Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: all | Judge: all
Part 1: La Crisis
The Mexican – American border is the result of white colonization of the original inhabitants of the Americas. It is an imagined, unnatural boundary that created the condition for economic exploitation of Mexico and its citizens by the United States. The borderland is a war zone and its inhabitants are racialized others subjected to constant physical and psychological violence.
Anzaldua 2007 (Gloria Anzaldua – PhD, award-winning writer and activist, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – Third Edition, p.25-35)
¶ The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third
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terrain.¶ This is her home¶ This thin edge of¶ barbwire.
This violent colonialism produced an imaginary line with real implications- Two cultures on each side of the border in which the Chicano does not belong. This produces a psychological conflict that destroys value to life.
Anzaldua 2007 (Gloria Anzaldua – PhD, award-winning writer and activist, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – Third Edition, p.84-86)
Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are
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renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.
The psychological violence imposed on Chicanas creates a shift in paradigms— a survival mode—to survive in contradicting societies. Embracing this shift is the only way to break down power relations and end rape, violence, and war.
Anzaldua 2007 (Gloria Anzaldua – PhD, award-winning writer and activist, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – Third Edition, p.101-102)
These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information
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bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.
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Thus, Georgie and I DEMAND that the United States federal government economically engage Mexico by opening the US-Mexican border. We use the economic genealogy of the 1AC as an interrogation process necessary for decolonizing our minds and moving toward a new consciousness.
Part 2: La Solución
The role of the ballot in this debate is to determine the best method for decolonization.
The 1AC is an unpacking of racist, colonialist history—the narrative allows us to place demands on the state and transform decolonization of our minds into reality. The ballot allows us to break the chains of Whiteness and write our own history.
Anzaldua 2007 (Gloria Anzaldua – PhD, award-winning writer and activist, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza – Third Edition, p.107-109)
Divided Loyalties. Many women and men of color do not want to have any
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real” world unless it first happens in the images in our head.
The border is a narrative constructed by imagination – to some, it is a fence – to Chicanas, it is a metaphorical dichotomy that bolsters societal exclusion that they can’t climb over - a critical interrogation is necessary to delineate self-identification.
Carter, 12 – PhD., the University of Essex, Matt's research is principally concerned with the expression of the American West in US cinema.(“’I’m Just a Cowboy’: Transnational Identities of the Borderlands in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”, 2012, http://ejas.revues.org/9845)
Limerick presses the importance of the history of the borderlands as part of the complex
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protected by force from the “incursion” of the Mexican “other.”