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"Necessity knows no law": artist-run spaces & the spatial politics of Tijuana's public domain

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"Necessity knows no law": artist-run spaces & the spatial politics of Tijuana's public domain

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Content “NECESSITY KNOWS NO LAW”:
ARTIST-RUN SPACES & THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF TIJUANA’S PUBLIC DOMAIN

by

Cesar Garcia

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Cesar Garcia

ii
Dedication

For my brother, Valentin Garcia Jr.
(1976-2009)
&
For Marcos Isaac Ramirez Orozco
(1991-2009)

iii
Acknowledgements

The trek to this completed manuscript has been made up of hundreds of border-
crossings—both real and imaginary. I would like to thank my parents, Otilia and Valentin Garcia
for making the first and most challenging one; your sacrifices have made all the difference in my
life. Sincere indebtedness is owed to my immediate and extended family, specially my sister
Erika who has been my backbone, given me strength, and helped me get my life back. I also owe
my strength and perseverance to my nieces and nephews—Samantha, Natalie, Nicole, and Rey;
thank you for your smiles and warm hugs. You fill me with joy, reinvigorate me, and have made
this process so much sweeter. I’d also like to acknowledge my older cousins Jimmy and Brenda
Bañuelos, and Marisela Ramos, and my aunt Juanita Macias Garcia, who over the course of this
thesis process and the tragic events I experienced provided unwavering support and helped me
find light in the darkest of places. I’d also like to offer my everlasting gratitude to my brother,
Valentin Garcia Jr., who was violently taken from us and whose untimely death has changed my
family’s life forever. Thank you for always being a protective big brother, for setting a good
example, and for always lifting our spirits. I love you and miss you so much.
I also owe thanks to many close friends who over the course of my graduate studies have
lend an ear, provided critical insight, and supported my academic and professional endeavors. To
Paul Camarena, Daniel and Almendra Perez, Christian Diaz, David Rodriguez, Edward Cordero,
Carissa Requejo, Crystal Calvillo, and my UCLA Gamma family—thank you for your friendship
and for believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.
I am also indebted to many people at USC who made my research and this thesis a
reality. First and foremost, I’d like to thank the members of my thesis committee. To Donna
Conwell and Joshua Decter, thank you for your patience and understanding throughout this
process. Your support, guidance, editorial insight, and challenging perspectives were instrumental
iv
in the formative process of this project. To Lauri Firstenberg, my mentor, thank you for
supporting me and cultivating both my academic and curatorial interests. Your pedagogical
engagement has served as a constant reminder of the purpose of my work and has both inspired
and challenged me in profound ways. Thank you for helping me find my voice as a writer, and for
bringing me along in one of the most rewarding journeys over these past two years. I’d also like
to thank Janet Owen Driggs who provided me with an enlightening perspective and approach to
teaching and the undergraduate public art studies students who challenged me to master my field
and who epitomize the promising future of public art practitioners. Thanks also go to Sue Bell
Yank for her friendly criticism and for always helping me keep my feet on the ground. This thesis
could also not have been finished without the support of Dean Weisberg, Elizabeth Lovins, and
Antonio Bartolome Jr. who have been immeasurably helpful and encouraging.
Deep appreciation is extended to many people in Tijuana and Mexico who played an
instrumental role during my research process. Thanks to Giacomo Castagnola, Teddy Cruz, Javier
Ramirez Limon, Sebastian Mariscal, Camilo Ontiveros, Rene Peralta, Luis Sanchez Ramirez,
Lucia Sanroman, and Felipe Zuñiga for generously sharing with me their wealth of knowledge
about Tijuana’s cultural landscape. Many thanks also go to Joaquin Segura who assisted me in
obtaining documentation of early alternative art spaces in Mexico City. I also must thank the
family of Estación Tijuana. There are no words that will ever be able to express my appreciation
for your work and your commitment to a better Tijuana. Mil gracias a Coco Gonzalez por su
amistad y solidaridad durante uno de los tiempos mas difíciles de mi vida. Estoy tambien
endeudado a Omar Pimienta, un gran artista y amigo que me ha dado fuerza e inspirado para
continuar mi trabajo. Finalmente, quisiera dar muchisimas gracias a Marcos Ramirez ERRE.
Este trabajo no se hubiera realizado sin su generosidad y su confianza. Es uno de los mejores
artistas que conozco y su obra me sigue asegurando que el poder del arte para cambiar la vida
de los seres humanos no ha desaparecido. El logro de este tesis le pertenece a usted.
v
Lastly, I want to thank Tijuana, a city that has given and taken so much from me and that
has taught me that in life some things can’t be understood solely with our intellect; they have to
be understood with our gut as well, no matter how painful it might be.

