2018 | The easiest way to visit the border wall prototypes begins in one of the day lots in Otay Mesa, the little strip of soil sandwiched between the Brown Field Municipal Airport in San Diego and Tijuana’s Aeropuerto Internacional Abelardo L. Rodriguez.
There is so much I want to do to cut the intensity of this visit. I want to drive further into Tijuana and eat, my favorite way of quelling any storm that rumbles, or walk on the broken concrete until I find the next sensory distraction. But there’s no time for that. As Michelle—my traveling companion—and I walk the few short blocks to the Otay Mesa port of entry, I am reminded that the thrashed earth on the other side of the rusted, corrugated fence is also America, one that comes with an accent mark over its middle syllable. Gripping my fairly new and little-used U.S. passport, I reflect on the fact that, for me, this short journey is meant to be a smooth one, uncomplicated. Yet it’s not—these days, it can’t be. Maybe I should have scrubbed my social media of any political positions before venturing south.
This is what traveling to Tijuana has been like recently—tinged with a fear of becoming more other, more suspect, than I already am. More queer. More brown. More susceptible to being noticed. When I was a kid, my parents would take us to Tijuana to see the dentist, to fill prescriptions more cheaply than we could in our southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. Nowadays I have friends in Los Angeles who opt to bring their dogs to the Tijuana vets for cheaper care.
As the crossing comes into view, I feel myself growing closer to what my parents left behind and further than ever from those who live in true precarities of mobility—lifelong friends whose poetry I love, who’ve slammed back tragos with me over heartbreak and hard-won victories, and who wait for news of green cards and amnesty. I am suspended in the haze of that spectrum where danger is always in theory. But anything could happen and laws change like goalposts, adjusting to fit the victor’s needs in a fixed game.
Both Michelle and I are tightly scheduled and highly organized on this visit to the prototypes before heading to our mutual friend’s wedding in San Diego later that day. The time for the trip shouldn’t—can’t—last more than three hours. It’s not even ten in the morning, which makes me feel doubly responsible. I am looking forward to toasting the aging punks of my youth later that afternoon as a vexed palate and soul cleanser.
Michelle and I pass a famous, ten-foot-tall sculpture of a Mexican man and woman, colorfully clothed in serapes and flowers. There is a velocity to the captured movement, a dance trapped by time—Fiesta Jarabe by Luis Jiménez. The sculpture seems jovial and out of place—at least to anyone who’s made anxious by borders. We cross the pedestrian bridge into customs. Michelle and I walk across the pedestrian bridge and get in the customs line. I photograph everything I see, even the sign that says no photographs allowed. This gets me into trouble: the security guard barks at me to put my phone away. I blush and offer a meek perdón. Te dije, Michelle says, shooting me a teasing look. I glance down at the passport peeking out of the chest pocket of my denim jacket. I am a citizen playing dumb, I think. A Los Angeles-born Mexican with a Salvadoran mother spending a quiet Saturday morning witnessing the material convergence of art, monument, and xenophobia.
Finally, it’s my turn to greet the customs official, an oliveskinned young woman with vermillion-hued highlights heightened against the olive drab of her uniform. She asks my intentions in México. I am short and the counter stops at my shoulders. I am honest with her. I want to see the border wall prototypes nearby. She looks up suddenly from stamping my passport and looks me in the eye—really looks me in the eye and the rest of my face. My twinkling Muppet eyes and big dumb smile disarm her, as does the light brown suede Tejana cowboy hat on my head and acid wash denim jacket on my body. I am a brown neon sign: aimless aging homosexual hipster with attachment issues. She practically suppresses an eyeroll as she gives me back my passport.
According to the coordinates on my phone, the prototypes are not very far away, less than five minutes up Boulevard de las Bellas Artes, followed by a loop around the maquila zone tucked in the hills behind this section of Tijuana’s main drag. I don’t have an international phone plan, but I figure we’ll stay close enough to the border that it won’t make a difference. On the other side of the bridge, the taxi drivers are a spectrum of khaki pants and white oxfords, leaning against crumbling concrete facades, drinking coffee and putting out their last cigarettes before the mass of tourists come stumbling through the port of entry ready to make a mess of their México. Michelle and I find an older driver named Manuel who knows exactly where we want to go. He’s intrigued by the two of us: we are older than the average co-ed, plus Michelle’s Spanish is very much reflective of her upbringing in nearby Chula Vista, whereas mine is Salvi singsong.
We tell him we’re educators. Manuel suddenly turns fatherly and begins to narrate President Trump’s recent springtime visit to the border. Manuel tells us many Tijuanenses were aflutter in anticipation that Trump would step foot in their city. Trump came all this way and didn’t have the guts to face México. But then I remember that we came all this way just to look back into the U.S.
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In an August 2016 campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton for not centering American citizens in her concern that migrant families seeking asylum would be separated at the border. He promised that the United States would be “fair, just, and compassionate to all,” but that the greatest compassion would be reserved for American citizens. That speech is worth revisiting, especially since it conjured a future we in the Southwest have started calling “the present,” where thousands of migrant parents have been systemically separated from their children. Trump used the promise of a wall, the denial of these migrant families, as a means to get elected. For four years, the Border Wall came to stand in for Trump himself, a metonym for his presidency. Chants of build that wall echo in reverse to “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the famous Berlin Wall speech delivered by Ronald Reagan in West Berlin the summer I turned eleven. In a campaign stop in Anaheim, California, Trump, newly invigorated by an endorsement from the U.S. Border Patrol, spurred a crowd to chant Build That Wall!
