Missions of The Border

Anthropological Theory
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The Classifying and Value-Filtering Missions of Borders

Michael Kearney
Anthropological Theory 2004; 4; 131
DOI: 10.1177/1463499604042811
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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 4(2): 131156
DOI: 10.1177/1463499604042811
The classifying and

value-filtering missions
of borders
Michael Kearney
University of California, Riverside, USA
Abstract
Using examples of migration of Mixtecs from Oaxaca and of Mexican nationals in
general across the USMexican border, this article explores and illustrates the
proposition that the political importance of social borders varies directly with the
degree to which they serve two basic missions. The first of these missions is
classificatory in the sense of defining, categorizing, and otherwise affecting the
identities that are circumscribed and divided by borders and that cross them. Such
kinds of identities are ethnicity, nationality, the cultural experience, markers of social
class and so on. The second mission is also classificatory, but in the sense of affecting
the economic CLASS positions and relationships of migrants who cross borders. This
second mission of borders is effected by differentially filtering and transforming forms
of economic value that flow across them and between identities defined by them. It is
argued that these two complementary processes classification of identities and
CLASSification (uneven value exchange) are the primary de facto missions of
significant borders.
Key Words
borders class identity migration Mixtec value
Four leading scholars of borders and border areas Robert Alvarez, Hastings Donnan,
Josiah Heyman, and Thomas Wilson focus our primary attention as anthropologists
on the political ecology of formal geopolitical borders rather than metaphoric cultural
borders.1 This theme is also the main concern of this article, but, like Alvarez, Donnan,
Heyman, and Wilson, I am also concerned with cultural borders that demarcate identities such as nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, and so forth. A border in this case the
USMexican border so defined in both senses, is a composite geographic, legal, institutional, and sociocultural structure and process. Understanding of this complex whole
requires an integrated holistic anthropological approach that combines and transcends
the particular interests of more focused disciplinary concerns such as those of political
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)
science, sociology, law, economics, and cultural studies. Thus, a major task of such a
robust anthropology is to explore how the two types of borders the geopolitical and
the cultural are related. This article explores such integration in the case of the
USMexican border and does so by examining two effects of this border, namely how
it classifies identities and how it moderates cross-border flows of forms of economic
value. The border in this extended sense is thus not just the boundary line demarcating
the United States and Mexico, but also the immense bureaucratic, law enforcement,
political, and sociocultural apparatus that formally and informally defines it and persons
who are divided by it and who cross it.
The analysis offered here requires that we distinguish borders, as just discussed, from
boundaries. Such a distinction is necessary to enhance ethnographic description and
analytic power (see Kearney, 1991). Here it is important to note that a border is a vaguely
defined area that exists on both sides of a boundary. As used here, boundaries are the
imaginary lines, running through borders, that states draw to demarcate their territories.
As such, boundaries of states have deep legal and psychological significances for the definition not only of territory demarcated by them, but also for conceptual definitions of
identity such as citizenship, foreigner, alien and so on. Borders may or may not
include boundaries, and here it is important to note that the USMexican border is transected by two boundaries: one drawn and defined by Mexico and the other drawn and
defined by the United States. We can refer to them, respectively, as the MexicoUS
boundary and the USMexican boundary.
In this article, we are concerned with the USMexican boundary and with migration
across it from Mexico into the United States.2 While the US and the Mexican boundaries coincide geometrically, they differ greatly in how they are defined and managed
within their respective national legal systems and national sensibilities. These two
different boundaries have distinctly different influences on the greater border area. Thus,
it is important to note that crossing the border in one direction is not the same as
crossing it in the other, since the border has the two different boundaries and regimes
of power, noted earlier, which profoundly shape the experience of entry into and exit
from their respective national spaces.
The theoretical model presented in this article is substantiated by Heymans extensive ethnographic research on and analysis of the policies and practices of the US
Immigration and Naturalization Service at the USMexican border and related issues,
which the reader is encouraged to consult (e.g. Heyman, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1998a,
1998b and especially 2001). This model is intended as a step toward a method and
theory for the comparative anthropology of borders and their boundaries, and more
specifically as a presentation of the hypothesis that significant borders effect certain
unequal exchanges of economic value between types of persons and regions defined by the
boundaries in question. In both cases, in the example offered here, the uneven exchange
of value is effected by migration across the boundary from a sending to a receiving
area.
This terminology, which is common in the migration literature, refers to regions that
send and receive migrants. Herein I extend these terms to refer to uneven exchanges
of economic value between such regions and between migrants and residents belonging
to them. This theoretical perspective draws on theories of colonial and other forms of
unequal exchange between regions. Such uneven transactions are mediated by various
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KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders
mechanisms such as mercantilist policies, tariffs, interest payments on national loans and
the taking of profits by multinational corporations. Here, however, we are concerned
with how the functioning of borders and migration across them may also affect such net
inter-personal and inter-regional transfers of value.
In order to work toward a more productive definition of borders, I would like to
propose that boundaries and their corresponding border regimes have two main
missions. The first of these missions is classificatory in the sense of defining, categorizing and otherwise affecting the identities of persons who are circumscribed and divided
by borders and who cross them. Such kinds of identity are ethnicity, nationality, the
cultural experience, markers of social class and so on. The second mission is also classificatory, but in the sense of affecting the economic CLASS positions and relationships
of migrants who cross borders (see later). This second mission of borders is effected by
differentially filtering and transforming forms of economic value that flow across them.
I contend that these two complementary processes the two senses of classification
are the primary de facto missions of significant borders. Accordingly, the border policies
and bordering practices of a nation-state can be seen as means to obtain a net flow of
economic value across its border into its territory by variable classification in the two
senses noted here.3
The proposition that borders have specific missions is suggested by James Fernandezs
(1974) discussion of the mission of metaphors. Fernandezs article was written before
and indeed anticipated current interest in how identities and cultural borderlands (e.g.
Rosaldo, 1989) are constructed. And whereas much of the current interest in identity
and identity politics takes a cultural studies or postmodern turn that considers identities to be arbitrary cultural constructions, Fernandezs theory of metaphor reveals how
a seemingly random bricolage of identities is indeed based on concrete aspects of the
material world. He thus presents a theory of cultural construction that links the
constructions to material referents. The approach to bordered identities presented here
also pushes into the material underpinnings of identity formation and their corresponding and necessary relation to class differentiation. Thus, in a manner similar to the
way in which Fernandezs metaphors have as their primary mission the concretization of
identities that would not otherwise exist, so do I propose that borders have similar
missions that are indispensable in the political economy of nation-states.4 Here again it
must be emphasized that these missions, which in final analysis are primarily economic,
are fulfilled by the power of borders to shape the cultural construction of the identities
of persons who are encompassed and excluded by them, who cross them, and who are
otherwise defined by them. Another border strategy of mature and emergent nationstates is to seek to relocate their boundaries so as to redefine territory and populations.
This type of geopolitical border dynamics is beyond the scope of this article.
IDENTITIES, BORDERS, ORDERS
To begin to address the classificatory and value-filtering missions of borders I would

