A borderland analytic: Thinking uneven development from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands

Abstract

Economic geographers have long emphasized the ways in which borders are central to capitalism's uneven development. Yet even as scholarship outlines how borders are central devices for the articulation of the global political economy, they often are framed as functional to the system's immanent dynamics or as theoretical devices, with borderlands invisibilized as complex sites and spaces in their own right. Drawing on Margaret Ramírez's concept of a borderland analytic, I ask what a position from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands might help us to understand about capitalism's uneven development, both in particular and more generally. On the one hand, a borderland analytic connotes an empirical return to border spaces as a way to reconstruct how the border, and processes of bordering, underpin the creation of relational (and racialized) hierarchies that assign differential value to human life, labor, and place in the borderlands, effectively underwriting the forms of economic devaluation key to the region's ‘competitiveness’ in a restructuring global economy. On the other hand, a borderland analytic connotes a methodological orientation to the work that borders do as a part of processes of uneven development more broadly, which evolves through the (re)ordering and recoding of sociospatial differences, rather than from their elimination.