It was around 10 a.m. one March day last year, when Catherine D’Ignazio and her sister drove away from the Arizona home of Ofelia Rivas, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation who has opposed the construction of the U.S. border fence through the tribe’s reservation [pictured above], which straddles the U.S. and Mexico. Rivas’s home is a simple one-room house in the desert village of Ali Jegk, located between two mountain ranges.
After visiting Rivas to talk about the fence, they were headed back to D’Ignazio’s sister’s home in Tucson, while Rivas followed in her minivan. A U.S. Border Patrol SUV tailed them for a while before its lightbar began flashing and the officer pulled over Rivas. “Not even a half mile from her house the Border Patrol stopped her,” D’Ignazio says. The D’Ignazio sisters turned around and waited for Rivas, who was asked a few questions before being sent on her way again.
“It was eye opening because it was she who was stopped and not us,” D’Ignazio says. “I felt like such a foreigner in that land. I felt so out of my normal landscape, my normal sun. This is where she was born. Their tribal creation story is set in this land. … I talked to her afterwards and she said it was an everyday occurrence.”
Out of such experiences came “The Border Crossed Us,” an installation that D’Ignazio has created under the banner of the Boston art collective The Institute for Infinitely Small Things at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst campus through May 1. The centerpiece of the project is a 400-foot-long barrier interrupting busy walkways through the campus. It’s made from five sections of chain-link fence covered by mesh printed with photos of the U.S. –Mexico border fence.
“My original goal was to create—it was always going to be a fiction—but to create this fiction of a material encounter with the fence,” D’Ignazio says. “When you actually encounter it in the landscape, it’s so stark and so striking. … It’s so regular and so violent and like a Christo piece. And also it’s dividing this community in half. … They’re living in this state where they’re under constant suspicion because they’re not white.”
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, D’Ignazio has been contemplating “these visible ways we’re becoming more scared.” It has prompted art projects she has done with The Institute for Infinitely Small Things and solo pieces like “It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston,” which had her jogging Boston’s entire evacuation route system in 2007, routes the government marked in 2006 to identify ways for residents to vacate the city in the event of a massive calamity. And now this contemplation had brought her from her home in Waltham, Massachusetts, to the Tohono O’odham Nation and the U.S.-Mexico border fence. [Pictured below, from left: Rivas, D'Ignazio's sister, D'Ignazio's son Gus, and D'Ignazio at Rivas's home.]
Parts of the United States’ border with Mexico have long been fenced, but the U.S. government’s “Secure Fence Act of 2006” authorized construction of hundreds of miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as new checkpoints and electronic surveillance, all “to control our borders and reform our immigration system.” This lead in 2007 to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security erecting a fence that bisected a 75-mile stretch of Tohono O’odham land, the second largest Native American reservation in the country. Some tribal leaders supported the fence as a way to reduce drug smugglers and undocumented immigrants from crossing their land, according to news reports, but other members of the tribe, like Rivas, protested the division of tribal lands and how it would divide their people and obstruct ceremonial practices.
“The border is in her backyard basically. It’s a quarter mile from where she lives, where she was born,” D’Ignazio says. “Her father’s community is 25 miles away [in Mexico]. She used to be able to get there in an hour and now it takes her six hours because of all the checkpoints.”
“There’s this border fence, but there’s also this security apparatus. It’s not only the land divided, but you’re under suspicion at all times,” D’Ignazio adds. “…It’s a way of living that we can’t really imagine and we wouldn’t stand for if it was happening to everyone. … It’s this military security state down there.”
When UMass Amherst invited D’Ignazio to do a project there as part of a series of pieces the school was curating while its art gallery is undergoing renovation, she proposed a replica fence. Plus a sign usually displaying a campus map has been repurposed for the run of the show with posters printed with border checkpoint questions like “Why are you here?” “How did you get here?” “Are you a citizen?” “May I touch you?” “Where are you going?” Viewers are invited to text their response the project website. The vents of a nearby campus parking garage broadcast a field recording of helicopters flying over the border fence and Rivas singing an “Eagle” song, which she describes as a song for strength, and giving a blessing thanking the people of Amherst for hosting the project. The project has also been the subject of UMass class assignments and featured in panels about public art, social activism and indigenous sovereignty.
Of course, doing the project on a major college campus demanded compromises. “There are too many concessions to people’s convenience. If there were a real fence it would be really inconvenient,” D’Ignazio says. “I wish it could have been more outrageous because what’s going on down there is really outrageous.”
“This really matters to all of us,” she adds. “Just like the evacuation routes, these are aesthetic symbolic manifestations of fear. It really matters that we’re erecting hundreds of miles of this fence along the southern border, in the same way it matters that we’re erecting gated communities. I think it’s a problem for democracy that we’re walling ourselves off.”
Institute for Infinitely Small Things “The Border Crossed Us,” University of Massachusetts at Amherst Campus, April 20 to May 1, 2011.