like to offer a conceptual framework. For several years I participated in an international workshop that devised a useful triad of terms specifically identities, borders
and orders, or IBO (see Figure 1).5 One may foreground any member of this triad and
examine it in its mutually constitutive relationship with the others. Thus, I am
focusing here on the USMexican border, but am doing so with a concern with
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Figure 1. IdentitiesBordersOrders.
political order, namely, aspects of the nation-state such as immigration law, policy,
theory and research, and culturally constructed identities, for example citizens, legal
residents and illegals.
A basic assumption of this triad is that, in specific cases, each of its components is
shaped by its relationship to the other two. Thus, an identity is a culturally constructed
dimension of personhood (Kearney, 1996: 13740). Two relevant critical points here are
that identity is shaped in some measure by being within a border or by crossing a border.
Thus, in terms of formal legal classification, on one side of the MexicanUS border some
persons may be Mexican nationals, but on the other side they may be Mexican nationals who are also undocumented immigrants, or legal residents, or non-immigrant
visitors, and potentially US citizens (see Heyman, 2001).
These formal, legal identities coexist and interact in complex ways with informal,
popular patterns of sociocultural classification in a process that is integral to the overall
dynamics of bordering. Thus, in this broader classificatory practice, a border crosser
legally defined as an undocumented immigrant is apt to be informally identified as and
to self-identify by the popular term illegal alien. The application of this folk category
to persons who technically might be undocumented immigrants or legal permanent
residents, or even citizens defies the legal principle of a presumption of innocence prior
to the proving of guilt. But as Heyman (1991, 1994, 1998a, 2001) shows, such informal
classification, pervasive as it is, is a major component of the overall classificatory practices concerning immigrants in US society. Another example of how attribution of
terms reveals common assumptions about identities is the pervasive use of immigration
and immigrant in speaking of border crossings and border crossers in innumerable cases
when it would be ethnographically more accurate to refer to migration and migrant. The
former terms are consistent with widespread popular assumptions that most illegal aliens
are illegal immigrants, that is, persons who have come to stay, rather than, perhaps,
temporary and circular border crossers.
As for orders, implied in order, is the exercise of official and non-official forms of power
to make territorial distinctions that is, to draw, define, and manage borders on the earth
that affect identities. Thus, according to this usage, the boundary aspect of a border is a
demarcation that both gives shape to nation-states, and other territorial entities, and that
has the power to define the identities of persons who cross them, are bounded by them,
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and excluded by them. A border also demarcates the internal domain within which this
order has the power to construct and define legitimate identities as contrasted with
illegitimate ones, for example undocumented. Furthermore, a border has this effect
because there is some constellation of formal and informal power, that is to say, some
political order, that constructs and enforces borders so that they function in this manner.
In addition to drawing and managing geopolitical borders, orders, in both their formal
institutional forms and their more everyday informal popular forms (as the language
usages noted earlier), also shape the identities of persons divided by and crossing borders.
By the same token, orders such as nation-states are largely defined by being bordered
vis--vis other orders. Hence, each of the three terms of the triad (Figure 1) shapes the
other two (see Lapid, 2001).
By bringing together its elements IBO is an advance on border theory. It generates
important questions about borders and leads to powerful analysis. It does not, however,
lead us to ask why, at any moment in its history, a border assumes the political significance and forms that it does. What I propose is that the IBO triad lacks the theoretical
power to do so because it is not yet sufficiently anthropological to deal with questions
of cross-border flows of value and economic class that are the concerns of this article.
Nor, would I submit, does it enable an incisive history of the present USMexican
border that explains the markedly different forms and functions that the border has had
at different historic moments since its formation in 1848.6
With its relational dynamics, the IBO model makes a significant conceptual contribution that is much more than the sum of its parts. But seen from an anthropological
perspective, IBO is basically a folk model, in other words, a construct conceptualized
within the same basic sociology and politics of knowledge that shape and define its individual components. As a concept its language and theoretical perspective are essentially
coterminous with popular speech and folk categories, and thus not sufficiently displaced
from its subject of investigation to be able to comprehensively envision it in a deeper
anthropological sense. In other words, the language of IBO derives primarily from the
disciplines of political science, international relations, and geography, which themselves
are intimately imbricated in the language, culture, and politics of the nation-states that
they seek to investigate. Thus, to the large degree that the aforementioned academic
disciplines, like national borders, are artifacts of the state and popular culture, they do
not have sufficient social and intellectual displacement from the state and from popular
culture to be able to gain a comprehensive vision of themselves and their artifacts, such
as the borders that they, as a complex order, create.7
A stronger version of this theoretical position is that because the language and models
of political science and international relations are closely related to the language and
structure of the state, their use functions in the construction and constitution the
reproduction of the same identities, borders, and orders that they study. That is, many
of the terms, concepts, and data employed in the social science discourse are basically
the same terms and concepts as those used by the subjects of investigation politicians,
bureaucrats, and the public. Thus, I propose as a working assumption that much mainstream sociology, political science, economics, and some anthropological approaches to
migration and border studies employ terminology and implicit cultural assumptions that
underlie and inform the political order of their respective nation-states, including their
borders, identities, and immigration policies. If this is so, then research and analysis based
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on such assumptions participate in the construction of the phenomena that they seek to
study.8
This strong version of the theory is suggested by Corrigan and Sayers (1985) analysis
of the role of government institutions and practices in state formation and goes beyond
it by suggesting that institutionalized social sciences especially those social sciences that
have close connections with government participate in the formation of constructs
that are integral components and practices of the state and of popular culture, which in
turn are the institutional and quotidian sociocultural matrices in which the social
sciences are embedded and shaped (Abrams, 1988). Similarly, an applied anthropology
to the degree that it is in the service of some official government entity and seeking to
promote its projects via social engineering also no doubt employs and reifies the official
and popular terms, categories, and social identities, and as such perpetuates the hegemonic system of classification of those identities.
The approach taken here and held to be necessary for a more objective scientific
method is to seek a socio-semantic displacement to a more inclusive theoretical vantage
point that takes the official terms of identity more as objects to be analyzed, rather than
as the basic categories of analysis and policy. For if indeed most scholarship about borders
and migration is developed within and is an expression of a national political sociology
of knowledge, then what is called for is a sociology or better said, an anthropology
of knowledge that examines the ideological dispositions and corresponding theoretical
and methodological assumptions of the prevalent sociological, economic, and political
science approaches to migration.9 To achieve such a theoretical shift we need a displacement of theory construction to a different social-intellectual space that enjoys some relatively greater degree of freedom from the political discourses of nation-states than is the
case with most conventional migration theory. In a word, we need to theorize more
anthropologically; we must disentangle theory from affairs of the state, including its
disciplines and their language.10 Such displacement is necessary for the advancement of
a more conceptually emancipated anthropology, that is, an anthropology that attains
