“A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” (25)
– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Echoes from the Borderlands is an exceedingly relevant and poignant exploration of the U.S./Mexico Border that presents an urban and natural auditory landscape developed by artists Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. This two-piece aural project consists of Study 1: Call You When I Get Home, a sonic documentary-fiction chapbook set on the US-Mexico Border, and Echoes from the Borderlands: Study 2, an audio exhibition currently on display at Dia Chelsea in New York City. Study 2 is a sound piece that consists of 24 hours of field recordings, divided equally into four sections that represent the U.S. border states: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. When pieced together, running over a four day period in six hour increments, they function as a full 24 hour day, from dawn to dawn. Each exhibition day features the sounds of one state, starting in California and ending in Texas. Study 1, developed in conjunction with Study 2, allows readers to engage with this passage through the Borderlands and also features a QR code, should they like to participate in an auditory experience as well.
Luiselli, Giraldo, and Heiblum developed this project in order to engage listeners with “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” and ask “what do the borderlands sound like?” In producing this project, the artists draw from their personal and artistic experiences with migration and ties to the Mexican diaspora. Valeria Luiselli, the leader of the project, was born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1983 and grew up in South Africa, South Korea, and India. She is an acclaimed fiction and nonfiction writer, with all of her work incorporating themes of migration and belonging and primarily centered in Mexico, Central America, and the Borderlands. In her nonfiction essay, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In 40 Questions, Luiselli uses her experience as a volunteer legal translator to draw attention to the influx of Central American undocumented youth migrants to the United States in 2014 and the inhumane treatment they received, including denial of due process, due to US migration policy and bureaucracy during the Obama administration. Luiselli currently lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College and Harvard University. Ricardo Giraldo was born in Cali, Colombia in 1971 and currently lives in Mexico City. He primarily works in sound, contemporary classical music, and exhibition design and has served as the composer-in-residence for the Residentie Orkest of the Hague. Leo Heiblum was born in Mexico City in 1970 and is a composer, producer, and sound artist known for his dual incorporation of indigenous and classical instruments in his work. He currently lives in Topoztlán, Mexico.
Visitors of Echoes from the Borderlands: Study Two walk into a dimmed room with minimal decoration at Dia Chelsea. Upon their entrance, the audience is immediately submerged in a seemingly never-ending auditory landscape at the US-Mexico border, consisting of desert, river, birds, plants, earth, air, and sky. In the room’s overhead audio and through the available headphones mounted on the walls, soothing sounds of nature layer and echo with heart beats, mechanical whirring, and increasingly sharp sounds of rain. The room plunges visitors into the soundscape at the US-Mexico Border in order to connect the ecology of the region’s physical environment to the ecology of the region’s cultural, social, and political environment. There are also field recordings dispersed throughout the soundscape incorporating the artists’ accounts of the recording process and their conversations with Border Patrol agents and folks who live in the region.
This project draws attention to the deep entanglement between the Borderland’s natural landscape and the flux of migration and anti-immigrant sentiments, militarized border enforcement, nuclear testing, genocide of native people, extractivism, and revival of space travel. This project engages with themes central to the Migration Mapping Project, such as Ecology, Border, and Alien, through its intimate aural exploration of the Borderlands.
– MM
Further Reading
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza 5th Edition. 1987.
Luiselli, Valeria. Lost Children Archive. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 2020.
Luiselli, Valeria. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions. 2017.
Romero, Fernando. Hyperborder: The Contemporary U.S.–Mexico Border and Its Future. 2007.