Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 26

THE AESTHETICS OF A MOVEABLE BORDER
crosses in different areas to remember undocumented immigrants killed by the United
States’ Operation Gatekeeper policy. Photos of crosses with “no identification” written
on them placed on the U.S.–Mexico border reveal the border’s brutality. Since photos
in the folder have both the English text on the crosses and Spanish text in street signs
in the background, it is not clear which side of the U.S.–Mexico border it is on (MSS
760, Box 27, Folder 9). Yet, given the international aspect of immigration, clearly representing
either side may be unnecessary. Photos of the installation placed on the bucolic
green lawns of Southwest College in 1998 blur the lines between border death commemoration
and graves that could belong to anyone in the United States (MSS 760, Box
27, Folder 14). In one photo of the cross-installation in Chicano Park, there are both
unidentified crosses and victim’s names (MS 760 Box 30, Folders 7–10 and 13–15). Another
picture is of the crosses with a mural with pre-Columbian imagery behind it (ibid),
thus blurring the time–space between Mexico before colonialism, the present violence
against Mexico emanating from the United States, and a past–present–future of Aztlán.
Maclovio Rojas is a squatters’ community in Tijuana, Mexico, run by women. The Border
Arts/Taller de Arte Fronterizo organization in San Diego helped them when they heard
about illegal denial of services by the Mexican government�in an attempt to expand
industry into the area�and helped with art installations and buildings (Aguiñiga 2012).
Most residents came from Chiapas and Oaxaca (ibid). This is, therefore, an example of
using art to halt primitive accumulation and common an area. One installation in the
area, the plans for Jardin de Emigrantes Muertos (The Garden of Dead Emigrants) (MSS
760 Box 34 Folder 2) have a slight written shift from the word immigrant to emigrant.
Along with its placement in northern Mexico, fairly close to the U.S.–Mexico border,
this slight change of wording enables a large change in meaning and use. It decentre the
issue from the U.S. progressive understanding of deaths of undocumented immigrants
as a sad event or commentary on the decline of U.S. democracy to a memorial for use by
people from Central American and Mexico who may have lost a loved one to the U.S.
nation-states’ violence.
In Texas, contemporary installations�started by people not from the Latina/o community�along
the U.S.–Mexico border have provided alternative imageries to the U.S.
government’s xenophobia. In 2017, German artist Doerte Weber placed Mexican-style
woven panels on the U.S.–Mexico border fence at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
In 2017, an expanded version was displayed as an installation called “Checkpoint,”
at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, as an echo of graffiti on the Berlin Wall to critique
humanity’s lack of lessons learned from history (Argesta 2017). Another installation has
incorporated civil disobedience against anti-immigrant policing. In the Rio Grande River
between Tamaulipus, Mexico, and Texas in the United States, Susan Harbage collaborated
with artists from Matamoros and Brownsville to create the 2009 Crossing Over:
A Floating Installation which consisted of a bridge of inner-tubes tied together across the
U.S.–Mexico border and trophies which were given to immigrants crossing the border
(Harbage 2019). This installation thus challenges both militarized border policing and
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