“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”
– Gloria Anzaldúa
I wrote Gloria Anzaldúa’s phrase on the border wall at Playas de Tijuana. Then I photographed my annotation. The image is now my book’s cover.
As a scholar of annotation, what drew me to the US–Mexico border? And, once there, why did I add Anzaldúa’s phrase to the metal slats of this fortified, inhumane barrier?
Because—as I detail in Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice, forthcoming in April from MIT Press—the US–Mexico border is an annotation.
Re/Marks on Power will be published at a time of acute humanitarian crisis and partisan hostility when the US–Mexico border is described and perceived in many ways. Of course, it’s important to remind readers that very few people from either nation have actually ever visited much less crossed the border. And, in my book, I don’t suggest this material and ideological construction be reduced solely for my convenient interpretation. Rather, it’s an irrefutable fact that this border is a literal annotation.
I visited the US–Mexico international boundary in March of 2023. Accompanied by my dear friend Francisco Perez, we walked into Tijuana from San Diego through the San Ysidro Port of Entry (contrary to some dominant media narratives, the San Diego–Tijuana region has witnessed—compared with all other areas of the border over the past decade—the greatest number of people crossing the boundary). When we walked along the Malecón to the border wall, on a quiet Tuesday morning, I read the murals, mariposa, graffiti, hashtags, and names that marked the borderline. American fencing and wall infrastructure have marked this border since the 1940s; before these barriers were built, the boundary was marked with stone monuments; and the international boundary was first drawn as a line, added atop a traced map, that was attached to the text of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Today’s international boundary between Mexico and the US was originally drawn by hand as a line on a map—it was the addition of a note to a text. What seems fixed and conspicuous appeared in 1848 as an annotation on an imprecisely reproduced map. In Re/Marks on Power, I retrace a history of how various annotators—including artists and engineers, bureaucrats and military veterans—have written, read, and resisted this border by marking the boundary.
In anticipation of my visit, I reread Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa begins her book with this observation about borders: “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.” She then offers this explanation of borderland dualities and incongruities:
“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. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.”
An unnatural boundary.
I walked along this unnatural boundary five months before US Customs and Border Protection began installing a new thirty-foot-high wall. Consequently, much of the art and annotation that I documented was removed, including my contribution of Anzaldúa’s phrase to the barrier. As I write in Re/Marks on Power: “Whenever you read this book, it’s likely that some annotations I analyze will have changed or disappeared… My definition of re/marks privileges glimpsed visibility—not perpetuity—of a collective literacy practice, as marks read and rewritten inscribe new social narratives.”
Annotations come and go.
Same for walls and borders.
Re/Marks on Power is available April 15, 2025.
You can pre-order today from your preferred retailed via MIT Press. The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.
If the book’s $40 cost is prohibitive, please know it will be openly accessible thanks to MIT Press’ Direct to Open program. And, as I have done each year since 2022, I will donate my book royalties to charity.
Here are a few additional photographs of this marked boundary that don’t appear in the book.
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