viewpoint is being expressed at any particular moment, or if the authors even wish to endorse a specific viewpoint at all, and the overall effect is to emphasize that whatever opinions or impressions one holds about Tijuana, however jumbled or even contradictory, they might all simultaneously be true.

Emerging codependences

Often this use of supposedly neutral “data” requires some knowledge of origins — the name of an institution, for example, or a URL — to decode the meaning apparently intended by the authors. At first I had a hard time reading between the lines, often helped where an image added texture and flesh to the flattened “facts” and figures (a price list of services provided by prostitutes in Tijuana, a schedule of assembly-plant salaries, counts of inbound and outbound passengers at the airport and bus depot, and so on). I certainly don’t think you have to read this book linearly, but I followed the conventional page order, and by the time I was reading the “Permutation” section, all of these fragments had slowly built up, connected with one another and developed a weave that resembled narrative.

And something else slowly revealed itself, too: Tijuana’s conjoined twin city across the border. San Diego emerges from the trip into Tijuana like the other surface of a Möbius strip. It’s not simply that the Mexican city becomes the site of displaced industries and repressed desires, though this is inarguably the case. It’s that the two places depend on one another, each place made possible by certain kinds of flows across this most extreme of borders. And while voice after voice here are entirely correct to insist on the place’s singularity (”It’s not even Mexico, it’s Tijuana”), in the end it’s also clear that like the countries they belong to, both cities are part of a single binary system. And that is something I’ll remember the next time I catch a glimpse into a Korean-restaurant kitchen in Manhattan.

A North Korean woman carries water she collected from the Yalu River in the North Korean city of Hyesan, which borders China’s Changbai county, April 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Reinhard Krause)

A young girl and her dog looks out from a vehicle as she and her family wait for security clearance at a checkpoint on the outskirt of Bannu, a town on edge of the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 as they flee a military offensive in South Waziristan. Pakistani troops and the Taliban fought fierce battles in Waziristan, a militant sanctuary near the Afghan border, with both sides claiming early victories in an army campaign that could shape the future of the country’s battle against extremism. (AP Photo/Ijaz Muhammad)

Supporters of ousted Honduras’ President Manuel Zelaya clash with soldiers near the presidential residency Tegucigalpa, Monday, June 29. 2009. Police fired tear gas to hold back thousands of Hondurans outside the occupied presidential residency as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez appealed to Honduras to reinstate Zelaya as president. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Pakistani men pray next to a bullet-ridden vehicle parked in the compound of radical Lal Masjid or Red mosque as the chief cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz, not seen, talks to his supporters during Friday prayers, in Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 17, 2009. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A Hindu woman devotee offers prayers after taking a holy dip in the waters of river Ganga in the northern Indian city of Allahabad May 4, 2009. (REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash)

A hunter holds his hawk during an annual hunting competition in Chengelsy Gorge, some 150 km (93 miles) east of Almaty, Kazakhstan on December 5, 2009. (REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)

Fishermen row a boat in the algae-filled Chaohu Lake in Hefei, Anhui province, China on June 19, 2009. China invested 51 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) towards the construction of 2,712 projects for the treatment of eight rivers and lakes in 2009, Xinhua News Agency reported. (REUTERS/Jianan Yu)

A leopard walks with a tranquilizer dart hanging from its neck, in the residential area of Jyotikuchi in Guwahati, the capital city of the northeastern state of Assam, India on March 15, 2009. Three people were mauled by the leopard after the cat strayed into the city before it was tranquilized by forestry department officials. The full grown male leopard was wandering through a part of the densely populated city when curious crowds startled the animal, a wildlife official said. (BIJU BORO/AFP/Getty Images)

Thousands of scrapped taxis are abandoned at a yard in the center of Chongqing city on March 4, 2009. Traffic congestion and pollution have worsened dramatically in Chinese cities as the country’s long-running economic expansion has allowed increasing numbers of consumers to make big-ticket purchases such as cars. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

A mental patient named Totok reacts as he is given a shower at the Galuh foundation house in East Bekasi, outskirt of Jakarta, Indonesia on October 23, 2009. The Galuh foundation house has housed more than 285 underprivileged mental patients since it was founded in 1982 by Gendu Mulatip. (REUTERS/Beawiharta)

These enormous scrapers, seen through a storm of dust and a late spring snow shower, are moving earth to establish a new oil sands mine.

