Documenting Gender's Signs: Site, Performance, and the US-Mexico Border in Contemporary Art

Margeret Allen Crocker

doi:10.5070/r74155776

Abstract

Since the 1980s, artwork related to the US/-Mexico border region has employed site-specific and performative elements, collective production, and a distinctive set of images referred to as border semiotics. Rather than taking a purely critical approach to the symbols and interpretations of the US/-Mexico border, two women artists with cross-border identities engage and complicate these signs through their own artistic labor: Ana Teresa Fernández (b. Tamaulipas, 1980) and M. Jenea Sanchez (b. Arizona, 1985). Gender consistently influences both their performances as well as the interpretations of their works; because both artists generate phenomenological encounters and illustrate shifting subject positions to expose hegemonic readings of border imagery. This essay argues that by working to demystify the pervasive image of “woman as landscape” in art of the US/-Mexico border, these two artists implant a feminist approach into this evolving language that questions the repeated “types” of Mexican and cross-border womanhood throughout history and literature. Viewership is central to this argument and to the works in question: each artist purposefully engages a larger collective of interpreting viewers to through documentation as the ultimate collective feminist act.

Highlights

On the beach between San Diego and Tijuana, vertical steel slats stand close enough together that the spaces between them are impenetrable to human bodies, creating a physical demarcation of the border between the United States and Mexico
Her performance is part of a longer history of artists whose work depends on both site and documentation, yet Borrando la Frontera intervenes in a way that makes gender an integral part of conversations about the border
Employing her family’s camioneta, or small van service in Agua Prieta, Sanchez joins passengers as they cross the border into the United States

Summary

Margaret Allen Crocker

On the beach between San Diego and Tijuana, vertical steel slats stand close enough together that the spaces between them are impenetrable to human bodies, creating a physical demarcation of the border between the United States and Mexico. By climbing a ladder while wearing a cocktail dress and taking on the physical labor of painting, Fernández uses the imagery of gender roles to point out the labor of living between two cultures Sanchez literalizes this in-between position through her documentation of her crossing, a task she is able to do only because of her role as a woman. She uses a relajo sensibility to perform an imagined future where national borders are rendered invisible, centering other identities Fernández uses her costume to draw attention to women’s invisible labor, highlighting the critical, but often unnoticed, role it plays in these contested sites. Her signature in blue paint remains at the border, and in the documentation of her performance long after the slatted wall reappears against the sky

From Agua Prieta to Phoenix and Back Again

Envisioning the Border beyond the Borderlands