Contested Terrain: The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

The U.S.-Mexico borderlands—the territory running about 30 miles along either side of the 2,000-mile line stretching from Tijuana/San Diego on the Pacific coast to Matamoros/Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico—run through four U.S. and six Mexican states, areas of forbidding desert and urban sprawl, a wide variety of unique cultural landscapes, and the fastest-growing industrial belt in Mexico. As we explore in this Report, the borderlands are at the core of the "deepening contradictions of economic integration," and some observers—Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis among them—claim that they belong more to the domain of global "savage" capitalism than to either country.