Cesar Garcia
August 2009

vi
Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures vii

Abstract viii

Introduction: 153/09/201/AP 1

PART I: Walls, Glocalisms, and ‘Border Art’—Historical Perspectives 10

Chapter 1: (B)ordered Ecologies & Hybrid Imaginaries 10
1.1. Along The ‘Thin Edge of Barbwire’: A Border, Two Nations, and an Urban
Imaginary 10
1.2. Vanishing Walls and Rising Globalisms: Toward A World Without Borders 12
1.3. Structural Palimpsests: Tijuana, The Phantom City 14
1.4. Negotiating Glocality: The Border as Polyvalent 15

Chapter 2: Border Art and the Culture of the ‘In-Between’ 20
2.1. Early Border Art (1980-1990) 20
2.2. The Legacy of inSite (1992-2001) 21
2.3. Cultural Practices in the Public Sphere: inSite05 29
2.4. Temporal Restrictions of the Large-Scale Exhibition Model 31
2.5. Heterotopia Realized: The Special Events Weekends 32
2.6. Post-inSite Tijuana: Thoughts & Reflections 37

PART II: ¡Aquí Empieza La Patria!—Revisiting Tijuana 40

Chapter 3: Nation Without A State: Notes From The Home Front 40
3.1. The Cartel Wars & The Militarization of the Border 40
3.2. The Quarantined City 42
3.3. Tijuana’s State of Exception & The (Im)possibilities of the Public Sphere 45

Chapter 4: Tijuana’s Cultural Economy 52
4.1. Tijuana’s Cultural Infrastructure: The Artist as Architect 52
4.2. Alternative Art Spaces: New York to Mexico City 55
4.3. Necessity Knows No Law: Reconsidering the Artist-Run Space 60

Chapter 5: The Artist-Run Space as Public Domain 63
5.1. The Public Domain Experience 63
5.2. Estación Tijuana 64
5.3. Between Friction & Possibility: Exhibitions & Lecture Series 69

Conclusion 75

Bibliography 77
vii
List of Figures

Figure 1.1. U.S.-Mexico international boundary marker. 12

Figure 1.2. Kenneth Cole billboard near San Ysidro port of entry. 16

Figure 1.3. BAW/TAF, The End of the Line, 1986. 19

Figure 2.1. Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Century 21, 1994. 18

Figure 2.2. Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Toy an Horse, 1997. 17

Figure 2.3. Krzystof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection/ Proyección en Tijuana, 2001. 16

Figure 2.4. Mark Bradford, Maleteros, 2005. 36

Figure 2.5. Javier Tellez, One Flew Over The Void/(Bala Perdida), 2005. 37

Figure 3.1. Vehicle inspection at the San Ysidro point of entry. 45

Figure 3.2. Tijuanenses protest violence and corruption. 49

Figure 3.3. Marcos Ramirez ERRE, ICE/EYES TOWER (in progress), 2008. 50

Figure 4.1. Joaquin Segura, take a leak in some gallery corner, 2002. 51

Figure 4.2. La Panaderia. 52

Figure 5.1. Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Stop Signs (Pain, Hate, Fear, War), 2006. 67

Figure 5.2. My Barbarian performance at Estación Tijuana. 70

Figure 5.3. Luis Sanchez Ramirez, TRANSNACIONAL (installation view), 2009. 70

Figure 5.4. Shinpei Takeda presentation at Estación Tijuana. 70

viii
Abstract

Despite Mexico's pervasive history of narcotrafficking and violence, the current situation
in cities along the US-Mexico border has entered an unprecedented violent phase. This thesis is
historically positioned in these conditions and analyzes the ways through which the increased
militarization of Tijuana and the use of fear as a psychological mechanism of control have torn
the city’s public sphere. Providing a historical analysis of artist-run spaces in Tijuana, this
investigation considers how contemporary artists are using spatial strategies to respond to the
city’s calamitous conditions. Using Estación Tijuana as an initial case study, this thesis initiates a
proposition that positions recently founded artist-run spaces in Tijuana as generators of public
domain experiences. Thus, proposing the possibility of a new ecology for the survival of public
practice in Tijuana; one in which artists not only create work in the public sphere, but also
generate the infrastructure of the public sphere itself.

