UC San Diego

In her dissertation Magalí Murià studies how policies of territorial control at the border have affected everyday life in Tijuana, reorganizing practices of consumption. I argue that regarding consumption, this border city has undergone a process of infrastructural and cultural integration with Mexico, as well as a physical detachment from the binational region in which it is immersed. Paradoxically, this process was accentuated by NAFTA, since the intensified cross-border flow of goods came accompanied by restrictions to the movement of people, placing border populations at a crossroads between opposing forces of openness and closure. Based on an ethnography combined with historical research, I address how public policy in the region has reshaped local markets. Also, I study how Tijuana residents connect, through the goods they buy and the places where they consume, to Mexico and the United States. By examining patterns of consumption, I show some of the systems of difference and exclusion that nation states have introduced and enforced. I also explain how physical barriers that restrict cross-border mobility rearrange identities and boundaries both between north and south, and within border cities. This has reorganized social relations in Tijuana, and changed how Tijuanenses relate to the space where they live. My work contributes to the debate about the role of nation states and borders in the global economy, from the perspective of Tijuana residents, who have seen their everyday life increasingly conditioned by manifestations of state power and a more impenetrable border