ABSTRACT
The author compares the artifactuality of border walls with the naturalness of the surrounding landscape in which they are built. It traces out the differential fate of the fraught and overdetermined scene that is called “La Frontera” in local lingo: that is, the generic name for the US-Mexico border region. The deathdealing effects of the border wall at the US-Mexico border are to be contrasted with ways in which, beyond acting to undermine itself and thus failing at its own game, its force is diluted by features of the local landscape that resist wall construction and that offer alternative avenues for human flow which no wall construction can entirely contain or prevent. In short, the wall at La Frontera has engendered an environmental crisis of major proportions. Border walls are counter-natural–imperiously so–and act to stifle and degrade spontaneous life in its many varieties.
