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 accu-
mulated 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, Jenni-
fer 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 Tru-
ett, 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 col-
leagues and students, particularly the graduate students in Kent State Uni-
versity’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 Expedi-
tion,” provided useful feedback. Assistance and contributions from Cassan-
dra 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 Uni-
versity. 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, Steph-
anie 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, busi-
ness 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 Ameri-
can 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, Land-
scapes, 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 under-
standing 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 repre-
sentation 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 his-
tory 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 partic-
ular 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 associ-
ated 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 acad-
emy, 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 per-
spective. 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 his-
tory, 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 inter-
disciplinary 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 aes-
thetic, 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 environ-
ments 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 border-
lands and the border itself. As Samuel Truett and Maribel Alvarez discuss
in their conversational essay, the chapters in part 1 investigate the compli-
cations 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 bor-
derlands’ 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. Cul-
tural 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 photo-
graphs, and drew maps. Comparing and contrasting the images taken by
Mexican section photographer Luis Servín with those by his American coun-
terpart, 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 Mex-
ican 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 Mex-
ican “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 construc-
tion 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 bor-
derline. “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 beautifica-
tion 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 Mexi-
cana (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, chap-
ters 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 art-
ist Mary Jenea Sanchez, and the photo documentary Border Film Project.
These artists address and question conventional approaches to documenta-
tion, 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 bor-
der 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 publica-

tion that crosses art historical, academic, and community boundaries. Sch-
reiber’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 com-
monplace neoliberal paradigms, Schreiber’s research methodology flags
problems with locating various border conversations in the same way, espe-
cially regarding art about the border. Schreiber asks crucial questions about
documentation and self-­representation with a sensitive nuance to author-
ship. 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 bor-
der 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, War-
ner 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 border-
line, borderlands, and fronterizo/a experiences as the subject and object of
history. These essays as a whole offer important methodological develop-
ments. The research questions range from performative, playful, and gam-
ing (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 repre-
sentation 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 stud-
ies, 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 stud-
ies as well as changing U.S.-­Mexico border policies. Several scholars, exhibi-
tions, 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 Chi-
cano/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 dis-
course. Largely because of their humorous but serious and radical contribu-
tions 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 bor-
der.” 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 nec-
essarily 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 his-
tory explores the politics of place making for the U.S. and Mexican nations
and Mexican and Mexican American peoples. Patricio Chávez and Made-
leine 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 Chi-
cano/a art history. In La Frontera/The Border, Chávez and Grynsztejn recon-
sider 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 inter-
pretations 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 his-
tories published in Mexico, such as Miguel León-­Portilla’s 1976 Culturas en
peligro (Endangered Cultures). Although León-­Portillo does not discuss bor-
der 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 cul-
tural 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 muse-
ums 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 Pub-
lic 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 intel-
lectual 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, Amer-
ican 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 inter-

ests to this discussion. Our daily lives are permeated, both directly and indi-
rectly, by the border’s presence. The dynamics of the border and its represen-
tations—­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 cen-
tury. Its chapters call attention to a variety of visualization projects—­border
art, fences, buildings, and tangible and semipermanent marks on the land-
scape. 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. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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

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: Stan-
ford 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: Har-
vard 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 (Cam-
bridge, 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).
4. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987); John C. Welchman, ed., Rethinking Borders (Minneap-
olis: 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).
5. Ila Nicole Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S.
Frontera Since 1984 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Christina Aus-
hana, “Transborder Art Activism and the U.S.-­Mexico Border: Analyzing ‘Art­
scapes’ as Forms of Resistance and Cultural Production in the Frame of Global-
ization,” 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

Routledge, 2016); Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-­Williams, eds., Critical Bor-
der 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).
6. In the 1970s, Shifra Goldman wrote one of the earliest dissertations on modern
Mexican art. Before passing away in 2011, she published numerous founda-
tional works for Chicano/a art history: Goldman and Tomás Ybarra-­Frausto,
Arte Chicano: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Chicano Art, 1965–­1981 (Berke-
ley: 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; Mexi-
cali, 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.
7. 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.
8. Miguel León-­Portilla, Culturas en peligro (Mexico City: Alianza Editorial Mex-
icana, 1976); and Eduardo Barrera, Discursos emergentes de (desde/sobre) la
frontera norte (Ciudad Juárez: ENTORNO, 1995).
9. 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 performa-
tive 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: Rout-
ledge, 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 Equilib-
rium: 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 cen-
tury 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.: Smithso-
nian, 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 Stan-
dard 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 loco-
motives of globalization slam on the brakes— where the boundaries of mod-
ern 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 perma-
nent 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 cen-
ters and dipping vats, but also through what the art historian George Fla-
herty 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 ten-
sion 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, pho-
tographs, 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 reengi-
neered 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 con-
trolled space through new spaces of consumption, pulling workers toward
a centrist web of shopping centers, museums, and patriotic portals. Mean-
while, 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 oppos-
ing 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 bor-
der is usually an extreme sign that things have not gone well among neigh-
bors 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 neces-
sary.” 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 busi-

ness 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 evi-
dent 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 keep-
ing nations and states intact—­but we want the power and modern comforts
that come with allowing things to move across borders. This is a fundamen-
tal 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 acalora-
das” emerged around the campfire? U.S. ranchers, traditionally working with
Mexican ranchers to gather strays behind the state’s back, watched their live-
stock 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 his-
torical 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 hege-
monic 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 vul-
nerability 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 receiv-
ing end of that wielding are most often marked by contention, argument,
and gestures that range along a performatic spectrum from accommoda-
tion 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 Rose-
berry, 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 help-
ful. The border is this enigma of power in so many ways: continually rein-
forced 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 grass-
roots 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 “accomplish-
ments” 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 Mexi-
can highway systems, or the Bureau of Animal Industry, state institutions
and networks figure prominently in all these essays. Their histories fit nat-
urally 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. Mendo-
za’s tick eradicators also entered a world in motion, as livestock, ticks, and
protozoa circulated in maddening ways across the landscape. Like bound-
ary 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 inadver-
tently 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 Washing-
ton 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 var-
ious 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 bor-
derlands 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 care-
ful process that aims to document how a borderlands panorama of knowl-
edge 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 dis-
ciplined 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 Auto-
mobile 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 scat-
tered 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 cir-
cuit board. People, information, and commodities move, and borders offer
resistance, in an epic battle tied to epic forces: technology, modernity, xeno-
phobia, 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 read-
ers 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 ordi-
nary 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 col-
lapsed the border itself through photographic monuments. A prior hop-
scotch 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 over-
whelms 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 moder-
nity, 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 prop-
osition. So thwarted our political public discourse on the “border crisis” has
become that a scheme as managerial and contrived as a chamber of com-
merce project today seems progressive.
And yet, as you say, Sam, in the ebb and flow of border politics and soci-
ety, 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 perma-
nent 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 ambiv-
alence, but also the possibility, perhaps only in the crevices, that a major-
ity 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 democrat-
ically 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 per-
suaded 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 pessi-
mistic 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 mas-
ter 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. George Flaherty, “Consuming Desires: Beautification and Repatriation at Mex-

ico’s Northern Border” (“Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico
Borderlands,” symposium, University of Arizona, December 1–­3, 2011).
2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
3. Merriam-­Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, MA: Merriam-­
Webster, 1994).
4. David Von Drehle, “The Great Wall of America,” Time, June 30, 2008.
5. 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: Pen-
guin, 1968).
6. 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 Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 361.
7. 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.
8. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 1989).
9. 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 ven-
ues— 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 Sala-
zar’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, survey-
ors, 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 bor-
ders through a combination of cartographic, scientific, physical, and pho-
tographic means. The survey teams strove to make abstract lines visible,
 42 | Part I

marking national boundaries with obelisk-­shaped monuments, astronomi-

cal 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 collabo-
rative labor and as an archive of competing interpretations.
An abstract international boundary, the U.S.-­Mexico line traces diplo-
matic agreements between two countries and marks the extent of territo-
rial 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 politi-
cal 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 bound-
ary 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 inter-
national 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 photog-
rapher 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 rep-
resentations, the maps, monuments, and photographs were notably assigned
somewhat different meanings. The maps defined the borderline, the mon-
uments made the borderline visible, and the photographs marked the loca-
tions 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 for-
eign 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 obser-
vation. 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, commer-
cial 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 intro-
duced 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, sug-
gesting 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 pro-

fessional 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, cap-
turing 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 con-
tracted 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 read-
ily 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 Mex-
ican members of the late nineteenth-­century border survey teams, Servín
was accustomed to viewing the landscape through instruments and trans-
lating 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 mathemat-
ics, 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 topo-
graphical 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, Covar-
rubias 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 Mex-
ican 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 monu-
ment is a misdemeanor, punishable by the United States or Mexico.” Find-
ing 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 doc-
umenting them with photographs, and in doing so, they provided visual
sources for stories about shifting boundary lines. In official texts, in histori-
ans’ accounts, and in local displays, the photographs of old and new monu-
ments, 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 col-
umns, 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 mount-
ing 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 com-
ment, 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 place-
ments 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 identi-
fied 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 inter-
pretation 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, repro-
duced, and consumed, the physical monuments, maps, and photograph
albums link the tangible and the abstract. What happens in the transforma-
tions 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 loca-
tions.39 The photographers and their photographs were well integrated into
the commission. The likable and useful Servín and Payne gained the appre-
ciation 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 respec-
tive capitals. Availing themselves of the equipment and skills of El Paso
 50 | Part I

photographic shops, they had specific images developed and printed. Pho-
tographs 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, archaeo-
logical 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 pro-
cess, involving many different hands, and relied, for the most part, on pains-
taking work on the ground. Consider the common process as employed by
the 1890s U.S. section: operating from separate mobile camps, topograph-
ical teams walked the landscape and drew sketch maps, made observation
notes, and provided calculations in notebooks. These sketches and calcula-
tions 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 Devel-
opment, 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 bilin-
gual 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 simul-
taneously 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 per-
sonal, 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 exist-
ing 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, riv-
erbanks, and bars made efforts to map and mark the designated border-
line 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 vari-
ations, 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 photo-
graphic set of the 258 monuments. Servín enlisted the services of a San Diego
Figure 2.3 Boundary between the United States and Mexico as Surveyed and Marked by the International Bound-
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.
 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 Span-
ish 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 photo-
graph 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.
 54 | Part I

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 photogra-
phers. The manuscript collections of both the U.S. and the Mexican com-
missions 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 posi-
tion 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 gov-
ernment 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 con-
trast, 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 pres-
ence. 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 Commis-
sion 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. Speak-
ing 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 dis-
cusiones, 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, deci-
sions and practices of survey personnel, and interventions of local inter-
ests all influenced the border-creation process and its resultant aesthetic
products.
 56 | Part I

Bodies, in particular, were largely obscured in the aesthetic results. Con-

sider 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 visual-
ization 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: distinc-
tions between U.S. and Mexican photographic views, the visibility and invis-
ibility 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 Pacif-
ico; 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

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.
2. Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States– Mexico Boundary,
1849– 1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 196– 97.
3. 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.
4. On the continuing state markings of the border, see Mary Mendoza’s “Fencing
the Line” in this volume.
5. 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).
6. 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.
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.
8. 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: Albuquer-
que Museum, 1996), 27.
9. For the history of the Mexico-U.S. border surveys, see Leon C. Metz, Bor-
der: The U.S.-Mexico Line (El Paso, TX: Mangan Books, 1989); Joseph Rich-
ard Werne, “Redrawing the Southwestern Boundary, 1891– 1896,” Southwest-
ern 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 ocupacio-
nal 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. Expediente 89, legajo 3, caja 2, Límite con Estados Unidos, Límites con Esta-
dos 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 Min-
ería é Industrias (October 1892): 289– 332, as indexed in Rafael Aguilar y San-
tillán, “Bibliografía Geológica y Minera de la República Mexicana completada
hasta el año de 1904,” Boletín del Instituto Geológico de México 17 (1908): 225.
11. Exp. 39, legajo 1a, caja 4, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN.
12. 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 Internacio-
nal de Límites, según la convención de 29 Julio de 1882, renovada en Febrero 18
de 1889 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896).
13. Report of the Boundary Commission, pt. 1, 17.
14. William H. Emory, Report of the United States and Mexican Boundary Sur-
vey, 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. Goetz-
mann, The West of the Imagination, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2009), 161– 66; and Hall, Drawing the Borderline. On the social and politi-
cal processes embedded in mapping and surveying, see Raymond B. Craib, Car-
tographic 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 Univer-
sity, 2010); and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-
Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1994).
 Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 59

15. 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 bor-
derline. 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.
16. 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 Inge-
niero 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.
17. 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, Gua-
temala 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: Univer-
sidad 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).
18. 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. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (National Archives microfilm publica-
tion T9), Los Angeles data accessed through http://www.ancestry.com.
20. See reference in H. T. Payne, Game Birds and Game Fishes of the Pacific Coast
(Los Angeles: News Publishing, 1913).
21. Blanco to J. W. Barlow, February [illegible day] 1892, 92, libro 1, legajo 1, caja
29, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN.
22. A selected collection of photographs was published as Report of the Bound-
ary 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.
23. 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 Interna-
tional Boundary Survey, 1892– 1894, Edgar Alexander Mearns Papers, Record
Unit 7083, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C.
24. 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 collec-
tions 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 Con-
cerned 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.
25. 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,” Cos-
mopolitan (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

States and Mexico, 1892–1894,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum 19,
no. 1111 (1897): 333– 79.
26. 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, Califor-
nia 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.
27. 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 geo-
desia con los primeros elementos de astronomía práctica, 2 vols. (Mexico City:
Imprenta del Gobierno, en Palacio, 1868).
28. José Omar Moncada Maya, Irma Escamilla Herrera, Gabriela Guerrero Cis-
neros, 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.
29. Covarrubias, Tratado de topografía. This standard text went through several
editions. Servín was likely also familiar with the second edition, retitled Trat-
ado 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.)
30. Covarrubias, Tratado de topografía, 1:484.
31. Covarrubias, Tratado elemental, 2:444– 45.
32. While the survey business had become increasingly professionalized, central-
ized, 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.
33. 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. 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.
35. “The Mexican Boundary Line,” New York Times, December 29, 1894.
36. 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 mon-
uments. 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.
37. The latter definition draws on Michel Foucault’s influential analyses of dis-
course 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 freu-
dienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995) and Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans.
Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
38. I am playing here with the Foucauldian notions of “monument” and “docu-
ment,” especially in reference to the practice of history. Foucault, Archaeol-
ogy of Knowledge, 6– 11. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded
Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 33– 44.
39. In thinking about the relations among photographs, monuments, landscapes,
and maps, I have found useful Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photog-
raphy 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).
40. 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
 Monuments, Photographs, and Maps | 63

