Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of the US–Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to border architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and additional valences of violence enacted through border landscapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the border’s imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecology of critical border studies becomes more proximate, material, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts its sensory affects – the border as experience.