By Neve Clements

In Mitrovica, Kosovo, the Ibar River bridge does not merely connect the north and south, it embodies the weight of history, tension and unhealed wounds. Guarded and watched, it is seen less as a passage and more as a boundary. When we spoke with Community Building Mitrovica, the spokesperson Milica stated, “The bridge is seen as a place of division rather than connection… Everything depends on the space on the bridge where they stand.” These words expose how even within a shared structure, people remain locked in an either/or ideology: always standing on one side or the other.
Anzaldúa speaks of borderlands as spaces where resistance is born through hybridity, ambiguity and identity. She writes, “I am my language… Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Anzaldúa, 1987). She gestures toward the everyday resistances that take place in Mitrovica: speaking one’s native tongue across the divide, reclaiming space through art, storytelling and simply remaining. While resistance is not always loud, it can be the quiet insistence on presence in a place designed to separate.
The bridge, then, is more than infrastructure, it is a metaphorical site of struggle, possibility, and reimagination. As Anzaldúa says, “it is in the margins that I grow strong.” (Anzaldúa, 1987). In standing on the bridge, anywhere on it, there is the potential to challenge the narrative of division. By refusing to be confined to one side, communities in Mitrovica embody the borderland consciousness: resisting not by retreating from difference, but by learning to live within it.
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