The debate around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to be dominated by familiar one-sided positions. On the one hand a direct line can be drawn from Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” (New York Times 1992) to Donald Trump’s (2016a) representation of NAFTA as “worst trade deal in history” benefiting Mexico at the expense of the US. Early accounts of NAFTA as a win–win-scenario, on the other hand, are continued today by representations of an ever-deeper global division of labour characterized by interlocking supply chains. Both sides mobilize their trivial geographies: a deeply entrenched methodological nationalism turned political chauvinism and contrasting imaginations of globalization as “the economic equivalent of a force of nature” (Clinton 2000). But the NAFTA debate demonstrates also that the zeitgeist has changed during the last 25 years or so. Tales of economic laws of nature are increasingly eclipsed by a mix of frustration and anger that is predominantly inward-looking and driven by diffuse longings for the good old Fordist times.

Doreen Massey would have been critical of this development, but almost certainly not too surprised. It seems to be increasingly difficult to avoid the impulse to either succumb to a globalizing neoliberal vision or fall back to methodological nationalism. As different as they seem to be, both positions are connected to models of development that are part of the same trajectory of modernization. This is why Bruno Latour has referred to this view as “modernizing the modernization” (Latour 1998: 1). One way to escape this dilemma is to recall Massey’s repeated reminder of the “structured divides, the necessary ruptures and inequalities, the exclusions, on which the successful prosecution of [capitalist modernity] itself depends” (Massey 2005: 84) and her earlier insistence that “globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place” (Massey 1991a: 29).

The Mexico–US border has long been a paradigmatic site on which to study these inequalities.