Objects from the Borderlands

Objects from the Borderlands: The U.S.–Mexico Anti-Archive

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For ten years I have documented and collected objects from the U.S.–Mexico Border, creating an “Anti-Archive” that challenges who is worthy of documentation, attention, and remembrance. My work on the border—a geopolitical flash point in which contested bodies (race), contested statuses (refugee vs. “illegal”), and contested histories are bound together—is a witnessing that serves its purpose only if others witness it in turn. The work serves as source material for scholars and citizens to engage and interpret. The work functions as a sort of reliquary, with photographs accompanied by clothing and objects found on the border.

In 2007 I began making yearly trips/pilgrimages to photograph objects left behind by undocumented migrants crossing the U.S–Mexico border between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas, and west to Laredo and Eagle Pass, Texas. As Gloria Anzaldua says in her groundbreaking book Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, “The U.S.–Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the life blood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (p. 25). This Border Culture and the space in-between is central to this project, which takes an ever-evolving imagined space and concretizes it as a collection of specific objects, first as they are found in the landscape, then as they are archived, and, finally, as they are united in exhibitions. This work creates a narrative of memory that stands as a corrective and a challenge to the dominant histories housed in state-sanctioned archives.