Borders and Bodies: The United States, America, and the Caribbean

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, THE UNITED STATES appears to be caught in one of those time warps periodically brought about by the familiar workings of a "tacit ahistoricism" that safeguards the American Dream. 1 In an extended moment of frightful symmetry, the racialist nativism of the opening decades of the twentieth century has found a new lease on life a century later: U.S. permanent residents are suddenly treated as second-class citizens who are, among other things, subject to deportation without appeal when convicted of a felony. The U.S. Coast Guard captures and turns away fugitive Haitians and Cubans from our shores as routinely now as "La migra" carts Mexicans back across the border after each attempted crossing. Last, but by no means least, the body of young Elián González is all but torn apart in the three-way tug-of-war between a demonized Fidel Castro, the Miami Cubans, and the U.S. Justice Department that so delighted the media. Whatever one thinks of the outcome of this particular hemispheric incident, "allowing" the boy to return to his "proper" patrimony—both his biological father and Cuba—conjures up troubling memories of that fear of "improper," that is, politically and culturally [End Page 55] undesirable, contact with the Caribbean. The history of such contact takes us back, through the Spanish-Cuban-American War, to the revolution in Haiti, "the second country in the New World to declare itself independent from colonial Europe" and "the first state in the New World to declare itself 'other.'" 2 I take my few examples (and there are many more) as evidence that the American Dream still exacts its toll of foreign bodies, bodies that are either systematically kept out of or expelled from United States territory. "The United States," George Handley argues lucidly, "has preferred to create arbitrary borders among postslavery cultures in the Americas and to deny kinship with them by means of its own imperialist pretensions, and this for the sake of preserving an idea of its own racial purity." 3 Politico-economic treaties such as NAFTA have in no way prevented national boundaries from being redrawn and policed with almost breathtaking confidence. Since national borders regulate the movements of individual bodies and the shape of collective ones, the ways in which they are imagined, enforced, and (one hopes) rethought have palpable ramifications for how many Americans live their daily lives both within and outside of the bounds of the nation that José Martí was fond of calling "the colossus of the North."