Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Frontera 9780816537235, 0816537232

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Border Dynamics: Visible Meanings Along the U.S.-Mexico Line
1. A Conversation on Border Landscapes Through Time
2. Monuments, Photographs, and Maps: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border in the 1890s
3. Fencing the Line: Race, Environment, and the Changing Visual Landscape at the U.S.-Mexico Divide
4. Open Border: The National Press and the Promotion of Transnational Commerce, 1940–1965
5. A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces
6. Stealth Crossings: Performance Art and Games of Power on the Militarized Border
7. How the Border Wall Became a Canvas: Political Art in the U.S.-Mexico Border Towns of Ambos Nogales
8. Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and Self-Representation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
9. A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present: Land Use and Representation
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Border Spaces

EDITED BY K AT H E R I N E   G . M O R R I S S E Y A N D J O H N - M I C H A E L   H . WA R N E R

BORDER S PA C E S VISUALIZING THE U.S.- MEXICO FRONTERA

The University of Arizona Press www​.uapress​.arizona​.edu © 2018 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2018 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­8165-­3723-­5 (cloth) Cover design by Carrie House, HOUSEdesign llc Cover art: [left to right] Self Portrait on the Border Line by Frida Kahlo © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Border Agent Along the Border, from the National Archives; Border Dynamics by Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morakis, photo by Jay Rochlin; Border Monument, courtesy of University of Arizona Special Collections Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data are available at the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Border Dynamics: Visible Meanings Along the U.S.-­M exico Line 3 KATHERINE G. MORRISSEY AND J O H N -­M I C H A E L   H . W A R N E R

PA R T I

1. A Conversation on Border Landscapes Through Time 23 S A M U E L T R U E T T A N D M A R I B E L A LV A R E Z



2. Monuments, Photographs, and Maps: Visualizing the U.S.-­M exico Border in the 1890s 39 KATHERINE G. MORRISSEY



3. Fencing the Line: Race, Environment, and the Changing Visual Landscape at the U.S.-­Mexico Divide 66 MARY E. MENDOZA



4. Open Border: The National Press and the Promotion of Transnational Commerce, 1940–­1 965 86 G E R A L D O L U J Á N C A DAVA

vi | Contents

PA R T I I

5. A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces 113 A M E L I A M A L A G A M B A - ­A N S Ó T E G U I A N D SARAH J. MOORE



6. Stealth Crossings: Performance Art and Games of Power on the Militarized Border 134 ILA N. SHEREN



7. How the Border Wall Became a Canvas: Political Art in the U.S.-­M exico Border Towns of Ambos Nogales 151 MARGARET REGAN



8. Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and Self-­Representation in the U.S.-­M exico Borderlands 175 REBECCA M. SCHREIBER



9. A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present: Land Use and Representation 195 J O H N -­M I C H A E L   H . W A R N E R

Contributors 219 Index 223

Acknowledgments

O

ver the years of developing this collaborative project, we have accumulated many debts of gratitude. Throughout we have drawn on the expertise and grace of several individuals and organizations. It began with the Border Research Group at the University of Arizona, where Barbara Babcock, William Beezley, Jennifer Burley, Emily Cammack, Jennifer Jenkins, Tricia Loescher, Sandra Soto, Emily Umburger, Stacie Widdifield, and many others shared ideas and energy. We are grateful to Kate P. Albers, Maribel Alvarez, William Beezley, Kate Bonansinga, Geraldo Cadava, Kerry Doyle, Javier Duran, George Flaherty, J. Frank Galarte, Cindy García, Nicole Guidotti-­Hernández, Laura Gutiérrez, Ann Marie Leimer, Oscar Martínez, Kelley Merriam-­Castro, Sarah J. Moore, Lauren Rabb, Rebecca Schreiber, Anna Seiferle-­Valencia, Ila Sheren, Janet Sturman, Sandra Soto, Samuel Truett, and other participants in far-­reaching discussions at the 2011 symposium “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands.” The University of Arizona and Kent State University have provided welcoming academic spaces for interdisciplinary collaborations. We thank all our colleagues and students, particularly the graduate students in Kent State University’s fall 2015 “Nations and Borders” art history seminar. Our work has benefited from support at the University of Arizona, from the Director’s Fund of the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, the School

viii | Acknowledgments

of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Art, and the Department of History. Audiences in southern Arizona, the UA Institute of the Environment’s Arts/Environment Group, and the WEST Network, as well as at the 2013 Newberry Library Symposium “Pictures from an Expedition,” provided useful feedback. Assistance and contributions from Cassandra Hernandez, Jay Rochlin, Dan Millis, the Arizona Humanities Council, and the wonderful team at UA Libraries Special Collections, including Erika Castaño, Roger Myers, and Veronica Reyes, are much appreciated. So too is the support from Marie Bukowski, director, School of Art, Kent State University. We are indebted to our authors for their generosity and patience as we brought this book to production. It has been a privilege to know and work with Amelia Malagamba-­ Ansótegui, Ewelina Bańka, Katherine Benton-­Cohen, Marcus Burtner, Stephanie Capaldo, Mahwish Chishty, Claudio Dicochea, Adriana Gallego, Kelly Lytle Hernández, Paul Hirt, Meg R. Jackson, Zofia Kolbuszewska, Karen Leong, Kim Lowry, Eric Meeks, Gabriela Muñoz, Margaret Regan, Teresa Salazar, Mary Jenea Sanchez, Rachel St. John, Jeremy Vetter, and Fred and Rita Warner, whose ideas and inspiration are reflected in this volume. We especially thank Mary Mendoza, Douglas Cazaux Sackman, and Emily Wakild for their collegiality and timely advice. The University of Arizona Press, particularly Kristen Buckles, has been an excellent partner; thanks for joining and sustaining us on this journey.

Border Spaces

Introduction

Border Dynamics Visible Meanings Along the U.S.-Mexico Line K AT H E R I N E   G . M O R R I S S E Y A N D J O H N - M I C H A E L   H . WA R N E R

A

massive metal sculpture—fourteen feet tall, nine hundred pounds, with four larger-than-life human figures— Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis’s Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza (2002) is a striking composition with a political edge. Its four abstracted human bodies push against two sides of an amalgam of rusted sheets of metal taken from the Ambos Nogales border fence. Originally, Border Dynamics was installed on the U.S.-Mexico border itself, parallel to Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora. Since 2003, Border Dynamics has occupied the Harvill Plaza at the University of Arizona in Tucson. As students and faculty walk through campus, the installation prompts and continues discussions about the border and questions that surround it. In the shadow of that sculpture and its ensuing conversations, this book has its origins. Building a border wall and other markings of the U.S.-Mexico border are hotly contested topics in political and social debates. Politicians, business leaders, and the media offer rhetorical assessments and proposals. They evoke visible and aspirational symbols of nationalism, economic control, and/or cultural identity to define a diverse set of ends. Whether proposed policies, material objects, or human actions, the embodiments of the latest concerns are part of a “legacy of simultaneously crossing and reinforcing borders,” as historians Samuel Truett and Elliott Young phrase it.1 In these often tense conversations, places considered on the margin— the Mexican

4 | Introduction

Figure I.1 Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis, Border Dynamics, as installed on the Mexico side of the border wall in Nogales, Sonora. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

North and the U.S. Southwest—come to center stage. From the borderlands perspective, the symbolic importance of borders resonates deeply. To investigate these concerns from a regional base, the Border Research Group, a University of Arizona cluster of arts and humanities scholars, began meeting in the summer of 2010. An array of academics from across campus, committed to interdisciplinary research of northern Mexico and the American West, we met bimonthly to share works in progress, especially on studies of borderlands histories, arts, and cultures. From this process, we developed

Introduction | 5

two related initiatives—­an exhibition at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (November 2011–­March 2012), The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes, and a symposium, held in December 2011, “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands.” The symposium brought together scholars based in the United States to share their work on a range of topics, including visual and performing border arts, border art museums, dance, race and sexuality studies, border economic history, and photography. We also invited several scholars—­including Samuel Truett, Amelia Malagamba-­Ansótegui, Sarah J. Moore, and Maribel Alvarez—­who offered commentaries and a keynote address. It was an exciting and diverse intellectual conversation. Out of these dynamic exchanges we came away with a deeper understanding of the interdisciplinary challenge inherent in border studies as well as with an enhanced appreciation of the ways visual representations work to communicate across divides. Energized to share our collaboration beyond the symposium, we committed to this book project. We aim to draw attention to the physical landscape of the U.S.-­Mexico border and its representation through arts and time. Building on our strengths as borderlands dwellers, or fronterizos/as, we offer perspectives from a variety of disciplines. In particular this book draws on two interrelated fields—­border art history and border studies. Border art history is a relatively new field that has emerged from a melding of Chicano/a studies and art history, with particular attention to cross-­border performance art and art installations in the borderlands. Its close attention to landscapes, place, and the border brings it into conversation with border studies. An interdisciplinary field associated with a range of related intellectual inquiries, border studies explores the processes involved in constructing, maintaining, and contesting borders and boundaries.2 Our perspective on border studies comes predominantly from history. As historians—­whether trained in American studies, art history, U.S. history, or Latin American studies—­we share an engagement in placing contemporary issues and ideas in relation to the past.3 Grounded in the borderlands, prompted by art, and situated in the academy, Border Spaces considers the connections between art, land, and peoples in this fraught binational region. As borderlands scholars we are dedicated to examining the region from an interdisciplinary and cross-­border perspective. We think about border spaces—­as represented in art and in the

6 | Introduction

landscape—­as sites of juxtapositions, not just between nations, but also between abstract and material forms. Border Spaces asks two main questions: How has the U.S.-­Mexico border, especially its land border between El Paso and the Pacific Ocean, been represented and marked through time? How do different scales of reference—­international, national, regional, local, or individual—­shape our understanding of the border? These questions are both historical and contemporary. They open up intellectual inquiries that speak to the symbolic importance of borders. Whether for political and social debates of the present or for academic discussions of borderlands, these questions of time and space have both material realities and cultural meanings. They matter to border residents and crossers, to national interests, and in a global context.4 This edited volume connects ongoing discussions in visual studies, film studies, museum studies, art and architectural history, environmental history, border studies, and history.5 To that end, this expansive collection of essays includes a combination of well-­known and new voices. We invited specific scholars who had participated in the symposium and three others whose work directly related to our emerging themes. Each scholar brings a particular disciplinary strength, and collectively, through our work together, we have benefited from those strengths to craft nuanced interpretations of the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. The structure of the book is intended to develop and extend this interdisciplinary conversation. The volume is divided into two related sections—­ one on border histories of built environments and the second on border art histories. Each section begins with a “conversation” essay—­co-­authored by two leading interdisciplinary scholars in the relevant fields—­that weaves together the book’s thematic questions with the ideas and the essays to follow. Intended to imitate the give-­and-­take of the interdisciplinary conversation of the book as a whole, the co-­authored essays frame and extend the discussions.

Part I: Border Spaces in the Landscape We begin by examining the history and representations of the border’s built environments—­fences, monuments, buildings, and border cities and towns.

Introduction | 7

These physical markers, visible in the landscape, contribute both physically and imaginatively to the establishment and reworkings of borderlands, the border, and their meanings. From nineteenth-­century monuments to twentieth-­century fences, from railroads to highways, from mining towns to border cities, the people-­built borderlands have changed over time. Even those objects intended as permanent markers—­monuments and fences, for example—­have taken on multiple meanings and interpretations throughout the twentieth century. These structures, although at times aesthetic, are not the necessarily the work of intentional artists. Rather, they were constructed by surveyors, architects, city planners, local residents, government officials, customs officers, photographers, engineers, business owners, and urban leaders, each of whom shaped their initial meanings. Often established through international or national initiatives far removed from the region, they were built through local labor in specific environments and remained to shape local residents’ and travelers’ lives. Whether seen from Mexico or from the United States, such intentional structures in the landscape are, literally and figuratively, “constructions” of the borderlands and the border itself. As Samuel Truett and Maribel Alvarez discuss in their conversational essay, the chapters in part 1 investigate the complications inherent in marking the landscape through time. The three chapters that follow their introductory essay explore chronologically, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, different aspects of the borderlands’ built environment as modernist projects. Chapter 2, by Katherine G. Morrissey, and chapter 3, by Mary E. Mendoza, center on efforts of federal governments to demarcate and control the line in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century (1890s–­1920s). The 1890s marked a new visualization of the U.S.-­Mexico borderline. Cultural historian Katherine Morrissey’s essay, “Monuments, Photographs, and Maps,” begins with the International Boundary Commission of the 1890s, whose survey teams simultaneously established monuments, took photographs, and drew maps. Comparing and contrasting the images taken by Mexican section photographer Luis Servín with those by his American counterpart, Daniel R. Payne, Morrissey explores the aesthetic objects crafted through collaborative labor as an archive of competing interpretations. Unstable national visions, shared technology, and field experiences shaped

8 | Introduction

the effort to define a more precise borderline, yet these factors also led to depictions of the borderlands as fluid. Environmental border historian Mary Mendoza, too, keeps her attention on border markers and monitoring of the early twentieth century, specifically the fences and federal fortifications against disease alongside the construction of racial categories. The rhetoric and practice of border fencing marked differences in the appearance of Mexican and American cattle and, in doing so, laid the groundwork for extending this differentiation to human classifications. “Fencing the Line” considers the ways dynamic nature—­whether animals, people, or pathogens—­frustrated efforts to control a newly built environment. Fences and ideas about the Mexican “race” developed in tandem—­and the natural environment fueled both. The final essay in part 1, by borderlands scholar Geraldo Luján Cadava, turns to the mid-­twentieth century (1940s–­1960s), when U.S. and Mexican businessmen, journalists, and politicians engaged in the physical construction of border commerce and infrastructure. Envisioning the borderline as a “shop window,” they fashioned new perceptions, and confronted the instability, of a consumption-­linked nationalism. Cadava’s chapter on the immediate post–­World War  II era of tremendous economic growth in the borderlands examines how modernization in border cities reshaped the region. Newspaper reporting brought attention to these efforts and shaped both a local and a national conversation about the significance of the borderline. “Open Border” pays particular attention to the changing border dynamics, especially the tension between an “open” and “closed” border, as reflected in urban development along the U.S.-­Mexico border. The Mexican government’s National Border Program (Programa Nacional Fronterizo, abbreviated PRONAF) of the 1960s and 1970s developed urban beautification and cultural programming along the northern border with the United States. Visual transformations, such as architect Mario Pani’s newly designed border gateways, worked in conjunction with the economic investments of the Border Industrialization Program (Programa de Industrialización de la Frontera, abbreviated BIP). These efforts to convert the international line into a “shop window” had unintentional consequences for border residents and the borderlands’ built environment. As these chapters demonstrate, the visualization projects that centered on the U.S.-­Mexico border took on distinct adumbrations. Negotiated through

Figure I.2 Erección del Monumento Numero 153 (Erection of Monument 153). From Memoria de la Sección Mexicana de la Comisión Internacional de Límites entre México y los Estados Unidos que restableció los monumentos de El Paso al Pacifico; bajo la dirección por parte de México del ingeniero Jacobo Blanco, jefe de la Comisión Mexicana (New York: J. Polhemus, 1901), between pp. 96 and 97. Courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

10 | Introduction

culture and shaped through a combination of local and national interests, each left behind physical marks of their efforts.

Part II: Border Spaces in Art The second part turns to the more recent past. Introduced by Amelia Malagamba-­Ansótegui and Sarah J. Moore’s conversational essay, chapters 6–­9 focus on visual art and culture, and their intersection with the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands, in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The essays examine the contemporary art forms of cross-­border art troupes, including Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g. Lab, the images of U.S. photographers Mark Klett and David Taylor, a film by fronteriza artist Mary Jenea Sanchez, and the photo documentary Border Film Project. These artists address and question conventional approaches to documentation, authorship, and fine art. Through their visual and cultural work, they interrupt the social, political, and economic landscapes of la frontera. Art historian Ila N. Sheren situates present-­day San Diego–­Tijuana border art history within a performance and body art framework, beginning with the Border Art Workshop  / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). “Stealth Crossings” focuses on the San Diego–­Tijuana border nearly twenty-­ five years after the BAW/TAF’s 1984 The Exile. Within the broader context of border art, Sheren looks at new media and gaming culture to account for border crossings. After asserting the importance of embodied readings, Sheren examines performance as a form of border crossing in the work of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g Lab. Public historian and journalist Margaret Regan contributes a much-­ needed art history of Taller Yonke, a collective based in Nogales, Sonora. In “How the Border Wall Became a Canvas,” Regan contextualizes the more than twenty-­five years of artistic collaborations between Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis, and at times Chicano artist Alfred Quiroz, within the landscape of well-­known border art studies, including the San Diego–­ Tijuana inSITE exhibitions. The colectivo’s decades of art making began in the 1980s with public art in Nogales, Sonora, continuing into the first decade of this century with the physical border wall art. In a time when the arts

Introduction | 11

Figure I.3 Guadalupe Serrano, Alberto Morackis, and Alfred Quiroz, Paseo de Humanidad detail. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

and humanities are increasingly denigrated, Regan posits the importance of art and visual culture for catalyzing change, promoting community, and disseminating information. In “Visible Frictions,” American studies scholar Rebecca Schreiber takes a film and museum studies approach to the Border Film Project (BFP), which placed cameras in the hands of Minutemen and migrants. The project,

12 | Introduction

simultaneously performative and photographic, is an exhibition and publication that crosses art historical, academic, and community boundaries. Schreiber’s article situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its institutionalization to contextualize her analysis of the BFP’s highly visible traveling exhibition and coffee table book. Using critiques of commonplace neoliberal paradigms, Schreiber’s research methodology flags problems with locating various border conversations in the same way, especially regarding art about the border. Schreiber asks crucial questions about documentation and self-­representation with a sensitive nuance to authorship. In particular, Schreiber’s concerns about visibility speak directly to the countercultural legacies of border art, such as the BAW/TAF. In the last chapter, John-­Michael Warner, art historian and gender and women’s studies scholar, treats photography and film from three distinct borderlands locations. Examining art by Mark Klett, David Taylor, and Mary Jenea Sanchez, Warner builds on the notion of performance, crucial to border art histories, and queries art forms that recenter authorship on border dwellers and border crossers. Warner blurs the boundaries between border art and art about the border as well as emphasizes the expansive terrain of la frontera—­in addition to the borderline and the broader borderlands, he posits border art as something embodied and corporeal. In doing so, Warner draws particularly on art that does not reinscribe la linea, articulating a borderland that is not reduced to geography. Border art history, for Warner, suggests possibilities for visual and cultural studies as a layered and complex field of various abstracted forms of borders. Overall, these authors look to how art captures the U.S.-­Mexico borderline, borderlands, and fronterizo/a experiences as the subject and object of history. These essays as a whole offer important methodological developments. The research questions range from performative, playful, and gaming (Sheren) to leftist critiques (Schreiber), as well as regional and border-­ specific narratives that expand our understanding of altern and subaltern studies in the U.S.-­Mexico border region (Regan and Warner). By focusing on art’s role in social organizing and activism as well as community representation and development, these essays challenge the dominance of the U.S.-­built fence and the ever-­growing militarization in the region. Sheren and Schreiber address visual arts’ role in exploring how the border fence and

Introduction | 13

the borderline is viewed in the United States and its impact on fronterizos/ as in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Examining ways artists respond to the politics of place and difference, Regan and Warner focus on specific experiences in la frontera that result from state uses of the frontier dictated by history, economics, nation, and racialized identity.

On Border Art History All nine of these essays are part of the interdisciplinary field of border studies, with an emphasis on border art history. They represent a space where historians of different trainings organize around visual analysis. Border art history, necessarily a fluid space, refers to art about the border and border art. It comes from a legacy of Chicano/a art and academic borderlands studies as well as changing U.S.-­Mexico border policies. Several scholars, exhibitions, and bodies of knowledge have been influential in border art history.6 As Sheren’s essay demonstrates, border art history, at least for the U.S.-­ Mexico border, is deeply informed by the performances of the BAW/TAF, which began in the mid-­1980s. This group of countercultural largely Chicano/a artists crafted outdoor performance pieces enacted along the San Diego–­Tijuana border. Although the BAW/TAF’s artworks were not the first example of border art, they have become an important entry into the discourse. Largely because of their humorous but serious and radical contributions to the field of body art, the BAW/TAF forced scholars and audiences to move beyond the confines of a museum to the borderline itself. Notably, the BAW/TAF distinguishes between what Amelia Malagamba-­ Ansótegui describes as “border art/art of the border” and “art about the border.” In this instance, the BAW/TAF’s art is both located in the borderlands as well as constructed by fronterizos/as. Their performances represent the lived experiences, studied exercises, and knowledges of the artists whose day-­to-­ day experiences are marked by borders: geographic and corporeal among them. Art about the border, on the other hand, adds another important voice, namely, by artists who depict borders (usually geographic) that are not necessarily rooted in a fronterizo/a imaginary. At best, border art, and art about the border, deconstruct, rupture, and intervene in the notion of borders. At

14 | Introduction

its worst, border art reinscribes the borderline, or la linea, and the assumed supremacy of the state and economics. In the United States, border art history explores the politics of place making for the U.S. and Mexican nations and Mexican and Mexican American peoples. Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn’s La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience (1993) is one of the best-­known border art histories in the United States.7 Chávez and Grynsztejn’s co-­curatorial initiative originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) and the Centro Cultural de la Raza and is an important facet of institutional history because it speaks to how border art histories began as a field of inquiry within Chicano/a art history. In La Frontera/The Border, Chávez and Grynsztejn reconsider some well-­known Chicano/a artists through a border studies lens and include emerging artists whose work treats the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. Although many works in the exhibition contained more discursive interpretations of borders that resonate with Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s fronteriza and mestiza method, the pieces were primarily understood through the discourse of geopolitics, or a method of analysis that deconstructs causal relationships between politics—­its assumptive power and authority—­and geography. Exhibitions such as La Frontera/The Border often relied on cultural histories published in Mexico, such as Miguel León-­Portilla’s 1976 Culturas en peligro (Endangered Cultures). Although León-­Portillo does not discuss border art directly, he recognized the importance of norteña, an articulation of a distinct community in northern Mexico. Subsequently, Eduardo Barrera expressed border culture as a hybrid construction, a crucial development in recognizing border art as uniquely suited to address politics and geography in la frontera.8 The El Colegio de la Frontera Norte research center for cultural studies, founded by Amelia Malagamba-­Ansótegui, one of the essayists in this volume, established its mission to study film, television, and visual and performing arts—­a turn important to U.S.-­based scholars (including Chávez and Grynsztejn, among others) for international exhibitions in Tijuana and San Diego. Beginning in the 1990s through the cross-­border inSITE series, the San Diego and Tijuana borderlands grew increasingly more visible through collaborations with Mexican and Chicano/a artists as well as nearby museums and barrios.9 Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo privado en espacio

Introduction | 15

público (1998), Fugitive Sites: inSITE 2000–­2001 New Contemporary Art in San Diego and Tijuana (2002), and Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Terrain (2007) are prominent among inSITE publications.10 Over more than a decade, inSITE’s sustained work maintained a focus on Mexican, Mexican American, and fronterizo/a subjectivity in art history. This series of exhibitions emphasized geographic specificities pertinent to artworks and visual culture located on or near the physical border fence and looked to how some border art captured borderlands as something much larger than the U.S.-­Mexico borderline. Moreover, inSITE’s publications challenged art world hierarchies with their attention to community art in Mexican American barrios and posited recognition for deurbanized art paradigms and desert experiences specific to U.S.-­Mexico border crossers. The intellectual dynamics from Barrera, León-­Portilla, and Malagamba-­Ansótegui to Chávez, Grynsztejn, and inSITE are important for this volume because the border art histories included here turn to a powerful aesthetic reading of human subjectivity in spaces previously thought only geographic.11 The relationship between Chicano/a and Latin American studies, American art, and feminist art history, however tenuous, helped create a space for border art histories such as the ones included in this volume.

Concluding Thoughts As academics located in the borderlands, we bring a particular set of interests to this discussion. Our daily lives are permeated, both directly and indirectly, by the border’s presence. The dynamics of the border and its representations—­as the Harvill Plaza sculpture suggests—­have complicated pasts. Twenty-­first century conversations about the border—­as a wall, as a place of crossings, as a political national dividing line, as a body—­have a long history. This volume stretches the conversation back through the long twentieth century. Its chapters call attention to a variety of visualization projects—­border art, fences, buildings, and tangible and semipermanent marks on the landscape. And the myriad examples highlight how these visualization projects hold inherently unstable meanings. The continuous, unfulfilled desire for permanency in a shifting environment is one salient irony.

16 | Introduction

Border artists have created their works along this tension line. In 2010, for example, a section of the U.S.-­Mexico border wall dividing Ambos Nogales disappeared.12 Taller Yonke’s Invisible Wall (2010), sometimes called “No Wall,” imagines Ambos Nogales without a militarized occupation. The monumental-­scale installation wrapped the United States’ architecture of border security and pictured the specific geography of that place as if the fence were gone. In other words, the installation depicted the landscape sans border fence. Invisible Wall pictures the borderline landscape with a view of the U.S. side as if the wall were not in place. Trees, miscellaneous foliage, and even lampposts emerge from the photographic installation, rendering an image of la linea in the border wall’s aftermath. One of the details, a mobile floodlight, represents the covert nature of the U.S. Border Patrol: a conspicuous reminder of such technologies placed along the border to illuminate the geography and presumably catch border crossers in the act of refusing the border. Invisible Wall was a short-­lived installation, which is an important component of the artwork. If the installation had remained in situ, it would have masked the wall altogether. Instead, the impermanence of Taller Yonke’s occupation of the border fence echoes the ebb and flow of borders, borderlines, and their meanings.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, “Making Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping the U.S.-­ Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. Recent border studies readers offer useful overviews of the field: Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds., A Companion to Border Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012); Brian DeLay, ed., North American Borderlands (New York: Routledge, 2013). See also Journal of Borderland Studies. While border studies has a long historiography and global reach, this volume centers on a region—­the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands—­that has been a rich focus for the development of the field. Its particular border historiography draws on the Boltonian tradition sustained by David J. Weber, among others: see Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians and the Borderlands,” American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 66–­81; Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New

Introduction | 17

4.

5.

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). The extensive literature on twentieth-­ century U.S.-­Mexico borderlands history, not all of which is cited here, includes Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-­Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Oscar J. Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-­Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism and Exclusion in the U.S.-­Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-­Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–­ 1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Katherine Benton-­Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Truett and Young, Continental Crossroads; and Benjamin  H. Johnson and Andrew Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); John C. Welchman, ed., Rethinking Borders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García, eds., Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Byron Brauchli and Fernando Meza, En La Línea/On the Line (Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009); and Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-­Imagining the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). Ila Nicole Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Christina Aushana, “Transborder Art Activism and the U.S.-­Mexico Border: Analyzing ‘Art­ scapes’ as Forms of Resistance and Cultural Production in the Frame of Globalization,” International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Studies 6, no. 7 (2012): 127–­42; Chiara Brambila, Jussi Laine, James W. Scott, and Gianluca Bocchi, eds., Borderscaping: Imaginations and the Practice of Border Making (New York:

18 | Introduction

6.

7.

8.

9.

Routledge, 2016); Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-­Williams, eds., Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the “Lines in the Sand” Agenda (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward, eds., Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). In the 1970s, Shifra Goldman wrote one of the earliest dissertations on modern Mexican art. Before passing away in 2011, she published numerous foundational works for Chicano/a art history: Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto, Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–­1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), which encouraged many Chicano/a art histories that relied on its index of Mexican and Mexican American artists; and Goldman, “Art Bridging Boundaries. Arte: Puente de fronteras,” in Visual Arts on the U.S./Mexican Border: Artes plásticas en la frontera Mexico/Estados Unidos, ed. Harry Polkinhorn et al. (Calexico, CA: Binational Press; Mexicali, Baja California: Editorial Binacional, 1991), 101–­38. Early on Goldman brought needed attention to the BAW/TAF. The artist collective was founded in 1984 by David Avalos and performance artists Michael Schnorr, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, and Sara-­Jo Berman. Goldman’s scholarship affirmed a place for Chicano/a art history and resulted in radical studies of art by border artists such as those in the BAW/TAF. Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn, La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1993); Ila Nicole Sheren, “The San Diego Chicano Movement and the Origins of Border Art,” Journal of Borderlands Studies (October 2016): 1–­15, http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1080​/08865655​ .2016​.1238314. Miguel León-­Portilla, Culturas en peligro (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1976); and Eduardo Barrera, Discursos emergentes de (desde/sobre) la frontera norte (Ciudad Juárez: ENTORNO, 1995). Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). Surely border art history would not be a possibility today if it were not for these museum and academic endeavors. Before any of these projects occurred, however, artists made art. U.S.-­Mexico border art’s beginning, the body as a cannonball hurled across an illegitimate boundary, marks border art as a form of body art. This is not to say that all border art is body art, but it does affirm the importance of performance: art as border crossing, artists as border crossers, and history as performative and human centered. Amelia Jones is a central figure in positing a performative art historical methodology. Jones’s scholarship—­Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Jones and Andrew

Introduction | 19

Stephenson, eds., Performing the Body/Performing the Text (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012)—­offers feminist proposals to decenter the hierarchies of art (sculpture and painting), promise the possibility of liberal interpretation, and direct historians to maintain the importance of politicized identities in representation and subjectivity. 10. Sally Yard, ed., Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo privado en espacio público (San Diego, CA: Installation Gallery, 1998); Osvaldo Sanchez, Fugitive Sites: inSITE 2000–­2001 New Contemporary Art in San Diego and Tijuana (San Diego, CA: Installation Gallery, 2002); and Sally Yard, ed., Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Terrain (San Diego, CA: inSITE, 2007). 11. The practice of locating border art exclusively in Chicano/a art history does not fully address the complexities and account for the nuances of twenty-­first century borderlands. If U.S.-­Mexico border art history is situated in the academy somewhere between Chicano/a studies and Latin American studies, it is also informed by U.S. art history. As a body of knowledge in U.S. art history, some American West studies, such as William H. Truettner, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–­1920 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1991), point to the importance of the expansive and far-­reaching West as anything but the hinterlands. Chon Noriega, for example, bridges Chicano/a and American West studies, proposing many Wests, with distinct and related communities and experiences. Noriega, From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography (San Francisco, CA: Mexican Museum, 1996). Most recently, the collaborative exhibition project funded by the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–­1980 (begun 2002), brings much-­needed attention to California as a historical objective for westward expansion and migration through the lens of late twentieth-­century art in Southern California. In a geographic region as contentious as Southern California, thinking about the relationship between past and present as well as contemporary art articulates many related histories, many Wests. 12. Another example of this type of artwork: Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrando la Frontera/Erasing the Border (2012, Tijuana; 2015, Nogales).

Part I

1

A Conversation on Border Landscapes Through Time S A M U E L T R U E T T A N D M A R I B E L A LVA R E Z

S AMUE L TRUE T T : Borderlands are places where the tales we tell ourselves about modernity founder. They are places where the world-shrinking locomotives of globalization slam on the brakes— where the boundaries of modern nations, so clearly marked on our maps, trickle and bleed in all directions under our feet, like fresh paint in a desert monsoon. They are places, to quote Katherine Morrissey in this volume, where “efforts to create permanent meanings and scientific lines” remain a work in progress. This is the world in which the essays in part 1 find their bearings: a world divided and crossed, rarely in anticipated ways. In this world, distinctions are drawn by lines on a map, but also by monuments of stone and series of images in photo albums. Borders are marked by barbed wire, but also by cows and ticks. Nations incorporate space with roads and shopping centers and dipping vats, but also through what the art historian George Flaherty calls “affectual infrastructure.” 1 Affect, like photographs or newspaper articles or quarantines, tethers people to space. In the borderlands of these chapters, this tethering typically pulls people in two directions, toward the nation and toward the outside world. The promise of modernity was that one might find a productive path to both, that one might disentangle national and transnational circuits, to manage sustainable relationships to both patria and mundo. This was an essential conundrum of the nineteenth- and

24 | Part I

twentieth-­century borderlands, one that each of these essays engages in its own way. As a historian, I’m drawn most powerfully to the issue of change over time. How, across the broader sweep of these chapters, did this modern tension between the national and the global resolve itself? What changed, what things dug in their heels, and what resonates across the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century sweep of these borderland stories? For the boundary resurveyors of the 1890s, change was bound up with new technologies of delineation and surveillance. With monuments, photographs, and maps, states expanded their nets of control—­filling in space, pinning space down. For their part, officials from the Bureau of Animal Industry sought to convert “a once open range marked only by obelisks,” in Mary Mendoza’s words, into a grid of chutes and tanks. States thus reengineered borderlands to manage mobility through what James Scott calls “choke points,” strategic places where states could concentrate their policing power.2 Later in the twentieth century, the Mexican state shrank and controlled space through new spaces of consumption, pulling workers toward a centrist web of shopping centers, museums, and patriotic portals. Meanwhile, business elites, using the power of the printed word, built alternative networks that pulled people across borders—­but in equally conscribed and managed ways. By the 1950s, Geraldo Luján Cadava observes in this volume, a “growing web of connections between the United States and Mexico could be seen from the air in the form of hundreds of miles of new highways and rails.” This bird’s-­eye view of a world transformed marks one endpoint of a larger borderland tale, but it would have resonated powerfully with Morrissey’s border surveyors generations earlier, whose photographic albums created a synoptic view of borderland space and its transformations. And just as these images pulled in other directions—­disrupting modernity’s clean lines, its efforts to contain and manage—­so too did Cadava’s transnational grid (like Mendoza’s fences and vats) remain always susceptible to countervailing forces, unanticipated ends. At the border, modernity hung perpetually in the balance, poised at the ragged edge of this side and that, teetering between the worlds within and the worlds beyond. In the 1950s, a century after the first boundary surveyors built monuments of stone, modern visions of a world

A Conversation on Border Landscapes | 25

Figure 1.1 International Street, Nogales, postcard. Arizona, Southwestern and Bor-

derlands Photograph Collection, University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

divided, contained, connected, and controlled continued to shimmer across the desert sand, siempre más allá. M ARI BE L ALVA R E Z : In a practical sense, within the schemes of nations, a

border is mostly a gimmick. That is to say, the function of a border is to trick those who must cross it, police it, regulate it, and live within its radius into believing in its rationale, effectiveness, and lawfulness. People on opposing ends of the political spectrum (for example, conservatives who wish to severely restrict immigration and liberals who simply want to reform the policies that regulate it) can often find their common ground of “civility” by agreeing on one universal truth: borders are not desirable. Borders tend to be ugly and show the least flattering side of our humanity. The erection of a border is usually an extreme sign that things have not gone well among neighbors or relatives; it renders in material form the psychological insecurity of one side (“us”) and the suspicion we harbor about the character of the other (“them”). Yet, despite these flaws, political opponents say, “a border is necessary.” They say this because the gimmick works wonderfully: it is, consistent with Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word, “an ingenious mechanical

26 | Part I

device” (a gadget of mass proportions) used to “attract business.” The business it attracts, mostly, is the business of justifying its own existence as the fitting horizon of what is rational in this time and age. As Hegel famously said about history, a border too (via the state) makes its own case for itself by presenting its “subject matter . . . adapted to the prose” of border policy.3 The essays in this part provide excellent, meticulous documentation of the various guises and shapes by which the dual nation-­building projects of demarcation and distinction by the United States and Mexico have become recognizable in the last 150 years. The artifacts implicated in these efforts to naturalize the border exhibit in turn a rich material texture: fences, dipping stations, monuments, photographs, maps, newspapers, malls, curio shops, rail lines, racetracks, supermarkets, and border-­crossing arcs. The more physical the marker, the more effectively the redundancy of its core message echoed throughout the border cities: the border is here to stay. In essence, these three chapters collectively shed light on the insidious processes by which the border as “gimmick” also becomes the border as feeling—­as you put it, Sam, a generalized sentiment of a promise that never fully arrives, but that keeps you busy and focused for the time being—­and that time, of course, is all the time, siempre. That these projects of state were largely successful is perhaps most evident in the generalized recognition as indisputable fact that the border is an artifact of our societal reality. I am always struck by the fact that in the current debates about immigration reform, for instance, no one—­not the president, nor any senator, nor any national Hispanic leader—­questions the existence of the border itself. None of the national pundits or advocates ever takes a step back and asks: Is this border logical or sensible to begin with? Does having a border actually serve the national interests better than having none? In a rare instance of reflexivity, a cover story on Time magazine in 2008 asked the question “Does America really need to wall itself off ”? The story that accompanied the headline cited Representative Ciro Rodriguez, a Democrat from Texas, repeating exactly the kind of double-­entendre logic that border policy has engendered and made “natural” so masterfully for itself: “We want to secure our borders, but we can’t wall ourselves off from Mexico. . . . Mexico is the No. 1 trading partner of Texas; if they do bad, we do bad.” 4 The fundamental dissonance in that statement and the possibilities,

A Conversation on Border Landscapes  |  27

if any, for agency (action) to counter its failed logic that can be gleaned out of the historical record, as evidenced by the chapters in this part, is a topic that I hope we get to explore together a bit more. S T : I share your concern, Maribel, about a world in which borders and their appurtenances become not only self-­evident features of the landscape, but also fetishes—­in these essays, embodying the power of states, markets, and modernity, as explored. And yet as the 2008 quotation from Ciro Rodriguez reminds us, borderlands are also profoundly unstable spaces, where even the strongest forms of power pull in countervailing and often unanticipated directions. We want to hold the line—­we want to protect citizens while keeping nations and states intact—­but we want the power and modern comforts that come with allowing things to move across borders. This is a fundamental tug of war, and it is as old as the border itself. And it raises important historical questions. I mentioned earlier the historian’s affection for change over time. We’re also drawn to forks in the road—­the possibilities, the contingencies, the paths taken, and the worlds that might have been. In each of these essays, we pass through crossroads like these. U.S. and Mexican surveyors, armed with training and technologies that crossed borders, passing through lands marked by the violence and dislocations of the contact zone, delineating space and telling tales. What “discusiones, algunas veces bastante acaloradas” emerged around the campfire? U.S. ranchers, traditionally working with Mexican ranchers to gather strays behind the state’s back, watched their livestock emerge from the reviled dipping vats. Who might have predicted the sudden turn to racialized markers, the embrace of the fence? The tourists flowing south for bullfights and Mexican food; resources and traffic flowing north along multilane highways, through a binational “land of the future.” Who, making these increasingly familiar crossings, would have predicted the border wall? As historians, we typically pause at these crossroads, comprehend their contingencies—­the factors that nudged the traveler right instead of left—­ and move on. But these were always worlds of possibility. And any good historical tale also trickles a trail of breadcrumbs back to that fork in the road, reminding us how things once were. Implicit here is the idea that despite the

28 | Part I

self-­evident features of our world—­the subject matter adapted to the prose of our modern condition—­we may one day lose our familiar path, without a proper map. Before us will lie a fork in the road. What, at that point in time, will we want to remember? If we’re looking for a place where borders do not matter, we may wander through that fork in the road without even seeing it. In the past, borders have almost always mattered in some way—­just as movement across borders, more or less free, has almost always sustained the world in which we live. The nightmare of a border wall and the fantasy of a world without borders are two sides of the same coin: a desire to consume and live in the world without the frictions and responsibilities that inevitably result. The reality is that we live in a profoundly networked world in which borders matter profoundly. Any fork in the road will point us to different versions of that reality. It may be that the most useful question one can ask of borderlands history is this: How did people in the past try to manage the networks and divides of the modern condition, including its tug of war between states, markets, and border-­crossing peoples, and what were the consequences? M A : Sam, your comments transport me to the days of graduate school, when

I first came face-­to-­face with the concept of “hegemony.” As I recall, most of my classmates and I struggled at first to grasp the complexity of that term. No matter how many times we invoked Antonio Gramsci, or read through the writings of Stuart Hall or even the more foundational works of E. P. Thompson, there was a tendency to always read into the theater of hegemonic dynamics in various societies, rural Mexico or urban London, a more deterministic, absolute, and hermetic use of power than the term actually supported.5 Once confronted with power and its technologies, the average person or grad student finds it hard to imagine an arena of civic, personal, or communal action that power does not penetrate. In fact, that’s precisely the difficulty of the term “hegemony”—­that in its consequential use within progressive politics, the penetration of power is not divorced from the vulnerability of power. And yet, the linkage that I am talking about between power and resistance is not quite what in Marxist terms one would call a “supplemental” relationship—­it is not like wealth and philanthropy, for example, where one functions to uphold the other while performing with

A Conversation on Border Landscapes  |  29

relative independence in distinct arenas of social action, namely, increasing and accumulating wealth and distributing the surplus of wealth to charitable causes. In grappling with how hegemony works, something more permeable and creative is at play. In graduate school, it wasn’t until I read William Roseberry’s meditations on the work of James Scott’s “arts of popular resistance” in Southeast Asia that a lightbulb turned on in my head. Roseberry talked about a “force field.” He described the theater of power as multidimensional and dynamic; the relationships between those with power to wield and those on the receiving end of that wielding are most often marked by contention, argument, and gestures that range along a performatic spectrum from accommodation to resistance. These “talk-­back” moments are, of course, shaped by the directives of power itself—­think, for example, how in Cadava’s essay, we see consumers along the border shop back and forth, exercising their agency as fronterizos/as, yet not out of the blue, not at will, but essentially within the parameters of a conceived narrative of “border zone commerce” that has been articulated and established. What hegemony constructs, said Roseberry, is not a consensus, but a “meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon” social realms and situations characterized by domination. The key here is to understand hegemony as a “hegemonic process” by which the state and the elites continuously instruct the subaltern on what to say, how to act, what to expect, where to look for answers, and so on, but in which people hear the instructions wrong or refuse to listen or conceive of their own imagined alternative instructions. According to Roseberry, the necessity of constructing, all the time, to the point of great effort and even exhaustion, what the state and elites wish becomes a, or the, common discursive framework, highlights simultaneously the fragility of that particular instantiation of power.6 To a student of the history of the border, these concepts can be very helpful. The border is this enigma of power in so many ways: continually reinforced as that fetish of states you mention, Sam, and perpetually transgressed by human actors. We see that even today, when the border has reached an epitome of militarization and technology by the most advanced power in the world. It is fundamentally “uncontrollable” in a pragmatic way that annoys conservatives, in a sad and dangerous way that troubles human rights

30 | Part I

activists, and in a refreshingly creative way that motivates artists and grassroots entrepreneurs. These multiple meanings of the binary order/disorder can be disconcerting. You can see the application of Roseberry’s expanded notion of hegemony in exquisite and erudite terms in the chapters in this part. In Morrissey’s essay, for example, the efforts to define and demarcate the border, both metaphorically and quite literally through tangible markers in the landscape, are complex processes characterized by a multivocality that takes on aesthetic properties in the choices about binding albums, lining up sequential monuments, and printing photographs. All throughout these projects of state, Morrissey tells us, there was the official mandate on the one hand and, on the other hand, “disruptions that rippled below the surface.” These disruptions manifested in discursive terms more often than not, she tells us. They are disruptions within a project of state articulated through those “discusiones acaloradas” that you mentioned earlier, Sam, that never become, to invoke Roseberry once again, sealed and delivered “accomplishments” of state. S T : Maribel, I think we’re very much on the same page when we think about

states and hegemony, and about the theatrical realities and possibilities of states, ordinary people, and border worlds. I agree that the fundamental “uncontrollability” of this world, something that states typically perceive as a problem and that has justified generations of state-­imposed violence in the borderlands, can also be a source of local creativity and empowerment. It is hard to think about the borderlands—­at least since the mid-­ nineteenth-­century birth of the U.S.-­Mexico border—­without bringing the state in. Whether in the form of boundary surveyors, the U.S. and Mexican highway systems, or the Bureau of Animal Industry, state institutions and networks figure prominently in all these essays. Their histories fit naturally within familiar maps of North America. Two large nations, set apart by a thick red line, each bound together by distinct national road systems, languages, and landmarks. Even when these webs cross the border, the red line—­like the uniformed border-­crossing agents we see from the car windows—­reminds us which side belongs where. With maps like these as our starting point, it becomes second nature to think about power in the borderlands in terms of what states and their

A Conversation on Border Landscapes | 31

Figure 1.2 Alberto Morackis and Guadalupe Serrano (Taller Yonke), Malverde y Virgen. Detail from Paseo de Humanidad, installed 2004 on the Mexican side of border fence in Nogales, Sonora. Photograph by Maribel Alvarez.

elites want, and how border people “talk back” along a broader spectrum of accommodation and resistance. Issues of hegemony— the domination (and limits thereof) of states and ruling classes— have long been central issues in borderlands history. But what if the map itself becomes part of our history? What if we start, as Morrissey does, with the 1850s— when William Emory and José Salazar y Larregui were still sorting out the state’s cartographic vision? Before the stage setting was complete for the modern state’s “theater of power,” what kinds of relationships held sway? States, of course, mattered a fair bit even then. But before maps delineated worlds and fixed them in place, most people experienced the borderlands as a land in motion. It was a land marked by ebbs and flows— as people set in motion by inclination, dislocation, commerce, violence, and empire met and vied for control of space. When surveyors like Daniel Payne and Luis Servín came to the border in the 1890s, they used cameras, obelisks, and

32 | Part I

mathematics to pin down these worlds in motion, not only as agents of states, but also as men of science—­sustaining webs of “global intelligence” that both supported and circulated widely beyond empires and nations. Mendoza’s tick eradicators also entered a world in motion, as livestock, ticks, and protozoa circulated in maddening ways across the landscape. Like boundary surveyors, the eradicators were hired to deploy scientific knowledge on behalf of states. As Claire Strom argues, they epitomized the “rise of the administrative state,” and as Mary Mendoza argues, their practices inadvertently reinforced the red line on the map.7 But as scientists, they drew on circulations of intelligence from France and Germany and applied what they learned to a transnational business in which young cattle migrated north to grow older and fatter. In both of these stories, attention to the complex power of states sheds light, but only partial light, on a more complex border-­crossing story of global flows and fixations. The same was true for Cadava’s “globalizing” borderlands of the postwar era. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post were mindful of state-­making efforts and the place of the United States in a wider world. But as they championed cross-­border exchanges, they were just as likely to work in tandem with local chambers of commerce, corporations, and businessmen—­entities for whom mobility was as much an opportunity as it was a scientific or bureaucratic problem to be solved. Cadava touches on forces of a modern world that transcended as much as it reinforced the theater of the nation-­state. With Morrissey and Mendoza, he helps us see a more nomadic world behind the state fixations of Payne and Servín—­a map behind the map—­a web of flows and circuits, punctuated with myriad efforts to interrupt and redirect. States matter in this scheme, but the exertions and disruptions of hegemony are entangled with alternative tales, histories that are far less fixed and far less contained than the state’s “theater of power” may lead us to imagine. M A : It strikes me that one thing both of us are addressing in our comments,

yet unnamed, is the kind of historiographic project or intervention these various essays represent—­and along with that, their larger relationship to the archive of the borderlands as we know it. If you pay attention to the selective cluster of topics represented in these chapters—­from mapping commissions

A Conversation on Border Landscapes  |  33

to shopping centers, national press coverage, and a cattle tick eradication campaign—­you are going to learn something about the border that is more nuanced, specific, and contingent than a large, sweeping historical account of border relations would yield. Even as each chapter takes as a point of departure some state-­initiated or state-­promoted action in the fashion of what Charles Tilly called “large structures,” all the essays quickly turn their attention to the crevices in the archive where one could perceive ruptures, absences, silences, and cultural meanings that may otherwise be deemed improbable.8 There is also a markedly cross-­and multidisciplinary thrust in these efforts: anthropology, natural resources, art history, journalism, and political science join history to narrate specific instances of border policy or border management that may or may not figure prominently in established historiography. And one wonders, why? Why would PRONAF—­such an ambitious program of border transformation—­be overshadowed in the borderlands archive by the ostensibly more substantive BIP? Could this reveal a hidden bias of some sort that pits a program mainly focused on aesthetics against one presumably more virile, focused on industrialization? And yet I do not wish to suggest that any simple culturalist enhancement of the archive is enough to correct historians’ field of vision. One can read too much sometimes into the polemics that pit disciplines and their methods against each other. What I think is promising in these essays, and in any careful process that aims to document how a borderlands panorama of knowledge developed over time (through artifacts we often take for granted or live bodies, such as those of cattle, that we know so intimately without realizing), is a reminder of how we came to know what we know. A reminder of how even our most charitable desires for a borderlands identity have been disciplined and mediated by discreet situations and practices—­embodiments of managerial ideologies that regulate everyday life—­and not just by the official pronouncements of grand schemes or huge visible benchmarks of border policy. Perhaps my analysis always lands there—­on the spheres of the everyday—­where I suspect we may find any potential for reversing the narratives that deem the border less than human. S T : The power we find in all three of these chapters, as you suggest, is the

power of the everyday. They uncover worlds hidden in the archival crevices,

34 | Part I

helping us think in new critical ways about nations, states, and borderlands. Whether the point of departure is six workers on scaffolding, repairing an obelisk near the Big Hatchet Mountains; a team of discouraged range riders facing customs guards near Del Rio; or a member of the American Automobile Association passing out maps near Nogales, the authors pay careful attention to issues of scale in borderlands history. To fully understand the borderlands, they tell us, we must stay in motion—­not only across national borders, but also between global and local horizons, keeping the large and the intimate simultaneously in mind. What can we learn about the world and its border crossings, trudging through the mesquite, inhaling dust with Luis Servín? Many things. But I’m drawn to the oblique trajectories that unsettle the “permanent meanings and scientific lines” of his border world. The detritus of other lands scattered among the cactus—­the barrels of cement from the Isle of Portland, in Dorset; the surveying equipment, much of it made by immigrant Germans in the District of Columbia. Engineers, fresh from the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, clown around the desert obelisks, striking heroic poses. These are spatial wrinkles and ruptures, worlds entangling worlds in messy ways. From a distance, it’s a familiar red line on the map. At intimate scales, border-­crossing cows enter a vat of crude oil and emerge on the other side as Mexican or “good old American.” At a closer vantage point, on my hands and knees, I see the border marked out by seed ticks, “bunching in large numbers,” waiting to hitch a ride on passing stock. At small scales, worlds in motion set some of the most unanticipated coordinates for the “large structures” of nations, empires, and borderlands. The historian missing these microcurrents may misconstrue how the world fits together. Large-­scale abstractions like globalization commonly guide us into the worlds of Cadava’s “open border,” a world that from a distance—­as from Cadava’s hypothetical air traveler in the early 1950s—­appears like a vast circuit board. People, information, and commodities move, and borders offer resistance, in an epic battle tied to epic forces: technology, modernity, xenophobia, inequality. Yet on the ground levels of this world, men and women drive peas, melons, and swordfish from one side to the other. Borders mean “paper bags and baskets heavily loaded.” Journalists scribble notes for readers on the backs of Mexican menus—­while farmers, flooded by saline waste,

A Conversation on Border Landscapes  |  35

scribble quejas to governors and presidents. In both cases, they gather up local fragments and send them to distant lands to be metabolized by the “large structures” of media and state. These same larger currents will eventually come full circle, carrying ordinary people back to the border, as the Mexican state sets out in the 1960s to redesign the borderlands for consumers. The spaces in motion that had initially given the border shape will now lead wandering braceros into a grid of malls, museums, and monuments—­mundos hecho en México. These all become nodes in a larger network of “flows without friction,” local efforts to shrink the distance between nations, much as a previous generation collapsed the border itself through photographic monuments. A prior hopscotch across sand dunes, grasslands, and deserts gave way to a new synoptic, consumer-­oriented vision that annihilated local space.9 And yet like the original boundary monuments of the 1850s, much of the edifice of these later borderlands crumbled. Nations could envision and propose, but if the stories we have read here offer any single lesson, it is that local people rarely responded in uniform, predictable, or sustained ways. Always a world in motion, the borderlands ebbed, flowed, shape shifted. In the words of Katherine Morrissey, no matter what “national acts” states and their agents intended, border people (like Morrissey’s aesthetic objects) soon “migrated beyond those intents.” M A : One of the benefits of being students of history is that we learn how

things came to be in certain ways and not in others; we can look back and pinpoint moments, situations, actors, and actions that determined the paths ahead and shaped how things would be from then on. But woven into that archaeological gesture—­that dusting off of our motives and reasonings—­is also always present the possibility that we could learn how things could have turned out differently. That’s often how agency appears in the archive—­as a spectral presence of what could have been. What is fixed on the record appears solid and impenetrable—­as if fated to be that way. But the student of history knows better. I find this a fascinating characteristic of what these essays attempt to do. They say to us in a collective voice: look, what we call today our “border reality” was crafted, manufactured, and willed into being through a long process of discrete actions that attempted to wrestle into

36 | Part I

Figure 1.3 Letras cruze. Photograph by Maribel Alvarez.

order and coherence the landscape of cross-cultural relations that collided along these natural and man-made terrains. In Cadava’s essay we are confronted with one of the great paradoxes of borderlands scholarship. The border as we know it today wasn’t always this way. By this I mean that it wasn’t this apparatus of biopower that today overwhelms all human encounters in the border zone. At one time, circa 1940, it was possible for a national newspaper to describe the crossing of the line from both sides as nothing more than “formalities” that became more and more “perfunctory.” The events at the border in recent years obscure the memory of when unhindered border crossing was possible. It is important to note that Cadava’s account is not in any way a romantic evocation of a time when things were “better” and we all got along. In fact, from his research we learn that the “open border” lauded by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times was an openness largely engendered by a capitalist dream of modernity, liberal commerce protocols, and elite interests. An open border meant “we are open for business.” And the faith deposited in business’s capacity

A Conversation on Border Landscapes  |  37

to transform society was nothing to take lightly. It was a grand faith. This period of “openness” came dressed in the Sunday attire of corporate ideology and developmentalist agendas. Nonetheless, it was a time when the field of border relations was configured differently. That such a moment happened, that “openness” was the preferred discourse of cross-­border transit by major media outlets is, from the long distance of the present, almost a radical proposition. So thwarted our political public discourse on the “border crisis” has become that a scheme as managerial and contrived as a chamber of commerce project today seems progressive. And yet, as you say, Sam, in the ebb and flow of border politics and society, I wonder: What can the memory of the past help illuminate? Is there a “usable past” that can instruct our actions in the present? I am reminded of a report I read a few years ago. An Associated Press poll conducted in 2008 found that the American public was deeply ambivalent about the buildup of border security that politicians (of all stripes) had been selling us since the 1980s. Forty-­nine percent of people polled favored the creation of a permanent fence to once and for all isolate ourselves as a nation from our southern neighbor. Forty-­eight percent opposed it. Forty-­four percent believed that the fence would make a difference in the immigration and drug situation. But fifty-­five percent did not. These figures reveal not only a deep ambivalence, but also the possibility, perhaps only in the crevices, that a majority can imagine border policy differently. The lesson from history is that if such a consensus were to emerge, it would not spring up, happily, from the grassroots. Instead, such a shift in public opinion is most likely realizable if a coalition of interests—­including, ostensibly, border commerce interests—­ congeals around some bold propositions that are simultaneously democratically aspirational and pragmatically desirable. Is this a hopeful ending to our conversation? I don’t know. Our current enforcement mentality to address border relations seems pretty mighty to me. Maybe the ambivalence detected in the 2008 poll has evaporated by now, and afraid and exhausted, the American public is more than ever persuaded to favor hawkish solutions. Certainly, neither deaths in the desert nor Dreamers graduating seems to have moved the heart of the general public much toward humane policies. Mary Mendoza ends her essay on a pessimistic note. The campaign of tick eradication, she tells us, reveals that the

38 | Part I

impulse to police the nation’s boundaries is rooted in something larger than any immediate crisis of human movement: it is fed by a larger desire to master nature. Surely, the attempt to accomplish such mastery is complex and contradictory. But make no mistake: the fortification it aims for is not one we can easily contest solely with the rhetoric of historical lessons.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

George Flaherty, “Consuming Desires: Beautification and Repatriation at Mexico’s Northern Border” (“Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands,” symposium, University of Arizona, December 1–­3, 2011). James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Merriam-­Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, MA: Merriam-­ Webster, 1994). David Von Drehle, “The Great Wall of America,” Time, June 30, 2008. Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-­Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (June 1986): 5–­27; and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1968). William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 361. Claire Strom, Making Catfish Bait Out of Government Boys: The Fight Against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 5. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989). Flaherty, “Consuming Desires.”

