Local Cultures – Global Spaces

Abstract

In the modern geopolitical imagination, borders are crossed unidirectionally. Nation-states define and fortify borders, individuals properly belong on one side, and those who do cross do so in one direction seeking to gain something on the other side. Less well understood, however, are the processes that generate binational living, in which people routinely cross borders and evade being pinned down. (Löfgren termed them “regionauts.”) Such border hoppers are cast as illegal, or at the very least, transgressive and suspect, tainted by their rootlessness. However, the politico-economic conditions that generate such straddling of borders are critical to understand if just and humane policies, including those of Indigenous lands rights, are to be fashioned. This paper traces the colonial construction of Indigenous illegality in the borderlands between Mexico and British Honduras (Belize) in the late nineteenth century. A series of factors (Indigenous rebellion in Mexico; commercial, export-oriented mahogany extraction; the munitions trade; a regional system of labor based on debt servitude; semi-feudal labor relations; and border disputes) created the conditions in which Indigenous Maya people had the best chances of physical survival, making a livelihood, evading debt, and remaining free of bondage if they routinely crossed the presumed border, marked by the Hondo River. They could erect houses on one side, farm on the other, and flee whenever necessary from rent and tax collectors, military leaders, and “masters.” This creative, short-term strategy, however, earned them the opprobrium and suspicion of British Honduran officials and employers and cemented the misperception of them as “immigrants,” setting them up for subsequent exclusion from land and voting rights.