Embodiment Against Borders: Discourses of Crisis and Collaborative Performance Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall

• Britta Anderson ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Arizona

     University of Arizona

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, ISSN 1096-2492, Nº. 24, 2020, págs. 129-148
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this article, I approach the existing 700-miles of wall between the United States and Mexico as an axis and materialization of broader practices of anti-immigrant policing throughout both countries. By tracing the state-generated rhetoric of crisis, which constructs migrants as a national threat, I identify an underlying crisis of affect, which functions to emotionally distance U.S. citizens from the human impacts of state violence perpetrated against migrants. Drawing on a history of border performance art, I delineate a new era of site-specific performance that responds to the hypervisibility of anti-immigration rhetoric. I demonstrate the ways in which three recent collaborative, binational performances enact protest and transnational solidarity through an affective repertoire of joy, play, vulnerability, dignity, and intimacy. I analyze Ana Teresa Fernández’s Borrando la frontera (2012, 2015) which involved painting sections of Tijuana-San Diego and Nogales wall sky blue; Boundless Across Borders (2017), through which Ciudad Juárez and El Paso women braided their hair together in a human chain across the border during the presidential inauguration; and Teeter-Totter Wall (2019), created by Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello. By engaging the imagination, directly involving co-creators, and generating transnational intimacy, these performances simultaneously reveal the violence of the wall’s existence and work to disarm it, challenging the perception of migration as crisis.