Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands.

Wood, Andrew Grant

Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, edited by Alexis McCrossen. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2009. xix, 414 pp. $99.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper).

Land of Necessity offers a tantalizing variety of perspectives on consumerism and the circulation of merchandise in the US-Mexico borderlands. Transcending tidy distinctions between the two nations, Alexis McCrossen writes that "the transnational consumer culture and society that had been developing in the borderlands ... undermin[ed] the geopolitical boundaries that [had been so carefully] drawn and redrawn with such exactitude over the course of the nineteenth century" (p. 5). Appropriately, McCrossen observes the fact that "[c]ontemporary marketing specialists, more so perhaps than scholars, recognize that rather than one type of borderlands consumer, there are many, with identities rooted in particular configurations of ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, gender, and sexual orientation" (p. 22).

In addition to two opening essays by McCrossen and two concluding chapters, Land of Necessity features nine original essays. Amy S. Greenberg's essay considers early-nineteenth-century Anglo (as contrasted with fronterizo Mexican) constructions of domesticity and gender in relation to US territorial expansion. Here, various publications by northeastern politicians and, interestingly, many women, she observes, promoted Anglo settlement as synonymous with "civilization." Greenberg's fascinating discussion focuses on US-Mexico Boundary Commission head John Russell Bartlett whose efforts, despite being an enthusiastic proponent of Manifest Destiny, nevertheless argued against incorporation of the Northern Mexican Mesilla Valley. Bartlett's reasoning followed from the notion that he considered the area unsuited for US colonization because of its "worthless" and "barren" lack of "the necessities" and various "comforts of life" (p. 83). Although Bartlett's political stance would eventually be cast aside with the signing of the Gadsden Purchase in December 1853, his writings on the issue nevertheless "both shaped and reflected a conflict between divergent views on the place of consumption and domesticity in American society and the potential value of the borderlands within American civilization" (p. 84).

Rachel St. John's piece on tourism in Baja California offers a concise take on the rise of the borderlands hospitality industry during the first decades of the twentieth century. Lawrence Culver's interesting work on leisure in Southern California hammers home the fact that Mexican workers (and other exploited "types") bore the brunt of this development, whether as fishing guides on Catalina Island off the California coast or prostitutes working the notorious red-light districts of Mexicali and Tijuana. Laura Serna's essay on early borderlands cinema (and particularly in El Paso, Texas) considers how cinema "promoted education and signified modernity" while also reminding us that going to the movies "contributed to the [Mexican] nation-building project, despite the fact that most of the films being distributed and exhibited were products of US film studios" (p. 143).

Evan Ward takes up former President Adolfo Lopez Mateos's (1954-1964) vision of the borderlands by examining the 1961, initiated National Border Program, dubbed PRONAF, as a site not for ill repute but instead for upscale spending and family-style diversion. Masterminding this effort was Chihuahua native and former Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) head Antonio Bermudez. As Ward explains, PRONAF's well-laid plans did not necessarily lead to the desired outcome, which was aimed at attracting wealthy consumers, but instead paved the way for the ensuing Border Industrial Program (BIP) and its attendant maquiladoras. Nevertheless, new and different borderlands sites (for example, along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts) sprung up thanks to heavy borrowing from the Banco de Mexico in collaboration with the Mexican federal government's new tourism initiative (FONATUR).

Josef Barton's critique of rural peoples negotiating a new production and consumption paradigm during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals a complex process of globalization at work. Far from being passive purchasers of products, "land hungry rural poor in Northern Mexico," Barton writes, "engaged in a "collective assertion [that] widened to include social movements [which] claimed not only human rights, but consumer rights as well" (p. 221). The irony of this process is not lost on Barton, who contends that "in the act of seizing the political and economic initiative, communities had made permanent the very discipline of market-oriented consumption that they had sought to fend off" (p. 228). From this came "the full immersion of Mexican laborers in a consumer economy [and an ensuing] near complete exploitation" (p. 232). Networking, solidarity, consumer strategies, and collective action on the part of the rural (and, one might add, urban) poor did make a difference for a time in certain instances, but nevertheless most effectively remained hogtied by "the never-ending regime of provisioning" (p. 236). The same can be said for Native peoples of the borderlands, who, as Robert Perez aptly discusses, have largely been kept at the margins. In his essay, Perez traces an enduring pattern of negotiation, adaptation, and struggle on the part of indigenous groups as they entered the market economy as--among other things--international drug smugglers.

Two of my favourite essays in this fine collection derive from ethnographic projects. Anthropologist Peter S. Cahn's interesting piece on direct selling (including Avon, Mary Kay, Herbalife, and, especially, Omnilife) reveals an alternative consumerism propelled by individuals on both sides of the border. Although buyers have been promised improved financial, physical, and mental health by company heads as well as rank and file members, Cahn shows how the results have proven mixed at best. Environmentalist/anthropologist Sarah Hill's careful analysis of consumerism and transnational recycling (writ large) in the El Paso/Juarez political economy reveals not only the divergent paths of various discarded materials, but also the contrasting signifiers of this stuff on both sides of the border.

Concluding pieces by Howard Campbell and Josiah McC. Heyman, in addition to an insightful essay by Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, round out the volume. Interestingly, Heyman and Campbell challenge the 1990s "hybridity" perspective, considering this more a passing academic trend than social fact. They write that "[m]any border residents resist hybridity more fervently than do their compatriots living in the interior: they espouse nationalist, ethnic, or racist reasons for wishing to "buy American" or to maintain their mexicanidad" (p. 331). In the light of recent nativist legislation in Arizona, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and several other states, not to mention changing cultural, economic, and political realities in Mexico during recent years, this is indeed a notion well worth contemplating. Mauricio Tenorio's caution at the end of the volume is one that encourages us to avoid "perpetuat[ing] the unquestioned assumption [of] two clearly demarcated and opposed US and Mexican cultures, defined historically, culturally or racially" (p. 341). Instead, as much of Land of Necessity suggests, Tenorio urges us to challenge the stubborn binaries of "nation," "race," and "civilization" so as to appreciate more significantly the complex history of North America. In the end it is a matter--to again quote Tenorio--of not only appreciating the "social transformation of the border," but also an "intellectual struggle over the category border (sic) as ... [a] ... barrier between civilizations" (p. 345). Focusing on transnational consumer culture, as Land of Necessity so ably does, is an approach that will no doubt provide further insightful riches to be distributed, contemplated, and shared.

Andrew Grant Wood

University of Tulsa