In/Visible Line: The Physical and Symbolic Power of the US-Mexico Border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What does the US-Mexico border mean to people whose marriages are defined by – and defy – this international boundary? Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with 42 mixed-citizenship US-Mexican couples, I demonstrate the imagery and symbolisms mixed-citizenship couples evoke to make meaning of the border in their lives. I find that an individual’s initial encounter with the border, each couple’s current proximity to the border, and the non-citizen spouse’s US immigration status all informed the meanings and descriptions of the border that couples shared. For couples living in the US-Mexico Borderlands, the border looms largest as a physical structure cutting into the landscape, literally separating space and people. For couples living away from the border but who can freely travel between countries, the border/lands are mostly invisible, but also a danger to be avoided. And for couples living away from the border with no legal authorization to travel across it, the border predominantly functions as a symbolic power, dividing individuals from families and communities, past from present, reality from possibility. These different understandings of the border show the physical and symbolic power of the border to divide, while simultaneously revealing how its divisiveness can be overpowered by relationships and community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".