2

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border in the 1890s K AT H E R I N E   G . M O R R I S S E Y

T

he black-and-white photograph captures a group of men at work on a monument in an arid grassland. Three men, mounted on scaffolding and cart, surround the partially obscured stone pillar. Along with three other workers arrayed along the base, they are engaged in repairs— placing the top cap on the obelisk. Isolated in the landscape, with clusters of tents and men populating the scene, there is evidence of extended work in progress. Viewers on the right, on the left, and in the foreground keep their eyes, and ours, on the activity in the center. Triangular shapes repeat across the landscape: distant hills, tents, scaffolding, rigging, and the obelisk marker itself. Variously titled Rebuilding Monument No. 40 or Reconstrucción del Monumento Número 40 en la Extremidad Norte de la Sección Meridiana, the photograph illustrates the labor of the 1892– 94 resurvey teams along the U.S.-Mexico border. Taken by Daniel R. Payne to document the survey work, the image is one of an extensive photographic series that includes multiple views of 258 monuments along the U.S.-Mexico land border from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean. This photograph has been reproduced and published in numerous venues— in official reports, in photograph albums, and in historians’ articles.1 It tells multiple stories. One is of the scene itself in 1893. Another reaches back to the original joint 1850s international boundary survey, led by Major

40 | Part I

Figure 2.1 Reconstrucción del Monumento Número 40 (Rebuilding Monument No. 40). Photograph by Daniel R. Payne. From Memoria de la Sección Mexicana de la Comisión Internacional de Límites entre México y los Estados Unidos que restableció los monumentos de El Paso al Pacífico; bajo la dirección por parte de México del ingeniero Jacobo Blanco, jefe de la Comisión Mexicana (New York: J. Polhemus, 1901), between pp. 96 and 97. Courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

William H. Emory and Commissioner José Salazar y Larregui, when the cut stone marker had been initially erected. Following different national and regional visions, the Mexican and U.S. teams created their own maps, with the monument designated as no. 8 on Emory’s map but as no. 9 on Salazar’s map.2 Forty years on, the rebuilding effort renumbered, repaired, and reassembled the stone edifice, using the Emory survey map to locate it in space, at the spot along the 31o47′ parallel north, where the treaty line turned south to the 31o20′ parallel. In the new resurvey, mapmakers and surveyors alike referred to the initial boundary markers as Old Monuments. Other stories and cultural meanings coalesced on the landmarks and on their photographic representations. For the 1890s boundary commissioners, for example, International Boundary Monument No. 40 became a marker not

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps  |  41

only of the passage of time, but also of their national divergences over spatial ownership. Errors by the original 1850s survey meant that the monument’s physical location was more than a mile off from the location specified on maps and in treaties. Both sides agreed that this monument, among others, was misplaced, but they disagreed on how to handle such discrepancies. Not authorized to renegotiate the established line or monument locations, the commissioners left the marker in place, resulting in the unintended transfer of some thirty square miles of Mexican territory to the United States.3 As the image and its multiple meanings suggest, marking and defining the U.S.-­Mexico border has been an ongoing process, involving diplomatic negotiations, mapmaking, national policies, and international agreements, along with tangible markers on the landscape: monuments, fences, and walls. In the 1890s the U.S.-­Mexico land boundary gained particular material visibility—­through the simultaneous creation of obelisk monuments and accompanying photographs, like the image of Monument No. 40. The 1891–­ 96 International Boundary Commission, sponsored by the U.S. and Mexican governments, resurveyed and remapped the already established borderline and sought to create a more permanent definition between the two nations. The use of photographers—­Daniel Payne for the United States and Luis R. Servín for Mexico—­was a new addition to the process. Intended as a tool for maintaining the exact borderline location through time, the images, like the process of defining the border itself, proved to be more malleable and open to interpretation than expected.4 Defining and marking borders is a challenging process.5 The physical processes of boundary making—­the impact on bodies and borderlands environments; the creation of maps, reports, monuments, and images; the movement of instruments, medicines, peoples, and letters through space—­ link the material with the abstract. For those engineers, astronomers, surveyors, and other team members engaged in their nations’ modernist efforts to fix territorial claims in the landscape, the fieldwork involved physical labor, exposure to the elements, and ventures into the unfamiliar. Such factors contributed to interruptions and restructured plans for the work itself. As visualization projects, international boundary surveys constructed borders through a combination of cartographic, scientific, physical, and photographic means. The survey teams strove to make abstract lines visible,

42 | Part I

marking national boundaries with obelisk-­shaped monuments, astronomical calculations, and two-­dimensional maps, sketches, and images.6 At times such efforts occurred concurrently. As the photograph by Payne reminds us, alongside the laborers who erected monuments on the U.S.-­Mexico border in the 1890s, photographers created glass plate negatives that contained their images. In the service of nation-­states and guided by professional scientific methods, the late nineteenth-­century boundary fieldwork did not always follow national and scientific scripts. Physical experiences, the moments and processes of production, shaped the overlapping visual products that resulted from the labors of everyone involved. In this chapter, I examine the aesthetic objects—­especially photographs, monuments, and maps—­crafted through the joint 1890s U.S.-­Mexico border survey as products of collaborative labor and as an archive of competing interpretations. An abstract international boundary, the U.S.-­Mexico line traces diplomatic agreements between two countries and marks the extent of territorial loss and gain through war. As defined by nineteenth-­century treaties and purchases, and confirmed by joint surveys, the border was delineated through mathematical calculations, astronomical measurements, and political negotiations.7 On maps, the boundary line followed the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso, then marched across to the Pacific Ocean, with a few twists and turns along the way. On the landscape, however, only a few visual signs differentiated the undulating landscapes of grasslands, deserts, mountains, valleys, and forests. Issues over borderline placement plagued Mexico’s northern boundary. The Mexico-­U.S. border, dictated by the Treaties of Guadalupe Hidalgo and Mesilla, had been established by U.S. and Mexican field survey teams between 1849 and 1855. Artists, scientists, and cartographers—­but not photographers—­had accompanied the initial U.S.-­Mexico surveys, crafting visual representations of the border region to make the desert, mountain, and river landscapes comprehensible to their U.S. and Mexican audiences. As art historian Gray Sweeney has noted, the survey maps, watercolors, engravings, and paintings constructed “a visual order” that defined and shaped understandings of the new border as a national boundary and an environmental place.8 Still, the 1,969-­mile-­long border, marked by only fifty-­ two monuments, was not as orderly as it might have appeared on the maps.

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps  |  43

By the 1880s, the frequency of local disputes over exactly where this boundary existed on the ground, especially in the Arizona-­Sonora region, drew the attention of U.S. and Mexican governments. After a reconnaissance of the border confirmed the disorder and inconsistencies, the nations agreed that the temporary joint International Boundary Commission would resurvey the borderline. Two engineers-­in-­chief, Lieutenant Colonel John Whitney Barlow, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and señor Jacobo Blanco, led the joint survey teams for their respective countries from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean, aiming to locate and repair existing monuments as well as add new monuments.9 Blanco, who had been involved in planning Mexico’s other 1880s international border survey, assembled the Mexican section of the Mexico-­U.S. boundary survey from the well-­seasoned surveyors and astronomers who had been at work along his nation’s southern border with Guatemala. United through personal connections, educational training, and fieldwork, the team brought a specific set of experiences that shaped their new enterprise. Although not part of the original assemblage, Luis Servín joined the group in February 1892 as an assistant engineer. His skills as an amateur photographer may have made him a desired addition.10 Barlow and Blanco, who had recently established their detailed plan of operations during a meeting in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, included photography as one of their interlocking methods for reinscribing the border.11 Along with astronomical and geodetic work, they each agreed to map the boundary area in a two-­and-­a-­half mile swath along their respective sides of the border.12 “The topography thus obtained,” they described in their plan, “should be supplemented by sketches and photographs, especially in the vicinity of the monuments, for the purpose of more exactly defining their positions.” 13 This cartographic responsibility, similar to that assigned to artists in the earlier original 1850s survey, linked the tangible results (maps, monuments, and photographs) to more abstract ones—­the legal, political, and imaginative boundary between the countries.14 While perhaps intended as parallel representations, the maps, monuments, and photographs were notably assigned somewhat different meanings. The maps defined the borderline, the monuments made the borderline visible, and the photographs marked the locations of the monuments more precisely.15

44 | Part I

Blanco sent to St. Louis, Missouri, for the necessary camera equipment and assigned Servín his new role. After the materials arrived in late August, Servín began photographing.16 Although relatively new to the craft, he had likely watched photographers at work during his time on the Mexico-­ Guatemala border survey; Antonio W. Rieke and Mansueto Cristiani each took official photographs as part of that earlier survey.17 Their work, intended to illustrate Mexican governmental reports and document the progress of the surveys, captured vignettes that told those stories: the survey images invariably included national flags, work teams, and equipment; completed border monuments were centered in the frames, all proud evidence of the nation-­state. As European-­born photographers, Rieke and Cristiani also held interests that ranged beyond Mexican national concerns. Cristiani, for example, eagerly turned his lens on other monumental structures—­Maya ruins recently visited and photographed in the region by the competing foreign travelers and archaeologists Alfred P. Maudslay and Désiré Charnay. Following in their footsteps, Cristiani took shots of Palenque that reflected the dominant romantic genre for such subjects, mixed with scientific observation. Devoid of overt human presence, the ruins appear as lost remnants of an ancient past emerging out of the jungle wilderness.18 Servín also drew on the expertise of his American counterpart, commercial photographer Daniel R. Payne. By all accounts, the forty-­five-­year-­old Payne had more experience in photography than his Mexican counterpart. Daniel’s older brother, Harry, an artist, writer, and journalist, had likely introduced him to photography some fifteen years earlier. The two brothers both worked as commercial photographers and painters in the greater Los Angeles area during the late 1870s and 1880s.19 The peripatetic Daniel, however, never made a career in the arts. In fact, he was likely seeking mining opportunities in northern Mexico when he was hired onto the American survey team.20 Under the direction of John Whitney Barlow, the extensive American team had included a photographer from the start. But neither the first, J. H. Wright of Nashville, Tennessee, nor the second, M. J. Lemmon of El Paso, lasted long under the duress of the fieldwork. The selection of Payne in 1892 stabilized the uncertain position. He remained with the survey through the next two years. Blanco initiated the two photographers’ introduction that summer, suggesting that Servín could benefit from meeting with the American artist.21

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 45

Based on Servín’s improving photographic skills, he likely gained some professional tips. The photographers at times operated in tandem; images of each other show up in their monument shots. While Payne’s and Servín’s official responsibilities were to document the position of each of the 258 monuments that the field commissions either built or restored, they also pointed their cameras in other directions. Servín, for example, took group portraits at local rancheros and snapped young girls bathing in streams, capturing borderlands life and peoples.22 Payne’s interest in mining drew his lens to industrial scenes in the copper mining town of Bisbee. Edgar Alexander Mearns, the U.S. team’s medical officer and natural history collector, called upon Payne to document specimens of trees and other flora.23 Although the two national teams mainly worked independently, their leaders held frequent meetings to compare findings, and their work parties

Figure 2.2 Río de Sonoyta, en Sonora. From Memoria de la Sección Mexicana de la Comisión Internacional de Límites entre México y los Estados Unidos que restableció los monumentos de El Paso al Pacífico; bajo la dirección por parte de México del ingeniero Jacobo Blanco, jefe de la Comisión Mexicana (New York: J. Polhemus, 1901), between pp. 258 and 259. Courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

46 | Part I

passed each other in the field and occasionally camped together.24 During the two years of fieldwork, each section relied on multiple parties, including those working in supply camps, as well as astronomers, tangent runners, biological collectors, topographers, and monument builders in a series of mobile camps.25 Local ranchers, freighters, and merchants provided contracted supplies, horses, transportation and other support services. Given the varied necessities and dispersed nature of the teams, the photographers both operated independently and contributed other collaborative labors—­ Servín continued his duties as an assistant engineer, and Payne became an essential member of the monument-­building crew. Son of a blacksmith, Payne had worked as a teamster in Southern California, so his skill set readily extended beyond his camera work.26 Luis Servín served on his nation’s Guatemala and U.S. border survey teams. While his responsibilities along the southern boundary rested in his cartographic work, he was pressed into photographic service for the 1891–­96 International Boundary Commission resurvey of the U.S.-­Mexico border. As topographer and photographer, he participated in crafting maps and images that circulated well beyond the two borders. Working in these overlapping scientific arts of representing landscapes, Servín bridged distinct genres and products of expression. His experiences, alongside those of his compatriots, offer an opportunity to consider how maps and photographs intersected, both as part of the border surveys and as visual markers unmoored from border spaces and reassembled in albums and archives. Trained as a topographical and mining engineer at the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros (formerly known as Colegio de Minería), as were most Mexican members of the late nineteenth-­century border survey teams, Servín was accustomed to viewing the landscape through instruments and translating the variegated visual scene into measurable, and presumed stable, forms using science and mathematics.27 During his three years (1878–­81) at the Escuela Nacional, his specialized courses included applied mathematics, geometry, topography, hydrology, geodesy, and astronomy. He initially pursued a degree in mining engineering before switching his emphasis to topography. Under Mexico’s late nineteenth-­century politicized educational reforms, the curriculum was filled with pragmatic professional forms of knowledge embedded in a broader nationalist agenda.28

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps  |  47

Servín came to his border assignments aware of the distinctions among international surveying and astronomical methods, gained largely from his coursework. He had learned from Francisco Díaz Covarrubias’s Tratado de topografía y de geodesia con los primeros elementos de astronomía práctica the similarities and differences among surveying systems and instruments used in France, Germany, the United States, and Mexico.29 Some of the topographical iconography for mapmaking—­such as the specific marks used to indicate hill elevations—­varied in form and intensity, whether designated as continuous wavy lines or short strokes of the pen. In addition to these national distinctions among the visual vocabularies of mapmaking, Covarrubias discusses the use of specific Mexican geographic terms—­taken from the Mayan language—­to refer to landforms and human alterations of the environment. In lieu of the German term thalweg, or “valley road,” which was in international use, for example, some Mexican engineers intentionally wrote becan, or “snake road,” to more accurately describe a serpentine path.30 This was practical and environmental knowledge, to be sure, of use to a Mexican engineer-­in-­training, but it carried cultural and national intents along with it. The distinctions, while relatively minor from a scientific perspective, underscored national identity. Pointing out such variants in linguistic and cartographic practices, Covarrubias emphasized partisan expertise, naming specific Mexican engineers and noting the strengths of Mexican practices. Still, for Servín and other students, knowing about the different styles would also enable communication among engineers in the field, whether from Mexico, Guatemala, Germany, or the United States. And for the men at work, accuracy and scientific advancements could trump national pride. On the 1850s Mexico-­U.S. boundary resurvey, the Americans brought along an updated zenith telescope that the Mexican astronomer José Salazar was pleased to use. In doing so, he followed the North American Talcott method and gained extraordinary precision in his measurements.31 Sharing space, results, and methodologies in formal and informal ways, the 1890s Mexican and U.S. survey teams operated in tandem and influenced each other’s work in the field.32 Conscientious about maintaining any preexisting monuments, the Mexico-­U.S. survey rebuilt the few remaining edifices—­an irregular lot, made of dressed stone, rock, and masonry—­left by the 1850s Emory-­Salazar

48 | Part I

survey. The teams added descriptive and admonitory bilingual texts to their replacement efforts: “Repaired by the Boundary Commission created by treaties of 1882–­1889” and “The destruction or displacement of this monument is a misdemeanor, punishable by the United States or Mexico.” Finding all the original markers proved to be quite difficult. Over the past forty years, many had been moved, at times intentionally, obscured, or improperly marked. In Nogales, the survey team found Old Monument No. 26 relegated to a rock pile, now holding up part of John Brickwood’s saloon. Situating the new monument in the old location, the survey building team nestled the now renumbered Monument No. 122 inside an exterior nook.33 Even as the old markers were displaced, the photographers sustained the place of these earlier border markers in the imagined landscape by documenting them with photographs, and in doing so, they provided visual sources for stories about shifting boundary lines. In official texts, in historians’ accounts, and in local displays, the photographs of old and new monuments, placed side by side, juxtapose and link the past and present. Most of the 258 monuments were new and uniform. Fabricated in an El Paso foundry, these obelisks—­cardinally oriented, four-­sided iron columns, topped with a pyramidal cap—­were transported in sections to their sites. Plaques on their north and south faces identify their purpose and authority—­“Boundary of the United States, treaty of 1853, reestablished by the treaties of 1882–­1880” and “Límite de la Republica Mexicana, tratado de 1853, restablecido por tratados de 1882–­1880.” Attachments for mounting a flagpole, on the west side, and the monument numerals, on the east, adorn the other faces. Although the selection of the obelisk as the form for the physical boundary markers themselves occasioned no special comment, it held cultural significance. As a universal symbol of political power, albeit ascribed with diverse meanings and associations, the form had already been appropriated for other national boundaries, including the Mexico-­ Guatemala border, as well as for memorial monuments in both the United States and Mexico.34 Spaced no more than five miles apart, the monuments were numbered sequentially from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean. International Boundary Commission Secretary L. Seward Terry explained the reason for the variable locations to the New York Times: “Conspicuous positions were chosen for

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps  |  49

placing the new monuments, with the intent of making them intervisible.” 35 The monuments’ implied transparency, as a function of their geographic locations, worked two ways, both dependent on human interactions with the structure. First, in making one monument visible from the next, the placements essentially strung an immaterial borderline, one brought into being through human eyesight. When the bilingual texts, viewed from the north or the south, were read, the marker’s meanings were translated across the line. The linkage among words, bodies, and monuments did not end there. Inside the final monument, no. 258, located along the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Tijuana River, both commissions deposited written documents—­in English and in Spanish—­signed by commission members, which identified official treaties and governmental authorities as well as enumerated the commissions’ physical achievements. Embedded for future generations to uncover, the documents reveal a historical and archival sensibility.36 Indeed, the original establishment of the sequential line of boundary monuments constituted a form of archives. In its modern sense, an “archive” might refer to an organized physical collection of artifacts, open for interpretation and analysis; a repository for stored memories; or a general system that both formulates and transforms bodies of knowledge.37 As signifiers, the monuments, as well as the photographs of those monuments, have taken on diverse and changing meanings, power, and authority. Produced, reproduced, and consumed, the physical monuments, maps, and photograph albums link the tangible and the abstract. What happens in the transformations of monument to document?38 One way to address this question is to consider the genesis of the mobile photographs and maps that circulated away from the physical border locations.39 The photographers and their photographs were well integrated into the commission. The likable and useful Servín and Payne gained the appreciation of other survey members. And their images, when printed, became the record not only of the official placement of monuments but also of the workers’ lives on the survey, of the borderlands, and of national intent. Some of their photographs—­especially those related to topographical questions—­were immediately consumed. While in the field, both Barlow and Blanco selected and sent small image collections back to their respective capitals. Availing themselves of the equipment and skills of El Paso

50 | Part I

photographic shops, they had specific images developed and printed. Photographs sent to the Secretaría de Fomento (Ministry of Development), for example, illustrated the desert conditions, marked national interests, and helped clarify surveying problems, especially along the north 31 o47′ line.40 They joined other photographic images from government surveys and projects—­such as those of the Mexico-­Guatemala border survey, archaeological ruins in the Yucatán, railways, and public works—­helping to shape the Ministry of Development’s visual vocabulary and to document Porfirian modernization.41 For the topographer-­turned-­photographer, the two forms of labor had some obvious links. Servín brought an eye trained to focal points, hands accustomed to manipulating technological instruments, and a mind honed to translate three-­dimensional environments into two-­dimensional visual products. His photographic assignment, like his more familiar mapping efforts, placed him in the same relationship to his subjects, in a basic physical sense. His body, triangulated through his camera, enabled him to calculate new angles of vision. The production of border maps was a multistep process, involving many different hands, and relied, for the most part, on painstaking work on the ground. Consider the common process as employed by the 1890s U.S. section: operating from separate mobile camps, topographical teams walked the landscape and drew sketch maps, made observation notes, and provided calculations in notebooks. These sketches and calculations were then reconciled into larger sectional sheets, usually by a different cartographer working at the commission’s urban base office, which moved through time from El Paso to Tucson to Yuma to San Diego. The border resurvey project pointed to the deficiencies of the region’s current maps and spatial knowledge and, for the Mexican Ministry of Development, reinforced the desire for cartographic certainty. Along the northern boundary, this desire permeated the correspondence between the Mexican section and the Secretaría de Fomento.42 The goal of the commission, after all, was to correct the preexisting maps and to create a new one that would more permanently affix national meanings to the borderline. The final bilingual version—­initially aggregated and drawn in San Diego with data and information from both the Mexican and U.S. sections—­was published by a New York firm as part of the International Boundary Commission’s official

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps  |  51

report, each page signed and attested to by the leadership of the U.S. and Mexican sections. With its clearly designated five-­mile swath of land, the joint map simultaneously defined the borderline and the borderlands. As a shared space of rancheros, towns, trails, rivers, mountain ranges, mines, and water sources, the mapped borderlands made visible that “fugitive landscape” where personal, economic, and environmental connections, at times more than national identities, defined allegiances to place.43 Individual names identified local knowledge, landmarks, and owners: Ranchería de Pozo Verde and San Rafael Ranch (Cameron), for a few examples. Still, long stretches had no such personalized designations, where fewer individual properties marked the landscape. While such absences might have been read by early twentieth-­ century viewers as signs of an empty desert, for those who knew the region, these ellipses might have been surprising since they essentially erased existing habitations and land uses, especially on the U.S. side of the border. The cause for this omission lay in the original topographers’ work—­pressed to complete the survey, and loath to overexpose their bodies to the desert heat, the U.S. section relied on general reports rather than field sketches for a long 150-­mile stretch.44 Another, more visible interpretive difference showed up on the joint map where the border wended along the Colorado River, between monuments 206 and 209. The continuous shifting of channels, riverbanks, and bars made efforts to map and mark the designated borderline in the middle of the river especially taxing.45 The U.S. section based its map on fieldwork in March 1893, while the Mexican drawings relied on the following year’s efforts of engineers José González-­Moreno and Manuel Alvarado (February to March 1894). Unable to reconcile the multiple variations, the commissioners dedicated a separate map sheet to the Colorado River section, using color to distinguish the differences between the two sections’ topographies.46 At the completion of the survey fieldwork in 1894, photographers Payne and Servín also worked separately and simultaneously in San Diego to develop their negatives and to organize their photographs into albums for their respective governments. In the process they shared some of their negatives with each other, to enable each group to have a complete photographic set of the 258 monuments. Servín enlisted the services of a San Diego

ary Commission Under the Convention of July 29, 1882 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896), map no. 5. Courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

Figure 2.3 Boundary between the United States and Mexico as Surveyed and Marked by the International Bound-

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 53

landscape photographer, Chauncey William Judd, to help with his darkroom work, especially in retouching damaged or underexposed negatives.47 In the end, Servín completed three identical albums of his set of photographs, which he presented to the Secretaría de Fomento in Mexico City, and Payne made four identical albums of his set of more than six hundred photographs, which he sent to Washington, D.C.48 The creation of albums—as a form of archives—did not end there. The following year, Barlow and Blanco crafted yet a third album, drawing on those two sets of photographs. They selected three hundred views— all of which, except for thirty-two “special subjects,” depicted the monuments— and contracted with a Philadelphia firm, F. Gutekunst Company, to create halftone plates and produce a collaborative album in both English and Spanish versions. The two nations split the costs and the results, each receiving twenty albums and a set of the halftone plates.49 Multiple copies of these albums exist and constitute, along with the illustrated reports, maps, and the monuments themselves, a relatively stable public set of the survey’s accomplishments.50 As an archive, or rather as a series of archives, these photograph albums, along with the monuments, offer a rich interpretive field as well.51 The Report of the Boundary Commission Album is a predominantly visual text, with only brief descriptive labels. The images, like the monuments themselves, are numbered and presented in order, one per page. Individually, each photograph depicts a monument, locating it in the center of the image, the clear focal point of the camera lens, disciplining the eye to identify the monument within its particular landscape. The stated purpose of the photographs is to help locate the monument for repairs. Situated in the album, however, the repetitive sequence of images, with one monument following another page by page, leads to other readings. The viewer’s eye wanders off the central focus and is drawn instead to the less permanent surroundings— workers, horses, dog, barrels, cacti. Differences and repetition capture the viewer’s attention. The photographic monuments collapse space as they hopscotch across the varied terrain— grasslands, mountains, hillsides, deserts, sand dunes. The erased geographic space between the images implies a smooth, orderly, and continuous borderline between the United States and Mexico, chained together by the monuments.

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Ignoring evidence of mines, ranches, and railroads, rarely including towns or local residents, the photographs leave an impression of empty space, only temporarily occupied by the government workers.52 As a collaborative work intended to represent harmonious relations along a shared boundary, the album intentionally does not identify the photographers. The manuscript collections of both the U.S. and the Mexican commissions do, however, clearly enumerate their respective photographer’s contributions.53 The internal reports and correspondence to governmental officials focus on each nation’s contributions. Blanco, for example, hastened to assure the Secretaría de Fomento that the joint album, comprising the best photographs, included those taken by the Mexican photographer.54 While both photographers were in the service of the state, Servín’s position as a topographical engineer embedded him firmly into government service and placed his photographic work as a side task. As an artist and essentially an independent subcontractor, Payne was only a temporary government employee. Comparisons between the two photographers’ work also identify significant differences. Commercial photographer Payne exhibits greater technological skills; almost two-thirds of the images selected as the “best negatives” for the album are his. His artistic sensibility, especially his awareness of perspective and his familiarity with the landscape genre, shapes his work. Accustomed to wielding his craft in the service of his clients, Payne frames his images in a more consistent style. Whenever possible, he takes the photograph directly from the west, showing the monument’s number clearly, and excludes any other evidence of the survey teams’ work. In contrast, Servín incorporates numerous survey personnel in his photographs, often arranged in narrative vignettes— whether demonstrating the work processes, showing them striking a heroic pose, or documenting their presence. Debris and team supplies, such as empty barrels of Portland cement or surveying equipment, are scattered across the viewscape around the base of the monuments. Servín more often aims his camera at an angle to the monument, so that both the number and one of the plaques (usually the Mexico side) are visible. Handsomely bound, the album presentation of the government report held political and diplomatic aims, especially as tangible evidence of state making. Both the U.S. and Mexican individual written reports praise effec-

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 55

Figure 2.4 Monumento Número 222 (Monument No. 222). The figure next to the camera is likely photographer Daniel R. Payne. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891– 1896: Album (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899). Courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

tive international collaborations in the field.55 There were, however, moments of strife not necessarily emphasized in the official public documents. Speaking about negotiations between the U.S. and Mexican commissioners over the final collaborative report, Blanco characterized the process as “difficult and delicate,” one that gave rise to “sometimes quite heated” discussions. (“La formación de ese informe fu difícil y delicada. Dio lugar a muchas discusiones, algunas veces bastante acaloradas.”)56 Hidden from public view, these negotiations echo other disruptions that rippled below the surface of nineteenth-century international boundary surveys in the Americas. Beyond the diplomatic realm, such factors as physical interactions in unfamiliar borderlands environments, the instability of nature as a fixed marker, decisions and practices of survey personnel, and interventions of local interests all influenced the border-creation process and its resultant aesthetic products.

56 | Part I

Bodies, in particular, were largely obscured in the aesthetic results. Consider the labor and presence of borderlands residents— from local merchants in Nogales, Sonora, and Bisbee, Arizona, who supplied survey camps, to the ranchería families whose photographic and physical presence were omitted from the published joint album— as well as that of the semi-anonymous topographers and photographers, including Luis Servín and Daniel Payne. Although traces of both can be seen in the complete photographic record and in the original commission papers, the intentions of the photographic albums, official reports, and maps worked to hide their impacts. In many ways these modernist efforts to create permanent meanings and scientific lines belied the centrality of human intervention. The visualization projects relied on eyesight to bring the borderline into focus, after all, and that necessary emphasis on human physiological intervention was what opened them up to multiple discernments. Each form of archive— border photographs, maps, albums, monuments— offered spatial ruptures, resurveying and redefining the borderline for specific purposes. As the albums, maps, and monuments were intended to create visual order, they also marked signs of disorder and offered unruly interpretations: distinctions between U.S. and Mexican photographic views, the visibility and invisibility of human actors as essential components of the construction and definition of the borderline, and the emphases on public display. While the surveys and their visual artifacts may have been intended as national acts, the creation, selection, and circulation of the aesthetic objects migrated beyond those intents.

Notes 1.

Memoria de la Sección Mexicana de la Comisión Internacional de Límites entre México y los Estados Unidos que restableció los monumentos de El Paso al Pacifico; bajo la dirección por parte de México del ingeniero Jacobo Blanco, jefe de la Comisión Mexicana (New York: J. Polhemus, 1901), between pp. 80 and 81; “Album of Photographs of Old Monuments and Other Views along the Mexican-American Border,” Still Picture Branch, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, Record Group (RG) 76, National Archives and Records Administration, at College Park, Maryland (NARA II);

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 57

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

and Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Remarking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891 to 1896, Part I: Report of the International Commission; Part II: Report of the U.S. Section, S. Doc. No. 247, 55th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1898), pt. 2, between pp. 186 and 187. Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States– Mexico Boundary, 1849– 1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 196– 97. Report of the Boundary Commission, pt. 2, 183, 186; and Rebert, La Gran Línea, 190– 91. Despite these directives, the commissioners found it necessary to move some monuments, especially as they adjusted to environmental constraints. On the continuing state markings of the border, see Mary Mendoza’s “Fencing the Line” in this volume. Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). I borrow the term “visualization projects” from Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7. The 1848 agreement that marked the end of the 1846– 1848 U.S.-Mexico war is known in the United States as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The 1853 Treaty of Mesilla necessitated by the Gadsden Purchase required an adjustment of the land boundary. Gray Sweeney, “Drawing Borders: Art and Cultural Politics of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1850– 1853,” Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, ed. Dawn Hall (Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Museum, 1996), 27. For the history of the Mexico-U.S. border surveys, see Leon C. Metz, Border: The U.S.-Mexico Line (El Paso, TX: Mangan Books, 1989); Joseph Richard Werne, “Redrawing the Southwestern Boundary, 1891– 1896,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104 (July 2000): 1– 20; Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848– 1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007); Luz María Oralia Tamayo P. de Ham, La geografía: Arma científica para la defensa del territorio (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2001); Luz María Oralia Tamayo Pérez, “José Salazar Ilarregui, personaje central de la Comisión de Limites Mexico, 1849– 1857, y dos de sus colaboradores: Francisco Jiménez y Agustín Díaz,” in De estamento ocupacional a la comunidad científica: Astrónomos-astrólogos e ingenieros, siglo XVII al XIX, coord. María Luisa Rodríguez-Sala (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), 215– 42; and Rebert, La Gran Línea.

58 | Part I

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

Expediente 89, legajo 3, caja 2, Límite con Estados Unidos, Límites con Estados Unidos y Guatemala, 176, Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, Galería 5, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), México (hereafter Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN). Servín’s work as a topographical engineer included surveys of central Mexico mining regions before he joined the northern survey. Luis R. Servín, “Informe que presenta á la Secretaría de Fomento como resultado de la exploración de la zona minera en el Mineral de Pregones, Municipalidad de Tetipac, Distrito de Alarcón, Estado de Guerrero,” Boletín de Agricultura Minería é Industrias (October 1892): 289– 332, as indexed in Rafael Aguilar y Santillán, “Bibliografía Geológica y Minera de la República Mexicana completada hasta el año de 1904,” Boletín del Instituto Geológico de México 17 (1908): 225. Exp. 39, legajo 1a, caja 4, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. The joint map was published as Boundary between the United States and Mexico as Surveyed and Marked by the International Boundary Commission, under the Convention of July 29th, 1882, Revived February 18th, 1889 / Línea divisoria entre México y Los Estados Unidos trazada y demarcada por la Comisión Internacional de Límites, según la convención de 29 Julio de 1882, renovada en Febrero 18 de 1889 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896). Report of the Boundary Commission, pt. 1, 17. William H. Emory, Report of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Made under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, vol. 1, H. R. Doc. No. 135, 34th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1857), 96. On the visual work of the 1850s survey team, see Robin Kelsey, “Arthur Schott: Marking the Mexican Boundary,” in Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850– 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 19– 72; Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1968); William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 161– 66; and Hall, Drawing the Borderline. On the social and political processes embedded in mapping and surveying, see Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Also useful in thinking through the issues surrounding surveying, mapmaking, and nation-states are Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765– 1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, “Borderland Cartographies: Mapping the Lands between France and Germany, 1860– 1940” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010); and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the GeoBody of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994).

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15.

16.

17.

18.

In comparison, the earlier 1850s U.S.-Mexico boundary survey teams agreed to discount the monuments as official markers, since their stones were so easily moved; they relied on the combination of maps and images to define the borderline. Emory, Report, pt. 1, 38. See Paula Rebert’s assessment in “Views of the Borderlands: The Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1857– 1859,” Terrae Incognitae 37 (2005): 75– 90. Blanco to Secretaría de Fomento, August 24, 1892, 78, libro 2, legajo 2, caja 9, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. “En nuestra Comisión teníamos al Ingeniero Ayudante Luis R. Servín, que, aunque no era fotógrafo de profesión, teis conocimientos y practica en el arte, y lo hizo muy bien, según se vio después por los resultados.” (In our Commission we had Assistant Engineer Luis R. Servín, who, although he was not a photographer by profession, had a good knowledge and practice in the art, and he did very well, as was later seen by the results.) Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 15. For Servín’s role on the Mexico-Guatemala survey, see exp. 37, legajo 2, caja 1, Límite con Guatemala, Límites con Estados Unidos y Guatemala, 176, Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento, Galería 5, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), México (hereafter Límite con Guatemala, 176, AGN). On the photographers who accompanied the Mexico-Guatemala survey, see Límites con Guatemala, 176, AGN. See also Límites entre México y Guatemala, L-E-2019, L-E-2020, L-E-2003, Serie Legajos Encuadernados, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE), México, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada; Luis G. Zorrilla, Relaciones de México con la República de Centro América y con Guatemala (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1984), 441– 62; Manuel Angel Castillo, Mónica Toussaint Ribot, and Mario Vázquez Olivera, Espacios diversos, historia en común: México, Guatemala y Belice: La construcción de una frontera (Mexico City: SRE, 2006); Jan de Vos, Las fronteras de la frontera sur: Reseña de los proyectos de expansión que figuraron la frontera entre México y Centroamérica (Villahermosa: Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco, 1993); and Alberto Amador, Memoria de la cuestión de límites entre México y Guatemala . . . (Mexico City: SRE, 1931). For a nineteenth-century Guatemala-centered perspective, see La cuestión de límites entre México y Guatemala (por un centro americano): Cuestiones entre Guatemala y Méjico, colección de artículos del Mensajero de Centro-América (Guatemala: Centro Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1964). Olivier Debroise, Fuga mexicana: Un recorrido por la fotografía en México (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 78– 93, esp. 78, 85– 86; Roberto García Moll and Daniel Juárez Cossío, eds., Yaxchilán: Antología de su descubrimiento y estudios (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1986); and Ian Graham, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography (London: British Museum Press, 2002).

60 | Part I

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (National Archives microfilm publication T9), Los Angeles data accessed through http://www.ancestry.com. See reference in H. T. Payne, Game Birds and Game Fishes of the Pacific Coast (Los Angeles: News Publishing, 1913). Blanco to J. W. Barlow, February [illegible day] 1892, 92, libro 1, legajo 1, caja 29, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. A selected collection of photographs was published as Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891– 1896: Album, S. Doc. No. 247, 55th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899) (hereafter Report of the Boundary Commission Album). Unpublished photographs can also be found in the manuscript and photographic collections at AGN and NARA II. Payne’s original glass plate negatives are located in the Still Picture Branch, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, RG 76.6, NARA II. Although AGN archival documents indicate that Servín’s glass plate negatives were sent to Mexico City along with the Mexican section’s other records, they are not currently found with these materials in the AGN’s 176 collections in either Galería 5 or Fototeca. Edgar A. Mearns, Nogales, Sonora, to Frederick V. Coville, October 26, 1893, and Coville to Mearns, October 23, 1893, folder 21, box 5, Frederick V. Coville Papers, Record Unit 7272, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C. See Payne photographs in folders 2– 4, box 4, United States– Mexican International Boundary Survey, 1892– 1894, Edgar Alexander Mearns Papers, Record Unit 7083, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C. The official reports of the Mexico-U.S. survey were published as Report of the Boundary Commission; Report of the Boundary Commission Album; Memoria de la Sección Mexicana. See also Charles A. Timm, The International Boundary Commission (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1941). The manuscript collections at the respective national archives offer more complete records of the commissions’ work: U.S. Section, International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico, Records of International Boundary Commissions Concerned with the Southern Boundary of the United States, 1796– 1937, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, RG 76, NARA II; Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. Individual published accounts by survey workers include Edgar Alexander Mearns, Mammals of the Mexican Boundary of the United States, Smithsonian Institution, United States National Museum, Bulletin 56 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907); D. D. Gaillard, “The Perils and Wonders of a True Desert,” Cosmopolitan (October 1896): 592– 605; and William Healey Dall, “Report on the Mollusks Collected by the International Boundary Commission of the United

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 61

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

States and Mexico, 1892–1894,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum 19, no. 1111 (1897): 333– 79. California, Voter Registers, 1866– 1898, online database (Provo, UT: Ancestry .com Operations, 2011), http://www.ancestry.com, based on data from Great Registers, 1866– 1898, FHL roll 976466, CSL roll 16, collection 4-2A, California History Section, California State Library, Sacramento; Ninth Census of the United States, 1870 (NARA microfilm publication M593), Los Angeles data accessed through http://www.ancestry.com. Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, “Libro de Inscripciones, 1868– 1879,” ML32a, Archivo Histórico del Colegio de Minería, UNAM Facultad de Ingeniería, Acervo Histórico del Palacio de Minería, Mexico City (hereafter cited as AHPM); Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, “Registro de títulos expedidos,” ML301a, AHPM; Francisco Díaz Covarrubias, Tratado de topografía y de geodesia con los primeros elementos de astronomía práctica, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno, en Palacio, 1868). José Omar Moncada Maya, Irma Escamilla Herrera, Gabriela Guerrero Cisneros, and Marcela Mezza Cisneros, Bibliografía geográfica mexicana: La obra de los ingenieros geógrafos, Serie Libros 1 (Mexico City: Instituto de Geografía, UNAM, 1999), 9– 14. Covarrubias, Tratado de topografía. This standard text went through several editions. Servín was likely also familiar with the second edition, retitled Tratado elemental de topografía, geodesia y astronomía práctica, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Paris: A.H. Bécus, 1884). Its title page boasted, “Esta obra es la adoptada como texto en los Colegios de la República Mexicana, y fue premiada en la Exposición de Filadelfia en 1876.” (This work is adopted as a text in the Colleges of the Mexican Republic, and was awarded at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876.) Covarrubias, Tratado de topografía, 1:484. Covarrubias, Tratado elemental, 2:444– 45. While the survey business had become increasingly professionalized, centralized, and scientific by the late nineteenth century, these modernization efforts were certainly not uniformly applied, especially at the local level. The unruly processes involved in boundary surveying challenged even the most scientific and rational individuals. See William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1966); Kelsey, Archive Style, 143– 45; and Craib, Cartographic Mexico. The story of Monument No. 122 has been retold by several scholars: see Metz, Border, 110– 12; St. John, Line in the Sand, 90– 96; and Charles R. Ames, “Along the Mexican Border, Then and Now,” Journal of Arizona History 18 (Winter 1977): 444.

62 | Part I

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

Plans for the monuments date to the 1880s. Although those plans were altered a bit for the final versions used in the 1890s, they all used the obelisk form. For copies of the plans— both 1880s and 1890s— see legajo 1, caja 37, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); and Kirk Savage, “The Self-Made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial,” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, ed. Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 5– 32. With the relatively recent completion in 1884 of extenuated construction of the visually striking Washington Monument, the symbol held specific contemporary resonances within the United States. “The Mexican Boundary Line,” New York Times, December 29, 1894. October 3, 1894, legajo 47, caja 26, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. The commission’s farsightedness did not extend to precarious locations of such monuments. An 1895 winter storm, for example, destroyed one of the Tijuana River valley monuments (255) early on, necessitating a replacement, located out of harm’s way. Blanco to J. W. Barlow, January 22, 1895, 305; March 8, 1895, 375; and March 23, 1895, 397, libro 5, legajo 5, caja 33, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. The latter definition draws on Michel Foucault’s influential analyses of discourse and power in modern thought. There is an extensive interdisciplinary literature on archives, including the theoretical approaches of Michel Foucault, especially L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) and The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); and Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995) and Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). I am playing here with the Foucauldian notions of “monument” and “document,” especially in reference to the practice of history. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 6– 11. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 33– 44. In thinking about the relations among photographs, monuments, landscapes, and maps, I have found useful Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 155– 206, esp. 180– 204; Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), esp. 11– 40, 226– 42; and James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See discussion of eighteen photographs sent in spring 1893, Blanco to Secretaría de Fomento, April 28, 1893, 481, libro 2, legajo 2, caja 30; and Manuel Fernández

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41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

Leal, Secretaría de Fomento, to Ingeniero en Jefe Blanco, September 24, 1892, 203, and May 6, 1893, 290, exp. 546, legajo 36, caja 21, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. These eighteen images are likely those included in caja 19, Límites entre México, Estados Unidos y Guatemala, 176, Colección Fotográfica, Fototeca, AGN. Some of Payne’s and Servín’s prints may have remained in the borderlands. It seems likely that Sonoran family group shots taken by Servín, for example, were produced for the families. I do not, however, have any textual confirmation of this supposition. See exp. 103, legajo 5, caja 4, Límite con Guatemala, 176, AGN, on senior engineer Prospero Goyzueto’s practice of sending photographs to the Secretaría de Fomento. Photography had been employed by the Mexican Ministry of Development since the 1870s. In 1876 it began using photographs in its annual reports and established its own photographic studio. See Debroise, Fuga mexicana, 70. John Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Rosa Casanova and Adriana Konzevik, Mexico: A Photographic History (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes / Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2007); Roberto Tejada, National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Leonard Folgarait, Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Casasola, Modotti, and Álvarez Bravo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). See, for example, no. 8, legajo 1, caja 37, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. I borrow the term “fugitive landscape” from Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). In thinking about local knowledge and mapmaking, I have found useful, in addition to the histories of cartography noted above, D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). As U.S. topographer P. D. Cunningham noted in his California-Arizona field book: “The sketches in the remaining part of this book were not made in the field but compiled from the sketches in Books containing Lines ‘C’ U.S. Topog. and from memory. The purpose is to give a somewhat connected representation of topog. without regard to minutiae. There being no time for field sketching, this proved to be the only alternative.” See entry 460, field notebooks, box 25, International Boundaries, U.S.-Mexico Border, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, RG 76, NARA II. Jacobo Blanco, “Reseña de los trabajos topográficos,” Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, appendix 11, p. 259. As the Mexican engineers’ report describes the process, “La exuberante vegetación de las márgenes de rio, así como el gran número de esteros, bajos y pequeñas hondonadas que se encuentran en sus riberas, cuyo suelo, en lo

64 | Part I

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

general, presenta poca resistencia, pues la arena de que están formadas, es removida y aumentada por el acarreo que anualmente recibe en la época de las crecientes.” (The exuberant vegetation of the river banks, as well as the great number of estuaries, lows and small hollows that are in its banks, whose soil, in general, presents little resistance, because the sand of which they are formed, is removed and increased by the transported sediment that it annually receives during floods.) Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 319. Boundary between the United States and Mexico map. See Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, appendix 25, pp. 315– 52, for the comparative astronomical and mathematical calculations and a visual representation of triangulations. Jacobo Blanco to Manuel Fernández Leal, Sr. Ing., Nov 12, 1894, 178– 81, libro 5, legajo 5, caja 33, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN; Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 40; Directory of San Diego City and County, 1897 (San Diego, Calif.: Tine Olmsted, 1897), 142, 302. I have been unable to locate the Servín-Judd albums created in San Diego. Although the transmissions of the albums Luis Servín created, as well as his specific prints and negatives, are referenced in the Mexican commission papers, the fifteen albums now at the AGN Fototeca are those based off the later plates. The 612 glass plate negatives by Daniel Payne, now in Still Picture Branch, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, RG 76.6, NARA II, are likely the basis of Payne’s San Diego albums. Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 46; Report of the Boundary Commission, pt. 2, 200; Report of the Boundary Commission Album. J. W. Barlow to Secretary of State, November 25, 1896, in S. Doc. No. 56, 55th Cong., 1st Sess (1897). My thinking about the survey photographs, and the archives they created, is influenced by Kelsey, Archive Style; Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982): 311– 19; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Olivier Debroise, “Brief Speculations from a Photographic Archive,” foreword to Casanova and Konzevik, Mexico: A Photographic History, 10– 19; Rebecca Comay, ed., Lost in the Archives (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002); Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 443– 52; and Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Servín and Payne both photographed such images of people and structures, and a few were included in the official joint report. See, for example, “Ordenes de Pago Diversos (1896/97),” 214– 16, exp. 534, legajo 24, caja 41, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN.

Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 65

54. 55.

56.

Blanco to Secretaría de Fomento, June 1, 1896, 106–8, exp. 551, legajo 41, caja 24, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN. These written reports are organized differently, a reflection perhaps of cultural preferences as well as field management decisions. Blanco organized his five chapters chronologically and, as perhaps befits a topographical engineer, geographically by location (Paso del Norte, Nogales, Yuma, San Diego, Washington). He relegated special reports, calculations, and other matters to appendices. Barlow organized the chapters by task and incorporated written reports and key correspondence within his ten-chapter report. Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 47. Blanco goes on to credit the harmonious teamwork established in the field for enabling successful settling of these disagreements.

3

Fencing the Line Race, Environment, and the Changing Visual Landscape at the U.S.-Mexico Divide M A RY   E . M E N D O Z A

I

n the early morning of June 24, 1910, W. P. Strafford, manager for the Val Verde Irrigation Company in Del Rio, Texas, found himself in a quandary. Four of his company’s cattle had strayed across the Rio Grande into Mexico, and he needed to get them back to the north side of the river— but retrieving them was not as easy as it once was.1 Ranchers’ ability to move cattle across an open border had changed in recent years, making it more difficult to return wandering animals or to buy and import new stock from nearby Mexican ranchers. Like many other ranchers, Strafford knew that if government officials caught him sneaking animals across the line, he could find himself charged with smuggling.2 Despite the risks, Strafford ordered his employees to drive the cattle back across the river, but the herders failed to slip past the customs guards. The guards seized the animals and held them until Strafford could meet with Levi E. Johnson, an official from the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI).3 The next morning Strafford argued with Johnson in Del Rio and insisted that he had “a perfect right to return his American-cattle.” Johnson, a veterinarian hired to inspect all animals entering the United States from Mexico, retorted that Strafford did not have that right because the creatures were “liberally infested with Margaropus annulatus,” a cattle tick that the BAI had spent years trying to eradicate from the United States. With the assistance of

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the customs guards, Johnson roped and tied the animals, then “thoroughly hand dressed them with Beaumont-­oil” and placed them in a ten-­acre pasture for quarantine, where they would remain for sixty days.4 By 1910, inspectors from the BAI had spent four years actively trying to rid the United States of the tick that Johnson mentioned. Researchers had recently discovered that the tiny bug was responsible for the deaths of thousands of cattle in the northern portion of the United States. The tick transmitted one of earth’s tiniest living organisms: a unicellular protozoan, which caused those cattle that had not been exposed to the parasite as calves to contract a fatal fever. The bureau drew quarantine lines and did its best to control the movement of animals across county and state lines, but states such as Texas and California, because they bordered Mexico, posed even greater challenges than others.5 Cattle from both Mexico and the United States naturally drifted across the borderline on open ranges. In addition, many ranchers, both Mexican and American, owned or leased land that traversed the border, further complicating efforts to control cattle movement.6 For the cattle and for many ranchers in this period, the border was simply a “line in the sand”: it was fluid, permeable, and intangible, and although it had been socially constructed and imposed on the landscape, it had little meaning for people and even less for the animals that surrounded it.7 In an effort to keep the dreaded tick on the south side of the U.S.-­Mexico divide and to make the border more visible to cattle ranchers and their stock, the BAI, overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, built the first federally funded fence along the U.S.-­Mexico boundary as a part of the eradication campaign in 1911, forever changing the border’s visual landscape.8 At the same time that officials from the BAI constructed border fences, American cattlemen constructed racial categories—­but for cattle, not people. When officials of the BAI stopped American ranchers like W. P. Strafford to inspect their animals at the border, the ranchers claimed that their “American” cattle did not need inspection. In their minds, only stock from Mexico could be so contaminated as to require such scrutiny. In other words, fences and ideas about the Mexican race developed in tandem—­and the natural environment provided fertile context for both. Just as the protozoa and the tick drove fence construction, these same environmental threats created conceptions of Mexican cattle (and later Mexican people) as diseased and/or inferior.

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Although often overlooked, the tick eradication campaign marked the beginning of the long history of failed efforts to control movement across the U.S.-­Mexico border and of a process of making the border a more distinct visual and physical marker of racial difference. Over the course of the twentieth century, policy makers, American citizens, and sometimes Mexican citizens imagined and then reimagined the creation of a barrier that would regulate, funnel, and impede the movement of dynamic nature: pathogens, animals, and increasingly racialized people. The process of border fortification began as an effort to combat a small environmental threat and over time became a large-­scale effort to control not only small pathogenic threats, but also the nature of human migration. The story of tick eradication at the U.S-­Mexico border reveals how nature, at its most fundamental level, can be seen at the center of racial discourse, which is too often exclusively analyzed in the realm of human bodies and politics. Scholars such as Alexandra Minna-­Stern, Natalia Molina, and John Mckiernan-­González have discussed how health examinations at the border contributed to the construction of racial categories in the early twentieth century.9 The perceived threat of diseases such as typhus or smallpox carried by Mexican people, they argue, rendered Mexican bodies as unsanitary and therefore inferior to sanitary American bodies. This chapter builds on their work, but the argument herein underscores the importance of the nonhuman natural environment in the construction of both race and the border itself. Moreover, this essay pushes the periodization of pathogenic threats contributing to the racialization of Mexico and its inhabitants back to the nineteenth century, when cattle ranchers and officials from the BAI set out to find and eradicate ticks across the American South and parts of the Southwest. This is a story about nature and the way in which a protozoan (a tiny unicellular organism) carried by a tick (a tiny bug) on the bodies of cattle (large mammals) influenced the construction of a racialized and imposing border control apparatus. In 1868, thousands of cattle in New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and other “northern states” fell ill after mingling with cows and steers that had come from the American South. This disease came to be known as Texas fever and quickly drew the attention of the federal government.10 By this time, cowboys understood that the disease had something to do with the migration

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Figure 3.1 Agent Burying Dangerous Drifter. Courtesy of National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland.

and mixing of southern cattle with cattle from the north, but they did not know how the transmission of the disease occurred. As animals traveled north on various trails know as “lines of drive,” cattle across the United States contracted the disease. In the Texas Panhandle in 1881, cattle rancher O. H. Nelson noted, It had long been known that when our cattle in the Panhandle came in contact with the southern Texas cattle, or a trail over which they had recently traveled, they contracted the so-called Texas Fever. No one knew the cause of this,

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and it was a great mystery inasmuch as the cattle communicating the disease were absolutely healthy. . . . The southern cowmen honestly thought we were simply agitating the question in order to keep them from encroaching on our good ranges.11

Nelson and his business partner had lost two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cattle to Texas fever and decided to join other ranchers in north Texas to find ways to stop the massive toll. He and others met to form the Panhandle Stock Association, made up of cattle ranchers in the Panhandle who looked for ways to protect their animals. They established lines of drive to bypass their ranges and even spent their own money to construct water tanks where cowboys could find drinking water for their animals as they made their journeys. Members of the Stock Association tried to enforce these new lines but found that cattle drivers continued to sneak across their ranges.12 Individual states, too, tried to enforce restricted trails and other quarantine measures, but with little success. At different state borders, cowboys faced different quarantine measures and found it easier simply to travel routes that seemed most direct, which continued the spread of the fever. Without a coordinated effort and a well-­researched, scientific explanation for the disease, cattle ranchers across the country would not be able to protect their cattle. Between 1868 and 1889, D. E. Salmon of the BAI carefully researched the disease and determined the boundary line of the “permanently infected district.” Salmon showed that the infected area “did not extend north of the 37th parallel of latitude excepting along the eastern slope of the country, where it extends half way between the 38th and 39th parallel.” In other words, the infected district covered most of the South and parts of the southwestern United States—­the disease seemed to thrive in regions that remained warm throughout the year. By February 1889, the Department of Agriculture ordered the BAI to conduct its first systematic experiments to find the cause of the mysterious disease.13 Tick eradication was one of the first of many government projects to turn to science to solve societal problems.14 In historian Claire Strom’s analysis of tick eradication and its effects on the American South, she notes that the eradication program “epitomizes the rise of the administrative state in the

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United States.” 15 Because of several factors—­the extensive range limit and threat posed by the tick, the rise of the germ theory, and the influence of the Progressive Era, which encouraged bureaucrats and politicians to transform both nature and society—­BAI officials believed that if they could find the cause of the disease, they would be able to eradicate it.16 The germ theory, developed by Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, revealed that microorganisms moving from one living being to another could transmit diseases, and this new understanding empowered bureaucrats. 17 This theory in conjunction with the rise of industrialization propelled widespread government intervention to transform society, a political movement known as progressivism.18 The experiments conducted by doctors from the BAI in 1889 found conclusive evidence that “the cause of the disease was an intracorpuscular parasite (one living within the blood cells), the intermediate stage of the development of which occurred in the cattle tick, thus making the cattle tick the indirect but absolutely essential factor in the natural production of the disease.” 19 Put another way, the doctors discovered that protozoa lived inside ticks, and when those small bugs attached themselves to cattle, they injected the protozoa into the animals’ bloodstream. Upon infection, a cow or steer would develop a fever, and its internal organs would begin to shut down.20 This discovery “was the first experimental proof furnished on the subject of diseases borne by insects, or diseases that can be carried from one animal to another only by an intermediary host” within the United States.21 With this new understanding, the doctors of the bureau believed that “by intelligent and energetic” design, they could reduce the size of the tick’s natural range limit and push it out of the United States.22 By February 1903, Congress had granted the secretary of the Department of Agriculture the authority to “effectually suppress and prevent the spread of contagious diseases of live stock [and given] him exclusive power over the matter . . . without qualification.” 23 Three years later, the BAI, overseen by the Department of Agriculture, launched a detailed eradication campaign that drastically affected the movement of cattle across county, state, and international boundary lines. The eradication process had begun, the secretary of agriculture had full jurisdiction over the matter, and the free movement of cattle across boundaries was poised to change.

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Within the United States, BAI officials built fences, used dipping stations, and formulated eradication methods based on the life cycle of the tick to rid the South and Southwest of the dreaded parasite. The feedlot method, for example, restricted cattle to specific locations known as feedlots by building fences and planting crops in between cattle corrals. Pasture rotation, another method for tick eradication, helped to isolate the infected areas by restricting the movement of cattle from one pasture to the next based on the season, outside temperature, and life cycle of the tick. Although BAI officials faced some opposition in the South from yeoman farmers who resisted the quarantines, tick eradication was largely successful within the borders of the United States.24 Along the U.S.-­Mexico border, however, tick eradication posed unique problems. The tick’s geographic range limit included nearly the entire country of warmer Mexico. As a result, cattle in Mexico had developed immunities to the fever, and Mexican officials had no reason to enforce such costly measures to quarantine animals on the Mexican side of the border. Cattle in Mexico did not present symptoms, and the only concern the tick raised was the threat to stock trade with the United States.25 To ensure that cows and steers did not bring the parasite into the United States, BAI officials set up inspection stations at selected points of entry along the border, where veterinarians could inspect, dip, quarantine, or deny entry to cattle they deemed dangerous. Those animals found free of disease and ticks were permitted to enter, those with ticks were barred from entry, and those who had occupied “questionable locations,” such as Durango, where ticks persisted, were subject to dipping and a quarantine that could last as long as sixty days.26 Dipping consisted of having the cow or steer walk into a vat of crude oil, which would kill any ticks that might be on it.27 Sometimes veterinarians at the border insisted that each animal go through this process multiple times. In addition to dipping, veterinarians mandated that cattlemen clean out all stock cars that transported cattle to ensure that the animals would not become reinfected.28 The dipping stations set up to channel the movement of stock through ports of entry raised a host of concerns for cattle ranchers on both sides of the border. The threat of the tick’s (re)entry to the United States nearly halted cattle trade with Mexico.29 In addition, when cattle wandered south of the border, new regulations forced American ranchers to round them up

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and cross them at the ports of entry. At these ports, BAI officials inspected the cattle, allowing the animals to return to the United States, but they often barred stock that had once occupied U.S. pastures from reentry. The protocol enraged cattle ranchers. If they wanted to herd cattle across the borderline, they had to provide affidavits stating that the cattle had “not passed through any district infected with contagious disease.” 30 If they moved cattle that they had purchased in Mexico or that they wished to import for any reason, the cattlemen had to provide two affidavits—­one stating that they had not driven the cattle through tick country and one from the previous owner stating the same. If they simply wanted to return their own cattle that had strayed, they needed only one affidavit.31 Inspection upon entry ensured that the ranchers would not lie. The new regulations were inconvenient in every possible way. Cattle ranchers who had once crossed the open line with ease were now funneled through these entry points. If cattle strayed south of the border a short distance from a U.S. range, cowboys would have to round them up and drive them long distances (sometimes hundreds of miles) to the nearest inspection station, where, more often than not, they would be forced to wait until an inspector could examine the herd. Inspectors traveled from one port of entry to another each week, leaving some checkpoints unmanned for days. Once the inspector arrived, sure that the cattle had crossed through “ticky country,” he would (sometimes repeatedly) dip the cattle and then enforce the strict quarantine regulations.32 BAI inspectors hoped that with all but the animals’ heads submerged in crude oil, one or two walks through this channel would rid their bodies of the disease-­carrying parasites.33 The checkpoints transformed the border landscape from once open range marked only by obelisks, with miles between them, to a landscape that now included ports of entry with sophisticated chutes for dipping cattle and other infrastructure for control. These changes, driven by the natural environment, birthed a series of fortification projects in decades to come that would slowly close off the United States from Mexico, forever changing the visual imagery of the borderline. The inconvenience of the checkpoints sparked a series of complaints. Cattlemen wrote to their congressmen, the secretary of agriculture, and officials from the BAI to beg for relaxed regulations. W. H. Jennings of the Piedra

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Figure 3.2 Quarantine Measures at the Border. Cattle walking through the chute of

a dipping vat near the border. Courtesy of National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland.

Blanca Cattle Company queried the chief of the bureau if he could simply reduce the quarantine time from sixty days to thirty. Jennings was happy to oblige with the dipping and placement of his cattle in a quarantine pasture. All he wanted to do was import aged cattle for slaughter, so he did not mind waiting one month, but two months seemed too long. Jennings hoped to cross the cattle sooner so that he could boost his own cattle business while also helping a business south of the border that was “in a bad way.” 34 Denied relaxed regulations, Jennings later insisted that he could prove that the cattle he and his colleagues wanted to import did not carry the fever tick, explaining, “We feel that it is an injustice that we are refused the privilege of importing our cattle.” 35 In Southern California, where the ticks seemed to be a greater threat than in Texas because of the consistently warm, dry climate, Congressman

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Frank P. Flint asked the secretary of agriculture in 1910 if regulations could be eased for ranchers wishing to cross animals for immediate slaughter. He argued that allowing these eased regulations would curtail additional costs that the regulations imposed while still minimizing the risk of infection. If cattle went straight to the slaughterhouse, they would not mingle with other cows or steers and thus could not spread the infection. Beyond that, cattle that had been exposed to the parasite since birth did not present symptoms of the fever, making them cheap, edible beef cows and steers that could be imported and killed. It would be good for business, Flint emphasized, to allow importation for immediate slaughter.36 In June 1910, the same year that W. P. Strafford failed to sneak his four “American-­cattle” across the border, Ike T. Pryor of the Livestock Commission in San Antonio, Texas, wrote to the secretary of agriculture on behalf of J. D. Savage, asking for preferential treatment for Savage and his cattle near Eagle Pass. He asked to secure assurance that, if cattle broke out of their pastures and “naturally drift[ed]” across the border, Savage could return cattle to the American side with ease. “Mr. Savage is a high-­class, respected citizen of this community and would not take advantage of any order given him permitting the return of cattle to this country,” Pryor assured the Secretary. “You are not taking any chance whatever in favoring these people.” 37 For Pryor, Savage’s character and community citizenship determined whether his cows would be infected—­risk had little or nothing to do with where his cattle had wandered. The livestock commissioner’s claim that allowing Savage’s cattle to cross the border would not take any chances implied an imaginative germ theory at best: one where high-­class citizens had high-­class cattle that were immune to contagious disease and repelled parasites. Officials from the bureau did not waver. In response to Pryor, one official wrote, “Cattle infested with ticks cannot in any event be lawfully driven from Mexico into the United States, although they may have previously strayed from the United States into Mexico; and all cattle, though not believed to be infected or exposed to the disease, can be returned to the United States only at the points of entry.” Emphasizing that Mexico posed a great risk to the eradication campaign, he went on: “Inasmuch as the territory within the Republic of Mexico along the international boundary line is known to be infested with cattle ticks, the removal or lightening of the restrictions

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upon the importation of cattle from . . . Mexico to the United States, even though such cattle may have strayed from the United States into Mexico, would contravene the purpose and spirit of the law and seriously retard and jeopardize the accomplishment of its object.” 38 This response became the standard reply to cattle ranchers asking for relaxed regulations for the importation of cattle from Mexico. The bureau designed the process to be uniform and nondiscriminating. The quarantine was meant for “all cattle” that could potentially carry the disease vector, and any cow or steer that crossed into Mexico posed a risk. Still, Pryor, Savage, and others refused to accept the idea that their cattle, once south of the border, risked attracting the tick and carrying the disease vector back into the United States. Ranchers all along the U.S.-­Mexico border lodged complaints. W. P. May in Laredo, Texas, wrote to his U.S. representative, John N. Garner, in reference to a veterinarian inspector’s decision that his stock could not reenter: To prove to that gentleman what I told him is true, I enclose to your [sic] certificate of exportation which I wish you would show him in support of the fact that my cattle are American cattle which I wish to return for immediate slaughter: the cattle were born and raised in the United States, therefore they are not Mexican cattle as he calls them; if that was the case every American that went into Mexico would return a Mexican. Please return to me without fail the certificate as they are the only absolute proof I have of those being good old American cattle.39

Stafford, Pryor, and May’s language suggests that, despite the nondiscriminatory regulations imposed on cattle crossing the border, cattle ranchers began to make clear distinctions between “American” and “Mexican” cattle in the borderlands. According to American ranchers, “American cattle” had every right to be on American soil. Mexican cattle, on the other hand, threatened the health of the American cattle industry. Angered and frustrated by the dipping process, cowboys began to conceive of and talk about cattle from Mexico as distinctly “Mexican” and infested with ticks. The disease that they carried made them impure, and they needed examination. American cattle, born and raised north of the border, did not require such scrutiny.

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This language personified and then racialized the cattle in the minds of these ranchers in a very similar way to how, historians Alexandra Minna-­ Stern and Natalia Molina suggest, Mexican people later became associated with disease and filth through the process of screening for lice. Minna-­Stern and Molina show how the louse, which could be carried by people, came to be associated with the Mexican body in the typhus scare of 1915.40 But the racialization process occurred on cattle before 1915, and it occurred because of a tick. This process of racializing animals was a precursor to the racialization of Mexican migrants as “diseased” and “filthy.” While the term “race” often references a human physiognomy (skin color, hair color and texture, and so forth), Mexican cattle, though similar (if not exactly the same) in appearance to American cattle, could only be identified by their brands. Cowboys along the border and elsewhere had an intimate knowledge of the brands of ranches for hundreds of miles. These brands, once seen, indicated to ranchers whether the cow or steer with the brand was American and seemingly pure or uninfected, or Mexican and therefore potentially infected. In a letter begging for relaxed regulations for American cattle, rancher J. D. Savage of the G. Bedell Moore Estate noted, “Cattle with our brand can only originate on this the U.S. side of the river.” He went on, “The cattle raised on the Mexican soil are so infectious we should then have protection from Mexican cattle that cross the border into our pastures.” 41 Savage pointed out that Americans could identify which cattle were Mexican and which were American by looking at their brands. He further emphasized that, in his opinion, there was not any physical protection for his “high-­class” American cattle from Mexican cattle wandering across the border and infecting the good old American cattle, despite the dipping stations. To Savage, the dipping stations were simply an obstacle to a successful American cattle business. The racialization of cattle in the borderlands suggests that race, as a social construction, is not just a system of organizing human bodies according to perceived difference, but a system of exclusion and inclusion based on notions of moral hierarchies (pure vs. impure, good vs. bad, and so on) that is often loosely organized around physical difference. In this story, cattle in Mexico and cattle in the United States appeared indecipherable, apart from

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their brands. It was the tick that set them apart, rendering cattle on the Mexican side of the border impure and undesirable. Here race as a system of exclusion was not applied to humans, but to protozoa, bugs, animals, and landscapes. The cattle south of the border became “Mexican,” and the border became a dividing line to contain those Mexican cattle and their ticks. At the same time that American cattlemen ascribed nationalities and racial distinctions to cattle, Congress appropriated money for the Department of Agriculture to “permit the erection of fences along the international boundary line” to aid eradication and to stop the “natural drift” of cattle (and their ticks) across the border. By June 1910, the BAI presented plans for forty-­ five miles of “four or five strand barbed wire fence” along the border.42 The bureau planned to build the fence in four separate segments as “early as practicable” in the areas where the threat was greatest: “17 miles in the Jacumba Valley and Campo section, 6 miles in the Tecate Valley section, 6 miles in the Marron Valley section, and 16 miles from the Otay Mountain to the Pacific Ocean.” 43 These segments, the department believed, would stop the migration of cattle north into the United States and help stop the spread of disease. But cattle were not the only means by which a fever tick could travel. Female ticks, once engorged after feeding on a cow, drop to the ground where they lay their eggs. These eggs then developed into larvae, or seed ticks—­a process that takes anywhere from two to six weeks, depending on the climate and other environmental conditions. Once fully developed into seed ticks, roughly 1⁄32 of an inch in size, these ticks “crawl actively on the ground and among leaves, bunching in large numbers upon grass blades, shrubs, weeds, and fence posts to await an opportunity for attachment to their passing host.” 44 The ticks can live for quite some time (three to four months) independent of a host before they eventually die. Once they attach to a host, they grow into mature adults, reproduce, and start the cycle again. Although the ticks can “crawl extensively,” they do not generally crawl long distances, but they “can be transported long distances by animals, by rains, by winds, cattle cars, hides, and on the clothing of man.” 45 Thus, BAI agents faced a constant danger of tick movement above their quarantine line, or perhaps even above a border fence. The bureau finished the first federally funded border fence in 1911 and fences became a popular solution for American cattle ranchers. Ranchers

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Figure 3.3 Quarantine line map, showing the original quarantine line as well as a

shaded region along the border in Texas that had to be quarantined in 1956. Courtesy of National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, Maryland.

loathed the dipping stations but loved the idea that the fences would stop cattle from wandering across the line.46 Dipping continued and sustained ranchers’ perceptions of difference between “Mexican” and “American” cattle. Though the tick eradication campaign was largely successful in most of the United States, Texas counties along the border continued to be a buffer zone well into the 1950s, causing continued headaches for cattle ranchers. Barbed wire fences, then, served as psychological security blankets— and not much else— for those worried about the spread of Texas fever. In the minds of ranchers and veterinarians, the fences would stop unregulated movement of cattle and thus stop the movement of the tick. In reality, cattle still moved across the border on ranches that traversed it and along unfenced sections of the border. And the ticks could easily bypass the strands of wire. High winds, rain, and the movement of other animals and people ensured that the fence could not stop the tick. In fact, the fence itself could facilitate the migration of ticks across the border.

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Cattlemen hated the quarantine and the dipping, even though these measures likely contributed to the success of the eradication campaign, and they increasingly lobbied for more federal protection physically manifested in fences. By the 1930s, the language used to describe cattle had transformed, even among BAI officials. They no longer set out to inspect “cattle potentially infected”; rather, they inspected “Mexican cattle” and noted that nearly all “Mexican cattle are tick-­infested.” 47 Increasingly, the threat of “Mexican cattle” took hold and cattlemen continued to petition for fences to protect them from the Mexican cattle and to “prevent illegal entry of livestock” to the United States.48 The frustration that ranchers felt when subjected to inspection, delay, and dipping combined with the knowledge that the cattle tick remained in Mexico created a discourse among cattle ranchers that reified the need for protection in the form of a fence from a filthy, tick-­infested Mexico. Throughout the tick eradication campaign, cattle ranchers along the border racialized cattle. The BAI reinforced that racialization process once it built the first border fence and set a precedent that would only feed further into the racialization process. The language surrounding the tick eradication campaign resurfaced again and again over the course of the twentieth century—­perceptions of Mexicans as filthy and diseased, anxieties about the illegal entry of Mexicans, and fences for protection of a sanitized “pure” homeland all have historical roots in how the tick eradication process unfolded at the border. Nature in the form of a tick acted as a catalyst for the construction of fences along the border and for the intensifying racial tension that still surrounds the border today. Over the course of the twentieth century, the border control apparatus initially built to control the movement of small bugs became a massive web of fences, stadium lighting, and large metal barricades erupting from the earth. These structures have not only changed the look of the borderline, but they have cast shadows into the borderlands. Now built to control human migration, fences funnel people to the most dangerous places, exposing them to the deadly elements of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest, resulting in increasing death rates for migrants. By focusing on tick eradication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter reveals how bounding the nation’s perimeter has been an attempt to control the movement of not only people, but animals

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Figure 3.4 Border agent along the border barbed wire fence, 1947, outside Nogales. National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

and other organisms. Consequently, the line at the southwestern border has become much more than a national boundary. Over the last century, it has developed as a complex, often contradictory, attempt to separate people and nature in one place— the United States— from the people and nature of its southern neighbor, Mexico.49 While scholars have focused on many attributes of the U.S.-Mexico border, they have in general overlooked the degree

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to which its fortification represents, at root, an effort to remake the natural and built environments of a vast, little understood, and hotly contested landscape.

Notes 1.

Levi E. Johnson, Veterinarian Inspector, to Thomas A. Bray, Veterinary Inspector in Charge, June 25, 1910, entry 2, box 17, Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) Records, Record Group (RG) 17, National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland (NARA II). 2. United States of America v. Garland Livingston, “For Smuggling Neat Cattle into the United States in Violation of Section 2865, Revised Statutes of the United States,” August 27, 1907, BAI Records, NARA II. 3. Johnson to Bray, June 25, 1910. 4. Ibid. 5. John Robbins Mohler, Texas or Tick Fever, Farmer’s Bulletin No. 569, U.S. Department of Agriculture, BAI (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), 3–­5; and H. W. Graybill, Studies on the Biology of the Texas-­Fever Tick, U.S. Department of Agriculture, BAI (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911), 8. 6. A. D. Melvin, Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry, to Doctor Thomas Bray, November 11, 1910, entry 2, box 17, BAI Records, NARA II; and William H. McKellar and George H. Hart, “Eradicating Cattle Ticks in California,” 26th Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry for the Year 1909 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), 317. See also Manuel A. Machado, The North Mexican Cattle Industry, 1910–­1975: Ideology, Conflict, and Change (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 25–­26; and Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S-­Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 103. 7. St. John, Line in the Sand. 8. James Wilson, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, to Secretary of State, April 21, 1910, entry 479, box 38, Records of the Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, 1716–­1979, RG 76, NARA II. On earlier efforts, by the United States and Mexico, to mark and visualize the international border, see Katherine G. Morrissey, “Monuments, Photographs, and Maps,” in this volume. 9. Alexandra Minna-­Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-­Building on the U.S.-­Mexico Border, 1910–­1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (February 1999): 41–­81; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–­1939 (Berkeley: University

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of California Press, 2006); and John Mckiernan-­González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-­Mexico Border, 1848–­1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 10. F. L. Kilbourne and Theobald Smith, Investigations into the Nature, Causation, and Prevention of Texas or Southern Cattle Fever, U.S. Department of Agriculture, BAI Bulletin No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1893), 12. 11. Quoted in J. Evetts Haley, “Texas Fever in Winchester County,” Panhandle Plains Historical Review 7–­9 (1935): 38–­39. 12. Ibid. 13. Kilbourne and Smith, Investigations, 12. 14. Claire Strom, Making Catfish Bait Out of Government Boys: The Fight against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 5; and Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 5. 15. Strom, Making Catfish Bait, 5. 16. “Range limit” is a scientific term used to describe the reaches of an inhabitable region for any given organism. 17. Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 5 and 22. 18. Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 5. 19. John Robbins Mohler, Texas Fever (Otherwise Known as Tick Fever, Splenetic Fever, or Southern Cattle Fever), with Methods for Its Prevention, Department of Agriculture, BAI (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905), 5. 20. Kilbourne and Smith, Investigations, 16–­25. 21. Mohler, Texas Fever, 5. 22. Kilbourne and Smith, Investigations, 12. 23. James Wilson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to Hon. Frank P. Flint, United States Senate, June 11, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 24. Strom, Making Catfish Bait, 5. 25. Machado, North Mexican Cattle Industry, 26. 26. Melvin to Bray, November 11, 1910. 27. Thomas A. Bray, Inspector in Charge (El Paso, TX), to Doctor Levi E. Johnson (San Antonio, TX), October 11 [1910], BAI Records, NARA; and Wilson to Flint, June 11, 1910. 28. Chief of Quarantine Division to Doctor Thomas A. Bray (El Paso, TX), October 26, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 29. Machado, North Mexican Cattle Industry, 26. 30. Chief to Bray, October 26, 1910. 31. Ibid. 32. Chief of the Bureau to Thomas A. Bray (El Paso, TX), July 6, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II.

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33. While the documents in the BAI Records indicate that the dipping solution was made up of crude oil, other sources note that at times, the solution was creosote or arsenic bath. For references at the border that discuss crude oil, see Bray to Johnson, October 11 [1910]; and Wilson to Flint, June 11, 1910. 34. W. H. Jennings (San Antonio, TX) to A. D. Melvin (Washington, D.C.), May 21, 1910; and W.  H. Jennings to John  N. Garner, May  20 , 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 35. Jennings quoted in J. R. Blocker (San Antonio, TX) to Hon. A. S. Burleson (Austin, TX), October 10, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 36. Frank P. Flint to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson, May 31, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 37. Ike T. Pryor, Director, Evans-­Snider Buel Co., to James Wilson, Department of Agriculture, June 30, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 38. Memorandum for Doctor Melvin from the Office of the Solicitor in response to letters from Ike T. Pryor, July 19, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 39. Emphasis in original. W. P. May to John N. Garner, January 25, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 40. Minna-­Stern, “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood”; and Molina, Fit to Be Citizens. 41. J. D. [Savage] to Honorable James Wilson, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, June 27, 1910, BAI Records, NARA II. 42. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture to Secretary of State, June 16, 1910, entry 479, box 38, Records of the Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, 1716–­1979, RG 76, NARA II. 43. The bureau built all of the first fences in Southern California. Unlike Texas, Southern California did not have a river separating it from cattle in Mexico, and because California had a consistently hot, dry climate, the tick threatened many of the large cattle ranches in Southern California. The BAI thought that the threat was greatest in these locations. P. C. Knox, Secretary of State, to Henry Lane Wilson, American Ambassador, Mexico City, June 1, 1910, entry 479, box 38, Records of the Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, 1716–­1979, RG 76, NARA II. 44. Mohler, Texas or Tick Fever, 4. 45. Ibid., 4–­6. 46. Rachel St. John has noted that fences “divided ranges” and stifled the ability to move cattle freely along and across the border. While this was certainly the case, ranchers loathed the quarantine regulations so much that they seemed to prefer fences to protect from wandering cattle so they could avoid herding cattle through ports of entry. As the century progressed, petitions for fences increased dramatically. St. John, Line in the Sand.

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47. Herndon W. Goforth, American Consul to Secretary of State, March 30, 1935, file 711.12 158/41, Decimal Files, 1930–­1939, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NARA II.. 48. Alfred Paul to Hon. Henry Ashurst, U.S. Senator, January 15, 1938, file 711.12 158/59, Decimal Files, 1930–­1939, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NARA II; W. M. J. Tucker, Executive Secretary of Game Fish and Oyster Commission (Austin, TX), to Texas Members of Senate, October 10, 1941, file 711.12 158/106, box 2125, Decimal Files, 1940–­1944, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NARA II. 49. Until 1965, there was not a limit on how many Mexicans could enter the United States. Many others have written about the border and immigration or immigration policy but have not considered the environment. See also Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-­Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); St. John, Line in the Sand; Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-­Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-­Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Robert Lee Maril, The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-­Mexico Border (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). Maril’s book is a more recent study of public policy.

4

Open Border The National Press and the Promotion of Transnational Commerce, 1940–1965 G E R A L D O L U J Á N C A DAVA

I

n 1944, as many Americans contemplated the war that divided Europe, foreign correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times claimed that the United States and Mexico were as close as they ever had been. A century earlier, the U.S.-Mexico border had been a “vague unsettled fighting ground” that, as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, had become “fixed by war and purchase.” But by the mid-twentieth century, it was “as open and unguarded as the northern boundary.” Whereas the borders of Europe “itch and throb like unhealed scars,” wrote McCormick— the first woman to contribute regularly to the paper’s editorial page, a member of its editorial board, and only the second woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism— the borders of the United States “do not cut so deep and tend to dissolve rather than fester.” Such differences between Europe and the Americas, she argued, translated into unlimited possibilities for borderlands tourists and residents. For visitors moving back and forth between the United States and Mexico, the “formalities attending the crossing” became “more and more perfunctory.” Along with the ethnic, racial, and cultural mixing that was typical in border regions— the “mixing boards of races,” McCormick called them— the vibrancy of cross-border exchange made the borderlands the “land of the future.” McCormick’s article was representative of how hun-

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dreds of articles in national newspapers portrayed the U.S.-Mexico border during and after World War II.1 Journalists like McCormick wrote during a period—from 1940 to 1965— when industrialists in Mexico and in the United States transformed borderlands economies, making the region the fastest-growing area of both countries. Mexican and U.S. investment in agriculture, ranching, and manufacturing industries; infrastructural developments including highway, railroad, and monorail construction; the building of new customs gateways, factories, and oil pipelines; and tourism and free-trade initiatives implemented by local, state, and national governments all demonstrated the increasingly dense economic connections promoted by businesspeople and politicians on both sides of the border. Instead of focusing on the close economic relationships of the two countries, however, most studies of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the mid-twentieth century have focused on labor migration and border policing efforts, especially the revolving door character of Mexico-U.S. migration symbolized by the simultaneous implementation of the Bracero Program and Operation Wetback. Yet national newspapers focused on what historians have not; throughout the period, they promoted the flow of capital, trade, tourism, and economic development between the United States and Mexico. They defined the character of the region’s wartime and postwar transformation every bit as much as the area’s militarization and immigration enforcement apparatus.2 Borderlands historians often observe that local communities along the international line prove exceptions to national discourses about the border and policies directed toward it, but articles in newspapers from New York to Los Angeles revealed how national and local discourses about the U.S.Mexico borderlands operated in concert between 1940 and 1965. The residents of border cities crossed the border routinely, historians have demonstrated, even during periods of heightened immigration restriction; and locals valued cross-border relationships, even when national politicians or Americans in other regions increasingly pronounced divisions between the United States and Mexico. But articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times offered evidence of the unity of local and national discourse, praising with a singular voice the advantages to be gained

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through increased commerce with Mexico. Their common celebration of quests for harmony throughout the Americas during World War II and the Cold War, in addition to their drive for financial profit— newspapers were, after all, businesses that sought to capitalize on America’s patriotic fervor— led to the proliferation of essays that described the border exactly as their authors, and the businessmen and politicians they interviewed, wished to see it: the border was open, friendly, dynamic, almost nonexistent.3 To take nothing away from histories of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that focus on immigration and its policing— indeed, these offer vital lessons about racial prejudice, the increasingly militarized practices of the state, and the habit of defining the American polity by excluding certain groups from it— studies of cross-border commerce and the voluminous attention it received from postwar journalists also offer something to the field of borderlands history. Pro-business, pro-growth, and pro-development newspapers help explain how the border region became increasingly integrated into global economies not only with the later construction of maquiladoras or the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but also during this earlier period. Despite domestic protections seeking to limit U.S. influence, the economic bases of northern Mexico’s border states— agriculture, ranching, manufacturing, and the provision of services— became increasingly geared toward international markets. Such developments transformed the entire border region, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. They lured millions of immigrants from throughout Mexico to border cities like Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Matamoros, and led to the construction of new water and electricity facilities, schools, and hospitals. In combination with the chain link and barbed wire that cut through borderlands landscapes, these other constructions demonstrated how the built environment of border cities both limited undesirable crossings and promoted modernization and unfettered human and capital flows, which reaped profits for the United States and Mexico. When it came to U.S.-Latin American political and business relationships, national newspapers, like their local counterparts, echoed the rhetoric of the U.S. and Mexican governments and entrepreneurs in both countries about hemispheric harmony and progress.4 The widespread attention that newspapers paid to cross-border commerce between 1940 and 1965 also complicates our understanding of more

Figure 4.1 Leon Helguera, Americans All, Let’s Fight for Victory / Americanos todos, luchamos por la victoria. Office of War Information Poster No. 65. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1943). University of North Texas Libraries, Digital Library, digital.library.unt .edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.

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recent border debates. From the 1970s forward, anti-immigrant agitators argued that the growing wave of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants entering the United States constituted a reconquista, or takeover of the Southwest, evinced by the rising influence of Latin American culture and the increased presence of Latin Americans in the United States. But the collaborative exchanges of the mid-twentieth century between industrialists and politicos on both sides of the border demonstrate how they invited the mutual influence that Mexico and the United States had on one another, and the increased penetration that has characterized cross-border relations into our own times. With their allies in the national press, who, like them, were considered capitalists, conservatives, and patriots, they signal a bygone era when all political persuasions— if only for financially motivated calculations of personal or institutional reward— recognized the benefits of cultivating positive relationships with Mexico. The efforts of particular interest groups notwithstanding, the general economic trend in the borderlands between 1940 and 1965 was toward economic integration and interdependence. With words and images, journalistic accounts reinforced this trend by painting the landscape of an open U.S.-Mexico border.5 To be sure, national journalists covered the international conflicts that also shaped the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the mid-twentieth century. The land expropriations and oil nationalization of the Cárdenas era, from 1934 to 1940, rankled U.S.-Mexico relations on the eve of World War II. During the war, U.S. and Mexican officials stood on heightened alert against a feared Axis invasion of the Americas. Crossing the border itself became more difficult. The “period of relatively free access into the United States” ended, wrote one reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a reversal of the earlier practice of allowing local border residents to use border-crossing cards for travel to the other side. Then the New York Times claimed that Communists fomented leftist politics in border cities such as El Paso, describing how U.S. government officials observed their activities and testified about them before the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities.6 Americans also read news coverage of the tensions that lingered after the war and threatened peace between the United States and Mexico, even though the governments of both countries stressed the importance of good neighbor relations. Just as animal-borne diseases raised concerns along the

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border during the early twentieth century, as Mary Mendoza demonstrates in her chapter in this volume, the 1947 outbreak in Mexico of foot-andmouth disease halted not only cattle exports, the Los Angeles Times reported, but also the export of “sheep, goats, and hogs” to the United States. The ban on Mexican livestock lasted into the early 1950s, forcing Mexico to expand domestic markets and increase trading relationships with other countries besides the United States. The Mexican government also promoted economic protectionism, explained the New York Times, by creating a “banned list” of hundreds of goods that Mexicans could not buy in the United States. U.S. growers argued for similarly protective measures, protesting the importation of Mexican winter fruits and vegetables. Finally, the national papers reported on more dangerous crossings. Arms and drugs, including opium, heroin, and marijuana, were smuggled through “hot spots” such as Nogales, Sonora; Mexicali, Baja California; and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.7 National newspapers also reported on conflicts over the flow of water across the border. According to the New York Times, Mexican farmers complained that they did not get enough fresh water from Arizona’s rivers, and that “saline waste” damaged their crops. The farmers voiced their complaints to the Mexican government, which feared that their demonstrations would become a mass leftist movement “intent on precipitating violent border incidents.” The problem only got solved, the Los Angeles Times observed, when presidents John F. Kennedy and Adolfo López Mateos agreed to construct a clean water canal that would bring water into the Mexicali valley. Finally, toward the end of the period, the Chicago Tribune covered U.S. and Mexican negotiations over the shifting course of the Rio Grande. Both governments, the paper explained, agreed to the American-Mexican Chamizal Convention Act of 1964, which, after decades of conflict between the two countries, redesignated hundreds of acres of land as U.S. or Mexican territory. Although this particular episode came to a peaceful resolution, when the United States and Mexico established national parks to serve as monuments to international friendship and cooperation, underlying tensions shaped the negotiations over the land.8 The literary journalist Gay Talese wrote in his best-selling book about the New York Times, entitled The Kingdom and the Power, that the paper was as committed to “capitalism and democracy” as the U.S. government itself, and

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“what was bad for the nation was often just as bad for The Times.” Putting it similarly, and conveying the regional interests of the Los Angeles Times in addition to its national outlook, Harry Chandler, the conservative, antiunion businessman and publisher of the paper, argued that what was good for his paper and business in general would be good for L.A. (and, conversely, what was good for L.A. would be good for the paper). Articles and editorials in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, therefore, expressed an antiCommunist bent, even though Cold War– inspired policies often led to antiimmigrant sentiment and increased tensions between the United States and Mexico. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, for example, excluded Communists and others seen as subversive threats, including many Mexicans living in the United States. During the early 1950s, “wetback drives” expelled millions of them, in addition to an unknown number of Mexican American citizens. The New York Times reported in 1953 on the jails and former POW camps in Arizona that were filled with Mexicans awaiting deportation. The government’s Cold War– era removal efforts culminated with Operation Wetback in 1954 and 1955, when authorities and federal immigration officers rounded up “wetback Mexicans”— as the Los Angeles Times called them, adopting nomenclature used by government officials and many other Americans in the mid-twentieth century— and sent them on an “unwilling journey” back to Mexico. Frustrated by their deportation, the immigrants, one reporter for the paper wrote, threw watermelons and fruit purchased from Mexican street vendors at the “newsmen” who sought to interview them. Some hurled stones that hit a TV cameraman, giving him “smashed lips” that had to be sewed up by a local nurse.9 Yet such vivid portrayals of the conflicts underlying exchanges between the United States and Mexico appeared in national newspapers episodically, whenever conflicts arose, whereas promotions of commercial exchange and profit were constant and characterized the period as a whole. The crossborder exchange, industrial development, and modernization of the postwar period had its origins in the war years themselves. After a decade of turmoil in the 1930s, wartime production revitalized the economies of each nation separately as well as together. Wartime threats, especially fears that Japanese, German, or Italian troops would invade Mexico or the United States via sea or by crossing the border, drew both countries together into a military

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and economic alliance. Fears of attack led the United States and Mexico to increase the presence of military troops and immigration authorities from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Coast, for the entire length of the border. Regional businessmen also capitalized on fear by securing contracts to grow produce, raise livestock, extract metals, pave roads, and build dams. Each of these activities had avowed military purposes, including feeding troops, building weapons, and transporting personnel throughout the borderlands. But they also laid the groundwork for postwar economic development. The Pan-American Highway began as a “military highway” designed to protect international security, for example, but later became a symbol of commercial exchange. Newspapers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York— because they supported national policies and had connections with regional, national, and international businessmen and business organizations— reported on these activities enthusiastically.10 Wartime diplomacy established the political conditions necessary for the commercial exchanges covered by newspapers during the postwar period. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy— speeches and a series of decrees including the observance of international holidays and the removal of U.S. troops from Latin America— set the tone for U.S.-Mexico relations from the 1940s through the 1960s. The United States and Mexico carried out seemingly every military, political, and economic negotiation during these decades in the name of cooperation and friendship with one another. Newspapers published countless essays that adopted the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor era and showed their support for friendly cross-border relations. Photographs frequently showed U.S. and Mexican politicians locking hands, embodying the open embrace between the United States and Mexico. The Los Angeles Times reported that the San Diego Defense Council and the Tijuana Civilian Defense Council acted “in concert” to protect their shared borderland. The New York Times quoted U.S. government officials such as Vice President Henry Wallace, who argued that industrialists, Mexican braceros in the United States, and agricultural workers south of the border did their part to support the Allied war effort, standing “shoulder to shoulder” and producing “the tools of war” that were used to defeat their enemies. Similarly, the Good Neighbor policy worked, according to the Washington Post, because the United States and Mexico both did everything

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Figure 4.2 Jack Sheaffer, Retail Trade— Mayor Lew Davis, Mike de la Fuente and

Abe Rochlin. Tucson mayor Lew Davis (left) and Nogales, Arizona, mayor Abe Rochlin (right), united by Mike de la Fuente, at the Tucson Retail Trade Bureau meeting, Nogales, Sonora, April 1964. 24829.3, Jack Sheaffer Photographic Collection (MS435), University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

they could to improve cross-border relations. The result, claimed the New York Times, was that the “continent” was “becoming a region.” 11 Believing that the spread of capitalism, democracy, and international friendship would be good for businesses, including their own, newspapers, as evidenced by the tone and number of articles they published about these topics, supported the activities of entrepreneurs who seized the opportunities for profit presented by economic integration. To promote “good neighborliness,” the New York Times explained, more than seventy “businessmen and civic leaders” from Arizona flew across the border in their “private and commercial planes,” spending a week in Sonora to “make friends and discover specific fields in which over-the-border commerce could be expanded.” Only a few months later, a “reciprocal party” of more than one hundred Sonorans visited Arizona, where they spent time with members of the Phoenix Chamber of

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Commerce. Business groups in Southern California and central Mexico also expanded economic relationships, said the Los Angeles Times, a paper that was notorious for promoting regional economic developments that reaped profits for the Chandlers. In an article that relied exclusively on the accounts of L.A. and Mexico City businessmen for its description of their entrepreneurial designs, the Los Angeles Times told of a visit to L.A. by Ernesto Ayala and Antonio Izaguirre, two Mexican Chamber of Commerce representatives who met with their California counterparts to promote “tourism and the exchange of goods” across the border. In an interview with the paper, Ayala noted that Angelenos bought “raw materials” and “manufactured goods” from Mexico, while Mexicans bought “manufactured goods” from California. Considering this trade, he told the reporter, he was in L.A. to “see if this exchange cannot be stepped up, as it has proved to be mutually advantageous.” 12 Following the logic that notice of commercial exchange between the United States and Mexico would invite even more of it, newspapers reported the increasing dollar value of trade and the great variety of goods that flowed across the border. In Arizona alone, the New York Times stated, trade with Mexico increased by 50 percent in two years alone, from approximately $50 million in fiscal year 1945– 46 to more than $75 million in fiscal year 1946– 47. The paper rattled off a list of goods that went “into Mexico,” such as machines, wire, pipe, cement, steel, farm equipment, glass, and paint, as well as the goods that came “out,” such as silver, shoes, fish, flax, bamboo, guano, tomatoes, and chickpeas. Newspapers in border cities detailed this kind of information constantly, much like the papers in crop-producing regions that listed average yields and prices almost daily, because it was directly relevant to their livelihoods, whereas the New York Times used it as a general metric of growing economic relationships between Mexico and the United States. As a further sign of the success of cross-border commerce, U.S. companies based in other regions— and as early as the late 1950s, well before the establishment of maquiladoras in the mid-1960s— relocated their headquarters to the border region. Local businessmen told reporters that companies moving to border cities signified the arrival of “American enterprise at the doorstep of Latin America.” Newspapers bought into their rhetoric, offering bullish interpretations of U.S.-Mexican economic relations, and stating that borders were “natural” gateways between the United States and Mexico.13

