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Drawing a Line: Encounters with the U.s.a.-Mexico Border

2 years ago, I drove through the Southwest to San Diego. I had recently gotten a phone with GPS on it, which made most of the trip a kind of perfunctory practise in enduring the altitude betwixt points A and B. Following the Interstate, I booked it through New United mexican states, made Phoenix by noon, and was in Yuma by three. Simply after crossing the Arizona state line on I-8 into California, a biscuit pickup pulled level with my car, and so passed information technology. Strapped to the back with some twine and little else was a affiche, flapping in the wind, that read "SUPPORT ARIZONA! SEND ILLEGALS PACKIN'!"ⁱ

It was early August of 2010, only days afterwards a federal injunction temporarily halted the so-called "show me your papers" provision of Arizona SB-1070, the legislation that would effectively legalize racial profiling by allowing police to stop any person suspected of being undocumented, and demanding proof of citizenship.ⁱⁱ Reports and reactions to the law had been playing on the radio throughout the day--a sonic illustration of the human and political landscape that lay invisible as I sped through by in my car. But until the beige truck and its virulent sign appeared, it hadn't occurred to me I, also, was within the active contestation of mural and meaning that is the borderlands.

I reached for the phone to snap a moving-picture show, and noticed something strange. At the top of the screen, my carrier registered as MOVISTAR. I soon got a text message: According to my cellular company, I was in international territory. Just as information technology hadn't occurred to me I'd be driving through the Borderlands on my manner to San Diego, I hadn't idea nearly how close to the actual edge I would come. Out the window, the mural was the same for miles on either side--vacant dunes tufting the surface of the earth. Turning with the freeway, I caught a glimpse of the edge itself--a rust-dark-brown contend, running less than a thousand feet away to the southward, peeking out from behind the sand. With my cell phone in Mexico, my radio in Washington, and my machine just past the go out to Pair a Dice Bar & Grill, I'd arrived without realizing it.

I'd never been to the border before--in fact, information technology was my starting time fourth dimension in the Southwest at all. I grew up and (at that betoken) lived far away. The border for me was a funny thing--easier to picture as a line on a map, stories in the news, and political confrontation than anything physical. Not really a landscape--continuous, historically conditioned visual cultures of place--information technology stood more than as a representation of the abstruse concepts of ability and politics.

In some ways, that'due south an accurate understanding. Traditionally a border is a slice of physical geography: a river, mount range, coulee, or coastline. In other words, an impediment to movement that separates there from here, cultures, practices, people, and identities. Just modern borders are more than often political than physical, the results of wars and treaties that institute a formal partition of territories whose definition lies in the temporal framework of history, the political mandate of expansionism, and the arcanely specific language of the law. Borders are diplomatic agreements, drawn on a map, and represented in line.

The U.Due south.-Mexico border is, in part, this kind. On February 2, 1848, in Mexico Urban center, representatives from the Republic of Mexico and the United States signed of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Under the terms of the treaty, Mexico ceded over half its territory to the U.S. for $15 one thousand thousand,ⁱⁱⁱ catastrophe the Mexican-American War, increasing U.Due south. landmass by 1/3, and furthering the mid-19th century project of American Manifest Destiny.^iv A wide expanse of desert, ranchland, mountains, and forests, what we now know as the "American" west was at that point relatively little-known, and almost unrepresented.

John Disturnell, Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico: segun lo organizado y definido por las varias actas del congreso de dicha républica y construido por las mejores autoridades, 1847 | Courtesy of Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC

In the absence of whatsoever hard reconnaissance, the signatories relied on two descriptions, ii pieces of paper--the starting time visual, the second textual--to decide the fate of peoples and their lands. The offset was an 1847 map, published past the New York map-maker John Disturnell, showing Mexican and U.S. territories prior to the War, Native American tribal distribution, and, crucially, rivers, coasts, and mountain ranges. Using the map as a template, the signatories composed an administrative legal definition of where the new border would lie. Article V, a pithy verbal description of the line they drew, read as follows:

The purlieus line between the 2 Republics shall embark in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, otherwise called Rio Bravo del Norte, or Opposite the mouth of its deepest branch, if it should have more than than one co-operative emptying directly into the sea; from thence up the center of that river, following the deepest channel, where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes the southern boundary of New Mexico; thence, westwardly, forth the whole southern boundary of New Mexico (which runs northward of the town chosen Paso) to its western termination; thence, due north, along the western line of New Mexico, until it intersects the first branch of the river Gila; (or if it should non intersect whatsoever branch of that river, then to the point on the said line nearest to such branch, and thence in a directly line to the aforementioned); thence down the middle of the said branch and of the said river, until it empties into the Rio Colorado; thence beyond the Rio Colorado, post-obit the division line between Upper and Lower California, to the Pacific Sea.⁵

