Seeing Through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)order

• Published in: Latino studies 2007-12, Vol.5 (4), p.418-438
• Main Author: Soto, Sandra K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African American literature; American culture; American literature; Archives & records; Artists; Biemann, Ursula; Border patrol; Borders; Boundaries; Bowden, Charles; Business; Capitalism; Citizenship; Corporate sponsorship; Cultural and Media Studies; Cultural Studies; Disorders; Documentary films; Economic change; Essays; Ethnicity Studies; Everyday life; Gender relations; Globalization; Hispanic Americans; Literature; Mexico; Migration; Militarization; Narratives; Nihilism; Noncitizens; Olmos, Edward James; Photography; Politics; Postcolonial/World Literature; Postcolonialism; Poverty; Racial profiling; Regional and Cultural Studies; Reification; Stereotypes; Transnationalism; United States of America; Violence; West, Cornel
• ISSN: 1476-3435; 1476-3443
• DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600272

The charged geopolitical region of the US–Mexico border has provided a rich source of material for theorists, artists, and filmmakers invested in documenting the material and discursive effects of transnational capitalism in everyday life. The infamous maquila industry, the alarming rate of embodied and structural gendered violence in border cities such as Juárez, and the para-militarization of the border are just a few of the factors that make the border region germane to an analysis of the complex and dynamic relationship between global economic processes and violent transformations in cultural formations. As “Seeing Through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)Order” illustrates, however, many of the efforts to document that relationship as it plays out on the border are uncritically framed by a discursive narrative of order and disorder, such that contemporary capitalism is seen as wreaking havoc on tradition, community, a liberal notion of “freedom,” and gender relations – all of which are putatively positioned outside of or before capitalism. What are the political implications of this rhetorical strategy, particularly when it is punctuated by the realist tools of documentary evidence, as it is, for instance, in the central text engaged in my essay, Charles Bowden's Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future ? “Seeing Through Photographs of Borderlands (Dis)Order” is centrally concerned to show that while the visual documentation of suffering on the border to tell this story of order and disorder might bring into sharper (and more affective) relief the tangibly devastating effects of uneven processes of globalization, it also lends itself to a reification of the culture of poverty narrative.