Chapter 11 A world without borders? Mexican immigration, new boundaries and transnationalism in the United States Alejandro I. Canales and Israel Montiel Armas Introduction A walk through certain areas in any large Western city, such as the Raval in Barcelona, Brixton in London, or in East Los Angeles, is bound to give the unwary visitor an odd feeling: most of the people he or she comes across will belong to ethnicities from elsewhere in the world, speak unintelligible tongues, and in some cases even wear picturesque costumes without a trace of self- consciousness, because after all this is ‘their’ neighbourhood and it is the visitor who looks out of place. This feeling is not just produced by the manners and aspect of the residents: the whole morphology of the place, from the appearance of the shops and the products they sell to the very smells and colours, does not correspond to what is normally considered indigenous to the country. The most striking feature of all this is that these areas are not curiosities for tourists craving exotic images for their holiday photographs (although there is some of that) or a kind of theme park showing in the flesh what everyday life is like in other parts of the planet. Although visitors may have the feeling that they have been inadvertently transported to another continent, what they are actually looking at is a typical neighbourhood in the globalized West, as authentic as any other but of a kind unknown outside the First World. Pecoud_SB1 14/3/07 19:40 Page 221