greater distance from specific local social contexts and their corresponding world view
assumptions as they are inscribed in, for example, language specific constellations of
IBO.
Such displacement is facilitated by an anthropological perspective that envisions space
and social processes transnationally. Indeed anthropology is the premiere transnational
discipline by virtue of its distinctive sociology of knowledge and its focus on communities beyond the national borders of its own institutional centers. In spite of some of the
colonial origins of anthropology and some linguistic traces of them (Kearney, 1996:
2630), it more than any other discipline has achieved a transborder sociology of knowledge that best enables the displacement of theory from national institutional and
hegemonic semantic contexts to other social and conceptual fields. It is with the intent
of further advancing such anthropological displacement to another different sociology
of knowledge of borders that I propose a second triad of terms CLASSValueField,
or CVF as a complement to the first. When combined, the two triads of concepts
constitute a paradigm that interrelates all six terms. Whereas most research on migration across borders is written mainly with the terminology of, and from the perspective
of, the first triad (Figure 1), herein I am attempting to extend this work into the theoretical and practical realms of the second triad (Figure 2). The basic proposition here is
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Figure 2. CLASSValueField.
that a robust anthropology of migration must attend to and integrate the concerns of
both triads.
VALUE, CLASS, FIELD
I was led to devise this second triad because of a notable missing element in the first
triad and the rich discussions and research that it generates, namely class a term with
two fundamentally distinct meanings, which are distinguished by reference to Figure
3.11 In common speech and most social science language, class refers to cultural characteristics of persons and groups that roughly correspond to their occupations and income
levels. In this sense it is appropriate to speak of, for example, working-class culture or
elite-class identity, whereby such features are reflected in, among other ways, style of
speech and cultural tastes. This meaning of class refers to a socially acquired culturally
constructed component of a persons or groups overall identity, comparable to other
dimensions of their identity such as their gender, ethnicity, race, nationality and so on
(Figure 3) and as such belongs to the IBO triad (Figure 1).12
CLASS AND class
In contrast to class as used earlier in the usual sense of an identity, such as working class,
capitalist class, peasant and so on, is its usage as introduced here, and that is the sense
of class as a relationship and a process. It is this dynamic sense of CLASS (written with
capital letters to distinguish it from the other senses) that is used in the CVF Triad
(Figure 2). The nature of this CLASS process is relationships of unequal exchange of
economic value among the identities positioned in fields in which value is unevenly produced,
consumed, and exchanged. Thus, whereas class identities are culturally constructed
features of persons and groups, what I propose to call their CLASS nature is, consistent
with Marxian theory, determined by their positions within and relationships within a
mode of production such that one is, for example, either a worker or a capitalist, a serf
or a lord, who is defined as such by economic and political relationships with other identities. Thus, CLASS, as I propose to use it in this second sense, is distinct from while
dependent on the various forms of culturally constructed identity. Also, I propose that
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it is a more fundamental dimension of social being and relationships one that shapes
and is shaped by the formation of economic and power relationships among variants of
the identities, for example upper and lower classes, men and women, whites and
blacks, white women and black men and so on.13 Accordingly, CLASS is conceptually distinct from identity (including class identity: see Figure 3), although, among
humans, some culturally constructed identities are necessary for the existence of CLASS
differences, which make possible CLASS relationships, as just defined.14
The inherent core meaning of the sense of CLASS as a relationship of uneven
exchange was first developed by Marx with reference to the specific case of accumulation
of surplus value from workers by capitalists in the production process (Marx, 1967: Part
III). In this relationship the value that workers added to products in excess of the wages
they earned, minus costs of production, amounted to surplus value. Herein I am generalizing this basic idea of surplus value as a process and a CLASS relationship to other
forms of value and to borders as constructors and demarcations of classes and as mechanisms for the uneven CLASS distribution of value.
VALUE
A robust anthropological theory of value must be able to move toward two goals. The
first is to facilitate a seamless integration of the treatment of infrastructural economic
phenomena and processes with symbolic ones having to do with the differentiation of
identities and CLASS (Figure 3). In other words, it must devise an approach to value
that attends equally to its material, monetary, social, and symbolic forms and how they
are distributed and how they are in various ways inter-convertible. The second goal is
to enable documentation and analysis of value flows and conversions that take place
between different economic formations. Thus, for example, whereas Marxian economics
and anthropology are working mainly with a theory of value that was derived from
analysis of capitalist society, a robust anthropology must also attend to how value is
created, distributed, and converted not only in non-capitalist formations, but also how
it flows between various capitalist and non-capitalist communities. In the particular case
that we are examining here, such value flows occur between capitalist and non-capitalist
communities and regions, and across an international border. The immediate task is to
consider how this border affects these flows.
Value is perhaps the most controversial concept in Marxian economics (see Mohun,
1994) and I do not presume here to resolve the debates that swirl around it. Rather, I
offer a broadened anthropological approach to value that recognizes, per Marx, that
abstract value, which is the basis for the exchange of commodities and which derives
from the value of the human labor that created them, is but one, albeit important, source
of value in human relations. This basic Marxian paradigm can be extended, and made
more anthropological, by combining it with the concepts of capital as elaborated by
Bourdieu (1986), which manifests in economic, social, intellectual, and symbolic forms.
Like Marx, who deals with value as both infrastructural embodied labor power and
material resources and abstract symbolic value, so too does Bourdieu deal with forms of
capital that span the divide between base and superstructural phenomena. Furthermore,
Bourdieus work (e.g., 1984) . . . integrates the analysis of economic value with cultural
values by way of developing a theory of class differentiation, thus preserving the original
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Marxist project of theorizing class in terms of the production, accumulation, transformation, and consumption of value (Kearney, 1996: 161).15
CLASS AND IDENTITY
In the classic Marxian case, two culturally constructed identities (workers and owners)
come together in the production process so that an uneven exchange of economic value
takes place between them, that is, a transfer of value from one CLASS position to
another. But this unequal exchange is only possible because of the different identities
present at the two CLASS positions in a social field and the political relationship between
these positions. These CLASS relationships are thus inscribed in a complex set of legal,
cultural, linguistic, and embodied forms16 and practices, in other words, an order. The
primary point here is that the CLASS relationship is synonymous with such uneven
exchange of economic value within an economic field. This structural relational feature
of CLASS as resulting from positions in a field of unevenly produced, exchanged, and
consumed value is distinct from, but depends on the corresponding cultural correlates
of, the person or groups so positioned their other class identities. A working assumption here is that we only become deeply concerned with relationships among identities
when we sense that some such relationship of value inequality exists among them. Were
it not for such unequal exchange, namely such CLASS relationships among identities,
we would simply celebrate their cultural singularity. But we realize intuitively at some
level of comprehension that contending identities exist in fields and relationships of such
uneven exchange of value. And, as noted earlier, such relationships of uneven exchange
are by definition CLASS relationships. But because humans are all members of one
species, these CLASS relationships must of necessity be based on some artificially
constructed distinctions, that is, on the construction of corresponding identities, be they
nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, class and so on (see Figure 3).17
The second triad is a complement to the first in that each refers to a different phenomenal and conceptual sphere.18 First of all, the terms of the IBO triad refer to popular
culturally constructed artifacts, and as such are phenomenally located in the cultural
superstructure of a social formation its formal legal system and its informal social
classification of cultural identities, borders, and so forth.19 In contrast, each of the terms
of the CVF triad refers to and relates to phenomena that are based in the material infrastructure of a social formation, but that also have manifestations or permutations that
appear in the social and cultural superstructure. Value, for example, can exist in material
forms such as tangible property, commodities, and embodied labor power, and it can
also be converted into paper and electronic money and other material and immaterial
symbolic forms (Bourdieu, 1986; Kearney, 1996: 15868, 2004; Maurer, 1999). Similarly field can be tangible ground that is distributed to persons and upon which they are
distributed, as well as a socioeconomic space in which the persons are distributed in ways
that reflect how the ground is distributed to them.
Similarly, the distinction between CLASS and identity is a fundamental difference
between the two triads. Note that whereas identities are culturally constructed, CLASS
is a position and a relationship within a field of unevenly distributed value. Thus a CLASS
relationship exits between two identities when they exchange unequal quantities of value
such that one is a net receiver and the other is a net donor (see later). Therefore, CLASS
is not opposed to identity. Rather, each identity (including class identity) is associated
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Figure 3. CLASS and Identities.
with a CLASS position vis--vis one or more other identities. In much contemporary
social analysis, attention focuses on class identity, which is treated only or mainly
without reference to the corresponding CLASS relations that underlie it and the other
identities. CLASS is disregarded and class is rightly treated largely as an identity,
comparable in its conceptual status to, for instance, race and ethnicity, as is evident in
courses, symposia, books and so on that deal with various permutations of, for example,
ethnicity, race, class, and gender. Such treatment of class thus leads to endless debates
about whether it, or say race, nationality, ethnicity and so on, is a more important
feature of personal and collective identity. What the presence of CLASS as an element
in the second triad, in contrast to the identities (including class) in the first, asserts is
that consideration of the relationship between identities and CLASS is not one of
eitheror, but always one of bothand. This relationship between CLASS and identity is
not therefore best thought of in terms of which is the most important aspect of a person
or group. Instead, it is best to consider how they both function together, and in particular, how identities function in the structuring of CLASS relations among persons and
groups, in other words, the uneven production, exchange, and consumption of value.
Figure 3 depicts this relationship between CLASS and identities.20
MIGRATION, IBO, AND CVF
We can now define migration in the terms of the two triads. In terms of IBO, migration is movement across a significant ordered border that changes identity. Moreover, in
terms of CVF, migration is movement across a border that bisects a field and that changes
both the identity and, most likely, the CLASS position and relationships of the migrant.
Thus, a field is a space with geographic and abstract coordinates in which persons are
located, move, and migrate. Similarly, forms of value are distributed in fields, where they
are acquired, lost, transformed, and transferred among persons and groups, thus giving
a basis to CLASS positions and relationships within the field. Fields, like geographic
territory, are dissected by borders, which can be seen as devices that control flows of
persons and forms of value within the fields (see Donnan and Wilson, 1999: 1078).
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The major ethnographic and analytic task in the study of migration then becomes
comprehending the double CLASSificatory impact of movement across borders on, first,
the construction of the identities (including class culture) and, second, on the CLASS
positions and relationships of migrants and immigrants vis--vis other identities. Here
it is important to recall that CLASS in this sense is a relationship of uneven value
exchange.
BORDERS AND CLASSIFICATION
A primary mission of borders is to CLASSify persons and things that cross them. But
in speaking of CLASSification in this sense we must invoke the two senses of class
contained in the verb classify, each of which corresponds to one of the triads (see earlier).
The first has to do with classifying in a nominal sense of assigning identities as, for
example, the Immigration and Naturalization Service does everyday at ports of entry,
and during immigration hearings and so on, as Heyman (1995, 1998a, 2001) well
describes. This form of classification thus belongs to the realm of the first triad of terms
in that it is a function exercised by some official and unofficial order (including the
public at large) that affects identities of persons who cross and who are defined by its
borders.
But this term classification also carries within it the sense of social CLASS. Buried
within this form of nominal classification are acts of socioeconomic CLASSification that
belong to the second triad of terms in that they affect the social CLASS position and
relationships of the person bearing the identity so classified in the first sense. We can
and must distinguish between the nominal categorical classification of identities associated with the first triad of terms versus the socioeconomic CLASSification of the second
triad that affects the CLASS position and relationships of migrants, remembering that
the seemingly formal and informal assigning of identities classification in the first sense
always has implications for CLASSification in the second sense.
Indeed, I propose that in almost every case of contested identity construction and
the formal and informal construction of the identities of border crossers is a primary
example there is an underlying dynamic of CLASS, as I have defined the term, which
significantly shapes the cultural dynamics of identity formation. The primary theoretical task is thus to relate the dynamics of identities and the cultural and political borders
that define and detain them to the underlying CLASS issue, namely the uneven exchange
of economic value that flows across the borders between them, that is, between persons
and between regions in CLASS relations. In the present sense we are primarily concerned
with CLASS relationships that are shaped, in part, by the USMexican border and
boundary.
MIGRATION, VALUE FILTERING, AND CLASS21
Now, what do migration and borders have to do with uneven exchange of value? Let us
begin with a working definition of migration as a movement across a significant border
that changes identity, and let us examine this relationship among borders, orders, and
identities in the case of migrants by bringing in the second triad of terms and compare
its relationship to those of the first triad, starting with borders. To advance this analysis
I propose that a major mission of borders is to serve as differential filters that allow certain
things to pass, but not others, and to control the rates at which some things pass. Clearly,
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one of the most obvious things that borders control is persons, such control being the
essence of immigration policy, just as the cross-border control of commodities and
currencies is the essence of foreign trade and monetary policy. In the case of trade and
monetary policy, the goal of nations is to operate with a positive advantage, that is, to
have net value flow into national accounts. Similarly, by invoking the second triad, we
can suggest that, at base, a major effect of the cross-border control of persons like the
cross-border control of commodities is to affect the net cross-border flow of value that
is contained actually and potentially in such persons.22
The value-filtering power of borders can be illustrated with an analogy from the
physical world: Imagine a container filled with water and divided by a semi-permeable
membrane through which the water can diffuse in both directions (see Figure 4). If a
soluble protein or a salt is added to one side, a net volume of water will flow to that side
of the membrane as a result of osmosis and the water level on that side will rise, and the
level on the sending side will fall.
In this analogy the membrane represents the USMexican border and the water
represents general economic value that flows in net amounts to the United States from
Mexico as a result of migration across the border. The corresponding theoretical task is
to inquire into the nature of the border as a differential filter of economic value. This
discussion of the differential filtering action of the USMexican border is necessarily
concise. Heyman (1994: 512, 1995: passim, 2001) provides an analytical model and
Figure 4. Osmosis across a semi-permeable membrane (border).

