170542 UE La Frontera - the aesthetics of the border in video, photography and performance art (2023W)

“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.” Gloria Anzaldúa

This class focuses on how the ruthless and savage border politics or surveillance, inequality and violence provoked by the “war against drugs” has affected the society living on the US-Mexico border to its core. Furthermore, this class attempts to understand a border in a symbolic, physical and social way—for example, thinking of language as a territory and fashion as a mechanism of identity. In constructing families or disintegrating the same, we will analyze, for example, the works of Teddy Cruz, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and others.


Borders become an entity of their own, and the US-Mexico border, being the most surveilled one, turns into an interesting space to analyze the mechanism of social discrimination, alienation, and getthoification and how artists approach these phenomena on both sides of the country or the region one could call The Frontera. The border becomes a culture of its own, with a specific slang, usage of money, and fluctuation between territories and passports. The multi-space that can be read in the border allows for experimentation in the realm of representation. Music with techno cumbia, ranchero punk and other mixes reminds us of the reflections highlighted by Mark Fisher in his book Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.