Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System

Ports of entry are viewed as nodes in the world system where people and commodities step up and down in value as they move across borders. To understand how this happens, this article examines, in an ethnographic fashion, the interplay of inspectors and crossing populations in United States land ports with Mexico. It focuses on the categorization of commodities as legitimate or illegitimate and the movements of people in class, nationality, and gender-differentiated roles as laborers, shoppers, tourists, managers, and smugglers. It briefly surveys the Mexican-side ports with the United States and then explores new objects of regulation and systems of surveillance, such as intellectual property and national security. The ethnography not only reveals trends in the governance of international flows, but also helps us to understand the social-political construction of value and the continuing role of borders in demarcating and enforcing global inequalities in an era supposedly marked by free trade and transnational movement. Differential access to mobility and incomplete but forceful efforts at enclosure are thus shown to be crucial to the reproduction and remaking of combined and unequal spatial (world systemic) relations.