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ethnographic description of it that shows how the construction of and variable enforcement of immigration policy at the border and in the interior of the United States serve
to discipline undocumented workers to produce more economic value and to remunerate them with less value in return, as compared with citizens and legals; see also Donnan
and Wilson (1999: 99).
Whereas Heyman focuses on how immigration laws and policies and their variable
enforcement affect value transfer from immigrants to non-immigrants within the United
States, the discussion that follows deals mainly with a comparable uneven flow of value
across the border from Mexico to the United States that is mediated by migrants and
immigrants. In both cases Heymans processes occurring within US territory and the
cross-border dynamics detailed here bordering policies and practices result in a net
transfer of value from the immigrant-migrant community into the greater US economy.
To demonstrate combinations of such uneven and even exchange (filtering) across
borders we can refer to the case of migration from the Mixteca region of southern Mexico
to California.
THE MIXTECA AND CALIFORNIA
Since its inception in the late 19th century, large-scale corporate agriculture in California
presently around a 30 billion dollar a year industry has relied heavily on successive
waves of migrant workers from throughout the Pacific Basin, such that various foreign
national ethnic groups have cycled through the California farm labor system. Today,
Mixtecs from the Mixteca region of western Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, are the most
significant recent arrivals on the scene, where they are in varying degrees replacing
mestizo Mexican migrant workers, who preceded them, as they in turn came after earlier
migrations of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and other ethnic groups.23 Mixtec migrants
and immigrants are also increasingly working in the service sector and the informal
economy, and as self-employed entrepreneurs.
Central to contemporary Mixtec migration is the formation of transnational
communities, or TNCs, that span the border. In addition to primary communities in
Oaxaca, Mixtec TNCs also contain numerous daughter communities in central and
north-western Mexico, and in the United States especially in agricultural areas of California and the south-eastern United States. Households and individuals move among all
the communities of the greater TNCs in complex patterns of economic, social, cultural,
and biological reproduction deployed at multiple sites on both sides of the border
(Besserer, 2003; Kearney and Nagengast, 1989; Rivera-Salgado, 1999a). As cultural
entities the Mixtec TNCs constitute a third space that is popularly referred to as Oaxacalifornia, which exists in both Mexico and the United States (Kearney, 1995; RiveraSalgado, 1999b; Ziff, 1994).
The Mixtec TNCs are anchored in agrarian communities in Oaxaca where agricultural and craft items that have use and exchange value are produced outside of capitalist relations. These forms of value, including embodied labor power and other forms
of human capital, enter into circuits through which they flow across the USMexican
border, just as value acquired in the United States by migrants is remitted through their
TNCs back to the towns in Oaxaca. These TNCs are bisected by the USMexican
border in all its manifestations, as described herein and by Heyman (1994, 2001), which
is in the zone where the largely non-capitalist features of the TNCs and the capitalist
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society and economy of the receiving society meet and are articulated. The border is thus
in effect a complex semi-permeable membrane with respect to flows of forms of
economic value. As such the border regulates a sort of osmotic process (see Figure 4) in
which more value flows through the TNC from Mexico and into the non-Mixtec California economy than vice-versa.
The case of San Jernimo Progreso, a Mixtec community of about 2000 in the district
of Silacayoapan in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, is typical and instructive. In the late 1970s
and through the 1980s virtually all of the migrants from San Jernimo who came to California crossed the USMexican border illegally. Appreciable numbers regularized their
status under provisions of the 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act. Presently
about 35 to 40 per cent of the San Jernimo population of some 800 in California are
legal residents, including those born in the United States. Migrants and immigrants from
San Jernimo either settle in the United States or retire in Oaxaca. Those who stay tend
to move up the employment and income ladder and generally to be less vulnerable to the
kinds and rates of super exploitation that more vulnerable new arrivals experience. But
those who thus move more toward immigration and economic parity with domestic
counterparts are constantly replaced by the new immigrants who are, as illegals,
subjected to the various regimes of discipline and discrimination as were the previous
ones, in the general pattern that Heyman (2001) describes. In this way, the net flow of
value continues from the Mexican side of the San Jernimo transnational community,
across the border and out of the community into the greater California and US economy.
The functioning of the border as a differential filter changes from one historic period
to another. At this moment in the wake of the creation of NAFTA (the North American
Free Trade Agreement) the border is becoming more permeable to capital and commodities. But at the same time more restrictive immigration policy is making it less permeable to the northward transborder movement of persons. Indeed, until the Great
Depression of the 1930s, personal movement across the border was virtually unrestricted
(Vlez-Ibez, 1996: 823). It is important to note, however, that while immigration
policy currently restricts the movement of persons, it does not entirely prevent such
movement. Rather, what border immigration policy ordering does by bordering (see
Figure 1) in the case of undocumented workers is to separate labor power from migrant
persons, such that ideally their labor power is delivered to sites in California, but they
return to Mexico without it (see Kearney, 1991: 5560, 1996: 98103). Central to this
bordering is the classification of most Mixtec migrants and their relatives as illegals24
that is integral to their CLASSification, or exploitive relations, with other persons and
corporations that receive quanta of net value when they deal with them (see Donnan
and Wilson, 1999: 1356).
This basic premise concerning the extra-national economic contribution of illegal
immigrants is suggested by dependency theory, which posits a net flow of economic
value from de-developed peripheries of the world system to developed cores, both of
which are two sides of the same coin.25 But for the most part dependency theory focuses
on unequal macroeconomic exchanges between global regions rather than on the kind
of fine-grain ethnographic transnational analysis required to speak to the issue of the
impact of individual migrants on unequal exchange between regions. A step in this direction was provided by articulation theory, which paid more attention to the dynamics of
migration at the level of the household.
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Articulation theory depicts how infra-subsistence peasant households and communities such as San Jernimo are articulated with distant labor markets via migration
(Foster-Carter, 1978; Kearney, 1996: 81104; Palerm and Urquiola, 1993). In such
systems the labor power delivered to employers is partially reproduced by the production of food and other resources outside of capitalist relations of production, thus
articulating capitalist and non-capitalist (peasant) modes of production. In a situation
of articulation, as discussed by de Janvry and Garramon (1977), the following
conditions typically prevail.
1
2
3
A rural peasantry lives in a remote region such as the Mixteca where some combination of demographic pressures, scarcity of good farming land, and lack of wage
employment make out-migration in search of wage labor a necessity for survival;
that is, they live in an infra-subsistence local economy.
The labor markets that the infra-subsistence peasants migrate to are seasonal and
saturated or nearly so, thus causing them to return home in the off seasons.
Because such labor power is partially reproduced with non-wage income (via subsistence farming and the informal economy), it is possible for such workers to accept
very low wages and even less than a living wage when they enter labor markets.
Such systems of articulated labor are economically advantageous to the receiving

