Afterword: Border Theory in Practice North of the US-Mexican Borderlands - Further Perspectives on the Canada-US Border

Alejandro Lugo

doi:10.31261/rias.18383

Published: 2025-01-24

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2025)

Afterword: Border Theory in Practice North of the US-Mexican Borderlands - Further Perspectives on the Canada-US Border

Alejandro Lugo

Website: https://anthropology.nmsu.edu/anthropology-faculty/alejandro-lugo.html

Section: FEATURES

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.18383

Abstract

This Afterword underscores the collective interdisciplinarity of Canada-US Border Studies as evidenced in the preceding essays, particularly as they decidedly transcend the borders of individual disciplines. In the process, the essay maps out how the empirical and theoretical richness of such collective interdisciplinarity in the study of the US-Canada border effectively captures and documents the social heterogeneity characterizing the cultural, economic, political, environmental, and historical borderlands found at the transnational crossroads of the US-Canada and Canada-US international boundaries. The theoretical and empirical analysis of this productive interdisciplinarity in the field of border studies more broadly is presented from the theoretical perspective of border theory as it emerged via the US-Mexico border and through a brief photo essay of the Freedom Convoy of 2022.

Keywords:

border theory and practice , border inspections , cultural borderlands , interdisciplinarity , Canada-US Border , US-Canada Border , Freedom Convoy , Canadian Truckers

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Lugo, A. (2025). Afterword: Border Theory in Practice North of the US-Mexican Borderlands - Further Perspectives on the Canada-US Border. Review of International American Studies, 18(1), 205–217. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.18383

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Alejandro Lugo

alugo85@nmsu.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2317-9077

Affiliation:

New Mexico State University, USA United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Alejandro Lugo (Stanford PhD, Wisconsin MA, NMSU BA) is a cultural anthropologist who was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and was raised on both sides of the Juárez-El Paso (Texas)-Las Cruces (New Mexico) border region. Lugo is the author of multiple scholarly articles and book chapters on border theory and border culture and co-editor (with Bill Maurer) of the feminist anthropology volume, Gender Matters: Rereading Michelle Rosaldo (University of Michigan Press) as well as author of the award-winning book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border (University of Texas Press), which won the Southwest Book Award and the ALLA Book Award. His ethnographic and artistic photographs have been published as photo essays in the South Atlantic Quarterly (2006), Religion and Society: Advances in Research (2015), and the Review of International American Studies (2018). He has taught anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Arizona State University, where he served as Director of the School of Transborder Studies, as well as at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he taught for 20 years. Currently, Lugo holds a Faculty Affiliate position back at his undergraduate alma mater, New Mexico State University, where he was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences "2019 Star of Arts and Sciences." Lugo is the 2024 recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s “Anthropology in Media Award” for his opinion letters in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

Vol. 18 No. 1 (2025)
Published: 2025-06-30

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

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University of Silesia Press

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Afterword: Border Theory in Practice North of the US-Mexican Borderlands - Further Perspectives on the Canada-US Border

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Keywords:

Alejandro Lugo

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