UC Santa Cruz

From its conception as a nation, the U.S. pushed from east to west and north to south expanding and establishing new borders, a process reinforced by nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. landscape photography. By contrast, twentieth and twenty-first century Chicanx and Latinx artists addressed the border as a site of political turmoil, violence, and resistance as well as a metaphorical and transportable space of identity formation. My dissertation draws upon these two fields, landscape studies and Chicanx/Latinx visual culture, to addresses contemporary landscape photography at the U.S.-Mexico border. In doing so, I established a comparative analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century landscapes against the decolonizing potential of the contemporary works that expose, subvert, and expand traditional landscape vernaculars. My dissertation examines closely David Taylor and Marcos Ramirez ERRE’s DeLIMITations (2014), the Border Film Project (2005-2007), Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s Border Cantos (2016), and Delilah Montoya’s Sed: Trail of Thirst (2004-2008). Each of these projects delve into a critical set of questions around what is happening at the border and why, but also how the border crisis impacts migrants and migrant communities. To address these questions, I approach the photographs in search of narratives that are often omitted from history, art history, and contemporary discourse on the U.S.-Mexico border. I then use visual clues in the images to generate new narratives about who has existed in the border landscape, who is currently attempting to cross, and what these experiences might be like. I argue that their work transgresses old forms and pushes against the limiting nature of the border itself. In doing so they bring attention to the double erasure of Indigenous and migrant memory, history, and bodies from the landscape; expose the lasting colonial legacy of earlier landscape practices that contributed to the making of the border; and explore the possibility for innovative visions that deviate from those of territorial mastery, and instead attend to migrant subjectivities.