ABSTRACT
The Mexican-US border may not be the epochal marriage of cultures that Brazilian futurist Alfredo Valladão 1996 has in mind, but it is nonetheless a lusty bastard offspring of its two parents. Consider, for example, La Mona (Figure 13.1). Five stories tall and buck-naked, ‘The Doll’ struts her stuff in the dusty Tijuana suburb of Colonia Aeropuerto. Distressingly – to the gringo eye at least – she looks like the Statue of Liberty stripped and teased for a Playboy centrefold. In reality, she is the home of Armando Muñoz García and his family. Muñoz is an urban imaginer somewhere on a delirious spectrum between Marcel Duchamp and Las Vegas casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn. ‘Give me enough rebar and an oxyacetylene torch,’ he boasts, ‘and I’ll line the border with giant nude Amazons.’ In the meantime, he eats in La Mona’s belly and curls up to sleep inside her enormous breasts. When asked why he built a house with pubic hair and nipples, he growls back, ‘Why not?’