Relying on Disturnell's rendering of concrete boundaries, Article 5 followed rivers west as far as information technology could through the desert, to the border of present-24-hour interval California, where information technology was presented with 150 miles of dunes, rockpile mountains, and chaparral, identical on either side. A simple solution was reached, every bit Commodity Five continued its diplomatic legalese:

[...]in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the footing the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that the said limit shall consist of a straight line drawn from the heart of the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a bespeak on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant 1 marine league due south of the southernmost signal of the port of San Diego[....].^vi

The Treaty negotiators understood all too well that their line was to a certain extent capricious. So, they added a requirement to investigate its entire 2000-mile length, commissioning a bi-national survey to record, measure out and draw the new boundary'southward position on the ground. A incomparably 19th-century project, this quantitative and qualitative measuring assumed information technology could cement the relationship between the words on the folio and the line in the sand, as if declaring it both legally and physically would get in practically so.^vii

The newly formed Boundary Survey Commission deployed teams of astronomers, cartographers, scientists and artists--many of them veterans of the Mexican-American War--to the border region for six years.eight Beginning July 6, 1849, they met at the port of San Diego under the direction of the American Gen. John B. Weller and Mexican Gen. Jose Salazar Ylarregui and fix out for Fort Yuma, AZ--a journey of 150 miles. Charting their grade through calculations of the pole star in the night heaven, Ylarregui and Weller made their way across the forbidding July oestrus of the Sonoran desert, convening intermittently to compare their course.^ix

John Weyss, View from Emory's Monument South of the San Luis Springs Looking West across the Parallel of 31°20', engraved past Due west.H. Dougal, ca. 1856. Plate from William Emory, Report on the U.s.a. and Mexico Boundary Survey, 1857, vol. 1.

Along the way, they congenital several masonry monuments, replaced in 1852 with rock cairns pegged with a flag--the physical instantiation of the graphic border, meant equally local indexes of politics and power determined from afar. However, remote both from each other and from practical enforcement, the makers were often moved or destroyed--viewed equally acts of aggression by the Native peoples who disputed both the Treaty and non-Native ownership on the whole, and as irrelevant afterthoughts by Mexican and American ranchers whose territory straddled information technology. Despite the Boundary Commission's attempt, in effect no border existed on the footing at all. Its but record lay in the representational languages of map, text, and the occasional survey site-drawing showing something no longer there.

Detail of map showing Monument 210 between Araz Junction and Holtville, California, 1891-6. From The International Boundary Commission, Written report of the International Boundary Committee, U.s. and Mexico, 1891-half dozen.

In an effort to rectify this, the cairns were replaced in the 1890s with more than permanent obelisks in stone and cast fe, spaced mostly between 2 and 4 miles apart in order to exist visible by line of sight. They were besides photographed, creating a continuous visual record of the border as a 258 black-and-white images, a serial montage whose focus remains the same while the surroundings change.^eleven But even then, for long stretches on the line, the border existed mainly in theory. In the faraway desert, the border existed as occasional indexes of remote federal politics, hard markers appearing like apparitions in the heat.^xii

Monument No. 210 (Fe), View to the W: On Sand Hills w of Pilot Knob [AZ], 1891-six. Plate from The International Boundary Commission, Study of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-mark of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico Due west of the Rio Grande. Album, 1891-1896.

However irrelevant to local practice, mapping the edge had indelible geopolitical importance to an expanding nation. As the historian James C. Scott has written, states need maps to merge a personal knowledge of lived experience with the abstruse statutes of the police.¹³ If you can place yourself as a position on a map, you understand yourself in relation to the political landscape of national identity.^xiv Though practically ineffectual, legally defining and mapping the limits of sovereignty between ii emerging nations made the limits of country ability legible both to foreign and domestic publics. Simply mapping played only ane role in the try to visualize a nation. As I discussed in an before mail service, the artistic representation of landscape was a huge (and hugely of import) 19th-century pursuit, domesticating nature every bit both national property and national pride. The Boundary Survey Committee understood this, hiring visual artists to accompany its afterwards missions and found a visual record of the border landscape. If their mapmakers established a geography of nationality while drawing a line, their artists created its visuality of territory through images brokering site and sight.^xv

