“This Season’s Breakout Star: The Border”

Arts & Leisure cover story. 

Border talk is rarely just about the border itself. In both politics and popular culture, the border is a proxy for thinking about the role of Mexico in American life and for grappling with the ways Mexican immigrant culture and the American mainstream influence each other. It is both a scapegoat and a mirror: a place to project fears and anxieties about a changing nation, and a reflection of the identity-straddling, language-juggling multicultural nation that is already here.