-Andriko and Rob

In person, Rushdie is relaxed, wittier and far better read than one would expect. He is funny, almost like a comic who can’t help himself but make jokes that push the limits just past the conventional mores of his audience by saying publicly what might be thought privately. His ability to sustain conversations on history and ethics is also a surprise. I have just time to put up some of his comments on mobilities, frontiers, movement, cities, space and culture, based on my brief notes.

Home:

‘Many of us now come from many places… Its ok to feel at home in different places.’

‘Once you’ve packed and unpacked as many books [as I have in my move to New York in 1999], then that’s where you live!’

[Home is where there are] ‘Echos of home which you never have anywhere elses…’

Travel

To the question about what are the most difficult frontiers in a person’s life, regarding a quote from one of his books that humans are ‘frontier crossing’ people:

‘The most difficult…most important frontier…my father asked if I wanted to go to boarding school in England. My decision when I was 12…’

And later: ‘In ‘Ground Beneath our Feet’ [the argument is made that]…There are two great dreams: the dream of home and of leaving…the direction of away, our imaginings, what excites us is that, …the outcast. … What if Odysseus had stayed home… the journey of the person who departs is absolutely at the heart of our dreams…’

Religion

‘Despite the storehouse of powerful narratives which religions are …[there is, we live in a] Twilight of the gods. A time comes when we have to take on for ourselves our responsibility for our fate…this is a kind of growing up… found in both Nordid and Greek mythologies.’

The last time the Gods appear… intervene in the affairs of man… is the wedding of Cadmus the inventor of the alphabet and the nymph Harmonia – the union of writing and peace.’

Later, Rushdie contrasts the foundations of contemporary European and American political cultures: ‘the Western European idea of freedomn is freedom from religion, not to be declared ‘anathema’ by the church. In the United States liberty is freedom to have religion…. the main preoccupation of the First Amendment.’

Islam:

‘It is important to understand that Islam has never created a free society…’

‘In an open society, people constantly questions their first foundations on which they are based and disagrees on them. [Thus] it shifts and those disagreements shift. …. Societies that don’t allow you to question the fundamental principals on which they are based are not free.’

‘Literalists who insist [that religion is based on] the actual word of god… Once can’t be quesitoned other things atrophy. …Questions are considered to be blasphemy.  A stultifying atmosphere results.’

 And later, recommending the book of David Eggers What is the What: ‘as for the question of ethics, I don’t want to be told by some priest how to live… it is the Mystery’

Freedom

‘An open society requires the ability to quesiton. If you can’t ask difficult questions, quesitons people don’t want asked… you can’t grow.’

‘If you look at the cites of the Muslim world in the 50s and 60s… very different from today… Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East… Cairo. If have witnessed their backsliding into a bog of narrow mindedness during my lifetime… in part a self-inflicted wound.’

‘Who would you rather be, a heretic, apostate or a blasphemer?’

The Global: East and West

‘Amerigo Vespucci was one of the first to understand that this [American continents] was a new thing, it was not India. It was very very big and another big ocean was on the other side… [The 1400s are] a world in which one can see our world at the moment of its birth. [The natives of the New World had a very different sense of time, which didn't invovle progress].. The time included the collision of two different existential ideas of how one lived … either …in a sense of eternity or in a Western European sy in dynamic linear time.’

‘What united these worlds [the Mughal and Florentine Courts] was a belief in magic, even more than god. If you gell in love…you went and got a love potion to make the other person love you back. …[It was a time of the] use of sexual charms. …how to manuals.’

‘The division of East and West is a retro notion which is broken down inside me. Bombay was built in India as an English city on Indian soil. [There is no ancient] Bombay… Old bombay was a fishing village.’

Rushdie’s hilarious comments on American politics and the election of Obama can be found in the broadcast version of this interview.

Salman Rushdi was in Edmonton to launch the inaugural Festival of Ideas and as part of the University of Alberta Centenary. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel at a full house in the Winspear Centre. Their conversation will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s ‘Writers and Company‘.

- Rob

At the 2005 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland, former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin recalls that ‘the emerging countries were invited to lunch, then dismissed’:

University of Toronto G8 Research Centre’s Director, John Kirton, quoted in the same article.  HE comments that Bush has ‘basically admitted that the G8 could not do the job.’

The President of the United States comes over to a meeting of finance ministers chaired by a Brazilian and says, ‘I need your help.;  You see a very important structural shift.

