ABSTRACT
The border goes by many names. With a capital B it stands for the most troublesome part of American geography. In Mexico, it is often referred to simply as la línea, a line deflated of its political weight or implication. The international boundary between the United States and Mexico has also been re-imagined through more academic monikers: the “hyper border” of Mexican architect Fernando Romero, or “the political equator” framed as a global human rights issue that motivates Teddy Cruz’s projects between San Ysidro and Tijuana. But la frontera seems to be the only adequate term that describes this specific part of the world through prying apart and holding open the dimensionlessness of the borderline and the binary logic that underwrites it. La frontera translates as frontier, to be sure, but fron - tiers, for all their colonial baggage, at least indicate a state of uncertainty and lack of resolution. La frontera recalls the outer limits of Spanish colonization in what is now called the American southwest, but it also brings depth to the complex realities of the borderlands which have been erased by the blunt instruments of border control and militarization. The concept emphasizes cultural, spatial and temporal complexity against the stark contrasts produced by the line itself: a landscape torn up by demarcation and fortification and further subdivided in the atomized spaces of geoengineered agriculture and post-industrial logistics.
