El Paso to Juarez: Porosity and performativity at the US–Mexico border

The border between the United States of America and Mexico is long, contested, a threshold to the “land of opportunity,” a site of death, and a sieve that relentlessly sifts out the citizen from the pariah. This notion of being a citizen does not refer to legal citizenship of either country. Instead, belongs to Hannah Arendt’s conception of the citizen as one with rights. The sociopolitics of the US–Mexico border has given rise to many well-known artistic and cultural interventions—from JR’s Giants, Kikito (2017) to cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Suite No. 1 along the crossing between Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas (2019). The biggest intervention, however, would be the “Run Internacional: The US–Mexico 10K,” a race that begins in downtown El Paso, Texas, crosses the border into Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and ends on the Paso del Norte International Bridge at the border. The race, sponsored by both cities, is a way to showcase “the unique greatness of the largest borderland of the world.” This paper uses the author’s autoethnographic account as a participant of the race along with an analysis of Ursula Biemann’s video essay Performing the Border (1999) to explore the rigidity, porosity, and performativity of/at this particular stretch of the border and examine the relationship between the sorting of humans as citizens and non-citizens and the conception of citizenship with respect to the labouring body.