For the U.S. to suddenly realize that in fact the major emerging economies have to be at the table is a major, major step forard…  You cannot say that the Chinese are a major part of the solution but, by the way, when we sit down to discuss these things, you won’t be there.

As Ed Yardeni, a market strategist explains in the article:

If Abu Dhabi or Shanghai sets up a financial centre that allows everybody to skirt these regulations, we’ll still have all these excesses.

That these centres, which are not at the epicentre of global capital and information flows, to be understood as having the potential for independent action, indicates the sort of shift in perceptions that adds up to a new understanding amongst financial elites of the globally inter-knit nature of economies, and the networked, rather than simply hierarchical possibility of agency.  No one is able to insist that the financial world is solely the White House and a few New York and London trading floors.  Whether or not this world network of many centres is able to consolidate its status, a tectonic shift has taken place in the spatialization of world finance.  It is not surprising that Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) resorts to an interactive map to present the recent turmoil in financial markets.

A networked topology to global finance has long been a reality, as suggested in the diagram above of relationships between financial centres (each city is abbreviated as a pair of letters) from Peter Taylor’s book World City Network but it was governed hierarchically from a very few dominant centres, as if from the top of a pyramid.  This centre-periphery topology reinforced the power of the dominant centres and States.  However a more egalitarian network form would raise the importance of multilateral, transnational institutions capable of coordinating flows across the network, for example to mitigate the transmission of shocks or panics across the net.  Where some have argued that States have returned with a vengeance as major global actors, this vision suggests that these States will have to work together, muting their power and independence.

- Rob

Shaun Springer, chief executive of Napier Scott , the financial headhunter based in the City [of London], said he was hoping to pick up a bit of business over the next few weeks as staff at Lehman and other troubled banks looked for new berths; but he knows that the golden age of the City is over.

‘What we are living through now will reverberate through the rest of the century in the same way the Great Depression did last century. We are witnessing a very real power shift. Money is moving eastwards – while they’re creating wealth, we’re losing it hand over fist. Where it ends no one knows.

‘London has enjoyed an unprecedented decade of global dominance. Let’s hope people took lots of photos to look back on in the years to come’

This makes part in sense because surely the United States government requires its own bankers and bond holders who will underwrite the cost of their nationalization of significant parts of the financial sector which is now underway.  Where are the geographers commenting on this?  (Feel free to add links via Comments).

-Rob

‘The recent events in New Orleans show that civilization is merely a thin veneer’ said one British HK_New Orleans survivor in a local newspaper The Nottingham Evening Post. This reminds of Durkheim’s work on anomie and his far-from-optimistic analysis of the transitional process now commonly referred to within social theory as ‘modernity’. Durkheim (1984) wrote about the decline of organic solidarity as a consequence of the division of labour and about the need for the establishment of a new form of mechanical solidarity that was better attuned to the functional differentiation of social roles and identities. In a later work he suggested that social relationships could provide an effective protection against the pressures of modern life, which are now more commonly known as ‘individualization’. Finally, before he died, he wrote about the need for the development of a ‘conscience collectif’ within social systems, which needed to become increasingly abstracted from everyday life if they were to continue to function in modern life.

Durkheim’s sociological imagination has travelled quite well into the vernacular sociology of everyday life, particularly that of local media. We now tend to see modern society as constantly on the verge of breakdown, and events such as the aftermath if Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans ‘prove’ this to be true. It does not take much for social systems to plunge into lawlessness, for social norms and codes to be pulverised by the naked violence of ‘gun-toting criminals’, for ordinary, ‘law-abiding citizens’ to take to the streets and loot everything that moves.

The events of Hurricane Katrina have shown a peculiar inversion of the logic of globalization. The powerful, i..e the white western tourists, were now trapped in localities where their allegedly cosmopolitan lifestyle and knowledge brought them no advantages. They were at the mercy of those they would normally not seek to encounter, and probably most likely to avoid. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina showed that those who are used to being trapped in local settings, who do not possess cars, credit cards or other means of escape, were far better adapted to a post-apocalyptic life.

This, however, suggests that the situation one would describe as ‘anomic’ is not as disordered and pathological as an invocation of Durkheim’s social theoretical repertoire might allude to. Even in a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland, there still seem to be rules. This becomes more apparent, if one considers the ‘normal’ events of so-called pre-apocalyptic modernity, in which gang violence and violent policing produce excessive numbers of deaths on a day-to-day basis. There were perhaps more killings in the days before Katrina struck than afterwards.