The Border that Unites Us: Picturing the Border, at the Cleveland Museum of Art

In several scenes in the film Como agua para chocolate[1] (Alfonso Arau, 1992, based on the book of the same name by Laura Esquivel), the De la Garza sisters cross the border between Mexico and the United States, like those who cross the street: without so much drama or paperwork. They cross for a variety of reasons: They go to visit Dr. Brown, who lives on the U.S. side; Gertrudis escapes from a family and social system she disagrees with; Tita flees north to take refuge with Dr. Brown; Rosaura is sent to the other side to live with a cousin, and Esperanza (Rosaura’s daughter) emigrates to try to save her future children from the tradition that imposed that the youngest daughter takes care of her parents, without being able to marry. The border thus becomes another character, a permeable and permissible space where the forbidden can be reversed, disguised, or deceived.

More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.

This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed –or tried to cross– the border.

Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.

In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].

But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking -the primary approach from the media- but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.

On one of the exhibition walls, a large mural represents the more than three thousand kilometers between Mexico and the United States and the conflicts that emerge at different points due to ecological, economic, migratory, and political situations. This mural also allows the viewer to have a more comprehensive look and understand that the border is not homogeneous and that it cannot be summarized in a couple of paragraphs.

The photos, sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white, do not speak of a division, of a separation, although the mural where the border wall appears seems to say otherwise, but of what unites those who coincide in this area, what they have in common.

Witnessing this exhibition brings us back to a part of the United States and Mexico that is, and it is not, a differentiated and unifying space; it allows us to understand the border as a union, not as a division.

---

Click here to read La Frontera Que Nos Une, in Spanish

---

[1] The plot of Like Water for Chocolate takes place in northern Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century, during the Mexican Revolution. Since February 1848, the border was already different: after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe, the United States and Mexico not only put an end to the war between the two countries but also Mexico ceded 55% of its territory to the northern neighbor, for a tiny amount of money.

[2] Nadiah Rivera Fellah is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the CMA.

[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994.

[4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57.

[5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.