There have been a relatively large number of photographic bodies of work made around the border between the United States and Mexico. In effect, for most people in the West, that border has become a convenient screen onto which to project their ideas. This also is what artists do: project their ideas onto someone or something, to (ideally) extract some deeper meaning from it.
Over the years, I have received a number of requests to review work made around that border. I mostly couldn’t bring myself to do it — not because the work was or is necessarily bad. It’s just that the projection mostly remains unacknowledged.
Maybe this is easier to see when looking at, say, the projects (mostly male) German photographers produce around Los Angeles with depressing regularity: none of them are really about LA. The fact that there is a lot of driving involved in LA (one of the reasons why I personally can’t stand the city) is not telling anyone anything new.
What’s really going on is a group of people admiring what they don’t have in Germany (at least to that extent: cars über alles if you will), while simultaneously somewhat smugly looking down on a perceived lack of civic culture in LA and, by extension, the US.
The border invites similar mechanisms, and the fact that the far right has been using it to score political points using shallow resentment isn’t helping. Of course, the border isn’t really the problem per se; it’s the fact that people are crossing it even though they’re not supposed to, and those people also happen to be brown — and not the milky white that the far right prefers.
It’s one thing to project one’s own ideas onto a city and its cars; it’s quite another to do it with actual human beings involved. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve mostly stayed away from writing about projects about the border: it just doesn’t strike me as the ideal situation and/or place to use for one’s idea of art, regardless of how good one’s intentions might be.
Those crossing the border, often after very long treks across thousands of kilometers, are already kept in a state of anonymity (if you don’t believe me: what’s the name of the little girl who is crying in that heartbreaking photo that I’m sure you’ll remember?).
As the past few months have cruelly shown, it is when people are plucked out of anonymity that cracks will appear in the convenient projections: Trump’s approval rating around immigration cratered once the faces and stories of some of the Venezuelans shipped to a concentration camp in El Salvador became known (this collection of words and pictures by will break your heart).
In addition, there is the fact that borders typically cut across communities, even if these communities might not be homogeneous. The coming and going from one side to the other involves commerce as much as cultural exchanges, resulting in connections being made across the border and both sides getting enriched, whether in a literal (monetary) sense or otherwise.
If you look at a border, especially when you’re an outsider, you will miss all of that. Then, there’s just this side, and once you cross, there is the other side. The end result is that things can easily become very reductive.
Arturo Soto‘s Border Documents is an outlier in all of this border work in more ways than one. This starts with its form. At 165 × 95 mm (6.5 × 3.75 inches), it’s a most unassuming softcover book. You’re likely going to hold it in one hand, using the other to look through it. The intimacy of the experienced in this fashion is crucial, because the text contained in the book is very personal.
It’s a man’s story, and that man tells you about growing up right near the border (in Juárez, right across the border from El Paso [USA]). The man is the photographer’s father, and many relatives make an appearance. Given that many of the relatively short stories originate from the narrators childhood or adolescence, there is an innocence to the narration: things are experienced without much of an added judgment.
The combination of that innocence and the various shenanigans the narrator was engaged in is disarming. In effect, the book centers on the border; but the border itself becomes a side character — if even that. Instead, the very specific life experience of someone who happened to grow up there allows the reader to get access to his world.
Many of the texts are paired with photographs Soto took at the various locales mentioned in the text. It’s not always straightforward to tell the US and Mexico apart, even though details, of course, will make things clear.
What makes Border Documents so strong is how inconsequential almost everything narrated in the book is — inconsequential in the larger sense, not in the familial sense, of course. But it is exactly the fact that so many things in a person’s life are inconsequential that cracks open the image of the border: it’s simply a largely random line on a map that cuts through the land, now in the form of some huge fence (“border wall”).
And the Juárez narrated in the book has changed as well. The last entry is dated 1981, and it talks about the narrator taking a job in Mexico City, “wanting to shield my newborn son from the vices and limitations of Juárez”.
“But when it all ends,” he concludes, “I want my ashes to be spread on the Río Bravo to recover the time lost and safeguard my side of the border, in whichever way possible, against the fury of the American empire.”
This, after all, is how it goes: if one side wants to close their hearts and their part of the border, then the other side can do it as well.
It’s everyone’s loss.
Recommended.
Border Documents; photographs and text by Arturo Soto; 144 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2025
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