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.
41. See exp. 103, legajo 5, caja 4, Límite con Guatemala, 176, AGN, on senior
engineer Prospero Goyzueto’s practice of sending photographs to the Secre-
taría de Fomento. Photography had been employed by the Mexican Minis-
try 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).
42. See, for example, no. 8, legajo 1, caja 37, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN.
43. I borrow the term “fugitive landscape” from Samuel Truett, Fugitive Land-
scapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008). In thinking about local knowledge and mapmak-
ing, 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).
44. 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, Inter-
national 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.
45. As the Mexican engineers’ report describes the process, “La exuberante veg-
etación 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

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.
46. Boundary between the United States and Mexico map. See Memoria de la Sec-
ción Mexicana, appendix 25, pp. 315– 52, for the comparative astronomical and
mathematical calculations and a visual representation of triangulations.
47. 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.
48. 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.
49. Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 46; Report of the Boundary Commission, pt. 2,
200; Report of the Boundary Commission Album.
50. J. W. Barlow to Secretary of State, November 25, 1896, in S. Doc. No. 56, 55th
Cong., 1st Sess (1897).
51. My thinking about the survey photographs, and the archives they created, is
influenced by Kelsey, Archive Style; Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discur-
sive Spaces,” Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982): 311– 19; Alan Trachtenberg, Read-
ing 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 Pho-
tographic History, 10– 19; Rebecca Comay, ed., Lost in the Archives (Toronto:
Alphabet City Media, 2002); Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photogra-
phy 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).
52. Servín and Payne both photographed such images of people and structures,
and a few were included in the official joint report.
53. 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. Blanco to Secretaría de Fomento, June 1, 1896, 106–8, exp. 551, legajo 41, caja
24, Límite con Estados Unidos, 176, AGN.
55. These written reports are organized differently, a reflection perhaps of cul-
tural 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, Wash-
ington). He relegated special reports, calculations, and other matters to appen-
dices. Barlow organized the chapters by task and incorporated written reports
and key correspondence within his ten-chapter report.
56. Memoria de la Sección Mexicana, 47. Blanco goes on to credit the harmoni-
ous 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 quan-
dary. 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 veter-
inarian 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
 Fencing the Line  |  67

the customs guards, Johnson roped and tied the animals, then “thoroughly
hand dressed them with Beaumont-­oil” and placed them in a ten-­acre pas-
ture 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 tra-
versed 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 environ-
ment 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.
 68 | Part I

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 twen-
tieth 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 fortifica-
tion 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 nonhu-
man 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 South-
west. 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, cow-
boys understood that the disease had something to do with the migration
 Fencing the Line | 69

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,
 70 | Part I

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 Panhan-
dle 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, cow-
boys 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 pro-
tect 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 dis-
trict.” 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
 Fencing the Line  |  71

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 trans-
mit 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 interna-
tional 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.
 72 | Part I

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, out-
side 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 coun-
try of warmer Mexico. As a result, cattle in Mexico had developed immuni-
ties 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
 Fencing the Line  |  73

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 dis-
tance from a U.S. range, cowboys would have to round them up and drive
them long distances (sometimes hundreds of miles) to the nearest inspec-
tion 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. Cat-
tlemen wrote to their congressmen, the secretary of agriculture, and officials
from the BAI to beg for relaxed regulations. W. H. Jennings of the Piedra
 74 | Part I

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 pas-
ture. 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
 Fencing the Line  |  75

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 Commis-
sion 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 pas-
tures 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 per-
mitting 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
 76 | Part I

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 bor-
der lodged complaints. W. P. May in Laredo, Texas, wrote to his U.S. repre-
sentative, 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 nondiscrim-
inatory 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, threat-
ened 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.
 Fencing the Line  |  77

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 racializa-
tion 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” Amer-
ican 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
 78 | Part I

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 Depart-
ment 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 prac-
ticable” 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 migra-
tion 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
 Fencing the Line | 79

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” cat-
tle. 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.
 80 | Part I

Cattlemen hated the quarantine and the dipping, even though these mea-
sures 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 poten-
tially 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 Mex-
ico created a discourse among cattle ranchers that reified the need for protec-
tion 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 sur-
rounds the border today. Over the course of the twentieth century, the bor-
der 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 Mex-
ican Northwest, resulting in increasing death rates for migrants.
By focusing on tick eradication in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, this chapter reveals how bounding the nation’s perimeter has
been an attempt to control the movement of not only people, but animals
 Fencing the Line | 81

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 attri-
butes of the U.S.-Mexico border, they have in general overlooked the degree
 82 | Part I

to which its fortification represents, at root, an effort to remake the natu-

ral and built environments of a vast, little understood, and hotly contested
landscape.

Notes

1. Levi E. Johnson, Veterinarian Inspector, to Thomas A. Bray, Veterinary Inspec-

tor in Charge, June 25, 1910, entry 2, box 17, Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI)
Records, Record Group (RG) 17, National Archives and Records Administra-
tion 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 Cat-
tle 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 Commis-
sions 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 Ameri-
can Historical Review 79 (February 1999): 41–­81; Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Cit-
izens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–­1939 (Berkeley: University
 Fencing the Line  |  83

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 Agricul-
ture, 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 (Balti-
more, 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), Octo-
ber 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.
 84 | Part I

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 Agri-
culture, 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 Arbitra-
tions, 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 Arbitra-
tions, 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.
 Fencing the Line  |  85

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 Com-
mission (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 immi-
gration policy but have not considered the environment. See also Mae Ngai,
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Rein-
forcing 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 bor-
ders 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-
 Open Border | 87

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 bor-
derlands economies, making the region the fastest-growing area of both
countries. Mexican and U.S. investment in agriculture, ranching, and man-
ufacturing industries; infrastructural developments including highway, rail-
road, and monorail construction; the building of new customs gateways, fac-
tories, 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 rela-
tionships of the two countries, however, most studies of the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands during the mid-twentieth century have focused on labor migra-
tion 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 resi-
dents of border cities crossed the border routinely, historians have demon-
strated, 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
 88 | Part I

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 sign-
ing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but also during
this earlier period. Despite domestic protections seeking to limit U.S. influ-
ence, the economic bases of northern Mexico’s border states— agriculture,
ranching, manufacturing, and the provision of services— became increas-
ingly 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 bor-
der 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 busi-
ness 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 com-
merce 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.
 90 | Part I

recent border debates. From the 1970s forward, anti-immigrant agitators

argued that the growing wave of Mexican and other Latin American immi-
grants 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 diffi-
cult. 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. govern-
ment 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
 Open Border | 91

border during the early twentieth century, as Mary Mendoza demonstrates

in her chapter in this volume, the 1947 outbreak in Mexico of foot-and-
mouth 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 eco-
nomic 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 impor-
tation 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 com-
plained 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 inci-
dents.” 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 Conven-
tion Act of 1964, which, after decades of conflict between the two coun-
tries, 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
 92 | Part I

“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 anti-
Communist bent, even though Cold War– inspired policies often led to anti-
immigrant sentiment and increased tensions between the United States and
Mexico. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, for example, excluded Commu-
nists and others seen as subversive threats, including many Mexicans liv-
ing in the United States. During the early 1950s, “wetback drives” expelled
millions of them, in addition to an unknown number of Mexican Ameri-
can 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 Opera-
tion 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 cross-
border 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
 Open Border | 93

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 Coun-
cil and the Tijuana Civilian Defense Council acted “in concert” to protect
their shared borderland. The New York Times quoted U.S. government offi-
cials 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 “shoul-
der 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
 94 | Part I

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 Roch-
lin (right), united by Mike de la Fuente, at the Tucson Retail Trade Bureau meet-
ing, 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 top-
ics, 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 commer-
cial 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
 Open Border | 95

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 prof-
its 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 estab-
lishment 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
 96 | Part I

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 Mid-
west 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 thou-
sands 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 develop-
ment and commercial exchange adopted the rhetoric of modernization and
tended toward superficial stereotypes about American progress and Mexi-
can primitiveness. Many U.S. politicians and businesspeople, stated the New
York Times, held that the United States would introduce modernity to Mex-
ico, 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 unpleas-
ant 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 dis-
parities as well as the promise of capitalist development.15
 Open Border | 97

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, restau-
rants, 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 rela-
tions in general. It was also good for newspapers such as the Los Angeles
Times, whose publishers had investments in several tourism-related busi-
nesses. 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 valu-
able to both countries, state governments established tourism agencies that
promoted travel to border cities, beach towns, and other destinations. News-
papers 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 newspa-
pers 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 insur-
ance, 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
 98 | Part I

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 per-
fume, 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 snap-
per, 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 cele-
bration, 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 coun-
tries. The statistics compiled by government officials, businesspeople, and
booster organizations backed their claims. By the mid-1950s, wrote Rob-
ert 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 peo-
ple 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
 Open Border | 99

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 “scen-
ery,” 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 increas-
ing 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 Ari-
zona Libraries, Special Collections.
 100 | Part I

Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, to Mexico City. The Mexican government also

completed several rail lines that connected with the United States, includ-
ing 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 develop-
ments 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 electri-
cal 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 border-
lands 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 trac-
tors, 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 ware-
houses. 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
 Open Border | 101

other national papers, the expansion of cross-border agriculture and live-

stock industries, like the growth of tourism, represented progress, mod-
ernization, 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, tur-
tles, sharks, marlins, swordfish, perch, and sea bass— that moved from Mex-
ico 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 devel-
opment, offered their readers laudatory accounts of the development proj-
ects 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 Corpo-
ration 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 Mexi-
canos (PEMEX), the paper continued, planned to raise bonds to construct
 102 | Part I

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 com-
merce 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 Bra-
cero Program ended, sending many thousands of Mexican migrant work-
ers 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 man-
ufactured 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, politi-
cians, and newspapers, PRONAF and the BIP opened the border to unprece-
dented 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
 Open Border | 103

new shopping centers, golf courses, movie theaters, country clubs, zoos, bull-
rings, restaurants, and convention centers lured hundreds of thousands of
visitors to Mexico every year. Border cities that gave the “worst possible pic-
ture of Mexico to northern visitors,” they proclaimed, became destinations
that encouraged a more wholesome “family trade.” As did earlier develop-
ment 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 redevelop-
ment, Mexico projected an image of itself as a modern nation. One Mexi-
can 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 con-
tinued to grow at faster rates than other areas of both countries. Twenty-
six 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 mod-
ernization 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 Mexi-
can 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 govern-
ment 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
 104 | Part I

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 prolif-
eration 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 Mexi-
can gasoline would have on their state’s oil industries. Some politicians and
manufacturers in Mexico complained that the country’s northern border-
lands 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 cross-
border flows of capital.27
The metaphor of an open border with Mexico, such as the one articu-
lated 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 flow-
ing 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 cen-
tury, 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
 Open Border | 105

the aims and ambitions of businesspeople, politicians, or their advocates in

the national press. Indeed, development schemes have often led to discrim-
ination, 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 for-
ward 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. Anne O’Hare McCormick, “Boundaries and Border States—American Model,”

New York Times, January 19, 1944, 18.
2. 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 Indus-
trialism, 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 Pol-
itics 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).
3. 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.
4. Ignacio Almada, Breve historia de Sonora (Mexico City: Colegio de México,
2000), 146– 68; Luis Aboites Aguilar, Chihuahua: Historia breve, 4th ed. (Mex-
ico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011); and Sergio Noriega Verdugo,
 106 | Part I

Ensayos económicos de Baja California, 1940–1970 (Mexicali: Universidad

Autónoma de Baja California, 1982).
5. Beatrice Ganzoff Loewenherz, “New York Times Editorials and the Good Neigh-
bor Policy, 1933– 1940” (master’s thesis, Northwestern University, 1944), 12.
6. “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 (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995), 152– 78; and Camacho, Migrant Imag-
inaries, 112– 51.
7. “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.
8. “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 bor-
der parks, see Emily Wakild, “Border Chasm: International Boundary Parks
and Mexican Conservation, 1935– 1945,” Environmental History 14 (July 2009):
453– 75.
9. 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.
10. “Both Sides of Mexico Border Closely Watched,” Los Angeles Times, Decem-
ber 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 Rea-
son to Fete 1943,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1943, F4; Cadava, Standing on
Common Ground, chapter 1; and McDougal, Privileged Son, 130, 166.
 Open Border | 107

11. “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.
12. 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.
13. Hill, “Mexican Trade Booms”; and Alexander S. Lipsett, “Border Industry Wel-
comed,” New York Times, December 9, 1958, 40.
14. Lipsett, “Border Industry Welcomed.”
15. Ibid.; Ray Josephs, “The Siesta’s Over,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 1947, F22.
16. James Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches to Bolster Tour-
ism,” 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).
17. 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, Feb-
ruary 16, 1941, 2; and Michael Scully, “Vivas for Jorge Washington,” New York
Times, February 22, 1942, 1.
18. Robert L. Duffus, “Mexico Goes Modern, Unmodernly,” New York Times, Sep-
tember 29, 1957, 23; and Copeland, “Laredo Gateway.”
19. 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:
 108 | Part I

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Duffus, “Mexico Goes Modern”;

Cadava, Standing on Common Ground, chapter 2.
20. “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.
21. Bill Dredge, “Mexican Cattle Pour into U.S. as Embargo Is Lifted,” Los Ange-
les Times, December 15, 1952, 2; and Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara, Moderniz-
ing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological Change,
1940– 1970 (Geneva: United Nations Research for Social Development, 1976).
22. “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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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, Febru-
ary 1, 1963, 5; Ruben Salazar, “Fence, River Divide”; “Border Improvements
Planned by Mexicans,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1962, 5; Salazar, “New Rail-
road”; and Ruben Salazar, “Matamoros Undaunted by History of Disaster,” Los
Angeles Times, January 12, 1962, B2.
26. Tanner, “Mexico Gives Border ‘Wholesome’ Touches”; Salazar, “Matam-
oros Undaunted”; Salazar, “Fence, River Divide”; and “Border Improvements
Planned.”
27. 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
 Open Border | 109

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.
28. Barry Goldwater, “Arizona’s Next Fifty Years,” Tucson Daily Citizen, Febru-
ary 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, bor-
ders pressed themselves into landscape art unnoticed, as were their entan-
glements with layered discourses of progress, power, civilization, and gen-
der. 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 pro-
posed 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 bor-
der evocations. The essays also address the border as a performative space.1
 114 | Part II

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 technol-
ogy to provide border crossers with virtual data (mobile phones were made
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 115

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 pro-
viding 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 trans-
parency of meaning in these images and their ostensible visual equivalence
when included in a book by the BFP organizers. Schreiber notes that nei-
ther 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 sup-
posedly empowers with the potential to envision.
 116 | Part II

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 War-
ner 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 histo-
ries, 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 his-
torical 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 perspec-
tive, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the main representation of this
region was through maps. Cartography is an important aspect of this north-
ern region’s inclusion within the consciousness of the Mexican nation. The
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 117

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 represen-
tations 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.
 118 | Part II

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 land-
scape 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 land-
scape 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.
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 119

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 cen-
tury, 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 composi-
tion 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 tech-
nologies 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
 120 | Part II

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 bor-
der 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
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 121

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 per-
formative 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
 122 | Part II

Regan discusses in her essay, is a form of border art: it is an insider’s per-

spective 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 mak-
ing 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
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 123

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 cross-
ing. 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.
 124 | Part II

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 The-
ater’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.