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Celebratory accounts of cross-border exchange in national newspapers therefore helped characterize U.S.-Mexico relations for millions of Americans from the 1940s through the 1960s. The New York Times writer Alexander S. Lipsett argued that the relocation of one of the “principal corporations” of the United States to Brownsville, Texas, demonstrated the economic potential of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the transplant of American companies, he wrote, was the “guarantee of peaceful coexistence and meaningful growth.” The movement of privately owned corporations, he continued, would never replace large public projects like the construction of roads, dams, or harbors. These were “beyond the scope of private financing.” Yet the growth of private companies would be a significant boon to borderlands economies and would benefit the United States and Mexico equally. Part of the general move of companies away from the old industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt South and Southwest— more than 3,700 companies had moved to the South alone during the 1950s— the new borderlands industries, Lipsett believed, would create new opportunities for trade, provide thousands of jobs to Mexican citizens, create ancillary businesses like grocery and clothing stores, and lead to the expansion of the border region in general.14 The very presence of new businesses in the region, according to the national newspapers, had the potential to transform the character of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. U.S.-based promotions of economic development and commercial exchange adopted the rhetoric of modernization and tended toward superficial stereotypes about American progress and Mexican primitiveness. Many U.S. politicians and businesspeople, stated the New York Times, held that the United States would introduce modernity to Mexico, either in a practical sense through financial investment, or through the example of “dynamic capitalism,” which would “render potent and lasting help to peoples in the predawn of industrialization.” Another article, in the Los Angeles Times, argued that it was in the best interest of the United States to promote Mexico’s industrialization because, “as any neighbor knows, an impoverished, jealous family across the back fence is not only unpleasant company but dangerous,” but a “self-respecting, prosperous, happy one improves the whole community.” Images from the period show the old and new Mexico side by side, highlighting the country’s enduring economic disparities as well as the promise of capitalist development.15

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According to the leading business newspaper in the country, the Wall Street Journal, Mexico’s modernization was the result of both industrial development and the establishment of museums, shopping centers, restaurants, and hotels. No longer did border cities have to rely on their “brothels and honky-tonks” to attract American tourists, the paper argued; now they had more “wholesome” attractions as well. Statements about Mexico’s new attractions demonstrated how tourism became a symbol of cross-border ties and an engine driving profits throughout the border region. Again, what was good for business was good for the borderlands and international relations in general. It was also good for newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, whose publishers had investments in several tourism-related businesses. Boosters and businessmen took advantage of the decline in tourism to Europe during World War II, and between 1939 and 1945 cross-border tourism skyrocketed, in terms of both the number of people crossing the border every year and the profits reaped from their visits. It continued to grow during the postwar era. As tourism industries became extremely valuable to both countries, state governments established tourism agencies that promoted travel to border cities, beach towns, and other destinations. Newspapers and radio became the primary means for advertising the sights and experiences that awaited tourists in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Local and regional newspapers catered to the visitors who might cross the border for a few hours or a couple of days— to go to a bullfight, eat authentic Mexican food, or visit towns along the Mexican coastline— whereas national newspapers enticed tourists from across the country, who stayed longer, arrived via automobile or airplane, and traveled farther into Mexico. Employees of the American Automobile Association (AAA), the Chicago Tribune reported, were eager to help these tourists at one of several “border stations” from Texas to California, assisting them with paperwork, selling them auto insurance, and handing out maps so that American tourists could find their way in Mexico.16 As visitors arrived in the borderlands, writers for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times stood with their pens in their hands, ready to describe for their readers the sights, sounds, and activities of the thousands of individuals who crossed the border every day. They wrote about the Mexicans who came north to shop in department

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and grocery stores, returning to Mexico with their “paper bags and baskets heavily loaded,” as well as the Americans who crossed into Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Laredo, and Matamoros to seek leisure and buy perfume, liquor, pharmaceuticals, and other items. In the early 1950s, millions of tourists crossed into Tijuana, including many sailors who, on weekends, according to the New York Times, made the city look like a “United States naval station.” Meanwhile, U.S. border cities like Brownsville, Texas, the Chicago Tribune stated, held weekly “parties, dances, picnics, and tourist excursions.” The city’s chamber of commerce listed for the paper’s reporter all the fish that could be caught in the Gulf of Mexico, such as red snapper, grouper, tarpon, sailfish, bonita, kingfish, mackerel, jackfish, and tuna. Newspapers also detailed the binational celebrations of borderlands cities, including Border Days, United Americas, and Charro Days festivities. A reporter for the New York Times, describing Brownsville’s Charro Days celebration, wrote that participants “could never tell where Texas’s participation began nor Mexico’s left off.” 17 The national newspapers, echoing the rhetoric of modernization and progress that was prevalent among politicians and businesspeople on both sides of the border, concluded that the growth of borderlands tourism during and after World War II had brought great financial rewards to both countries. The statistics compiled by government officials, businesspeople, and booster organizations backed their claims. By the mid-1950s, wrote Robert L. Duffus, a longtime writer for the New York Times and a member of the paper’s editorial board, American tourists were spending half a billion dollars in Mexico every year, much of that amount in the northern border region. They became an “extremely valuable asset,” he wrote. Placing their impact in the context of the Mexican economy in general, Duffus noted that income in Mexico generated from tourism “offset twice over the deficit in the country’s international trade.” His colleague George H. Copeland later added that the boom of tourism in Mexico led to the creation of thousands of jobs. He noted that in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, of the eighty-five thousand people who lived in the city in 1960, some sixty-five thousand of them worked in jobs related to tourism. Demonstrating how tourism furthered Mexico’s modernization projects, Copeland explained that the city also charged a fee to cross the bridge from the United States to Mexico, and used 10 percent

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of the collected toll to finance its schools, roads, parks, and “other public works.” 18 Several cultural historians have written about the meanings of travel by American tourists to Mexico in the mid-twentieth century, arguing, as did Copeland in the New York Times, that “Americans go to Mexico because it is strange and different”; that Americans saw everything in Mexico as “scenery,” not only the “mountains, plains, lakes and rivers, but also the people”; and that many Mexicans developed a sense of national pride as a result of the swelling interest in their country and its new skyscrapers, hotels, department stores, universities, and apartment buildings. Fewer scholars have noted the state and private investments that undergirded the tourism boom. Tourists moving across the border were only the most visible symbols of the increasing cross-border exchange, in part because of the promotional effort behind the industry. But as the national newspapers made clear, infrastructural investments made the movement of people and goods across the border possible to begin with.19 By the early 1950s, the growing web of connections between the United States and Mexico could be seen from the air in the form of hundreds of miles of new highways and rails. Mexico’s Federal Highway 15 connected Nogales, Sonora, and Guadalajara, Jalisco; Federal Highway 45 ran from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, to Panales, Hidalgo; and Federal Highway 85 ran from

Figure 4.3 Café Serena Tourist Photograph, Tijuana, Mexico. Photographer unknown. Arizona, Southwestern, and Borderlands Photograph Collection, University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

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Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, to Mexico City. The Mexican government also completed several rail lines that connected with the United States, including the Chihuahua and Pacífico Railroad, which crossed northern Mexico from Nuevo León in the east to Baja California in the west and enabled the economic integration of the region not only with the United States but also with itself. Like all other manifestations of economic vitality, these developments featured prominently in the national news of the United States. With the new railways, lumber from the “rich forests” of the Sierra Madre could be transported more easily to the south, explained the Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar, who wrote a series of articles for the paper in the early 1960s about the transformation of borderlands economies. The rail lines also ran in the other direction, easing the “task of bringing goods from the Mexican interior to the border cities,” with the expectation that Mexico would have to rely less on the importation of basic goods from the United States. The Los Angeles Times also promoted the construction of a planned sixteen-mile-long monorail that would connect San Diego and Tijuana. The height of technological modernity, the monorail would be “entirely electrical and would require no operators.” Passengers— more than five million of them every year, the paper estimated— would travel from city to city in eight minutes.20 In addition to benefiting tourism industries, infrastructural developments also supported the agriculture and livestock sectors of U.S.-Mexico borderlands economies. Between 1940 and 1965, state and federal governments in Mexico offered financial, political, and technical assistance primarily to private growers and ranchers— but also to collective landowners— who built dams, irrigated fields, preserved pasture lands, improved animal breeds, and used new seeds to expand agricultural output. Growers and ranchers bought many of their supplies from businesses in the United States, including tractors, harvesters, and genetically modified seeds. Businesspeople diversified their holdings, trading in cattle, chickens, pigs, and corn; and public-private partnerships invested in meat-packing plants, canneries, and storage warehouses. As a result, livestock, produce, and grain production boomed during the period. In good economic times, harvests reached markets throughout the United States and Latin America, while in periods of economic decline, most goods were distributed within Mexico. For the Los Angeles Times and

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other national papers, the expansion of cross-border agriculture and livestock industries, like the growth of tourism, represented progress, modernization, an opportunity for profit, and a commitment to international friendship.21 The sheer number of fruits and animals crossing the border became an indicator of the health of regional economies, and so national newspapers offered their readers weekly, monthly, and yearly reports on the cross-border flow of these goods. The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, true to their character as advocates of international business, offered detailed accounts of the vegetables and seafood— garden peas, bell peppers, melons, cotton, grapes, olives, oysters, tuna, sardines, shrimp, mackerel, lobsters, turtles, sharks, marlins, swordfish, perch, and sea bass— that moved from Mexico to the United States. In 1943 alone, Sinaloan growers exported 160 million pounds of tomatoes. Photographs showed fleets of trucks owned by U.S. distributors that stood ready to ship the tomatoes throughout the country. Grocery stores paid $26 million for them, and shoppers bought them for more than $50 million. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times also reported on the hundreds of cattle that crossed the border every day and the shopping habits of border city residents, who spent billions of dollars across the line every year. Such reports clearly demonstrated for readers across the country the potential of economic relations with Mexico.22 Finally, in addition to the cross-border flows of produce, animals, and consumers, the national newspapers, favoring large-scale industrial development, offered their readers laudatory accounts of the development projects and investment opportunities that helped define the borderlands in the mid-twentieth century. U.S. and Mexican investors and governments built power plants and water desalinization plants, pumped capital into mineral production, and constructed gas and oil pipelines throughout the region. The New York Times reported that the U.S.-owned Westinghouse Corporation constructed a water desalinization plant in Baja California, and that U.S. and Mexican companies planned to construct a “joint Mexican– United States gas pipeline operation” extending from Texas to Arizona. According to the plan, participating U.S. companies would benefit from cheaper materials, labor, and right of way. Mexico’s nationalized oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the paper continued, planned to raise bonds to construct

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the portion of the pipeline that ran through Mexico, while the Tennessee Gas Transmission Company, based in the United States, planned to finance the connecting links that continued north of the border. This particular pipeline did not get built because U.S. suppliers fought it “vigorously,” expressing the protectionism that free-trade advocates such as the New York Times often opposed.23 By the early 1960s, Mexico began to implement national programs that, despite their avowed domestic focus, further increased cross-border commerce with the United States. Rather than the beginning of a new period of neoliberalism, these programs represented the culmination of twenty-five years of cross-border exchange supported by U.S. and Mexican governments and businesspeople, and celebrated in the national press of the United States. In 1961, President Adolfo López Mateos established the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (PRONAF), the border beautification program through which Mexico would revamp the appearance of border cities, beach towns, and other ports of entry. Time and again, Mexican officials said that the program would make the border a “show window” into Mexico and would improve the image abroad of the country as a whole. Then in 1965, a year after the Bracero Program ended, sending many thousands of Mexican migrant workers back to Mexico, the Mexican government established the Programa de Industrialización de la Frontera (Border Industrialization Program, or BIP), which established maquiladora factories from Texas to California that manufactured electronics, textiles, and automobiles for distribution around the world. If agriculture, livestock, mining, and tourism were the main engines of northern Mexico’s economies from the 1940s through the early 1960s, the maquiladoras would grow in significance from the late 1960s forward. For national newspapers, these programs became two more opportunities to promote international tourism and trade.24 Building on the twenty-five-year alliance among businesspeople, politicians, and newspapers, PRONAF and the BIP opened the border to unprecedented levels of commercial exchange, foreshadowing later efforts to nurture cross-border commerce such as NAFTA. Mexico commissioned modernist architect Mario Pani Darqui to design new border gateways and customs offices all along the border. According to newspapers from New York to Los Angeles, multilane highways reduced waiting times at the border, and

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new shopping centers, golf courses, movie theaters, country clubs, zoos, bullrings, restaurants, and convention centers lured hundreds of thousands of visitors to Mexico every year. Border cities that gave the “worst possible picture of Mexico to northern visitors,” they proclaimed, became destinations that encouraged a more wholesome “family trade.” As did earlier development projects, PRONAF promised to create thousands of construction and service jobs. Mexican government officials expected the program to raise the living standards of all borderlands residents, including those who lived in the United States. Places like El Paso became sites of conferences attended by Americans who conducted business and sought pleasure south of the border. The mayor of El Paso explained to reporter Ruben Salazar that anything improving Ciudad Juárez also “helps El Paso.” 25 Without interruption, national newspapers between 1940 and 1965 argued that the border had become “big business,” and that through its redevelopment, Mexico projected an image of itself as a modern nation. One Mexican official explained to a reporter for the Wall Street Journal that through PRONAF, “we intend to do away with depressing contrasts” between the United States and Mexico. Immigrants from southern and central Mexico streamed into northern border states. The border region’s population continued to grow at faster rates than other areas of both countries. Twentysix counties along the southern border of the United States, Ruben Salazar reported, grew by more than 40 percent between 1940 and 1960, 10 percent more than the U.S. national average. The simultaneous growth and modernization of both frontiers— the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico— led many borderlands residents to believe that Mexico had become an equal partner of the United States. As a judge in El Paso told Salazar, “If our Mexican friends along the border continue to improve their standard of living . . . we will be more than just neighbors; we will be partners in a better world.” 26 During the mid-twentieth century, a period of increasing cultural and economic integration, national newspapers adopted an internationalist position in sync with the public expressions of U.S. and Mexican government officials who promoted international harmony, which bolstered the arguments of industrialists on both sides of the border who trumpeted the advantages of regional economic development. Harmony and profit: these were interdependent ideals, they believed, that would lead to mutual

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benefits for both countries, despite class and political tensions that revealed persistent divisions in the borderlands and between the United States and Mexico in general. Some borderlands residents worried about the proliferation of vice industries or dirty factories that produced smog. American growers protested the importation of Mexican winter fruits and vegetables. Texas politicians worried about the negative effects that purchasing Mexican gasoline would have on their state’s oil industries. Some politicians and manufacturers in Mexico complained that the country’s northern borderlands had become a “dumping ground for surplus United States products.” Yet the national papers gave greater voice to the growers, industrialists, and merchants who bristled when government officials tried to limit the goods shoppers could purchase across the border, threatened to eliminate tax-free shopping zones, or otherwise supported measures that would impede crossborder flows of capital.27 The metaphor of an open border with Mexico, such as the one articulated by Anne O’Hare McCormick in 1944, often accompanied arguments in support of increased relations with Mexico. National newspapers with a generally conservative bent employed it often, as did some of America’s more radically conservative personalities. In 1962, for example, on Arizona’s fiftieth anniversary of statehood, and looking ahead toward the state’s next fifty years, Senator Barry Goldwater predicted that the opening of the border that took place in the 1940s and 1950s would continue. He said that by the year 2012, “the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it was not there.” In some ways, his vision became reality, as the growth of maquiladoras kept raw materials and manufactured goods flowing into and out of the region, and as NAFTA represented the adoption of neoliberalism by the United States and Mexico as the economic philosophy that guided their dealings with one another. But by the early twenty-first century, Goldwater’s words had become laughable. The “open border crowd”— instead of referring to conservative businesspeople, newspaper reporters, and politicians like him— became a derisive misnomer that conservatives applied to the supporters of increased immigrant rights. To recall a time when advocating for open borders meant something else is not to celebrate

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the aims and ambitions of businesspeople, politicians, or their advocates in the national press. Indeed, development schemes have often led to discrimination, inequality, and indebtedness. Rather, it is a reminder of an earlier period when a broad spectrum of Americans bought into the idea, however flawed, that international cooperation and friendship was the best path forward for both countries. The national newspapers between 1940 and 1965 both shaped and reflected this idea, and it is one that should play a greater role in the crafting of a national discourse on U.S.-Mexico relations today.28

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Boundaries and Border States—American Model,” New York Times, January 19, 1944, 18. On the industrialization of the U.S.-Mexico border region, see Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 21– 134; and Susan Gauss, Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s– 1940s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 205– 40. For recent histories of immigration and its policing during the mid-twentieth century, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 127– 65; Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 61– 151; Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Deborah Cohen, Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Geraldo L. Cadava, “Borderlands of Modernity and Abandonment: The Lines within Ambos Nogales and the Tohono O’odham Nation,” Journal of American History 98 (September 2011): 362– 83; Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson, The Gatekeeper: 60 Years of Economics According to the New York Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), 1– 14; and Nicholas O. Berry, Foreign Policy and the Press: An Analysis of The New York Times’ Coverage of U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), xi– xv. Ignacio Almada, Breve historia de Sonora (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000), 146– 68; Luis Aboites Aguilar, Chihuahua: Historia breve, 4th ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011); and Sergio Noriega Verdugo,

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Ensayos económicos de Baja California, 1940–1970 (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1982). Beatrice Ganzoff Loewenherz, “New York Times Editorials and the Good Neighbor Policy, 1933– 1940” (master’s thesis, Northwestern University, 1944), 12. “Closer Accord Between U.S., Mexico Is Seen,” Atlanta Constitution, January 31, 1941, 6; “Border Control Drawn Tighter,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1940, 1; “Border Red Inquiry Ends,” New York Times, March 10, 1940, 20; and “Reds Talk or Face Jailing,” New York Times, March 27, 1940, 13. On immigration and border politics during the Cold War, see David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 152– 78; and Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 112– 51. “Mexican Cattle Banned to Prevent Disease,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1946, 4; “U.S. Closes Border to Cattle,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1953, 24; “U.S. Acts on Border Trade,” New York Times, August 5, 1949, 24; “Gangs Flying Opium Near U.S. Border,” Washington Post, July 4, 1947, 8; “Mexico Blamed for Flood of Heroin Pouring into State,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1953, 2; and “Undercover Agents Choking Opium Trade across Border,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1948, 3. See also Mary Mendoza, “Fencing the Line,” in this volume. “A Problem with Mexico,” New York Times, June 17, 1964, 42; “U.S., Mexico to Confer on Salinity Protest,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1965, 13; and “What’s Mexico Done for Us?” Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1963, 10. On the Chamizal controversy, see Alan C. Lamborn and Stephen P. Mumme, Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign Policy Making: The El Chamizal Dispute (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). On earlier controversies over the establishment of border parks, see Emily Wakild, “Border Chasm: International Boundary Parks and Mexican Conservation, 1935– 1945,” Environmental History 14 (July 2009): 453– 75. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: New American Library, 1969), 7; Dennis McDougal, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001), 130, 140, 173; “Arizona Jails Full in ‘Wetback’ Drive,” New York Times, June 21, 1953, 33; and Bill Dredge, “Wetbacks Herded at Nogales Camp,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1954, 1A. On Operation Wetback, see Lytle Hernández, Migra!, 171– 95. “Both Sides of Mexico Border Closely Watched,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1941, 2; Ed Ainsworth, “Mexican Village War Hide-Out Built for F.D.R., Rumors Insist,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1951, A1; “Nogales Has Good Reason to Fete 1943,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1943, F4; Cadava, Standing on Common Ground, chapter 1; and McDougal, Privileged Son, 130, 166.

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

“Border Cities to Act in Unity,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1942, A10; “Men of Labor March Across the Border,” New York Times, September 8, 1942, 10; L. P. Stuntz, “Mexico Aids U.S. War Effort with Her Deposits of Metals Necessary for Arms,” Washington Post, December 22, 1941, 9; and McCormick, “Boundaries and Border States,” 18. On the Good Neighbor policy more generally, see Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63– 86. For earlier depictions of harmonious relations along the shared boundary, see Katherine G. Morrissey, “Monuments, Photographs, and Maps,” in this volume. Gladwin Hill, “Mexican Trade Booms through a New Outlet,” New York Times, August 10, 1947, E7; “Tighter Southland Bonds with Mexico Predicted,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1951, 3; “Border Cities Set Conference at San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1953, A23; and “Increased Trade with Mexico Eyed,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1957, C9. Hill, “Mexican Trade Booms”; and Alexander S. Lipsett, “Border Industry Welcomed,” New York Times, December 9, 1958, 40. Lipsett, “Border Industry Welcomed.” Ibid.; Ray Josephs, “The Siesta’s Over,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1947, F22. James Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches to Bolster Tourism,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1964, 1; and “AAA Opens New Border Station at Nogales, Ariz.,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 23, 1955, G4. On the evolution of American tourism in Mexico, including during the postwar period, see Jason Ruiz, Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood, eds., Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). George H. Copeland, “Laredo Gateway on Our Southern Frontier,” New York Times, June 12, 1960, 16; Percy Finch, “Border Gateway,” New York Times, December 9, 1951, 32; “Rio Grande Valley Ideal for Vacation,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 11, 1955, D28; “International Fence Marks City Limits,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1940, F3; “Fearful Aliens Halt at Border,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1940, 11; “Charro Days Festival,” New York Times, February 16, 1941, 2; and Michael Scully, “Vivas for Jorge Washington,” New York Times, February 22, 1942, 1. Robert L. Duffus, “Mexico Goes Modern, Unmodernly,” New York Times, September 29, 1957, 23; and Copeland, “Laredo Gateway.” For cultural histories of American tourists in Mexico, see Ruiz, Americans in the Treasure House; Berger and Wood, Holiday in Mexico; and Catherine Cocks, Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas (Philadelphia:

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Duffus, “Mexico Goes Modern”; Cadava, Standing on Common Ground, chapter 2. “Tighter Southland Bonds”; Finch, “Border Gateway”; Ruben Salazar, “New Railroad Provides Mexican Border Boost,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1962, A16; “Mexico Studies Use of Monorail System,” Washington Post, November 5, 1964, A21; and “Monorail System to Tie Border Cities Proposed,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1964, B5. Bill Dredge, “Mexican Cattle Pour into U.S. as Embargo Is Lifted,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1952, 2; and Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara, Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological Change, 1940– 1970 (Geneva: United Nations Research for Social Development, 1976). “Millions of Tomatoes To Be Sent to U.S. by Mexico This Winter,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1943, 1; “Baja California Emerges as Booming New State,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1953, D8; Dredge, “Mexican Cattle Pour into U.S.”; Jack Langguth, “Ciudad Juarez Sees Trade Gain Stemming from Border Shift,” New York Times, July 21, 1963, 6; and Bill Becker, “The Mexican Look,” New York Times, March 1, 1964, 16. Paul P. Kennedy, “Mexico-U.S. Gas Pipeline along Border Gains,” New York Times, July 20, 1960, 37; Becker, “Mexican Look”; and Loewenherz, “New York Times Editorials,” 129. Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches”; Ruben Salazar, “Fence, River Divide U.S., Mexico Cultures,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1962, J1; and Paul P. Kennedy, “Mexico Starting Industrial Plan,” New York Times, May 30, 1965, F5. See also Evan R. Ward, “Finding Mexico’s Great Show Window: A Tale of Two Borderlands, 1960– 1975,” in Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States– Mexico Borderlands, ed. Alexis McCrossen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 196– 215. Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches”; “Mexican Border Cities Dolling Up,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1962, O2; Paul P. Kennedy, “New Border Gateways to Welcome the Visitor to Mexico,” New York Times, February 1, 1963, 5; Ruben Salazar, “Fence, River Divide”; “Border Improvements Planned by Mexicans,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1962, 5; Salazar, “New Railroad”; and Ruben Salazar, “Matamoros Undaunted by History of Disaster,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1962, B2. Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches”; Salazar, “Matamoros Undaunted”; Salazar, “Fence, River Divide”; and “Border Improvements Planned.” Langguth, “Ciudad Juarez Sees Trade Gain”; “Brownsville to Preserve Its Way of Life,” Washington Post, August 20, 1951, B6; “Mexican Farmers Block Roads to U.S. in Export Tax Fight,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 2, 1955, B9; “Texas

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28.

Shuts Border to Mexican Trucks,” New York Times, July 22, 1955, 27; “Mexico Sales Cut by New U.S. Rules,” New York Times, December 5, 1965, 16; Henry Giniger, “Mexico Curbing Smuggling Trend,” New York Times, August 14, 1965, F9; Kennedy, “Mexico Starting Industrial Plan”; and “’55 Tijuana Fair May Be Dropped,” New York Times, June 4, 1955, 23. Barry Goldwater, “Arizona’s Next Fifty Years,” Tucson Daily Citizen, February 14, 1962.

Part II

5

A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces A M E L I A M A L AG A M B A - A N S ÓT E G U I AND SARAH J. MOORE

S A R A H   J . M O O R E : Borders are everywhere in nineteenth-century U.S.

art, although artists and viewers rarely call attention to this fact. Indeed, the very ubiquity of borders— their insistent presence— is precisely what renders them invisible and unseen. Seemingly natural and meaningless, borders pressed themselves into landscape art unnoticed, as were their entanglements with layered discourses of progress, power, civilization, and gender. The foundational national narrative of the history of the United States, as one resting on the broad shoulders of intrepid pioneers who wrestled a nation out of the chaos of wilderness, informs these images of the nineteenth century while arching back to the earliest visual and textual evocations of European contact with the New World. Think of the explorers in Jan van der Straet’s drawing of Amerigo Vespucci’s so-called discovery of America, America (c. 1580), and the settlers in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s U.S. Capitol mural, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1861). The primary pictorial devices in nineteenth-century landscapes of the United States proposed the border between civilization and wilderness as fluid and reinforced ideas of Manifest Destiny and progress. Late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century border art, the focus of all the chapters in part 2 of this volume, reflects these earlier border evocations. The essays also address the border as a performative space.1

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Figure 5.1 Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

(mural study, U.S. Capitol), 1861. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Sara Carr Upton, 1931.6.1

The border is highlighted as a performative and politicized site in the 2009 project Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT), by the artists of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. In “Stealth Crossings: Performance Art and Games of Power on the Militarized Border,” Ila Sheren situates the TIT within the historical context of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1986, and what she calls the border art that emerged in response. She notes particularly End of the Line, the first site-specific U.S.Mexico border performance by the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). The legacy of the BAW/TAF’s insistence on the border as a performative site, at a moment when the border was becoming increasingly militarized and its security couched in terms of drug trafficking and violence, informs the 2009 project TIT, in which the border is conceived as both physical site and virtual geography. The TIT used cyber technology to provide border crossers with virtual data (mobile phones were made

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available that required only GPS satellites, not cellular networks) about the locations of water stations and Border Patrol outposts. These data have the potential to save lives and shift information— and the power it generates— into the hands of those to whom it is normally denied. Moreover, Sheren argues, the physical site of the border assumes a virtual fluidity, thanks to the data provided by satellites, while the project transgresses legal boundaries. Margaret Regan, too, examines the border as a politicized artistic space in her chapter, “How the Border Wall Became a Canvas: Political Art in the U.S.-Mexico Border Towns of Ambos Nogales.” Focusing on the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century public artwork of Taller Yonke— a collaboration between two Nogales, Sonora, artists, Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto Morackis— Regan considers art within the changing contexts of border fence construction. The artists’ depictions, using the fence as a canvas, marked their resistance to the militarization of la frontera. Regan contextualizes Taller Yonke’s works and other Sonora-Arizona border art within the post-1970s California– Baja California history of art and visual culture. “Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and Self-Representation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” by Rebecca Schreiber, critiques the Border Film Project (BFP), proposed in 2005 and brought to fruition two years later, in which two sides of the debates around the U.S.-Mexico border would have an opportunity to visually document their realities. Migrants and Minutemen were given disposable cameras and asked to take photographs that would later be assembled into a traveling exhibition and a book. The goal of the project was to enable each faction to self-represent with the intent of providing an objective middle ground between the two. Although Schreiber notes the humane impulses behind the BFP, she is quick to dismantle the project’s rather naïve assumptions about the transparency of meaning in these images and their ostensible visual equivalence when included in a book by the BFP organizers. Schreiber notes that neither the images nor their display are neutral, given the unequal relation of power between the two groups of image makers. Moreover, she argues that as meaning is actively and partially produced across multiple fields, the BFP does not ultimately render visible either set of players that the project supposedly empowers with the potential to envision.

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As the relationship between art and activism and the legacy of performance art along the border animate Regan’s and Sheren’s essays, John-Michael Warner in contrast proposes a border art history in which absences are embodied and silences are rendered audible in art created on and about the border. In “A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present: Land Use and Representation,” Warner examines three works of art— by Mark Klett, David Taylor, and Mary Jenea Sanchez— that provide geographies in which the border is embodied and enacted. Warner shares Sheren’s engagement with the border as fluid and unfixed— as performed— while evoking the logic of the map, the archive, and history to dismantle their assumed objectivity. It is the presence of absent bodies— either physically absent, as in the case of Klett’s Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona (1985) and Taylor’s Working the Line (2008), or rendered invisible by racial and political forces while being physically present, as in Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta (2010)— that Warner teases out in the many different landscapes. These artists imagine the border and propose the land itself as a palimpsest of sorts, embedded with a topography of discourses that seem to vanish under layers of history. Warner’s chapter raises the possibility of a border art history, or histories, as he sometimes writes. The possibilities of a border art history are intriguing. One must wonder what the contours of such a history would be, if disciplinary boundaries would be jettisoned, and if so, in favor of what? It remains to be seen whether the border as a nuanced and shifting terrain— geographic, historical, ideological, political, and imagined— can provide the armature in which such a history can be articulated. This cluster of essays addresses some of the rich topography a narrative of the border might traverse. AM E L I A M AL AG A M B A -A N S ÓT E G U I : It is worth noting that these essays offer a perspective of the U.S.-Mexico border from the U.S. side. The historical perspective is different from the Mexican side of the border. Mexico, even today, is a centralist country. Decision-making processes, and the views of Mexico, are generally from Mexico City. From that nationalist perspective, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the main representation of this region was through maps. Cartography is an important aspect of this northern region’s inclusion within the consciousness of the Mexican nation. The

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concept of the border was not ingrained within the cultural imagination of the time. We lacked other forms of representation; significant photographs or paintings of the region are difficult to find, for example. My hypothesis is that the loss of this northern territory became such a painful memory that people did not want to deal with it. So the idea of the border, la frontera, takes hold in the consciousness of the collective spirit within the nation only in the 1930s. Earlier visual representations of this region are of the Mexican Revolution, which was seen not as a border event, but as a national event. The artworks that do begin to address the border, in the 1930s and 1940s, include two well-known images that deal with the cross-national space: Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, from 1932, and Pablo O’Higgins’s 1944

Figure 5.2 Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, 1932. Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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print Buenos vecinos, buenos amigos. Each includes two flags—Mexico and the United States— and represents the borderline. Yet both artists are working from Mexico City; the perspective is from the center, not from the northern region. O’Higgins, part of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, helped craft a new marking of the border at this time. But the imaginary produced was not necessarily one that addressed the phenomenon that took place in the northern human landscape. Local representations of that northern landscape did not depict the landscape of expansion, of Manifest Destiny. The landscape that was painted or imagined was one of distance from Mexico City, of the forgotten children of Mexico, the orphans of nationalism. There was a need to affirm the landscape as a secure place, a romanticized place, even if it was never such. So on the Mexican side of the border, the registrars of landscapes, people, and events in photography and painting are different. S JM : I’m so struck by your interpretation. In the United States, the concep-

tion of border is a malleable one, to be sure, but it has always been part of

Figure 5.3 Pablo O’Higgins, Buenos vecinos, buenos amigos, 1944. Published by Taller de Gráfica Popular. Courtesy of Special Collections & Archives, University of California, San Diego, Library.

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the national consciousness to a degree. You offer such a different model—a type of core-periphery model, with Mexico City at the core. Although I’m vastly oversimplifying here, that’s not the pattern at all in the United States, where it seems the border has always been part of the national imaginary. In the United States, expansion, and the idea of the border, began within an international context, from its origins as a nation to its movement from east to west and south to north. Nineteenth-century images represent the United States as a border nation.2 In John Gast’s American Progress (1872), for example, which became one of the most widely known landscape images of the later nineteenth century, the fluid border is both everywhere and nowhere. This image celebrates Manifest Destiny and westward expansion, using many visual strategies of earlier nineteenth-century landscapes, including the view from above and the compression of time and distance to track progress, quite literally, across land and through various technologies. At the right edge of the composition is a bustling harbor bathed in light, representing the East Coast and its memory of the light of civilization, which had traveled from Europe and landed on the eastern seaboard some four centuries earlier. Moving across a vast open (and borderless or malleably bordered) space are various technologies of progress, traveling from right to left, from the East to the West: covered wagons, prospectors and pioneers, the stagecoach, several railroads, telegraph wires. In the immediate foreground, a farmer tills the land with an oxen-driven plow; his humble log cabin is partially cut off at the canvas’s right edge. Hovering above the scene is an allegorical female figure, scantily clad in a flowing white gown. At the left edge of the canvas, storm clouds form in the sky, and the American Indians and buffalo retreat in haste at the onrush of civilization. The message is clear: progress, as it was defined in the nineteenth century, displaces wilderness and its inhabitants along a forever malleable border. In this image, the edge of the canvas itself becomes a border to be transgressed. AM-A : I appreciate the concept of the United States as a border nation. When you lose half your territory, on the Mexican side, you want to forget the wound. When you win, then you want to make certain that the line you push is well known. One side wants to make peace with the loss, the other

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Figure 5.4 John Gast, American Progress, 1872. Library of Congress Prints and Pho-

tographs Division, Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-ppmsca-09855.

to glorify the win. We might talk about asymmetries of power, but I would like to go beyond that. It has been a struggle of power; this is a theater where nations meet, yes, but where localities play out a struggle on both sides. It is a fight for place and space, one that is marked by the presence of the border nation. The local residents on the Mexican side have looked at border localities, from the 1960s on, as places where they have opportunities, but where, at the same time, they have to fight for them. They have recovered that land in the Mexican imagination. So the struggle on the Mexican side of the border is not only with the U.S. side of the border but also with the national point of view about who we are. The beginnings of distinctions between the forms of border art come from these differences. Both countries write and paint their own versions of history that accommodate the two different experiences that took place. On the one hand, the idea of pain and suffering, and attempts at recovery, and

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on the other, the assertions that extend control over land through whatever means. These versions are very powerful: whether a people wants to forget the wound— to make peace with the loss of territory— or strives to glorify the win.3 Separating “border art” from “art about the border” is very important. Art about the border is about the place, seeing from the outside in. Border art takes place within la frontera and at the border.4 From the 1980s on, the fence itself became the canvas. Many artists used the fence as the backdrop, recovering the space through cultural and artistic practices. The Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo, as Ila Sheren notes in her essay, left a legacy in its insistence that the border was a performative site, more so than a geographic location. When somebody says about these artworks, “They are too folkloric, they are not conceptual enough, or somebody is looking for the minimalism of it all,” I say, “You don’t understand the layers of it all.” The works go so deep. Yet the Border Film Project is folkloric in the most negative way. First of all, there is no self-representation. Talking about relationships of power; talking about the navigation of cultural, political, and psychological borders in the mind; talking about not only the organizers of the project but the people who are taking the photos themselves. I always think, when I’m looking at a photographic project, I ask myself, “Whose story is it?” And the Border Film Project is a story of power. Power to pose a project for the migrants. Power to make the Minutemen agreeable and acceptable. Schrieber surfaces those relations of power really well. I cannot imagine a Mexicano artist coming to the United States and asking Minutemen to take pictures of themselves. Just switch the participants— do you think the Minutemen would agree if a Mexicano artist asked them to take pictures of themselves? Talk about border nation. S J M : I’m reminded of what Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary points out in her

2012 essay, “Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display,” that the performative and fluid nature of art of the border counterbalances the fixed nature of fences along borders. She argues that border art is defined by its intentional use of place.5 Taller Yonke’s Paseo de Humanidad, which Margaret

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Regan discusses in her essay, is a form of border art: it is an insider’s perspective about the day-to-day, everyday experiences of life on la frontera that intentionally uses the border fence. A M - A : Yes, but of course another one of Taller Yonke’s pieces, Border Dynamics, was intended to be positioned on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the U.S. Border Patrol wouldn’t allow it. On the Mexican side, it is legal to place art on the fence, and on the U.S. side, it is illegal, as Regan points out. It continues to be a matter of legality, based in this concept of the border nation. Many artists wanted to use the fence as canvas, but on the U.S. side they couldn’t. Here we are talking about a very localized piece of materiality, that is, the fence. We cannot subtract ourselves when we look at these works of art from all those spheres of power. To tell you the truth, those spheres of power exist on both sides of the border. There is no innocence here. In Mexico, there is a law that says that Mexican nationals have the freedom to circulate, to travel throughout the country, without being detained. That does not happen on the U.S. side. There are laws to protect your freedom, but you are stopped. The fence is not Mexico. It does not belong to Mexico. The artists are not offending any kind of Mexican property law when they use the Mexican side of the fence as a canvas. It belongs to the United States. At the same time, U.S. officials cannot do anything— they cannot jump the fence and say to the Mexicanos who are writing on the fence, don’t do it, because they are on the Mexican side of the border, and other laws apply. So even in that very small space, the local, regional, and national power dynamics are at play. S JM : I’m thinking about the fence as an actual material space: this sliver of

space in the landscape. It runs across a vast expanse of territory, to be sure, but it is a sliver of space, one that is both place and nonplace. In the United States and Mexico, there are important differences in the perception of the fence as both a real place and a negotiable place. The United States has militarized the border, marking the place and making certain actions illegal to do at that particular space. Yet in some broader sense, it is considered a negotiable space. America assumes the right to draw the line, and the line happens to be there right now, but it was someplace else

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earlier, and it may be someplace else again in the future. On the one hand, it is a place: it can be militarized and defined legally. But on the other hand, it is also a negotiable place when you consider the American presumptions of motion and of power. On the U.S. side, the presumption is that borders are not stable, that as a nation we are always pushing up against and through borders, reassigning their locations. One of the fundamental differences between U.S. and Mexican narratives is about who gets to define where the wall is and what the wall means now and in the future. AM - A : What do you mean by nonplace? I know what you are saying, but at

the same time, that reality you are describing as invisible is also very real. It is present. It appears in its full contradictions and complexities when you have art like the pieces discussed in these essays— otherwise, you wouldn’t think about it. In the 1980s, with the strengthening of the fence on the U.S. side, the same construction materials were used along the border in Nogales and Tijuana, and in other border cities and towns, establishing a visual coordination. What is especially interesting is that this particular style of fence, or wall, does not allow you to see through it, which is why I referred to it as a canvas. There is no chance of communication through the fence. The materiality of this style of barrier adds to the border nation idea. And it shapes the ideas of art that is produced by using it as a canvas. S JM : Some of the fences you can put your hands up against. But there are other fences that you can’t even touch, that are just as real, maybe in a way more real. A M - A : That is an interesting point. Not as many artists have touched on this aspect of the border, about the nonphysical borders. For me, I think of migrants who are crossing the border, making borders more visible by crossing. One of the chapters touches on this point, the ways in which crossing the border is a performance. Think of the migrants from Chiapas, Veracruz, or Guatemala. The border starts in the imaginary, in the space of everyday life, in self-representation, in action, and in agency. The border has meanings away from the physical border itself.

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How can we even conceptualize that border carried along in the head of the migrant? You start saving money for the crossing. You start planning. You start making decisions about your family for the crossing. Everything has to do with the crossing. Crossing the line will mark the event, but the mental spaces created by the future event take place away from the border. The spatial quality of the border has become a powerful place and space because it marks an event on both sides of it. Some of the artworks discussed in the essays have been able to create a new consciousness about what the border is. Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool points to the performativity of movement and the inscription of the border in the imagination of the migrant, from home to the event of crossing. S JM : Another performative piece that speaks to this notion of the border

as being more than just a material place you can mark is Alfred Quiroz’s Milagros. Beyond milagros’ many other references, they have a portability of meaning— the idea that you can carry the conception of the hand, la mano, and the heart, el corazón, in your pocket. I can have the memory of a milagro

Figure 5.5 Alfred Quiroz, Milagros. Photograph by Maribel Alvarez.

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you gave me; it might be at home, but I can also carry it with me. In this sense, the milagro is a nonplace reference to the border being something that is inscribed in the border crosser’s imaginary. AM - A : It is a spiritual tool. The GPS tool of the Electronic Disturbance The-

ater 2.0 is a piece of technology that helps navigate the geography. These other tools, los milagros and Quiroz’s Milagros, help navigate the spiritual realm. The origins and the carrying of those traditions take place through time. Migrants use them to cross the border, then Quiroz is crossing the border and bringing them back. S JM : Yes, if I could have only one thing to help me negotiate through space, one thing that you and I share, I’d much prefer el corazón, the milagros, than a GPS system. Any day. The milagros help to negotiate through all sorts of spaces— cultural space, legal space, healing space. AM - A : It reminds me of something that I experienced a long time ago, in

the 1980s. I was with a filmmaker who wanted to cross the border. We were in Tijuana, and she wanted to cross to the U.S. side, to go to the fields and interview some of the undocumented fieldworkers. We drove to Encinitas, which is a very rich town where they grow flowers for the California market. We stopped to eat something at a hamburger place on our way to where the fieldworkers were, and we saw a guy. I said to the filmmaker, “He’s a campesino.” I approached him. He spoke a little bit of Spanish. He was Zapotec from Oaxaca. You know the Oaxaqueños do the farm labor circuit— following of the crops, going from Oaxaca to Washington state to pick apples and then back to Mexico. I started a conversation with him. “What are you doing here?” He said, “Well, I’m trying to get to . . .” He said the name of the town, but it wasn’t entirely clear, something like “Frufru.” I said, “What? I don’t know what Frufru means.” I got a map from the car and started looking at it. It had to be something close by that started with an F and that employed a lot of farmworkers. I decided it was Fallbrook, which is one of the big sites of the Aryan Nation. I look at this man and think, “Chiquito.” He was my size. Zapotecs, as you know, are tight and compact. Not a word of English at all. He spoke a little

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bit of Spanish in addition to Zapotec. How did he get here? He was traveling by himself. Talk about navigational tools that are different from the ones we typically think about: he didn’t have the language, he didn’t have a GPS tool, he didn’t have a coyote to guide him. How do people who come from rural areas, who have rarely seen huge cities or interstates, who speak other languages, how do they navigate? What kind of a border and borders are they crossing? I asked him, “Do you want me to give you a ride?” I thought, I’m going to get in trouble if la migra stops me. They are going to kill me. I’ll be a smuggler. Nevertheless, I said to el campesino, “I’ll take you. Do you know where you’re going?” He said, “Oh yes, I’ll know once we get there.” “Have you ever been there?” “No, but I know.” That conversation was inscribed with a chisel in my mind because we got there. He knew. He knew to turn and follow certain paths. The navigation that we’re talking about— the navigation of the heart— is a different form of navigation tool than GPS. There are other systems useful for navigating borders that are in the mind of a migrant. We got there, and they were waiting for him. S JM : And la migra didn’t stop you? AM - A : No, la migra didn’t stop us!

The experiences of people who have to navigate or cross borders are very different from those of someone who sees from the outside in. When we are talking about all these navigations of different borders— psychological, mental, spiritual, cultural, physical, all of these— for me, it is difficult not to see the artworks differently, not to acknowledge how experiences are referenced in the art. And so that is why I make the distinction between border art and art about the border. Both are very valuable. But they are born out of different experiences, spaces, and places, and the ways that we each navigate them. One thing I do always have in mind when talking about border art on the U.S. side in relation to the Mexican side is the border nation power structure. I cannot avoid it. S JM : You’ve always talked about these terms—border art and art about the border, but what you mean is so much clearer to me now. The notion of border art has always seemed to me to be a flattening of the field, limiting art to one place, to the actual fence. Yet it does not diminish the field to

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acknowledge that its meanings are different from one side than from the other, to recognize the richness of all those other notions of the border that come into play here. AM - A : Yes, that’s because it’s the materialization of all the borders: social,

political, historical, and psychological. Everything. And I would link the border nation concept to the distinction between how the U.S. side conceptualizes the border and how the Mexican side does so. And not even the Mexican side in general, but the fronterizo side, because Mexico City is another story. S J M : I think that’s such an important distinction. There’s a very different

notion of border in the United States. I suppose the border has a different meaning for someone who lives in Tucson, given that we’re seventy miles from the border, than it does for someone who lives in Chicago. But it’s not as fundamental a divergence. It’s not the same kind of difference as you might find in Mexico between someone living near the northern border and someone living in Mexico City. The core-periphery perspective in Mexico, so different from the U.S. perspective, is a critical distinction in conversations about spaces and negotiating boundaries, certainly in terms of cultural discourse, with respect to the notion of power. But the United States thinks of itself as a border nation, as a nation always pushing, always negotiating that spot. And always being the one to build the fence, to draw the line. It is a national project. That is so different from how la frontera is perceived in Mexico. AM - A : That line in the sand, often quite literally, was drawn in very different

circumstances for both countries. The borderline was built historically; it reflects asymmetries of power. S J M : And those asymmetries, that constructed history, sit right there, on

that fence. AM - A : Yes, right there. I think that the fence has become so critical because

it is the materialization of all those realities and all those experiences. That’s why many artists go to the fence. I was thinking about the work of Betsabeé

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Romero, an artist from Mexico City, who came to the border for inSITE. And many of the Mexico City artists have just discovered the border, which is very telling in terms of all that we have been talking about. The arts themselves have been able to create a new consciousness about what the border is, on both the Mexican and the U.S. side. I don’t think many of these artists would have ever come to the border to do anything if it wasn’t for what had happened in the 1980s, you know, the collaboration between Border Art Workshop and Centro Cultural de la Raza. And I think that one critical aspect that we are forgetting in this discussion is that the border for the Chicano/a experience was always there. The work of artist Rupert García in the 1970s was already taking on the fence using barbed wire imagery. I always bring those images back to the discussion because for someone like me and many artists of my generation, who grew up on the border and had to move to the United States or Mexico City because there was nothing happening in our region, the work of Chicanos/as provided our first real glimpse of the complexity of the place we were part of. So our growing awareness of the marginality of fronterizos/as and Chicanos/as— although not to the level of intellectual or artistic pursuit until later, on the U.S. side first, then slowly on the Mexican side— was such a relation. Probably the first shock for me, personally, was at the Escuela Nacional des Artes Plásticas, in Mexico City, where I was told that I was a pocha. I just stared at my student friends and my professor. I had always thought that I was Mexicana. My mother and grandmother are Mexicana. Nobody on la frontera had ever doubted who I was. “No, no, you aren’t Mexican,” they insisted. “You’re something else.” Being confronted by how people in the center imagine who you are offers awareness of your place on the periphery. If nobody tells you that no, you aren’t part of the center, you just go on and live your life unaware. I knew, as a fronteriza, about asymmetries of power; I knew that the U.S. side of the border was something else. But now my relationship to power was in some other place, Mexico City. Who am I? I thought. My birth certificate says I’m a Mexican citizen, and I know I can trust my mom and my dad. I know that I’m Mexicana— but at one level, I am not. I can either reject or embrace who I am. I think this process happened along the border for others as well.

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Other events that enabled embracing a fronterizo/a identity took place in the 1960s and 1970s, especially PRONAF (Programa Nacional Fronterizo), which was the first program on the Mexican side to address the border as the border. PRONAF had a tremendous effect on how Mexican border towns and their residents saw themselves. Two governments were making arrangements elsewhere, but the consequences were for the border. That, I think, was the beginning of a new consciousness of what the border meant for fronterizos/as, connected and disconnected from Mexico City, and connected and disconnected from el otro lado, the U.S. side of the border.6 S JM : As meeting places of nations, world’s fairs in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries offered similar sites that resonated with the cultural productions of meaning and identity. The fairs redefined American identity at a national rather than regional level, for both a national and an international audience. Even those fairs, intended for exploiting commerce and forging connections between the United States and its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere, echoed the national chauvinism and American cultural imperialism of the time, with displays of colonial possessions and representatives of exotic bodies. The hemispheric imaginary of the Buffalo, New York, Pan-American Exposition of 1901, for example, spoke more to the colonial designs of the United States as an imperial nation than to collaboration across borders. And the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco physically and ideologically inscribed the triumphs of U.S. expansionism, especially the Panama Canal, within the fluid boundaries of a muscular, masculine, and racialized national body.7 A M - A : Yes, the exhibition of bodies goes back in time to the world’s fair

expositions. To me, the Border Film Project is a new version of the exhibition of bodies— both the eroticization of the Minutemen and the migrants, but one more exotic than the other. The display of these supposed selfrepresentations is the same as the Filipino aboriginal in the cage at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. Only now it’s done with a photograph instead of a body. But the body needed to be there in the border. That’s how the body is on exhibition now. It carries on all the stereotypes of both the Minuteman and the migrant.

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S J M : In this context we might also consider again Van der Straet’s America. The thinly veiled eroticism of the image, what Michel de Certeau has called “an inaugural scene,” aligns the border with the female body— each pliable and open— and alludes to the importance of writing, of texts, and of the representation of bodies in the conquest of the New World. It is the prerogative of the colonist to be the author of the history of this unnamed place. As Certeau notes, Vespucci grasps that “she is a nuova terra not yet existing on maps— an unknown body destined to bear the name, Amerigo, of its inventor. But what is really initiated here is a colonization of the body by the discourses of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, savage page on which Western desire will be written.” 8 In relation to the so-called living ethnological displays, the body is a perfect model of fluid space. Like Van der Straet’s America, these are conquered places and people; the trophies were collected. The world’s fairs were designed for entertainment and scientific edification, and they also defined racialized space. So if you’re walking down the midway of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, on one side of the border you will see Filipinos who have become police officers, and on the other side, the so-called dog eaters. There’s the border fence between the civilized, who have become American, and the other. AM - A : The assimilated and the unassimilated.

