Transfrontera translations: Language, culture, and history in the U.S./Mexican borderlands

The U.S./Mexican borderlands are a region where people, cultures, and ideologies meet, integrate, coexist, and clash. These varied encounters happen against a background of economic inequality, national divisions, deeply embedded racial stereotypes, and linguistic difference. It is therefore the case that constant acts of translation are necessary to navigate the borderlands' unique and uneven social landscape. The premise of this work is that translation in the borderlands bridges disjunctures not only between languages, but also between bordering and converging cultural, political, and national bodies. In this way, translation is essential to the exposition and negotiation of difference. Yet translation is also a subjective practice, with meaning simultaneously lost and made in the process. This makes difference difficult to fully reconcile and acts of translation import to examine. Since the disjunctures bridged by translation often go either ignored (in cases when translations are erroneously thought to provide unmediated access to the original) or met with fear, resistance, or aggression towards the other (in cases when the need for translation is abandoned in favor of perpetuating difference) the imperative for a sustained investigation into the methodologies that guide translation in the borderlands rests in a need for improving understanding and assuaging violence. In the pages that follow, translation in the borderlands becomes an essential part in reconstructing national narratives from the periphery, and also of understanding "American" culture as a transnational and hemispheric phenomenon. Because translation has a distinct temporal dimension, and is capable of bridging different historical moments, a second contention made in this work is that translation provides a compelling method for studying borderland history, and that borderland history is often propelled forward through acts of translation. Studying translation in the borderlands provides a way to identify how the negotiation of difference at the edges of contiguous social and national bodies has impacted both the unfolding of American history, and the way that this history has been transmitted and understood. Through an examination of a variety of distinct historical texts and moments, this project shows that translation has played an essential role in the development of U.S./Mexican relations across time, and helped shape the meaning of the borderlands in a modern context.