Cross-Border Citizens
by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman
This essay is adapted from a text written for Artforum, Summer 2016.
Designing Border Walls?
“There continues to be an inability to envisage the problems facing our societies today in a political way. Political questions always involve decisions, which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives.”
– Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political
In early March 2016 the Third Mind Foundation announced an international architecture competition to design a new US/Mexico border wall, aligning itself with what it deemed inevitable: that Donald Trump’s proposal to build a cross-continental border wall was real, and that the creative professions should anticipate how to design a more efficient and aesthetically pleasing wall in case he is elected.
Not only is the specter of this proposition by a group of cultural thinkers worrisome, but the nature of how the competition is framed exposes an even more problematic aspect of the role of architecture and design in confronting today’s sociopolitical realities. The anonymous group of architects, designers, and artists of Third Mind began the challenge emphatically: “Let us be clear, we take no position on this issue, we remain politically neutral….”
This is precisely the problem with our current institutional thinking: the refusal to name the problem, and the desire to remain politically neutral. To maintain impartiality in the face of today’s social and economic injustices is to become complicit with those institutions that perpetuate what is ethically and morally wrong. In fact, architects and artists need to think more socially and politically, to prioritize, and to take a position against what is morally and ethically wrong:
That inequality is wrong
That xenophobia is wrong
That building border walls is wrong
In this realm, a “political act” for architects means taking a position about where and when not to build, as much as when and where to build, for whom, and why. These questions should always shape a critical spatial practice. This does not mean there is no role for architects in the debate of the Third Mind and Trump’s border walls. But the role is not one of service, but one of critique. Of course, thinking socially and politically as architects means expanding the role of design to include such questions as: Can we intervene in the designing of rights, and can social justice have design implications?
This inability to think politically is nothing new in the general state of contemporary art and architecture. The majority of our creative fields have been smoothly aligned with the hegemonic power of neoliberalism in the last years, unifying and materializing the universalist consensus politics of free-market economics into an apolitical formalist project of beautification whose relentless homogeneity hides any vestige of difference or the conflicts that are at the basis of today’s urban crises. This has resulted in a period of anti-public and anti-social agendas, obsessed with deregulation and privatization, which have engendered unprecedented urban asymmetries and planetary socioeconomic inequality. Institutional indifference to societal and urban conflicts is especially problematic here. A broad institutional “neutrality” continues to widen the gap between social responsibility and artistic experimentation, whose imbrication was central to the historic avant-garde.
We must resist architecture and design that camouflage the exclusionary politics and economics of urban development. It is not buildings but the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations that must ground the expansion of democratization and urbanization today. The institutional mechanisms of uneven urban development must be exposed, not masked. They must become the catalysts for new architectural paradigms. In other words, the critical knowledge of the conditions that produce today’s urban crises should be the material for architects in our time, advancing urban conflict as the most important creative tool to reimagine the city.
The Political Equator: A Cross-Border Citizen?
The Political Equator traces an imaginary line along the US/Mexico continental border and extends it directly across a world atlas, forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30-and 35-degrees North Parallel. Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds, including the US/México border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African into Europe; and the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East.
But this global border, forming a necklace of some of the most contested checkpoints in the world, is ultimately not a “flat line,” but an operative critical threshold that bends, fragments, and stretches in order to reveal other sites of conflict worldwide, where invisible trans-hemispheric sociopolitical, economic, and environmental crises are manifested at regional and local scales. The Political Equator has been our point of entry into many of these radical localities, other marginal communities and neighborhoods distributed across the continents from which to imagine new forms of governance and urbanization, arguing that some of the most relevant projects forwarding socioeconomic inclusion and artistic experimentation will not emerge from sites of economic abundance but from sites of scarcity, in the midst of the conflicts between geopolitical borders, natural resources, and marginal communities.
In recent years, we launched the Political Equator Meetings to advance new critical interfaces between Latin America and the US — taking the Tijuana/San Diego border region — and to promote the circulation of knowledges between the top-down and the bottom-up. Social justice today cannot be only about the redistribution of resources, but must also engage the redistribution of knowledges. The Political Equator takes the shape of an urban-pedagogical research project, producing corridors of knowledge exchange linking the specialized knowledge of institutions and the activist social, economic, and political intelligence embedded within communities.
The Political Equator Meetings have taken the form of nomadic urban actions and debates involving institutions and communities, oscillating across diverse sites and stations between Tijuana and San Diego. These conversations on the move have proposed that the interdisciplinary debate take place outside the institutions and inside the actual sites of conflict, enabling the audience to be both witness and participant. The meetings unfold around a series of public works, performances, and walks traversing these conflicting territories and serve as evidentiary platforms to re-contextualize debates and conversations among diverse publics.
