Identity, Movement and Response

Abstract

Borders run across land but through people. On maps they appear as fine one-dimensional lines, whereas on the ground they have many dimensions. In human terms, it is impossible to understand borders, and indeed the peripheral relations between the states and societies they contain, without understanding how it is to live along them. Borderlands are boundaries-in-depth, a space around a line, the place where state meets society and “where no one ever feels at home”. They are a terra de pas (footlands or steplands) to Catalonians and “the third country” to Mexican-Americans. The academic definitions (since academics rarely stick to one definition) are “sub-national areas whose economic and social life is directly and significantly affected by proximity to an international boundary ”, or, more extensively, “zones of varying widths, in which people have recognizable configurations of relationships to people inside that zone, on both sides of the borderline but within the cultural landscape of the borderlands, and, as people of the border, special relationships with other people and institutions in their respective nations and states”.