Negotiated Border - Yadiel J Rivera-Diaz
Boundaries are walls and have no other purpose than to be transgressed.
-Teddy Cruz
The materialization of a boundary wall is meant to create a no-place in the location it is erected. No activity is supposed to happen in this territory besides a minimum transit of goods and people that fulfill specific requirements and go through a formal process from which they are allowed to go from one side to the other. The border is meant to be a transitory space, a space of movement.
Bernauer Strasse, Berlin
On the other hand, for the people that, before the wall, transited over it, it becomes a space to be broken, as it presents itself as a direct restriction to access and fulfill their needs. The space becomes what Stalker present as an “Actual Territory” , a place in process of coming into being. It is in the materialization of the border and is in the action of trespassing it where we can witness the space. On the other side of the wall await for them relatives that before moved free to visit, also the economic income of a family that depended on trades and sells they make on the other side, also liberty from oppressive military or political regimes, labor, even whole or halves of land owned now inaccessible, among other things. These people become obsessed with the wall, they know what it is made of, they watch its construction and its changes (materialization), they know its strong points and most important, they know where it leaks (action of trespassing).
Looking at three border conditions, the Berlin wall, the Israeli-Palestinian wall, and the Mexico-USA border reveals how the wall is being characterized and what role it plays in the definition of the territory. During the Cold War, the city of Berlin, in the divided Germany after World War II, became the center of the dispute between Western capitalism and Soviet Communism. The city was split in two, and a wall was erected by the Soviets creating a physical separation between two political regimes, dividing the territory without consideration of the social and processional geography of German citizens.
Similarly, in Israel, the territorial disputes between Israelis and Palestinians have caused the construction of a wall. Israelis are building walls to demarcate the boundaries of the territories they have occupied, separating Muslim Palestinians from Jewish Israelis.
And in the border between Mexico and USA, a fence, a river, and a desert define the boundaries of the two countries. The constant illegal migration of Mexicans to the United States has started a discussion within the US government about the construction of a wall, replete with high surveillance systems, along this border.
In a world in which globalization claims to produce the blurring of boundaries, in which everything is suddenly connected, why the contradictory raising of walls that determine physical boundaries? Stefano Boeri in his essay “Border Syndrome: Notes for a Research Program” argues that the proliferation of enclosures could be read as a reflection of one of the many instances of the protection of identity that explode every day between groups in our multifaceted societies. But, it is more important to know the “Actual Territory”. What is the significance of these walls materially, socially and economically? What are they for? These are the questions that need to be asked.
Israel/Palestine
Walls and fences give a recognizable presence and physical definition to the boundaries of territories. Activities that were more diffused or uncontrollable, (such as wars, trade, cultural exchange, etc), and that occurred in undefined grounds, now have a defined space in which they take place. But, there are different ways in which these physical boundaries are been negotiated. These negotiations are an informal response to the “formalization” of the line or boundary (the wall). I will look at three ways in which the wall is informally approach. The first is the wall as an obstacle to be trespassed, and the different means of trying to cross the border. Sample of this are the digging of subterranean tunnels under the border during the time of the Berlin wall, or simple surveillance by Palestinian individuals to identify unguarded spots.
The second is the wall as a place for interaction and exchange, and the economies created along it. Sample of this is the network of “coyotes” along the Mexico-USA border to which people pay to cross. And third, the wall as an inhabitable space, and the new geographies that produces an informal way of living, like in the case of the West Bank wall where lands were divided into pieces on each side of the wall and some families have their house in one side of the wall and their crops in the other. By inquiring the materialization of the wall, and the methods with which it is perceived, approached, and negotiated, I hope to also understand the informal economies, structures, and paradigms associated with it.
I will attempt to map and link the reasons for separation with the nature of the constructed boundary, and how this eventually translates into spaces of negotiation with distinct economies. I will use the three cases mentioned above: the Berlin Wall, the Israeli-Palestinian border wall, and the Mexico-USA border fence, as historical and contemporary sample studies of the manifestation of these different aspects.
USA/Mexico Border
In this essay I intend to address state border lines, and how their physical manifestation becomes a space of negotiation. The establishment or creation of a border line delineates the division between “one” and the “other”. It establishes a distinction between two groups, one on each side of the border. This separation occurs for different reasons. These include political difference, unequal capital distribution, and ideology. But, regardless of their intention for separation, these borders have become places of interaction between the two sides.
- Yadiel J Rivera-Diaz
Sources:
Cruz, Teddy. Lecture. SFMOMA, San Francisco. 23 Feb. 2006. 2 Dec. 2006 <http://www.architecture-radio.org/learn/public/20060223-CRUZ>. Teddy is an architect with office in San Diego and is the founder of the “Border Institute” at Woodbury University where he researches the urban phenomena at the border between Mexico and the United States.
Stalker, laboratorio d’arte urbana is a collective subject that engages research and actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around the city's margins and forgotten urban space, and abandoned areas or regions under transformation. These investigations are conducted across several levels, around notions of practicality, representations and interventions on these spaces that are referred to here as "Actual Territories."
“Actual Territories” constitute the built city's negative, the interstitial and the marginal, spaces abandoned or in the process of transformation. These are the removed lieu de la memoirs, the unconscious becoming of the urban systems, the spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice. Here the metabolization of humanity's discarded scrap, or nature's detritus, produces a new horizon of unexplored territories, mutant and by default virgin.
Boeri, Stefano. "Border Syndrome: Notes for a Research Program." Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia. Berlin: KW-Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003.
“coyotes” is a term used to describe people who smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States for a profit.
I found this information to be of grand value. I wonder if parts of this article can be included as part of some extension work for a study guide I am currently designing. I am developing a TEFL approach based on literature.
Looking forward to hear from you.
Rafa
— Rafael Angel · Nov 7, 08:56 AM · #