ABSTRACT
Leading up to Labor Day 2005, the Department of Ecological Authoring Tactics, Inc. (DoEAT) launched a border disturbance action with the yellow ‘‘Caution’’ signs mounted along the San Diego area highways. Introduced in the early 1990s, the signs were intended to function as warnings to drivers about the possibility of immigrants trying to cross the busy highways before border checkpoints. DoEAT’s intervention was to defamiliarize the iconic silhouettes of three running figures, surprising drivers with the new titles: ‘‘Wanted,’’ ‘‘Free Market,’’ ‘‘No Benefits,’’ and ‘‘Now Hiring.’’ In the wake of Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and the construction of the ‘‘Iron Curtain,’’ the 14-mile San Diego-Tijuana border fence, highway deaths are no longer as common as they once were. The scene of death has shifted eastward to the deserts and mountains – but the iconic signs remain (Robbins 2006). In the hands of the DoEAT group, the signs were no longer simply cautionary warnings; instead, they were a tactical art performance enacted with a sense of urgency that also resonates in the Spanglish word play in the group’s acronym: ‘‘do eet.’’ Reminiscent as it was of the Situationist technique of de´tournement, DoEAT’s interruptive and resignifying art performance commented on the neoliberal economic policies that compel the forced movement of migrant labor. In its allusion to NAFTA and the ‘‘free market’’ that opens the USMexico border to commodities but reinforces its closure to people, the DoEAT tactic was truly site specific, situated both physically and socioculturally. Highlighting the disparity between the mobility of capital and the immobility of people, the signs continue to speak both to the conditions of labor and to the criminalization of border crossings. The circulation of goods and capital has been enabled by the free trade agreement, the signs remind us, but border security practices, particularly walls and fences, continue to prohibit the circulation of people. At the new Iron Curtain, neoliberal market ideologies of liquid, free-flowing capital and open borders of labor come up against new policing tactics to regulate the movements of people.
