During fieldwork, most ethnographers produce far more data than they can use in a single monograph. Such was the case with Pablo Vila, who, in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders (University of Texas Press, 2000), examined how narratives of region, ethnicity, race, and nation organized identity for inhabitants of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In that work, he parted from border theories derived from literary criticism to argue for a more nuanced, heterogeneous experience of identification. His interviews with actors on each side of the international divide revealed a convergence around certain hegemonic beliefs that shaped how people positioned themselves in the social universe of the border.

In this follow-up volume, Vila illustrates how these hegemonic beliefs, or “narrative plots,” provide the underlying logic for how residents of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez understand their religious, gender, and class identities. By focusing on these three axes of experience, which do not always adhere to the prevailing narrative plots along the border, Vila explores more fully how the struggle for identification takes place. Although the author’s own process of identification positions his intellectual heritage in the genealogy of thinkers of border hybridity, his direct interlocutors are theorists of narrative and identification. To that end, Vila’s analysis of interviews with border subjects aims not to illuminate the trajectory of any individual life but, rather, to demonstrate how all actors make sense of their selves through discursive practices.

In terms of religious identity, the narrative plots that structure the stories of Mexicans and Mexican Americans include the belief in a gradient of Roman Catholicism that intensifies as they travel south. Interviewees in both cities respond to a photograph of a well-tended cemetery by placing it on the Mexican side of the border, where they say that Roman Catholic traditions of caring for the dead endure. By contrast, Protestants in both cities reverse the gradient, claiming that northerners are more likely to achieve salvation. For them, the photographs serve as vehicles to narrate their own conversion stories.

Vila provides two chapters on religious identity, one focusing on Catholic and one on Protestant respondents. He then dedicates two chapters each to gender and class, one on each side of the border. On the Mexican side, the prevailing narrative plot about gender depicts Ciudad Juárez as a city of vice. This assumption leads men and women alike to connect bars and prostitution with female employment. Female Mexican migrants view their North American counterparts as dominating their husbands, a role the migrants must reconcile in their narratives with persistent machismo.

Vila explains the relative absence of class discourse on the Mexican side of the border as the result of a hegemonic belief that frames upward economic mobility as a movement from Mexico to the United States. This trope is so entrenched that respondents in Mexico consistently locate photos of El Paso shantytowns in Ciudad Juárez. By contrast, poor Anglos in El Paso correctly identify the locations of all the images because their operative narrative claims that “poverty is everywhere on the border” (p. 218).

If Vila argues that dominant narrative plots select for particular metaphors to construct coherent identities, disembodied interview transcripts provide only partial evidence. His opaque methodology, limited to semistructured group interviews using photographs as a modified Thematic Apperception Test, seems ill equipped to illustrate how such discursive practices anchor individual identities. Without any thick description or participant-observation, Vila cannot link interview responses to lived behavior. All he can claim, which he does repeatedly, is that the process of identity construction along the border is “complex.”

The disconnect between the variables religion, gender, and class compounds the complexity of identity formation. Vila justifies his focus by saying that those three categories came up most frequently in his interviews. No quantitative measurements bolster that, however, and no interview subject appears in all three sections to demonstrate the interplay between different narrative plots. Despite the author’s claim that this volume stands on its own, the data— framed by liberal quoting from secondary literature and not updated since the original 1990s fieldwork—feels spliced together from the cutting-room floor.