For example, in the work of Arthur Schott, a German immigrant who worked with the Purlieus Survey following the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the border was imagined equally a negotiation between close-upward and faraway.¹⁶ While showing stone cairns in the foreground flanked by yucca, cholla, and other detailed desert specimens, his backgrounds are reduced to topography. In his drawings, Schott imagined sheer distance equally a kind of perforation or absence--filling in the perfunctory gaps between points on a line left unseen, ridgelines and badlands receding toward a distant, barely visible monument. His pictures portraitized the mural, making it intimate and knowable upwards close, while indicating the vastly expansive territory beyond. This, too, is a way of drawing a border. Non equally a concrete monument, or linear index of politics, but as the art historian Robin E. Kelsey has argued, a line of sight, a permeable, visual globe of commencement-person encounter that admits ambiguity, the border as a shifting field of landscape.^xvii

Arthur Schott, View from Monument No. 17 on the Cerro de Sonora, Looking West towards Monument No. 15 on the Sierra del Pozo Verde, engraved by J.D. Smillie, c. 1856. Plate from William Emory, Report on the The states and United mexican states Purlieus Survey, 1857, vol. one.

Arthur Schott, View towards the Eastern Slope of the Californian Cordilleras Taken from About Carrizo Creek, engraved by Westward.H. Dougal, ca. 1856. Plate from William Emory, Report on the Usa and Mexico Boundary Survey, 1857, vol. one.

Today it is those very perforations and outset-person encounters with landscape that occupy national business concern. They are the same visibilities and invisibilities that surprised me equally I headed through Yuma in 2010. From mounds to monuments, maps to drawings to photographs, today's militarized border has adult a popular identity equally a prohibitive barrier, even as its geopolitical function is more that of regulator of motility. As the world around information technology grows more than difficult to encompass in terms of the coincidence between its physicality and its influence, the way we choose to imagine the border becomes all the more than simplistic.^xviii Fences may mark the political line, but as in the case of the biscuit pickup, the radio, the cell phone, and line of sight that is the view, they are an absurd reduction of what it means to understand the politics of landscape.

This summer, I repeated my bulldoze to San Diego, 2 years later moving West to California, and then New Mexico. My destination, this time, was Border Field State Park, the spot on the map where the 1849 Purlieus Commission began its work. I'd wanted to find the old border monuments--many now hidden, equally the photographer David Taylor's 2008-10 projection Working the Line demonstrates so well, from the Due north behind layers of defence force infrastructure. Border Field Land Park offered the easiest and clearest way to see one. It'southward located at the mouth of the Tijuana River, in a marshy estuary south of Imperial Embankment. Yous can't bulldoze there on weekdays--instead you have to park a mile away and walk in, passing the observant stares of Edge Patrol members on foot, on horseback, on Segway, in Jeeps, and from the helicopters buzzing incessantly overhead. You round a corner, and meet the aforementioned brown fence--beyond information technology lies the flat blocks and stadium of Tijuana's Terrazas neighborhood, hard upwardly confronting the line.

To arroyo the monument itself, you must speak with a Border Patrol agent, sitting in an idling Jeep merely outside a loftier fence. You must answer some questions: what practice you want to see; what is your name; where were you born. You are advised you may enter the xxx' "border security zone," a fenced-in, flood-lighted area between the park and the border argue, open up to the sea on its west side. You may spend 20 minutes there, and can take photos. Simply you cannot touch the fence--it's alarmed on the U.Southward. side--and you cannot stray more than xxx' laterally. The monument is located behind the fence, subtracting about 3' of U.S. soil for the purposes of national security. You lot can merely brand out the carved names of Ylarregui and Weller, the text in English on the Due north and Spanish on the South challenge the monument equally the mark of a national border.

It'due south possible to see through to the Mexican side, where in that location is no debate, no edge patrol, no Segways and floodlights. Instead, in that location's a stadium, a lighthouse, and a pocket-sized plaza. During my 20-infinitesimal visit, a number of people strolled by, unconcerned. One man, bare-chested and in cutoffs, sailed through on rollerblades. He stopped to look at the monument, and so to await at me through gaps in fortified chain-link. We said hello, then he skated off, and I went back to inform my Patrolman I was gear up to be released, to walk back to my machine from a monument that indexed a line, conditioned a view, encapsulated a politics of national identity.

Edge Field State Park, San Diego, looking toward Boundary Monument No. 258, August 2012 | Photo courtesy of Susanna Newbury

Notes:

ⁱ This research has benefitted from the kind advice and wisdom of colleagues whose knowledge of borders and borderlands far exceeds my own. Special thank you to Katherine Sarah Massoth of the Academy of Iowa, and Duane Price of the El Paso office of the International H2o and Boundary Commission for their conversation and assistance in the procedure of writing this essay.