 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 125

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 campes-
ino.” 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
 126 | Part II

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, men-
tal, 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 differ-
ent 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
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 127

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 conversa-
tions 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
 128 | Part II

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 them-
selves 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 discus-
sion 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 discus-
sion 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.
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 129

Other events that enabled embracing a fronterizo/a identity took place

in the 1960s and 1970s, especially PRONAF (Programa Nacional Fronter-
izo), 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 con-
nected 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 cul-
tural 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 collabo-
ration 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 exhibi-
tion of bodies— both the eroticization of the Minutemen and the migrants,
but one more exotic than the other. The display of these supposed self-
representations 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.
 130 | Part II

S J M : In this context we might also consider again Van der Straet’s Amer-
ica. 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 con-
quered 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 Fil-
ipinos 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
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 131

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, verbal-
ized 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 entangle-
ments 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, Elec-
tronic Disturbance Theater 2.0’s TIT, Alfred Quiroz’s Milagros, or San-
chez’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 pres-
ent day, border art emphasizes the importance of identities— expected iden-
tifications, 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.
 132 | Part II

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. Several scholars not engaged in the border per se offer critical tools to concep-
tualize 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 Map-
pings (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.
2. One can draw a historical link from many of these studies back to a founda-
tional 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 Turn-
er’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
 A Conversation on Border Art and Spaces | 133

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,” Atlan-
tic Monthly, September 1896, 296.
3. Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui and Gilberto Cardenas, Caras Vemos, Cora-
zones no Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration (Notre Dame,
Ind.: Snite Museum of Art and University of Notre Dame, 2006).
4. 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.
5. Anne-Laure Amilhat-Szary, “Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display,”
Journal of Borderlands Studies 27, no. 2 (2012): 213– 28.
6. On PRONAF’s impact on the border region, see also the chapter by Geraldo
Cadava in this volume.
7. 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 Dis-
play: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).
8. 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 contin-
gencies 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 Elec-
tronic 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 con-
sidered 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
 Stealth Crossings | 135

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 permis-
sion of EDT 2.0.

toward water. The software could be said to function as a modern-day divin-

ing rod. The desert crossers ultimately desire to head north, so the TIT actu-
ally 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 condi-
tions for artists to embrace such virtual and technologically enhanced per-
formances. 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, perfor-
mative 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
 136 | Part II

Mexican American community.1 Those same Chicano activists simultane-

ously 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 twenti-
eth 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, how-
ever, 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 authori-
ties, 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 legal-
ization program for around two million Mexicans.4 The act also implemented
a “low-­intensity conflict” protocol for patrolling the border.5 With the concen-
tration of state power along the U.S.-­Mexico border, artists focused on diffus-
ing that power, rather than offering direct protests. The layers of surveillance
in place demanded a stealth approach to crossing. Technology-­enabled jour-
neys, 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
 Stealth Crossings | 137

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 Pri-
eta, Sonora, become part of a network of safehouses, and their populations
increased accordingly.8
The names of these operations reflected the reinvigoration of the mil-
itarized border in the early 1990s and, ultimately, emphasized its antago-
nistic 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 Arten-
stein, and Jude Eberhard, dressed in costumes depicting border stereotypes.
 138 | Part II

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 pas-
sage of the IRCA marked an end to the openness of not just Imperial Beach
 Stealth Crossings | 139

and Border Field State Park, but also the nearly two-­thousand-­mile bound-
ary. 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 doc-
umentation 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 con-
dition 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 fal-
lacy. End of the Line broke new ground in connecting border crossing with
performance art—­pioneering the act of performative crossing for this spe-
cific 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 per-
formative 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 circum-
stances 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.
 140 | Part II

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 com-
munity 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 conse-
quence 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 conse-
quence, 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 Her-
man Baca, promising to “take care of those bean-­belching border bound-
ers,” 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
 Stealth Crossings | 141

hiring Mexican Americans and Filipino Americans rather than nonunion-

ized workers.14
San Diego’s Committee on Chicano Rights had worked to cast the immi-
gration 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 pol-
itics” 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 immigra-
tion policy.
The tension between political and military interests produces feelings of
confinement and constraint. This situation is somewhat analogous to bor-
der 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.
 142 | Part II

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 geogra-
phy 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 cross-
ing. Prior to developing the tool, EDT 2.0 had addressed U.S.-­Mexico eco-
nomic 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 Domin-
guez 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 distri-
bution of information both saves lives and abets an illegal action. Dissem-
inating 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
 Stealth Crossings | 143

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 philoso-
phy 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 per-
formance. Literary theorist Rita Raley characterized tactical media as per-
formative, 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 append-
ages 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 con-
tribution 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
 144 | Part II

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 consti-
tutes 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 per-
sonal 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 tradi-
tionally 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 resis-
tance. 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
 Stealth Crossings | 145

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 immi-
grants 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 spa-
tial 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.
 146 | Part II

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 appropri-
ate clearances ahead of time (as they did with Smith), but the performance
would have taken on another level of significance altogether. Instead of sim-
ply 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 com-
plicating 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 con-
sequences 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 pol-
icies 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 under-
scoring 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,
 Stealth Crossings | 147

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. 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 Mul-
ford’s 1988 documentary Chicano Park (Berkeley, CA: Redbird Films, 1988),
film, 58 min.
2. 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.
3. For a more thorough discussion, see Ila N. Sheren, Portable Borders: Perfor-
mance 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 Cali-
fornia, ed. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003),
143–­82.
4. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-­Mexico Divide, 2nd ed. (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 38.
5. 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.
 148 | Part II

6. Ibid., 94.
7. “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 accompa-
nied 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: Uni-
versity 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: Autonome-
dia, 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
 Stealth Crossings | 149

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 Dun-
combe, “Mayan Technologies and the Theory of Electronic Civil Disobedi-
ence,” 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.
 150 | Part II

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 activi-
ties. 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 bor-
der 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 clus-
ter 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.
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 153

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 mov-
ing 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 stand-
ing today, it’s made of nearly impenetrable steel poles embedded into con-
crete footings six feet deep, and it’s much less hospitable to art.
 154 | Part II

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 jun-
gles 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 unapol-
ogetically 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 vir-
tues: 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 art-
ists hammered their metal artwork Paseo de Humanidad (Parade of Human-
ity) 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 collabo-
ration, 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 155

task of tabulating the bodies, relying on the reports of county medical exam-
iners.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 bor-
der 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 some-
thing 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
 156 | Part II

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, embla-
zoned 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 can-
nonball launched by Javier Téllez traveled from the beach in Tijuana and
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 157

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 depen-
dent 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 Amer-
ican 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 border-
long 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 sta-
ples knitted together la frontera.
 158 | Part II

“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 Cle-
mente 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 159

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 cross-
border 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 inter-
national 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, seem-
ingly 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 admin-
istrator 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
 160 | Part II

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. Pho-
tograph 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 fron-
tera had always been intended to be temporary. The piece traveled to the
University of Arizona campus in Tucson later that year; the university even-
tually bought it and positioned it permanently on campus. Now, removed
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 161

from the contested border, the work took the form that the artists had origi-
nally 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 bor-
der 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 Bor-
der 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, emblem-
atic 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.
 162 | Part II

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 medie-
val “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 revolv-
ing 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 flee-
ing 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.
 164 | Part II

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 indige-
nous 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 165

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
 166 | Part II

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 enforce-
ment 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 commu-
nities 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. eco-
nomic 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas  |  167

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 Passe-
ment, 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
 168 | Part II

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 Tuc-
son 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, mak-
ing a distinct contrast to the town’s usual kitschy southwestern art.
In late 2011, the Paseo pieces were uprooted once again, this time trav-
eling to the University of Arizona. During the five-­month run of The Bor-
der 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 bor-
der 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 knock-
ing 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 Cam-
paign 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 gen-
tly 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas  |  169

The less prized art on the wall fared worse. Years’ worth of political graf-
fiti 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 iden-
tity, 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 Gua-
dalupe Serrano, Alberto Morackis, and Alfred Quiroz. Photograph by Jay Rochlin.
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 171

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 Ser-
rano 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 proj-
ect 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
 172 | Part II

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 neigh-
bors 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
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.
1. “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. Coali-
cion 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.
2. 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
 How the Border Wall Became a Canvas | 173

locations where they were found. The numbers of migrant deaths cited here
are based on data from all these sources.
3. Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona
Borderlands (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Regan, Death of Josseline.
9. Latorre, “Border Consciousness and Artivist Aesthetics.”
10. Regan, “Artistic Warning.”
11. Ibid.
12. Miriam Davidson, Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 33.
13. Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt
Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
14. Margaret Regan, “Art Has No Borders: Organizations in Tubac, Amado and
Sonora Team Up to Break Down Barriers,” Tucson Weekly, November 4, 2010.
15. 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.
16. Alfred Quiroz, personal communication, October 18, 2017.
17. 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.
18. R. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19. Guadalupe Serrano, personal communication, June 27, 2013.
 174 | Part II

20. Rubén A. Ruiz, “Fallece el artista Alberto Morackis,” Desde Sonora, Decem-
ber 16, 2008, http://desdesonora.blogspot.com/2008/12/fallece-el-artista-alberto
-morackis.html.
21. 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.
22. Herreras, “Arte en el Otro Lado.”
23. Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.”
24. Margaret Regan, “Despite the Hardships: Powerful Works Make UAMA’s
Uneven ‘Border Project’ Worth a Visit,” Tucson Weekly, January 19, 2012.
25. Guadalupe Serrano, personal communication, June 17, 2013.
26. Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.”
27. Serrano, personal communication, June 17, 2013.
28. Ibid., June 27, 2013.
29. Steller, “Workers See Mural as Graffiti.”
30. Ibid.
31. Serrano, personal communication, June 27, 2013.
32. Ibid., June 17, 2013.
33. Serrano, personal communication, October 18, 2017.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Abe Ahn, “Erasing the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence,” Hyperallergic, November 2,
2015, https://hyperallergic.com/248786/erasing-the-us-mexico-border-fence.
37. Regan, “Barrier Rebuilt.”
38. Coalición de Derechos Humanos, “Missing Migrant Project.”
39. Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services, “Defense, Prosecution Agree to Post-
pone 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 Min-
utemen, 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 pol-
icy.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
 176 | Part II

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 pho-
tographs 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. govern-
ment’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 paral-
lel 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
 Visible Frictions | 177

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,” pri-
marily 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 film-
ing 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 “doc-
ument the border” through their own eyes.7 In a radio interview, the orga-
nizers 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 bor-
der, 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 cam-
eras 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
 178 | Part II

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 bal-
ance 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 expe-
riences of the individuals portrayed. With this focus on self-­representation,
the organizers’ interest in making these two groups visible, and to privi-
lege 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 presump-
tion 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,
 Visible Frictions | 179

as well as by groups such as the Minutemen, who operate in tandem with

government agencies, particularly the Border Patrol, in surveilling undoc-
umented 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 sur-
veillance, 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 Min-
utemen, by U.S. politicians and government agencies in the first decade of
this century is essential background to a reading of the Border Film Proj-
ect.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 Min-
uteman 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 ter-
rorists.” 21 Similarly, Roxanne Lynn Doty, in her work on the Minutemen,
 180 | Part II

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, undocu-
mented 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 undocu-
mented migrants and anti-­immigrant activists through documentary pho-
tography 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 transpar-
ency between images and their meanings espoused by the Border Film Proj-
ect 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 mul-
tiple 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 orga-
nizers downplay their curatorial imprint on the book’s production, of the
 Visible Frictions | 181

two thousand photographs they received from migrants and Minutemen,

they use less than 10 percent in the publication of the Border Film Proj-
ect. 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 inter-
viewed 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 presenta-
tion.” 26 In the Border Film Project, the organizers’ image choices and order-
ing, 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 rela-
tions 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 ideologi-
cally subjugate both groups.
The Border Film Project, published only in English, appears to be a cof-
fee 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 indi-
cating 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 Minute-
men. Viewers look through the lens-­shaped holes in the cover to view pho-
tographs of the main subjects of the Border Film Project—­an undocumented
 182 | Part II

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, presum-
ably unselfconscious pictures of migrants and Minutemen are intended to
signify reality to the viewer. The project participants were constrained in
 Visible Frictions | 183

portraying their subject matter by the technological limitations of the dispos-

able 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 dis-
posable 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 order-
ing frequently found in photographic archives.30 Sekula argues that in photo-
graphic 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 photo-
graphs by migrants from those by Minutemen. With few exceptions, the orga-
nizers generally position images of and by migrants across from one another
 184 | Part II

on full-­page spreads, thus isolating them from images of and/or by Minute-

men, 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 gen-
erally 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 iso-
lating 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
 Visible Frictions | 185

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, undoc-
umented 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 move-
ment, 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, Cri-
ado, 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
 186 | Part II

“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 boundar-
ies 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 photo-
graphic equivalences in the book and on the website, where the images are
organized under three categories—­“Migrants,” “Minutemen,” and “Similar-
ities,” 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.
 Visible Frictions | 189

The idea behind the Border Film Project was to use photography, specif-
ically a form of self-­representation, to convey the truth of the experiences
of undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants and Minute-
men. 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 represent-
ing “both sides” of the debate over U.S. border policy. In addition to posi-
tioning 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 bro-
ken 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 oxymo-
ron.” 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 represent-
ing the Border Film Project as unmediated, they present the project as (at
least partially) about migrants representing themselves and their experi-
ences. This perspective ostensibly authenticates the project. Yet, by taking
up a liberal nativist position in relation to unauthorized migration, they
 190 | Part II