Mary Jenea Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta, with its display of bodies, offers something entirely different. The film depicts the different points of view of the fronterizos/as. As John-Michael Warner describes the work in his chapter, the camera captures the perspectives of the lived experiences of the passengers who cross the border. What is wonderful about the arts are the layers of meaning— once you understand the location of where you are looking, the layers become more apparent. SJM : Historias en la Camioneta renders visually many of the things that we’ve

argued we can’t render visually. Moving through international, national, and regional spaces as well as legal and economic realms, the passengers cross

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the U.S.-Mexico border in a commercial van. Their human bodies are also a site of borders— racialized, gendered, psychological, spiritual, and physical. Language is a boundary too— even the idea of English and Spanish, verbalized in the same conversation, going back and forth between passengers, and in their oral histories discussing lived, day-to-day borderlands realities. Historias en la Camioneta brings all these ideas about borders, what can’t be rendered visually, to the forefront. Sanchez, a fronteriza artist herself, makes border art (not art about the border) and depicts the technology of moving through space as a palimpsestic form of borders, both geopolitical and embodied. In all the essays we’ve been discussing, border art, bodies, and spaces are central. Whether we view them from the United States or Mexico, whether they are shaped by the border nation or by the core-periphery relationship with Mexico City, we’ve shared an appreciation of the complex entanglements of art and region. These artworks of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century— for example, Taller Yonke’s Paseo de Humanidad and Border Dynamics, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’s TIT, Alfred Quiroz’s Milagros, or Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta— are informed by history. The legacy of nineteenth-century American landscapes and the ubiquity of borders echo in these more recent works. The artists also embrace the Chicano/a artistic legacy and are especially knowledgeable of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. Border art and border artists construct art that is far more than an aesthetic gesture: the works are historically engaged, culturally oriented interventions— in other words, activism. When historical frameworks are used to interpret border art, rich layers of meaning emerge alongside the contemporary conditions of la frontera. Before the modern-day border fence was a canvas for artists, the corrugated metal wall was a relic from the Vietnam War, and the premise for a fence dates back even further. Through representations of history and of the present day, border art emphasizes the importance of identities— expected identifications, such as race and gender, and those, such as fronterizo/a, that are specific to the U.S.-Mexico border. As we think about borders, it’s impossible for me to separate contemporary art from recent and historical pasts.

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AM - A : Even our meeting today is another way of thinking about borders.

We represent different territories, or mapped places, cartographically and ideologically speaking, with distinct visions, histories, and perspectives. Gathering together, seeing border art and spaces from each other’s point of view is critical. The conversations, and the essays, open up the line.

Notes 1.

2.

Several scholars not engaged in the border per se offer critical tools to conceptualize its performative nature. For example, Tony Bennett considers the extent to which social technologies of meaning and identity, including museums, are as much defined by what they render invisible as visible, unseen as seen, in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995). In Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), W. J. Thomas Mitchell proposes shifting the term “landscape” from a noun to a verb to underscore landscape not as an object to be seen or text to be read but as a cultural practice in which identities are formed. His text evokes Marx’s notion of a social hieroglyph in which the landscape functions as an emblem of the social, political, and cultural relations it conceals. Denis Cosgrove disrupts the assumed coherence, objectivity, and transparency of the map, in his edited Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999) and other books, proposing instead its uncertainties and incompleteness. Maps function as a technology of order and discipline and are neither neutral nor self-evident but partial, ideological, and driven by desires and longings as much as by the quest for knowledge or the desire to educate. William Cronon, in his edited volume Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996), unpacks the prevailing assumption of nature as transcendent and pristine, as natural, in favor of seeing it as produced and defined by the cultures that encounter it. One can draw a historical link from many of these studies back to a foundational text of the United States and the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” auspiciously delivered at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Defining the frontier as the site for the formation and definition of America’s essential features— rugged, democratic, independent, expansive, masculine, and always pushing the limits of the frontier— Turner’s declaration that the frontier was closed, following the 1890 census, presented a crisis while offering an escape route. Implicit in Turner’s claim that the frontier was closed was at least the possibility that the frontier was a fluid concept and that the geographic closed doors of the 1890 census

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

were but a part of a broader narrative of national progress and expansion. Understanding frontier as a plural concept— as a verb rather than a noun— and not as one fixed place at a specific geographic boundary, Turner’s frontier thesis was more celebratory than mournful of what had passed. He remained optimistic that the West represented not one particular place on the map but rather a national mindset premised on progress and the manly triumph of civilization over wilderness. Turner stated reassuringly, “Decade after decade, West after West, the rebirth of American society has gone on,” and he posited the coordinates of American masculinity, nationhood, and progress along an imperial frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1896, 296. Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui and Gilberto Cardenas, Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration (Notre Dame, Ind.: Snite Museum of Art and University of Notre Dame, 2006). For an extended discussion on this point, see Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui, “The Real and the Symbolic: Visual(izing) Border Spaces,” in Mobile Crossings: Representations of Chicana/o Cultures, ed. Anja Bandau and Marc Priewe (Trier, Germany: WVT, 2006), 63– 76. Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary, “Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 27, no. 2 (2012): 213– 28. On PRONAF’s impact on the border region, see also the chapter by Geraldo Cadava in this volume. For a more extended discussion of this point, see Sarah J. Moore, “Mapping Empire in Omaha and Buffalo: World’s Fairs and the Spanish-American War,” Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 25 (January– April 2000): 111– 26; Moore, “Manliness and the New American Empire,” in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, ed. T. J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 75– 94; and Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), xxv– xxvi. The conflation of power and maps is critical here as it references the colonial agenda and underscores the inescapable discursive frameworks in which maps are bound, frameworks that are historically and culturally specific and involve authorship. Maps are defined by their contingencies and discourses of power rather than their pretense to transparency or neutrality.

6

Stealth Crossings Performance Art and Games of Power on the Militarized Border ILA N. SHEREN

C

an border art play the game of power and win? The artists of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 (EDT 2.0) and b.a.n.g. Lab sought to answer this question with their 2009 project, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT). This software was loaded onto GPS-enabled mobile phones and programmed to point the way to water stations and aid in the desert. University of California, San Diego, professor Ricardo Dominguez, along with collaborators Amy Sara Carroll, Brett Stalbaum, and Micha Cárdenas, intended for the tool to lead border crossers to water or first aid stations, as well as to Border Patrol outposts. The goal, ultimately, was to reduce the sheer number of border-crossing deaths by providing immigrants with information. The TIT took advantage of earlier attempts to redefine border crossing in terms of the Internet, while emphasizing the significance of physical crossings in a highly militarized zone. The TIT, with its simple interface and crude graphics, would be considered laughable in the age of smartphones. Everything about the design, though, was practical, tailored for the needs of the migrants who would use it. The software required no cellular network for functionality, only GPS satellites. The TIT worked like a compass, giving only the relevant pieces of information— the location of water and the location of the phone itself. Significantly, unlike a compass, which always points north, the TIT points

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Figure 6.1 Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and b.a.n.g. Lab, Transborder Immi-

grant Tool (2009) in action, with sample water station. Image reprinted by permission of EDT 2.0.

toward water. The software could be said to function as a modern-day divining rod. The desert crossers ultimately desire to head north, so the TIT actually diverts them from a prescribed course of action. The push and pull of two forces on the border— the economic opening of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the physical closure brought on by immigration-control legislation— created the conditions for artists to embrace such virtual and technologically enhanced performances. As a matter of necessity, border art has had to respond to and anticipate changes in the region’s political situation. Historically, artists did so by focusing on the presence or absence of the highly charged site. This focus on site specificity worked in part because the border lends weight to the symbolic action of moving through space. At the same time, performative crossings momentarily dissolve the border as they reinforce it. This paradox, that transgressing the boundary line— violating it even— increases its symbolic importance, is not a novel one. It has been mined throughout the entire history of border art. In the early 1970s, San Diego Chicano artists had used mural art to draw a border within the city, claiming Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park as a site of

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Mexican American community.1 Those same Chicano activists simultaneously undermined the authority of the border, emphasizing the connections between South and North. Border art adopted performance tactics with the formation of the Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/ TAF) in 1984; the binational collective pioneered the idea of performative crossings. Beginning in 1992, San Diego and Tijuana ultimately became hosts to an international border art festival, inSITE.2 The festival brought artists from around the world to create site-­specific projects. By the late twentieth century, the U.S.-­Mexico border had become a laboratory for artists to experiment with politically motivated art. The significance of this art rested on the existence of the border as a performative site. Many studies discuss this longer trajectory of border art.3 In considering the dual impact of border militarization and the Internet on border art, however, the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986 is pivotal. After the measures mandated by the IRCA were put into place, the very definition of performative crossing changed. Immigrants required increasingly sophisticated strategies and techniques to evade the authorities, and the focus of border art shifted from the performance of the artists to the movements of undocumented migrants. EDT 2.0 used technological means to enact physical crossings, and in doing so, the group’s tool allowed for a renegotiation of border crossings as well as a shift in the definition of performance. The U.S. Congress enacted the IRCA on November  6, 1986. The act introduced sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants, expanded the size and scope of the Border Patrol, and offered a general legalization program for around two million Mexicans.4 The act also implemented a “low-­intensity conflict” protocol for patrolling the border.5 With the concentration of state power along the U.S.-­Mexico border, artists focused on diffusing that power, rather than offering direct protests. The layers of surveillance in place demanded a stealth approach to crossing. Technology-­enabled journeys, such as those made with the TIT, dispersed migrants along the length of the desert while pointing out the inhumanity of the militarized border. For certain state governments and local municipalities, the measures undertaken by the IRCA were not enough. El Paso, Texas, responded with

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Operation Hold the Line (later renamed Operation Blockade) in 1993. This plan shifted Border Patrol personnel to the downtown crossing between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, increasing the number of local apprehensions.6 California, in turn, instituted Operation Gatekeeper on October  1, 1994, strengthening the Imperial Beach border station and creating a three-­ tiered system of agent response.7 Arizona began its Operation Safeguard that same year, shifting Border Patrol agents to Tucson and rebuilding the fence at Nogales. These measures pushed undocumented immigration to the periphery of larger cities and helped establish a new border geography. Smaller, previously undistinguished towns like Naco, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora, become part of a network of safehouses, and their populations increased accordingly.8 The names of these operations reflected the reinvigoration of the militarized border in the early 1990s and, ultimately, emphasized its antagonistic nature. Defensive names—­Gatekeeper, Hold the Line, Blockade, and Safeguard—­made it seem as if the United States was under attack. When compared with the individuals undertaking the crossing, these names only underscore the disparity between perception and reality. Much like the naming of the Global War on Terror during the second Bush era, the act of labeling legitimizes the conflict.9 In both cases, the United States is put on the defensive against nameless or otherwise undefined forces. In the popular imagination, then, the newly fortified border cities become the last bastion of security in an epic siege. This characterization of border as war zone was naturalized throughout the 1990s and the subsequent decade. In 1986, anti-­immigration measures first began to paint the region in these terms. The first site-­specific U.S.-­ Mexico border performance, End of the Line, took place as a challenge to this rhetoric. On October 12, 1986, BAW/TAF enacted multiple crossings of the border. At the time, the fence separating the two countries stopped in the middle of the beach, allowing for an unfettered connection between Imperial Beach and Border Field State Park. Members of the collective, including cofounders David Avalos, Michael Schnorr, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, Victor Ochoa, Sara-­Jo Berman, Isaac Artenstein, and Jude Eberhard, dressed in costumes depicting border stereotypes.

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Figure 6.2 U.S.-Mexico border fence at Border Field State Park, looking south toward Tijuana, 2010, the location where, almost twenty-four years earlier, End of the Line took place. Photograph by Ila N. Sheren.

These homemade costumes were cut from large blocks of foam and spray painted. The stereotypes depicted included the Border Patrol, a Catholic bishop, and taxi drivers in Tijuana, among others. Together, the costumed performers gathered around a large table on which were placed three objects representing syncretic Catholicism. The participants placed the table directly on the border so that half of the participants were in the United States and half in Mexico. They then proceeded to rotate the table along that axis. In this way, members of the group enacted multiple international crossings, to the point that no one would have kept track of exactly how many he or she had performed. The large crowd of onlookers was then treated to a meal of elotes, or roasted corn. This symbolic first Thanksgiving occurred not even a month before the latest wave of border-closing measures was set to begin. The impending passage of the IRCA marked an end to the openness of not just Imperial Beach

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and Border Field State Park, but also the nearly two-­thousand-­mile boundary. Anticipating the changes to come, End of the Line was the end of the line metaphorically, physically, and temporally. The performance marked both the end of openness on the border and the beginning of separation for a shared community, one that had existed long before the establishment of the dividing line. During the performance, BAW/TAF members recited poetry, speeches, and general statements about the condition of the border. In the video documentation for End of the Line, an unidentified female voice announces the goal of the piece: to “prove that this border isn’t really a war zone, in which case we will all be alive by the end of the day.” 10 While overly dramatic, the statement was a direct challenge to the anti-­immigration rhetoric of the border as war zone, a taunt in the face of those who exaggerated the condition of the region. If the border was indeed a war zone and deserving of military enforcement, then how could such a peaceful gathering take place uninterrupted? Performance art, ultimately, would expose the border-­as-­war-­zone fallacy. End of the Line broke new ground in connecting border crossing with performance art—­pioneering the act of performative crossing for this specific international situation.11 This connection was a natural one, for the act of crossing is, at its core, a performance. Border crossers, when passing through immigration and customs control, present ideal versions of themselves. The BAW/TAF artists, in the name of art, solidified this connection of border crossing with performative action. Because the audience shares in this performative border, there is a more direct connection between art and lived experience. All other border artworks, especially performance, participate in this lineage, whether consciously or unconsciously. The themes of End of the Line would continue to resonate in border art history, but the methods and actions of border performance would change with the changing circumstances of the site. The BAW/TAF had emphasized community. Joy would take precedence; peaceful activity would keep the authorities at bay. The BAW/TAF artists created their performance with a dual meaning, especially within the historical context of the IRCA. End of the Line was not only the border’s first Thanksgiving, but also its Last Supper. The IRCA was significant to the piece because it would change the rules of the game.

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Peaceful demonstration on the line would no longer be enough. The region was presupposed to be a war zone, and the BAW/TAF’s emphasis on community could not undo that perception. The 1986 legislation constrained the historical fluidity of the border—­one of its hallmarks—­and ushered in this new culture of security. By the early twenty-­first century, that same scene on Border Field State Park had become one of isolation. Today, the border fence now extends into the ocean, and underwater spikes provide yet another layer of “protection” from swimmers. The traveler to this beach is under constant surveillance, even though he or she may be unaccompanied. Border Patrol members watch from an elevated position; vehicles are driven down the lonely road, and the occasional helicopter flies overhead. Far from the city, along other, more remote parts of the border, ground sensors pick up the vibrations of people walking in the desert. Expert trackers scan the earth for signs of human life, while unmanned drones patrol from above. All this activity gives the sensation that at the U.S.-­Mexico border, one is never completely alone. This military buildup marks the fullest expression of state power. The twenty-­first-­century border situation has been naturalized, particularly in Anglo-­American anti-­immigration rhetoric, but it is mainly the consequence of post-­1986 efforts to reduce immigration. Turning undocumented immigration into a “war” mimicked other militarization efforts of the time, most notably the War on Drugs and later the War on Terror. As a consequence, the security of the border with Mexico became couched in terms of drug trafficking. With a clearly defined enemy, political and cultural support was easy to garner. Immigration and labor issues then became folded into this larger narrative of narcoviolence.12 The issues concerning undocumented immigration, however, were not so straightforward. Mexican Americans, including Chicano activists, for example, did not speak with a single voice on the immigration question. As witnessed in a 1972 letter to Committee on Chicano Rights leader Herman Baca, promising to “take care of those bean-­belching border bounders,” many established second-­and third-­generation Mexican-­Americans harbored a degree of anxiety about undocumented workers.13 Even some of those directly involved in advocating for Mexican American rights steered clear of the issue. César Chávez, in his call to unionization, had advocated

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hiring Mexican Americans and Filipino Americans rather than nonunionized workers.14 San Diego’s Committee on Chicano Rights had worked to cast the immigration question in larger systemic and historical terms and hoped to appeal to a broad range of activists. Although often categorized by U.S. authorities as a problem or threat, the combined structure of labor and immigration on the border can best be described as a system. According to many Chicanos/ as, the U.S. addiction to cheap labor, drugs, and other goods and services in the gray market demands economic disparity across the border. Citing the United States’ reliance on cheap labor dating back to African American slavery and the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s, Baca and the Chicano leadership linked Mexican American political issues with a long-­standing history of systematic economic and labor exploitation. The complexity of this scenario belies the simplicity of the U.S. approach to border control: militarization. The buildup of force along the border did not address the underlying causes of undocumented immigration, but it gave the appearance of action. The consequences of this militarization were felt immediately. By redefining the border as a military zone, the United States equated all unauthorized crossings with acts of war.15 There had always been some degree of military presence on the border, especially during the Mexican Revolution, but the 1980s approach brought a shift from “low politics” to “high politics”—­a “shift in the definition of security threats and in the practice of security policy.” 16 This “high politics” garnered the attention of the United States as a whole, not just those directly affected by immigration policy. The tension between political and military interests produces feelings of confinement and constraint. This situation is somewhat analogous to border tensions in the European Union. Political philosopher Étienne Balibar, describing frontiers in Europe, claimed that constraint is felt in the zones “in which political control coexists alongside military control . . . but where the two are violently separated.” 17 Although Balibar notes a rift between political and military control, the U.S.-­Mexico border offers another version of this disjunction, one between economic interests and political ones. Constraint, then, is what results when economic and political interests diverge at the border.

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If the BAW/TAF’s legacy was to call attention to this proposed military buildup on the border, then the theoretical and technical impetus for the TIT comes from the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). The group, formed by Steve Kurtz, Steve Barnes, Dorian Burr, Beverly Schlee, and Hope Kurtz in 1987, was responsible for a new generation of activism—­cyberactivism. Ricardo Dominguez was a member during the 1980s and early 1990s, leaving CAE to cofound Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1997. In CAE’s 1994 book, The Electronic Disturbance, the group proclaimed that “the new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this electronic space.” 18 In doing so, the group redefined the term “site.” The contested site became intangible rather than physical; accordingly, the virtual border allowed for virtual crossings.19 With the TIT, however, the virtual site becomes mapped onto the physical one, collapsing physical space and cyberspace. Because of the association with Dominguez, Electronic Disturbance Theater was the intellectual heir of CAE. Dominguez took his experiments with CAE to bear on the human rights issues surrounding border crossing. Prior to developing the tool, EDT 2.0 had addressed U.S.-­Mexico economic policy, working with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. By launching their own program, FloodNet, EDT 2.0 staged virtual sit-­ins, shutting down Mexican and U.S. government websites and bringing global awareness to NAFTA’s economic exploitation of southern Mexico.20 Dominguez expounded on information and the electronic disturbance: “The main thing about the disturbance is not the shutting down of space but about disseminating information. And what you want people to get from that information.” 21 Considering that desert and border crossers die from lack of information, not solely from the harsh conditions of the crossing, the distribution of information both saves lives and abets an illegal action. Disseminating concrete data is the disturbance that allows for successful crossing. The TIT translates practical information into action. The migrants express concrete data through the routes they take, which could be said to resemble journeys of self-­discovery. In this manner, the project exploits the tension between the allure and romance of the nomad and the harsh physical ordeal of a desert border crossing. In CAE’s 1994 manifesto, the group describes the “nomad” as “free to wander the electronic net, able to cross national

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boundaries with minimal resistance from national bureaucracies.” 22 EDT 2.0 members mediated this tension and assessed the ontology of walking, citing the “seemingly irreconcilable” distance between walking as philosophy or art and walking as “migratory necessity.” 23 There exists an enormous gulf between Situationist International practices of dérive and migrant treks through the desert, however much one might extol the psychogeographic potential of desert wanderings.24 Although this gap exists between walking as philosophy and walking as necessity, the journeys of immigrants using the tool do constitute a performance. Literary theorist Rita Raley characterized tactical media as performative, but a performance “for which a consumable product is not the primary endgame; it foregrounds the experimental over the physical.” 25 Along these lines, the TIT is a performative experiment in mitigating the effects of militarization and in distributing information to those who lack access. The tool merged poetics with experimentation, insisting on the project’s validity as art. According to EDT 2.0, “The cracked Motorola i455 phones are poems for psychic consultation, spoken words, compasses, and geographia (where the graphia of geography is outed and rerouted) of encouragement and welcome.” 26 This idea of phone-­as-­poem is worth considering. The two words describe very different concepts: the Motorola phones are mass-­ produced mundane objects, seemingly devoid of aesthetic or artistic merit. Only when fused with the proper software do they become speaking actors, welcoming and encouraging. The transformation of phone to poem imbues the gadgets with a quasi-­biblical nobility; they are shepherds, guiding their flock through the desert. The phones themselves become extensions of the body, cybernetic appendages that then connect the crossers to a global network. By 2009, mobile phones were already ubiquitous devices, constantly attached to the hands of their owners. The discussion of the phones as appendages, and, ultimately, the association with the body or performance art, may undermine the larger contribution of the project. Rather than a seamless connection between human and machine, the TIT emphasizes the incongruity of desert crossers and mobile phones. The urban pastime of talking, texting, tweeting, or playing mobile games seems frivolous and unnecessary in the hands of undocumented

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immigrants. Of course, this cognitive dissonance is relegated to the image or description of the tool, for these devices are stripped of their original purpose: two-­way communication. The result of the TIT is a performance piece enacted daily and repeatedly, even after the distribution of the phones ceased. The players are the migrants, the desert crossers, and the Border Patrol. The outcome is never certain, and the durational quality of the piece limits conclusions as to what even constitutes a “result.” On the individual level, one cannot compare the experience of the tool from one border crosser to another. Everyone is caught up in a personal game of power. The phrase “game of power” is significant, for EDT 2.0 was long influenced by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as a way to access dialogues of power.27 Boal devised the theater in 1971 in Brazil as a way to “humanize Humanity.” 28 EDT 2.0 cited Boal’s ideas in relation to the TIT: His idea was that political challenges could be overcome collectively by finding new ways of thinking about them, thinking through the body and that if we can move in new ways perhaps we can think in new ways. The Transborder Immigrant Tool can also be seen as a kind of thinking which has emerged from a practice of walking art.29

Here, EDT 2.0 connects walking and thinking, the mind and the body. Those crossers using the tool become active generators of knowledge, expressing new ways of thinking. By playing the game of power, those traditionally denied power are better equipped to access it for themselves. Within each vignette, there is the position of power, those denied power, and those representing the resistance. Players take up these different roles, using their own bodies, their fellow participants, and inanimate objects to chart a new geography of resistance. Electronic Disturbance Theater members, as well as other practitioners of tactical media, cyberprotest, and hacktivism, envision new modes of resistance. If, at the U.S.-­Mexico border, power coalesces on a physical line, then how else to thwart it but to make the crossing elsewhere? With the collapse of cyberspace and physical space mentioned earlier, the crossing occurs both on the border and in the virtual realm. In that case, the Border Patrol

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is guarding an uncontested site. The diffusion of power echoes the dispersal of the TIT itself. These phones travel with the migrants, moving with them, following routes and paths previously unrecorded, and subjecting them to the actions of the Border Patrol and the guidance of the software they carry. It was no surprise that the TIT crossed the boundaries of legality. The ensuing controversy centered on whether the phones, and the software they contained, assisted people in breaking the law.30 Lost in the discussion was the moral imperative to aid people lost in the desert, whether or not they were engaged in crossing a border.31 Critics instead focused on the use of public funds to create something supposedly against the public interest.32 In that regard, EDT 2.0 followed a long tradition of art projects that sought to redistribute wealth. On the subject of undocumented immigration, artists David Avalos (from the BAW/TAF), Elizabeth Sisco, and Louis Hock staged Art Rebate (Arte Reembolso) in 1993. The three artists, using grant money from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, handed out ten-­dollar bills to undocumented immigrant workers. The bills, accompanied by an official “receipt,” stood in for the tax rebates that these workers would never receive. The project called attention to the fact that undocumented immigrants pay taxes, in the forms of sales and payroll taxes, but have no access to government services. EDT 2.0’s tool did not seek to redistribute wealth so directly but instead paid the immigrants in bits and bytes of knowledge that could, if used correctly, save lives. Although the information contained within the TIT could be used to empower the desert crosser, could the tool reduce the number of border-­ crossing deaths by any discernible amount? How could causation even be determined? These unresolved questions concern the practical nature of activist art. The TIT sought tangible results to a well-­documented problem, that of border-­crossing deaths in the desert. Specifically, the project aimed to reduce the number of deaths due to lack of information, to not knowing one’s location relative to the position of water and resources. This was a spatial question as much as it was a political one, a question of mapping as well as of moving through space. It helps to consider who, exactly, is moving through space. Embodiment has been a critical aspect of performative crossings since the very beginning.

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In the BAW/TAF’s End of the Line, identity politics were displaced in favor of a binational, multicultural emphasis on community. Anyone and everyone did cross, whether Chicano, Anglo-­American, or Mexican born. Other border-­ crossing projects, however, were unable to escape the trap of identity politics. For the 2005 version of San Diego and Tijuana’s inSITE festival, Javier Téllez staged One Flew Over the Void, a performance that shot a human cannonball over that same stretch of border fence, yet the stuntman, David Smith, was a U.S. citizen. Before beginning his short aerial journey from Mexico to the United States, Smith flashed his passport to the waiting crowd.33 While Smith’s unorthodox immigration check was played for laughs, the scenario would have been quite different had the stuntman been a Mexican citizen. Téllez and inSITE authorities would have had to obtain the appropriate clearances ahead of time (as they did with Smith), but the performance would have taken on another level of significance altogether. Instead of simply creating a spectacle out of the act of border crossing, One Flew Over the Void would have preyed heavily on U.S. fears of undocumented immigration. The Mexican stuntman, in this case, would have constituted an assault on U.S. borders, rather than a homecoming. Embodiment is the defining issue of the TIT, however. Rather than complicating the project, this discourse interpretively gives the tool its purpose. The software empowers desert crossers, giving them enough information to have a chance at winning this very real game of power, of which the consequences are life and death. EDT 2.0 had used similar tactics against the Mexican government regarding Chiapas: “The act of simulation ultimately reveals the incommensurate force and aggression that underwrites the policies of the government and military; thousands of armed troops and real airplanes are dispatched to ‘fight’ communities armed with little more than paper.” 34 By acknowledging empowered undocumented migrants, EDT 2.0 and the TIT reveal the aggression of U.S. border militarization—­both underscoring it and undermining the buildup. After all, a small low-­tech phone is all it takes to thwart the might of the border authorities. Now, of course, the site is still contested. It is perhaps too convenient to claim that the digitization of protest simply subverts state power on the line. If the TIT places the means to cross successfully in the hands of migrants,

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it does little else to aid them, and nothing to demilitarize the border. If the authorities were to confiscate one of the phones, the Border Patrol could use the information to learn the location of water stations and stake them out.35 Trust in the tool would erode, and the Border Patrol would once again hold all the power. But this give and take is built into the game and, ultimately, into the TIT. Viewing activist art, especially such projects on the U.S.-­Mexico border, through this lens enables a new consideration of the relationship between art and activism. Ultimately, the tangible results such projects seek are, in fact, intangible shifts in the balance of power.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

For a full account of Chicano Park and its mural program, see Eva Cockcroft, “The Story of Chicano Park” Aztlán 15 (Spring 1984): 79–­103; and Marilyn Mulford’s 1988 documentary Chicano Park (Berkeley, CA: Redbird Films, 1988), film, 58 min. InSITE did not begin as an exclusive showcase for border art, but by the 1997 iteration of the festival, the theme of border art and site specificity had solidified. For a more thorough discussion, see Ila N. Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), which argues for a reconsideration of site and site specificity in relation to the enactment of NAFTA in 1994. For an analysis of portability and site specificity in art of the region, see Claire F. Fox, “The Portable Border: Site-­Specificity, Art, and the U.S.-­Mexico Frontier,” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994): 61–­82; and for a longer history of border art, see Jo-­Anne Berelowitz, “Border Art Since 1965,” in Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, ed. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 143–­82. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-­Mexico Divide, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 38. This protocol adhered to the standards of low-­intensity conflict doctrine, used in guerilla warfare and the War on Drugs. Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-­Mexico Border, 1978–­1992: Low-­Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1996), 4.

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6. 7.

Ibid., 94. “Background to the Office of the Inspector General Investigation,” Operation Gatekeeper: An Investigation into Allegations of Fraud and Misconduct, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Special Report, July 1998, http://​www​.justice​.gov​/oig​/special​/9807​/gkp01​.htm. 8. Andreas, Border Games, 94. 9. For an extended discussion of rhetoric and the War on Terror, see political theorist Richard Jackson’s Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-­terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 10. Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo, End of the Line, October 12, 1986 (video documentation provided by David Avalos). This video accompanied installations of End of the Line in later BAW/TAF exhibitions, along with costumes, photographs, and props from the original performance. 11. The phrase “performative crossing” refers specifically to border crossing as performance art, which had not been attempted on the U.S.-­Mexico border prior to End of the Line. 12. Timothy J. Dunn presents a detailed timeline of U.S. efforts to control the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico and South America in Militarization of the U.S.-­ Mexico Border. 13. H. “Scoop” Jackson (Citizens for Jackson) to Herman Baca, n.d., 1972, folder 3, box 6, Herman Baca Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. The letter is from a U.S. senator, expressing the views of many second-­and third-­generation Mexican Americans, that those in the United States legally had “earned” their rights. It followed that the presence of undocumented migrants undermined the status of the community as a whole. 14. Isidro Ortíz, “¡Si, Se Puede! Chicana/o Activism in San Diego at Century’s End,” in Chicano San Diego, ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 130. 15. The ethics of whether the U.S. government has the right to close its border with Mexico have been debated elsewhere, especially in Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 16. Andreas, Border Games, 3. 17. Étienne Balibar, “Europe, an ‘Unimagined’ Frontier of Democracy,” Diacritics 33 (2003): 36. 18. Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1994), 3. 19. For more on site specificity and locational politics, see Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-­Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT

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Press, 2004). From a more historical standpoint, see Robert Smithson’s writings on the “non-­site” in Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Susan Kandel, “The Non-­Site of Theory,” Frieze, no. 22 (May 1995), https://​frieze​.com​/article​/non​-site​-theory. 20. For a detailed account of FloodNet and the connection with the Zapatista movement, see Jill Lane, “Digital Zapatistas,” Drama Review 47 (Summer 2003): 129–­44. 21. Ricardo Dominguez, interviewed by Benjamin Shepard and Stephen Duncombe, “Mayan Technologies and the Theory of Electronic Civil Disobedience,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate, 2007), 331. 22. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance, 16. 23. Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, and Brett Stalbaum, “The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity, and Hope in Post-­ NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic” (paper presented at Mobile HCI09, University of Bonn, Germany, September 2009), 1. 24. The term dérive refers to the Situationist International practice of wandering through urban space, allowing chance to determine the path. Situationist leader Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Guide of Paris (1957) does just this, pointing out key moments in Debord’s route but omitting the connective framework between them. For more information on the Situationist International, see Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (1967; New York: Zone Books, 1994); and Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog, 2005). 25. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13. 26. Cárdenas et al., “Transborder Immigrant Tool,” 3. 27. Ibid. 28. “Theatre of the Oppressed,” Jana Sanskriti International Research and Resource Institute, http://​jsirri​.org​/theatre​-of​-the​-oppressed/. 29. Cárdenas et al., “Transborder Immigrant Tool,” 2. 30. In the language of militarization, the project could be construed as aiding the enemy, but of course the U.S. government would not take it that far. 31. Undocumented immigrants are far from the only people caught unprepared in the Sonoran Desert. Luís Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown, 2004) provides anecdotes of hiking trips and desert drives that ended in tragedy. 32. See Duncan Hunter, “Taxpayers Should Be Outraged at This Use of Funds,” San Diego Union-­Tribune, March 7, 2010, http://​www​.sandiegouniontribune​.com​ /sdut​-taxpayers​-should​-be​-outraged​-use​-funds​-2010mar07​-htmlstory​.html.

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33. Ila N. Sheren, “Performing Migration: Art and Site-­Specificity at the U.S.-­ Mexico Border,” Journal of the Arts in Society 4, no. 2 (2009): 353–­64. 34. Lane, “Digital Zapatistas,” 130. 35. The scale of the project was such that, in reality, the Transborder Immigrant Tool would not have constituted a serious threat to the Border Patrol’s activities. The scenario discussed here is purely hypothetical.

7

How the Border Wall Became a Canvas Political Art in the U.S.-Mexico Border Towns of Ambos Nogales MARGARET REGAN

O

n a blazing May morning, a small troop of men wandered along Calle Internacional in Nogales, Sonora, passing by the ungainly metal wall that divides Mexico from the United States. Their dusty clothes, baseball caps, and backpacks, the unofficial uniform of the border crosser, were dead giveaways of their status— these men were migrants with plans to enter the United States without papers. At the moment, though, they were ambling up the avenida on their way to a free lunch offered by Grupo Beto, a Mexican border agency. Suddenly, they noticed some colorful metal figures welded right onto the towering border wall. Two of the men in the group stopped and laughed, pointing at the art. One of the painted cut-aluminum pieces depicted a green-skinned Border Patrol agent chasing migrants with a big stick. Another showed a migrant returning home to Mexico with an American washing machine loaded onto his back. The two men were not worried, they said, about the more serious figures, the ones that warned of the dangers in the desert: the saguaro growing out of a cluster of skulls; the fiery desert curling like a rattlesnake underfoot; Mexicans carrying home the body of a dead compañero. “I’ve crossed a lot of times,” boasted José-Antonio Hernández, a stocky thirty-seven-year-old in a Phillies cap, speaking in Spanish. “I’ve lived in

Figure 7.1 Migrants in front of Paseo de Humanidad, a mural once nailed to the border wall in Nogales, Sonora, created by Guadalupe Serrano, Alberto Morackis, and Alfred Quiroz. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

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L.A., Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Reno. I save money, and then I go home to Veracruz. I always cross through the city. I don’t worry about the desert.” His young companion, eighteen-year-old Ricardo Arellano of Mexico City, was equally sanguine. He was a runaway, he said with a smile, and his parents had no idea where he was. He had never crossed the line before, in either city or desert, but he was looking forward to the trip and maybe even to the cat-and-mouse games migrants play with la migra, the U.S. Border Patrol. “It’s an adventure,” he said.

Border Walls and Migrant Deaths The outcome of Arellano and Hernández’s “adventure,” undertaken in 2004, is unknown. They might have traveled to the outskirts of Nogales, which in those days was still fenced only with barbed wire, and gambled with their lives by striking out into the open desert. Alternatively, they might have risked almost immediate capture by the Border Patrol by scaling the big metal wall along the city’s downtown— the barrier that served as the canvas for the shiny metal art. That border wall erected along the border in Nogales by the United States in 1998 was an ugly wound; cutting three miles through the twin cities of Ambos Nogales, it divided the Sonoran city from the Arizona town of the same name. Set into graffiti-scarred concrete and rising up at least fifteen feet into the sky, the barrier clung to the land, snaking up the town’s many hills and curving down again into the flatlands. The wall had wire mesh at the top that tilted into Mexico, the better to deter enterprising climbers. Then as now, sky-high cameras stood watch over the wall, equipped with night-vision technology that turned night to day and detected bodies moving through the midnight brush. Bored Border Patrol agents, parked in white SUVs at intervals on the hilltops, stared down into Mexico. In 2011, Nogales got a new wall, courtesy of its northern neighbor, that was far longer, taller, and more intimidating than the 1998 model. Still standing today, it’s made of nearly impenetrable steel poles embedded into concrete footings six feet deep, and it’s much less hospitable to art.

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The earlier version of the wall was a ragtag affair. A rough patchwork of used helicopter landing pads, it had been hastily cobbled together. The U.S. Army had discarded the corrugated metal flats after using them in the jungles of Vietnam and in the deserts of Kuwait during the first war on Iraq, and it was only too happy to turn them over to the Border Patrol free of charge. The landing-mat fence, colored the purples and rusts of a bruise, was unapologetically ugly, and its battle history provided an uncomfortable metaphor for an international border between two nations ostensibly at peace. But the architecture of that early border barrier had some important aesthetic virtues: it stretched for miles, and its sides were flat and long. It was the perfect canvas, in other words, for a giant piece of political art. “The U.S. put the wall up without discussion,” muralist Alberto Morackis said that May morning in 2004, just two months after he and two other artists hammered their metal artwork Paseo de Humanidad (Parade of Humanity) onto the Mexican side of the barrier. “But our government said here you don’t need a permit to hang art on the wall. In the U.S. you have to ask the Border Patrol. Here there are no rules.” Paseo was a subversive piece of art forged through international collaboration, created by two Mexican nationals as well as a U.S. citizen and hung on a U.S.-built-and-maintained wall with the tacit permission of the local Mexican government. Besides Morackis, a native of Nogales, Sonora, the Paseo artists were his longtime mural partner Guadalupe Serrano, originally from Sinaloa, and Alfred Quiroz, a well-known Tucson artist and University of Arizona art professor who specialized in painting searing indictments of injustices of all kinds. Their Paseo was a painterly parade, a sprawling cavalcade of nineteen painted metal human figures and sixteen giant silver milagros that danced along the wall for perhaps one hundred feet. The work delivered an anguished lament for the deaths of border crossers— the people it depicted. “Too many people are dying for economic reasons,” Quiroz said shortly after the piece went up. In 2003, the year before the three artists fastened their artistic warning onto the war-weary wall, migrant deaths in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector hit an unprecedented 205, according to Coalición de Derechos Humanos, a human rights nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona, that for years took on the grim

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task of tabulating the bodies, relying on the reports of county medical examiners.1 Two years later, in 2005, after Arellano and Hernández braved a desert journey, the annual tally was the worst ever for Arizona: a total of 282 bodies found. By 2017, the toll of dead migrants found in Arizona’s killing fields had reached 3,191 for the period between October 1999 and October 2017.2 And these were only the bodies that had been found. Missing persons reports, filed by the families whose loved ones have been lost, greatly outnumber the number of recovered remains. Many of the dead disappear permanently in the remote wilderness, their bodies ravaged by animals and scattered, left to waste away into bones and then dust. The high numbers of deaths of border crossers in Arizona’s deserts— from exposure, from dehydration, from hypothermia, from car accidents— eventually became routine and not much discussed as the years wore on, but in the early 2000s the carnage was something new. Throughout the 1990s, Arizona’s medical examiners could count the number of deaths of border crossers on one hand. In those days, most undocumented migrants crossed safely into the United States through big cities in California and Texas, through San Diego and El Paso. That pattern began changing by the mid-1990s. Displaced from their lands after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted in 1994 and lured north by a booming U.S. economy, Mexican immigrants surged across the border in large numbers. And anti-immigrant sentiment ballooned. The Clinton administration, responding to the outcry, sought to end unauthorized immigration once and for all by sealing the urban crossings. In 1993, Operation Hold the Line clamped down on El Paso; Operation Gatekeeper followed suit in San Diego in 1994. In Arizona, 1998’s Operation Safeguard cracked down on the three major border towns, Nogales, Douglas, and Naco. Towering border walls went up, replacing flimsy fences; stadium lighting turned night to day; new cameras zeroed in on travelers; and the Border Patrol added boots on the ground. But the beefed-up enforcement didn’t stop desperate migrants from crossing; it simply forced them away from the safe routes through cities and into the perilous deserts. It didn’t take long before migrants traveling through the bone-dry desert were dying in numbers never before seen in Arizona. By 2000, migrant deaths in Arizona were skyrocketing to unprecedented levels: 65 bodies found in 2000, 75 in 2001, and a staggering 146 in 2002.3

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Artists on both sides of the border were quick to respond to this human catastrophe in photography, in installations, and, notably, in large public art projects— like Paseo— whose scale matched the size of the tragedy. The new border walls were irresistible to artists, as both metaphors and canvases. “Art is part of the discussion,” Morackis declared in 2004. “The border is an issue that art can say a lot about.” 4

Early Border Art in Ambos Nogales From the get-go, the people of Nogales, Sonora, responded angrily to the new wall blockading their town. Not only did the new crackdown make it harder to visit family and friends al norte, the border wall eliminated views. Where once the residents of the twin towns looked out across a line at the neighbors in another nation, now they looked at vertical sheets of ugly metal. Guerrilla artists painted furious graffiti slogans on the wall’s rusty corrugated sides. Mundo sin fronteras ya basta, one of the politer ones, loosely translates as “A world without borders. Enough walls already.” 5 As the migrant deaths rose, activists began adding white memorial crosses to the barrier, emblazoned with the names of the dead. The crosses were erected, pointedly, close to the DeConcini port of entry into the United States. California artists, and their Mexican collaborators in Baja California, have long garnered most of the attention for in-your-face border art that inventively defied the artificial separation between their two nations. In 1984, a freewheeling collective named Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) started doing multimedia projects right on the line. Border Door, a Richard Lou piece from 1988, featured a one-way door to California along the fence in Tijuana. Lou also thoughtfully provided more than a hundred keys to prospective border crossers to open it and walk right on through to the United States.6 From 1992 to 2005, inSITE, a private nonprofit in San Diego, staged an extravaganza of public art along the border fence with Tijuana. Like the BAW/TAF projects, inSITE’s entries subverted the political boundary drawn through the landscape. In 2005, for example, in a piece called One Flew Over the Void, a human cannonball launched by Javier Téllez traveled from the beach in Tijuana and

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through the air over the border fence.7 In the 1980s and 1990s, San Diego and Tijuana had advantages that the sleepy twin cities of Nogales did not. The two Pacific coast cities had a combined population of about 2.5 million and a long history of politically charged Chicano/a and Aztec-inspired art. With their sophisticated big-city vibe, their joint inSITE festival attracted the attention of international curators and arts reporters and, importantly, funders. Ambos Nogales, or Both Nogales, as the towns are affectionately known, are a fraction of the size of Tijuana-San Diego. Their total population was about 241,000 in 2016, with all but 21,000 of those souls living south of the line in Nogales, Sonora. Neither town has a moneyed art audience. Arizona’s Nogales is a small Mexican American town with an economy heavily dependent on border enforcement and produce brokers that ship Mexican fruits and vegetables into the United States. Nogales, Sonora, is a factory town, specializing in maquiladoras. These U.S.-run factories hire Mexican workers at low Mexican wages and, courtesy of NAFTA, export their products north over the border without paying tariffs. The city’s small-scale tourism trade dropped off precipitously starting around 2008, imperiled by North American fears of drug violence; around the same time, many of the maquilas, as they’re known, decamped for Asia, where they could pay workers even less.8 Neither town had the art infrastructure—or the money—to support a festival of inSITE’s size. But the Nogalenses had a little contact with some of the California hotshots. In 1995, Judy Baca, a Chicana muralist, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the force behind Los Angeles’s Great Wall of California, had a show at the tiny Hilltop Gallery in Nogales, Arizona. Even before that, in 1990, the BAW/TAF artists rolled into the region during the hellfire summer months. Moving along all 1,969 miles of the U.S-Mexico line in an “interactive traveling caravan,” they created a borderlong binational project called Border Sutures.9 The team made huge metal staples that they used to “suture” the divided border back into one piece. Each staple’s two sharp points were planted into the earth, one on each side of the international divide. From the far end of Texas/Tamaulipas, through Arizona/Sonora, to the beaches of California and Baja California, their staples knitted together la frontera.

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“They were wild guys,” Quiroz remembered. “They healed the wound by stitching it together.” 10 But unknown to the outside art world, scrappy Nogales, Sonora, was incubating its own homegrown mural movement.

Border Dynamics The Nogales team of Morackis and Serrano, both self-taught artists, had met at a rock concert in Hermosillo in 1996.11 Morackis had worked in Nogales’s pre-NAFTA maquiladoras in the late 1970s and 1980s; at the Jefel factory, he and other workers were handling dangerous asbestos, and he was fired when he put together a committee to try to better working conditions. Even when he was tossed out of the maquila, he continued organizing and “refused to go down without a fight.” 12 Morackis had been drawing since he was a little kid, and he soon began using paint to fight for justice. A generation younger than Morackis, Serrano had come from Sinaloa in his early twenties in 1992 to work in the maquilas. He was still doing shifts when he and Morackis began to collaborate on murals. They set up shop in an old bullring two miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border and operated as Taller Yonke (Junk Studio).13 “There are a lot of junkyards in Nogales,” Morackis deadpanned in 2004. “And Mexico is the junkyard of the U.S.” Inspired by the trio of great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the two painted the town with Aztec imagery and other traditional indigenous motifs, all rendered giant size and in brilliant colors. In their mural Jardín de la Vida (Garden of Life), now destroyed, the implacable border barrier blocked off all but a sliver of sky above a garden. A godlike head, straight out of pre-Columbian Mexican art, presided within a giant flower, and human hearts sprouted out of the ground. A young boy in one of those flower-like hearts was sad faced— like the Nogales street kids— and out of his backpack he was selling human hearts.14 “We have a system,” said Morackis. “We mix our own styles, and it looks like they’ve been done by one person.” Occasionally, the Taller Yonke duo went solo. In 1996, in México Opuesto (Mexico in Opposition), Morackis painted a huge writhing snake, all gold and

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brown, in the clutches of an eagle armed with blood-red claws. Painted along a street close to the United States, just three blocks south of the international line, the mural’s triumphant eagle— the emblem of Mexico— delivered a not-so-subtle challenge to its northern neighbor. The Nogalenses nicknamed the popular mural La Serpiente.15 A few years after the oppositional eagle roosted in Nogales, the rising toll of migrant deaths in Arizona brought a new urgency to art along the line. Beyond Borders: Binational Art Foundation, a nonprofit in Tucson, inspired by the success of inSITE, commissioned Serrano and Morackis to create a public art piece. The Yonke artists began pondering a project that would confront and subvert the border wall, but they did not want to make still another painted mural. Instead they conceived a three-dimensional crossborder piece that would incorporate the irresistible expanse of the border wall itself. The plan was to put monumental metal figures on either side of the international divide, two in Mexico, two in the United States. Each of the human figures, their suffering flesh painted to look like meat, would be a muscular fourteen feet tall. Three were to push forcefully into the actual border wall, touching it with their hands. The fourth would rest against the barrier, seemingly exhausted. The message was ambiguous. Depending on their geographic location— and political context— the meaning of the figures would change. What looked like a push for migration on the Mexican side might look more like resistance from the American side. Either the figures were trying to knock down the wall and walk on across— or they were trying to hold off the hordes. The title? Border Dynamics. In the end, the Border Patrol nixed the plan for a binational location. The U.S. authorities could not control what happened on the Sonoran side, but they could and did forbid the artists to place anything in Arizona. After all, the artists’ political message would be propped right on the Border Patrol’s chief tool of border enforcement, an irony hardly welcomed by U.S. authorities. And one could imagine the big sloping figures easily serving as a chute— or ladder— into the United States. Gregory Sale, then an administrator with the Arizona Commission on the Arts, lamented the Border Patrol’s denial. “It was a nice project, it had integrity, and it addressed social

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Figure 7.2 Detail from Border Dynamics, by Guadalupe Serrano and Alberto

Morackis, installed on the Mexico side of the border wall in Nogales, Sonora. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

issues that are part of international dialogue,” he said. But with security fears rampant, especially along the border, “it’s way more difficult, post-9/11” to do political art. In 2003, the artists erected all four of their nine hundred-pound figures on Mexican soil, where they leaned into the American wall. The placement diluted the meaning, but the work debuted to local acclaim. While Nogales officials gave speeches at the inaugural ceremony, Border Patrol agents silently watched from the U.S. hills. But the artwork’s location along la frontera had always been intended to be temporary. The piece traveled to the University of Arizona campus in Tucson later that year; the university eventually bought it and positioned it permanently on campus. Now, removed

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from the contested border, the work took the form that the artists had originally envisioned. The improvised wall dividing the figures was a corrugated steel mock-up of the real barrier down on the border, and the sculpture finally enacted the push and pull of migration. Two powerful figures leaned in full force from either side, using all their strength to push against the border wall, a barrier that operated both literally and figuratively as an emblem of the divide between two nations.

Murals on the Border Wall The year after the Taller Yonke artists debuted Border Dynamics, they were ready to confront the border deaths directly. The two Mexicans had known Quiroz since the midnineties, and the three agreed to collaborate. If Border Dynamics used the border wall literally, as barrier, Paseo de Humanidad used it metaphorically. The expanse of the metal “canvas” stood in for the vast sweep of Arizona desert al otro lado, on the other side. With its fierce coyotes, flaming hearts, and a truck stuffed with skulls, Paseo shrieked out warnings to travelers about the dangers of the journey ahead. And the work raged against an uncompassionate capitalism that forced human beings to make the treacherous passage across borders. With the passage of NAFTA in 1994, cheap American corn had been dumped into Mexico. Mexican campesinos displaced from their milpas surged into the United States, willing to work for the lowest wages America was willing to pay. Morackis and Serrano painted a retail bar code onto a saguaro, emblematic of an America where everything is for sale. Quiroz was more literal with a giant flying dollar sign and— even more to the point, considering what undocumented workers can earn— a cent sign. Flanking Morackis and Serrano’s painted human figures, Quiroz’s shiny milagros were prayers in aluminum, taking their form from the popular folk icons whose name means “miracle.” The Mexican devout use these small tin pieces when they pray, to strengthen their petition for a cure from heart disease, say, by clutching a heart-shaped milagro, or offering up a tiny metal leg while praying for a broken femur to mend. An ordinary milagro can be cupped in a hand, but Quiroz’s were writ large, four feet by four feet.