The border wall prototypes made their public debut in October 2017, with six contractors vying for the job. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) evaluated the designs in five categories: breaching, scaling, constructability, engineering design, and aesthetics.7 (“The north side of the barrier should be pleasing in color and texture to be consistent with the surrounding area.”)
Aesthetics.
CBP hired engineers from Johns Hopkins University to develop a test to determine which design was “most beautiful.” As a report from the Government Accountability Office states flatly, “CBP identified three prototypes that ranked highest in terms of attractiveness and participants’ perception of effectiveness.”8
There is more of this inadvertent arts writing in an ekphrastic Associated Press article quoting Border Patrol spokesman Terron Francisco: “the models, which cost the government up to $500,000 each, were spaced 30 feet (9.1 meters) apart. Slopes, thickness and curves vary. One has two shades of blue with white trim. The others are gray, tan or brown—in sync with the desert.”9 Some fanfare about two of the potential contractors presenting prototypes made of materials other than concrete. This doesn’t feel “in sync with the desert.”
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In January 2018, a Swiss artist named Christoph Büchel took advantage of a residency in Los Angeles at a well-known and even better-resourced gallery to guide participant-spectators from the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego into Tijuana. The tours were a way for Büchel to spread the gospel of his provocation—that the prototypes be considered seriously as land art; that Donald Trump be considered a conceptual artist. People flipped out, which was of course the point, and he was accused of aestheticizing state violence toward immigrants coming north, amplifying the currency in which Büchel traffics. Artists outside the country had a conceptual playground in the U.S.—we had an unstable tyrant at the helm of the First World who ate Big Macs in front of Fox News, drank Coca-Colas and yearned to push the red button that would destroy our enemies. We didn’t know that we would be living the stuff that would drive the art market into its own frenzy.
What Büchel did recalled the tradition of what many East Coast and European artists have done with and to the western regions of the U.S. Declaring the desert landscape a “nothingness,” ready to be swept into grander aesthetic visions, is not a new practice. Maybe Büchel recognized something familiar in the prototypes. He saw the artistic history that informed the way each prototype sat situated between two countries.
The following month, in February 2018, I read art critic Carolina Miranda’s article in the L.A. Times recounting her ride in the Mercedes-Benz van that took her—along with other curious spectators, journalists, and one art historian—to witness Büchel’s “intervention.”10 Donald Trump is a conceptual artist. I’m not surprised to learn that the gallery Hauser & Wirth (annual revenues: $225 million) would champion this work.11
Büchel—whose previous provocation involved building a mosque inside an unconsecrated Catholic church at the 2015 Venice Biennale—is barely legible as the author of this border spectacle, an artistic sleight of hand hidden behind a gallery website that makes bare mention of his name.12 An art world so cozy with itself. I’m losing half the day trying to find the artist’s signature. Am I a part of this meaning-making now? I think about making the most of lost time and plan a trip to the western borderlands.
When I write to Miranda asking for more information about the prototypes, she replies quickly, sending me the coordinates.
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For the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol’s operational requirements for the border wall prototypes considered such things as “aesthetics, how penetrable they are, how resistant they are to tampering and then scaling or anticlimb features.”
Aesthetics, as I have understood them in my several decades of working in the arts, are the ways we observe and understand information through the senses. If we’re lucky, we’ll find beauty. If we’re smart, we’ll find ways to convince others of said beauty and sell them a membership to an institution. I felt a pang of sickness at the thought of the sensory overload these structures would cause for those encountering them coming from the south to the north on foot, after scavenging for water and foraging for whatever edible thing the desert offered, surviving rape and murder with breathing bodies but living in the perpetuity of social death.
Six vendors constructed the eight prototypes, with one company building two of the eight examples. These companies are Caddell Construction Company of Montgomery, Alabama; KWR Construction of Sierra Vista, Arizona; ELTA North America Inc. of Annapolis Junction, Maryland; W. G. Yates & Sons Construction Company of Philadelphia, Mississippi; Fisher Sand & Gravel Company of Tempe, Arizona; and Texas Sterling Construction Company of Houston, Texas. ELTA, a large Israeli defense contractor owned by state-run Israel Aerospace Industries, which opened a new office in Maryland in 2012, paid $406,319 for its contract. ELTA strayed from the desert color palettes of the other prototypes and instead offered six light blue squares with white trim on the bottom third, topped by dark blue beams and metal plates. KWR Construction Inc. earned $486,411 for its contract. The company, located just twenty miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border, presented its prototype as gray metal columns topped with a large metal surface. KWR is a small company founded by one Arthur W. Rivas and located in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Their website mentions Davis-Monthan and Luke Air Force Bases and Interior departments among its clientele.
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When the prototypes were finished and installed just below the Otay County Open Space Preserve, located in the Otay Valley Regional Park just four miles north of the international border, it wasn’t hard to see them through a contemporary artistic lens. The regional park extends about eleven miles inland from the southeastern edge of the salt ponds at the mouth of the river, through the Otay River Valley, to the land surrounding both Lower and Upper Otay Lakes. It also wasn’t hard to imagine Fox News having a field day imagining “the illegals” ruining their pastoral possibility projected onto this last bastion of open space. Across the valley on the U.S. side of the border stood fences marking off access to the prototypes that looked like huge sculptures. But it wasn’t just concrete that held court in the horizon line that the prototypes, side by side, created together. Multiple materials were making meaning upon an exhausted palimpsest.