1
153/09/201/AP
INTRODUCTION

On April 30, 2009 at 2:10am, members of the specialized municipal police unit against
organized crime in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, arrived at Colonia Sepanal in the Mesa de
Otay section of the city after receiving information about the possible finding of a cadaver inside
a parked car. The vehicle, a stolen white Nissan Maxima with California license plates, had been
abandoned at the intersection of Tijuana and Mexicali streets across from the Castillo Magico
Special Events Hall. Upon arriving at the scene, officers and the forensic team confirmed the
finding of the cadaver of an unidentified man inside the vehicle. The backseat had been lowered,
and the body had been pushed halfway into the trunk of the car, leaving the man’s legs laying on
the backseat. The body had then been covered with a large beige piece of plastic. The man was
found wearing a gray muscle shirt, blue boxer shorts, and white socks. His hands were tied and
his body was severely bruised and had marks that indicated torture. The responding officers
stated in their report that the man had light brown skin, was about 6’1”-6’3” and weighed
approximately 250-275lbs. After initial analysis of the body at the scene, forensic doctors
determined that based on the state of decomposition, the man had probably been dead for 2-3
days. The man did not have any form of identification besides a large tattoo on his left arm. The
body of the man, like all other unidentified bodies in Tijuana, was picked up and taken to the
Servicio Medico Forense (SEMEFO) where a full autopsy would be performed as required by
law. Authorities also retrieved the vehicle he was found in as well as other evidence from the
crime scene. An investigation was opened and the case was assigned the following number:
153/09/201/AP.
On April 28, 2009 at about 5:00pm, a family in Lynwood, California received news that
their oldest son of 33 had been kidnapped in Tijuana on April 27. The family was aware of their
son’s visit to Tijuana—a city he frequented to visit friends. After not returning from the grocery
2
store to the home of the friends he was visiting during his trip, his friends attempted to contact
him via phone only to hear from his captors that he was with them. The kidnappers did not make
any ransom requests and never contacted the friends again. His phone was immediately turned off
after this call, and his family did not receive any phone calls or demands. Local Sheriff authorities
in Lynwood opened a local investigation and contacted the FBI who assigned agents to the case.
A preliminary missing persons report was filed and the 72-hour waiting period required before
agents could take further action began. In the meantime, his family reported the incident to the
US State Department, the US Embassy in Mexico City, and the US Consulate in Tijuana. After
72 hours and no communication from the kidnappers, FBI agents put the family in contact with
Mexican federal agents who assisted the family with the filing of a local report in Tijuana.
Mexican federal agents from the anti-kidnapping unit were assigned to the case and began
communication with the family’s youngest son who would be the designated point of contact. On
May 11, 2009, the family’s youngest son received a phone call from the Mexican agents assigned
to his brother’s case and they requested he go to Tijuana to receive some critical developments.
When he arrived in Tijuana on May 12, 2009, he was informed that a cadaver had been found that
displayed similar facial characteristics to those seen in the photograph of his brother that the
agents had been provided with. He was escorted to the SEMEFO, taken to the front of the line of
people waiting to see the “weekly load” of bodies in hopes of finding a missing loved one, and
then taken to the forensic amphitheater where he positively identified the body of his brother. The
Chief Forensic Doctor prepared all identification paperwork for case 153/09/201/AP and stated
that the cause of death had been anoxemia through strangulation and that based on toxicology
analyses and the autopsy, it was believed the man had been robbed and killed almost immediately
upon capture. The name of the murdered man was Valentin Garcia Jr. The younger brother who
identified his body was me.
3
My brother is only one of 12,300 people who have been killed since December 2006 as a
result of the escalating violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
1
Immediately following Mexican
President Felipe Calderon’s inauguration in 2006, the Mexican government publicly declared a
war against the drug cartels. Deploying thousands of federal troops, launching an anti-corruption
program across all law enforcement agencies, and aggressively seizing large quantities of drugs,
the Mexican government has pushed the violence once contained within rival cartels and corrupt
law enforcement units out into cities all across Mexico. With little support from corrupt officials
once paid to secure the cartels’ transport routes, the cartels have turned to strategies like robbery,
kidnapping, and murder to sustain and fund their trade. Their targets now include the local, state,
and federal governments, and the civilian casualties of war seem to have become nothing but an
unfortunate side effect of this civil strife.
For the past three years the warring conditions affecting Mexico, specifically, cities like
Tijuana along the U.S.-Mexico border, have spread across media circuits and become a
centerpiece of discussion on an international level. The governments of the U.S. and the
European Union have now been forced to respond to security threats they face as a result of drug
trafficking and to take a more direct role in stopping this growing illicit market. Newspapers
around the world have become oversaturated with headlines of daily killings, bodies dissolved in
sulfuric acid, kidnappings, decapitations, top law enforcement officer arrests, and drug seizures.
The Tijuana that for many was once sketched as a daytime tourist attraction, a destination to buy
cheap prescription drugs, or an exotic playground of bars and nightclubs where American
teenagers could indulge in a “foreign” culture for one night, is now depicted as a militarized and
violent home front. Despite the surge in violence that has surfaced, the lives of Tijuanenses
continues and positive developments in the city have occurred even if they have been