economies not only because cheap labor delivers itself to them, but also because the costs
of the reproduction and retirement of that labor are borne by the economy of a different,
distant region. In the purest form of this system adult workers migrate at their own
expense from their homes, where children and other dependants remain, to sites of
employment. From these places of employment they remit earnings that support their
dependants who do not have access to public services in the locale where the migrant
workers are employed. Employment in farm work is mostly seasonal and farm labor
markets in California agriculture are typically saturated such that most workers do find
work, but sporadically (see e.g. Griffith and Kissam, 1995: 190239). Then at the end
of work seasons and at the end of their work career the workers are typically retired back
to their home communities, which must bear costs of their retirement. Under these
conditions the rate of exploitation, that is, the accumulation of surplus value, of such a
work force is potentially higher than from one that is in residence all year and fully proletarianized. When migrants began to settle down in the areas of their wage labor, then
the conditions of articulation start to decay. From the receiving economys perspective,
efficient functioning of the system requires that biological reproduction and retirement
be maintained in the sending communities. It is a de facto function of the border and
bordering to promote such a situation.26
As the newest entrants into the farm labor markets, the Mixtecs are typically a desired
work force from the employers point of view since they are recognized as more selfdisciplined and productive, as is typical of a first generation of foreign workers. It is also
important to note that the Mixtecs are now entering California labor markets at a time
of increasing anti-immigrant sentiments, which is fueled in part by negative impact
research that defines immigrants as net consumers of economic value in the California
economy, relative to what they contribute to it. In this political climate, compounded
by an overabundance of illegal labor, employers and labor contractors can and do use
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the freshly arriving Mixtecs as a means to discipline more experienced workers, thus
getting double mileage out of disciplining the Mixtecs directly.27
For this system of articulation to endure over time there must be some mechanisms
that perpetuate a cross-border separation of biological reproduction from economic
production. In the case of apartheid in South Africa it was the passbook laws; in the
CaliforniaMexico case it is the international border and immigration laws and uneven
enforcement of them (Burawoy, 1976; Heyman, 2001; Kearney, 1991). Such immigration law, policy, and practices can be seen as functioning, or bordering, to ensure
some spatial separation of biological reproduction from economic production, so as to
perpetuate the economic advantages of this system to the receiving communities, in
other words, an uneven flow of net value.
UNEQUAL VALUE EXCHANGE BETWEEN THE MIXTECA AND THE
UNITED STATES
The osmotic filtering analogy introduced earlier is one way to think about trans-border
value flow, but it is an incomplete analogy for it fails to account for other possible combinations of net cross-border exchanges of value between any given TNC and the greater
US society. For as Figure 5 indicates, there are eight general possibilities in such a case
(of which the osmosis analogy represented in Figure 4 is an instance of number 6).
At the time of the Conquest the valleys of the Mixteca region were productive corn
exporting areas (Spores, 1984). In the early colonial period rural indigenous settlements
there were formed as closed corporate communities, as described by Wolf (1957), that
were designed to be self-sufficient and surplus producing entities at the bottom of the
colonial food chain (Pastor, 1987). The goal of the planners of this system seems to have
been to create a Type 3 situation, as shown on Figure 5, in which the indigenous communities would be able to reproduce under constant conditions while also producing surpluses
that were to be accumulated by persons and entities outside of the communities (combination + 0). At present, however, after five centuries of colonial and neo-colonial conditions
much of the Mixteca is a de-developed corn-importing region with widespread environmental deterioration. The value exchange relation has thus deteriorated to Type 6, Figure
5 ( +). Many of these communities still practice subsistence agriculture, but because they
now produce less than they consume, high percentages of their members must migrate
permanently or sporadically in search of wages or other income.28
Figure 5. Possible combinations of net cross-border flows of value between a transnational community and receiving communities.
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The colonial period in the Mixteca was a case of classic dependence in which absolute
surplus was extracted from it via mining, logging, and migration to elsewhere in Mexico.
Clearly, now at the beginning of the 21st century a new regime of orderingborderingidentity has come into play in the Mixteca, and like the earlier one of the colonial
period it too functions within a global political economy that extracts economic value
from Mixtec communities. Now, however, the primary mechanism of such transfer of
value is circular migration within Mexico and circular transnational migration to the
United States. The circuits of extraction of value are now more complex in that the
indigenous labor power that lies at the base of the present regimes of accumulation is
reproduced primarily not from self-sufficient corporate peasant communities, but from
partially proletarianized villages and towns that reproduce via combinations of peasant
production and migration to distant sites of wage labor.29 Thus, numerous closed
corporate communities have now evolved into largely deterritorialized and partially
reterritorialized transnational communities, each of which has as its nucleus its original
territorially based corporate community (see, for example, Besserer, 1999b, 2003).
Self-employment in non-market based subsistence production in these communities
makes substantial contributions to the reproduction and retirement costs of migrants.
Were these activities paid the minimum or sub-minimum wages received in formal labor
markets, such wages would exceed the value produced. The same is true of the extensive work that members of the TNCs perform in other informal economic activities such
as vending and handicraft production. The main point here is that the income contribution which such informal activities make to the overall reproduction of labor power
makes it possible for migrants to receive lower wages than would be necessary if they
were fully dependent on wage labor for their biological and social reproduction. These
conditions of articulation, described earlier, thus make possible a higher rate of accumulation, by employers and consumers, of the value added to products and services by
Mixtec workers. In this situation the income (net value accumulated) by the migrants
increases, but it appears that the amount and rates of surplus value that is accumulated
from their labor by employers and others above them in reticular CLASS relationships
is yet greater.30 Thus the value accumulation and exchange relationship between the
migrants and these others is typically a case of Type 1, Figure 5 (+ ++).
The basic point here is that for such high rates of accumulation of Mixtec produced
value by non-Mixtecs in the United States to endure at their present levels, some effective forms of bordering of CLASSification are necessary to keep wages and other