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For the uninitiated, land art, a shortened catchphrase for “landscape art,” is any artwork that utilizes natural elements in harmonious congruence with an outdoor location. The process is meant to work within the physical context of the environment, which means the work tends to settle itself among the forces that will alter or destroy it. Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson’s iconic work, uses 6,650 tons of basalt, boulders, mud, and salt crystals mined from the area around Rozel Point on Utah’s Great Salt Lake to form a massive spiral that winds 450 meters out from the lake shore. The ramp that leads to the sculpture is eroding, both by the natural progression of a salt lake basin under climate change’s duress, as well as by the work’s exposure to people.
I made my own pilgrimage to Spiral Jetty in May 2018, surprised by the level of fanfare present on a Wednesday. The shrieks of aggrieved preschoolers filled the otherwise calm environment, where just the right bit of sun pouring through the billowy white clouds shows up as red on the lake’s salty water surface.
For fifty years, the land art movement has stirred up many an art student to abandon paintbrushes and take up concrete blocks against the art establishment, to stand with these coastal mavericks articulating new, large-scale expressive modalities. In an art school context, stanning for land art has always been a line in the sand, one that states that the performance and sculptures standing largely outside of market forces hold faithful to the tenets of artistic freedom. When I worked in an arts institution in San Francisco, colleagues would plan land art road trips, where one could roam freely (with four-dollar-a-gallon gas) through the Southwest in search of Smithson’s ghost. And, more important, one could behold these earthworks as they were meant to be experienced—in the vast space of western landscapes unencumbered by the trappings of modernity. I tend to be drawn to fanaticism and fan culture, so I bought in, too.
Art, the land artists contended, could be a liberatory project, one that upends the gallery and institutional system, and is perhaps best exemplified in a series of 1,500-foot long, 50-foot deep, and 30-foot wide trenches in the earthy landscapes of Overton, Nevada. In 1969, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative displaced 240,000 tons of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, to compel spectators to consider how art informs our relationship to the land.
Heizer was born in Berkeley in 1944 to a prominent anthropologist father. This legacy apparently influenced the younger Heizer to explore Native histories and cultures, seizing on the concept that nothing exists in that part of the Nevada desert except for an invitation to tear into the earth—never mind that the territory was inhabited by Shoshone, Washoe, and Ute tribes before and after the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.
Situating the border wall prototypes in this history, I think, conjures the anarchy of consequences put forth by history then and policy now. Half a century since Spiral Jetty was constructed, maybe it’s time to consider how the architects of land art have reproduced a version of Manifest Destiny—one that stretches from the corners of lower Manhattan to the deserts of the Southwest. The wall—in whichever flavor of prototype you imagine it—marks the boundary, the extreme limit, a beyond brutalist demarcation of that tradition. The mere thought of the prototypes allows for the wall’s aestheticized form to emerge not just in the material of the border but in the collective imaginary.
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While I never made it to Double Negative, I did find my way to the other side of the Great Salt Lake in the Great Desert Basin side of Utah. I drove up from Salt Lake City and the highway took me momentarily through Wendover, Nevada, where I stopped at a familiar site and ordered a bean burrito from Tacos El Brasero, which serves an array of red and green salsas and mouthwatering escabeche from a makeshift counter in a converted horse trailer on the edge of town. El brasero as an object is typically a brick stove you might find in a Mexican kitchen. It’s a heater, a controlled fire pit. But in my mind it’s also the homonym for bracero, a laborer. I smiled at the young Indigenous woman, said gracias, and commented on the dark clouds overhead. I headed back to my 4Runner and looked out onto the last big town for the next forty-five miles. I drove back again into Wendover, Utah, the skies sending me into a Freudian sense of the oceanic. The road was empty except for one gas station where I wondered if I could pee in peace while I pumped a few gallons for the just-in-case. I crossed into the looser graveled roads and passed the TL Ranch. I kept driving until I saw the dramatically contemporary orange arrows pointing me toward Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. I passed a crossroads that caught my attention because they were the kind of crossroads I sought for any necessary communions with Eleggua, the mischievous Yoruba deity of the crossroads, the trickster child messenger I have been in contact with for much of my adult life. The drive to Sun Tunnels was as good a time as any to offer my gratitude for safe passage. I had a few trinkets and candies in the glove compartment and made a mental note to stop on the way back.
On that day Uranus stationed into a new sign of Taurus. Would I feel any shift in energy as I moved through these new terrestrial pathways? Something new was giving way. What was it? I wandered along the astrology podcast that had been scoring my thoughts into another great, wide-open space. The astrologer said that Uranus ruled sudden changes. She suggested that the Tower tarot card relates to the kind of change Uranus might be responsible for, and I thought back to all my tarot readings in the Bay Area, asking a brilliant trans writer what it means when the Tower card showed up over and over again. Taurus is the antithesis of change, but it rules money, systems of value, investments, beauty, rich foods, and sex. But the podcast astrologer I was listening to on the drive also asked us to focus on the terrestrial nature of the symbol’s animal figure—the bull—and our current climate crisis. The fact that it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. That this astrological shift into a new energy might ask us to consider new plant-based foods. That there would be food shortages. That the earth is demanding that humans adopt a new mode of relating to it or bear the consequences.
