On the Possibility of Imagining an Open Border

In Tijuana, Mexico, middle‐class desires for an open border with neighboring San Diego, California, are riddled with tensions and contradictions that derive from the way in which local ideals of citizenship are entangled with securitized US entry protocols: legal access to the US is basic for local belonging. This article examines the limitations that haunt both these tijuanenses’ nostalgic memories of free passage in the past and their projects to reestablish it in the future. The most glaring contradiction, I argue, lies in the forgetting of the predicament of those without authorization to cross the border, even as expedited legal passage is invested with political hopes for a more just future. The article focuses on young, highly binational professionals, whose socioeconomic and legal privilege puts them in the vanguard of the tensions of an emerging global regime of citizenship to which “flexible” borders are key.