Getting personal: Writing-stories

The author participated in the Border Studies Program in the fall of 2000, and during that time she conducted a field study at the Center for Environmental Resource Management in El Paso, Texas. Most of her time was devoted to a project that built composting toilets in two communities on the periferia of Ciudad Juárez. The author's work on this environmental project provided her a lens into social interpretations of the two sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. This ethnography looks at language dichotomies - the social construction of difference - in order to analyze how stereotypes functioned in the maintenance of structural inequalities.