As you drive eastward on the main road from the rough Pacific coast of Mexico toward Tijuana, on the left side of the road a thick concrete barrier stretches for miles, rising so high that you can see the other side only when hills rise in the distance. All along this "fence," men are gathered in knots, many of them grilling chorizos, waiting for dark when they will try to scale the fence, evade detection and capture by border guards, and reach family and friends on the other side. Across the border, guards wait for what they see as an invasion, trying to police this boundary that seeks to divide life in the United States from life in Mexico, two countries with two flags and two histories.	1
This struggle between individuals and nation-states enacted along the southern border of the United States dramatizes a growing challenge as national governments seem increasingly unsure how to engage the growing movement of people, to say nothing of their ideas, products, institutions, and cultures, across national borders. Behind impenetrable borders, nation-states such as the United States and Mexico, with their national cultures and institutions, present themselves as the main arenas for defining values and allocating resources. And yet people have increasingly challenged the faith that the border can keep people and nations apart. Over the past thirty years the number of United States residents of Mexican ancestry has jumped from 4.5 million to over 17 million.1 Many of them have been "undocumented" and thus "stateless" individuals invisible to both nation-states because they constructed their lives in transnational circuits that looped between Mexico and the United States. Over the same period, governments in Mexico City and Washington increasingly surrendered their visible attempts to control the flow of trade between the two countries to the invisible hand of the market, most notably through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but also through promotion of private commercial ventures in the borderlands that neither state would regulate. The rise of transnational crimes such as narcotics trafficking and currency laundering taxed the traditional ability of the two states to define crimes and enforce laws within their borders and soon led to jurisdictional conflicts as law enforcement agencies sought to pursue criminal suspects and enforce one nation's laws in the other's territory. As the two nation-states collaborated to maintain surveillance over citizens, as Mexican politicians increasingly campaigned in the United States for local and state office in Mexico, movements for democracy, human rights, and citizenship burst across national borders and became transnational struggles. Mexican popular culture spread via radio and television networks that sprang up in the United States as Spanish-language alternatives to traditional American mass media. Also moving across borders were water and air pollution and health problems such as AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) that governments on neither side seemed able to control.	2
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