Fronteras Imaginarias: Theorizing Fronterizidad in the Simulated Illegal Border Crossings of El Alberto, Mexico

Spring 2011 23 Fronteras Imaginarias: Theorizing Fronterizidad in the Simulated Illegal Border Crossings of El Alberto, Mexico Natalie Alvarez1 “Oye, Gloria, aguantaras hasta California?” (“Hey, Gloria, can you make it to California?”). I was expecting the significance of this tourist’s question to be diffused by nervous laughter, as we crouched, huddled along a dusty path in amongst brush in the dead of night with little moonlight and only our coyote to guide us. The question, instead, was met with awkward silence as we tried to catch our breath. Two hours into this night trek through the desert canyon of El Alberto, Mexico in the heart of the Valle del Mezquital—with our field of vision limited to the person next to us, but imaginatively reaching all the way to the border some seven hundred miles north of the site of this fictional border crossing—the prospect of “making it” “for real” is, in fact, unimaginable. This question, “Can you make it to California?” uttered in the context of this simulated border crossing was an invitation—or perhaps a reminder—for all of us tourists huddled there to immerse ourselves “in the role” of illegal migrant and to try to amplify in our imaginative vistas—by hours, by degrees of hunger, thirst and fatigue, by levels of fear, injury, and threat—this mere fragment of an experience into the kind of journey that it might be, or could be, “for real.” In the time that has passed since this caminata nocturna, or “night walk” as the simulation is called, the question, “Can you make it to California?” remains there in that silence both awkwardly and ominously, a hollow echo of a question undoubtedly uttered in desperation by some of the roughly 600,000 plus migrants who attempt to cross illegally into the United States every year.2 If we think of the border as an interpellating force that hails and constitutes the identities to whom it grants passage or expels, a regulatory force that has come to constitute transnational migrant identities and fronterizas/os in movement across national boundaries, then what constitutive acts take place in a reenactment of this passage? How does a reenacted border crossing lay bare the performative force of the border? Furthermore, in this laying bare what questions does it compel us to ask about the construction of cultural identities made in the image of what Marcial Gonzalez refers to as “the most repressive and racist symbol of demarcation and exclusion produced by capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism—namely, the Natalie Alvarez is an assistant professor at Brock University’s Department of Dramatic Arts, where she teaches in the theatre praxis concentration. She has two edited books (forthcoming) on Latina/oCanadian theatre and performance with Playwrights Canada Press and is currently working on a SSHRC-funded manuscript project titled Enactments of Difference: Simulation and Performance from Military Training to Dark Tourism. 24 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism border”?3 I’d like to situate the simulated border crossing in El Alberto, Mexico, as a social imaginary and praxis—that is, as a repertory of collective practices and symbolic representations with material impacts on the community—that not only constitute cultural identities but also develop a critical realism seeking to dismantle, paradoxically, the very borders that constitute them.4 The caminata nocturna takes place every Saturday night at the Parque EcoAlberto—an adventure tourism park run by the indigenous community of the Hñahñu in the municipality of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, roughly three hours north of Mexico City. The rugged valley that surrounds the park’s site, thick with cacti and bushes, swamp, and steep, rocky climbs, becomes the obstacle course for a largely improvised game in which some eighty-two members of the Hñahñu community take on a variety of roles in the simulation. These community members play either the coyotes (or polleros), guiding the tourists who have paid roughly twenty US dollars each for this five- to seven-hour journey, or the US border patrol, undermining the performative power of the oppressor in an instance of Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed.5 As these “border patrol officers” chase participants in police cars, they...

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