The astrologer’s was the only voice I heard as I turned on the last stretch. I saw what looked like lead pipes in a cross configuration in the distance and felt myself wince in warm anticipation. I parked at a respectful distance and walked toward the tunnels at high noon. I knew Nancy Holt owned the terrain I walked on, but the fact of my solitude in the there-and-then eclipsed that fact. It felt like the land belonged to itself and these immense tunnel-like structures were an anachronistic homage that channeled the sky’s light into intention. I sat in each tunnel, noticing each cylinder’s configuration of smaller holes representing the stars of four constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. Ptolemy’s greatest hits in four directions.
I walked back and forth and diagonally into each tunnel. I was a needle sewing a button. It was nearing high noon but the sun was softened by the cool winds, the hue of blue so languid and lush it felt like the sky was draping itself over the desert basin. I lit a glass candle I had brought from Tucson—an abre caminos (road opener)—for my time in each cylinder as an exercise in stillness. The flame struggled on the wick and my lighter overheated. Am I trying too hard?
In her essay “Tunnel Visions: Nancy Holt’s Art in the Public Eye,” Lucy Lippard writes that Holt’s masterpiece is neither “monument [nor] memorial” to the memory of Holt’s husband, Robert Smithson, who died in a helicopter crash on July 20, 1973, near Amarillo, Texas. Yet, the site itself, Lippard writes “offered an extraordinarily relevant way in which to mourn, to contemplate, and to build a future at the same time.”
The noontime sun meant that everywhere I walked would be marked by the long shadow ahead of my feet. I was alone with too many of my selves. I conjured the many conch shells I had heard over the course of my young adulthood, how its muted horn was released into the ether in each of the four directions. I thought of the times I have made fun of these cosmological expressions of faith and energetic exchanges structured by the Chicano studies classes my generation took back in the learning halls of greater, lesser, and East Los Angeles. I think of the poor ways I was taught to construct relationships to the ancestral past that determined these lands. To rely on the phenomenology of resistance and Chicano movement-making as a root for a spiritual practice. I remember the Aztec danzantes on Alcatraz during one recent San Francisco Thanksgiving, ushering in the sunrise ceremony with dance and drum. How those dancers crafted costumes in the image of a warring Mexica peoples. And how I moved my body to the east, west, north, and south right along with them. Mexico made it all the way to where I stood until 1848, itself a powerful machination in the systematic enslavement and removal of Indigenous people from the territories I had been driving on and through for the last week. Maybe my philosophy was cringe-inducing—I was an urban Aztec in prayer, light-skinned mestizx long distanced from any experience of Indigeneity that saddled my Salvadoran grandparents who grew up in a time in the early twentieth century that made it dangerous to be a Poor Indigenous Person. Ysaura and Catalino became common-law married, birthed twelve babies, and raised the nine that survived in El Saucé, a valley hamlet in the northeastern mountainous region, a reasonably safe distance from the western departments of El Salvador that were at the center during La Matanza at the start of the new year, 1932. They hid themselves in the iconographies of the savior, the country’s namesake and reason for the many instances of Indigenous bloodshed. The first because they were savages. And the second, communists.
It felt ancient and I was exhausted of being interpellated by images of Catholic belief—the dead girls and the waifish monks, pagan murderers, and tenacious scribes—saturating available mystical possibilities. I found the Zapatistas the year I graduated high school; their aggrieved dispatches against the many ways the North American Free Trade Agreement would upend their culture were the anarchist cookbook whose recipes fed my desire for a different world.
I stepped out of the tunnels and into the directions they faced like portals and raised my palms in salutation.
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2018 | Manuel drives us quickly and then slowly through the Nido de las Aguilas neighborhood, the two gas stations per block indicative of a neighborhood mapped by its proximity to the border, roads pockmarked by huge eighteen-wheelers carrying their loads to the clamor of consumers poised and ready for product. It is early on a Saturday, so we don’t see the young girls queuing in and out of the maquilas, huge hangarlike buildings surrounded by fences topped with terrifyingly sharp barbed wire coils. The dirt road is parched but along the fences there are gutters of oily colorful prisms glowing in the putrid runoff. In the other direction, a rusted corrugated fence looks puny in comparison with the scale suggested by the prototypes. There is a cloud storm of dust left in our cab ride’s wake. I reach for my red bandana to tie around my neck, mouth, and nose for protection against the toxic particulates no doubt catching in the air.
We stop. There are traces of housing along the road, but it’s eerily quiet as we approach the coordinates Miranda gave me. I wait for the dust cloud to pass us before rolling my window down. The open woundedness—Anzaldúa’s apt description of the border persists—comes to life as we catch sight of the structures’s tops on the other side of the fence. We get out of the car and stand on our tippy toes, trying to look past the corrugated fence and into the country we left behind that morning. I look around to see what can help elevate us. I find an old tractor tire that Michelle holds steady. We three try for a better, longer look. Then we meet Jorge.
Jorge, a short and wiry man in his early thirties, pops out of his shanty wearing a sunbeaten black baseball cap, a dusty gray T-shirt and loose Levi’s. The cheery smile on his mouth, the familiar lilt reminding me of my aunts in San Salvador. After we tell him why we’re here, he brings out a short, wooden ladder. Gracias, paisano. I tell him my mom is from El Salvador, too, as I offer him some money and a meek smile.
I hold on to the top of the border fence, the one initiated in the Clinton-era Operation Gatekeeper and secured during the Bush years. It runs along the line through Baja California into the Sea of Cortez; its rusty bars even spill into the Pacific Ocean. I’m trying to tread lightly in hopes that the rusty metal digging into the flesh of my hands won’t break skin as I stabilize my footing on the ladder.
