• Iberoamérica
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.179-208
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• 2021

Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, as a witness to the accelerated changes in Tijuana since the 80's, has built a chronicle of the city based on nostalgia, fantasy, popular language, music, and criticism of the inequality between both sides of the border, but above all, on humour and irony. Among the gallery of characters that populate his stories, the common resident of the border has a special place. Here we are not talking about the passing person or newcomers, but of those who have shaped their social and personal identity from a long every day relationship with the city and the borderline, which makes up what we will call the border-being. In this work, we dialogue with the psychoanalytic concept of border personality or borderline disorder, which refers in a general way to subjects with a deep fracture between the self and the being, which prompts a psychotic search to reconcile this division. In addition, we will engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue to analyse how Crosthwaite characterises the fracture of the border-subjects in some of the stories of the book Instrucciones para cruzar la frontera, to point out the psychosis caused by the sociocultural tensions of life in a border city like Tijuana.