1
Figure of total death toll related to the cartel wars obtained from “Drug cartel war in Mexico claims further victims,”
Welt Online English News, July 14, 2009, http://www.welt.de/international/article4116269/Drug-cartel-war-in-
Mexico-claims-further-victims.html (accessed July 24, 2009).

4
overshadowed by its turbulent ambiance. For Tijuanenses, the image of their city and its daily
reality is not just formed by the large disparaging headlines that dominate local newsstands, but
also by those in small font that never reach a public larger than the student who crosses the border
daily to go to school in San Diego or the local shop owner who has made a living for years selling
crafts to tourists waiting to cross the international checkpoint. The Tijuana that is lived,
experienced, and understood by those whose lives are molded by its conditions is not the same
Tijuana that others living outside that context believe it to be.
This void in the understanding of locality has been a prominent thread in the historical,
socioeconomic, and cultural development of Tijuana. From the time the border was established to
the intensification of globalization, Tijuana has stimulated intellectual investigation into a myriad
of socio-cultural phenomena. Rather than being considered simply a complicated geographic
location, Tijuana and the border like Ole Bouman states have become a popular “framework
within which institutions and disciplines operate.”
2
The dominant discursive and ideological
structures that have emerged from this framework and created a set of references through which
the border is understood have crystallized a prism that allows only a thin segment of a wide
spectrum of frequencies molding border dynamics to become visible. This visible wedge that
manifests itself through the constructed image of Tijuana, whether that be one of a violent
militarized zone or one of a laboratory for cross-cultural art production, leaves a broad range of
unseen processes and interactions and establishes a rigid frame for the portrait of the city.
In many ways my family’s experience mirrors Tijuana’s constantly reconstructed
narrative. From its physical role as a point of entry to Mexico, to its function as a cultivator of
global industries and labor, to its place as the lower confine of one of the largest megalopolis’ in
the world, Tijuana’s history has been structured as a factual-mythical dichotomy. Every chapter

2
Ole Bouman, “Don’t Save Art, Spend It!,” in Manifesta 3: European Biennial of Contemporary Art (Slovenia:
Cankarjev dom Culture and Congress Center, 2000), 15.

5
that unfolds, every economic, political, social, and cultural image of the city that is put forth, is
caught amidst the negotiation of the real and the imaginary, the publicized and the concealed, the
seen and the unseen.
For the past two years my research has explored these complex negotiations and the
narrow, discursively-manufactured constructs of Tijuana that prominently emerge as their
byproduct. Focusing specifically on the interactions molding the cultural infrastructure in
Tijuana, my research has looked at how the city’s geographical, sociopolitical, and economic
transformations have led to the structuring of the now historicized field of ‘border art.’ How can
one engage the now taxonomically categorized cultural practices of artists, architects, designers,
and curators working in the Tijuana/San Diego border region? Despite the rapid and continuous
transmutations of the region’s cultural ecologies, artistic practices at the U.S.-Mexico border
remain tangled in discourses of hybridity, immigration, border-crossings, and “in-between”
spaces that then form the prism through which the context of these practices materializes in
prominent contemporary artistic discourse. Tijuana’s location at the edge of a large urban and
economic network that extends north to San Diego and Los Angeles has allowed cultural projects
that have explored this intricate terrain to seldom consider Tijuana as an autonomous locale.
Thus, like Lucia Sanroman, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
states, these projects have “fortified a context that is explained as the result of economic and
social convergences of the global and the local and that manifests itself through fusions and
cultural crosspollinations.”
3