Once I get a clear sight line of the prototypes, I feel the impact of their power immediately, along with the ache of my family’s history, of all they risked to arrive and to stay in the U.S., risks echoed in the caravan of migrants seeking asylum today. As structures, the prototypes are a chorus of intimidation, shoulder to shoulder, their lines so clean and so out of touch with the elements immediately surrounding us. The hues chosen for each prototype make some gesture to the parched terrain—the desert sand and walnut brown—as well as hues of sky and concrete and the shining line where the two meet. These are shades and shapes that invite a sharp contrast to Tijuana’s palette of abject poverty. The prototypes look as though they could cut right through you.
But I can’t flee or fight from the top of this rickety ladder. I stand there and hold my ground and keep my eyes steady and dare to imagine what’s next on the horizon that these things obfuscate. Taking it all in—the valley, the fences that make accessing the prototypes from the U.S. side impossible, the fence I’m supporting myself on—I suddenly see what the critics saw. Any one of these prototypes could have easily been created by one of the masters of minimalism. Not Donald Trump, but rather Donald Judd.
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The original border fence, a sturdy stretch of corrugated metal colorfully graffitied with NO MUROS and HECHO EN MEXICO, becomes a line disappearing into a rising vanishing point into a deeper, more mysterious Mexico. Standing on the arbitrary line itself brings to light the failure of what borders are supposed to do—keep people in and keep people out. (This even though the migrants’ labor, siphoned almost from vein and artery, bodies spirited away from family and alienated from ancestral land, has led both nations to look the other way, turn away from the border, for so long.) I imagine those who’ve never had to risk anything to get here looking through the fence, watching as bodies are dramatically subjugated into the maquiladoras, a ghost ship of capitalist production.
There it is—Trump’s “beautiful” wall. Signed off on, however uneasily, as the land art of a fascist state. As critic Jerry Saltz wrote, like “minimalism, these prototypes are hard-edged geometry and impervious materials brought into the American landscape of the West and arranged to impose order, inspire awe, and try to manage and align mystic political forces.” Just like the land in Owens Valley, California, got caught between policy and prisoners at Manzanar.13 Just like Heart Mountain outside Ralston, Wyoming.14 I feel caught in the border’s entropic crosshairs. Here, it is easy to read the markings left on the earth by the necrocapitalist superpowers of the post-NAFTA world. Here are eight examples of what one wall could do to “secure a border.” Eight models for keeping us from each other.
History, I think, as we all stand silent for a moment, is the manual, and Jorge, Manuel, Michelle, and I—we borderland denizens from both sides of this wall—await its future directives. Michelle and I say good-bye to Jorge and Manuel, walk back out through customs and onward to the lot where I parked my truck.
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Seeing each prototype was like going to a trade show for someone’s fixer-upper, a flipped house waiting for its gentrification fence to be painted a tasteful neutral, for its colors to cohere despite its location (but anticipating that the value in that location would rise); would this mythical wall match the sky or usher in a new era of concrete-minded futurity? Or would it be the color of a grassland caught in a perpetual drought? Would this manifestation of power be distilled into a miniature version, sold in the living room section of Design Within Reach? Tasteful studio partitions in eight styles? Not when the Trump administration was seeking nearly $18 billion from Congress to extend and reinforce a border wall with Mexico. Not when Trump was holding 800,000 federal workers economically hostage with the longest government shutdown ever. Not when a Democratic House was digging in its heels to avoid giving in any further to his madness. A monumental manifestation and it will be beautiful. But can beauty move beyond a clean line? Can minimalism’s compulsory privileged position as a default marking of artistic integrity be reconsidered?
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I can’t remember where I read of Donald Judd’s assertion that his work would be more meaningful if it were placed somewhere more permanent. I think of the ghosts that roam the halls of these assertions. Judd, whom art critic Roberta Smith eulogized as “one of the foremost American artists of the postwar era and a major figure in the Minimal Art movement,” no doubt found the cleanliness of the wide, open space at Marfa, Texas, in line with his vision built on the fealty to “specific objects”—the boxes, the stacks, the repetition of true phenomenological things that ultimately lead back to the box and its variations. If only the environment could hold the meaning of his assertions without taking into account its own temporary ontology, as erosion and water shortages are more than mere material reminders of environmental limitations. In addition, how can we think of Judd’s concrete structures that dot the landscape of his Chinati Foundation as permanent when it sits butt-to-butt with the Border Patrol headquarters off the stretch of Highway 90 that enters and exits Marfa. I’ve been to Marfa and have walked the beaten paths that run parallel to the concrete structures that make the town an arts destination for lovers of land art. It’s hard for me to completely corroborate Judd’s desire for the work to simply be interesting. What’s interesting to me is the way history is forced off the land along with most of its inhabitants, a historical awareness I’m supposed to check at the door once I put the red Chinati sticker on my lapel. I wouldn’t want to sully my experience.
But then again, a new thirty-foot border wall—distilled in equal measure from the design minds of Chinati and Border Patrol agents—sits sixty miles from Marfa in Ojinaga, Chihuahua. That’s close enough for a day trip: another arttourist destination, perhaps.
