USA

Mexico’s Split Public Sphere In 1930, Robert Redfield wrote, “Mexico is in no small part modern... In the more sophisticated villages of the north, in the middle classes in the cities everywhere, are to be found a people much like the masses in our own country. They not only can read, but they do read. The folk hear rumor; these people read the news” (1930: 3). With this last sentence, he gives the basic division with which this dissertation will be concerned, though in a context very different from the one Redfield was familiar with: contemporary Tijuana, a fast-paced border city of some two million people and an integral part, however segregated by the international boundary, of the vast metropolitan constellation that is southern California. Through a detailed analysis of texts and interactions, the chapters collected here trace ethnographically the relation between two publics: one that takes shape through the genres of communication associated with the classic bourgeois public sphere (rational debate, for instance, as well as news-reading) and another that depends on genres of rumor. The border brings out not just the importance of the nation for these publics, but that of state recognition: the first public imagines itself as documented, that is, with papers to cross the border legally, while the public of hearsay imagines itself as undocumented.