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 proj-
ect, are able to represent their own experiences, but this claim is contra-
dicted 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 surveil-
lance 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
 Visible Frictions | 191

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 Bor-
derlands 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. Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the
Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 145.
2. 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 fol-
lowed. 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 Bur-
ridge (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 181–­89.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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).
 192 | Part II

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 Work-
ers and America’s Future (New York: Grove Press, 1986); and Mae Ngai, Impos-
sible 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 Vic-
tims 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 Quar-
terly 105 (Fall 2006): 674.
19. Roxanne Lynn Doty, The Law into Their Own Hands: Immigration and the Pol-
itics 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: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2008), 143.
 Visible Frictions | 193

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 Photo-
graphs 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 Pho-
tographer’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 fea-
tured 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.
 194 | Part II

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 land-
scapes 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 racial-
ization 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 expe-
riences 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, Tay-
lor, and Sanchez significantly reverberate with what historian Samuel Truett
describes as “hidden histories” of the American and Mexican frontier.1
 196 | Part II

In addition to aesthetically visualizing a variety of borderlands experi-

ences, Klett, Taylor, and Sanchez trace in their work the intellectual dynam-
ics 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 cami-
oneta (bus) passengers. Through these artists’ engagement with history, their
art forms depict border spaces that are characterized by intersecting geo-
political and biopolitical modalities. In other words, the artworks decon-
struct 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. Focus-
ing 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 Sub-
altern 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
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present  |  197

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 peo-
ples, shaped in distinct ways at the continental crossroads of empires, nations,
markets, and cultures.” 3 Extending Truett’s articulation of borderlands his-
tory 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 boundar-
ies, border art deliberately engages with far-­reaching geopolitics. Second, bor-
der 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 myr-
iad 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 photog-
raphy. For example, his series of photographs with collaborator Byron Wolf
picture the Grand Canyon from a standpoint first imaged by earlier art-
ists 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 produc-
tion. 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
 198 | Part II

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 inter-
loper 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 Pos-
ton, 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.
 200 | Part II

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 Pos-
ton 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 vio-
lence, 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 his-
tory 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 his-
tories. In other words, Spivak proposes that historians cannot produce histo-
ries 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
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 201

Notably, the landscape picture and its viewer are prevented from represent-
ing and seeing historically absent bodies: a point emphasized by includ-
ing 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 com-
plicated attempts to recognize subaltern histories and responds with dif-
ficulty 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 his-
torical 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 unnat-
ural 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.
 202 | Part II

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 Bor-
der 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 pyrami-
dal tops, obelisks, were used by Mexico and the United States to trace the
expanse of the national boundary and were a physical product of nineteenth-
century 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. architec-
tural occupation of the region. Taylor’s photograph does not disregard or
entirely reject the importance of the fence or its locational specificity. In par-
ticular, Taylor’s representation of the Arizona and Sonora border calls atten-
tion 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
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 203

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 con-
jures 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 mech-
anism 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
 204 | Part II

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 sophis-
ticated 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 sym-
bolically speaks to Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault terms the penetrating, everywhere
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 205

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 pho-
tograph, 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: white-
ness, the construction of a racialized portrait of the United States. As art
historian Martin Berger explains in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and Ameri-
can 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 pho-
tograph, 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, explain-
ing 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
 206 | Part II

photograph—particularly the surveillance tower, which has been inter-

preted 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 strate-
gically 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 bor-
derlands. 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 dis-
cernible 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 nationalis-
tic 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 Histo-
rias 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
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 207

border, refers to how the Arizona-Sonora borderline and border politics

affect the everyday lives of children, narrates moments of violence in bor-
der 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 aesthet-
ically 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 passen-
gers 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, pre-
sumably 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 cap-
tured 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 inter-
national 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.
 208 | Part II

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 incorpo-
rates conversations with passengers about the various ways language, educa-
tion, family, documentation, and food shape lives. Historias en la Camioneta
is a portrait of a geographically unique and specific culture and the fronter-
izo/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.
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 209

The video depicts the shuttle traversing earthen terrain, and the environ-
ment inside the bus reflects the omnipresent Sonoran Desert. The temporal
and spatial effects of the artist’s land use lend complexity to locational iden-
tity: viewers always know where we are inside the bus, but the precise loca-
tion 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 pas-
senger in the seat ahead of him articulates his recent experience with vio-
lence 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 cul-
ture 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
 210 | Part II

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 experi-
ences 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 pres-
ent. 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 pas-
senger 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 undoc-
umented 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, San-
chez visualizes people who are engaged in the immediacy of crossing mul-
tiple borders (i.e., land based, nationally defined, economically proscribed,
gendered and racialized, and so forth). Always moving and continually tra-
versing private and public lands, the corporeal bodies in Sanchez’s film are
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 211

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, Ari-
zona, 1985, David Taylor’s View into Nogales from the Border Fence (with cam-
era 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 representa-
tion 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 arbi-
trarily 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, corpo-
rations, and for-profit media. The artworks’ use of land and landscape rep-
resentation 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 knowl-
edge production and lead to an interpretation that results in accounting
 212 | Part II

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 state-
derived 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. Samuel Truett, “Hidden Histories,” Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History

of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006),
1– 9.
2. This is a discussion of the intersection of border art with geopolitics and bio-
politics. I understand geopolitics as a method of analysis that examines the
relationships between geography and the power and authority of politics. Addi-
tionally, 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).
3. Truett, “Hidden Histories,” 8.
4. 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 devel-
oped 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-
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 213

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 con-
tacto, 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 Mex-
ican 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./Mex-
ico 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.
5. 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).
6. 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 Nel-
son 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).
7. 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: Univer-
sity of New Mexico Press, 1984); Klett, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephoto-
graphic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 2004);
 214 | Part II

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.
8. Mark Klett, artist, interview by the author, December 9, 2012, Tempe, AZ.
9. I draw on these histories of Japanese American internment and the Diné
Long Walk simultaneously to emphasize historically racialized state produc-
tion. 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.
10. 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.
11. I first learned about the photograph while studying at the Center for Creative
Photography, while researching for the exhibition The Border Project: Land-
scapes, Lifescapes, and Soundscapes (Tucson: University of Arizona Museum of
Art, 2011– 12).
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.
13. 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 perpetu-
ally 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.
14. Here I am calling attention to an absence in Arizona’s art historical record. Pho-
tographs 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 Amer-
icans 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

eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese Ameri-
can 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.
15. In Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginar-
ies (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 particu-
lar, Guidotti-Hernández identifies nationalisms— broadly defined as Mexican,
American, and Chicano— as one of the primary state mechanisms for main-
taining hegemonic order.
16. 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.
17. Mark Klett, e-mail to the author, November 28, 2011.
18. 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 Ari-
zona, December 1– 3, 2011) and her chapter in this anthology.
19. 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 occu-
pations 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
 216 | Part II

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).
20. Albert Boime, “View from Above,” in The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny
and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830– 1865 (Washington, DC: Smithso-
nian Institution Press, 1991).
21. The U.S.-Mexico international boundary line was established in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), signed by the two nations ending the Mexican-
American War. The subsequent Gadsden Purchase, finalized in 1854, settled
the international boundary line that is intact today. On the joint border sur-
vey 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.
22. 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 think-
ing 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 Univer-
sity Press, 1987).
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 195.
 A Border Art History of the Vanishing Present | 217

26. Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
27. David Taylor, artist, interview by the author, December 5, 2012, Tucson, AZ.
28. “David Taylor’s artist statement on Working the Line,” David Taylor Studio,
accessed October 2, 2012, http://www.dtaylorphoto.com.
29. 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.
30. 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.
31. Mary Jenea Sanchez, e-mail to the author, June 7, 2013.
32. 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.
33. 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 conver-
sation a dialogue about insider and outsider dynamics in an age of fear-driven
policy and state production.
34. Sanchez, Historias en la Camioneta. The mention of slaughters begins around
12:55.
35. Ibid. This description of slaughter begins at 13:08.
36. Trinh, “Other than Myself,” 27.
37. 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 Ari-
zona. In addition to being a 2009 Fulbright Scholar, executive director of the
Southwest Folklife Alliance, co-­founder and co-­director of Sabores Sin Fron-
teras, 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 Uni-
versity 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 accompa-
nying catalogue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
She co-­edited Mujer y Literatura Mexicana y Chicana: Culturas en Contacto II
 220 | Contributors

(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 intersec-
tions 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 Iden-
tity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880– 1915 (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2003) and Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Interna-
tional 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 Pictur-
ing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s (Tucson: University of Ari-
zona 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 His-
tory. 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 publica-
tions. 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 Uni-

versity of New Mexico. Schreiber is the author of Cold War Exiles in Mexico:
U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity 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 Jack-
son 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 Cross-
roads: 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 Inter-
ventions. 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 pho- Ambos Nogales border fence: Border Dynam-
tographs, 200–­201; reading, in archive, ics/Dinámica Fronteriza and, 3; border
historical record, and cartography, 197; in walls erected by U.S. through, 153–­54
Sanchez’s film, 210; in Taylor’s photo- America (van der Straet, c. 1580), 113, 130
graphs, 206. See also bodies and body art American art: border art history and, 15
academic discourse, border art as critique of, 197 American Automobile Association
Adams, Ansel, 214n14 (AAA), 97
Adler, Rudy: arrangement of BFP images and, American-­Mexican Chamizal Convention
186; on Border Film Project, 175; on both Act (1964), 91
sides of story, 178; photograph selection American Progress (Gast, 1872), 119, 120
and, 185; race and racism in Minuteman Americans All, Let’s Fight for Victory poster
Project and, 184; on shedding light on (Helguera), 89
“illegal” immigration, 177. See also Border American South: resistance to tick eradication
Film Project; Border Film Project measures in, 72; Texas fever in northern
affectual infrastructure of nations, 23 states and, 68–­69
African American slavery, cheap labor and, 141 American West: U.S.-­Mexico border art
agriculture: cross-­border exchanges and, 100–­ history and, 19n11
101. See also cattle Amilhat-­Szary, Anne-­Laure, 121
Agua Prieta, Sonora: Historias en la Camio- Amparano Gámez, Juan, 169
neta (Sanchez) and, 207; safehouses in, 137 anti-­immigrant groups: Border Film Project
Alvarado, Manuel, 51 and, 180; on Mexican and Latin American
Alvarez, Maribel: on border as gimmick, immigrants’ takeover of Southwest, 90;
25–­27; Letras cruze, 36; “Looking at Arts, militarized border and, 189; narcovi-
History, and Place in the U.S./Mexico olence narrative and, 140; surveillance of
Borderlands” (symposium, 2011) and, migrants by, 185, 186; as vigilantes, 179
5; on marking the landscape, 7. See also anti-­immigrant policies and rhetoric: border
border landscapes conversation as war zone and, 137, 139, 140; Cold War
Ambos Nogales. See Nogales, Arizona; and, 92; NAFTA and, 155
Nogales, Sonora Anzaldúa, Gloria E., 14, 217n32
 224 | Index

apexart, Fencing Democracy (group show) used by, 49–­50; written report organi-
at, 169 zation by, 65n52. See also Report of the
archives: Border Film Project as, 183–­84; Boundary Commission Album
crevices in, 33; impossible-­to-­retrieve his- Barnes, Steve, 142
torical past and, 200, 214n11; International Barrera, Eduardo, 14, 15
Boundary Commission as, 42; reading in Barton, Bryan, 179
absences, 197; Tagg’s critique of, 214n13 Bennett, Tony, 132n1
Arellano, Ricardo, 153, 155, 164 Berger, Martin, 205
Arizona: Tucson Sector of, 172n1. See also Berman, Sara-­Jo, 18n6, 137–­39
specific cities Beyond Borders: Binational Art Foundation, 159
Arizona Commission on the Arts, 159–­60 binational celebrations of borderlands cities, 98
Arizona-­Sonora region: border disputes BIP. See Border Industrialization Program
(1880s), 43; businessmen and civic leaders’ (Programa de Industrializacion de la
exchanges, 94–­95; Operation Safeguard Frontera)
in, 137, 155 Blanco, Jacobo: collaborative photograph
arms smuggling, post-­World War II album and, 53; on final collaborative report
U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91 negotiations, 55, 65n56; International
Arpaio, Joseph, 191n2 Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43,
art about the border: border art compared 44; introduces Payne and Servín, 44–­45;
with, 13–­14, 121–­22, 126–­27, 213n4; photographs used by, 49–­50; on Servín as
documentation and self-­representation photographer for the Report, 54; written
of, 12; nuances of twenty-­first century report organization by, 65n52. See also
borderlands and, 19n11 Report of the Boundary Commission Album
Artenstein, Isaac, 137–­39 BlueServo, 216n24
artists: joint international boundary survey Boal, Augusto, 144
(1850s) and, 42 bodies and body art: border art and spaces
Art Rebate (Arte Reembolso, 1993), 145 and, 131; border art as interpretation of,
arts of popular resistance, in Southeast Asia, 29 197; border art history and, 18n9; policing
Associated Press poll, on border security, 37 other bodies via electronic inspection,
astronomers: for International Boundary 204; politicization of, Sanchez on geogra-
Commission (1890s), 43, 46; marking and phy and, 196; San Diego–­Tijuana border
defining borders and, 41–­42; North Amer- art history and, 10; van der Straet’s Amer-
ican Talcott method and, 47; surveyors ica and, 130; world’s fairs and, 129–­30. See
methods vs. methods of, 47 also absences; surveillance
Avalos, David, 18n6, 137–­39, 145 Body Art: Performing the Subject (Jones and
Ayala, Ernesto, 95 Stephenson, eds.), 18–­19n9
Aztec-­inspired art and imagery: Morackis and Boime, Albert, 202
Serrano and, 158; Paseo de Humanidad border: marking and defining process for,
and, 162, 164; in San Diego–­Tijuana, 157; 41–­42; Merriam-­Webster’s definition of,
Santa Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166 25–­26. See also U.S.-­Mexico border
border art: art about the border compared
Baca, Herman, 140, 141 with, 13–­14, 121–­22, 126–­27, 213n4; as label
Baca, Judy, 157 for frontier legacies, 197. See also border
Balibar, Étienne, 141 art history
b.a.n.g. Lab: border art, game of power and, border art and spaces: art about the border
134; performative crossings and, 10; Trans- vs. border art and, 121–­22, 126–­27; bodies
border Immigrant Tool in action, 135. See and, 131; conceptualizing performative
also Transborder Immigrant Tool nature of, 132n1; conflation of maps and
Barlow, John Whitney: collaborative pho- power and, 133n8; fence as nonplace and
tograph album and, 53; International place, 122–­23; fight for place and space
Boundary Commission (1890s) and, 43; and, 119–­20; laws governing, 122; Mexico
photographers hired by, 44; photographs City artists vs. fronterizos/as and, 127–­29;
 Index | 225