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Arranged along the rusty wall, Quiroz’s milagros, when read in sequence, recounted the migrant journey. The tale began with a flaming heart that sent the wanderer away from home. Next was a snarling coyote head, a stand-in for the human coyotes who smuggle migrants across the border for cash. Finally, there was a big human leg and foot, dressed in border-crossing jeans and a sneaker, running across the desert. Up ahead lay multiple death heads: skulls piled in a truck; a trio of skulls at the foot of a saguaro; and a single skull lying next to empty water bottles. Quiroz used the milagros as static warnings about desert perils, while the Yonke artists created a traveling pageant of humanity. Like a medieval “dance of death” updated for modern times, their Paseo was a queue of colored-metal humans rushing forward in a great wave of movement. The artists strove to combine Aztec iconography (fish spouting words, a coyote head grinning) with a contemporary sensibility. Metaphorically and literally, “the border is a revolving door,” Morackis said, and the Paseo cavalcade began at left with an image of just such a door, exactly like the real revolving door up the street at the port of entry. The traveling figures surging al norte carried a Virgin of Guadalupe and mariachi instruments, bringing, as Morackis put it, “their labor to the U.S. as well as their culture.” Above them was a map of a much larger Mexico, as it looked before it lost so much of its territory to the United States in the Mexican-American War and before the United States bought pieces of Arizona and New Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase. The middle section conjured up the slog through the desert, where the burning floor is a “camino with fire,” as Morackis’s borderlands Spanglish had it. One woman was giving birth in the torrid wilderness, her belly exploding with light. A smuggler seeking protection had painted his chest with the image of Malverde, the borderlands Robin Hood who is the patron saint of traffickers. At the far right, a Border Patrol agent gave chase to a pack of fleeing border crossers. The agent’s chest was made of the same corrugated metal as the border wall, and he had a voice bubble like a cartoon character’s— but he was spouting Latin, as incomprehensible as English is to the people he was pursuing. Above this human parade was a murderous blazing sun. Wearing the death mask of the Aztec gods, the burning sol warned migrants of the tragedies that might well befall them on the other side. “It’s a way for the

Figure 7.3 Detail of Paseo de Humanidad, by Guadalupe Serrano, Alberto Morackis, and Alfred Quiroz. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

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migrants to see the dangers that are behind the wall in the desert,” the soft-­ spoken Serrano said in Spanish. “Does it work? Who knows?” At least one admirer thought that it did. The same day that Hernández and Arellano and dozens of others passed Paseo on their journey into the United States, Nogales resident Noel González and his son Noel-­Fernando stopped to admire it. “I like it; it’s well-­designed,” González said. “It’s about the dangers in the desert. It’s hard, they don’t find water. It’s about death.” The locals learned to love it. “What is amazing is that no one disturbed the work while it was on the border wall from 2004 to 2010,” Quiroz said in 2017. “Individuals living on Calle Internacional were very protective of the work and commented on how many tourists were visiting the installation.” Once a local man chided Quiroz for trying to straighten a sign at the installation. “He did not know I was one of the artists. He lived across the street.” 16 During the six years that Paseo delivered its warning from the battered wall, at least one other mural appeared on the fence. In 2005, one year after Morackis and Serrano portrayed the terror of Mexican migrants hurtling down the “camino of fire,” they shepherded the creation of a painting that idealized life in rural Mexico. The new mural was painted right on the wall’s corrugated metal, along hilly Calle Internacional, a few blocks west of Paseo. The two muralists instigated the project, but they enlisted local residents from both sides of the border to paint it. Officially called Vida y sueños de la cañada perla (Life and Dreams of the Pearl Stream), and nicknamed the Mural de Taniperla, it was an idyllic depiction of indigenous people living in the mountains of Chiapas. The painting was a copy of a 1998 work painted by Sergio Valdez and numerous Tzeltal Indians in embattled Chiapas, where the Zapatistas were in a standoff with the Mexican army. Soldiers invaded the pueblo of Taniperla and destroyed the original painting, Serrano said, and Valdez was jailed for six months. To show support for the embattled people of Chiapas, artists around the world painted identical murals on their own hometown walls. The original and its painted copies pictured the rolling green hills of Taniperla, a blue sky full of birds and butterflies, brightly painted houses, and people in indigenous garb. Emiliano Zapata, the legendary revolutionary, floated overhead. In the Nogales edition, the colors rippled across the corrugated metal of the border wall, and the painted Chiapas sky seemed to merge with the

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Figure 7.4 Detail of Vida y sueños de la cañada perla (Life and Dreams of the Pearl Stream), a community-painted mural rescued from the border wall in Nogales. Based an earlier Chiapas version, the Sonoran re-creation was painted under the auspices of Taller Yonke. Photograph by Dan Millis.

real Sonoran sky overhead. This cheerful international collaboration had a political subtext: the contemporary Zapatista rebellion. Among the idyllic fields, some Zapatistas could be seen armed with rifles, their faces concealed behind ski masks. A third mural that appeared was far more ominous. A few blocks from the DeConcini port of entry, where the steep slopes push the border wall high into the sky, a solo artist named Ruben Daniel painted Santa Muerte— Holy Death. He positioned this skeletal new folk saint of the borderlands below the border wall— on a slab of concrete firmly planted in Mexican soil. The painting’s location had a remarkable historical resonance. The death-head saint was deliberately positioned where a small nineteenth-century border marker was overshadowed by the monster barricade of the late twentieth century, each of them a distinct manifestation of a wildly different border policy. At the top of a hill, the rusty panels of the fifteen-foot landing flats

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towered over the nineteenth-­century boundary monument, one of the many white obelisks erected in the late 1850s and early 1890s by the U.S. Boundary Commission to mark the new international line between Mexico and the United States. The obelisks—­mini–­Washington Monuments—­still survive here and there, reminders of a time when the border was open and enforcement was minimal.17 Directly below the obelisk was the haunting painting, a death mask of Santa Muerte, a modern figure given life by contemporary border travails. Saint Death, or La Huesuda, the Bony Lady, is the object of veneration in a rapidly expanding cult, an icon condemned by the Roman Catholic Church but venerated by adherents for the quick miracles she delivers.18 Santa Muerte is now worshipped all over Mexico and in Mexican communities in the United States, but here on the border, her identification with the death of migrants was inescapable. Daniel’s version was a full-­size skeleton cloaked in the traditional black robe of the Grim Reaper and carrying a scythe. His Santa Muerte also echoed Quiroz’s denunciation of U.S. economic oppression. She was surrounded by Aztec figures, but above her head was a painted version of the pyramid that appears on the back of the U.S. dollar bill. Daniel was a wildcat artist who had some friction with Taller Yonke, and the mural duo remained the best-­known art enterprise in town. Morackis had devoted himself entirely to art ever since he had flamed out in the maquiladoras, but for years Serrano split his time between painting walls and working the factory line. In 1997, he began to earn a little from the city for his public art projects, but in the time of Paseo, he was still in a maquila, recycling computer parts to support his wife and two children. Only in 2005 was he finally able to quit and paint full time. Two years later, he officially became a city employee, one of several artists paid to create art for the people of Nogales.19 An unexpected death put an end to the pair’s fertile partnership. Morackis had gone to Spain in late 2008 to mount an exhibition of his work. He had apparently been suffering from tuberculosis, and on his trip, he fell seriously ill. He languished for three weeks in a hospital, and that December he died of pneumonia, two days before his fiftieth birthday. His obituary credited him with no fewer than twenty works of public art, including solo works and collaborations with Serrano; most were in Nogales, but a few were in Hermosillo and Querétaro.20

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Taller Yonke had to regroup after the devastating blow of Morackis’s death. Serrano eventually teamed up with Luis Diego Taddei, a like-­minded young Nogales artist whose personal work used the city’s trash—­more yonke—­as its raw material. His paintings featured splintery planks of raw lumber thrust outward from the canvas, or faces cut in two by the border wall.21 These two simpatico artists soldiered on together, continuing the Taller Yonke style. The studio’s murals were large format and edgy, relying on Mesoamerican and Catholic folk imagery for some of their most challenging images—­such as skinless heads and floating hearts. These deadly themes, taken from ex votos and paintings of the Sacred Heart, inevitably suggest the nearby border wall and the killing field on the other side. One of their murals, at the top of a staircase in the municipal building, pictures ocher-­tinted humans struggling to climb a human-­made barrier; beyond that structure they face a forbidding cubist landscape of mountains in pinks and yellows. A peaceful painting near a basketball court imagines a more tranquil Nogales, hillsides of colorful painted houses, where workers, perhaps, can make a decent living and no one needs to leap over the looming barricade.22

The Fall of the Landing-­M at Wall After years of functioning as a canvas for artists, the border wall finally came down. In the summer of 2011, Granite Construction knocked down three miles of the landing-­flats wall in Nogales and replaced it with steel poles, banishing more than a decade’s worth of art. The new border wall that replaced it rises as high as thirty feet in some places, according to Steve Passement, a Border Patrol supervising agent. The massive poles, six inches square and filled with concrete, descend six feet down into the earth. The beauty of the new wall, from the Border Patrol perspective, is that it is see-­through. The heavy posts are separated by four inches of open air, too small for a body to slip through, but big enough to allow la migra to look south into Mexico. “Our agents need to be aware of what’s on the other side,” Passement said. “There’s always the chance of being rocked”—­hit by rocks thrown from the other side. “The new [wall] definitely gives agents an awareness.” 23

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But the new wall is hardly hospitable to art. Border Dynamics had long since found a safe berth at the University of Arizona, and Paseo was carefully removed in 2010 in anticipation of the wall’s demolition. Alfred Quiroz’s silver milagros migrated back to his Tucson studio. Morackis and Serrano’s colored-­metal figures traveled to Karin Newby Gallery in Tubac, a tony town north of the border. For months, the provocative pieces dominated the gallery’s outdoor sculpture garden, making a distinct contrast to the town’s usual kitschy southwestern art. In late 2011, the Paseo pieces were uprooted once again, this time traveling to the University of Arizona. During the five-­month run of The Border Project exhibition inside the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the vibrant figures were hung on the façade of the architecture building—­not far from Border Dynamics. Paseo’s migrants running across the desert, trying to flee death, corresponded with the museum exhibition’s wrenching display of multimedia border art, featuring, among other things, portraits of border crossers and recordings of their anguished voices.24 After the exhibition ended in spring 2012, the shimmering pieces were exiled into storage in Tucson.25 The Taniperla mural had a narrow escape from the wrecking ball. The painting could not simply be unfastened and carried away: its scenes of Chiapas were painted directly onto the metal border wall. When the wall went down, Taniperla would go with it. Granite Construction started knocking down the old wall on June 6, 2011, and the demolition workers were scheduled to reach Taniperla within ten days. Alarmed by the looming loss, Serrano, activists, and members of arts groups on both sides of the border led a crusade to save it. Dan Millis of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign alerted the media, and even Arizona congressional representative Raúl Grijalva joined the fray. This time the art advocates and the Border Patrol were aligned. Saving a pretty painting whose underlying political intent was not immediately obvious was a cause both parties could get behind. Border Patrol authorities instructed Granite to use care in taking down Taniperla, and early on the morning of June 16, the mural’s thirty panels were gently felled.26 The artists of Nogales, Sonora, hauled the pieces to Serrano’s studio, and like Paseo’s multiple parts, Taniperla’s panels were placed in storage.27

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The less prized art on the wall fared worse. Years’ worth of political graffiti disappeared along with the wall’s rusted flats, which were carted off to be sold as scrap metal. The fate of the white crosses is unknown. The city’s giant border canvas may be gone, but Nogales still energetically promotes its art. In 2009 it established el Centro Cultural los Nogales, employing Serrano and other public artists to paint and maintain murals and to teach. The long-­ awaited Museo Arte de Nogales opened in 2012.28 The museum’s debut show exhibited paintings by Nogales artists, but Morackis was given the place of honor. “Historically, Morackis was the most important artist in Nogales,” Juan Amparano Gámez, the director of the new art museum, later told a reporter. “All of us local artists were practically born with him.” 29 And when Morackis’s beloved Serpiente mural was painted over in November 2011 by an overzealous city graffiti-­cleanup crew, Serrano and Taddei repainted it within weeks, respectfully signing their names below Morackis’s. “Serpiente,” Amaparano said, is “a piece that screams of identity, justice, democracy and many other things that are always in play in the identity of the U.S. border area.” 30 Serrano is proud of what he has brought to his adopted city: “I see the public art we’ve done at Taller Yonke as the thing that gives the city an identity, both cultural and artistic. With these murals in a very eclectic style, we’ve succeeded in putting Nogales on the art map.” 31 And the work that first brought attention to the town’s art was on the border wall.32 Fortunately, the wall’s two downed murals were hauled out of storage in 2014 and put back into service. The colored-­metal figures made by Serrano and Morackis were hung once again on Calle Internacional, but not on the wall itself. This time they were fastened to a Mexican structure that faces north, and the dancing figures of migrants confront the barrier.33 Quiroz has been exhibiting his shiny milagros, taking them to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2015 for a Chicano mural show, and to New York in 2016 for a Fencing Democracy group show at apexart. The Taniperla mural also was restored to street duty in 2014. The lyrical painting of rural Chiapas, still occupying the metal panels of the old border wall, is on Calle Ruiz Cortines, ironically by the Municipal Police station.34 In 2016, Serrano, one-­time maquila laborer and passionate street artist, rose to the directorship of the Museo de Arte de Nogales, close to the border.

Figure 7.5 Guadalupe Serrano with border wall art Paseo de Humanidad, by Guadalupe Serrano, Alberto Morackis, and Alfred Quiroz. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.

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The modernist structure needs a lot of work, and Serrano is “just making it work as two big galleries and space for young creators.” Serrano’s Taller Yonke partner Diego Taddei moved to Tucson, and Serrano activates the workshop only when he has a specific project and invites selected artists to participate. But he’s busy with his own work, planning a new border piece to go up in 2018 in collaboration with American activists.35 Most of the time, the poles of the new border wall remain unadorned. A Mexican-born California artist, Ana Teresa Hernández, blew into Nogales in October 2015 to erase the border wall temporarily— with paint. For her project Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), she enlisted locals, including a deportee from the United States, to paint the bollard wall sky blue. Blending with the deep blue Southwest sky, the newly cerulean poles seemed to disappear.36 Enterprising Mexicans have co-opted the see-through wall for their own purposes, using it as a place where divided families can reach out and touch. Within days of the new bollard wall going up in 2011, several families had a cross-border visit in a quiet district east of the port of entry. The mothers and children were on the Mexican side of the wall, and the dads were on the American. One little girl had dressed up in pink to see her father. She sat by her mother, her legs dangling into the ditch created by the new wall. Her parents leaned into the poles, and her father listened intently as her mother spoke. A few feet away, a little boy of five or six had brought along a school paper— a drawing, perhaps?— to give to his father. The child was too small to push the paper into the United States, so his father thrust his own hand between the bars and reached toward his child in Mexico.37 Santa Muerte remains on its concrete slab on Mexican soil, unaffected by the comings and goings of North American construction crews. The wall above the painting changed, but the terrifying reminder of mortality in Saint Death’s eyes did not. Nor did the deaths abate. As of October 31, 2017, the known deaths of border crossers in the Arizona borderlands al norte had reached more than three thousand.38 And on October 10, 2012, a sixteen-year-old Mexican boy, José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, died just steps away from Santa Muerte’s fierce glare, shot to death by the U.S. Border Patrol. Agent Lonnie Swartz, standing high on the hillside in Arizona, aimed his gun downward through

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the border bars and shot across the international line, pumping ten bullets into the unarmed teen, seven of them in his back. Swartz was standing some thirty feet above Elena, behind the bars of the border wall, but he claimed he acted in fear for his life, declaring that Elena was throwing rocks at him from the street below. The agent was charged with second-degree murder; after numerous delays, his trial in federal court is set for 2018, more than five years after the boy’s death.39 Elena’s grieving family quickly constructed a traditional Mexican shrine at the site of his death, adorning it with an engraving of Elena’s face and a sea of flowers and candles. They regularly lead vigils along Calle Internacional, the street where he died. At one of the early vigils, on the six-month anniversary of his death, protesters gathered on both sides of the border. Like the families separated by immigration, they made innovative use of the see-through wall, defying the separation created by the barrier. Chanting and singing, they held hands with neighbors across the international line. Mexicans and Americans alike threaded banners through the bars. They held aloft Elena’s picture, denouncing his killing. And like the artists of Nogales who turn their rage into paint and metal, the protesters demanded an end to the deaths of innocents all across the borderlands.

Notes

1.

2.

Parts of this chapter originally appeared in slightly different form in Tucson Weekly, in the articles “Artistic Warning,” May 13, 2004; “Art Has No Borders,” November 4, 2010; and “Barrier Rebuilt,” June 23, 2011, all written by Margaret Regan. Used by permission of the author. “Missing Migrant Project,” Coalición de Derechos Humanos, accessed June 20, 2013, http://derechoshumanosaz.net/projects/arizona-recovered-bodies-project/. Arizona’s Tucson Sector takes in most of the state, stretching some 262 miles along the border with Sonora, from New Mexico clear to Yuma County. Coalicion de Derechos Humanos no longer compiles migrant deaths. The nonprofit Humane Borders keeps track of bodies at https://www.humaneborders.org/wp -content/uploads/deathpostercumulative_letter16.pdf. The Pima County Medical Examiner also records the deaths. I am grateful to Ed McCullough for compiling the Medical Examiner data; each month, Dr. McCullough charts the numbers of recovered human remains and the

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3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

locations where they were found. The numbers of migrant deaths cited here are based on data from all these sources. Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). Margaret Regan, “Artistic Warning: A Group Including Tucsonan Alfred Quiróz Hopes to Send a Message About Border-Crossing Deaths with Their Gigantic Nogales Border Art,” Tucson Weekly, May 13, 2004. Margaret Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt: As a New Wall Is Built Through Nogales, Well-Known Art Is Being Relocated or Destroyed,” Tucson Weekly, June 23, 2011. Guisela Latorre, “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics: Richard Lou’s Performance and Multimedia Artwork,” American Studies Journal, no.  57 (2012), http:// www.asjournal .org /57 -2012 /richard -lous -performance -and -multimedia-artwork. Ila Sheren, “From the Trojan Horse to the Human Cannonball: InSite at the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1997– 2005” (paper presented at 1st International Forum for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars, Transnational Latin American Art, University of Texas, Austin, November 6– 8, 2009), http://www.academia .edu/1659868/From_the_Trojan_Horse_to_the_Human_Cannonball_InSite _at_the_U.S.-Mexico_Border_1997-2005. Regan, Death of Josseline. Latorre, “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics.” Regan, “Artistic Warning.” Ibid. Miriam Davidson, Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 33. Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Margaret Regan, “Art Has No Borders: Organizations in Tubac, Amado and Sonora Team Up to Break Down Barriers,” Tucson Weekly, November 4, 2010. Tim Steller, “Blog: In Nogales, Sonora, Workers See Mural as Graffiti, Paint It Over,” Señor Reporter blog, Arizona Daily Star, November 21, 2012, http:// tucson.com/news/blogs/senor-reporter/blog-in-nogales-sonora-workers-see -mural-as-graffiti-paint/article_8f60df3c-3418-11e2-9fc9-0019bb2963f4.html. Alfred Quiroz, personal communication, October 18, 2017. Claire E. Carter, “Straddling the Fence” in David Taylor Monuments: 276 Views of the United States-Mexico Border (Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, in association with the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, 2015), 287. R. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Guadalupe Serrano, personal communication, June 27, 2013.

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20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Rubén A. Ruiz, “Fallece el artista Alberto Morackis,” Desde Sonora, December 16, 2008, http://desdesonora.blogspot.com/2008/12/fallece-el-artista-alberto -morackis.html. Regan, “Art Has No Borders”; Mari Herreras, “Arte en el Otro Lado / Art on the Other Side: Some Residents of Nogales, Sonora, Say that Art Can Revive Their Struggling City,” Tucson Weekly, December 8, 2011. Herreras, “Arte en el Otro Lado.” Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.” Margaret Regan, “Despite the Hardships: Powerful Works Make UAMA’s Uneven ‘Border Project’ Worth a Visit,” Tucson Weekly, January 19, 2012. Guadalupe Serrano, personal communication, June 17, 2013. Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.” Serrano, personal communication, June 17, 2013. Ibid., June 27, 2013. Steller, “Workers See Mural as Graffiti.” Ibid. Serrano, personal communication, June 27, 2013. Ibid., June 17, 2013. Serrano, personal communication, October 18, 2017. Ibid. Ibid. Abe Ahn, “Erasing the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence,” Hyperallergic, November 2, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/248786/erasing-the-us-mexico-border-fence. Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.” Coalición de Derechos Humanos, “Missing Migrant Project.” Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services, “Defense, Prosecution Agree to Postpone Border Agent’s Murder Trial,” Arizona Daily Star, September 23, 2017, http://tucson.com/news/local/defense-prosecution-agree-to-postpone-border -agent-s-murder-trial/article_7ea8cb17-ab96-5e8a-8872-143b13db3e00.html.

8

Visible Frictions The Border Film Project and Self-Representation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands REBECCA M. SCHREIBER

I

n April 2005, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Project, an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, organized an action and publicity event in Tombstone, Arizona, with the goal of attracting media attention to issues concerning “illegal” immigration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The Minutemen, as they called themselves, were primarily attempting to influence the perspectives of politicians on U.S. immigration policy during President George W. Bush’s second term, when tensions regarding immigration had become increasingly fraught. Scholars, including Leo R. Chavez, who have written about the Minutemen’s actions in April 2005 have argued that they used their surveillance of undocumented migrants to produce a spectacle on the U.S.-Mexico boundary.1 The Minutemen’s use of visual technologies of surveillance, as well as how the mainstream media participated in creating a spectacle of the Minutemen’s actions, are a form of social violence.2 Between 2005 and 2007, the Border Film Project, described by organizers Brett Huneycutt, Victoria Criado, and Rudy Adler as a “collaborative art” project, also attempted to address conflicts over U.S.-Mexico border policy.3 The organizers of this documentary photography project distributed disposable cameras in northern Mexico to Mexican and Central American migrants, who were headed to the United States, and to members of the Minuteman Project, who were positioned at “observation sites” along the

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U.S. side of the U.S.-­Mexico border. Rather than addressing the views of state officials, the Border Film Project focused on individual perspectives of and by migrants and Minutemen to represent what organizers viewed as “both sides” of the debate over U.S. border policy.4 The photographs taken by migrants and Minutemen first circulated as part of an exhibition in galleries and were the basis for the 2007 book Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.-­Mexico Border.5 This emphasis on including photographs by migrants and Minutemen was based on the idea that there is an objective middle ground to what the organizers position as two opposing perspectives. Although the organizers of the Border Film Project downplay their own roles in the meaning and effect of the images, as curators they made crucial decisions regarding the selection and organization of these photographs in the exhibitions and in the book. By constructing a visual and textual parallel between migrants and Minutemen, the organizers make absent the power differentials between U.S. citizens and undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants in the United States. Further, the organizers evade the specific ways in which the Minutemen have taken part in the U.S. government’s policing of undocumented migrants’ movement from Mexico into the United States and do not address the question of vigilante violence conducted by groups and individuals aligned with the Minuteman Project against undocumented migrants in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. Indeed, an emphasis of the project is the construction of compositional similarity between photographs of migrants and Minutemen. What does it mean to provide supposedly equal representation and to construct a pictorial equivalence between migrants and Minutemen? These visual arrangements appear intended to convey an immanent parallel between these groups. The artifice of equality and equivalence deployed visually relates to the larger ideological work of the Border Film Project to construct an ostensibly neutral middle ground between these two groups, all the while disavowing the curatorial logic of the project’s organizers. How are photographic representations of undocumented migrants and Minutemen articulated through discourses of exhibition and distribution in the Border Film Project, and how are these practices inscribed by unequal relations of power? A visual and cultural analysis of the Border Film Project, drawing

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particularly on the theoretical perspective of photographer and critic Allan Sekula, offers an opportunity to address these questions within the historical and political contexts of the early twenty-­first century. Huneycutt, Criado, and Adler originally conceived of the Border Film Project as a way to “shed light on the issue of ‘illegal’ immigration,” primarily in relation to the U.S.-­Mexico border.6 During the summer of 2005, following the Minuteman Project’s month-­long action and publicity event in Tombstone, Arizona, the organizers spent a few weeks traveling and filming on both sides of the U.S.-­Mexico border. Instead of editing this footage into a film, the group decided to give disposable cameras to Mexican and Central American migrants in Mexico and to members of the Minuteman Project in the United States so that individuals in both groups could “document the border” through their own eyes.7 In a radio interview, the organizers explained that they felt giving cameras to these groups would enable them to represent themselves and to provide a “more realistic” perspective as opposed to how they had been portrayed in the mainstream media. As a result, the Border Film Project would offer up a different understanding of the effects of U.S. border policy.8 The Border Film Project organizers had initially envisioned creating an exhibition of the photographs by migrants. They started by visiting migrant shelters and humanitarian organizations on the Mexican side of the border, explaining their project to migrants in groups.9 They then taught the migrants how to use disposable cameras and told them how to mail them back to the organizers once they were in the United States. In exchange for mailing back their disposable cameras, the organizers offered each of the migrants a $25 gift card at Walmart. Later, the organizers distributed cameras in areas where members of the Minuteman Project had set up self-­made observation sites near the U.S.-­Mexico boundary in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. If the Minutemen mailed back their cameras to the organizers, they would receive a $25 gift card at Shell. Minutemen were asked to fill out and include with the camera a card that asked for name, address, age, phone number, e-­mail address, hometown, and observation site. These individuals could also indicate if they wanted copies of the pictures and were asked whether the organizers could display their first name, age, and hometown with the images. After the organizers received a substantial

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number of cameras back from the migrants and Minutemen, they started to organize exhibitions of their photographs. By 2007, the organizers had received seventy-­three cameras, thirty-­eight from migrants and thirty-­five from Minutemen, with a total of two thousand photographs.10 With these photographs the Border Film Project organizers held eleven exhibitions in galleries, bookstores, museums, and universities across the United States.11 In curating the exhibitions, the organizers were interested in creating a balance between the views of migrants and Minutemen. “The exhibit doesn’t pick sides,” the organizers contended in a radio interview, “but instead tells both the migrants’ and Minutemen’s stories.” Rudy Adler stated further, “I hope that people come to the exhibition and can see both sides, hear and listen and decide for themselves what they think the solution to the border situation should be.” 12 The strategy of self-­representation in photography is based on the notion that this form is less mediated and thus more truthful than documentary photography. Self-­representation conveys the idea that by looking at these images, the viewer is able to have direct access to the perspectives and experiences of the individuals portrayed. With this focus on self-­representation, the organizers’ interest in making these two groups visible, and to privilege visuality as somehow capable of transcending differences and revealing otherwise hidden truths, is curious. Why, in this context, do the organizers presume that visibility is undeniably a good thing? Despite their presumption that the perspectives of migrants and Minutemen needed to become more visible in U.S. society, undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants were already quite visible in the eyes of the state at the time of the project’s production. Indeed, the legal and political consequences of this visibility speak to the differences between these two groups.13 Undocumented migrants from Mexico and Central America have had a particularly difficult relation to the U.S. state, both historically and in the moment in which the Border Film Project was produced. For example, the U.S. government’s regulation of the movement of Mexican migrants into the United States since the early twentieth century has involved creating guest worker programs when U.S. industry needed low-­wage laborers and deporting these individuals during periods of economic friction.14 In the United States undocumented migrants are policed by agents of the state,

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as well as by groups such as the Minutemen, who operate in tandem with government agencies, particularly the Border Patrol, in surveilling undocumented migrants. By 2005, when the Border Film Project was being produced, anti-­ immigrant vigilante groups had already begun to use a range of surveillance technologies, such as night-­vision cameras and unmanned aerial drones, to track undocumented migrants.15 Once “caught,” migrants would be detained (under armed guard) by members of these groups as well as photographed while waiting for the Border Patrol to arrive.16 The Minutemen and other anti-­immigrant groups thus used photography not only as a form of surveillance, but also, like hunters or fishermen, to document their “catch” as trophies. Undocumented migrants had little recourse in preventing their photographs from being taken by the Minutemen or other groups. Many migrants believed the Minutemen were U.S. military personnel, since they and members of other vigilante groups typically dressed in military clothing or clothes similar to those of Border Patrol agents.17 The Minutemen’s use of cameras has also been more directly abusive, as in a case where members (including a man named Bryan Barton) forced the Mexican migrant they were detaining to hold a T-­shirt that said, “Bryan Barton caught an illegal alien and all he got was this lousy T-­shirt.” 18 The Minutemen’s use of cameras to surveil migrants, as part of the political content of the early twenty-­first century, can be interpreted as an extreme form of objectification. The growing acceptance of right-­wing militia groups, such as the Minutemen, by U.S. politicians and government agencies in the first decade of this century is essential background to a reading of the Border Film Project.19 The decision of the organizers to represent the Minutemen as furthest out on the political spectrum regarding U.S. border policy downplays the support they received not only from the Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol during the George W. Bush administration, but also from members of Congress.20 Jane Juffer argues that the figure of the Minuteman became “mainstreamed” during the years of the George W. Bush administration, appearing as a helpful citizen “volunteering” to guard the border, rather than as a vigilante who would “take the law in his own hands and punish the ‘illegal aliens’ who can be easily lumped together with terrorists.” 21 Similarly, Roxanne Lynn Doty, in her work on the Minutemen,

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has related the success of the group’s legitimating activities to its ability to influence decisions made by federal governmental agencies.22 For example, Doty suggests that Chris Simcox’s announcement that the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps Project would build a border security fence unless the White House deployed military resources led to President George W. Bush’s plan to send six hundred National Guard troops to the border as well as to sign the Secure Fence Act (2006).23 The increased militarization of the U.S.-­Mexico border in the early twenty-­ first century is a critical context for thinking about the self-­representation of migrants and Minutemen in the Border Film Project. Thus, undocumented migrants are surveilled by state agents, Minutemen, and viewers. The organizers, however, in framing their subjects through the terms of self-­representation, present the project as unconstrained by the forms of policing and coercion that are themselves the conditions of possibility for its visual economy of images and, as such, efface how it is complicit with both the Minutemen’s and the state’s surveillance of undocumented migrants. The ideas behind the Border Film Project are dominated by the liberal reformist notion that the act of making visible the problems of undocumented migrants and anti-­immigrant activists through documentary photography will result in these problems being dealt with through the rational workings of social institutions. This approach assumes an inevitable causal relation between images and action, which drives the belief that making these issues visible will allow them to be rectified. The presumed transparency between images and their meanings espoused by the Border Film Project is reminiscent of how documentary photography was understood during the 1930s—­that the camera was an unmediated form of communication and an image-­making instrument whose own apparatus necessarily disappears. This emphasis thus sees the meaning of the image as being inherent and immediate for the viewer, rather than being actively produced across multiple fields, including the particular social and institutional conditions of reception, and the interpretive dispositions of the viewer.24 The organizers’ emphasis on the transparent meaning of photographic self-­representation is also apparent in the Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.–­Mexico Border (2007). While the organizers downplay their curatorial imprint on the book’s production, of the

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two thousand photographs they received from migrants and Minutemen, they use less than 10 percent in the publication of the Border Film Project. The organizers also include short quotations in the book drawn from interviews they conducted with migrants and Minutemen to “give greater depth to the images.” The organizers interviewed migrants in Mexico who planned to cross the U.S.-­Mexico border, those already living in the United States, and migrants’ relatives in El Salvador and Mexico. They also interviewed members of the Minuteman Project at observation sites along the U.S.-­Mexico border and leaders of the Minuteman Project in Washington, D.C.25 In addition to the quotations from interviews, the organizers include two statements—­one on the “Project Background” of the Border Film Project and the other on the topic of “The U.S.-­Mexico Border”—­both of which are positioned in the center of the book. In creating a parallel between migrants and Minutemen while developing the Border Film Project from an archive of two thousand photographs, the organizers eclipse the inequities between Minutemen and undocumented migrants in the United States. The meaning of photographs, as Sekula notes, “is always directed by layout, captions, text and site and mode of presentation.” 26 In the Border Film Project, the organizers’ image choices and ordering, as well as the positioning of quotations from interviews alongside these images, construct a visual equivalence between migrants and Minutemen. In this way, the organizers “produce ‘truths’ that naturalize and legitimate relations of power in part by obscuring the operations of power.” 27 Further, by taking the images of migrants and Minutemen and arranging them without consultation with either group, the Border Film Project organizers ideologically subjugate both groups. The Border Film Project, published only in English, appears to be a coffee table book or art monograph, directed toward a U.S.-­based audience. The cover design includes an image of a Minuteman and one of a migrant, framed by circular holes cut into the cover, that are divided by a line indicating the boundary between the United States and Mexico. In its design, the cover deemphasizes the role of the Minutemen as surveilling migrants, instead positioning the viewers as surveilling both migrants and Minutemen. Viewers look through the lens-­shaped holes in the cover to view photographs of the main subjects of the Border Film Project—­an undocumented

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Figure 8.1 The cover of the Border Film Project positions the two figures along the

U.S.-Mexico border as a form of juxtaposition between the Minutemen and border crossers. Courtesy of Border Film Project.

migrant and a member of the Minuteman Project. The address to an outside audience is also evident in the organizers’ statement that the book represents the “human face of immigration” in order to “challenge us to question our stereotypes,” which in turn will enable the viewer of these images “to see through new and personal lenses.” 28 The organizers’ goals for the Border Film Project rest on the belief that representing the embodied and personal experiences and perspectives of Mexican and Central American migrants and Minutemen will contribute to a reasoned and balanced approach to reforming U.S. border policy. In the book, both the form of self-representation and the casual, presumably unselfconscious pictures of migrants and Minutemen are intended to signify reality to the viewer. The project participants were constrained in

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portraying their subject matter by the technological limitations of the disposable camera, which resulted in a different aesthetic than that of professional documentary photographers. For example, the absence of an adjustable lens prevented the participants from taking close-­ups or wide-­angle shots. And, since they returned the cameras to the organizers before processing, the participants could not further shape the images after taking the photographs. In other words, they could not interfere with the negatives—­they could not crop or retouch the photographs, and they could not select particular images and dispose of others. As a result, the photographs taken by the migrants and the Minutemen appear uncontrived and much like informal snapshots. These aesthetic qualities of the photographs are intended to validate the self-­ evidence of the images. What gets obfuscated by the organizers’ choice of self-­representation is their role in the construction of the book. One of the fundamental issues with the Border Film Project is that the organizers portray it as representing the perspectives of migrants and Minutemen because these individuals took the photographs and are quoted in the book. However, neither migrants nor Minutemen were involved in the process of selecting the photographs or quotations, or in the arranging the images or text within the book. The organizers developed the Border Film Project from an archive of photographs taken by migrants and Minutemen, a context that reflects Sekula’s statement that “Archives . . . constitute a territory of images; the unity of an archive is first and foremost that imposed by ownership.” 29 By exchanging their disposable cameras for Shell or Walmart cards, the migrants and Minutemen who participated in the Border Film Project relinquished their ownership of their photographs and their control over the organization and circulation of those images. The arrangement of images in the book appears similar to a form of ordering frequently found in photographic archives.30 Sekula argues that in photographic archives, an “empiricist model of truth” takes precedence, in which “pictures are atomized, isolated in one way and homogenized in another.” 31 The Border Film Project replicates this type of organization primarily because of two approaches to arranging the images. First, the organizers separated photographs by migrants from those by Minutemen. With few exceptions, the organizers generally position images of and by migrants across from one another

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on full-­page spreads, thus isolating them from images of and/or by Minutemen, which are also placed across from one another on full-­page spreads. The captions, which consist of quotations from the organizers’ interviews with migrants and Minutemen, are situated next to many, although not all, of the images and are ordered in a similar way, with quotations from migrants generally placed next to pictures by migrants, and quotations from Minutemen next to images by Minutemen. In this arrangement, the captions appear to correspond to or directly comment on the specific images with which they are paired. The organizers’ second approach was to pair images of migrants and Minutemen that had similar visual elements on full-­page spreads. Although the project’s intended focus on self-­representation is related to the organizers’ attempt to present the “truth” of migrant and Minuteman experiences, the positioning of images constructs a parallel between these two groups as a means to decontextualize their relation to each other. By isolating images of migrants from those of Minutemen, the organizers eclipse the relations of undocumented migrants and Minutemen. Further, when visually similar images by migrants and Minutemen are placed together on full-­page spreads, the photographs are “reduced to ‘purely visual’ concerns,” establishing what Sekula has described in his writing about photographic archives as a “relation of abstract visual equivalence between pictures.” 32 This homogenizing of migrant and Minuteman images through their formal and visual similarities appears related to the organizers’ emphasis on linking both groups by their supposed marginality in relation to the U.S. state, and by their shared belief that U.S. border policy is “broken.” Yet these two groups are fundamentally at odds with each other. While one group (migrants) tries to enter the United States, the other (Minutemen) attempts to keep them out. Moreover, in the Border Film Project, organizers align themselves with a liberal nativist position that, as anthropologist Nicholas De Genova argues, “deracialize[s] the figure of immigration in a manner that abdicates any responsibility for analyzing the racial oppression of migrants of color.” 33 In the construction of the Border Film Project, Huneycutt, Criado, and Adler deemphasize issues of race and racism within the Minuteman Project, which parallels the official statements of the Minutemen’s leaders, who, as Robin Dale Jacobson contends, “while adamantly denying the role of race[in their organization] . . . focus on the schemas of invasion.” 34

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The book contains an equal number of photographs taken by Mexican and Central American migrants as by Minutemen. While the Minutemen represent themselves as patriotic U.S. citizens guarding the border, undocumented migrants had more at risk in photographing themselves because their main goal in crossing the U.S.-­Mexico border was to evade detection. Almost all the Minutemen’s photographs relate to their surveillance of migrants. These photographs include Minutemen surveilling migrant movement, reporting migrants to the Border Patrol, and building the Minuteman fence. The images of the migrants overwhelmingly portray their attempts to hide from the gaze of state agents. The migrants’ photographs document their encounters with signs indicating that trespassers will be prosecuted, as well as their challenging travel conditions hiding in trucks, walking for miles through remote areas, climbing over barbed wire fences and walls, and sustaining injuries while doing so. In addition, they also photographed other migrants successfully crossing the U.S.-­Mexico border. In the majority of Minuteman photographs selected by Huneycutt, Criado, and Adler, the Minutemen represent themselves as nonstate actors performing the work of state agents. As such, they dress in military garb, which also suggests that they view themselves as agents of the state engaged in fighting a war. This perspective is further supported by the prevalence of photographs of Minutemen carrying weapons, especially guns; engaging in target practice; looking through binoculars; communicating with each other on walkie-­talkies or CB radios; surveilling from portable towers; and “tracking” migrants. Whereas members of the Minuteman Project have been accused of physically assaulting unarmed migrants, some items of their clothing speak directly of their belief that they are defending themselves against invaders, such as a T-­shirt that reads “Innocent Bystander.” In their photographs, American flags are omnipresent, relating to their view that they are patriotic citizens protecting the borders of “their” country. The photographs the Minutemen took of migrants, which are included in the Border Film Project, need to be situated in a larger context in which members of the Minuteman Project and other anti-­immigrant groups use imaging and surveillance technologies to both harass unauthorized migrants and make them visible to the state. Minutemen’s photographs of migrants portray them as committing the crime of crossing the U.S.-­Mexico boundary

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“illegally.” Most often the Minutemen photographed migrants being detained by a Minuteman or apprehended by Border Patrol. The Minutemen did not include themselves in the photographs detaining migrants, which would have visualized the relationship between migrants and Minutemen. Instead they appear to have used their cameras as weapons to detain the migrants while they waited for Border Patrol to arrive. For example, on a two-­page spread of photographs, the Minuteman is not visible within the boundaries of the physical picture, but the camera serves as his weapon, a form of surveillance. The viewer is led to conclude that the figure visually present in the photograph is an undocumented border crosser, creating a narrative in which the Minutemen are partners with the U.S. Border Patrol. While the Minutemen’s use of the camera to detain migrants is a legal act, it can also be seen as a form of what Justin Akers Chacón describes as “low intensity terrorism,” in which anti-­immigrant activists use cameras to harass Latino/a migrants in part by threatening to show these photographs to state agents, which could lead to migrants’ detention and deportation.35 Most of the images of and by Minutemen and migrants are on separate pages, with the exceptions showing both on the same full-­page spread when the images seem similar in appearance or content. Two photographs in the book—­one of a Minuteman couple and the other of a migrant couple—­ make this point directly. By placing these photos next to each other, the organizers attempt to emphasize the similarities between the kissing migrant couple and the Anglo couple at dinner. Huneycutt, Criado, and Adler also invite viewers to note the comparable living conditions between the two groups, juxtaposing one interior shot taken by a migrant next to another by a member of the Minuteman Project. There are many similar photographic equivalences in the book and on the website, where the images are organized under three categories—­“Migrants,” “Minutemen,” and “Similarities,” the latter referring to photographs by migrants and Minutemen that share elements of composition or subject matter.36 The website categories speak to how the organizers both isolate the two groups from one another visually while also lumping together images by Minutemen and migrants that resemble one another superficially in an attempt to relate these two groups by making absent the different context in which these photographs were taken.

Figure 8.2 Two images of couples from the Border Film Project. Courtesy of Border Film Project.

Figure 8.3 Two images of interiors from the Border Film Project. Courtesy of Border Film Project.

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The idea behind the Border Film Project was to use photography, specifically a form of self-­representation, to convey the truth of the experiences of undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants and Minutemen. In presenting their subjects through the vehicle of self-­representation, the organizers portray the project as unmediated. This interpretation is further supported by the organizers’ interest in exhibiting photographs by undocumented migrants and Minutemen, whom they view as representing “both sides” of the debate over U.S. border policy. In addition to positioning undocumented migrants and Minutemen on opposite ends of the political spectrum concerning U.S. border policy, the organizers relate them by their supposed shared belief that the “U.S. border policy system is broken and needs to be fixed.” 37 The perception that these groups view this policy as “broken” does not indicate common ground. In emphasizing this one shared value, as well as by constructing a visual equivalence between undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants and Minutemen, the organizers do not acknowledge the different relations of these groups to the U.S. state and thus make absent the power differentials between U.S. citizens and undocumented migrants in the United States. The organizers position the Border Film Project as the rational center from which U.S. border policy should be developed. As Mike Davis argues, however, “‘Rational border policy’ is simply a fantasy, if not a sheer oxymoron.” 38 The limitations of the Border Film Project seem to stem at least in part from the organizers’ choice not to delve into the root causes of migration. They do not, for example, frame the issues globally, which, in this case, would involve an examination of the role of the United States in contributing to the unauthorized migration of individuals from Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere. The organizers’ perspective also makes absent the ways in which U.S. border policies have led to the increased militarization of the U.S.-­Mexico border, which has contributed to the growth of anti-­immigrant groups while also producing the “illegality” of migrants from Mexico.39 The organizers’ decisions have other consequences as well. In representing the Border Film Project as unmediated, they present the project as (at least partially) about migrants representing themselves and their experiences. This perspective ostensibly authenticates the project. Yet, by taking up a liberal nativist position in relation to unauthorized migration, they

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also position the migrants’ photographs in very particular ways. While the migrants who participated in the Border Film Project visually represent their experiences traveling through the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands, the organizers frame these images as documenting the migrants’ “illegal” movement. The organizers state that the migrants, through their involvement with the project, are able to represent their own experiences, but this claim is contradicted by how they are framed in the Border Film Project. In other words, the migrants do not construct their own activity as “illegal.” In addition to Minutemen surveilling migrants, by participating in the Border Film Project, these migrants also surveilled each other. The Border Film Project organizers viewed their act of giving cameras to migrants and Minutemen as a humanitarian gesture, because they enabled their subjects to portray their own lives. Yet there are implications in using photography to document Mexican and Central American migrants’ “illegal” passage into the United States considering the federal government’s emphasis on national security in the post-­9/11 era. This project was thus complicit with the surveillance of migrants by state agents in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. By ignoring the context of the photographs taken by the Minutemen, which are intricately connected to their surveillance of migrants on the U.S. side of the border, the Border Film Project organizers make invisible the specificity of uses and meanings these images have for these groups. As Sekula argues, “in an archive, the possibility of meaning is ‘liberated’ from the actual contingencies of use”; this “abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context,” certainly applies in this case.40 The “uses” of these photographs, which are related to the Minutemen’s surveillance and policing of undocumented migrants, are made absent in the Border Film Project. Although the Minutemen use cameras rather than guns to detain migrants, they employ visual technologies as a means to exert power over undocumented migrants. The Minutemen’s use of imaging and surveillance technologies, including cameras, in their attempts to make migrants “visible” to the state needs to be understood as a form of social violence. Through the Border Film Project, including the circulation of the disposable cameras, the photographs, and the coffee table book, the organizers participate in the Minutemen’s efforts. In this sense, the Border Film Project is complicit with

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the Minutemen’s use of visual technologies to surveil, detain, and document unauthorized migrants.

Acknowledgments In addition to the editors of this volume, Katherine Morrissey and John-­ Michael Warner, I would like to thank those who gave me feedback on this essay when I presented an earlier version at the Seminar on Latino and Borderlands Studies at the Newberry Library, Chicago, in November 2012, and at the “Looking at Arts, History and Place in the U.S.-­Mexico Borderlands” symposium at the University of Arizona in December 2011. I would also like to acknowledge Maria López for her research assistance.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 145. Scholars including Jodie M. Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo have also related the spectacle of the Minuteman Project, as well as that of former Maricopa County sheriff Joseph Arpaio, and the escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and detention of immigrants in the years that followed. Jodie M. Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo, “Policing Our Border, Policing Our Nation: An Examination of the Ideological Connections between Border Vigilantism and U.S. National Ideology” in Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis, ed. Jenna Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 181–­89. See the Border Film Project’s website, http://​www​.borderfilmproject​.com, for the use of the term “collaborative.” I understand their use of the term to mean that they believe they are collaborating with the photographers. This quotation is from a radio interview with Rudy Adler and Brett Huneycutt on NPR’s Weekend Edition in September 2006. It is archived on the Border Film Project’s website: http://​www​.borderfilmproject​.com​/en​/press. Rudy Adler, Victoria Criado, and Brett Huneycutt, Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.-­Mexico Border (New York: Abrams, 2007).

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6. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, “Project Background,” Border Film Project, n.p. 7. Ibid. 8. Adler and Huneycutt interview, NPR. 9. According to a map with distribution points labeled in the center of the book, the organizers gave out cameras to migrants primarily in the northern border states of Sonora and Chihuahua. 10. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, “Project Background.” 11. See “Exhibitions,” Border Film Project, accessed November 1, 2017, http://​www​ .borderfilmproject​.com​/en​/exhibitions. 12. Adler and Huneycutt interview, NPR. 13. In Nicholas De Genova’s essay “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality,’ ” Latino Studies 2 (July 2004): 178, he writes about the visibility of “illegal” immigration in the first decade of the twenty-­first century. 14. See James Cockcroft, Outlaws in the Promised Land: Mexican Immigrant Workers and America’s Future (New York: Grove Press, 1986); and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 15. Wayne Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted Immigration’: Lessons from the United States, 1993–­2004,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (July 2005): 784. 16. See Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, Undocumented Migrant, Legal Resident, and U.S. Citizen Victims of Anti-­Immigrant Vigilantes, United States, Admissibility Report No. 78/08, Petition 478-­05, August 5, 2009, 4, http://​www​.cidh​.oas​.org​/annualrep​/2009eng ​/USA478​-05eng​.htm. 17. Some Minutemen have even worn badges that read “Undocumented Border Patrol Agent,” which include color copies of the Department of Homeland Security seal on them. Ibid. 18. Jane Juffer, introduction to “The Last Frontier?: Contemporary Configuration of the U.S.-­Mexico Border,” ed. Jane Juffer, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (Fall 2006): 674. 19. Roxanne Lynn Doty, The Law into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Politics of Exceptionalism (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 41. Robin Dale Jacobson argues, “The Minuteman Project in the 1990s would have been a fringe group from which the mainstream restrictionist forces would have attempted to distance themselves. In 2006 the line between mainstream and extreme restrictionist forces is not so clear.” Robin Dale Jacobson, The New Nativism: Proposition 187 and the Debate Over Immigration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143.

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20. Juffer, introduction to “Last Frontier?,” 671. See also Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-­ Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 241. 21. Juffer, introduction to “Last Frontier,” 666. 22. In May 2005 when the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform held a hearing on border security, the National President of the Border Patrol Council testified about the significance of the work of the Minutemen along the border. During these hearings, Minuteman Project cofounder Chris Simcox was also asked to testify. Doty, Law into Their Own Hands, 41. 23. Ibid., 97. The Secure Fence Act was passed in September 2006 and signed by President Bush in October 2006. 24. See Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 452–­73; and Mary Price, The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 25. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, “Project Background.” 26. Allan Sekula, “Photography between Labor and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–­1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glatt Buy, Cape Breton, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Robert Wilkie (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 195–­96. 27. Ibid., 193. 28. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, “Project Background.” 29. Sekula, “Photography between Labor and Capital,” 194. 30. The ordering of the images can be deciphered by consulting the “Camera Photographer’s Information” section at the center of the book. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, Border Film Project. 31. Sekula, “Photography between Labor and Capital,” 197. 32. Ibid., 194. 33. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 72. 34. For example, Robin Dale Jacobson notes, “In August 2006, their website featured articles on the Reconquista movement, ‘Hezbollah invading U.S. from Mexico,’ [and] undocumented immigrants’ claims about political takeover.” The Minutemen also state on the Minuteman Project website that their organization “has no affiliation with, nor will we accept any assistance by or interference from, separatist, racist, or supremacy groups.” Jacobson, New Nativism, 143. 35. Akers Chacón and Davis, No One Is Illegal, 251. 36. See the Border Film Project’s website: http://​www​.borderfilmproject​.com.

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37. Adler, Criado, and Huneycutt, “Project Background.” 38. Mike Davis, foreword to Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.–­Mexico Boundary, by Joseph Nevins (New York: Routledge, 2002), xi. 39. Ibid. 40. Sekula, “Photography between Labor and Capital,” 194.