Political Equator Performance: Conversations on Co-Existence
Inspired by our ongoing collaboration with legendary Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus and his idea that art can be a performative tool for community engagement and civic participation, we orchestrated a cross-border performance to provoke the notion of the cross-border citizen. As part of the Political Equator Itinerant Dialogues that we have been curating in the last years across the San Diego/Tijuana border, we collaborated with two NGO’s, Casa Familiar and Alter Terra, representing two communities that are adjacent to the checkpoint but divided by the border wall. These communities have been the sites of our research and practice in the last years: San Ysidro on the US side, which is the first immigrant neighborhood into the US; and Laureles Canyon in Mexico, an 85,000-person informal settlement in Tijuana, the last slum of Latin America towards the US, literally crashing against the border wall.
These two marginalized neighborhoods are uniquely situated next to the wall, and are the “bookends” of a natural estuary on the US side that is part of a binational watershed system. This sensitive environmental zone at the edge of the border has been impacted in recent years by the presence of Homeland Security militarization, as the US has been building the “third border” and other infrastructure of control, such as the construction of a new highway of surveillance that runs parallel to the wall, along a 150-foot-wide linear corridor that Homeland Security claimed as its own jurisdiction after 9/11. Along this corridor, US Border Patrol has been systematically building a series of concrete dams and drains that truncate the many canyons that are part of the trans-border watershed system, accelerating the flow of waste from the informal settlements on the Tijuana side, which are at a higher elevation on the south end of the wall.
Border-Drain Crossing
It is inside this site of exception where we orchestrated our border performance, encroaching into official institutional protocols and jurisdictional zones — a fundamental part of the curatorial dimension of this event. We proposed an unprecedented public border crossing through an existing drain, recently built by Homeland Security — located at the actual intersection between the wall, the informal settlement and the estuary — that would enable the audience to slip uninterrupted from San Diego into Tijuana, from the Tijuana River Estuary on the US side into Los Laureles Canyon.
Working closely with local community activists, this required a long process of discussions and negotiations with both Homeland Security and Mexican Immigration, requesting the re-coding of this specific generic drain beneath one of those dirt berms, as a temporary but official port of entry for 24 hours. A significant part of this strategy was to camouflage this happening as an artistic performance, while implicitly orchestrating the visualization of the collision between environmental zone, surveillance infrastructure, and informal settlement, and bringing together local, national, and international activists, scholars and researchers, artists, architects and urbanists, politicians, border patrol, and other community stakeholders who represent the many institutions who have an antagonistic role around this site of conflict to debate the implications of the new border wall and its impact on the binational environmental systems.
As the audience moved south against the natural flow of wastewater coming from the slum and contaminating the estuary, it reached the Mexican immigration officers who had set an improvisational tent on the south side of the drain inside Mexican territory, immediately adjacent to the murky water and trash that flows from the slum into the estuary. The strange juxtaposition of pollution seeping into the environmental zone, the stamping of passports inside this liminal space, and the passage from pristine estuary to slum under a culvert amplified the contradictions between natural security, environmentalism, and the construction of citizenship. It was exactly at this moment that the participants in this performance experienced the contradiction: The construction of imposed border walls for the sake of security is only exacerbating insecurity, as these stupid logics of division only threaten to produce future environmental and socioeconomic degradation. By enabling the physical passage across this odd section of the binational territory, the Political Equator performance not only exposed the dramatic collision between informal urbanization, militarization, and environmental zones, but also articulated the urgency for strategies of coexistence between these two border communities. Can we shift our gaze and resources from the border wall itself and into the slum? Can this poor Mexican informal settlement be the protector of the rich Tijuana River Estuary in the US?
Our Border-Drain Crossing was an instrument to provoke the idea of a cross-border citizen, whose notion of belonging is not based on the arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries that too loosely define cityhood, or the “identitarian” politics of the nation state, but rather on the shared values and common environmental interests between two divided cities. Most importantly, the crossing was orchestrated to physically manifest the idea of the border region as a laboratory to rethink global citizenship — the problems of Mexico are the problems of the US and the problems of San Diego are the problems of Tijuana. The problems of the world are ours to tackle collaboratively.
The need to reimagine the border through the logic of natural and social systems is the foremost challenge for the future of this binational region, and of many other border regions across the globe. A community is always in dialogue with its immediate social and ecological environment; this is what defines its political nature. But when this relationship is disrupted and its productive capacity splintered by the very way in which jurisdictional power is instituted, it is necessary to find a means of recuperating its agency, and this is the space of intervention that art and architecture practice need to engage today. Can architects intervene in the reorganization of political institutions; new forms of governance, economic systems, research, and pedagogy; and new conceptions of cultural and economic production? This cannot occur without expanding and recoding our conventional modalities of practice, making architecture a political field and a cognitive system that can enable the “public” to access complexity, building collective capacity for political agency and action at local scales, and generating new experimental spaces and social programs for the city.