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The running loop in my head in the days, weeks, months after my visit takes on the aspect of a codependent relationship. Aren’t you tired of an established aesthetic that pulsates well enough through toxic spectacles to occasionally penetrate the discerning sensibilities of American art critics? Haven’t you encountered the difficulty that comes with forging a relationship with art, a bid for rightful representation, time and time again? How many times have you learned and mastered art’s parlances only to be caught off guard by new regimes and attending social conditions that sever you from the language of art in the first place? You accept helpless dogs exploited on a looped video in the Guggenheim or long queues to see Marina render millennials into salty puddles on a concrete MoMA floor. You get called an art-washing vendido. But you stay. Sometimes you stay and watch your friend’s four-hour durational performance in front of the local county jail, other times you stay in even more precarious terrains, daring to thrive on a land turned state where you are surveilled and further conditioned against your own instinct.
Art is a hostile place.
In its own attempts to build monuments to itself, art literally builds fences. Some of us still make it through, cracking the obstacle course with aplomb either as practitioners or interlocutors. Many don’t. Still, the prototypes were a shock you should have seen coming—their hostility doesn’t exist in a void. It’s there for a reason. And arming itself with the relentless shock of the now is a good a reason for the art world to ride out and leverage the frightening moment trapping us all.
Declaring eight border wall prototypes as land art: an art-bro provocation. A didacticism of trolling or the trolling of didacticism. Still, while these new, insidious monuments rise, older monuments are brought down by individuals working across difference and conceptual execution. Bree Newsome’s act of civil disobedience lit us up when she was arrested for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house grounds.15 Or Therese Patricia Okoumou’s Statue of Liberty sit-in protesting the separation of migrant families at the border on the Fourth of July.16 Several contemporary city governments eagerly marching toward the progressive horizon do so literally in the middle of the night, as happened with the disappearing racist statues in Baltimore, where four Confederate monuments were dismantled a week after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.17
And yet the wall prototypes were the surprise we didn’t know we needed. A metaphor so brutally obvious. A brutalist movement revived by a populace’s desire for an art inching closer to an open identification with fascism. An antagonized reminder of history repeating all over itself, the border an exhausted hamster wheel, a Sisyphean crossing where migrants are only ever seen as laborers if they are seen at all. What else can we squeeze out of the border? You stop asking yourself how art could be involved in a fascist project. Art has never left its side.
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I am famished by the time we pass through the border checkpoint at Otay Mesa. As soon as we get back to Chula Vista, Michelle and I stop for some amazing carne asada tacos, deep fried quesadillas, and Mineraguas. The tacos were equal parts spirit cleanser and spicy meat fix, since our friend Ceci’s wedding is offering guests vegetarian fare. But it felt good to be in a space of sensory and familiar pleasure. Couples bickering and their children squealing at the tables and red vinyl booths around us, the speakers in the strip mall taqueria blaring the latest reggaeton. We could eat and we could enjoy ourselves, be reminded that there was so much of ourselves still capable of bringing and feeling joy even as each new day and week with the Trump administration meant something unimaginably nefarious coming to fruition. A sensate for the improbable. If we lost our joy then we had lost everything. If we could keep our families together for one day, we might as well revel in the ephemeral and hope we could still summon the memory.
They want our tacos but they don’t want us, I sing-sang in a familiar protest rhythm between bites. I savored every bite of roasted green onions, cilantro, and smoky chipotle red sauce. But that was true before a wall. We want so desperately to belong to ourselves that we still await liberation through representation. And the cultural zeitgeist put that burden of recognition on whomever could master narrating the democratizing logics of the taco for a public bummed out by the xenophobics in D.C.
Son capaz. Michelle is right. They’re capable of extracting even the food we make from us behind the barriers—whether they’re the ones in Otay Mesa or the points that connect the stitches between here and Brownsville and Matamoros, the points of land that kiss the Pacific on the West, with the Sea of Cortez in the middle and the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the demarcation.
I drive Michelle back to her sister’s house and head to my three-star discount app hotel room in Pacific Beach, a little neighborhood south of La Jolla in San Diego, to get ready. We would meet back up again for the wedding. It feels strange to pull out my suit, though it is the suit of my dreams—charcoal gray sharkskin. I blew my grant money getting it tailored to my short and stocky butch body, even though I bought it for ten dollars a decade prior. It feels good to lay it on the crisp white comforter that makes my hotel bed look like a cloud. I want to crawl under the bedding though. I have it pretty cushy, considering where I would lay my frayed nerves for the night, which reminds me of the way mobility works for anyone with a U.S. passport. If I had more time, I could soak my feet in the tub. Instead I pull my black socks and black brogues out of my weekender bag. I feel more awake, ready to be social, once I am out of the shower and have buttoned up my white shirt. I pull out a gray tie, then a red one, and finally decide to go white on white. It feels strange to see myself fill the suit out handsomely when my synapses are firing off rounds. I am abuzz with fear and fury as if I’ve spent the last few hours chain-smoking one hundred cigarettes. I step out of my room into the parking lot to collect my truck and feel the bay breeze on my gooseskin. I feel overdressed walking past everyone at the resort hotel wearing swim trunks and suits, children in an array of inflatables around their limbs and bodies. I am off to see people I haven’t seen in twenty years—aging punks from San Diego, the nihilist crème de la late nineties post-hardcore crème, a screamo-emo scene carved out by this fellowship of misanthropes. This day was dedicated to reuniting with those with whom I built my tastes for dissonance and off-time signatures alongside the anarcho-politics that roared against a state building walls for people and dropping trade regulations.