9

A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present Land Use and Representation J O H N - M I C H A E L   H . WA R N E R

S

ocially, historically, and politically situated alongside art historical conventions of American landscape paintings and photographs, as well as impressions of the North American frontier, contemporary art of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico expands current studies of landscapes and power. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, some of the salient issues that reverberated in U.S.-Mexico borderlands artworks included the racialization of borders and the uses of racialized citizenship, as defined by state production. Whether the subjects are located away from the borderline, such as in Mark Klett’s Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 (1985), or directly engaging the international border, for example, David Taylor’s Working the Line (2008– present) and Mary Jenea Sanchez’s video Historias en la Camioneta (2010), the racialization of borders and the uses of citizenship by nations help shape both the artists’ and the viewers’ impressions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Through the artists’ use of land and representation of the landscape, these three border artworks bear witness to a range of often unheard human experiences and render visible some forms of state production, such as laws and treaties that are used to mark people as suspect. The artworks of Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez significantly reverberate with what historian Samuel Truett describes as “hidden histories” of the American and Mexican frontier.1

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In addition to aesthetically visualizing a variety of borderlands experiences, Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez trace in their work the intellectual dynamics that compose the practice of history. Klett’s photograph pictures the afterlife of a U.S.-­constructed border site designated for Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II and thus responds to the inscription of history on the landscape. Taylor’s View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) is part of a series of landscape photographs that depict residents who inhabit the present-­day U.S.-­Mexico borderlands, specifically exploring how the United States and Mexico mediate geography and culture. Mary Jenea Sanchez’s video Historias en la Camioneta (2010) begins in Agua Prieta, Sonora, pictorializes fronterizo/a narratives by rendering a national border crossing in a moving shuttle, and shifts the role of historian to camioneta (bus) passengers. Through these artists’ engagement with history, their art forms depict border spaces that are characterized by intersecting geopolitical and biopolitical modalities. In other words, the artworks deconstruct causal relationships between geography and the assumptive power and authority of the nation-­state in addition to examining the politicization of the human body.2 Each artwork resists monolithic and nationalistic forms of hegemonic history and, as such, engages with the complexity of producing borderlands knowledges, which results in a variety of U.S.-­Mexico border spaces. Focusing on land use and representation then reveals hidden histories embedded in location and sustains existing communities therein, all while concurrently examining technologies that maintain nations and nationalisms. Useful in this context, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a feminist and postcolonial study that helped establish the field of subaltern studies. Subsequently, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Spivak posits a critical look at the intellectual dynamics of philosophy, literature, history, and culture and their modes of academic production in the West. Through interpretations of Spivak’s theorization of cultural historical practice, in this chapter I query how the art forms of Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez contribute to reimagining a human-­centered landscape despite the production of national divides and militarized borderlands. Moreover, my emphasis on artistic uses and representations of land is informed by Spivak’s discussion of history as a

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means to emphasize location and community across time in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. Truett describes U.S.-­Mexico borderlands history as “a story of many peoples, shaped in distinct ways at the continental crossroads of empires, nations, markets, and cultures.” 3 Extending Truett’s articulation of borderlands history to the visual arts, specifically to the works of Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez, suggests that the label “border art” is useful for expanding and deepening frontier legacies in at least three usually intersecting ways. First, border art is geographic, or terrestrially bound. These art forms convey a sensitivity to the southern boundary of the United States and the northern edge of Mexico. In a region between two nation-­states containing numerous land-­based boundaries, border art deliberately engages with far-­reaching geopolitics. Second, border art is abstracted and layered with everyday realities, including economic and social conditions.4 Through this additional interpretation of the term “border art,” the human form becomes a site, either the actual human body or a representation of the body. The use of corporeal forms exposes hegemonic tendencies embedded in the everyday world, including the destructive nature of capitalism and the reductive structure of state-­derived citizenship. Third, border art is a critique of the normative forces within academic, social, and political discourses. Furthermore, these interpretations of North American West border art are deeply engaged with the radical and complicated practice of reading absence—­in the archive, in the historical record, and in various forms of cartography. These interrelated politics of border art emphasize myriad boundaries and divides that become material possibilities for historicizing human experiences, which help articulate hidden borderlands histories. Klett, well known for his rephotography project, explores the dimensions of the North American West landscape and respective histories of photography. For example, his series of photographs with collaborator Byron Wolf picture the Grand Canyon from a standpoint first imaged by earlier artists and surveyors.5 Klett’s oeuvre demonstrates that the art and histories of photography have a particular ability to move across sometimes divergent discourses and reveal technologies of national and art historical production. Though Klett is often considered in relation to landscape photography, especially of the West, his photographs of the region have influenced the development of border art history.6

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Klett’s Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 (1985) is part of the series Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest (1992), an album arranged with the objective of creating pictorial openings for articulating rarely acknowledged histories of the American Southwest.7 Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is unusual because it is the artist’s only representation of Poston, Arizona, and unlike much of his work, it was not based on a historical photograph. In the context of this chapter, this image speaks to many borderlands discourses in the North American West including its place on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. The photograph functions on several layers: as historical record; as a lament for racialization, including the designation of nonwhite others; and as a fantasy about the possibility of rupturing hegemonic logics. Klett’s Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is a black-­and-­white photograph that isolates a wind-­blown palm tree in the Sonoran Desert within its frame. The palm tree is not indigenous and thus references past human interaction and relations in the desert Southwest. This desert interloper has not been trimmed or maintained and has been left to grow at nature’s whim. The palm tree occupies almost the entire vertical column of the picture, and the background opens up to an empty and expansive space. As the wind sweeps the fronds across the sky, the tree appears blurred. At the edges of the frame, the materiality of the photographic process is indicated by the uncropped edges of the composition. As Klett describes, “I wanted to leave the edges intact so the viewer could see everything. Not in an effort to show the whole truth but rather to reference the process and the surface of the picture. I was conscious of the fact that the edges would construct my vision of the place and emphasize that the viewer is looking at an artificial place.” 8 Therefore, attention to the outer limits of the composition reinforces the view that Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is a constructed image of a people-­made site located on a Native North American reservation. Considered an allegorical map of the United States, the image reveals how and when borders cross people’s lives regardless of geography or law. Klett’s photograph chronicles a history of internment from World War II, when Japanese Americans living in the western U.S. restricted zones were forcibly relocated to camps, including the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona. This historical sequence cannot help but recall another history

Figure 9.1 Mark Klett, Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Ari-

zona, 1985. Courtesy Mark Klett.

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of relocation in Arizona: the 1864 forced march of the Diné (Navajo) from Canyon de Chelly to Bosque Redondo.9 In Klett’s photograph of Poston, no person, building, or obvious monument is identifiable. The site has physical evidence of the history of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at Poston and forced into labor to support the nation’s war cause, but that is not what Klett photographs.10 Klett’s photograph marks the site of a practically nonexistent pictorial record of nationalized racism, fear, and intolerance. Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is symbolic of an ongoing national erasure. Complicating the artistic gesture of representing all-but-forgotten violence, this photograph was published only once, in Revealing Territory (1992). Furthermore, the photograph is buried deep in the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography archives, which immediately underscores obstacles associated with writing history.11 In “History,” Spivak critiques the privileging of documents and affirms absences in archives that result in a difficulty in knowledge production.12 The archival location of the photograph contributes to an understanding of academic obsessions with sanctioned repositories as the source for researching the past. Analyzing cultural history methodologies, Spivak examines whether scholars can understand an impossible-to-retrieve historical past rooted in archival tradition. In doing so, she reframes her provocative 1988 question from speaking to audibility, questioning in particular scholars’ ability to hear and recover subaltern histories. In other words, Spivak proposes that historians cannot produce histories based on what they are unable to find and lack training to hear, nor can they mine institutionalized repositories for what is inherently absent. Using Spivak’s cultural history analytic of the “vanishing present”— a referent for unpacking absence in the service of writing postcolonial histories— I see Klett’s photograph as an object situated between a hidden historical past, an archive, and the published literature.13 Seeing where Klett’s photograph captures the vanishing present means iterating, in art historical terms, an interpretation of the photograph’s visual lack. Reading Klett in light of a vanishing present, the banal and blurred photograph appears powerfully hopeless. The camera is mute and cannot ultimately corporealize the sounds of 17,867 Japanese Americans who were forced from their homes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. 14

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Notably, the landscape picture and its viewer are prevented from representing and seeing historically absent bodies: a point emphasized by including the date of origination (1985) in the photograph’s title. How is it that a nation— and the consuming forces and tendencies that shape nationalism— has all but silenced the sounds of what was the third largest city (Poston) in Arizona between May 1942 and November 1945? As the photograph will not speak for another person’s human experience, strategically, it visually lacks representations of past internment. Klett’s photograph pictures complicated attempts to recognize subaltern histories and responds with difficulty because it will not represent human experiences at the Poston war relocation center. The photograph signals an absence of knowledge and ultimately imagines a relative silence that permeates archival and historical records. Klett’s photograph labors to unpack the nation, a state construct, that redrew the map and redefined citizenship during wartime based on race-driven fears of Japanese Americans and the immigrant other. Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp visualizes the limitations of knowing, of postcolonial knowledge production, and it offers critical clues about historical production— a scholarly practice sometimes too closely associated with the maintenance of nationhood.15 Klett’s rarely seen photograph exercises the theories and methods that compose the making, writing, and production of a history, especially border art histories. The photograph is compelling because it depicts the limits of a visual-only index. Klett’s representation of the landscape, in conjunction with his title, brings forth discomfort and uncertainty. Responding to a lack of historical information, Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp asks viewers to reconcile their inability to account for absent firsthand histories of relocation. Klett’s picture is challenging because it stands in opposition to state-sustained silence.16 The photograph ultimately exhausts the potential of only seeing and highlights the limits associated with visual and cultural knowledge production. Significantly then, the photograph depicts an unnatural site at Poston, marked by a skull and crossbones painted on a feral palm tree.17 The photograph is a cultural coordinate of human interactions and relations that crosses geography, human bodies, and discursive realms. Directly crossing the borderline, David Taylor’s Working the Line (2008– present) is a series of color landscape photographs divided into two parts.

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The first, “Working,” examines human capital and labor conditions in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the second, “the Line,” departs from late nineteenth-century collaborative surveys between the United States and Mexico that resulted in the international boundary line used today.18 In the photograph View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower), no person or visible figure is literally represented in the picture plane. The photograph frames contested lands in northern Mexico and the American Southwest.19 From a hilltop perspective, the picture casts a downward gaze on the built expanses of the United States, an ideological rendering of the landscape that recalls art historian Albert Boime’s theory of the magisterial gaze. In “View from Above,” Boime defines the mastering and panoramic view from on high, such as the one imaged in View into Nogales from the Border Fence, as a racialized and colonial claim or possession of the landscape that is seen below.20 From this vantage point, very little of Nogales, Sonora, is visible. Significantly, Taylor’s constructed view of the landscape draws on colonial and national land histories. Historically, stone pillars with pyramidal tops, obelisks, were used by Mexico and the United States to trace the expanse of the national boundary and were a physical product of nineteenthcentury survey projects.21 This picture is somewhat unique within Working the Line, as this historical marker is notably absent. Instead, the U.S.-built border fence divides the photographic foreground from the background and frames the composition. View into Nogales from the Border Fence, barring people and an obelisk, emphasizes that Mexico— and migrants of many nations— is often absent from public discourse in the United States. For many scholars, border art is a topic dominated by the U.S. architectural occupation of the region. Taylor’s photograph does not disregard or entirely reject the importance of the fence or its locational specificity. In particular, Taylor’s representation of the Arizona and Sonora border calls attention to technologies of the nation— in this instance, surveillance structures that dramatically alter the landscape and divide communities— and reworks the art historical tradition for rendering a landscape as a way to expose the production of nation-states and nationalisms.22 View into Nogales from the Border Fence pictures a phallic tower, deploying long-range cameras and forward-looking infrared cameras, which is positioned erect and standing between two independent but mutually dependent nations. By representing

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Figure 9.2 David Taylor, View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera

tower), from the series Working the Line (2008– present). Courtesy David Taylor.

the United States as a phallus (i.e., surveillance tower), the photograph conjures the genre of landscape representation and interrogates the premise of the nation-state.23 Twenty-first-century surveillance mediates lives while often operating unbeknownst to us. There may be no better place to identify where and how these mechanisms exist than where they emerge as hypervisible. Notably, Taylor’s photograph inverts power dynamics: View into Nogales from the Border Fence allows the state’s means for scrutiny, the surveillance tower, a prominent place for extended consideration. One reading of the surveillance tower, visible in the middle ground of the photograph, suggests it is a mechanism by which the United States aggressively and invasively disciplines the everyday. As if the continually rebuilt higher and higher fence were not enough, the phallus-like surveillance tower reveals man’s preoccupation with inspection, observation, and combat. This representation of the Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, landscape acknowledges what exists beyond the politics that shape fence making. Even though the fence is central for viewing the photograph, this physical form of architecture situated alongside the tower serves as a marker. Viewers interpret the image based on what

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is seen on the surface of the photograph; and through the fence’s location, they begin to recognize the politics that construct these built environments. Lingering doubt about the meaning of the photograph helps capture and sustain the viewer’s attention. Since the use of surveillance haunts symbolic representations of men, land, and nation, questions remain about whether a state has the means to exceed its own demarcation. Through the inclusion of a surveillance tower— in the full title as well: View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower)— Taylor’s photograph aptly directs our attention from the U.S.-built border fence to another penetrative member of the state. Appearing to project above land, fence, and municipalities in View into Nogales from the Border Fence, surveillance is one form of technology that sustains the nation. The cameras at the top of the tower are modes of sensing and delegitimizing human presence in the militarized zone. Developed to see difference, record change, and designate illegality, these supposedly sophisticated human inventions are based purely on visual information. Implicitly, various acts of (self-)regulation are represented in View into Nogales from the Border Fence: the photograph depicts the federal government’s ability to construct an environment where bodies police other bodies via electronic inspection. One can even go online to watch the border as it is recorded from the camera, a form of entertainment in the guise of service.24 This is not a one-sided gaze, however. Taylor’s photograph inverts the view— typically, the U.S. Border Patrol’s line of sight is from the United States onto Mexico, but instead the picture effectively looks across the militarized expanses of the United States from Sonora— in an effort to reorient the directionality of the state’s gaze. The presence of a multivalent form of surveillance in Taylor’s photograph can also be understood as a critique of the covert nature of the state. The exposed surveillance tower is thereby reclaimed as a marker for those who overcome state violence: groups such as Humane Borders, which established water stations and deposited first aid kits throughout the Sonoran Desert, and No Mas Muertos, which maintains a Sonoran migrant shelter in Nogales and freely provides information about crossing conditions. On the one hand, Taylor’s photograph constructs a landscape that symbolically speaks to Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault terms the penetrating, everywhere

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gaze of the panopticon as an “inspection [that] functions ceaselessly.” 25 The prospect of 360 degrees of alert surveillance— as a form of dutiful entertainment— maintains a national environment where actions, languages, communications, and lives are always scrutinized. Such inspections hail and teach subjects to fear foreignness and to assign it a color, not unlike the photograph, in which the steel tower blends into an artificial and constructed militarized environment. Subsequently, the surveillance tower in View into Nogales from the Border Fence reveals another apparatus of the state: whiteness, the construction of a racialized portrait of the United States. As art historian Martin Berger explains in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, whiteness is an institutionalized norm that naturalizes a racialized image of the United States.26 Painted brown to blend into the so-called natural landscape, the telescoping observation tower allegorically pictures a federally conceived form of whiteness. Taylor’s photograph with its national phallus, seen as a technology of the state, brings light to the extreme ways in which the U.S. government is producing a discourse grounded in white privilege. It reminds viewers when and how brown became the color of fear. Through the use of the kind of surveillance imaged in Taylor’s photograph, the state produces a normative portrait of a citizen who is white and deems others alien and therefore recognizable through inspections that function endlessly. View into Nogales from the Border Fence offers a critical look at mechanisms that mobilize a national discourse on racial privilege. Taylor’s depiction of the brown surveillance tower on a hilltop, imbued with the magisterial gaze, becomes an acknowledgement of the processes that render so-called nonwhite others as unnatural or illegal. Obfuscated by the border fence and surveillance tower, the sounds of the border are inaudible, and human experience is speculative at best. Taylor reflects on his experience at the border fence, saying, “While making the photograph, people began to climb over the fence. I could hear the sounds of sneakers gaining traction and against the corrugated metal wall.” 27 Taylor took the opportunity to briefly converse with the border crossers, explaining that he was not a threat. Through the lens of the camera and that of the artist’s experience, viewers can reimagine the photograph yet again. To return to Spivak, we can make the photograph’s strategies explicit: the artist’s experience is not that of an undocumented border crosser. Taylor’s

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photograph—particularly the surveillance tower, which has been interpreted in numerous ways as a technology of the nation— aestheticizes an impossible-to-retrieve history. Even when View into Nogales from the Border Fence is considered with the artist’s standpoint, the undocumented migrant’s experience is contained in Spivak’s theory of the vanishing present. Informed viewers, however, can interpret this visual lack— an aesthetic absence strategically represented in Taylor’s photograph— as a decidedly important space of recognition in the face of oppressive national machines. View into Nogales from the Border Fence draws on a geopolitical legacy of border art history and pictures the visual rhetoric of white privilege and its national trope. In the artist’s words: My project is organized around an effort to document all of the monuments that mark the international boundary west of the Rio Grande. The rigorous undertaking to reach all of the 276 obelisks, most of which were installed between the years 1891 and 1895, has inevitably led to encounters with migrants, smugglers, the Border Patrol, minutemen, and residents of the borderlands. During the period of my work the U.S. Border Patrol has doubled in size and the federal government has constructed over 600 miles of pedestrian fencing and vehicle barrier. With apparatus that range from simple tire drags to seismic sensors the border is under constant surveillance.28

The artist’s decision to omit corporeal bodies from the photograph reminds viewers of an absent figure who is tracked through surveillance, and whose embodiment is racialized and abstracted to the point of rarely being discernible in debates in the public sphere about U.S.-Mexico relations. The hurtful and harmful impact of institutionalized/nationalized whiteness is the elephant in the room. Taylor’s photograph productively troubles nationalistic discourses and situates the transnational interconnectedness of Ambos Nogales. Working at the same time but in a different artistic medium, Mary Jenea Sanchez posits the importance of specific borderlands experiences.29 Historias en la Camioneta (2010) is a twenty-one-minute narrative work of video art that chronicles the importance of maintaining personal connections despite national divides. Sanchez’s video exemplifies why people cross the

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border, refers to how the Arizona-Sonora borderline and border politics affect the everyday lives of children, narrates moments of violence in border towns, and examines economic and human relations in the borderlands despite ongoing U.S. militarization. Crucially, various border crossers— all of whom hold internationally distinguished documentation— speak and share their histories aboard a bus during a transnational border crossing. Strategically, like Klett’s and Taylor’s photographs, Sanchez’s video aesthetically lacks to enable the figures present to write with their own bodies, an idea that recalls Spivak’s concept of history as a vanishing present. 30 The artist describes the importance and experience of border crossing: “I feel travels aboard la camioneta are always symbolic voyages. Whether passengers reveal it to me or not, I know that day of travel may be of monumental importance in someone’s month, year, or life.” 31 The video opens at a shuttle station with passengers boarding a bus. Although the exact location of the terminal is not disclosed in the video, presumably the station is in the northern Mexican border city of Agua Prieta, Sonora. This disorientation is noteworthy and originates when the vantage point of the camera is outside the shuttle. The remainder of the film is captured from an interior location, a strategic representation of continuity that parallels the passing of time inside la camioneta. Travel has barely begun, however, before the bus is waiting in a queue alongside la linea, or the international borderline. When la camioneta arrives at the port of entry, U.S.

Figure 9.3 “We hope this situation gets better.” Video still from Mary Jenea San-

chez’s Historias en la Camioneta (2010). Courtesy M. Jenea Sanchez.

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Border Patrol interviews each passenger. This is the only moment when the artist’s voice is audible.32 After minor complications and with paperwork secured, the shuttle proceeds across the national borders of the United States and Mexico into Douglas, Arizona. The video sequence that follows incorporates conversations with passengers about the various ways language, education, family, documentation, and food shape lives. Historias en la Camioneta is a portrait of a geographically unique and specific culture and the fronterizo/a people who constitute a border region. The construction of the composition’s surface is significant. At times, viewers see a diptych, with the image on the right pointed inside the cabin of the shuttle and the image on the left looking outside through the driver’s window or the swinging double door characteristic of vans. Elsewhere in the film, the composition is a single frame at eye level or below. The single frame is commonly used when the artist is listening to the oral stories and histories shared by fellow passengers. Throughout the film, the composition format yields clues about location— somewhere in Arizona or Sonora— and what direction the bus is traveling. The film appears to begin in the morning and end during the night. As the video progresses, the rising and falling of the sun records time and space; that is, the brightness and intensity of the light is visible and describes time lapses and space changes as passengers narrate personal histories. The moving tires of la camioneta also track time and space as the bus moves across the desert.

Figure 9.4 “Every month I make a visit.” Video still from Jenea Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta (2010). Courtesy M. Jenea Sanchez.

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The video depicts the shuttle traversing earthen terrain, and the environment inside the bus reflects the omnipresent Sonoran Desert. The temporal and spatial effects of the artist’s land use lend complexity to locational identity: viewers always know where we are inside the bus, but the precise location in Arizona and Sonora remains uncertain. In Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, Trinh Minh-ha describes a material and immaterial space where endings pass into beginnings as a “re-siting of boundaries.” 33 Within the space of la camioneta, the notions of foreigner, tourist, immigrant, and refugee reconstitute as passengers and historians. The appearance of moving in a single direction forces the viewer to continually reorient. Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta strategically negotiates boundaries and creatively emphasizes the specificity of borders in thoughtful and abstract ways. In one scene a Spanish-speaking male in conversation with another passenger in the seat ahead of him articulates his recent experience with violence in Nogales, Sonora. Referring to the “slaughters” that occurred over twenty days, he describes the assassins as sicarios, meaning hired hit men.34 The use of the term “sicarios” is important, and it is rarely heard in U.S. representations of border violence. In Sanchez’s film, sicarios are described as decapitating three men, shooting another between the eyes, and killing a gay man “just for being a homosexual.” 35 The passenger says the events happened close to the house where he was living. This excerpt gives voice to how violence is just beyond the doors of fronterizos’ homes. In the United States, media representations paint a picture of a monolithic Mexican culture that actively seeks to invade and ruin the United States. As la frontera Sonorense is seen and heard in Sanchez’s video, there is real and frightening violence. Unlike for-profit media, however, Historias en la Camioneta does not spectacularize violence or imagine northern Mexico as the aggressor. Instead, the film depicts the importance of hearing across geographic and linguistic borders and acknowledges how technologies of the nation foster violent conditions. After refusing two national borders and disavowing nationalistic attempts to control lives, this artwork gives voice in English and Spanish and renders presence to borderlands histories from journeying perspectives. The figures in the film, as Trinh suggests, “negotiate between home and abroad, native

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culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere.” 36 Therefore, a journeying perspective is rooted in lived experience and is necessarily detached from a singular geographic site. The passenger’s historias express worldviews and experiences that are perpetually resisting boundaries. The artist’s fronteriza life and the experiences of fellow fronterizos/as aboard la camioneta trouble the singularity of national citizenship and emphasize a fluid construction of boundaries that are often perceived to be fixed. Specifically, as the video recalls, borderlands families are bound together regardless of national origin. For example, they share food and celebrate important birthdays and holidays together. Gleaned from the video, the experiences heard as passengers travel from one place to another complicate cultural understandings of home(s) and point to the reductiveness of nation-only sanctioned citizenships. The oral histories and the fronterizos/as that appear in Historias en la Camioneta also become a marker for Spivak’s notion of the vanishing present. Sanchez’s film turns to an aesthetic lack to bring sensitivity to the human experiences of undocumented persons. For example, as the bus rolls across the desert floor, viewers learn physical health and well-being transcend the U.S.-Mexico divide. One of the oral histories in the film comes from a passenger traveling to help an undocumented family member.37 Nameless, the person’s condition and circumstances are relatively unknown, except that person is gendered male, he was deported after being pulled over by the U.S. highway patrol, and he needs clothes and money. By interpreting the absences in Historias en la Camioneta, the viewer recognizes an undocumented border-crossing figure that remains inhuman in national eyes. Furthermore, as this video explicitly depicts human bodies, Historias en la Camioneta uniquely muscles its visual lack through representations and voices of people crossing the U.S-Mexico border as a symbolic form of land use and representation. In Klett’s and Taylor’s landscape photographs, the representation of the terrestrial space was the mechanism that rendered a vanishing present perceptible, whereas in Historias en la Camioneta, Sanchez visualizes people who are engaged in the immediacy of crossing multiple borders (i.e., land based, nationally defined, economically proscribed, gendered and racialized, and so forth). Always moving and continually traversing private and public lands, the corporeal bodies in Sanchez’s film are

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precisely the space where a postcolonial reading is possible. The lived acts in Historias en la Camioneta constitute a routine borderlands performance that situates new boundaries and sustains the development of familial and community collectives. Mark Klett’s Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985, David Taylor’s View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower), and Mary Jenea Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta are situated in the historically and culturally rich U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is removed from the physical demarcation that separates the United States and Mexico today; however, the photograph depicts a tract of frontier land taken from Native Americans to temporarily construct a World War II camp for Japanese Americans. It aestheticizes the impermanence and constructed nature of borderlands and the racialized relationship of borders to citizenship. View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) responds to the international borderline, at least as it exists in the twenty-first century. In conversation with Klett’s representation of a mediated environment, Taylor’s photograph frames the artificiality of borders and then decenters regimes that attempt to naturalize racialized discourses surrounding fence building. Crossing the borderline, Historias en la Camioneta depicts a variety of boundaries that are not only inscribed arbitrarily onto the landscape but also lived and felt daily. Sanchez’s video brings together a racialized understanding of borders that is geographic as well as thrust in abstract ways onto the bodies of fronterizos/as. When considered together, the three works of art engage with geopolitical and abstract notions of boundaries and divides. They become crucial aesthetic spaces that analyze the manufacture of nations and the fabrication of nationalisms. The art forms of Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez help to deconstruct dominant historical narratives that are written and propagandized by nations, corporations, and for-profit media. The artworks’ use of land and landscape representation create critical opportunities to reflect on aesthetic strategies for knowledge production and ways to reimagine a landscape that is embodied. Each project rethinks the credibility of existing citizenship structures that repeatedly fail and are used against people. Cautiously aestheticized through varying forms of presence and absence, these artworks interrogate knowledge production and lead to an interpretation that results in accounting

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for human experience. Through a visual lack, Klett’s photograph marks the place of a practically forgotten Japanese American internment camp, and the landscape representation geographically sites complications associated with historical practice and the necessity of counterhegemonic thought in contesting violence perpetuated by the state. Furthermore, through the viewer’s reimagining of a border crosser’s feet climbing over the rusted steel wall, Taylor’s photograph emphasizes a race-based age of digital surveillance in the United States and examines the apparatuses that ensure such statederived conditions persist. Finally, through changing but continuous land use, Sanchez’s video inverts the roles of historian and camioneta passenger and affirms the importance of lived, oral histories for unearthing a vanishing present. These three works of art activate significant sociopolitical traces embedded in hidden frontier histories, which is important in accounting for a complex and shifting environment of human spaces in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

Samuel Truett, “Hidden Histories,” Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 1– 9. This is a discussion of the intersection of border art with geopolitics and biopolitics. I understand geopolitics as a method of analysis that examines the relationships between geography and the power and authority of politics. Additionally, for Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics— discourses that politicize the body, medicine, and science— see Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009). Truett, “Hidden Histories,” 8. I describe the art forms of Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez as border art to draw on feminist art historian Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui’s border art history practice, including the co-authored essay with Sarah J. Moore in this volume. Beginning in the 1980s, transborder art historian Malagamba-Ansótegui developed the field of border art history at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, where she also founded the Department of Cultural Studies. In Mexico, she produced numerous exhibition catalogs and volumes, including Malagamba-

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5.

6.

7.

Ansótegui, Antecedentes bibliográficos y conceptuales para un estudio sobre el efecto de la televisión en los niños fronterizos (Tijuana: Centro de Estudios Fronterizos del Norte de México, 1982); Malagamba-Ansótegui, La televisión y su impacto en la población infantil de Tijuana (Tijuana: Centro de Estudios Fronterizos del Norte de México, 1986); Malagamba-Ansótegui, Encuentros: Los Festivales Internacionales de la Raza (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1988); and Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui, Aralia López González, and Elena Urrutia, eds., Mujer y literatura mexicana y chicana: Culturas en contacto, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer and Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1988– 1990). Notably, throughout her career, Malagamba-Ansótegui has used the term “border art” as a description rather than a category. In Malagamba-Ansótegui and Gilberto Cardenas, Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration (Notre Dame, IN.: Snite Museum and Notre Dame University Press, 2006), Malagamba-Ansótegui posits border art as a symbolic space that humanizes politicized understandings of border crossers. At the University of Arizona symposium “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” (December 1– 3, 2011), Malagamba-Ansótegui delivered the keynote address, “Not All Borders Are the Same,” in which she distinguished between “art of the border” and “art about the border.” Malagamba-Ansótegui’s contributions to the field of border art history are long-standing, and since U.S.-based scholars sometimes neglect Mexican scholarship, it is worth repeating here. Rebecca Senf and Stephen J. Pyne, eds., Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Here I am suggesting, if only indirectly, that Klett’s photography has also had a tremendous influence on the development of border studies, for example, in Mark Klett, Denis Johnson, and Peter Galassi, Traces of Eden: Travels in the Desert Southwest (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1986); Mark Klett, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Thomas W. Southall, Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); and Gary Paul Nabhan and Mark Klett, Desert Legends: Re-Storying the Sonoran Borderlands (New York: Holt, 1994). Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp is not part of Klett’s well-known rephotography project, which is how the artist is most typically acknowledged in art history today. Examples of Klett’s rephotography work can be found in Klett, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); Klett, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 2004);

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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Mark Klett, Rebecca Solnit, and Byron Wolfe, Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, and Ghost Rivers (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2005); and Senf and Pyne, Reconstructing the View. Mark Klett, artist, interview by the author, December 9, 2012, Tempe, AZ. I draw on these histories of Japanese American internment and the Diné Long Walk simultaneously to emphasize historically racialized state production. The U.S. federal government has long been engaged in using racialized boundaries in the region and forcibly moving people across the landscape, including Diné relocation, the establishment of reservations, and so on. Despite the changing role of the state— from colonial to national periods through territory days and Arizona statehood— it has continually enforced racialized divisions. Today the Poston Memorial Monument is located near Parker in La Paz County, Arizona, and it includes a central thirty-foot concrete pillar surrounded by twelve small pillars that form a sundial. Built in 1992, after Klett made his photograph, the monument was erected by the Colorado River Indian Tribes, former internees of Poston, and Veterans and the Friends of the Fiftieth Year Observance of the Evacuation and Internment. The absence of the U.S. federal government in erecting the 1992 memorial is noteworthy and returns attention to Klett’s remarkable photograph. I first learned about the photograph while studying at the Center for Creative Photography, while researching for the exhibition The Border Project: Landscapes, Lifescapes, and Soundscapes (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of Art, 2011– 12). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “History,” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 198– 311. It has been observed that my analysis maintains a close relationship to John Tagg’s critique of archives and his call to “burn them down” for being perpetually misleading. For more on Tagg’s critique of the archive, refer to Tagg, “The Pencil of History: Photography, History, Archive,” in The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 209– 33. Here I am calling attention to an absence in Arizona’s art historical record. Photographs of Japanese American internment camps do exist. Notably, in 1943 Ansel Adams photographed Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, and he produced a body of images depicting the Japanese Americans imprisoned there. In 2004, as many as eight hundred new photographs of Japanese Americans taken by Dorothea Lange were discovered in the U.S. National Archives, some of which have been published in Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro,

A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 215

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York: Norton, 2008). It is my sincere hope that this point about absence will be slowly unraveled, that as more historical photographs are found and contemporary artists begin to construct a critical gaze of the history of Japanese Americans, this point will no longer beckon urgency. In Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), Nicole Guidotti-Hernández examines nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Native American and Mexican American histories that resulted in violence instigated by the U.S. government, as well as various academic accounts of how these histories have been told and retold over time in the service of state production. In particular, Guidotti-Hernández identifies nationalisms— broadly defined as Mexican, American, and Chicano— as one of the primary state mechanisms for maintaining hegemonic order. Prompted by decades of advocacy by then–U.S. representative Norman Mineta, the United States tried to make amends for its human rights violations. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, legislation authorizing reparations and an official apology for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Two years later, all surviving victims were paid $20,000. By the time the apology and reparations were offered, however, many of the Japanese American internees were deceased. Mark Klett, e-mail to the author, November 28, 2011. For histories of U.S.-Mexico border surveys and borderlands survey practices, see Leon C. Metz, Border: The U.S. Mexico Line (El Paso, TX: Mangan Books, 1989); Joseph Richard Werne, “Redrawing the Southwestern Boundary, 1891– 1896,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104 (July 2000): 1– 20; and Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848– 1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007). I express appreciation to Katherine Morrissey, University of Arizona history professor, for her advisement and expertise in this area, including the paper presentation, “Borderline Photography: The Visual Legacy of the 1890s U.S.-Mexico International Boundary Survey,” at the symposium “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” (University of Arizona, December 1– 3, 2011) and her chapter in this anthology. I describe the land seen in the photograph and the place depicted in the picture as “contested” for a variety of reasons. Foremost, I acknowledge indigenous claims to the land. I am also responding to the colonial history of land occupations and land swaps by Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Finally, I see the escalating militarization and construction of the modern border zone in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, and their parallels in border zones

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

elsewhere in the world. The result is a palimpsest of land histories that are anything but resolved. For example, in “Westward the Course of Empire,” in Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 155– 206, Martha Sandweiss addresses the complicated relation of text to survey photography as a means to examine complex land histories. For a cultural history of the northern Mexican and southwestern U.S. territories, consult Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600– 1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). Albert Boime, “View from Above,” in The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830– 1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). The U.S.-Mexico international boundary line was established in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), signed by the two nations ending the MexicanAmerican War. The subsequent Gadsden Purchase, finalized in 1854, settled the international boundary line that is intact today. On the joint border survey projects, see William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (Washington, DC: Cornelius Wendell, 1857) and the chapter by Katherine Morrissey in this volume. Technologies of the nation are various ways the state perpetually constructs itself and expresses its nationalism vis-à-vis people. When I use the description “technologies of the nation” to animate a discussion of surveillance, I am thinking of Teresa de Lauretis’s inventive and productive study of the mechanisms that shape and define gender (and her use of the term “technology” therein). For more on the use of the term “technology,” consult de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Here, I’m thinking not only of Boime’s groundbreaking analysis of American landscape painting, but also Alan Wallach and William H. Truettner, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). American landscape paintings have often been used to portray (and erase) an ingenuous American people and a divinely sanctioned nation, as well as a form of the future nation that is unique and distinct from Europe because of its landscape. With growing political favor, many southwestern U.S. states are actively finding ways to manipulate surveillance into a form of racialized entertainment for a largely white audience. For example, BlueServo provides a virtual stakeout that uses real-time displays of the border. BlueServo, accessed October 29, 2011, http://www.blueservo.net. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195.

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26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). David Taylor, artist, interview by the author, December 5, 2012, Tucson, AZ. “David Taylor’s artist statement on Working the Line,” David Taylor Studio, accessed October 2, 2012, http://www.dtaylorphoto.com. A version of Mary Jenea Sanchez’s Historias en la Camioneta (2010) is available on YouTube, 20:39, posted by “m jenea Sanchez,” October 12, 2011, http://youtu .be/ZGOSBLhqwOM. Accounting for Derrida’s influence on her thinking and postcolonial reasoning, Spivak writes, “I will focus on a figure who intended to be retrieved, who wrote with her own body. It is as if she attempted to ‘speak’ across death by rendering her body graphmatic.” Spivak, “History,” 246. Mary Jenea Sanchez, e-mail to the author, June 7, 2013. I have written elsewhere about personal fronteriza experiences and the urgency of their inclusion in art history. John-Michael H. Warner, “Traces: Land Use and Representation in Arizona, U.S.A. and Sonora, Mexico Border Arts,” in “Borders and the Global Contemporary,” Interventions 2, no. 1 (2013), https:// interventionsjournal.net/author/interventionsjournal/page/25. I choose to make this point again now as I have just collapsed a complex notion of standpoint epistemology into one aesthetic moment derived from the video’s sequence. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), Gloria Anzaldúa creates a theoretical space derived from personal fronteriza experiences. She describes her life as a geographic border dweller in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and as a border crosser, which for Anzaldúa meant living as a lesbian woman of color in the United States. I refer to Jenea Sanchez as a fronteriza based on personal interviews and discussions in which she has self-identified as such. Additionally, the artist expresses solidarity with Anzaldúa as a fellow border crosser and woman of color. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Other Than Myself, My Other Self,” in Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York: Routledge, 2011), 27. Examining human movement across borders, Trinh articulates a “boundary event” that is both material and immaterial. I see this articulation of border crossing as groundbreaking, in part because Trinh adds to the conversation a dialogue about insider and outsider dynamics in an age of fear-driven policy and state production. Sanchez, Historias en la Camioneta. The mention of slaughters begins around 12:55. Ibid. This description of slaughter begins at 13:08. Trinh, “Other than Myself,” 27. Sanchez, Historias en la Camioneta. This narrative begins on 7:08.

Contributors

Maribel Alvarez is associate professor of anthropology and associate research social scientist for the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. In addition to being a 2009 Fulbright Scholar, executive director of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, co-­founder and co-­director of Sabores Sin Fronteras, and trustee of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Alvarez is an anthropologist, folklorist, curator, and community arts expert who is currently completing a book manuscript on the verbal arts and lore of workers in the Mexican curios cottage industry at the U.S.-­Mexico border. Geraldo Luján Cadava is associate professor of history and Latino/a studies at Northwestern University. Cadava is the author of Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. Amelia Malagamba-­Ansótegui is a lecturer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the director emeritus of the Department of Cultural Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana. Malagamba-­Ansótegui curated the exhibition Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos and authored the accompanying catalogue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). She co-­edited Mujer y Literatura Mexicana y Chicana: Culturas en Contacto II

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(Tijuana: El Colegio de México y El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1990) and Mujer y Literatura Mexicana y Chicana, Culturas en Contacto I (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte y El Colegio de México, 1988), as well as Encuentros: Los Festivales Internacionales de la Raza (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1988). Her current manuscript project is “Tracing Border Spaces: The Real and the Imaginary.” Mary E. Mendoza is assistant professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. Mendoza received her PhD from the University of California– Davis in 2015. Her work focuses on the intersections between environmental and borderlands history and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library. Sarah J. Moore is professor of art history at the University of Arizona. Moore is the author of John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880– 1915 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003) and Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). She was a summer scholar at the 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, City/Nature: Urban Environmental Humanities, University of Washington. Katherine G. Morrissey is associate professor of history at the University of Arizona. Morrissey is the author of Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) and co-editor of Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005). She was the principal investigator for the 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Grant, Nature and History at the Nation’s Edge: A Field Institute in Environmental and Borderlands History. In 2017– 18 she is a Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society Fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Margaret Regan is the author of two award-winning books on immigration, Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire (Boston:

Contributors | 221

Beacon Press, 2015) and The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). A longtime journalist in Tucson, Regan writes regularly about the arts for Tucson Weekly and has published work in the Guardian, the Independent UK, Al Jazeera English, the Washington Post, Newsday, Black + White, and many regional publications. She has won many journalism prizes for her arts criticism, her border reporting, and her stories on the Irish immigrant experience. Regan’s books are used in numerous university classrooms, including Duke University, University of California– Davis, Loyola University, University of Chicago, and the University of Arizona. Rebecca M. Schreiber is associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. Schreiber is the author of Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and The Undocumented Everyday: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Ila N. Sheren, assistant professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study (2015– 16) and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Jackson Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto (2011– 13). Samuel Truett is associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Truett is a leading border studies scholar and author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). John-Michael H. Warner is assistant professor of contemporary art history and theory at Kent State University. At the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Warner curated La Tapiz Fronteriza and Changing Views: Queering

222 | Contributors

U.S. Landscape Art as well as co-curated The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes. In 2013, he published “Traces: Land Use and Representation in Arizona, U.S.A. and Sonora, MEX Border Arts” in Interventions. Warner is preparing a manuscript on Niki de Saint Phalle’s Queen Califia’s Magical Circle (2003) and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (1972– 76).

Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate photographs. The letter n with page numbers indicates notes. absences: in border art, 116; in Klett’s photographs, 200–­201; reading, in archive, historical record, and cartography, 197; in Sanchez’s film, 210; in Taylor’s photographs, 206. See also bodies and body art academic discourse, border art as critique of, 197 Adams, Ansel, 214n14 Adler, Rudy: arrangement of BFP images and, 186; on Border Film Project, 175; on both sides of story, 178; photograph selection and, 185; race and racism in Minuteman Project and, 184; on shedding light on “illegal” immigration, 177. See also Border Film Project; Border Film Project affectual infrastructure of nations, 23 African American slavery, cheap labor and, 141 agriculture: cross-­border exchanges and, 100–­ 101. See also cattle Agua Prieta, Sonora: Historias en la Camioneta (Sanchez) and, 207; safehouses in, 137 Alvarado, Manuel, 51 Alvarez, Maribel: on border as gimmick, 25–­27; Letras cruze, 36; “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” (symposium, 2011) and, 5; on marking the landscape, 7. See also border landscapes conversation Ambos Nogales. See Nogales, Arizona; Nogales, Sonora

Ambos Nogales border fence: Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza and, 3; border walls erected by U.S. through, 153–­54 America (van der Straet, c. 1580), 113, 130 American art: border art history and, 15 American Automobile Association (AAA), 97 American-­Mexican Chamizal Convention Act (1964), 91 American Progress (Gast, 1872), 119, 120 Americans All, Let’s Fight for Victory poster (Helguera), 89 American South: resistance to tick eradication measures in, 72; Texas fever in northern states and, 68–­69 American West: U.S.-­Mexico border art history and, 19n11 Amilhat-­Szary, Anne-­Laure, 121 Amparano Gámez, Juan, 169 anti-­immigrant groups: Border Film Project and, 180; on Mexican and Latin American immigrants’ takeover of Southwest, 90; militarized border and, 189; narcoviolence narrative and, 140; surveillance of migrants by, 185, 186; as vigilantes, 179 anti-­immigrant policies and rhetoric: border as war zone and, 137, 139, 140; Cold War and, 92; NAFTA and, 155 Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 14, 217n32

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apexart, Fencing Democracy (group show) at, 169 archives: Border Film Project as, 183–­84; crevices in, 33; impossible-­to-­retrieve historical past and, 200, 214n11; International Boundary Commission as, 42; reading in absences, 197; Tagg’s critique of, 214n13 Arellano, Ricardo, 153, 155, 164 Arizona: Tucson Sector of, 172n1. See also specific cities Arizona Commission on the Arts, 159–­60 Arizona-­Sonora region: border disputes (1880s), 43; businessmen and civic leaders’ exchanges, 94–­95; Operation Safeguard in, 137, 155 arms smuggling, post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91 Arpaio, Joseph, 191n2 art about the border: border art compared with, 13–­14, 121–­22, 126–­27, 213n4; documentation and self-­representation of, 12; nuances of twenty-­first century borderlands and, 19n11 Artenstein, Isaac, 137–­39 artists: joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 42 Art Rebate (Arte Reembolso, 1993), 145 arts of popular resistance, in Southeast Asia, 29 Associated Press poll, on border security, 37 astronomers: for International Boundary Commission (1890s), 43, 46; marking and defining borders and, 41–­42; North American Talcott method and, 47; surveyors methods vs. methods of, 47 Avalos, David, 18n6, 137–­39, 145 Ayala, Ernesto, 95 Aztec-­inspired art and imagery: Morackis and Serrano and, 158; Paseo de Humanidad and, 162, 164; in San Diego–­Tijuana, 157; Santa Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166 Baca, Herman, 140, 141 Baca, Judy, 157 Balibar, Étienne, 141 b.a.n.g. Lab: border art, game of power and, 134; performative crossings and, 10; Transborder Immigrant Tool in action, 135. See also Transborder Immigrant Tool Barlow, John Whitney: collaborative photograph album and, 53; International Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43; photographers hired by, 44; photographs

used by, 49–­50; written report organization by, 65n52. See also Report of the Boundary Commission Album Barnes, Steve, 142 Barrera, Eduardo, 14, 15 Barton, Bryan, 179 Bennett, Tony, 132n1 Berger, Martin, 205 Berman, Sara-­Jo, 18n6, 137–­39 Beyond Borders: Binational Art Foundation, 159 binational celebrations of borderlands cities, 98 BIP. See Border Industrialization Program (Programa de Industrializacion de la Frontera) Blanco, Jacobo: collaborative photograph album and, 53; on final collaborative report negotiations, 55, 65n56; International Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43, 44; introduces Payne and Servín, 44–­45; photographs used by, 49–­50; on Servín as photographer for the Report, 54; written report organization by, 65n52. See also Report of the Boundary Commission Album BlueServo, 216n24 Boal, Augusto, 144 bodies and body art: border art and spaces and, 131; border art as interpretation of, 197; border art history and, 18n9; policing other bodies via electronic inspection, 204; politicization of, Sanchez on geography and, 196; San Diego–­Tijuana border art history and, 10; van der Straet’s America and, 130; world’s fairs and, 129–­30. See also absences; surveillance Body Art: Performing the Subject (Jones and Stephenson, eds.), 18–­19n9 Boime, Albert, 202 border: marking and defining process for, 41–­42; Merriam-­Webster’s definition of, 25–­26. See also U.S.-­Mexico border border art: art about the border compared with, 13–­14, 121–­22, 126–­27, 213n4; as label for frontier legacies, 197. See also border art history border art and spaces: art about the border vs. border art and, 121–­22, 126–­27; bodies and, 131; conceptualizing performative nature of, 132n1; conflation of maps and power and, 133n8; fence as nonplace and place, 122–­23; fight for place and space and, 119–­20; laws governing, 122; Mexico City artists vs. fronterizos/as and, 127–­29;

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Mexico’s perception of border, 116–­18; navigation of the heart and, 125–­26; new consciousness of border and, 124–­25, 124; other’s viewpoint of, 132; overview, 10–­13; in U.S. art, 113–­16; U.S. conception of border and, 118–­19; world’s fairs and, 129–­30 border art history: border studies and, 13–­15; Chicano/a studies and art history and, 5; nuances of twenty-­first century borderlands and, 19n11; possibilities of, 116 Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF): border art history and, 13; border as performative site and, 121; Border Door, 156; Border Sutures, 157–­58; End of the Line, 114, 137–­39; Goldman and, 18n6; Mexico City artists and, 128; performance and body art and, 10; performative crossings by, 136; Taller Yonke and, 131; theoretical and technical impetus for, 142 border cities: Immigration Reform and Control Act and, 136–­37; infrastructure development for, 102–­3; migration to, international markets and, 88; New York Times on Communists in, 90; One Flew over the Void (2005), 146, 156–­57; residents, shopping habits of, 101. See also specific cities border commerce and infrastructure: agriculture and livestock, 100–­101; border zone commerce as conceived narrative, 29; national press on advantages of, 87–­88, 90; national press on commercial exchanges, 32, 94–­96, 97–­98; national press on Mexico’s modernization and, 97, 103; national press on shared borderland defense, 91–­92, 93–­94; overview, 8; power plants and water desalinization plants, 101–­2; railroads and highways and, 99–­100, 102–­ 3. See also cattle; press, national; tourism border crossings: disseminating information about, 142–­43; successful, migrants photographs of, 185; Taylor’s photo from fence and, 205; technology to renegotiate, 136. See also desert crossers; One Flew over the Void; performative crossings; Transborder Immigrant Tool Border Days, binational celebrations of, 98 Border Door (Lou, 1988), 156 Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza (Serrano and Morackis): commissioning, 159; in Harvill Plaza at University of Arizona,

Tucson, 15; historical roots, 131; moved from border wall to University of Arizona, Tucson, 3, 160–­61, 168; in Nogales, Sonora on border wall, 4, 160; original installation goals for, 122 Border Field State Park, border fence and, 137, 138, 139, 140 Border Film Project (BFP): artifice of equality deployed visually by, 176–­77; cameras for Minutemen and migrants and, 11–­12, 115, 177–­78; constraint on project participants by, 182–­83; constructing visual equivalence between migrants and Minutemen, 181; documentary project of, 175–­76; documenting “illegal” migrant movements, 189–­90; as exhibition of bodies, 129; as folkloric, 121; organizers’ liberal nativism and, 184, 189–­90; overview, 10; photo exhibitions by, 178; photographic self-­representation vs. surveillance and, 180; photograph selection for, 185–­86; surveillance of migrants by migrants for, 190; surveillance of migrants by Minutemen for, 190–­91 Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and Minutemen on the U.S.-­Mexico Border: arrangement of images and captions in, 183–­86, 193n30; cover of, 181–­82, 182; curation of and statements in, 180–­81; as opposing perspectives, 176; organizers’ perspective and, 183; similar photographic equivalences in, 186, 187, 188 Border Industrialization Program (BIP, Programa de Industrializacion de la Frontera), 8, 33, 102 border landscapes conversation: border as gimmick, 25–­27; crevices in the archive and, 32–­33; as fork in the road, 27–­28; hegemony and, 28–­30; modernity and definitions of, 23–­25; overview, 6–­8, 10; power of the everyday and, 33–­35; states and, 30–­32; students of history and, 35–­37; visual signs of U.S.-­Mexico border and, 42 border nation, U.S. vs. fronterizo conception of border and, 127 Border Patrol. See U.S. Border Patrol border policing: by electronic inspection, 204; national press (1940–­1965) on, 87. See also BlueServo; Minutemen; U.S. Border Patrol The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes (2011–­2012), 5, 168 Border Research Group, 4–­5