sources of compensation low and to shift costs back into the TNCs and primarily to
those components of the TNCs in Mexico. A second advantage that such formal and
informal bordering affords to the receiving society is the shifting of costs of social services
and retirement of migrants who work in the United States, but who are born, raised,
recuperate, and retire in Mexico. Such bordering renders benefits to three types of US
receivers of net value. One type is the employers who benefit directly from highly disciplined, productive illegal workers who typically work harder and receive lower wages
than domestic and other legal and illegal workers. The second type is consumers that
benefit in several ways. First, they reap the benefits of lower production costs of
commodities due to lower wages paid to the undocumented workers. Here it should also
be noted that producers are pressured to keep down production costs of labor-intensive
products such as certain agricultural crops and garments because of stiff competition
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from producers outside the United States with access to abundant cheap labor. The third
type is the general tax-paying public that benefits from the shifting of health, welfare,
education, and other social service costs of members of TNCs to the greater TNCs to
which they belong and especially to those parts of them that are on the Mexican side of
the border (Martnez, 2003).
Another feature of this transnational relationship that, like the others, is a subsidy to
the US side of the balance sheet is also revealed in the ethnography of Mixtec workers
in the United States. I refer here to the frequent irregularities in social security deductions from the wages of Mixtec workers. A common practice is for such deductions to
be credited to a person other than the undocumented worker who should be receiving
such credits, either because the worker is using a false number, or else because the
employer assigns someone elses number to the worker. Furthermore, in unknown
numbers of cases Mixtec workers use their own valid social security numbers, but retire
to Mexico without collecting benefits, which thus remain in the US economy. Bordering, as described by Heyman (2001) and as Mixtec ethnography shows, inhibits such
settlement, thus shifting these costs back onto the home communities and other sites of
the TNCs that are in Mexico. The border in this extended sense loosely circumscribes
the TNCs.
These conditions and practices inhibit the accumulation of value in the Mixteca and
through the TNCs as it is transferred through the persons of Mixtec workers in the
United States where it is accumulated by US employers, consumers, and tax payers, who
in their relationship to Mixtec migrants are, again, an instance of Type 1, Figure 5. Thus,
although the production and acquisition of value by Mixtec migrants in the United
States increases in absolute terms and relative to what they accumulate in Mexico, the
accumulation of value transferred via the TNCs to the US recipients of this value takes
place at a rate higher than the accumulation rate of the Mixtec migrants. Therefore, a
net flow of value takes place through the Mixtec TNCs and across the border between
them and the greater US society. Here again it is important to emphasize that the border
referred to here is not just the boundary line between the United States and Mexico, but
also all the institutional and popular forms of distinction that create identities such as
citizens and migrants categorized as illegals, aliens, undocumented workers, undocumented immigrants, and so forth mentioned earlier and described at length by
Heyman (1994, 2001).
The result of such border differentiation is extraction of net value from the greater
transnational Mixtec community, much of this value being extracted from the Mixteca,
which is thus de-developed. This de-development occurs even though absolute wealth
of many migrant Mixtecs increases, although in formal terms, their CLASS positions
and relations worsen due to increased rates of exploitation, namely, loss of value. Again
it is important to recall that the definition of CLASS employed here is relational, rather
than referring to absolute wealth categories. The primary point is that this net northward flow of value from Oaxaca to California (Type 6, Figure 5) and the uneven
exchange rates between the Mixtec TNCs and the greater US economy (Type 1, Figure
5) are due in large measure to the differential filtering action of the border, as it variously manifests and functions.
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CONCLUSIONS
While avoiding facile economic determinism, the concepts and analysis presented here
suggest that the study of immigration and migration politics and the dynamics of bordering and identity formation of migrants can be fruitfully explored in terms of how bordering is employed to affect CLASS relations (unequal exchange of value) between migrants
and non-migrants and their respective regions and communities. This article deals with
a specific case of likely unequal exchange of value across a border and as such represents
one pattern among the range of possible such exchanges (see Figure 5). The same basic
questions asked here about how the USMexican border affects inter-regional and
migrantnonmigrant exchanges across it can be asked of other borders and regimes of
bordering and ordering of persons with specific identities refugees and brain drain
come readily to mind. Indeed, there is need for comparative work on how different
borders are constructed and how migration across them affects unequal exchange of
value, or CLASS relations.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of one component of this article was presented at the 1998 Annual
Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. I thank my coorganizer Thomas M. Wilson and other members of that panel for valuable comments
on the original paper. In the course of its development, this article has benefited from
discussions with Robert Alvarez, Josiah Heyman, Carole Nagengast, Tom Wilson, and
insightful comments by Gina Crivello, Kevin Yelvington, and Max Forte. A segment of
this article was presented for discussion in the Colloquium Series of the Program in
Agrarian Studies at Yale University, 6 February 1998; I am grateful to James Scott,
Enrique Mayer and others at Yale for constructive comments on that segment. Fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, UC-MEXUS, and the Academic Senate of the University of
California, Riverside.
Notes
1 See, for example, Alvarez (1995), Donnan and Wilson (1994, 1999), and Wilson
and Donnan (1998).
2 For discussion of the two-sided nature of borders, see Donnan and Wilson (1999:
213).
3 Heyman (1994: 51) provides my working definition of the state: States are aggregations of rules for social and economic action and the bureaucratic organizations
required to implement these rules . . . The nation in the nation-state, as I use the
term here, refers to the more informal cultural knowledge and values of citizens and
agents of the state that dispose them, inter alia, to form the rules of the state, e.g.
laws and regulations concerning immigrants, immigration, and citizens. Such
cultural dispositions also shape the enforcement, non-enforcement, and selective
enforcement of the rules and the identities that they define.
4 This concern also extends to sub-units of the nation-state, such as the state of
California, its counties and their various municipal entities, all of which share some
of the basic structural features of the modern nation-state, e.g. precise, absolute
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10
11
12
13
14
geopolitical boundaries, internal legal jurisdiction, definition of residence, taxation,

