Book Assignment Part 5 - Essay Example

Actors on a historical stage do not just exist; they act, and they act out of the conditions of their character and circumstances. Human life is biographical as well as biological, and it is clear that memory has sense from both of these perspectives. Following Martnez (1994), Wilson and Donnan state that: "transnationalism is the process whereby borderlanders are influenced by, and sometimes share the values, ideas, customs and traditions of, their counterparts across the boundary line" (Wilson and Donnan 1999, p. 5). Unlike the stage actor, whose assumed identity is not taken seriously to represent the self within, the spy must convince skeptical and suspicious others of the reality of an assumed identity, when that assumed identity is in fact false.

Thus, the spy poses an interesting case for a psychology of self and identity, especially when the possibilities of double agents or counterspies are considered. In contrast to other borders, the uniqueness of the U.S.-Mexican border is explained by historical relations between the nations and political struggle. The war between the United States and Mexico (1846-48) ended with the defeat of Mexico and its resultant loss of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. For the first time the Spanish Americans realized that the "Colossus of the North" was a threat to them.

Although Mexico has had to accept the loss of half the territory it claimed, that loss is still a source of bitterness. In South America after the wars of independence there were no developments of international importance comparable to those in Mexico. Though for some purposes and in some contexts the 'native' population was treated as homogeneous, there was in colonialism, an ideology and practice of classification' which usually divided that population into further, hierarchically ordered and stereotyped, categories.

Sometimes these were very broad: Spaniards in Mexico referred to the 'wild' Indians. This kind of transformation often emerged through an 'ethnic dialectic'. In the colonial classification of indigenous populations there was a dialectical relationship between existing ethnic categories, often those of the locally dominant group with which the colonizers first established contact, or with which they had their most enduring relationship, and the categories of the colonizers' own language and culture.

They did not impose or operate solely with a preformed system of classification, nor did they adopt existing systems wholesale. In the shaping and reshaping of indigenous ethnic and cultural pluralism there was a complex interplay between colonizers' systems of classification and those of the colonized (which in any case were not timeless or unchanging). The transformation of ethnic space involved various forms of social and political incorporation. "The exploration of Mexican and Mexican-American political values and actions at the border is an early example of ethnicity as a factor which gives character to the borderlands, binds communities to each other across the borderline" (Wilson and Donnan Wilson and Donnan 1999, p. 54) .The relations between the U.S. and Mexico were based on unique cultural values and traditions shaped by both cultures.

The historical and sociological process we have