Mexico’s perception of border, 116–­18; Tucson, 15; historical roots, 131; moved
navigation of the heart and, 125–­26; new from border wall to University of Arizona,
consciousness of border and, 124–­25, Tucson, 3, 160–­61, 168; in Nogales, Sonora
124; other’s viewpoint of, 132; overview, on border wall, 4, 160; original installation
10–­13; in U.S. art, 113–­16; U.S. conception goals for, 122
of border and, 118–­19; world’s fairs and, Border Field State Park, border fence and, 137,
129–­30 138, 139, 140
border art history: border studies and, 13–­15; Border Film Project (BFP): artifice of equality
Chicano/a studies and art history and, 5; deployed visually by, 176–­77; cameras for
nuances of twenty-­first century border- Minutemen and migrants and, 11–­12, 115,
lands and, 19n11; possibilities of, 116 177–­78; constraint on project participants
Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronter- by, 182–­83; constructing visual equiva-
izo (BAW/TAF): border art history and, lence between migrants and Minutemen,
13; border as performative site and, 121; 181; documentary project of, 175–­76;
Border Door, 156; Border Sutures, 157–­58; documenting “illegal” migrant move-
End of the Line, 114, 137–­39; Goldman and, ments, 189–­90; as exhibition of bodies,
18n6; Mexico City artists and, 128; perfor- 129; as folkloric, 121; organizers’ liberal
mance and body art and, 10; performative nativism and, 184, 189–­90; overview, 10;
crossings by, 136; Taller Yonke and, 131; photo exhibitions by, 178; photographic
theoretical and technical impetus for, 142 self-­representation vs. surveillance and,
border cities: Immigration Reform and 180; photograph selection for, 185–­86; sur-
Control Act and, 136–­37; infrastructure veillance of migrants by migrants for, 190;
development for, 102–­3; migration to, surveillance of migrants by Minutemen
international markets and, 88; New for, 190–­91
York Times on Communists in, 90; One Border Film Project: Photos by Migrants and
Flew over the Void (2005), 146, 156–­57; Minutemen on the U.S.-­Mexico Border:
residents, shopping habits of, 101. See also arrangement of images and captions in,
specific cities 183–­86, 193n30; cover of, 181–­82, 182;
border commerce and infrastructure: agricul- curation of and statements in, 180–­81; as
ture and livestock, 100–­101; border zone opposing perspectives, 176; organizers’
commerce as conceived narrative, 29; perspective and, 183; similar photographic
national press on advantages of, 87–­88, 90; equivalences in, 186, 187, 188
national press on commercial exchanges, Border Industrialization Program (BIP,
32, 94–­96, 97–­98; national press on Mex- Programa de Industrializacion de la Fron-
ico’s modernization and, 97, 103; national tera), 8, 33, 102
press on shared borderland defense, border landscapes conversation: border as
91–­92, 93–­94; overview, 8; power plants gimmick, 25–­27; crevices in the archive
and water desalinization plants, 101–­2; and, 32–­33; as fork in the road, 27–­28;
railroads and highways and, 99–­100, 102–­ hegemony and, 28–­30; modernity and
3. See also cattle; press, national; tourism definitions of, 23–­25; overview, 6–­8, 10;
border crossings: disseminating information power of the everyday and, 33–­35; states
about, 142–­43; successful, migrants pho- and, 30–­32; students of history and, 35–­37;
tographs of, 185; Taylor’s photo from fence visual signs of U.S.-­Mexico border and, 42
and, 205; technology to renegotiate, 136. border nation, U.S. vs. fronterizo conception
See also desert crossers; One Flew over the of border and, 127
Void; performative crossings; Transborder Border Patrol. See U.S. Border Patrol
Immigrant Tool border policing: by electronic inspection, 204;
Border Days, binational celebrations of, 98 national press (1940–­1965) on, 87. See also
Border Door (Lou, 1988), 156 BlueServo; Minutemen; U.S. Border Patrol
Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza (Ser- The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes,
rano and Morackis): commissioning, 159; and Lifescapes (2011–­2012), 5, 168
in Harvill Plaza at University of Arizona, Border Research Group, 4–­5
 226 | Index

Border Spaces, questions posed by, 5–­6 U.S.-­Mexico border art history and, 19n11.
border studies: border art history and, 5; See also San Diego
Klett’s photography and, 213n6; U.S.-­ cameras: long-­range and infrared, for border
Mexico borderlands and, 16n3 fence, 202–­3, 203; in militarized border,
Border Sutures (BAW/TAF, 1990), 157–­58 204; night-­vision, anti-­immigrant groups’
border wall: art and, 10; deaths at, 171–­72; use of, 179
erected by U.S. in Nogales, Sonora, 153–­ cameras, disposable: distribution to migrants,
54; murals on, 161–­62, 163, 164–­67, 165; 192n9; for migrants and Minutemen
political and social debates on, 3–­4; see-­ along border, 11–­12, 115, 175–­76, 177; as
through aspects and family visitations to, Minutemen weapon, 186; technological
171, 172. See also fences; Nogales, Sonora; limitations of, 183. See also Border Film
Taller Yonke; U.S.-­Mexico border Project; photographs and photographers
Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) cannonball, human, 18n9, 146, 156–­57
(Hernández et al., 2015), 171 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 196
Both Nogales. See Nogales, Arizona; Nogales, Cárdenas, Lázaro and administration, 90
Sonora Cárdenas, Micha, 134
boundary surveys: in the 1890s, 31–­32; Carroll, Amy Sara, 134
delineation and surveillance and, 24; joint cartographers: for International Boundary
international (1850s), 39–­40, 40; modern- Commission (1890s), 43; joint interna-
ization efforts, 61n32; national divergences tional boundary survey (1850s) and, 42.
over, 40–­41. See also International Bound- See also maps
ary Commission cattle: BAI on “Mexican” not “potentially
Bracero Program, 87, 102 infected,” 80; cattlemen’s distinctions
brands, cattle, identifying American or Mexi- between “American” and Mexican,” 76–­77;
can cattle, 77–­78 drifter, agent burying, 69; lines of drive
Brazil, Theatre of the Oppressed in, 144 across U.S., 68–­70; Mexican, as dis-
Brickwood, John, saloon of, 48 eased and/or inferior, 67–­68; Strafford’s,
Buenos vecinos, buenos amigos (O’Higgins, across Rio Grande, 66–­67; straying, tick
1944), 118 concerns and, 72–­73; U.S. tick eradication
Buffalo, New York, Pan-­American Exposition program and, 71–­72
(1901), 129 Center for Creative Photography, 200, 214n11
Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI): boundary Central America: U.S. regulation of migrants
as grid of chutes and tanks and, 24; fence from, 178–­79. See also Mexico; Mexico-­
plans for border, 78; first fences in South- Guatemala border survey
ern California by, 84n43; on “Mexican Centro Cultural de la Raza, 14, 128
cattle” not “cattle potentially infected,” el Centro Cultural los Nogales, 169
80; responding to cattlemen complaints, Certeau, Michel de, 130
75–­76; Strafford’s cattle across Rio Grande Chacón, Justin Akers, 186
and, 66; Texas fever research by, 70–­71. Chandler, Harry, 92
See also tick eradication Charnay, Désiré, 44
Burr, Dorian, 142 Charro Days, binational celebrations of, 98
bus across the border. See Historias en la Chávez, César, 140–­41
Camioneta Chavez, Leo R., 175
Bush, George W. and administration, 137, Chávez, Patricio, 14, 15
175, 179 Chiapas: Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0
businessmen: cross-­border exchanges and, and, 142; Mural de Taniperla (Nogales,
94–­95. See also border commerce and Sonora) and, 164–­65, 168, 169; perfor-
infrastructure mative crossings from, 123; Transborder
Immigrant Tool and game of, 146
Cadava, Geraldo Luján, 8, 24, 32, 34, 36 Chicago Tribune, 87–­88, 97–­98
California: Imperial Beach fence, 137, Chicano/as: artists in San Diego–­Tijuana, 157;
138–­39; Operation Gatekeeper in, 137; inSITE exhibitions and, 14–­15; marginality
 Index | 227

of, 128; performative crossings and, 146; communication, border fence and, 123
in San Diego, 135–­36; on undocumented Communism and Communists: in border
immigration, 140–­41; violence perpetu- cities, New York Times on, 90; national
ated by the state against, 215n15. See also press opposition to, 92
Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte confinement, political and military interest
Fronterizo; Quiroz, Alfred; Taller Yonke tensions and, 141
Chicano/a studies and art history: border art conflict doctrine, low-­intensity, 147n5
and, 19n11; border art history and, 5, 13, Congress: appropriations for border fences by,
14, 18n6 78; Minutemen support by members of,
Chihuahua and Pacifico Railroad, 100 179; on tick eradication, 71
citizens and citizenship: borderlands and, 27; constraint, political and military interest
failure of existing structures for, 211–­12; tensions and, 141
Mexican, borderland industries and, 96; Copeland, George H., 98–­99
Mexican, Malagamba-­Ansótegui on, Cosgrove, Denis, 132n1
128; Mexican-­American, wetback drives Covarrubias, Francisco Díaz, 47
(1950s) and, 92; national-­only sanctioned, Criado, Victoria: arrangement of BFP images
210; One Flew over the Void (2005) and, and, 186; on Border Film Project, 175;
146; Paseo de Humanidad creation and, photograph selection and, 185; race and
154; patriotic, Minutemen as, 185; state-­ racism in Minuteman Project and, 184; on
derived, 197; status, Border Film Project shedding light on “illegal” immigration,
and, 176, 179, 189; Taylor’s photo from 177. See also Border Film Project; Border
fence on, 205; tick eradication program Film Project
and, 68, 75; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands Cristiani, Mansueto, 44
and, 195; in wartime, Klett’s photograph Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), 142
and, 201, 211. See also race, racism, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
racial categorization; undocumented History of the Vanishing Present (Spivak),
immigrants 196
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua: arms and drug Cronon, William, 132n1
smuggling in, 91; cross-­border commerce cross-­border exchanges: locals value of, 87;
and, 103; highways and, 99; NAFTA and, national press on, 32, 86–­87; state and pri-
88; Operation Hold the Line/Blockade vate investments in tourism and, 98–­100.
and, 137; U.S. shoppers in, 98 See also border commerce and infrastruc-
civic leaders: cross-­border exchanges and, ture; U.S.-­Mexico border
94–­95. See also border commerce and Culturas en peligro (Endangered Cultures)
infrastructure (León-­Portilla), 14
Civil Liberties Act (1988), 215n16 Cunningham, P. D., 63n44
Clinton administration, unauthorized immi- cyberactivism, Critical Art Ensemble and, 142
gration and, 155 cyberprotesters, 144
Coalición de Derechos Humanos, 154–­55, cyberspace, collapsing physical space and,
172n1 142, 144
Cold War, wetback drives (early 1950s) and, 92
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 14 Daniel, Ruben, 165–­66
collaborative art, Border Film Project as, 175, Davis, Lew, 94
191n3 Davis, Mike, 187
Colorado River, joint map between monu- deaths at the border wall, 171–­72
ments 206 and 209 for, 51, 63–­64n45 deaths in the desert: artists respond to,
Colorado River Indian Reservation, 198 156; border security issues and, 37; of
Colorado River Indian Tribes, 214n10 migrants, 2003 to 2017, 154–­55; Santa
Colorado River Relocation Center, Poston, Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166; statistics
Arizona, 200 on, 172–­73nn1–­2; Transborder Immigrant
Committee on Chicano Rights, San Diego, 141 Tool and, 145
commodities, borders and, 34–­35 Debord, Guy, 149n24
 228 | Index

De Genova, Nicholas, 184 The Electronic Disturbance (Critical Art

de Lauretis, Teresa, 216n22 Ensemble), 142
Department of Agriculture. See U.S. Depart- Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 (EDT 2.0):
ment of Agriculture on Boal’s ideas and the TIT, 144; border
dérive practices, of Situationist International, art, game of power and, 134; Critical Art
143, 149n24 Ensemble as precursor to, 142; perfor-
desert crossers: aid to people lost as, 145; mative crossings and, 10; technology to
hikers and drivers as, 149n31; Transborder renegotiate border crossings and, 136;
Immigrant Tool and, 135, 136, 144, 146. See Transborder Immigrant Tool in action,
also border crossings; deaths in the desert; 135; Transborder Immigrant Tool of, 114–­
performative crossings 15, 124; wealth redistribution and, 145. See
detritus in borderlands: of other nations, 34; also Transborder Immigrant Tool
Servín’s photographs including, 54 Elena Rodríguez, José Antonio, 171–­72
Dies Committee on Un-­American Activities, 90 El Paso, Texas, Operation Hold the Line of,
Dinámica Fronteriza (Serrano and Morackis). 136–­37, 155
See Border Dynamics/Dinámica Fronteriza El Paso to the Pacific Ocean: International
Diné (Navajo) Long Walk (1964), 200, 214n9 Boundary Commission (1890s) and,
dipping vats (stations): at the border, 34; 43; joint international boundary survey
border and, 23, 26; cattle walking (1850s) and, 42; monument numbering
through, 74; components of, 84n33; as and, 48–­49; Payne’s photographs of bor-
obstacle to American cattle business, 77; der monuments between, 39–­40, 40; U.S.-­
as racialized markers, 27; ranchers on Mexico border represented and marked
fences compared to, 78–­80, 84n46; as tick between, 5. See also monuments
eradicators, 32, 72 Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugee-
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ism and the Boundary Event (Trinh), 209
(Foucault), 204–­5 Emory, William H., 31, 40, 47–­48
divining rod, Transborder Immigrant Tool empiricist model of truth, photographic
as, 135 archives and, 183–­84
Dominguez, Ricardo, 134, 142 End of the Line (BAW/TAF): border crossers
Doty, Roxanne Lynn, 179–­80 and, 146; at Border Field State Park,
Douglas, Arizona: Historias en la Camioneta 137–­39; dual meaning in, 139–­40; Sheren
(Sanchez) and, 208; Operation Safeguard on, 114
in, 155 engineers, marking and defining borders and,
Dreamers, border security issues and, 37 41–­42
drones: over Border Field State Park, 140; entertainment, border cameras and, 204, 205,
tracking undocumented migrants with, 179 216n24
drug trade: border security issues and, 140, Erección del Monumento Numero 153 (Erection
148n12; maquiladoras in Nogales, Sonora of Monument 153), 9
and, 157; post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros, Mexico, 46
tensions and, 91; undocumented immigra- Escuela Nacional des Artes Plasticas, Mexico
tion anxiety and, 141 City, 128
Duffus, Robert L., 98 European Union, border tensions in, 141
Dust Bowl migrants, cheap labor and, 141 everyday, power of the, 33–­35
Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Ter- The Exile (BAW/TAF), 10
rain (inSITE exhibition, 2007), 15
feminist art history, border art history and, 15
Eberhard, Jude, 137–­39 fences: Associated Press poll on border
economic conditions: border art and, 197. See security and, 37; border, ownership
also border commerce and infrastructure of, 122; border, perception of, 122–­23;
economic protectionism: post-­World War II border agent near Nogales along (1947),
U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 91; U.S.-­Mexico 81; at Border Field State Park, 137, 138,
border and, 141 140; as canvas for artists, 131; as federal
 Index | 229