It would be naïve to completely disregard the symbiotic relationships that sustain this
economic organism, and the impact of globalization on the restructuring of economic and
political exchanges, but is returning to the discourse of transnationalism and hybridism that the

3
Lucia Sanroman, “Evasive Maneuvers: Citizens and Aliens Under the State of Exception,” unpublished manuscript,
2008, 5.

6
current generation of artists working in Tijuana is ardently pushing away from appropriate, in
light of the unprecedented sociopolitical and cultural shifts that have occurred at the border in the
past five years? In 2010, inSite
4
, which has provided one of the most important critical platforms
for the investigation of artistic practices at the border and also the lens through which the work of
artists from Tijuana has been canonized, will mark its five-year anniversary since its last
incarnation. Since then, there have been no new major platforms for international interaction with
cultural practitioners in the region, and not much attention paid to the new generation of artists
working there. Cultural practices in Tijuana seem to remain contextually fixed, even though the
discussions of international cross-border flows, hybrid spaces, and globalization ring hollow in a
city now militarized and contained, both figuratively and literally.
It is this contemporary Tijuana demands historicization. This thesis aims to operate as
both the conclusion to the research I’ve conducted over the past two years and as a brief
proposition that will inform a future body of research I hope to develop. Using Tijuana’s current
sociopolitical conditions as a point of departure, my thesis proposes a shift from the contextual
understanding of border cultural production that has been created largely through contemporary
art exhibition projects to a context rooted in local conditions. The hope of my broader
investigation is to push away from the clichéd discussions of border art and to expand the visible
spectrum of cultural practices in Tijuana by focusing on how the development of local artists’
conceptual strategies and practices form the crux of a context for cultural production in the region
rather than simply map structured categorizations of border dynamics.
Through this thesis, I intend to lay a foundation from which to move toward a
reconsideration of the conception of Tijuana and its cultural production. With this in mind, the
focus of this thesis will be on historically and theoretically separating cultural practices in Tijuana

4
For the purpose of this thesis, this will be the standard spelling used when referencing the inSite exhibition (with the
exception of references made in direct quotations used). Spelling of the exhibition title changed with each version and
can also be found in publications as IN/SITE, inSITE, insite, and inSite_.

