Confronted with an imperfect reality, proponents of free trade demand the erasure and dismantling of all obstacles to the free movement of goods, people, and financial capital. The utopian aim is a perfect global market, a homogenous economic space without borders and frictions. In order to reach this ideal state it is necessary to fix market imperfections and do away with trade distortions, aligning the existing real economic world to the laws and norms of the free-trade model. Free traders therefore advance a radical, but consistent position. For them the focus is solely on the essentials: the free movement of goods with as little interference as possible from noneconomic actors.For a long time now critics have commentated on the seemingly unrealistic character of this reasoning. In the real world, it is argued, demands for the unregulated movement of goods, labor, or capital are na|« ve and betray a complete misunderstanding of how the market really works. In a stylized way, there are two varieties of this critique. Socioeconomists point out that markets cannot be separated from their social and institutional context, arguing that the embeddedness of economic processes brings about variation. Political economists dispute the vision of the free-trade argument, challenging the utopian dream of the benevolent effect of free markets by pointing to the destructive nature of the (neo)liberal ideology [see Berndt and Boeckler (2009) for a discussion of different heterodox approaches to markets].At the heart of these critical interventions is the relationship between abstract free-trade/free-market discourse and concrete economic integration realities. We acknowledge this critique, but remain unconvinced of the underlying dichotomy between an economic model core and social context, or uneven economic realities with open borders for capital and goods and closed ones for labor, respectively. It is ironic that both free-market zealots and their heterodox critics draw a sharp line Approaching the contingency of borders from a perspective informed by the performativity approach to markets, this paper starts from the assumption that this paradox is particularly salient in the context of commodity chains which connect the Global South with the Global North. Taking the example of one single agrocommodity, the tomato, and two border regions (Morocco^EU and Mexico^USA), we follow the links and heterogeneous associations which stretch from the border to the fields, supermarket shelves, and standardization agencies to migrant labor, quality-control apparatuses, and so forth. By reading commodity chains from their literal limits, that is, from the border and from the margins, we focus on an element of this global assemblage which is normally taken for granted and excluded from academic and public discourse.