Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US–Mexico Divide by C. J. Alvarez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US–Mexico Divide by C. J. Alvarez Caitlin Blanchfield C. J. Alvarez. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US–Mexico Divide. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781477319031 Hardcover: 352 pages If recent footage of panels of the US–Mexico border wall being toppled by high winds and of flood waters "smashing through" border wall construction sites is an indication, nature would rather see the border wall unbuilt.1 C. J. Alvarez's Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US–Mexico Divide capably illustrates the entangled history of the built and natural environments of the US–Mexico borderlands. This volume is a significant contribution to the field of architectural history as well as environmental history and borderlands studies. As Alvarez points out, histories of the border often focus on the borderlands as spaces of social and political construction while environmental histories tend to focus on how development has transformed the landscape around the international divide. Alvarez intertwines both of these approaches by "advancing the notion that the border is a literal construction site." "Paying attention to the built environment of the border," he writes, "can help us understand the way it functions and for whom."2 The first chapter of Border Land, Border Water traces boundary surveys of the nineteenth century and the construction of stone and iron obelisks that cleaved Baja California, Sonora, and parts of Chihuahua in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. These beacons marked larger state projects both by the US and Mexico of mapping, surveying, and subdividing the borderlands in anticipation of future private development. "Just one more property line" in a vast landscape of extractive industries, Alvarez says.3 One of the strengths of this chapter is its reading of the desert through frameworks of both environmental history and aesthetics. Border markers were symbols of environmental management in a territory that many government administrators and settlers found both topographically challenging and unattractive. These two reactions arose from epistemological assumptions that rendered the desert a hard-to-inhabit wasteland—assumptions that, Alvarez points out, were extended to Indigenous peoples who lived in the borderlands. For instance, the Tohono O'odham Nation, whose homelands span the US–Mexico border, were depicted by surveyors as being as uncivilized as the landscape itself. The richness of the desert that the O'odham knew and prospered within was lost on these government officials. By looking at built interventions into the border, cultural perceptions of the border environment, and the social worlds of the borderlands, Alvarez constructs a layered and interconnected account of border building across different nations. This would have been made even stronger by discussing other cross-border Indigenous communities—such as the Yaqui and Kumeyaay—and by continuing this discussion through the book's longer chronology.4 While the border is a means of division, it is itself also divided. To the west of El Paso, the border is an imagined line, and to the east, it is an arcifinious boundary following the deepest channel of the Rio Grande. Border Land, Border Water shows how regulation and control unite the different types of construction across these terrains. Chapters one and two oscillate between descriptions of efforts to demarcate the border through these divergent territories and the impacts of the Mexican Revolution on border building all along the northern frontier. Modern militarization of the border, Alvarez argues, began with the Mexican Revolution, as the United States military began testing surveillance technology and developing [End Page 131] infrastructure to transport equipment and troops—an origin point for the militarized landscape of the border today and the intense accretion of surveillance infrastructure and architecture of control that limn the international divide. Some of Border Land, Border Water's most lively sections come from the detailed archival work Alvarez has undertaken in these chapters, revealing the borderlands as a terrain of individual experiences and relationships, not solely a reflection of state policies and top-down building projects. Chapters three and four focus on large-scale damming projects and efforts to reshape, harness, and manage the Rio Grande for commercial gain. Even...