7
from a context marked by cross-cultural, hybrid, and transnational discourse and generated by
contemporary art exhibition projects; on crafting a position that considers Tijuana as an
autonomous city-space, and thus allows for an analysis of current artistic practices that is locally
grounded; and on providing an initial base for a broader perspective of Tijuana’s cultural
landscape by engaging in a modest, yet critical inquiry of Tijuana artists’ current practices as
embodied by the rise of artist-run spaces and their role in the formation of Tijuana’s public
sphere and public domain experiences.
Considering that a majority of the context for border cultural production in contemporary
art discourse is a result of the geographical, sociopolitical, and economic development of Tijuana
and the larger border region, the structural approach to this thesis divides the research into two
distinct parts. The first part, titled “Walls, Glocalisms, and Border Art—Historical Perspectives,”
focuses on providing a historical analysis of the development of Tijuana (Chapter 1) as well as
critical account of how contemporary art exhibitions, specifically the inSite projects, have
translated these developments into a framework for the contextualization of artistic practices at
the border (Chapter 2). After establishing this historical background the second part of my thesis,
titled “¡Aquí Empieza La Patria!—Revisiting Tijuana”, will shift discussion to explore
contemporary Tijuana and its cultural topography.
The first chapter in this second section (Chapter 3) will provide an overview of the social
and political developments resulting from the cartel wars and will then examine how the
militarization of the city and the discursive strategies of isolation generated through media
coverage of the ongoing violence and US government policies have fostered a state of quarantine
that has isolated Tijuana from both the rest of Mexico and the United States. Considering Tijuana
in this contained position allows for a separation from the discourse of transnationalism and
hybridism that is overly used when Tijuana is considered part of a larger global structure instead
of an independent city-space. From this stance, the investigation, now locally grounded, moves
8
forward with an explanation of Tijuana’s political history and uses the writings of Giorgio
Agamben to discuss how Tijuana’s innate ‘state of exception’ has led to a blurring of the
distinction between law and lawlessness that has been enhanced and made visible through the
current shadowy relationship between the Mexican State and the cartel organizations. The chapter
concludes by exploring how this ongoing and rapid deterioration of the State puts forth
complications for the realization of a public sphere in the city, and thus generates various
obstacles for free expression.
Chapter 4 uses the hurdles cultural producers are facing in Tijuana as a historical lens to
lay out a survey of Tijuana’s cultural economy and look back at how political and cultural
complexities have influenced the development of artistic practices. Focusing on the lack of a
cultural infrastructure in the city during a majority of the twentieth century, the investigation
evaluates the role Tijuana artists have had in the development of cultural spaces, and argues that
their response to the lack of support for cultural practices, embodied by their initiation of artist-
run spaces, allowed artists to consider these spaces appendages of their larger practices and thus
artworks themselves. To differentiate between the development of these unique spaces and the
larger movement of alternative art spaces, the chapter provides a brief historical account of the
alternative art space movement and the conditions that activated it, focusing specifically on their
oppositional ideology toward mainstream cultural institutions. In light of the fact that Tijuana did
not have any cultural institutions, formal cultural academic programs, or state support for cultural
practices until the late twentieth century, artist-run spaces in Tijuana will not be tied to an
oppositional framework, but rather considered historical forms inherent to Tijuana artists’
practices. This tactic of using artist-run spaces to respond to local conditions in Tijuana will then
be used as a framework to analyze currently developing artistic trends.
Using the aforementioned analytical model, Chapter 5 will provide a comprehensive case
study of Estación Tijuana, an artist-run space founded by Marcos Ramirez ERRE, an artist who
9
rose to international attention through the inSite projects and has become an emblematic figure of
border cultural production. The history of Estación Tijuana will be documented as a discussion of
the artist’s conceptual practice and its manifestation in the formation of the space. The case study
will then consider Estación Tijuana as an ongoing artwork intended to generate public domain
experiences in response to Tijuana’s shattered public sphere. The analysis of the work will be
realized through an archival study of its materials—exhibitions and lecture series.
The conclusion section of this thesis will consider some of the problems of this type of
practice from both historical and contemporary views, while also evaluating the effectiveness of
this practice in generating a new possibility for public domain experiences. Briefly outlining
similar trends in the practices of a new generation of artists working in Tijuana, the investigation
then considers some of the possible future developments for artistic practice at the border, paying
close attention to the implications of a newly appointed director to the city’s largest cultural
center. Rather than taking an overly assertive position on the validity of the propositions laid out,
the thesis will provide an endnote made up of series of questions about the problems of its
analysis and potential future investigations. The goal of this is to make a critical provocation that
stimulates new approaches to artistic practices in Tijuana; hopefully approaches that are more
responsive than categorizational and that widen the visible frequencies forming Tijuana’s cultural
membrane in order to provide a more accurate contextualization of border artistic practices in art
historical discourse.

10
PART I: Walls, Glocalisms, and Border Art—Historical Perspectives

(B)ordered Ecologies & Hybrid Imaginaries
CHAPTER 1

1.1. Along The ‘Thin Edge of Barbwire’: A Border, Two Nations, and an Urban Imaginary

In 1848 the United States acquired a majority of its current Southwest territory with the
signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican-American War. While the
treaty brought an end to the conflict between Mexico and the United States, it also imposed a
2,000-mile long geopolitical border across an almost uninhabited swath of arid natural landscape
that would now be the shared edge of two vastly distinct nations (Figure 1.1). For years after its
establishment, the border territory remained largely bare and separated from the growth of both
the United States and Mexico. In this sense, the region played the traditional functional role of a
border zone—a highly guarded buffer that clearly demarcates the end of one nation-state and the
beginning of another. This natural geographic isolation from the developments occurring in the
centers of both nations generated a center-periphery polarization that positioned the border and
the cities that would eventually form along it as a marginal environment, detached and divergent
from the rest of the territories it confined.
The second half of the twentieth century brought drastic changes to the desolate
borderlands. Mexico launched a national economic development program aimed at economically
and physically expanding the cities along its northern border while a shift in regional economic
and political power in the United States pushed resources and capital to sparsely settled sectors of
the Southwest.
5
Mexico began to see groups of immigrants originally headed to supply the labor
demand in the United States stay to populate cities along the border, while in the United States,

5
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 4-5.

