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Faced with popular dissatisfaction with liberal-capitalist democracy, at the beginning of the 21st century there is a governmental shift to the left in Latin America, in which Mexico is recently participating, with the arrival of the Morena party to power. The social movements that promote these political projects convey leftist utopias that seek to institutionalize themselves in political systems and public policies. However, this process of utopian institutionalization presents tensions and contradictions within the so-called party-movements. In this paper I present a methodological proposal for utopian analysis, which I apply to the "Colectivo La Calle", a group that is part of the lopezobradorista movement in Mexico. I analyze three utopias mediated by this group and find that indeed the Colectivo is mobilizing against Morena's pragmatism. This result adds to previous literature, which, given contemporary governmental experiences, questions the ability of the Latin American institutional left to overcome conservative hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse theory is useful for understanding the creation of borders, whether material or imaginary. This paper addresses three situations on Mexico's southern border between 2000 and 2015 in which elements of discourse theory may be applied. The outcomes were the following: 1) correlations may be made between the elements of the discourse moving from the northern to the southern border, but not in the opposite direction; 2) the process of securitising the discourse about migrants is continuous, and new securitising elements are regularly added; 3) an "elastic borders" phenomenon exists, where borders extend or retract, thereby creating new border regions; and 4) discourses around the southern border are constructed with more pejorative elements than the northern, despite the fact that crime rates are higher in the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]