fortifications against disease and race, 8; global positioning system (GPS): mobile
first federally funded (1911), 67, 78–­79, phones enabled by, 134. See also Transbor-
84n43; as landscape markers, 7; ranchers der Immigrant Tool
on dipping stations compared to, 79–­80, Global War on Terror, 137
84n46. See also border wall; monuments; Goldman, Shifra, 18n6
U.S.-­Mexico border; View into Nogales Goldwater, Barry, 101
from the Border Fence (with camera tower) Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 18n6, 137–­39
Fencing Democracy (group show at apexart), 169 González, Noel, 164
F. Gutekunst Company, 53 González, Noel-­Fernando, 164
first aid: kits deposited in Sonoran Desert, Gonzalez-­Moreno, José, 51
204; Transborder Immigrant Tool for Good Neighbor policy and era (1940s–­1960s),
finding, 134 93–­94
first Thanksgiving, End of the Line as, 138, government websites, virtual sit-­ins by Elec-
139–­40 tronic Disturbance Theater and, 142
Flaherty, George, 23 Goyzueto, Prospero, 63n41
Flint, Frank P., 75 GPS-­enabled mobile phones, Transborder
FloodNet, 142 Immigrant Tool for, 134
foot-­and-­mouth disease outbreak (1947), 91 graffiti: by guerilla artists in Nogales, Sonora,
Foucault, Michel, 62n37–­38, 204–­5 156; new border wall in Nogales, Sonora
Friends of the Fiftieth Year Observance of the and, 169
Evacuation and Internment, 214n10 Gramsci, Antonio, 28
From the West: Chicano Narrative Photogra- Grand Canyon, Klett’s rephotography of, 197
phy (Noriega), 19n11 Granite Construction, 167, 168
La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/ Great Wall of California (Baca), 157
United States Border Experience (Chávez Grijalva, Raúl, 168
and Grynsztejn), 14 ground sensors, at Border Field State
fronterizos/as: BAW/TAF’s art by, 13; as bor- Park, 140
derlands dwellers, 5; embracing identity Grupo Beto, 151
of, 129; marginality of, 128 Grynsztejn, Madeleine, 14, 15
frontier: Turner’s definition of, 132–­33n2. See Guadalajara, Jalisco, highways and, 99
also U.S.-­Mexico border Guatemala: border-­crossing migrants from,
Fuente, Mike de la, 94 123. See also Mexico-­Guatemala border
fugitive landscape: joint map and, 51; use of survey
term, 63n43
Fugitive Sites: inSITE 2000–­2001 New Con- hactivism, 144
temporary Art in San Diego and Tijuana Hall, Stuart, 28
(2002), 15 Harvill Plaza, University of Arizona, Tucson:
Border Dynamics in, 3, 15
Gadsden Purchase (1853), 57n7, 162, 216n21 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26
García, Rupert, 128 hegemony: alternative histories and, 32; bor-
Garner, John N., 76 der art and, 197; borderlands history and,
gas pipeline operation, joint Mexican–­U.S., 31; border spaces and, 28–­30; contesting
101–­2 violence perpetuated by the state and, 212;
Gast, John, 119 nationalisms and, 215n15; nationalistic
geography: border art bound to, 197; jour- history and, 196; Palm at the Site of Japa-
neying perspective and, 210; nation-­state nese Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona,
power and authority and, 196; Sanchez’s 1985 and, 198
video and, 211; violence perpetuated by Helguera, Leo, poster by, 89
the state and, 212 Hernández, Ana Teresa, 171
germ theory of disease, 71, 75 Hernández, José-­Antonio, 151, 153, 155, 164
global economies and globalization: borders highways: cross-­border commerce and, 99–­
and, 34; cross-­border commerce and, 88 100, 102–­3; Pan-­American, 93
 230 | Index

Historias en la Camioneta (Sanchez, 2010): no, 258 by, 49; final collaborative report
absent or invisible bodies in, 116, 207, 210; negotiations, 55; impressions from
borders depicted by, 130–­31; racialization photograph albums for, 53–­54; individ-
of borders and, 195; tracking time and ual published accounts by, 60–­61n25;
space in, 208–­9; U.S. Border Patrol and, map production, 50–­51; mission of, 41;
207–­8; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 211; national teams working independently
as video of border crossers, 206–­7; video and together, 45–­46; new monuments
still from, 207, 208; violence in Nogales, and, 48–­49; omissions on U.S. side maps,
Sonora told in, 209 51; overview, 7–­8; Payne’s and Servín’s
historical markers. See monuments photograph albums for, 51, 53; Report of
“History” (Spivak), 200 the Boundary Commission Album, 53–­55;
Hock, Louis, 145 resurvey by, 43; Río de Sonoyta, en Sonora,
House Un-­American Activities Committee, 90 45; Servín as topographer and photogra-
human cannonball, 146 pher for, 46–­47
Humane Borders, 172n1, 204 International Boundary Monument No. 40:
Huneycutt, Brett: arrangement of BFP images rebuilding of (1893), 39–­40, 40; as spatial
and, 186; on Border Film Project, 175; ownership marker, 40–­41
photograph selection and, 185; race and Internet: BlueServo on, 216n24; border art
racism in Minuteman Project and, 184; on and, 134, 136
shedding light on “illegal” immigration, Invisible Wall (Taller Yonke, 2010), 16
177. See also Border Film Project; Border Izaguirre, Antonio, 95
Film Project
Jacobson, Robin Dale, 184
identities: border art and, 131; performative Japanese American internment camps: apol-
crossings and, 145–­46 ogy and reparations for, 215n16; Klett’s
Immigration and Customs Enforcement photograph as contesting state violence,
(ICE), 191n2 212; Klett’s photograph of afterlife of,
immigration reform (U.S.): agitators on Latin 196; lack of photographs in Arizona’s art
American culture influence in U.S. and, historical record of, 214–­15n14; Native
90; debates on, 25, 26; physical closing of American land taken for, 211; as pictorial
border and, 135. See also migration opening of American Southwestern his-
Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, tory, 198; racialized state production and,
1986), 114, 136; End of the Line and, 138–­ 214n9; as symbol of national erasure, 200–­
39, 139–­40 201. See also Palm at the Site of Japanese
Imperial Beach, California, border fence and, Internment Camp, Poston, Arizona, 1985
137, 138–­39 Jardín de la Vida (Garden of Life) (Taller
impermanence, border art installations Yonke), 158
and, 16 Jennings, W. H., 73–­74
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Johnson, Levi E., 66–­67
Images of Japanese American Internment Jones, Amelia, 18–­19n9
(Gordon and Okihiro), 215n14 journeying perspective, of U.S.-­Mexico
information, borders and, 34–­35 border, 209–­10
inSITE exhibitions: border art and, 147n2; Judd, Chauncey William, 53
cross-­border, 14–­15; Mexico City artists Juffer, Jane, 179
and, 127–­28; One Flew over the Void Junk Studio. See Taller Yonke
(2005), 146; San Diego–­Tijuana, 10, 15,
136, 146, 156–­57 Kahlo, Frida, 117
International Boundary Commission (1890s): Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, Arizona, 168
bodies obscured in aesthetic results of, 56; Kennedy, John F., Jr., 91
boundary map no. 5 by, 52; as collabora- The Kingdom and the Power (Talese), 91–­92
tive labor and archive of interpretations, Klett, Mark: absent bodies in photographs of,
42; documents deposited in monument 116, 200, 201; border studies and, 213n6;
 Index | 231

cross-­border art and, 10; inscription of Lou, Richard, 156

history on landscape and, 196; perfor- Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), 130
mance, border art and, 12; rephotography,
197, 213–­14n7; subjects of, located away magisterial gaze: Boime’s theory of, 202;
from borderline, 195. See also Palm at the Taylor’s photo from fence and, 205
Site of Japanese Internment Camp, Poston, Malagamba-­Ansótegui, Amelia: border art
Arizona, 1985 history and, 212–­13n4; on border art vs.
Koch, Robert, 71 art about the border, 13; El Colegio de la
Kurtz, Steve, 142 Frontera Norte and, 14; on contemporary
Kurtz Hope, 142 art forms of cross-­border art troupes, 10;
cross-­border exhibitions and, 15; “Looking
labor issues: undocumented immigration at Arts, History, and Place in the U.S./
issues and, 140–­41. See also North Ameri- Mexico Borderlands” (symposium, 2011)
can Free Trade Agreement and, 5. See also border art and spaces
landscape, shifting from noun to verb, 132n1 Malverde, in Paseo de Humanidad, 162
landscape painting or images, American Malverde y Virgen (Morackis and Serrano), 31
history and, 203, 216n22 Manifest Destiny, nineteenth century border
Lange, Dorothea, 214n14 art and, 113, 119
Laredo, U.S. shoppers in, 98 maps: border spaces in the landscape and,
Last Supper, End of the Line as, 139–­40 31–­32; conflation of power and, 130,
Latin American studies: border art history 133n8; International Boundary Com-
and, 15. See also Chicano/a studies and mission (1890s) and, 43; joint interna-
art history tional boundary survey (1850s) and, 40;
laws: Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 145, marking and defining borders and, 41–­42;
149n30; U.S.-­Mexico border and, 122, 126 Mexico’s perception of border and, 116–­17;
Lemmon, M. J., 44 production, border resurvey and, 50–­51;
León-­Portilla, Miguel, 14, 15 surveyors’ vs. astronomers’ methods for,
Letras cruze (Alvarez), 36 47; as technology of ordering and disci-
Leutze, Emanuel Gottlieb, 113, 114 pline, 132n1; Transborder Immigrant Tool
liberal nativism, Border Film Project organiz- as, 145; of U.S.-­Mexico border, 42. See also
ers and, 184, 189–­90 cartographers
lice, Mexican body, typhus scare of 1915 and, 77 maquiladora factories: Border Industrializa-
Lipsett, Alexander S., 96 tion Program and, 102; global econo-
Livestock Commission, San Antonio, Texas, 75 mies and, 88; growth of, 104; Morackis
livestock industries: cross-­border exchanges and Serrano and, 158, 166; in Nogales,
and, 100–­101. See also cattle Sonora, 157
“Looking at Arts, History, and Place in the Margaropus annulatus, 66–­67
U.S./Mexico Borderlands” (symposium, Marx, Karl, 132n1
2011), 5 Matamoros: NAFTA and, 88; U.S. shoppers
López Mateos, Adolfo, 91, 102 in, 98
Los Angeles Times: on advantages of cross-­ Maudslay, Alfred P., 44
border commerce, 87–­88; Chandler on May, W. P., 76
capitalism and democracy and, 92; on Maya ruins, Cristiani’s photographs of, 44
cross-­border agriculture and livestock McCarran-­Walter Act (1952), 92
industries, 100–­101; on cross-­border McCormick, Anne O’Hare, 86–­87, 101
commercial exchanges, 95, 96, 97–­98; on Mckiernan-­Gonzalez, John, 68
cross-­border exchanges, 32; on cross-­ Mearns, Edgar Alexander, 45
border exchanges in World War II, 90; on memorial crosses: new border wall in
“open border,” 36; on shared borderland Nogales, Sonora and, 169; painted on
defense, 93; on U.S.-­Mexico rail lines, Nogales, Sonora border wall for migrant
tourism and commerce, 100; on water for deaths, 156
Mexican farmers from Arizona’s rivers, 91 Mendoza, Mary E., 7, 8, 24, 32, 37–­38
 232 | Index