11
cities like El Paso and San Diego began developing competitive economies in the decades
following WWII.
6
By the 1980’s, like border scholar and geographer Lawrence A. Herzog
describes, the borderlands were no longer a vacuous terrain, but rather, had large and growing
populations and well-developed economic and social infrastructures.
7
These developments
Herzog states, “abruptly [brought] together into a common life space two very different societies,
one from the industrial North, the other from the less-developed South. This abrupt confrontation
of two disparate cultures [left] its mark on the settlements themselves . . . [for] space [now
became] more than a simple physical container of land uses and people woven together in a
functional living environment; it [became] a repository for social, economic, and political
relationships.”
8

It is this repository model of transactions that Herzog details that would inform early
spatial reconfigurations of the border. The ongoing exchanges at the border, induced merely by
the sharing of a common topography, gave rise to an amorphous and slippery spatial dimension
that blanketed the region—an ephemeral condition, encompassing the cities along both sides of
the wall yet formed by the network of relationships between them, and existing within both
nation-states, while remaining stateless simultaneously. No longer Mexico, and no longer the
United States, this nebulous urban imaginary would set the stage for a reconsideration of border
spatial dynamics and interdependence, specially during a time when rising global economies
could potentially breathe life to its phantom structure.

6
Ibid.

7
Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 5.

8
Ibid.

12
Figure 1.1

U.S.-Mexico international boundary marker. Photograph courtesy of Omar Pimienta. Reproduced with permission.

1.2. Vanishing Walls and Global Structures: Toward A World Without Borders
The interrelationships that brewed out of the necessity for cohabitation by cities along
both sides of the border remained largely contained to this specific locale. The United States and
Mexico still remained at distinct extremities of economic and political spectrums. Mexico’s
declining economy however, would prompt Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to take a
much more active role in bridging the two country’s asymmetrical economies.
9
Accounts of
human rights violations and political instability incited by ongoing opposition to the PRI’s
continued rule across local and national politics fostered an environment many foreign investors
deemed too risky for business development. Swayed by these echoing obstacles, Salinas de
Gortari pushed for an aggressively abiding agreement with the United States that would tackle

9
Mexico’s economic woes historically lingered due to the lack of substantial foreign capital investments needed to
promote sustained economic growth.

13
Mexico’s declining economy by providing it with the foreign capital it needed, and by creating a
seemingly safe investing environment for foreign businesses through an economic linkage with
the US markets. This economic treaty came in the form of a free trade agreement signed in 1994
that today we commonly know as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).
10

The symbolic opening of the border to the free flow of capital, resources, and labor that
NAFTA secured would bring about drastic changes to the notions of border formation, nation-
states, and city-spaces. Once separated and clearly defined countries were now symbiotically
interdependent on each other’s capital and resources. This weaving of economic markets paired
with the boom of the information revolution during the early 1990’s created an intricate system of
transport veins and arteries that would sustain an economic organism now spanning from Tijuana
to Los Angeles. This economic infrastructure would spatialize the once phantom urban imaginary
at the border through the concrete exchanges of capital and labor. The repository of relationships
Herzog theorized was now concretely performed and articulated; giving rise to a spatial
framework that superseded both nations and the border itself.
These ongoing flows and exchanges also reorganized and fused the physical structures of
border-adjacent city-spaces. Nestor Garcia Canclini, one of the many scholarly voices that
emerged in the attempt to explain the transformations caused by these rising networks argues that
the rasping forces of global exchange caused “a destructuring of cities whose peripheries touch
upon the edges of other urban spaces, even when these contiguous urban cores transcend a
geopolitical boundary.”
11

In the case of Tijuana-San Diego-Los Angeles, the newly established economic linkages
and the rapid urban growth in all three cities that by the mid-1990s began to rub against each

10
Ibid.

11
Nestor Garcia Canclini, “De-urbanized Art, Border De-installations,” in Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo
privado en espacio público, ed. Sally Yard, trans. Sandra del Castillo (China: Palace Press International, 1998), 39.