________
In 1994 I was eighteen with a bullet, aching to see any live punk rock any chance I could get. And I did. By then my parents had long accepted that my mode of resistance meant not seeing me most weekends while I stood in the periphery of the mosh pit for any Rocket from the Crypt shows happening from Westwood to Tijuana. That summer Ceci, Torie, and I would drive south on I-5 to catch San Diego emo-billy faves doing a secret show at Ché Café. The Ché Café continues to be a worker co-operative, gathering space, and live music venue located on the University of California San Diego campus in La Jolla, California. Its exteriors are decked out in murals of Ché Guevara, Rigoberta Menchú, Karl Marx, and Angela Davis, and it has hosted every emo band that ever mattered to me. Everyone’s played there. Even Los Angeles’ own Rage against the Machine, when they were on Columbia Records, would do secret sets for the homies from Zack de la Rocha’s Inside Out straightedge days. Everyone loves the Ché Café. Even de la Rocha described it as “a place that is not only a great venue, but a source of inspiration and community-building for any artist, student, or worker that has entered its doors.” The Ché has a storied reputation as a place where any revolutionary can grab a hummus sandwich, much to UC San Diego’s chagrin. To keep university officials off their scent, the café has signage that reads “C.H.E.—Cheap, Healthy Eats.”
San Diego in the early nineties had a vibrant underground of punk musicians who had learned their instruments well enough to start innovating on the genres that birthed them. It was punk but it was melodic. It was melodic but it was also relentlessly erratic. It was chaotic but it was also pertinent to my long nights of contemplation during those early days of one-dollar-gallon-gas road trips back home from San Diego. One of the most noteworthy bands emblematic of the “San Diego Sound” was Antioch Arrow. They toured their brand of minute-long songs up and down the West Coast, stopping one sweaty San Fernando Valley afternoon in northeast Los Angeles to play a storage garage someone had turned into a DIY venue. Antioch Arrow stopped in to see if they could open for my other favorite band, Los Crudos, from Chicago. As soon as Antioch Arrow turned up the knobs on their Marshall stacks, all you heard were the frenetic guitar wailing and snare drum slapping, and all you saw were human spinning tops wilding out like dirty white boy blurs on a Van Gogh canvas.
Us Los Angeles kids were hooked. We started wearing high water Levi’s Sta-Prest jeans and white studded leather belts, and combing down our hair like Dr. Spock from Star Trek. And I started to follow that band around, which meant finding myself often in the strange beach underground that was San Diego. Antioch Arrow broke up two years later, but the members started other bands that I wanted to see. And San Diego was a scene I wanted to belong to, although I would never admit that to anyone in Los Angeles. It was easy enough to get down there with Ceci, who was soon my roommate in a two-bedroom in a neighborhood that she called Echo Park and I called Silver Lake. We were right on the border and anyone who came over always argued which side of the line we lived on back in 1998. I’d come home some days from my weird digital music label in Santa Monica to invitations from Ceci to head to San Diego to see a band play.
I’m too tired, dude.
Don’t ever let your job dictate your life.
… Fine, let’s go.
Ceci and I both loved the music, the scene, gathering together around the sketchiest of locales in the alleys and surf shacks of San Diego, pounding Tecates with the locals while the Pacific pounded the shore. But she enjoyed hanging out with those young men in ways I didn’t, and they ended up becoming closer to her than to me. This was back when she used to rock a horn on her head, greased up with Royal Crown that made her look like a girl Ed Grimley. She eventually moved to San Diego after finishing up law school in Los Angeles to practice housing advocacy for numerous projects working with the homeless.
________
I leave my hotel and drive down the main drag with Sail Bay to my left and Fiesta Bay to my right. It’s stunning. But I realize I could probably never afford to live in this, the Southern California of postcards. I park my dusty truck half a mile from the Women’s Rowing Club in a Pacific Beach neighborhood with Spanish-style mansions and multilevel Craftsman bungalows and hope I don’t break a sweat under the bright sun getting to the venue. Just as I start to saunter my way to the sidewalk, I hear a raspy-voiced charlatan call out my name—or my punk rock name, that is.
Is that you, Rocky? I turn around and see the old bastard himself. Isreal has a distinct growl that shoves itself into an earworm every time I drive through Pomona, California. He was the singer for a band called Man Is the Bastard and a difficult figure in that nineties scene, so seeing him with a full paunch, a five o’clock shadow of strawberry-blond fuzz on his face, and a ratty, thin glen-plaid blazer gives me pause for the ways relational dynamics shift as we age. I feel my shoulders relax as he comes in for a warm hug. He is a sweet man, glowing with an aura soaked in pain, wounded in all of the obvious ways. Ours was a generation forced to stiffen our lips, deny our needs for nurturance, and wing it when dropped in the oceans of intimacy with no recourse. We were red flags waiting to be set on fire.
Oh shit, Loomis Slovak? That was the name of his other band when Man Is the Bastard temporarily kicked him out. How long has it been? Last time I saw you we were both flirting with sobriety at the House of Pies. Where’s your partner?
Oh man, I saw you at the beginning of that relationship. Well, two kids later and a move to Temecula, she’s decided she wants to divorce me. He says it with a grimace, and then I grimace.
Well, shit, you got two really cute kids out of it. And now we’re at a wedding!
He shrugs. Well, I’m flying solo. Let’s wingman each other tonight, yeah?