Mexicali, Baja California: arms and drug light on issue” of, 177, 192n13; as “illegal,”
smuggling in, 91; U.S. shoppers in, 98 migrants’ BFP photos as documenting,
Mexican Americans: on undocumented 189–­90; labor, national press (1940–­1965)
immigration, 140–­41, 148n13; violence on, 87; to Mexican border cities, inter-
perpetuated by the state against, 215n15. national markets and, 88; of ticks, fences
See also Chicano/as and, 79
Mexican-­American War, 162, 216n21 milagros: Paseo de Humanidad and, 154,
Mexican Chamber of Commerce, 95 161–­62; Quiroz’s, for Paseo de Humanidad,
Mexican geographic terms, 47 124–­25, 124, 168, 169. See also Paseo de
Mexican Revolution, 141 Humanidad
Mexicans: first limits on numbers entering militarized border: consequences of, 141;
U.S. of, 85n49; U.S. attitudes on envi- contested lands and, 215–­16n19; End
ronmental threats and, 67–­68. See also of the Line and, 139; ethics of, 148n15;
migrants; undocumented immigrants as full expression of state power, 140;
Mexico: cattle immunity to Texas fever in, Immigration Reform and Control Act
72; class and political tensions with U.S., and, 136; operations enforcing, 137; self-­
104; government websites, virtual sit-­ins representation of migrants and Minute-
of, 142; highways and railroads into U.S. men and, 180; Taylor’s photo from fence
from, 99–­100; National Border Program of, 204; Transborder Immigrant Tool and,
(1960s and 1970s), 8; Paseo de Humanidad 143, 146, 147; U.S. border policies and, 187.
on Nogales, Sonora border wall and, 154; See also U.S.-­Mexico border
post-­World War II tensions between U.S. Millis, Dan, 168
and, 90–­91; representations of northern Mineta, Norman, 215n16
landscape in, 116–­18; space control by, 24; Minna-­Stern, Alexandra, 68, 77
U.S. military and economic alliance with, Minuteman Project, 175
92–­93; U.S. regulation of migrants from, Minutemen (Minuteman Civil Defense
178–­79. See also norteñas; U.S.-­Mexico Corps Project): action and publicity
border event (2005), 175, 177; arrangement of
Mexico City artists, 127–­28 BFP images of, 183–­84; BFP minimizing
Mexico-­Guatemala border survey (1880s), 43, race and racism within, 184; BFP photos
44, 46, 48 representing, 185; Border Film Project
México Opuesto (Mexico in Opposition) and, 11–­12, 115, 129, 175–­76; Border Film
(Morackis, 1996), 158–­59 Project cover and, 181–­82, 182; denying
Mexico-­U. S. boundary resurvey. See bound- role of race in, 193n34; distribution of
ary surveys; International Boundary disposable cameras to, 177–­78; House
Commission hearing on border security (2005) and,
migrants: as absent in U.S. public discourse, 193n22; ideological subjugation by BFP,
202; arrangement of BFP images of, 183–­ 181; legitimating activities and influence
84; BFP photos on “illegal” movements of, on government decisions by, 179–­80;
189–­90; Border Film Project and, 11–­12, mainstream and extreme restrictionist
115, 129, 175–­76; Border Film Project cover forces and, 192n19; Mexican migrants and,
and, 181–­82, 182; distribution of disposable 121; migrant photos by, 185–­86; policing
cameras to, 177; ideological subjugation undocumented migrants, 176, 178–­79;
by BFP, 181; mental spaces for crossing the surveillance of migrants by, BFP and, 190–­
border and, 123–­24; Minutemen photos 91; “Undocumented Border Patrol Agent”
of, 185–­86; Sonoran shelter for, 204; badges worn by, 192n17
Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 134–­35, Minutemen Civil Defense Corps Project, 180
144. See also undocumented immigrants Mitchell, W. J. Thomas, 132n1
migration: of cattle, fences and, 78; of cattle, modernity and modernization: documenting,
Texas fever and, 68–­69; fences for control under Porfirio, 50; Mexico’s, U.S. national
of, 37, 80; global causes of, BFP omitting press on, 97, 103; tales about, borderlands
examination of, 187; “illegal,” BFP to “shed and, 23–­25
 Index | 233

Molina, Natalia, 68, 77 violence perpetuated by the state against,

monuments: erection of (1901), 9; Interna- 215n15
tional Boundary Commission (1890s) nativism, liberal, Border Film Project orga-
and, 43; as landscape markers, 7; locating nizers and, 184, 189–­90
and rebuilding of (1890s), 47–­48; marking nature, as produced and defined by culture,
and defining borders and, 41–­42; marking 132n1
U.S.-­Mexico border (1850s), 42–­43; Navajo (Diné) Long Walk (1964), 200,
Monumento Número 222, 55; moved, for 214n9
International Boundary Commission, necessity, walking as, walking as philosophy
57n3; new, for International Boundary vs., 143
Commission, 48–­49; no. 258, documents Nelson, O. H., 69–­70
deposited in, 49; plans for, 62n34; pre- New York Times: on advantages of cross-­
carious locations and, 62n36; Rebuilding border commerce, 87–­88; on closeness
Monument No. 40, 39–­40, 40; Santa of U.S. and Mexico (1944), 86–­87; on
Muerte—­Holy Death and, 166; Servín’s Communists in border cities, 90; on
photographs of, 54; Taylor on photo- cross-­border agriculture and livestock
graphing, 206; U.S.-­Mexico boundary industries, 101; on cross-­border com-
survey teams (1850s) on, 59n15. See also mercial exchanges, 95, 96, 97–­98; on
fences cross-­border efforts for Allied war effort,
Moore, Sarah J., 5, 10. See also border art and 93; on cross-­border relations, 94; on
spaces Mexico’s economic protectionism, 91; on
Morackis, Alberto: Border Dynamics and, 3, 4; “open border,” 36; Talese on capitalism
death of, 166; Museo de Arte de Nogales and democracy and, 91–­92; Terry on
and, 169; Paseo de Humanidad and, 11, 154, monument locations to, 48–­49
161, 162; Serrano collaboration with, 10, Nogales, Arizona: demographics and econ-
158–­59. See also Taller Yonke omy of, 157; J. Baca show (1995) at Hilltop
Morrissey, Katherine G., 7–­8, 23, 30, 31, 35 Gallery in, 157; Taylor’s photo from fence
Motorola phones, transformation into and, 203–­4; transnational connectedness
poems, 143 with Nogales, Sonora, 206
Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, Sonora), 164–­ Nogales, Sonora: arms and drug smuggling
65, 165, 168, 169 in, 91; border agent along border barbed
Museo de Arte de Nogales, 169, 171 wire fence (1947) near, 81; border art in,
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego 151; Border Dynamics and, 3, 160; border
(MCASD), 14, 145 walls erected by U.S. through, 153–­54;
museums, border art history and, 18n9 demographics and economy of, 157;
highways and, 99; International Street,
Naco, Arizona: Operation Safeguard in, 155; postcard image, 25; Mural de Taniperla,
safehouses in, 137 164–­65, 165; new border wall in, 167–­68;
naming, legitimizing through, 137 Old Monument No. 26 in, 48; Operation
narcoviolence narrative, anti-­immigration Safeguard and, 155; Paseo de Humani-
and labor issues and, 140 dad and, 164; public art in (1980s), 10;
National Border Program (Programa rebuilding fence at, 137; Santa Muerte—­
Nacional Fronterizo, PRONAF), 8, 33, Holy Death (Daniel), 165–­66; Taller Yonke
102, 103, 129 work in, 158–­59; Taylor’s photo from fence
National Guard troops, Bush deployment and, 203–­4; transnational connectedness
of, 180 with Nogales, Arizona, 206; U.S. shoppers
National President of the Border Patrol in, 98; wall blockading friends and family
Council, 193n22 in, 156
national press. See press, national No Mas Muertos, 204
Native Americans: absent in Klett’s photo- nonplace, fence as, 122–­23
graph, 211; forced march from Canyon de Noriega, Chon, 19n11
Chelly to Bosque Redondo (1964), 200; norteñas, border art and, 14
 234 | Index

North American Free Trade Agreement Paseo de Humanidad (Serrano, Morackis

(NAFTA): Border Film Project and, and Quiroz): detail, 11, 163; elements of,
12; FloodNet’s virtual sit-­ins and, 142; 161–­62; historical roots of, 131; life on la
Goldwater on open border and, 104; frontera, border fence and, 121–­22; in
maquiladoras in Nogales, Sonora and, 157; Nogales, Sonora on border wall, 152, 154;
Mexican undocumented immigrants and, removal of, 168; Serrano with, 170. See
155, 161; physical closing of border and, also milagros
135; precursors to, 102 Passement, Steve, 167
Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, highways and, 100 Pasteur, Louis, 71
Payne, Daniel R.: collaborative labor on aes-
obelisks. See monuments thetic objects and, 7; glass plate negatives
objectification, Minutemen’s use of cameras of, 60n22; monument-­building crew
to survey migrants as, 179 and, 46; Monumento Número 222 and,
Ochoa, Victor, 137–­39 55; name omitted from published joint
O’Higgins, Pablo, 117–­18 album, 56; negative processing and pho-
Old Monuments: joint international bound- tograph albums by, 51, 53, 64n48; other
ary survey (1850s) and, 40; locating and photographic interests of, 45; prints by,
rebuilding of (1890s), 47–­48. See also 62–­63n40; Rebuilding Monument No. 40
monuments by, 39–­40, 40; Report of the Boundary
One Flew over the Void (2005), 146, 156–­57 Commission Album and, 54, 64n52; Servín
open border: as capitalist dream, 36–­37; and expertise of, 44–­45; tools of, 31–­32;
conservative opposition in 21st century to, as U.S. photographer for International
104–­5; Goldwater on, 104; national press Boundary Commission, 41, 42, 49
(1940–­1965) on, 90 Payne, Harry, 44
Operation Blockade, 137 people, borders and, 34–­35
Operation Gatekeeper, 137, 155 Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History
Operation Hold the Line, 136–­37, 155 (Jones and Heathfield, eds.), 19n9
Operation Safeguard, 137, 155 performance: movement and inscription of
Operation Wetback, 87, 92 border from home to crossing, 124
oral histories, Sanchez’s video of, 131, 210, 212 performance art: border art history and,
Orozco, José Clemente, 158 18n9; End of the Line, 137–­39; San Diego–­
other nations, detritus in borderlands of, 34 Tijuana border art history and, 10
performative crossings: BAW/TAF and, 136;
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–­1980, dissolving and reinforcing the border,
19n11 135; Electronic Disturbance Theater
Palenque, Cristiani’s photographs of, 44 2.0/b.a.n.g. Lab and, 10; identities and,
Palm at the Site of Japanese Internment Camp, 145–­46; Immigration Reform and Control
Poston, Arizona, 1985 (Klett): absent Act and, 136; Sanchez’s video and, 210–­11;
bodies in, 116; archival location of, 200; use of term, 148n11. See also desert cross-
constructed image of people-­made site, ers; Historias en la Camioneta
199; layers of meaning in, 198; racialized Performing the Body/Performing the Text
citizenship and, 195; U.S.-­Mexico border- (Jones), 19n9
lands and, 211; visualizing the limits of personal fronteriza experiences: border
knowing, 201 crossers and, 217n32; in Historias en la
Panales, Hidalgo, highways and, 99 Camioneta, 208
Panama-­Pacific International Exposition Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), 101–­2
(1915), 129 Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, 94–­95
Pan-­American Highway, 93 phone-­as-­poem, Transborder Immigrant Tool
Panhandle Stock Association, 70 and, 143
Pani Darqui, Mario, 102 phones, mobile: GPS-­enabled, 134; as Trans-
panopticism, Foucault’s theory of, 204–­5 border Immigrant Tool, 143–­44, 145, 146.
Paris World’s Fair (1889), 129 See also Transborder Immigrant Tool
 Index | 235

photographs and photographers: at the on tourism and job creation, 98–­99;

border, border crosser’s experience on U.S.-­Mexico rail lines, tourism and
vs., 205–­6; for International Boundary commerce, 100
Commission (1890s), 43, 53, 60n22; Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo privado
marking and defining borders and, 41–­42; en espacio público (inSITE exhibition,
for Mexico-­Guatemala border survey, 1998), 14–­15
44; as monument signifiers, 49; of old Programa de Industrializacion de la Frontera
monuments, 48; ownership of, Border (Border Industrialization Program, BIP),
Film Project and, 183; self-­representation 8, 33, 102
in, for documentary evidence, 178; by vig- Programa Nacional Fronterizo (PRONAF,
ilante groups of undocumented migrants, National Border Program), 8, 33, 102,
179; visibility and invisibility of human 103, 129
actors, 56. See also Border Film Project; Progressive Era, 71
cameras, disposable; International Pryor, Ike T., 75, 76
Boundary Commission; Payne, Daniel R.;
Servín, Luis quarantines: for “all cattle,” 76; to control
physical space, collapsing cyberspace and, Texas fever at state borders, 70; northern
142, 144 boundary of tick-­infested territory and,
Piedra Blanca Cattle Company, 73–­74 79; Strafford’s cattle across Rio Grande
pochas, marginality of, 128 and, 66–­67
political interests: border art as critique of, Quiroz, Alfred: on Border Sutures, 158;
197; U.S.-­Mexico border and, 141 Milagros, 124–­25, 124, 169; Morackis and
Porfirio Díaz, José de la Cruz, 50 Serrano and, 10; Paseo de Humanidad
Poston, Arizona: Colorado River Relocation and, 11, 154, 161–­62, 164
Center in, 198; as third-­largest Arizona
city (1942–­1945), 201 race, racism, and racial categorization: cattle-
Poston Memorial Monument, 214n10 men on “American” vs. “Mexican” cattle
power: border art and game of, 134; Border and, 77–­78, 79–­80; construction of Border
Film Project and story of, 121, 176, 181; Film Project and, 184; dipping vats as, 27;
conflation of maps and, 130, 133n8; disper- health examinations at the border and,
sion of, Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 67–­68, 75; Klett’s photograph of, 195, 198,
145; of the everyday, 33–­35; laws govern- 200; southwestern U.S. states’ surveillance
ing U.S.-­Mexico border and, 122; military as, 216n24; Taylor’s photograph of white-
build-­up at U.S.-­Mexico border and, 140; ness as institutional norm, 205; Taylor’s
nation-­state authority, geography and, view of U.S.-­built border fence and, 202,
196; state, Immigration Reform and Con- 212; U.S. federal government and, 214n9
trol Act and, 136; Transborder Immigrant railroads, cross-­border commerce and, 99–­
Tool and game of, 146 100, 102–­3
press, national: on advantages of cross-­border Raley, Rita, 143
commerce, 87–­88, 90; anti-­Communist range limit: of Margaropus annulatus (ticks),
outlook of, 91–­92; on closeness of U.S. and 71, 72; use of term, 83n16
Mexico (1944), 86–­87; on cross-­border rational border policy, Border Film Project
agriculture and livestock industries, on, 187
100–­101; on cross-­border commer- Reagan, Ronald, 215n16
cial exchanges, 32, 94–­96, 97–­98; on Rebuilding Monument No. 40 (Reconstruc-
development projects and investment ción del Monumento Número 40 en la
opportunities in borderlands, 101–­2; on Extremidad Norte de la Sección Meridi-
Good Neighbor policy and era, 92–­93; on ana), 39–­40, 40
harmony and profit, 103–­4; on Mexico’s Regan, Margaret: on absences and silences in
modernization, 97, 103; post-­World War border art, 116; on Paseo de Humanidad,
II U.S.-­Mexico tensions and, 90–­91; on 122; Taller Yonke art history and, 10; U.S.-­
shared borderland defense, 91–­92, 93–­94; Mexico border studies and, 12, 13, 115
 236 | Index

