Escaping identity: border zones as places of evasion and cultural reinvention

The article, based on in‐depth ethnographic research in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez area, is concerned with the ways in which liminal border zones become places of cultural transformation in which groups of individuals, rather than synthetically blending two or more identities, may attempt to downplay potentially harmful or restrictive uni‐dimensional identities, evade past lives, and re‐create themselves anew. The argument is twofold: the relative separation and distance of borderlands from national structures allows for a degree of cultural agency that may be less available to individuals closer to centres of cultural and political power; and border zones provide possibilities for reinvention, new relationalities, and other cultural creations and constructions that I call ‘escaping identity’.