Of Boudin and Hurricanes

The subject of borders looks simple.  A border should be that line encircling the edges of your country, state, county, or even private land.  This definition is echoed in “New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” by Nicholas De Genova, et al, who agree that borders have “often signified more or less a sharp division between here and there.” Once you look a little closer at those borders, though, that definition starts to look inadequate as a way of understanding borders.  I’ll be using some scholarship by experts, along with examples from my personal experience, to lay out why borders have to be understood as more than “that line encircling the edges.”

I grew up near Beaumont in a small town in Southeast Texas.  Unless you’re from the area, it might seem strange that I’ve specified “Southeast.”  It might be even more strange that I capitalized it.  I’ve done this because Southeast Texas (SETX) isn’t really a description of the geography of Texas—SETX isn’t actually that “south” when you look at the whole map. Corpus Christi isn’t included, and neither are other major cities along the (geographical, lower-case) southeast Texas coastline.  The identity of the SETX area (and I might get flak for defining it this way—communities are so difficult to define in a way that every member likes!) lies more in the economy of oil, Louisiana Cajun culture, and the ecology of swamp-adjacent land.

When answering the question “where are you from?” I generally give a variation on “Texas, but basically Louisiana.”  An outsider’s conception of Texas is usually that cowboy-riding-his-horse-through-the-desert stereotype, but this doesn’t capture my homeland by a long shot.  I grew up with boudin balls and links sold at high school football games, a house ravaged by Hurricane Rita in 2005, and an Exxon processing plant visible from my college library.  Those first two ideas, of boudin and hurricanes, are connected more with Louisiana in outsiders’ minds (though Hurricane Harvey may have shifted that conception), but I’ll focus in on boudin.

 

Boudin (BOO-dan) and other Cajun foods are thought of as inherently Louisianian.  No tourist would choose to visit Texas over New Orleans if they wanted to try gumbo.  But, as French philosopher Etienne Balibar argues in “World Borders, Political Borders,” our concrete ideas of borders, as useful as they are for governments, jurisdictions, and laws, are “profoundly inadequate” when applied to real-world relations of people on either side of a border.  Louisiana bleeds into Texas and vice versa.  A tourist can find stellar gumbo in either state, as culture refuses to end at hard lines without mingling.

 

Similarly to Balibar, Avtar Brah, in her book chapter “Diaspora, Border, and Transnational Identities” argues that borders are metaphorical divides rather than real ones, even though they have supposedly-real locations.  However, borders don’t function in reality the way they do in theory.  To get comfortable with this complication, let’s look at a map of Europe:

What do you notice about the country divisions?  They’ve got a black line dividing them, yes, but what else distinguishes each country from the others?

 

The answer:  each gets its own blanket of color.  Of course, lots of maps don’t use this technique, but it’s useful to illustrating Balibar’s argument that political borders aren’t just present at the edges of countries.  Rather, they exist as blankets or fields, constantly present even after you’ve “crossed” the outer border.  This idea is supported by examples of how migrants, even legal migrants, are frequently treated even in the geographical centers of a country:  immigration raids and discrimination (both institutional and individual) occur throughout countries, not simply at their geographical edges.

 

So:  not only are borders contact zones that bleed into/against one another (as Brah uses Anzaldúa to argue), they also function as blankets rather than hoops, especially in legal contexts.  Migration deemed “illegal” by a given country is treated equivalently, whether the migrant enters the country by walking across the edge-border or arrives in a geographical center via plane.  Cross-cultural/cross-border bleed occurs because people are people, not metaphorical lines on paper.  Activities like counter-mapping, defined by Nicholes De Genova, et al, can help us further understand how this imaginary concept affects us in reality.  Maybe this way, Louisianians will stop telling me I can't find good gumbo across the state line.