Killing Borders: Geographies of Violence

• In Event: On Public Art

Abstract

Today, U.S. popular culture is flooded with images and stories of violence on the Mexican side of the border, particularly gendered violence, that bespeak this legacy of brutal U.S. imperialism. For example, references to the feminicides and disappearances of women and young girls in Ciudad Juarez are synonymous with the U.S.-Mexico border. Images of gendered violence are repeated in film (Narcocultura, El Infierno), songs (“Las Mujeres de Juarez” by Los Tigres del Norte), and perhaps most strangely, fashion and make-up (Rodarte). Since the signing of the North American Free Trade American cultural productions set or inspired by the U.S.-Mexico border have begun to respond to such representations in complex ways. In these texts, gender, genre, and geography intersect with violence, dying, death, and the undead, illuminating the legacies of colonization and conquest buried in the geography and cultural memory. Using the 2013 art exhibit State of Exception: An Exhibition of the Undocumented Migration Project alongside the anthropological study that influenced it as case studies this paper looks at the way academic and artistic representations are part of what I call a border horror genre, a genre that encapsulates discourses of violence and death set along the U.S.-Mexico border. This is the first trope of border horror genre, the personification of the U.S.-Mexico border. In this genre, we see how different types of media aimed at different audiences all engage with the border geography in very similar ways, creating and reinforcing the trope that equates the physical border with machines and/or bodies of death. The danger in the persistence of this image is that the political, policy, and capitalist forces that have shaped these circumstances are obfuscated, the blame for the violence and deaths falls on the geography itself. Those that choose to live there (brown men and women particularly) are putting themselves in a position of danger where they should expect violent deaths. When these deaths occur, then, only the dead are to blame. State of Exception: An Exhibition of the Undocumented Migration Project, a collaborative project by curator Amanda Krugliac, filmmaker Richard Barnes and anthropologist Jason de Leon, utilizes the artifacts, bodies, and memories left behind by people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border specifically in Arizona. The exhibit documents the violent ways in which the geography is used by the U.S. government to dispose and dispossess brown bodies. In this presentation, I argue that it is this representation of the physical border as anthropomorphic that sustains a dangerous myth about the border, violent death is natural for its inhabitants. In border horror genre representations of the border, the responsibility of violence and death is placed onto the border itself, a figure that is inescapable, unfeeling, and deadly.

Author

• Orquidea Morales, SUNY College at Old Westbury