We arrive together and put IPAS in each other’s hands for the rest of the afternoon until Ceci and her seven-year-old come down the aisle. I tell him what took me to Tucson and he tells me that his wife resented him for robbing her of her lesbianism.
If memory serves me well, Sarah wasn’t your first queer rodeo, Iz.
________
I start to load up on chips and guacamole and peek inside the rowing club, glimpsing quaint oil paintings of sailing superyachts hanging on wood paneled walls, when I see another ghost in the form of Patrick Delaney, who I hadn’t seen since our trip to Havana in 1999. We had gone to a young communist gathering on the ills of neoliberalism and globalization, bunking in dormitories that would wake up all the international inhabitants by blasting Silvio Rodriguez at seven in the morning. Pat and I were there mostly to hang out with Ceci and Torie, who were the politics punks. But I first encountered Pat on Los Angeles’s public radio airwaves. He used to host the afternoon show on KXLU that was my audio lifeline to bands like Fugazi and Alice Donut as well as to more experimental bands that studied punk like Slug or Laughing Hyenas from Chicago. His show gave me new ears for a world I was ready to inhabit, a world away from the Huntington Park that claimed me in a Catholic school uniform for many years. Of course Pat and I are tag teaming deejay duties for the wedding party once the ceremony and dinner portions of the evening are complete. I try to get him to play more cumbia for the bride’s Mexican side, but he is set on playing from deep in the crates.
I run into Torie and her husband, Anthony, and their vivacious five-year-old, Inez, who I hosted last August in Tucson during one of the desert’s hotter summers on record. I run into Leilani, who I hadn’t seen since the Free Mumia march we went to in San Francisco in 1998. And Nessa from Whittier, who every brown punk boy was in love with in 1998, and her daughters, who are her teenage mini-mes. I run into Quetzal and Martha and catch up on the local L.A. beef between curators of Chicano art and the artists whose precious archives they couldn’t penetrate, and the anarchist, polyamorous Fran with her new girlfriend. Monogamy—they are trying it out. I run into San Diego native daughter Maribel, who was Pat Delaney’s first girlfriend at twenty-three, and her white boo, Paul, who flew down from Portland. We were all late bloomers and sexuality was second to our music scenes. I run into so many great faces, all of whom hear about my visit to the border wall prototypes and my purpose for visiting them. Every conversation is meant to offer a brief history of land art as well as an anecdote about my personal interest. Or vendetta against it. The conflicted appreciation. The flurry of feelings that keeps dust deviling out of my mouth with each new IPA I swig. I am butchsplaining my ass off. And in every conversation I see the glint of panic.
These aging punks, stuffing shaved corn salad and roasted zucchini into their mouths and washing it down with Chardonnay, chasing the kids from their blended families around the wedding cake table, narrating every Drive Like Jehu show they ever attended and the time their eyes were pummeled by pepper spray at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, showing off the Rocket from the Crypt tattoos that earned them free entry to every show until the apocalypse, never imagining things would get worse than Bush stealing the election or Halliburton siphoning every drop of oil out of Iraq or the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of nation-building.
I see Michelle again, this time wearing a form-fitting red cotton dress that makes her look like the dancing-lady emoji. She looks great. We both do, considering we came back covered in maquila toxins and border fence dust. I give her a look that says, Can you believe we did that? But she doesn’t respond in the same way. She is ready to dance her troubles away. Or to at least dance with her troubles. It’s a good coping mechanism. We would be in trouble for at least two more years.
7. Jack Balderrama Morley, “But Are They Pretty? Government Grades Border Wall Prototypes on Effectiveness and Aesthetics,” The Architect’s Newspaper, https://www.archpaper.com/2018/08/border-wall-prototypes-tests.
8. United States Government Accountability Office, “Southwest Border Security: CBP Is Evaluating Designs and Locations for Border Barriers but Is Proceeding Without Key Information,” July 2018, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-614.pdf.
9. Associated Press, “Prototypes for Trump’s Wall, Including Israeli Model, Take Shape on Border,” Times of Israel, October 20, 2017, https://www.timesofisrael.com/prototypes-for-trumps-wall-including-israeli-model-take-shape-on-border.
10. Carolina A. Miranda, “Is It Inspired or Irresponsible to Call Donald Trump’s Border Wall Prototypes ‘Art’?” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-christoph-buchel-border-wall-prototype-20180208-story.html.
11. “Top Ten Art Dealers,” Forbes, May 3, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/pictures/mgg45egdg/4-iwan-wirth-42/?sh=3f34e7450074.
12. Randy Kennedy, “Police Shut Down Mosque Installation at Venice Biennale,” New York Times, May 22, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/arts/design/police-shut-down-mosque-installation-at-venice-biennale.html.
13. National Park Service, “Japanese Americans at Manzanar,” https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-at-manzanar.htm.
14. Steven Blingo, “A Brief History of Heart Mountain Relocation Center,” Wyoming State Historical Society, November 8, 2014, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/brief-history-heart-mountain-relocation-center.
15. “#KeepItDown Confederate Flag Takedown,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr-mt1P94cQ.
16. Victoria Bekiempis, “Woman Who Climbed Statue of Liberty in Immigration Protest Found Guilty,” Guardian, December 17, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/17/statue-of-liberty-climber-trial-us-immigration.
17. Jamie Grierson, “Baltimore Takes Down Confederate Statues in Middle of Night,” Guardian, August 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/baltimore-takes-down-confederate-statues-in-middle-of-night.