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Imaginaries and Migration

Mexico's northern border cities are urban agglomerations constructed by successive waves of migration during the course of the twentieth century, growth that continues apace in the twenty-first. Their terrains reflect the pulsing histories of rapid urbanization resulting from recent cycles of growth. What follows are excerpts drawn from interviews we conducted with U.S. -Mexico border residents for a project designed to investigate how people see themselves in terms of this dynamic built environment. It includes our own interpretations of and reflections on images of border cities as well. Our purpose here is to decipher some of the codes that arise in local imaginaries, the particular qualities that locals aspire to as they inhabit this borderlands space.1 The desires and yearnings registered in these interviews are also accompanied by explicit or implicit dislike. They are fragmentary assertions: contradictory visions and capricious or conventional perspectives that challenge rigid normative criteria. But they are also the substrate of a quotidian reality that is constantly being reconstructed. Researching this reality requires studying the imaginaries that underlie people's practices, because these imaginaries reveal values, fears, suspicions, and ideals. Such practices are, furthermore, rendered concrete in material expressions of the city's dynamics. For this study, we use as common threads the notions of memory city, encounter city, and fictitious city proposed by Marc Auge in El viaje imposible (1998). These common threads are, within the study of Mexico's northern border cities, a counterpoint to people's own ideas of territorial construction: the transitory city, the passing-through city, and the defensive -city, constructions that relate to the spatial ambits of home, neighborhood, and the entire urban area. The latter become directly interwoven into people's narratives of place, which were elicited in semi-structured interviews with residents.