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Border Spaces, questions posed by, 5–­6 border studies: border art history and, 5; Klett’s photography and, 213n6; U.S.-­ Mexico borderlands and, 16n3 Border Sutures (BAW/TAF, 1990), 157–­58 border wall: art and, 10; deaths at, 171–­72; erected by U.S. in Nogales, Sonora, 153–­ 54; murals on, 161–­62, 163, 164–­67, 165; political and social debates on, 3–­4; see-­ through aspects and family visitations to, 171, 172. See also fences; Nogales, Sonora; Taller Yonke; U.S.-­Mexico border Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) (Hernández et al., 2015), 171 Both Nogales. See Nogales, Arizona; Nogales, Sonora boundary surveys: in the 1890s, 31–­32; delineation and surveillance and, 24; joint international (1850s), 39–­40, 40; modernization efforts, 61n32; national divergences over, 40–­41. See also International Boundary Commission Bracero Program, 87, 102 brands, cattle, identifying American or Mexican cattle, 77–­78 Brazil, Theatre of the Oppressed in, 144 Brickwood, John, saloon of, 48 Buenos vecinos, buenos amigos (O’Higgins, 1944), 118 Buffalo, New York, Pan-­American Exposition (1901), 129 Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI): boundary as grid of chutes and tanks and, 24; fence plans for border, 78; first fences in Southern California by, 84n43; on “Mexican cattle” not “cattle potentially infected,” 80; responding to cattlemen complaints, 75–­76; Strafford’s cattle across Rio Grande and, 66; Texas fever research by, 70–­71. See also tick eradication Burr, Dorian, 142 bus across the border. See Historias en la Camioneta Bush, George W. and administration, 137, 175, 179 businessmen: cross-­border exchanges and, 94–­95. See also border commerce and infrastructure Cadava, Geraldo Luján, 8, 24, 32, 34, 36 California: Imperial Beach fence, 137, 138–­39; Operation Gatekeeper in, 137;

U.S.-­Mexico border art history and, 19n11. See also San Diego cameras: long-­range and infrared, for border fence, 202–­3, 203; in militarized border, 204; night-­vision, anti-­immigrant groups’ use of, 179 cameras, disposable: distribution to migrants, 192n9; for migrants and Minutemen along border, 11–­12, 115, 175–­76, 177; as Minutemen weapon, 186; technological limitations of, 183. See also Border Film Project; photographs and photographers cannonball, human, 18n9, 146, 156–­57 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 196 Cárdenas, Lázaro and administration, 90 Cárdenas, Micha, 134 Carroll, Amy Sara, 134 cartographers: for International Boundary Commission (1890s), 43; joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 42. See also maps cattle: BAI on “Mexican” not “potentially infected,” 80; cattlemen’s distinctions between “American” and Mexican,” 76–­77; drifter, agent burying, 69; lines of drive across U.S., 68–­70; Mexican, as diseased and/or inferior, 67–­68; Strafford’s, across Rio Grande, 66–­67; straying, tick concerns and, 72–­73; U.S. tick eradication program and, 71–­72 Center for Creative Photography, 200, 214n11 Central America: U.S. regulation of migrants from, 178–­79. See also Mexico; Mexico-­ Guatemala border survey Centro Cultural de la Raza, 14, 128 el Centro Cultural los Nogales, 169 Certeau, Michel de, 130 Chacón, Justin Akers, 186 Chandler, Harry, 92 Charnay, Désiré, 44 Charro Days, binational celebrations of, 98 Chávez, César, 140–­41 Chavez, Leo R., 175 Chávez, Patricio, 14, 15 Chiapas: Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and, 142; Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, Sonora) and, 164–­65, 168, 169; performative crossings from, 123; Transborder Immigrant Tool and game of, 146 Chicago Tribune, 87–­88, 97–­98 Chicano/as: artists in San Diego–­Tijuana, 157; inSITE exhibitions and, 14–­15; marginality

Index | 227

of, 128; performative crossings and, 146; in San Diego, 135–­36; on undocumented immigration, 140–­41; violence perpetuated by the state against, 215n15. See also Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo; Quiroz, Alfred; Taller Yonke Chicano/a studies and art history: border art and, 19n11; border art history and, 5, 13, 14, 18n6 Chihuahua and Pacifico Railroad, 100 citizens and citizenship: borderlands and, 27; failure of existing structures for, 211–­12; Mexican, borderland industries and, 96; Mexican, Malagamba-­Ansótegui on, 128; Mexican-­American, wetback drives (1950s) and, 92; national-­only sanctioned, 210; One Flew over the Void (2005) and, 146; Paseo de Humanidad creation and, 154; patriotic, Minutemen as, 185; state-­ derived, 197; status, Border Film Project and, 176, 179, 189; Taylor’s photo from fence on, 205; tick eradication program and, 68, 75; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 195; in wartime, Klett’s photograph and, 201, 211. See also race, racism, and racial categorization; undocumented immigrants Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua: arms and drug smuggling in, 91; cross-­border commerce and, 103; highways and, 99; NAFTA and, 88; Operation Hold the Line/Blockade and, 137; U.S. shoppers in, 98 civic leaders: cross-­border exchanges and, 94–­95. See also border commerce and infrastructure Civil Liberties Act (1988), 215n16 Clinton administration, unauthorized immigration and, 155 Coalición de Derechos Humanos, 154–­55, 172n1 Cold War, wetback drives (early 1950s) and, 92 El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 14 collaborative art, Border Film Project as, 175, 191n3 Colorado River, joint map between monuments 206 and 209 for, 51, 63–­64n45 Colorado River Indian Reservation, 198 Colorado River Indian Tribes, 214n10 Colorado River Relocation Center, Poston, Arizona, 200 Committee on Chicano Rights, San Diego, 141 commodities, borders and, 34–­35

communication, border fence and, 123 Communism and Communists: in border cities, New York Times on, 90; national press opposition to, 92 confinement, political and military interest tensions and, 141 conflict doctrine, low-­intensity, 147n5 Congress: appropriations for border fences by, 78; Minutemen support by members of, 179; on tick eradication, 71 constraint, political and military interest tensions and, 141 Copeland, George H., 98–­99 Cosgrove, Denis, 132n1 Covarrubias, Francisco Díaz, 47 Criado, Victoria: arrangement of BFP images and, 186; on Border Film Project, 175; photograph selection and, 185; race and racism in Minuteman Project and, 184; on shedding light on “illegal” immigration, 177. See also Border Film Project; Border Film Project Cristiani, Mansueto, 44 Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), 142 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Spivak), 196 Cronon, William, 132n1 cross-­border exchanges: locals value of, 87; national press on, 32, 86–­87; state and private investments in tourism and, 98–­100. See also border commerce and infrastructure; U.S.-­Mexico border Culturas en peligro (Endangered Cultures) (León-­Portilla), 14 Cunningham, P. D., 63n44 cyberactivism, Critical Art Ensemble and, 142 cyberprotesters, 144 cyberspace, collapsing physical space and, 142, 144 Daniel, Ruben, 165–­66 Davis, Lew, 94 Davis, Mike, 187 deaths at the border wall, 171–­72 deaths in the desert: artists respond to, 156; border security issues and, 37; of migrants, 2003 to 2017, 154–­55; Santa Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166; statistics on, 172–­73nn1–­2; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 145 Debord, Guy, 149n24

228 | Index

De Genova, Nicholas, 184 de Lauretis, Teresa, 216n22 Department of Agriculture. See U.S. Department of Agriculture dérive practices, of Situationist International, 143, 149n24 desert crossers: aid to people lost as, 145; hikers and drivers as, 149n31; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 135, 136, 144, 146. See also border crossings; deaths in the desert; performative crossings detritus in borderlands: of other nations, 34; Servín’s photographs including, 54 Dies Committee on Un-­American Activities, 90 Dinámica Fronteriza (Serrano and Morackis). See Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza Diné (Navajo) Long Walk (1964), 200, 214n9 dipping vats (stations): at the border, 34; border and, 23, 26; cattle walking through, 74; components of, 84n33; as obstacle to American cattle business, 77; as racialized markers, 27; ranchers on fences compared to, 78–­80, 84n46; as tick eradicators, 32, 72 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault), 204–­5 divining rod, Transborder Immigrant Tool as, 135 Dominguez, Ricardo, 134, 142 Doty, Roxanne Lynn, 179–­80 Douglas, Arizona: Historias en la Camioneta (Sanchez) and, 208; Operation Safeguard in, 155 Dreamers, border security issues and, 37 drones: over Border Field State Park, 140; tracking undocumented migrants with, 179 drug trade: border security issues and, 140, 148n12; maquiladoras in Nogales, Sonora and, 157; post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91; undocumented immigration anxiety and, 141 Duffus, Robert L., 98 Dust Bowl migrants, cheap labor and, 141 Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Terrain (inSITE exhibition, 2007), 15 Eberhard, Jude, 137–­39 economic conditions: border art and, 197. See also border commerce and infrastructure economic protectionism: post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91; U.S.-­Mexico border and, 141

The Electronic Disturbance (Critical Art Ensemble), 142 Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 (EDT 2.0): on Boal’s ideas and the TIT, 144; border art, game of power and, 134; Critical Art Ensemble as precursor to, 142; performative crossings and, 10; technology to renegotiate border crossings and, 136; Transborder Immigrant Tool in action, 135; Transborder Immigrant Tool of, 114–­ 15, 124; wealth redistribution and, 145. See also Transborder Immigrant Tool Elena Rodríguez, José Antonio, 171–­72 El Paso, Texas, Operation Hold the Line of, 136–­37, 155 El Paso to the Pacific Ocean: International Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43; joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 42; monument numbering and, 48–­49; Payne’s photographs of border monuments between, 39–­40, 40; U.S.-­ Mexico border represented and marked between, 5. See also monuments Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (Trinh), 209 Emory, William H., 31, 40, 47–­48 empiricist model of truth, photographic archives and, 183–­84 End of the Line (BAW/TAF): border crossers and, 146; at Border Field State Park, 137–­39; dual meaning in, 139–­40; Sheren on, 114 engineers, marking and defining borders and, 41–­42 entertainment, border cameras and, 204, 205, 216n24 Erección del Monumento Numero 153 (Erection of Monument 153), 9 Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, Mexico, 46 Escuela Nacional des Artes Plasticas, Mexico City, 128 European Union, border tensions in, 141 everyday, power of the, 33–­35 The Exile (BAW/TAF), 10 feminist art history, border art history and, 15 fences: Associated Press poll on border security and, 37; border, ownership of, 122; border, perception of, 122–­23; border agent near Nogales along (1947), 81; at Border Field State Park, 137, 138, 140; as canvas for artists, 131; as federal

Index | 229

fortifications against disease and race, 8; first federally funded (1911), 67, 78–­79, 84n43; as landscape markers, 7; ranchers on dipping stations compared to, 79–­80, 84n46. See also border wall; monuments; U.S.-­Mexico border; View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) Fencing Democracy (group show at apexart), 169 F. Gutekunst Company, 53 first aid: kits deposited in Sonoran Desert, 204; Transborder Immigrant Tool for finding, 134 first Thanksgiving, End of the Line as, 138, 139–­40 Flaherty, George, 23 Flint, Frank P., 75 FloodNet, 142 foot-­and-­mouth disease outbreak (1947), 91 Foucault, Michel, 62n37–­38, 204–­5 Friends of the Fiftieth Year Observance of the Evacuation and Internment, 214n10 From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography (Noriega), 19n11 La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/ United States Border Experience (Chávez and Grynsztejn), 14 fronterizos/as: BAW/TAF’s art by, 13; as borderlands dwellers, 5; embracing identity of, 129; marginality of, 128 frontier: Turner’s definition of, 132–­33n2. See also U.S.-­Mexico border Fuente, Mike de la, 94 fugitive landscape: joint map and, 51; use of term, 63n43 Fugitive Sites: inSITE 2000–­2001 New Contemporary Art in San Diego and Tijuana (2002), 15 Gadsden Purchase (1853), 57n7, 162, 216n21 García, Rupert, 128 Garner, John N., 76 gas pipeline operation, joint Mexican–­U.S., 101–­2 Gast, John, 119 geography: border art bound to, 197; journeying perspective and, 210; nation-­state power and authority and, 196; Sanchez’s video and, 211; violence perpetuated by the state and, 212 germ theory of disease, 71, 75 global economies and globalization: borders and, 34; cross-­border commerce and, 88

global positioning system (GPS): mobile phones enabled by, 134. See also Transborder Immigrant Tool Global War on Terror, 137 Goldman, Shifra, 18n6 Goldwater, Barry, 101 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 18n6, 137–­39 González, Noel, 164 González, Noel-­Fernando, 164 Gonzalez-­Moreno, José, 51 Good Neighbor policy and era (1940s–­1960s), 93–­94 government websites, virtual sit-­ins by Electronic Disturbance Theater and, 142 Goyzueto, Prospero, 63n41 GPS-­enabled mobile phones, Transborder Immigrant Tool for, 134 graffiti: by guerilla artists in Nogales, Sonora, 156; new border wall in Nogales, Sonora and, 169 Gramsci, Antonio, 28 Grand Canyon, Klett’s rephotography of, 197 Granite Construction, 167, 168 Great Wall of California (Baca), 157 Grijalva, Raúl, 168 ground sensors, at Border Field State Park, 140 Grupo Beto, 151 Grynsztejn, Madeleine, 14, 15 Guadalajara, Jalisco, highways and, 99 Guatemala: border-­crossing migrants from, 123. See also Mexico-­Guatemala border survey hactivism, 144 Hall, Stuart, 28 Harvill Plaza, University of Arizona, Tucson: Border Dynamics in, 3, 15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26 hegemony: alternative histories and, 32; border art and, 197; borderlands history and, 31; border spaces and, 28–­30; contesting violence perpetuated by the state and, 212; nationalisms and, 215n15; nationalistic history and, 196; Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 and, 198 Helguera, Leo, poster by, 89 Hernández, Ana Teresa, 171 Hernández, José-­Antonio, 151, 153, 155, 164 highways: cross-­border commerce and, 99–­ 100, 102–­3; Pan-­American, 93

230 | Index

Historias en la Camioneta (Sanchez, 2010): absent or invisible bodies in, 116, 207, 210; borders depicted by, 130–­31; racialization of borders and, 195; tracking time and space in, 208–­9; U.S. Border Patrol and, 207–­8; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 211; as video of border crossers, 206–­7; video still from, 207, 208; violence in Nogales, Sonora told in, 209 historical markers. See monuments “History” (Spivak), 200 Hock, Louis, 145 House Un-­American Activities Committee, 90 human cannonball, 146 Humane Borders, 172n1, 204 Huneycutt, Brett: arrangement of BFP images and, 186; on Border Film Project, 175; photograph selection and, 185; race and racism in Minuteman Project and, 184; on shedding light on “illegal” immigration, 177. See also Border Film Project; Border Film Project identities: border art and, 131; performative crossings and, 145–­46 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 191n2 immigration reform (U.S.): agitators on Latin American culture influence in U.S. and, 90; debates on, 25, 26; physical closing of border and, 135. See also migration Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, 1986), 114, 136; End of the Line and, 138–­ 39, 139–­40 Imperial Beach, California, border fence and, 137, 138–­39 impermanence, border art installations and, 16 Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (Gordon and Okihiro), 215n14 information, borders and, 34–­35 inSITE exhibitions: border art and, 147n2; cross-­border, 14–­15; Mexico City artists and, 127–­28; One Flew over the Void (2005), 146; San Diego–­Tijuana, 10, 15, 136, 146, 156–­57 International Boundary Commission (1890s): bodies obscured in aesthetic results of, 56; boundary map no. 5 by, 52; as collaborative labor and archive of interpretations, 42; documents deposited in monument

no, 258 by, 49; final collaborative report negotiations, 55; impressions from photograph albums for, 53–­54; individual published accounts by, 60–­61n25; map production, 50–­51; mission of, 41; national teams working independently and together, 45–­46; new monuments and, 48–­49; omissions on U.S. side maps, 51; overview, 7–­8; Payne’s and Servín’s photograph albums for, 51, 53; Report of the Boundary Commission Album, 53–­55; resurvey by, 43; Río de Sonoyta, en Sonora, 45; Servín as topographer and photographer for, 46–­47 International Boundary Monument No. 40: rebuilding of (1893), 39–­40, 40; as spatial ownership marker, 40–­41 Internet: BlueServo on, 216n24; border art and, 134, 136 Invisible Wall (Taller Yonke, 2010), 16 Izaguirre, Antonio, 95 Jacobson, Robin Dale, 184 Japanese American internment camps: apology and reparations for, 215n16; Klett’s photograph as contesting state violence, 212; Klett’s photograph of afterlife of, 196; lack of photographs in Arizona’s art historical record of, 214–­15n14; Native American land taken for, 211; as pictorial opening of American Southwestern history, 198; racialized state production and, 214n9; as symbol of national erasure, 200–­ 201. See also Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 Jardín de la Vida (Garden of Life) (Taller Yonke), 158 Jennings, W. H., 73–­74 Johnson, Levi E., 66–­67 Jones, Amelia, 18–­19n9 journeying perspective, of U.S.-­Mexico border, 209–­10 Judd, Chauncey William, 53 Juffer, Jane, 179 Junk Studio. See Taller Yonke Kahlo, Frida, 117 Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, Arizona, 168 Kennedy, John F., Jr., 91 The Kingdom and the Power (Talese), 91–­92 Klett, Mark: absent bodies in photographs of, 116, 200, 201; border studies and, 213n6;

Index | 231

cross-­border art and, 10; inscription of history on landscape and, 196; performance, border art and, 12; rephotography, 197, 213–­14n7; subjects of, located away from borderline, 195. See also Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 Koch, Robert, 71 Kurtz, Steve, 142 Kurtz Hope, 142 labor issues: undocumented immigration issues and, 140–­41. See also North American Free Trade Agreement landscape, shifting from noun to verb, 132n1 landscape painting or images, American history and, 203, 216n22 Lange, Dorothea, 214n14 Laredo, U.S. shoppers in, 98 Last Supper, End of the Line as, 139–­40 Latin American studies: border art history and, 15. See also Chicano/a studies and art history laws: Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 145, 149n30; U.S.-­Mexico border and, 122, 126 Lemmon, M. J., 44 León-­Portilla, Miguel, 14, 15 Letras cruze (Alvarez), 36 Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb, 113, 114 liberal nativism, Border Film Project organizers and, 184, 189–­90 lice, Mexican body, typhus scare of 1915 and, 77 Lipsett, Alexander S., 96 Livestock Commission, San Antonio, Texas, 75 livestock industries: cross-­border exchanges and, 100–­101. See also cattle “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands” (symposium, 2011), 5 López Mateos, Adolfo, 91, 102 Los Angeles Times: on advantages of cross-­ border commerce, 87–­88; Chandler on capitalism and democracy and, 92; on cross-­border agriculture and livestock industries, 100–­101; on cross-­border commercial exchanges, 95, 96, 97–­98; on cross-­border exchanges, 32; on cross-­ border exchanges in World War II, 90; on “open border,” 36; on shared borderland defense, 93; on U.S.-­Mexico rail lines, tourism and commerce, 100; on water for Mexican farmers from Arizona’s rivers, 91

Lou, Richard, 156 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), 130 magisterial gaze: Boime’s theory of, 202; Taylor’s photo from fence and, 205 Malagamba-­Ansótegui, Amelia: border art history and, 212–­13n4; on border art vs. art about the border, 13; El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and, 14; on contemporary art forms of cross-­border art troupes, 10; cross-­border exhibitions and, 15; “Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./ Mexico Borderlands” (symposium, 2011) and, 5. See also border art and spaces Malverde, in Paseo de Humanidad, 162 Malverde y Virgen (Morackis and Serrano), 31 Manifest Destiny, nineteenth century border art and, 113, 119 maps: border spaces in the landscape and, 31–­32; conflation of power and, 130, 133n8; International Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43; joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 40; marking and defining borders and, 41–­42; Mexico’s perception of border and, 116–­17; production, border resurvey and, 50–­51; surveyors’ vs. astronomers’ methods for, 47; as technology of ordering and discipline, 132n1; Transborder Immigrant Tool as, 145; of U.S.-­Mexico border, 42. See also cartographers maquiladora factories: Border Industrialization Program and, 102; global economies and, 88; growth of, 104; Morackis and Serrano and, 158, 166; in Nogales, Sonora, 157 Margaropus annulatus, 66–­67 Marx, Karl, 132n1 Matamoros: NAFTA and, 88; U.S. shoppers in, 98 Maudslay, Alfred P., 44 May, W. P., 76 Maya ruins, Cristiani’s photographs of, 44 McCarran-­Walter Act (1952), 92 McCormick, Anne O’Hare, 86–­87, 101 Mckiernan-­Gonzalez, John, 68 Mearns, Edgar Alexander, 45 memorial crosses: new border wall in Nogales, Sonora and, 169; painted on Nogales, Sonora border wall for migrant deaths, 156 Mendoza, Mary E., 7, 8, 24, 32, 37–­38

232 | Index

Mexicali, Baja California: arms and drug smuggling in, 91; U.S. shoppers in, 98 Mexican Americans: on undocumented immigration, 140–­41, 148n13; violence perpetuated by the state against, 215n15. See also Chicano/as Mexican-­American War, 162, 216n21 Mexican Chamber of Commerce, 95 Mexican geographic terms, 47 Mexican Revolution, 141 Mexicans: first limits on numbers entering U.S. of, 85n49; U.S. attitudes on environmental threats and, 67–­68. See also migrants; undocumented immigrants Mexico: cattle immunity to Texas fever in, 72; class and political tensions with U.S., 104; government websites, virtual sit-­ins of, 142; highways and railroads into U.S. from, 99–­100; National Border Program (1960s and 1970s), 8; Paseo de Humanidad on Nogales, Sonora border wall and, 154; post-­World War II tensions between U.S. and, 90–­91; representations of northern landscape in, 116–­18; space control by, 24; U.S. military and economic alliance with, 92–­93; U.S. regulation of migrants from, 178–­79. See also norteñas; U.S.-­Mexico border Mexico City artists, 127–­28 Mexico-­Guatemala border survey (1880s), 43, 44, 46, 48 México Opuesto (Mexico in Opposition) (Morackis, 1996), 158–­59 Mexico-­U. S. boundary resurvey. See boundary surveys; International Boundary Commission migrants: as absent in U.S. public discourse, 202; arrangement of BFP images of, 183–­ 84; BFP photos on “illegal” movements of, 189–­90; Border Film Project and, 11–­12, 115, 129, 175–­76; Border Film Project cover and, 181–­82, 182; distribution of disposable cameras to, 177; ideological subjugation by BFP, 181; mental spaces for crossing the border and, 123–­24; Minutemen photos of, 185–­86; Sonoran shelter for, 204; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 134–­35, 144. See also undocumented immigrants migration: of cattle, fences and, 78; of cattle, Texas fever and, 68–­69; fences for control of, 37, 80; global causes of, BFP omitting examination of, 187; “illegal,” BFP to “shed

light on issue” of, 177, 192n13; as “illegal,” migrants’ BFP photos as documenting, 189–­90; labor, national press (1940–­1965) on, 87; to Mexican border cities, international markets and, 88; of ticks, fences and, 79 milagros: Paseo de Humanidad and, 154, 161–­62; Quiroz’s, for Paseo de Humanidad, 124–­25, 124, 168, 169. See also Paseo de Humanidad militarized border: consequences of, 141; contested lands and, 215–­16n19; End of the Line and, 139; ethics of, 148n15; as full expression of state power, 140; Immigration Reform and Control Act and, 136; operations enforcing, 137; self-­ representation of migrants and Minutemen and, 180; Taylor’s photo from fence of, 204; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 143, 146, 147; U.S. border policies and, 187. See also U.S.-­Mexico border Millis, Dan, 168 Mineta, Norman, 215n16 Minna-­Stern, Alexandra, 68, 77 Minuteman Project, 175 Minutemen (Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Project): action and publicity event (2005), 175, 177; arrangement of BFP images of, 183–­84; BFP minimizing race and racism within, 184; BFP photos representing, 185; Border Film Project and, 11–­12, 115, 129, 175–­76; Border Film Project cover and, 181–­82, 182; denying role of race in, 193n34; distribution of disposable cameras to, 177–­78; House hearing on border security (2005) and, 193n22; ideological subjugation by BFP, 181; legitimating activities and influence on government decisions by, 179–­80; mainstream and extreme restrictionist forces and, 192n19; Mexican migrants and, 121; migrant photos by, 185–­86; policing undocumented migrants, 176, 178–­79; surveillance of migrants by, BFP and, 190–­ 91; “Undocumented Border Patrol Agent” badges worn by, 192n17 Minutemen Civil Defense Corps Project, 180 Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 132n1 modernity and modernization: documenting, under Porfirio, 50; Mexico’s, U.S. national press on, 97, 103; tales about, borderlands and, 23–­25

Index | 233

Molina, Natalia, 68, 77 monuments: erection of (1901), 9; International Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43; as landscape markers, 7; locating and rebuilding of (1890s), 47–­48; marking and defining borders and, 41–­42; marking U.S.-­Mexico border (1850s), 42–­43; Monumento Número 222, 55; moved, for International Boundary Commission, 57n3; new, for International Boundary Commission, 48–­49; no. 258, documents deposited in, 49; plans for, 62n34; precarious locations and, 62n36; Rebuilding Monument No. 40, 39–­40, 40; Santa Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166; Servín’s photographs of, 54; Taylor on photographing, 206; U.S.-­Mexico boundary survey teams (1850s) on, 59n15. See also fences Moore, Sarah J., 5, 10. See also border art and spaces Morackis, Alberto: Border Dynamics and, 3, 4; death of, 166; Museo de Arte de Nogales and, 169; Paseo de Humanidad and, 11, 154, 161, 162; Serrano collaboration with, 10, 158–­59. See also Taller Yonke Morrissey, Katherine G., 7–­8, 23, 30, 31, 35 Motorola phones, transformation into poems, 143 Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, Sonora), 164–­ 65, 165, 168, 169 Museo de Arte de Nogales, 169, 171 Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), 14, 145 museums, border art history and, 18n9 Naco, Arizona: Operation Safeguard in, 155; safehouses in, 137 naming, legitimizing through, 137 narcoviolence narrative, anti-­immigration and labor issues and, 140 National Border Program (Programa Nacional Fronterizo, PRONAF), 8, 33, 102, 103, 129 National Guard troops, Bush deployment of, 180 National President of the Border Patrol Council, 193n22 national press. See press, national Native Americans: absent in Klett’s photograph, 211; forced march from Canyon de Chelly to Bosque Redondo (1964), 200;

violence perpetuated by the state against, 215n15 nativism, liberal, Border Film Project organizers and, 184, 189–­90 nature, as produced and defined by culture, 132n1 Navajo (Diné) Long Walk (1964), 200, 214n9 necessity, walking as, walking as philosophy vs., 143 Nelson, O. H., 69–­70 New York Times: on advantages of cross-­ border commerce, 87–­88; on closeness of U.S. and Mexico (1944), 86–­87; on Communists in border cities, 90; on cross-­border agriculture and livestock industries, 101; on cross-­border commercial exchanges, 95, 96, 97–­98; on cross-­border efforts for Allied war effort, 93; on cross-­border relations, 94; on Mexico’s economic protectionism, 91; on “open border,” 36; Talese on capitalism and democracy and, 91–­92; Terry on monument locations to, 48–­49 Nogales, Arizona: demographics and economy of, 157; J. Baca show (1995) at Hilltop Gallery in, 157; Taylor’s photo from fence and, 203–­4; transnational connectedness with Nogales, Sonora, 206 Nogales, Sonora: arms and drug smuggling in, 91; border agent along border barbed wire fence (1947) near, 81; border art in, 151; Border Dynamics and, 3, 160; border walls erected by U.S. through, 153–­54; demographics and economy of, 157; highways and, 99; International Street, postcard image, 25; Mural de Taniperla, 164–­65, 165; new border wall in, 167–­68; Old Monument No. 26 in, 48; Operation Safeguard and, 155; Paseo de Humanidad and, 164; public art in (1980s), 10; rebuilding fence at, 137; Santa Muerte—­ Holy Death (Daniel), 165–­66; Taller Yonke work in, 158–­59; Taylor’s photo from fence and, 203–­4; transnational connectedness with Nogales, Arizona, 206; U.S. shoppers in, 98; wall blockading friends and family in, 156 No Mas Muertos, 204 nonplace, fence as, 122–­23 Noriega, Chon, 19n11 norteñas, border art and, 14

234 | Index

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): Border Film Project and, 12; FloodNet’s virtual sit-­ins and, 142; Goldwater on open border and, 104; maquiladoras in Nogales, Sonora and, 157; Mexican undocumented immigrants and, 155, 161; physical closing of border and, 135; precursors to, 102 Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, highways and, 100 obelisks. See monuments objectification, Minutemen’s use of cameras to survey migrants as, 179 Ochoa, Victor, 137–­39 O’Higgins, Pablo, 117–­18 Old Monuments: joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 40; locating and rebuilding of (1890s), 47–­48. See also monuments One Flew over the Void (2005), 146, 156–­57 open border: as capitalist dream, 36–­37; conservative opposition in 21st century to, 104–­5; Goldwater on, 104; national press (1940–­1965) on, 90 Operation Blockade, 137 Operation Gatekeeper, 137, 155 Operation Hold the Line, 136–­37, 155 Operation Safeguard, 137, 155 Operation Wetback, 87, 92 oral histories, Sanchez’s video of, 131, 210, 212 Orozco, José Clemente, 158 other nations, detritus in borderlands of, 34 Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–­1980, 19n11 Palenque, Cristiani’s photographs of, 44 Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985 (Klett): absent bodies in, 116; archival location of, 200; constructed image of people-­made site, 199; layers of meaning in, 198; racialized citizenship and, 195; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 211; visualizing the limits of knowing, 201 Panales, Hidalgo, highways and, 99 Panama-­Pacific International Exposition (1915), 129 Pan-­American Highway, 93 Panhandle Stock Association, 70 Pani Darqui, Mario, 102 panopticism, Foucault’s theory of, 204–­5 Paris World’s Fair (1889), 129

Paseo de Humanidad (Serrano, Morackis and Quiroz): detail, 11, 163; elements of, 161–­62; historical roots of, 131; life on la frontera, border fence and, 121–­22; in Nogales, Sonora on border wall, 152, 154; removal of, 168; Serrano with, 170. See also milagros Passement, Steve, 167 Pasteur, Louis, 71 Payne, Daniel R.: collaborative labor on aesthetic objects and, 7; glass plate negatives of, 60n22; monument-­building crew and, 46; Monumento Número 222 and, 55; name omitted from published joint album, 56; negative processing and photograph albums by, 51, 53, 64n48; other photographic interests of, 45; prints by, 62–­63n40; Rebuilding Monument No. 40 by, 39–­40, 40; Report of the Boundary Commission Album and, 54, 64n52; Servín and expertise of, 44–­45; tools of, 31–­32; as U.S. photographer for International Boundary Commission, 41, 42, 49 Payne, Harry, 44 people, borders and, 34–­35 Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Jones and Heathfield, eds.), 19n9 performance: movement and inscription of border from home to crossing, 124 performance art: border art history and, 18n9; End of the Line, 137–­39; San Diego–­ Tijuana border art history and, 10 performative crossings: BAW/TAF and, 136; dissolving and reinforcing the border, 135; Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. Lab and, 10; identities and, 145–­46; Immigration Reform and Control Act and, 136; Sanchez’s video and, 210–­11; use of term, 148n11. See also desert crossers; Historias en la Camioneta Performing the Body/Performing the Text (Jones), 19n9 personal fronteriza experiences: border crossers and, 217n32; in Historias en la Camioneta, 208 Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), 101–­2 Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, 94–­95 phone-­as-­poem, Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 143 phones, mobile: GPS-­enabled, 134; as Transborder Immigrant Tool, 143–­44, 145, 146. See also Transborder Immigrant Tool

Index | 235

photographs and photographers: at the border, border crosser’s experience vs., 205–­6; for International Boundary Commission (1890s), 43, 53, 60n22; marking and defining borders and, 41–­42; for Mexico-­Guatemala border survey, 44; as monument signifiers, 49; of old monuments, 48; ownership of, Border Film Project and, 183; self-­representation in, for documentary evidence, 178; by vigilante groups of undocumented migrants, 179; visibility and invisibility of human actors, 56. See also Border Film Project; cameras, disposable; International Boundary Commission; Payne, Daniel R.; Servín, Luis physical space, collapsing cyberspace and, 142, 144 Piedra Blanca Cattle Company, 73–­74 pochas, marginality of, 128 political interests: border art as critique of, 197; U.S.-­Mexico border and, 141 Porfirio Díaz, José de la Cruz, 50 Poston, Arizona: Colorado River Relocation Center in, 198; as third-­largest Arizona city (1942–­1945), 201 Poston Memorial Monument, 214n10 power: border art and game of, 134; Border Film Project and story of, 121, 176, 181; conflation of maps and, 130, 133n8; dispersion of, Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 145; of the everyday, 33–­35; laws governing U.S.-­Mexico border and, 122; military build-­up at U.S.-­Mexico border and, 140; nation-­state authority, geography and, 196; state, Immigration Reform and Control Act and, 136; Transborder Immigrant Tool and game of, 146 press, national: on advantages of cross-­border commerce, 87–­88, 90; anti-­Communist outlook of, 91–­92; on closeness of U.S. and Mexico (1944), 86–­87; on cross-­border agriculture and livestock industries, 100–­101; on cross-­border commercial exchanges, 32, 94–­96, 97–­98; on development projects and investment opportunities in borderlands, 101–­2; on Good Neighbor policy and era, 92–­93; on harmony and profit, 103–­4; on Mexico’s modernization, 97, 103; post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 90–­91; on shared borderland defense, 91–­92, 93–­94;

on tourism and job creation, 98–­99; on U.S.-­Mexico rail lines, tourism and commerce, 100 Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo privado en espacio público (inSITE exhibition, 1998), 14–­15 Programa de Industrializacion de la Frontera (Border Industrialization Program, BIP), 8, 33, 102 Programa Nacional Fronterizo (PRONAF, National Border Program), 8, 33, 102, 103, 129 Progressive Era, 71 Pryor, Ike T., 75, 76 quarantines: for “all cattle,” 76; to control Texas fever at state borders, 70; northern boundary of tick-­infested territory and, 79; Strafford’s cattle across Rio Grande and, 66–­67 Quiroz, Alfred: on Border Sutures, 158; Milagros, 124–­25, 124, 169; Morackis and Serrano and, 10; Paseo de Humanidad and, 11, 154, 161–­62, 164 race, racism, and racial categorization: cattlemen on “American” vs. “Mexican” cattle and, 77–­78, 79–­80; construction of Border Film Project and, 184; dipping vats as, 27; health examinations at the border and, 67–­68, 75; Klett’s photograph of, 195, 198, 200; southwestern U.S. states’ surveillance as, 216n24; Taylor’s photograph of whiteness as institutional norm, 205; Taylor’s view of U.S.-­built border fence and, 202, 212; U.S. federal government and, 214n9 railroads, cross-­border commerce and, 99–­ 100, 102–­3 Raley, Rita, 143 range limit: of Margaropus annulatus (ticks), 71, 72; use of term, 83n16 rational border policy, Border Film Project on, 187 Reagan, Ronald, 215n16 Rebuilding Monument No. 40 (Reconstrucción del Monumento Número 40 en la Extremidad Norte de la Sección Meridiana), 39–­40, 40 Regan, Margaret: on absences and silences in border art, 116; on Paseo de Humanidad, 122; Taller Yonke art history and, 10; U.S.-­ Mexico border studies and, 12, 13, 115

236 | Index

Report of the Boundary Commission Album, 53–­55, 65n52 reports, marking and defining borders and, 41–­42 Revealing Territory: Photographs of the Southwest (Klett, 1992), 198, 200 Rieke, Antonio W., 44 right-­wing militia groups: growing acceptance of, 179. See also Minutemen Rio Grande: Strafford’s cattle cross, 66–­67; U.S.-­Mexico negotiations on shifting course of, 91 Rivera, Diego, 158 roads: cross-­border commerce and, 99–­100, 102–­3. See also highways Rochlin, Abe, 94 Rodriguez, Ciro, 26, 27 Romero, Betsabeé, 127–­28 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 93 Roseberry, William, 29, 30 Salazar, Ruben, 100, 103 Salazar y Larregui, José, 31, 40, 47–­48 Sale, Gregory, 159–­60 Salmon, D. E., 70 Sanchez, Mary Jenea: bodies as invisible in video of, 116, 206–­7; bus passengers as historians crossing border video, 196; cross-­border art and, 10; as fronteriza, 217n32; lived experiences of border crossers and, 130; performance, border art and, 12; subjects engaging border in video of, 195. See also Historias en la Camioneta San Diego: Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park in, 135–­36; Committee on Chicano Rights, 141; as inSITE host, 10, 15, 136, 146, 156–­57; Operation Gatekeeper in, 155 San Diego Defense Council, 93 Sandweiss, Martha, 216n19 Santa Muerte—­Holy Death (Daniel), 165–­66, 171 Savage, J. D., 75, 76, 77 Schlee, Beverly, 142 Schnorr, Michael, 18n6, 137–­39 Schreiber, Rebecca, 11–­12, 115, 121 science and scientists: joint international boundary survey (1850s) and, 42; tick eradicators, borders and, 32 Scott, James, 24, 29 Secretaria de Fomento (Ministry of Development), Mexico’s, 50, 53, 63n41

Secure Fence Act (2006), 180 seed ticks, 78. See also tick eradication Sekula, Allan, 177, 181, 183, 184 Self-­Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (Kahlo, 1932), 117 self-­representation: arrangement of BFP images and, 184; Border Film Project organizers’ perspective and, 183; for documentary evidence, 178; of migrants and Minutemen for Border Film Project, 180; power differentials between U.S. citizens and undocumented migrants and, 187 Serpiente mural (Morackis), 159, 169 Serrano, Guadalupe: Border Dynamics and, 3, 4; el Centro Cultural los Nogales and, 169; Morackis’s collaboration with, 10, 158–­59; with Paseo de Humanidad, 170; Paseo de Humanidad and, 11, 154, 161, 164; repainting Serpiente mural, 169; saving Taniperla mural and, 168. See also Taller Yonke Servín, Luis: Blanco introduces Payne to, 44–­45; Blanco on photographic skills of, 59n16; central Mexico mining regions surveys and, 58n10; collaborative labor on aesthetic objects and, 7; detritus of other nations and, 34; as engineer, 43, 46; glass plate negatives of, 60n22; Mexican topographic skills of, 46–­47; as Mexico’s photographer for International Boundary Commission, 41, 44, 49; name omitted from published joint album, 56; negative processing and photograph albums by, 51, 53, 64n48; other photographic interests of, 45; prints by, 62–­63n40; Report of the Boundary Commission Album and, 54, 64n52; tools of, 31–­32; as topographer and photographer, 50 Sheaffer, Jack, 94 Sheren, Ila N., 10, 114, 115, 121 sicarios, violence in Nogales by, 209, 217n34 Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign, 168 Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berger), 205 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Turner), 132–­33n2 Simcox, Chris, 179–­81, 193n22 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 158 Sisco, Elizabeth, 145 site: Critical Art Ensemble on definition of, 142; portability, 147n3 sit-­ins, virtual, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and, 142

Index | 237

Situationist International, dérive practices, 143, 149n24 Smith, David, 146 social conditions, border art and, 197 social organizing and activism, art’s role in, 12–­13 Sonora: Río de Sonoyta (photograph), 45. See also Agua Prieta, Sonora; Arizona-­Sonora region; Nogales, Sonora Sonoran Desert. See desert crossers Southeast Asia, arts of popular resistance in, 29 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: on archives and knowledge production, 200; cultural history theory, 196–­97; on her postcolonial reasoning, 217n30; on vanishing present, 205–­6, 207, 210 Stalbaum, Brett, 134 state borders (U.S.), quarantines to control Texas fever at, 70 state institutions, border spaces in the landscape and, 30–­32 “Stealth Crossings” (BAW/TAF), 10 St. John, Rachel, 84n46 Strafford, W. P., 66–­67 Strom, Claire, 32, 70–­71 surveillance: camera tower for, 202–­4, 203; Foucault’s theory of panopticism and, 204–­5; of impossible-­to-­retrieve history, 206; of migrants by migrants, BFP and, 190; of migrants by Minutemen, BFP and, 190–­91; Minutemen’s photographs of migrant movements and, 185; photographic self-­representation vs., 180; as racialized entertainment for whites, 216n24; Taylor’s view of U.S.-­built border fence and, 212. See also View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) surveyors: for International Boundary Commission (1890s), 43; marking and defining borders and, 41–­42 Swartz, Lonnie, 171–­72 Sweeney, Gray, 42 tactical media, 143, 144 Taddei, Luis Diego, 167, 169, 171 Tagg, John, 214n13 Talese, Gay, 91–­92 Taller de Gráfica Popular, 118 Taller Yonke (Junk Studio): after Morackis’s death, 167; Beyond Borders commission for, 159; Border Dynamics, 3, 4, 131, 159–­ 61; formation of, 158; Invisible Wall, 16;

Mural de Taniperla and, 164–­65; Regan on history of, 10, 115; U.S. Border Patrol and, 122. See also Morackis, Alberto; Paseo de Humanidad; Serrano, Guadalupe Taniperla, Chiapas, mural of, 164–­65, 169 tax rebates, for undocumented immigrants, 145 Taylor, David: absent bodies in photographs of, 116; border crossers and, 205; cross-­ border art and, 10; performance, border art and, 12; subjects engaging border in photographs of, 195; two-­part color landscapes of, 201–­2; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands residents and, 196; on visual rhetoric of white privilege, 206. See also View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) technologies of the nation: characteristics of, 216n22; Sanchez’s video and, 209; Taylor’s photo of U.S.-­Mexico border and, 202 Téllez, Javier, 146, 156–­57 Tennessee Gas Transmission Company, 102 terrorism: low-­intensity, Minutemen photos of migrants as, 186; War on, 137, 140 Terry, L. Seward, 48–­49 Texas fever: lines of drive across U.S. and, 68–­70; permanently infected district boundaries for, 70–­71 Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal and, 144 Thompson, E. P., 28 tick eradication: BAI response to cattlemen complaints on, 75–­76; BAI’s programs for, 71–­72; borders and, 32, 34; cattlemen complaints to officials on, 73–­75, 76; cattlemen racializing cattle due to, 80; cattle straying across border and, 72–­73; fence construction for, 67–­68; quarantine line map and, 79; rise of U.S. administrative state and, 70–­71; seed ticks on plants and fence posts and, 78; Strafford’s cattle across Rio Grande and, 66–­67. See also dipping vats Tiempo privado en espacio público/Private Time in Public Space (inSITE exhibition, 1998), 14–­15 Tijuana: Border Door (Lou, 1988) in, 156; as inSITE host, 10, 15, 136, 146, 156–­57; NAFTA and, 88; U.S. shoppers in, 98 Tijuana Civilian Defense Council, 93 Tilly, Charles, 33 Time magazine, 26 Tombstone, Arizona, Minutemen action and publicity event (2005) in, 175, 177

238 | Index

tourism, 97, 98–­99, 99 Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT) (Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, 2009): in action, 135; border art, game of power and, 134; border as performative and politicized site and, 114–­15; Border Patrol and, 144–­45, 147, 150n35; mitigating militarization effects, 143; new consciousness about border and, 124; phone-­as-­poem and, 143–­44; translating practical information into action, 142 Tratado de topografía (Covarrubias), 47, 61n29 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 42, 57n7, 86, 216n21 Treaty of Mesilla (1853), 42, 57n7 Trinh Minh-­ha, 209–­10, 217n33 Truett, Samuel: on border history, 197; The Border Project (2011–­2012) and, 5; on hidden histories of U.S.-­Mexico frontier, 195; on legacy of crossing and reinforcing borders, 3; on marking the landscape, 7. See also border landscapes conversation Truettner, William H., 19n11 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 132–­33n2 Tzeltal Indians, Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, Sonora) and, 164 undocumented immigrants: Art Rebate (Arte Reembolso, 1993) and, 145; Border Film Project and visibility of, 178; evading detection as goal of, 185; Minutemen policing of, 176, 178–­79; multiple voices on, 140–­41; NAFTA and surge in, 155; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 146. See also migration United Americas, binational celebrations of, 98 United States: border art history in, 14; class and political tensions with Mexico, 104; conception of border in, 118–­19; cultural imperialism, world’s fairs and, 129–­30; first limits on Mexicans entering, 85n49; government websites, virtual sit-­ins of, 142; highways and railroads into Mexico from, 99–­100; historical reliance on cheap labor in, 141; media representations of Mexico and violence, 209; Mexico’s military and economic alliance with, 92–­93; tick eradication administrative state in, 70–­71. See also American South; press, national; U.S.-­Mexico border

U.S. Army, Ambos Nogales border wall and, 154 U.S. art history: border art and, 19n11. See also border art history U.S. Border Patrol: Ambos Nogales border wall and, 154; Border Dynamics (Taller Yonke) and, 122, 159, 160; Historias en la Camioneta (Sanchez) and, 207–­8; Immigration Reform and Control Act and, 136; Invisible Wall (Taller Yonke) and, 16; migrant deaths and, 154–­55, 171–­72; Minutemen photos of migrants detained by, 186; outposts, TIT for finding, 134; in Paseo de Humanidad, 162; policing undocumented migrants, 179; saving Taniperla mural and, 168; Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 144–­45, 147, 150n35; undocumented immigrants and, 153 U.S. Boundary Commission: boundary monuments and, 166. See also International Boundary Commission U.S. companies: relocating headquarters to border region (late 1950s), 95, 96. See also border commerce and infrastructure U.S. Department of Agriculture, 67, 70, 78. See also Bureau of Animal Industry U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 179, 192n17 U.S. House Committee on Government Reform, 193n22 U.S.-­Mexico border: BAI-­built fence along (1911), 67; border art history from U.S. perspective on, 116; contested lands in northern Mexico and American Southwest, 202, 215–­16n19; establishment of, 216n21; as fluid, permeable, and intangible for ranchers and cattle, 66–­67; fortification projects for tick eradication and, 73; gateways and customs houses for, 102; inSITE exhibitions at, 136; joint international survey (1850s) of, 39–­40, 42; journeying perspectives of, 209–­10; marking and defining process, 41–­42; as material and immaterial space, Trinh on, 209, 217n33; Mexican vs. U.S. perspective of, 116–­19; national press on economic development and, 96; population growth and modernization along, 103; reflecting asymmetries of power, 127–­28; representation and marking of, 6; separating U.S. from people and nature of Mexico, 81–­82; shared defense during Good Neighbor

Index | 239

era of, 93; tick eradication at, 72–­73. See also border cities; border commerce and infrastructure; border crossings; border landscapes conversation; border policing; border wall; boundary surveys; cross-­ border exchanges; militarized border University of Arizona, Tucson: Border Dynamics at, 3, 160; Center for Creative Photography, 200, 214n11 University of Arizona Museum of Art: The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, and Lifescapes (2011–­2012), 5, 168 Valdez, Sergio, 164 Val Verde Irrigation Company, Del Rio, Texas, 66 van der Straet, Jan, 113, 130 vanishing present: Klett’s photograph and, 200–­201; Sanchez’s video and, 210; Taylor’s photo from fence and, 205–­6 Vespucci, Amerigo, 113, 130 Vida y sueños de la cañada perla (Life and Dreams of the Pearl Stream) (Nogales, Sonora), 164–­65, 165 video art. See Historias en la Camioneta Vietnam War, corrugated metal wall as canvas and, 131 View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with camera tower) (Taylor): intersecting geography and biopolitical modalities, 196; magisterial gaze of, 202; national discourse on racial privilege and, 205; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 211; vanishing present and, 205–­6; as visual rhetoric of white privilege, 206; from Working the Line series, 203 vigilante groups: photographing undocumented migrants, 179. See also Minutemen violence: in Nogales, Sonora by sicarios, 209, 217n34; perpetuated by the state, geography and, 212, 215n15; technologies of the nation fostering, 209; vigilante, Minutemen Project allies and, 176 visualization projects: attention to, 15; international boundary surveys as, 41–­42, 56; of U.S.-­Mexico border, 8, 10. See also

boundary surveys; International Boundary Commission walking: EDT 2.0 connecting thinking and, 144; as philosophy or art or as migratory necessity, 143 Wallace, Henry, 93 “Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display” (Amilhat-­Szary), 121 Wall Street Journal, 97, 101, 103 Warner, John-­Michael, 12, 13, 116, 130 War on Drugs, 140, 147n5 War on Terror, 137, 140 Washington Monument, 62n34 Washington Post, 32, 93–­94 water, Transborder Immigrant Tool for finding, 134, 135 water rights, post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91 The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–­1920 (Truettner), 19n11 Westinghouse Corporation, 101 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (Leutze), 113, 114 wetback drives (early 1950s), 92 whiteness, federally conceived form of: Taylor’s photo from fence and, 205, 206. See also race, racism, and racial categorization Wolf, Byron, 197 Working the Line (Taylor, 2008–­present): absent or invisible bodies in, 116; racialization of borders and, 195; as two-­part color landscapes, 201–­2 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 132n2 world’s fairs, 129–­30 World War II, Axis invasion of Americas fears during, 90 Wright, J. H., 44 Young, Elliott, 3 Zapata, Emiliano, 164 Zapatista movement, 142; Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, Sonora) and, 164, 165 Zapotec from Oaxaca, navigation of the heart by, 125–­26