Moral Entrepreneurs and Moral Geographies on the US/Mexico Border

Abstract

This article explores the difference and interplay between the border as legal/political fact and the borderland as complex social/cultural reality through the development and application of the theoretical concepts of moral geography and moral entrepreneur. I argue that these concepts provide a bridge between macro, structural views of ‘the production of (borderland) space’ as used by critical geographers and the more experiential orientation suggested by geographers and anthropologists in studies of cultural landscapes and ‘place-making’. My particular concern is to apply and illustrate this argument through the ethnography of the desert borderlands straddling Arizona (USA) and Sonora (Mexico), but it is potentially useful in other contexts.