Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

From Hobsbawm’s rejection of the authenticity of a country’s “heritage” to today’s pursuit of transnational narratives of belonging and exclusion, the fragility of the nation as an analytical paradigm has long been evident. Yet our archives, courses, funding, and often our thinking, teaching, and writing still gets mired in the notion that the story ends at the national border. The current paper offers some avenues of getting out of this bind and, in so doing, making otherwise eschewed connections between the nineteenth-century past and the twenty-first present; the local and the international; and the “people” and the “state.” It does so through an analysis of the role of customs houses and exiles in state-making, particularly the state-making of nineteenth-century Mexico and Guatemala. Using an examination of customs houses’ establishment, activities and defense on the ill-defined Mexico-Guatemala border, I argue that these places represented a space of negotiation between the nation and its absence. Customs houses were efforts at defending and asserting national borders and authority at the same time that they were among a nation’s most vulnerable resources. They were burnt, stolen, attacked and otherwise appropriated to assert a territorial and political paradigm other than the nation or even the local or regional. In this way, they supply scholars of contemporary borders, their crossings, and transnational history alternative templates for assessing hierarchies of political power and processes of cultural dissemination.