Report of the Boundary Commission Album, Secure Fence Act (2006), 180
53–­55, 65n52 seed ticks, 78. See also tick eradication
reports, marking and defining borders and, Sekula, Allan, 177, 181, 183, 184
41–­42 Self-­Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico
Revealing Territory: Photographs of the South- and the United States (Kahlo, 1932), 117
west (Klett, 1992), 198, 200 self-­representation: arrangement of BFP
Rieke, Antonio W., 44 images and, 184; Border Film Project
right-­wing militia groups: growing acceptance organizers’ perspective and, 183; for doc-
of, 179. See also Minutemen umentary evidence, 178; of migrants and
Rio Grande: Strafford’s cattle cross, 66–­67; Minutemen for Border Film Project, 180;
U.S.-­Mexico negotiations on shifting power differentials between U.S. citizens
course of, 91 and undocumented migrants and, 187
Rivera, Diego, 158 Serpiente mural (Morackis), 159, 169
roads: cross-­border commerce and, 99–­100, Serrano, Guadalupe: Border Dynamics and, 3,
102–­3. See also highways 4; el Centro Cultural los Nogales and, 169;
Rochlin, Abe, 94 Morackis’s collaboration with, 10, 158–­59;
Rodriguez, Ciro, 26, 27 with Paseo de Humanidad, 170; Paseo de
Romero, Betsabeé, 127–­28 Humanidad and, 11, 154, 161, 164; repaint-
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 93 ing Serpiente mural, 169; saving Taniperla
Roseberry, William, 29, 30 mural and, 168. See also Taller Yonke
Servín, Luis: Blanco introduces Payne to,
Salazar, Ruben, 100, 103 44–­45; Blanco on photographic skills of,
Salazar y Larregui, José, 31, 40, 47–­48 59n16; central Mexico mining regions
Sale, Gregory, 159–­60 surveys and, 58n10; collaborative labor
Salmon, D. E., 70 on aesthetic objects and, 7; detritus of
Sanchez, Mary Jenea: bodies as invisible in other nations and, 34; as engineer, 43, 46;
video of, 116, 206–­7; bus passengers as glass plate negatives of, 60n22; Mexican
historians crossing border video, 196; topographic skills of, 46–­47; as Mexico’s
cross-­border art and, 10; as fronteriza, photographer for International Boundary
217n32; lived experiences of border Commission, 41, 44, 49; name omitted
crossers and, 130; performance, border from published joint album, 56; negative
art and, 12; subjects engaging border processing and photograph albums by, 51,
in video of, 195. See also Historias en la 53, 64n48; other photographic interests
Camioneta of, 45; prints by, 62–­63n40; Report of the
San Diego: Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park in, Boundary Commission Album and, 54,
135–­36; Committee on Chicano Rights, 64n52; tools of, 31–­32; as topographer and
141; as inSITE host, 10, 15, 136, 146, 156–­57; photographer, 50
Operation Gatekeeper in, 155 Sheaffer, Jack, 94
San Diego Defense Council, 93 Sheren, Ila N., 10, 114, 115, 121
Sandweiss, Martha, 216n19 sicarios, violence in Nogales by, 209, 217n34
Santa Muerte—­Holy Death (Daniel), Sierra Club’s Borderlands Campaign, 168
165–­66, 171 Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual
Savage, J. D., 75, 76, 77 Culture (Berger), 205
Schlee, Beverly, 142 “The Significance of the Frontier in American
Schnorr, Michael, 18n6, 137–­39 History” (Turner), 132–­33n2
Schreiber, Rebecca, 11–­12, 115, 121 Simcox, Chris, 179–­81, 193n22
science and scientists: joint international Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 158
boundary survey (1850s) and, 42; tick Sisco, Elizabeth, 145
eradicators, borders and, 32 site: Critical Art Ensemble on definition of,
Scott, James, 24, 29 142; portability, 147n3
Secretaria de Fomento (Ministry of Develop- sit-­ins, virtual, Electronic Disturbance The-
ment), Mexico’s, 50, 53, 63n41 ater 2.0 and, 142
 Index | 237

Situationist International, dérive practices, Mural de Taniperla and, 164–­65; Regan on

143, 149n24 history of, 10, 115; U.S. Border Patrol and,
Smith, David, 146 122. See also Morackis, Alberto; Paseo de
social conditions, border art and, 197 Humanidad; Serrano, Guadalupe
social organizing and activism, art’s role in, Taniperla, Chiapas, mural of, 164–­65, 169
12–­13 tax rebates, for undocumented immigrants, 145
Sonora: Río de Sonoyta (photograph), 45. See Taylor, David: absent bodies in photographs
also Agua Prieta, Sonora; Arizona-­Sonora of, 116; border crossers and, 205; cross-­
region; Nogales, Sonora border art and, 10; performance, border
Sonoran Desert. See desert crossers art and, 12; subjects engaging border in
Southeast Asia, arts of popular resistance in, 29 photographs of, 195; two-­part color land-
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: on archives and scapes of, 201–­2; U.S.-­Mexico borderlands
knowledge production, 200; cultural his- residents and, 196; on visual rhetoric of
tory theory, 196–­97; on her postcolonial white privilege, 206. See also View into
reasoning, 217n30; on vanishing present, Nogales from the Border Fence (with
205–­6, 207, 210 camera tower)
Stalbaum, Brett, 134 technologies of the nation: characteristics of,
state borders (U.S.), quarantines to control 216n22; Sanchez’s video and, 209; Taylor’s
Texas fever at, 70 photo of U.S.-­Mexico border and, 202
state institutions, border spaces in the land- Téllez, Javier, 146, 156–­57
scape and, 30–­32 Tennessee Gas Transmission Company, 102
“Stealth Crossings” (BAW/TAF), 10 terrorism: low-­intensity, Minutemen photos
St. John, Rachel, 84n46 of migrants as, 186; War on, 137, 140
Strafford, W. P., 66–­67 Terry, L. Seward, 48–­49
Strom, Claire, 32, 70–­71 Texas fever: lines of drive across U.S. and,
surveillance: camera tower for, 202–­4, 203; 68–­70; permanently infected district
Foucault’s theory of panopticism and, boundaries for, 70–­71
204–­5; of impossible-­to-­retrieve history, Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal and, 144
206; of migrants by migrants, BFP and, Thompson, E. P., 28
190; of migrants by Minutemen, BFP tick eradication: BAI response to cattlemen
and, 190–­91; Minutemen’s photographs of complaints on, 75–­76; BAI’s programs
migrant movements and, 185; photo- for, 71–­72; borders and, 32, 34; cattlemen
graphic self-­representation vs., 180; as complaints to officials on, 73–­75, 76;
racialized entertainment for whites, cattlemen racializing cattle due to, 80;
216n24; Taylor’s view of U.S.-­built border cattle straying across border and, 72–­73;
fence and, 212. See also View into Nogales fence construction for, 67–­68; quarantine
from the Border Fence (with camera tower) line map and, 79; rise of U.S. administra-
surveyors: for International Boundary Com- tive state and, 70–­71; seed ticks on plants
mission (1890s), 43; marking and defining and fence posts and, 78; Strafford’s cattle
borders and, 41–­42 across Rio Grande and, 66–­67. See also
Swartz, Lonnie, 171–­72 dipping vats
Sweeney, Gray, 42 Tiempo privado en espacio público/Private
Time in Public Space (inSITE exhibition,
tactical media, 143, 144 1998), 14–­15
Taddei, Luis Diego, 167, 169, 171 Tijuana: Border Door (Lou, 1988) in, 156;
Tagg, John, 214n13 as inSITE host, 10, 15, 136, 146, 156–­57;
Talese, Gay, 91–­92 NAFTA and, 88; U.S. shoppers in, 98
Taller de Gráfica Popular, 118 Tijuana Civilian Defense Council, 93
Taller Yonke (Junk Studio): after Morackis’s Tilly, Charles, 33
death, 167; Beyond Borders commission Time magazine, 26
for, 159; Border Dynamics, 3, 4, 131, 159–­ Tombstone, Arizona, Minutemen action and
61; formation of, 158; Invisible Wall, 16; publicity event (2005) in, 175, 177
 238 | Index

tourism, 97, 98–­99, 99 U.S. Army, Ambos Nogales border wall

Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT) (Elec- and, 154
tronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, 2009): U.S. art history: border art and, 19n11. See also
in action, 135; border art, game of power border art history
and, 134; border as performative and U.S. Border Patrol: Ambos Nogales border
politicized site and, 114–­15; Border Patrol wall and, 154; Border Dynamics (Taller
and, 144–­45, 147, 150n35; mitigating mili- Yonke) and, 122, 159, 160; Historias en
tarization effects, 143; new consciousness la Camioneta (Sanchez) and, 207–­8;
about border and, 124; phone-­as-­poem Immigration Reform and Control Act
and, 143–­44; translating practical infor- and, 136; Invisible Wall (Taller Yonke) and,
mation into action, 142 16; migrant deaths and, 154–­55, 171–­72;
Tratado de topografía (Covarrubias), 47, Minutemen photos of migrants detained
61n29 by, 186; outposts, TIT for finding, 134;
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 42, 57n7, in Paseo de Humanidad, 162; policing
86, 216n21 undocumented migrants, 179; saving
Treaty of Mesilla (1853), 42, 57n7 Taniperla mural and, 168; Transborder
Trinh Minh-­ha, 209–­10, 217n33 Immigrant Tool and, 144–­45, 147, 150n35;
Truett, Samuel: on border history, 197; The undocumented immigrants and, 153
Border Project (2011–­2012) and, 5; on U.S. Boundary Commission: boundary mon-
hidden histories of U.S.-­Mexico frontier, uments and, 166. See also International
195; on legacy of crossing and reinforcing Boundary Commission
borders, 3; on marking the landscape, 7. U.S. companies: relocating headquarters to
See also border landscapes conversation border region (late 1950s), 95, 96. See also
Truettner, William H., 19n11 border commerce and infrastructure
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 132–­33n2 U.S. Department of Agriculture, 67, 70, 78.
Tzeltal Indians, Mural de Taniperla (Nogales, See also Bureau of Animal Industry
Sonora) and, 164 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 179,
192n17
undocumented immigrants: Art Rebate (Arte U.S. House Committee on Government
Reembolso, 1993) and, 145; Border Film Reform, 193n22
Project and visibility of, 178; evading U.S.-­Mexico border: BAI-­built fence along
detection as goal of, 185; Minutemen (1911), 67; border art history from U.S.
policing of, 176, 178–­79; multiple voices perspective on, 116; contested lands
on, 140–­41; NAFTA and surge in, 155; in northern Mexico and American
Transborder Immigrant Tool and, 146. See Southwest, 202, 215–­16n19; establish-
also migration ment of, 216n21; as fluid, permeable, and
United Americas, binational celebrations intangible for ranchers and cattle, 66–­67;
of, 98 fortification projects for tick eradication
United States: border art history in, 14; class and, 73; gateways and customs houses
and political tensions with Mexico, 104; for, 102; inSITE exhibitions at, 136; joint
conception of border in, 118–­19; cultural international survey (1850s) of, 39–­40,
imperialism, world’s fairs and, 129–­30; 42; journeying perspectives of, 209–­10;
first limits on Mexicans entering, 85n49; marking and defining process, 41–­42; as
government websites, virtual sit-­ins of, material and immaterial space, Trinh on,
142; highways and railroads into Mexico 209, 217n33; Mexican vs. U.S. perspective
from, 99–­100; historical reliance on cheap of, 116–­19; national press on economic
labor in, 141; media representations of development and, 96; population growth
Mexico and violence, 209; Mexico’s mil- and modernization along, 103; reflecting
itary and economic alliance with, 92–­93; asymmetries of power, 127–­28; represen-
tick eradication administrative state in, tation and marking of, 6; separating U.S.
70–­71. See also American South; press, from people and nature of Mexico, 81–­82;
national; U.S.-­Mexico border shared defense during Good Neighbor
 Index | 239

era of, 93; tick eradication at, 72–­73. See boundary surveys; International Bound-
also border cities; border commerce and ary Commission
infrastructure; border crossings; border
landscapes conversation; border policing; walking: EDT 2.0 connecting thinking and,
border wall; boundary surveys; cross-­ 144; as philosophy or art or as migratory
border exchanges; militarized border necessity, 143
University of Arizona, Tucson: Border Wallace, Henry, 93
Dynamics at, 3, 160; Center for Creative “Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art
Photography, 200, 214n11 Display” (Amilhat-­Szary), 121
University of Arizona Museum of Art: The Wall Street Journal, 97, 101, 103
Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes, Warner, John-­Michael, 12, 13, 116, 130
and Lifescapes (2011–­2012), 5, 168 War on Drugs, 140, 147n5
War on Terror, 137, 140
Valdez, Sergio, 164 Washington Monument, 62n34
Val Verde Irrigation Company, Del Rio, Washington Post, 32, 93–­94
Texas, 66 water, Transborder Immigrant Tool for find-
van der Straet, Jan, 113, 130 ing, 134, 135
vanishing present: Klett’s photograph and, water rights, post-­World War II U.S.-­Mexico
200–­201; Sanchez’s video and, 210; Taylor’s tensions and, 91
photo from fence and, 205–­6 The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of
Vespucci, Amerigo, 113, 130 the Frontier, 1820–­1920 (Truettner), 19n11
Vida y sueños de la cañada perla (Life and Westinghouse Corporation, 101
Dreams of the Pearl Stream) (Nogales, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
Sonora), 164–­65, 165 (Leutze), 113, 114
video art. See Historias en la Camioneta wetback drives (early 1950s), 92
Vietnam War, corrugated metal wall as canvas whiteness, federally conceived form of: Tay-
and, 131 lor’s photo from fence and, 205, 206. See
View into Nogales from the Border Fence also race, racism, and racial categorization
(with camera tower) (Taylor): intersecting Wolf, Byron, 197
geography and biopolitical modalities, Working the Line (Taylor, 2008–­present):
196; magisterial gaze of, 202; national absent or invisible bodies in, 116; racializa-
discourse on racial privilege and, 205; tion of borders and, 195; as two-­part color
U.S.-­Mexico borderlands and, 211; vanish- landscapes, 201–­2
ing present and, 205–­6; as visual rhetoric World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago,
of white privilege, 206; from Working the 1893), 132n2
Line series, 203 world’s fairs, 129–­30
vigilante groups: photographing undoc- World War II, Axis invasion of Americas fears
umented migrants, 179. See also during, 90
Minutemen Wright, J. H., 44
violence: in Nogales, Sonora by sicarios, 209,
217n34; perpetuated by the state, geogra- Young, Elliott, 3
phy and, 212, 215n15; technologies of the
nation fostering, 209; vigilante, Minute- Zapata, Emiliano, 164
men Project allies and, 176 Zapatista movement, 142; Mural de Taniperla
visualization projects: attention to, 15; (Nogales, Sonora) and, 164, 165
international boundary surveys as, 41–­42, Zapotec from Oaxaca, navigation of the heart
56; of U.S.-­Mexico border, 8, 10. See also by, 125–­26