C. J. Alvarez

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2020 Winner, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2021From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction-“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Zoe Leonard is among the most influential artists of her generation. Her work merges photography, sculpture, and installation, balancing rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision. Al Rio / To the River, initiated in 2016, is an ambitious photographic project addressing the more than one-thousand miles of river boundary shared by the United States and Mexico. Leonard approaches the river, known as Rio Bravo in Mexico and Rio Grande in the United States, as a multifaceted leitmotif in which cultural, ecological, historical, social, political and economic concerns intersect. Published in two volumes, the first will feature Leonard’s photographs, while the second will bring together written contributions from a remarkable group of international artists, essayists, journalists, poets and scholars. Conceived as an alternate form of circulation for the work, the publication also provides an interdisciplinary reference for people interested in the river, environmental issues, borderlands culture and contemporary border issues. Writers: C.J. Alvarez, Ariella Azoulay, Cecilia Ballí, Remijio "Primo" Carrasco, Dolores Dorantes, Darby English, Álvaro Enrigue, Catherine Facerias, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Josh T. Franco, Esther Gabara, Adolfo Guzman Lopez, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Elisabeth Lebovici, Jose Rabasa, Cameron Rowland, Roberto Tejada, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. Languages: English, French, Spanish

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2020 Winner, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2021From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet.Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.