and delivery of public services.
I am grateful to Yosef Lapid (2001) for introducing this mutually referential triad of
terms, which became the conceptual common ground for the Las Cruces Group, an
international workshop on transnational issues that convened at the Institute for
Border Studies at the State University of New Mexico at Las Cruces and elsewhere.
This article has benefited from my participation in the Las Cruces Group. I have
also applied the IBO model in Kearney (2001, 2002, 2003).
See Vlez-Ibez (1996) for a comprehensive historic overview of the greater region
of the American Southwest (or conversely the greater Mexican Northwest) and the
impact that the imposition of the USMexican border has had on its inhabitants in
different historic periods.
See Newman (2001) and see Newman and Paasi (1998) for a comprehensive review
of the prevalent conceptualizations and theoretical issues concerning borders in
political science, international relations, sociology, geography, and other disciplines.
This review reveals an absence of the concerns with cross-border flows of value that
are the subject of the present article. Alvarezs (1995) thorough review of research
on the USMexican border reveals a similar absence in the anthropological literature.
It would be instructive but space does not permit to present a comparable
analysis of the sociology of language, theory, and research problem definitions in
Mexican scholarship on MexicanUS migration so as to reveal how it reflects official
and unofficial Mexican national concerns, all of which combine into a semantic,
intellectual, moral, and political complex quite distinct from the US counterpart.
A variant of this strong theory is that even theoretical approaches that seek critical
analysis as a way of resisting official policies and practices may in fact work to reify
and re-inscribe existing borders, orders, and identities by a subtle jujitsu of sociocultural politics (Kearney, 2001).
Heyman (1998b) proposes a comparable kind of displacement, also associated with
a different sociology of knowledge, with respect to the formation of immigration
policy and management.
Variants of Figure 3 have appeared in Kearney (2001) and Kearney (2003).
See Williams (1983: 609) for the history of this most prevalent sense of class, viz.,
as an identity.
In the case of men and women, the inverted commas are meant to indicate that
we are dealing here not with the natural biological distinction, but instead with the
gendered cultural identities whatever form they may take that are constructed
around the physical beings. Thus, CLASS relations can exist between sexes when
they are so gendered, viz., bordered, in ways that construct and constitute such asymmetry that is the basis of unequal exchange of forms of value.
Yelvington (1995: 323, passim) provides a comprehensive and nuanced definition
of the first sense of class as identity, while also suggesting the elements of the second
sense, viz. CLASS. While Yelvington discusses dynamics of class differentiation and
exchange relations that essentially conform to the second sense, viz. CLASS, as it
pertains to capitalist relations, I am herein generalizing CLASS to all uneven
exchanges of value.
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15 As a first approximation, value, in the broad sense used here, can be likened to
Bourdieus (1986) forms of capital, but see Kearney (1996: 1628). Bourdieus
theory of capitals, and his method of mapping their distributions among identities
in different social spaces and their transformations from one form to another, are
equally applicable to capitalist and non-capitalist societies, and for that reason, as
well as to better integrate it with Marxian value theory, I prefer to speak of forms
of value, rather than forms of capital.
16 Concerning embodied aspects of such identities see Bourdieus (1990) discussion of
habitus.
17 Here the reader is directed to Heyman (2001) for discussion of the nexus between
official and unofficial (popular) classifying of identities of border crossers.
18 The second triad is the result of an effort to gain displacement from the first, which
is taken as an emic (folk) model. However, there is no assumption here that the
second triad is a pure etic (culturally neutral) apparatus. Instead, it is seen as a pragmatic attempt to achieve displacement toward a species-wide, culturally neutral
universal anthropology, which can only be approached asymptotically.
19 There is of course a material dimension of such an order in this case the actual
hardware components of border construction and maintenance such as fences,
surveillance and detection equipment, patrol vehicles and so on.
20 Class consciousness may appear as a dimension of identity in IBO, but as such is
conceptually distinct from CLASS position in a field of value per CVF. These two
differing senses of class in the two triads are comparable to the distinction that Marx
makes between class for itself and class in itself in that the former refers to consciousness of CLASS membership as a collective identity while the other is the objective
reality of class position, whether or not those who occupy such positions are collectively conscious of their situation or not. And as Kevin Yelvington has noted
(personal communication), identity dynamics occur not only between the identities
and CLASS, but also among the identities.
21 This section, with modifications, is from Kearney (n.d.).
22 Value contained actually and potentially in such persons refers to the value that can
be created, for example, when migrants go to work as employees and thus meld their
actual embodied labor power and energy with technology and setting to produce a
product or service that is exchanged for a wage, or some other compensation.
23 See e.g. Bade (1993, 1994); Besserer (1999a, 2003); Cederstrom (1993); Garduo,
et al. (1989); Kearney (1986a, 1991, 1995, 1996); Martinez (2003); Nagengast and
Kearney (1990); Nagengast et al. (1992); Rivera-Salgado (1999a, 1999b); Runsten
and Kearney (1994); Stuart and Kearney (1981); Velasco Ortiz (1995, 1996, 2002);
Wright (1990); Zabin, et al. (1993); for descriptions of the living conditions of
Mixtecs in San Diego County, see Chavez (1992). There are also two films about
transnational Mixtecs: Grieshop and Varese (1993); Ziff (1994).
24 Here Heyman (2001) describes how this regime of classification and surveillance is
internalized and embodied by illegal aliens; see also the vignette and accompanying discussion in Kearney (1991: 601).
25 For a review of the migration research guided by dependency theory see Kearney
(1986b); for an assessment of dependency theory in general see Chilcote and
Edelstein (1986).
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26 The benefits to the receiving community that come from consigning such costs to the
sending community under conditions of articulation and how settlement in the
receiving areas causes decay in the structural advantages of articulation to such areas
over generations is shown in Kearney (1996, Figures 4.2 and 4.3) as adapted from
Meillassoux (1981), who examined labor migration between Senegal and France.
27 For example, it is not uncommon to hear foremen of agricultural work crews exhort
their workers, in so many words, to Hurry up, work faster and harder or were going
to bring the Mixtecs in to replace you.
28 See Stuart and Kearney (1981) for data and calculations that demonstrate the
relationships between infra-subsistence agriculture and migration for one more or
less typical Mixtec community.
29 See Kearney (1996: 98104, especially Figs. 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) for discussion of such
transfer of value.
30 Reticular is used to indicate the complex web-like nature of CLASS relationships
through which value flows in a generally upward direction in social fields organized
on the basis of class identity, but rarely marked by sharp CLASS boundaries (see
Kearney, 1996: 1267).
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MICHAEL KEARNEY is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Address:
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[email: michael.kearney@ucr.edu]
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Anthropological Theory

The Classifying and Value-Filtering Missions of Borders

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The classifying and

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

To begin to address the classificatory and value-filtering missions of borders I would

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

Figure 3. CLASS and Identities.

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

Figure 4. Osmosis across a semi-permeable membrane (border).

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

Such systems of articulated labor are economically advantageous to the receiving

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

geopolitical boundaries, internal legal jurisdiction, definition of residence, taxation,

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

Impacts of USMexican Relations, pp. 71102. University of California, San Diego:

KEARNEY The filtering missions of borders

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(2)

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