Page 176 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

LOCAL/GLOBAL NEGOTIATIONS

States, Anzaldúa celebrates the ‘new consciousness’ that has grown in her. ‘To
survive the Borderlands’, she exclaims, ‘you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads’
(ibid.: 195).
Writing from an entirely different socio-spatial positionality, Iain Chambers
(1994) also emphasizes the transgressive and redemptive cultural effects of crossing
borders. Entering the cultural borderlands, as he eloquently describes:

I perhaps learn to tread lightly along the limits of where I am speaking
from. I begin to comprehend that where there are limits, there also exist
other voices, bodies, worlds, on the other side, beyond my particular
boundaries. In the pursuit of my desires across such frontiers I am
paradoxically forced to face my confines, together with that excess to
sustain the dialogues across them. Transported some way into this border
country, I look into a potentially further space: the possibility of another
place, another world, another future.
(Chambers 1994: 5)
Yet we all know that traffic through a crossroads – and the borderlands can
be described as a space where the condition of crossroads traffic is normalized – is
never free-flowing and uncontrolled: there are traffic lights, road signs and rules
which all road users are supposed to obey, and those who approach the crossroads
from a minor road are supposed to give way to those passing through from the main
road. Consequently, borderlands are generally heavily policed and patrolled, and
it depends on your identity card, your credentials, what you own, or simply the
way you look, and in the intellectual borderlands of cultural studies: which theorists
you have read, how you are treated, whether you are searched, whether you are
let in and out, and so on. In other words, these interstitional spaces are pervaded
by power structures of their own. As the Mexican performance artist Guillermo
Gómez-Peña notes, referring as does Anzaldúa to the Mexican/US border,
‘Crossing the border from North to South has very different implications than
crossing the same border from South to North; the border cannot possibly mean
the same to a tourist as it does to an undocumented worker’ (1996: 9). Indeed, it
is precisely because the borderlands are a site for potentially conflictive juxta-
positionings and collisions between incompatible or irregular types that the
operation of regulatory and classificatory powers is intensified here. In this sense,
the voluntaristic desire for dialogues with ‘the other side’ in the border country
expressed by Chambers may be a luxury pursuit possible only from a position
of relative, arguably Eurocentric privilege. As Gómez-Peña pointedly reminds us,
‘People with social, racial, or economic privilege have an easier time crossing
physical borders, but they have a much harder time negotiating the invisible borders
of culture and race’ (ibid.). In other words, it matters who you are in border
encounters, as it does matter which borders, both physical and symbolic, are being
crossed. Chambers, in fact, does not present his discourse as context-neutral: the
historical experiences which made him reflect on the necessity of ‘border dialogues’

165