Visas, jokes, and contraband: Citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico-U.S. border

Abstract

This article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico-U.S. border through jokes told about and around checkpoint encounters-most centrally, those staged at the main port of entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California. In Tijuana, I argue, U.S. state recognition validates the proper, middle-class citizenship of Mexicans resident in Mexico. Attitudes towards the United States, however, remain ambivalent. I begin by exploring the checkpoint jokes of drug-Traffickers as represented in several narcocorridos (popular ballads about drug-Trafficking). Though this music is disapproved of by most people invested in U.S. state recognition, I show next how middleclass jokes build on the trope of the trickster-Trafficker to parry state interpellation. The jokes work as performative arguments where people begin to articulate the tensions that constitute citizenship and sovereignty at the border. Finally, I examine the consular interview for the U.S. Border Crossing Card, a key site knitting together U.S. and Mexican regimes of citizenship. Folk theories of how the interview works anticipate the jokes' bald thematization of duplicity, explaining why middle-class people would turn to jokes that frame them as traffickers. Understood in the context of the BCC interview, middle-class checkpoint jokes reveal Mexican citizenship as embedded in an international system organized not by principles of authentic identity, but by ambivalence, contradiction, and undecidability.