Description
This paper explores transborderism and its practices at the Cali-Baja region through the perspectives of transborder pupils and students living in Mexico, but attending school in the U.S. This population crossed the highly surveilled Mexico-U.S. border through the land Ports of Entry even twice a day. The narratives of documented border crossers, particularly transborder learners, have been missing in the myriad of Mexico-U.S. border scholarship. Such invisibility limits our understanding of the region and of transborder politics from below that understand the international as local and vice-versa, based on their intense practice of simultaneity. This paper is based on empirical data collected through ten months of fieldwork in Mexico and in the state of California. The ethnographic-bend transborder methods included in-depth interviews in Mexico and the US with twenty-seven former transborder learners, two policymakers in international education, and one scholar in the emergent field of transborderism. The findings reveal the following: (i) transborder population reconfigures the traditional pursuit of the American dream by including the Mexican side as part of the formula, (ii) documented transborder learners are highly vulnerable in particular at the border checkpoints and are invisible in border protocols about safeguarding minors (iii) international politics and policies from below are possible by looking at these transborder dynamics and understanding politics from a glo-cal perspective.
Keywords
Migration, International Borders, Postcolonialism, Transborderism, International Politics from below
