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Head for the Border

March 08, 2016
Head for the Border © Andrei Tudoran/Shutterstock.com

For many of us who spent evenings slouched in front of the TV, the phrase “Head for the Border” evokes savory tacos accompanied by bright colors speaking happily of queso, salsa, jalapeños, and, of course, Mexico. Recently, our border with Mexico has been brought to mind again with the visit of the ever-popular Pope Francis, who made his last stop on a tour of Mexico in Juarez, a city surviving amid spates of drug wars and which looks baldly across the Rio Grande at the Texas city of El Paso.

For many of us who spent evenings slouched in front of the TV, the phrase “Head for the Border” evokes savory tacos accompanied by bright colors speaking happily of queso, salsa, jalapeños, and, of course, Mexico. Recently, our border with Mexico has been brought to mind again with the visit of the ever-popular Pope Francis, who made his last stop on a tour of Mexico in Juarez, a city surviving amid spates of drug wars and which looks baldly across the Rio Grande at the Texas city of El Paso. Francis spoke of migrants struggling to keep together families across that divide and pointed fingers at governments not doing enough to help their citizens find decent work within their own borders, so they don’t have to head across others. And he also pointed to some US presidential aspirants, reminding them of their Christian duty of charity to those who feel forced to flee.

Not too many weeks ago, another pop figure, Queen Bey—as she’s known to fans—stomped on the grass of the Super Bowl 50 stadium, followed by a posse of strong women and singing “Formation,” her paean to the border she crossed separating female stars from male star power, and to her own border-crossing ethnic mix: “My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana / You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” Of course, many other borders were crossed with her performance, among them that between ordinary citizens and police officers assigned to protect them. HuffPost Black Voices reported recently a counterstatement by president of the Miami police union Javier Ortiz, who endorsed a police boycott of Beyoncé’s upcoming concert at the Marlin stadium, saying, “The fact that Beyoncé used this year’s Super Bowl to divide Americans by promoting the Black Panthers and her antipolice message shows how she does not support law enforcement." Queen Bey crossed a border firm for them and for many other steadfast law-and-order sympathizers.

Of course, we can add to our tales of border-crossing anxiety the 2016 presidential election, where we have watched in carnival-like fascination the candidates argue nastily about borders, testing, on the one hand, our American mettle to accept more war-torn Syrians within our borders and still dreaming, on the other, about building a wall against hapless Mexicans trying to cross the Rio Grande or a parched desert to a life of freedom. And, of late, some presidential aspirants would like to send at least one of their competitors across another border, back to Canada, the birthplace that makes him “ineligible” to run.

I have tried to cross a border of my own recently, in a personal struggle with Rosetta Stone’s gentle promptings to help me learn Spanish. Amid my tongue-twisted efforts to roll my R’s and utter whisper-soft O’s, I am greeted by happy pictures of students in Latin America, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom speak other languages that now have new Spanish names for me. We are all part of one happy family, speaking a language and crossing borders to learn new ones. My digital Rosetta Stone teacher displays on my screen an untroubled world where we all cross borders through language, and presumably, we all get along. Could it really be that easy, if I just learned Spanish?

Human border crossings are complicated. All involve myriad factors that make up our response to others as human beings. Those of us who teach about human response to others in language perhaps have a special responsibility to help unpack that complexity by showing how language use every day has the potential to join us or divide us. My colleague Patti Wojahn and I over the past several years have explored this issue, producing the edited collection Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines across America. We open the volume with our reflection on what democratic participation implies for communication, exploring, for instance, the simple gesture of making ourselves ready to listen to someone else (which Donald Davidson has called “charity” in his book Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation); the more complex choice not only to accept what others say but also to accept their bodily difference (a virtue that Rosalyn Diprose has named “corporeal generosity” in her book Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas); and the dangerous implications of opening our borders to everyone (an invitation that Jacques Derrida has framed as “hospitality,” as Giovanna Borradori reports in her interview of him in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida).

Crossing Borders brings together the research of scholars and teachers who have tried to parse the effects of all kinds of border crossings in language—writing and talk that make people citizens or foreigners, suburbanites or urbanites, silent victims or empowered resisters, non-English speakers or dual-language speakers, reasoners or dreamers, and friends or enemies. They explore border crossings in countries, cities, neighborhoods, and classrooms, offering insights on how language can both bring us together and divide us. We hope their studies will lead more scholars to explore how language can ease these border crossings, making it possible for all in our democratic society to participate without fear of being stopped at someone’s border. The dream we dare to dream is that with a little help from teachers and scholars who care, more of us head fearlessly with hope for borders, eagerly waiting to cross and accept what we might learn there with charity, generosity, and true hospitality.


Barbara Couture has held several academic positions, ranging from professor of English to university president. Her publications include six books, including Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries and The Private, the Public, and the Published, and numerous chapters and articles. She received the 2000 CCCC Outstanding Book Award for Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric and was awarded the distinction of Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing in 2010.

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