ⁱⁱ On September xviii, 2012 a federal judge ruled that Arizona metropolitan and land police officers could begin enforcing "show me your papers," which requires officers to demand proof of clearing papers with even the nigh routine noncombatant stop or suspicion of undocumented condition. Associated Printing, "Arizona: Judicial Ruling on Immigration Law," New York Times 19 September 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/u.s.a./arizona-judicial-ruling-on-immigration-law.html (accessed xix September, 2012).

ⁱⁱⁱ Effectually $388 million in 2010 currency.

^iv The Treaty brought the present-24-hour interval states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and parts of Texas and Kansas under the jurisdiction of the The states.

^five Article Five, Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits and Settlement with the Republic of United mexican states (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo). February 2, 1848. United States Statutes at Large 9 (1848): 922. Bachelor at http://avalon.police force.yale.edu/19th_century/guadhida.asp#art5 (accessed September 19, 2012).

^vi Ibid.

^seven The geographer Michael Dear has written an first-class introduction to the Boundary Survey Commission's work, to which this article is greatly indebted. See Michael Dear, "Monuments, Manifest Destiny and United mexican states" Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 37:2 (Summer 2005). Available at http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/summer/mexico-one.html. (accessed August 22, 2012). For more information on the history of the border see Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-United mexican states Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin: Academy of Texas Press, 2001), and, recently, Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western United states-United mexican states Border (Princeton: Princeton University Printing, 2011).

^eight The Purlieus Survey Commission was renamed the International Boundary Committee in 1889, and the International Water and Boundary Committee (IWBC) in 1944. The final proper noun-change reflects, interestingly, the irresolute physical nature of boundaries, as shifts of tides, floods, and water menstruum literally redraw borders each year. Founded equally an intergovernmental organization, it remains and so today, under the joint jurisdiction of the U.Due south. State Department and Mexican Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, or SRE.

^ix Their trip would somewhen be recounted in William H. Emory's 1857 Report on the U.s.a. and Mexican Boundary Survey, a 3-volume report on the commission's piece of work. Including azimuth measurements, botanical and ethnographic drawings, maps, geological studies and a memoir-travelogue, it represents the blended work of the viii-year survey project. Emory was the terminal of several American commissioners, following Weller, John B. Whipple, John C. Fremont, and Andrew B. Gray. Emory's report has been digitized, and is in the public domain. William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Fabricated nether the Direction of the Secretarial assistant of the Interior, 3 vols., 1857. To download a costless digital copy, click hither.

^x As the art historian Rosalind Krauss has remarked, monuments mediate between site and symbolism. They are, to utilize the theoretical term, indexes--rooted in a detail locale, they both help furnish meaning for that place, and derive their meaning from their placement within it. For her remarks on monuments' indexicality, see Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October eight (Leap 1979): 33-44. Krauss has also written persuasively on landscape photography'south various identities as art and every bit document. See Rosalind Krauss, "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Art Periodical 42:4 (Winter 1982): 311-319.

^xi All 258 images were published in the International Boundary Committee's Written report of the Boundary Commission upon the survey and re-marker of the boundary between the United states and Mexico west of the Rio Grande, 1891-1896. Album., 1896. The album has been digitized, and is in the public domain. To download a copy, click hither.

^xii In the 1880s and 90s, a binational convention deputed a re-survey of the border (known as the Barlow-Blanco Survey) for the express purpose of standardizing and anchoring these boundary monuments, and photographed them along the way. Today they number 276, thanks to several additions in urban areas over time. On the Barlow-Blanco Survey, see Joseph Richard Werne, "Redrawing the Southwestern Boundary, 1891-1896" Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104:1 (July 2000): ane-20.

^xiii James C. Scott, Seeing Like a Land: How Certain Schemes to Ameliorate the Human being Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Printing, 1998): 82.

^xiv Ibid., two.

^xv The art historian Jonathan Crary has written virtually the technological shaping of vision in the 19th century. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

^xvi The art historian Robin Due east. Kelsey has provided this definitive interpretation of Schott's work in his chapter on the artist, "Arthur Schott: Marker the Mexican Purlieus" in Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for United states Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley: Academy of California Press, 2007): 19-72.

^xvii Ibid.

^eighteen The artist Ursula Biemann'south 1999 video Performing the Border is an excellent investigation complicating this phenomenon vis-à-vis women's labor in transnational economies, exploring borderlands cultures of maquiladores in Ciudad Juarez. Run across Ursula Biemann, Performing the Border, 1999. Color video, 42 min.

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Source: http://www.incendiarytraces.org/linewatch-blog/2012/11/13/drawing-a-line-encounters-with-the-us-mexico-border-8w9rm

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