Iroquois Border Crossings

Abstract

In recent years, border studies have emerged as a new set of theoretical approaches to the intertwined issues of nationalism, national borders, and citizenship. This work has largely emphasized the challenges that Chicana/o and Latina/o cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands pose to notions of belonging to one culturally homogeneous nation, which corresponds to the outlines of the nation-state. While border studies originally emerged from analyses of a particular geographic place (the U.S. Southwest), notions of border crossings and border identities have more recently come to be identified with members of a Latina/o diaspora that transcends the United States and Latin American nation-states. Thus, border studies’ grounding in a specific place has given way to a sense of belonging that is no longer tied to place of residence and to which political limitations like nation-state borders are becoming less and less meaningful.