14
other’s verges led to the decentralization of these city-spaces like Garcia Canclini states and also
gave rise to what Herzog terms a transfrontier metropolis—a physically, economically, and
culturally linked post-border terrain. What were once understood as fortified national boundaries,
sovereign nation-states, and defined city-spaces now became moldable abstractions in what
seemed to be a world without borders.

1.3. Structural Palimpsests: Tijuana, The Phantom City

The unforeseen transmutations to the fabric of Tijuana’s city-space, engineered by the
newly established global industrial complex that now straddled the border, conceived a
significant shift in the form and function of the city as well as generated a new theoretical
approach for engagement with Tijuana. Herzog traces this formative period in one of his most
recent writings titled “Global Tijuana: The Seven Ecologies of the Border.” In this recent work,
Herzog states that the rise of globalization indicated that external forces such as immigration,
foreign investors, and labor would now have a direct impact on the local and regional
infrastructure of urban development.
12
Herzog asserts that in this new “world of global marketing,
high technology, instantaneous communication, and rapid-fire cross-border movements, [the city
was no longer] measured merely by physically bounded space but by the behaviors and
perceptions of local and regional actors, responding to the new global reality.”
13
The
ramifications of this phenomenon led to a deconstruction of Tijuana that shifted its geographical
cartography from one that outlined the built environment of the city to one of layered physical
and imaginary terrains, constantly reforming and inducing a state of flux that propelled Tijuana
beyond graspable cognition; leaving behind remnant and colliding forces in a now phantom city

12
Lawrence A. Herzog, “Global Tijuana: The Seven Ecologies of the Border,” in Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of
Bajalta California, eds. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 120.

13
Ibid.

15
This new re-mapping of the city according to Herzog shifted the hegemonic discourse of
various disciplines in an attempt to understand the impact of these global processes. Tijuana was
no longer considered a city, but rather, a condition, formed by seven distinct ecologies that reflect
the power relations that form them. These environs that juxtapose to form an understanding of
Tijuana and the border include global factory zones made up of the new manufacturing plants
sprawling at the border; transnational consumer spaces that include new shopping malls and
landscapes dominated by global marketing strategies (Fig 1.2); global tourism districts made up
of luxury developments designed specifically for foreign travelers; post-NAFTA neighborhoods
structured by newly built gated communities and growing suburbs; transnational community
places that materialize in the growing squatter communities in Tijuana and immigrant
communities in San Ysidro; spaces of conflict made up of physical places, like the border wall
itself, that are embedded with the tension induced by the history of this site; and invented
connections which represent opportunistic strategies of urbanism performed by businesses and
developers who aim to profit from this growing transnational phenomenon.
14

This new architecture of layered domains would mold a majority of the scholarship and
research surrounding Tijuana and the border, fortifying a position of placelessness,
crosspollinations, and hybrid systems that residents of Tijuana would struggle to understand as
they negotiated home in a now dwelling space of homelessness.

14
Lawrence A. Herzog, “Global Tijuana: The Seven Ecologies of the Border,” in Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of
Bajalta California, eds. Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (New York: Routledge, 2003), 122.

16
Figure 1.2

Kenneth Cole billboard in Tijuana near the San Ysidro port of entry. Photograph courtesy of Omar Pimienta.
Reproduced with permission.

1.4. Negotiating Glocality: The Border as Polyvalent

While Tijuana now conveyed connotations of international governance, migration,
uncertainty, risk, movement, and change; and home is associated with stability, safety,
domesticity, and enclosure, for the people permanently settled in this location, Tijuana is home.
This experienced contradiction became a definitive aspect of the lives of people living in cities
along both sides of the border. The communal feeling of displacement induced by the spatial
reconfiguration of the border generated a border condition marked by a never-ending longing for
stability and place. The border, like art historian Jo-Anne Berelowitz states, became polyvalent—
a space of flow and a place of settlement concurrently.
15

15
Jo-Anne Berelowitz, “The spaces of home in Chicano and Latino representations of the San Diego-Tijuana
borderlands (1968-2002),” Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 23, 2005, pp. 323-350.

17
This reality that people inhabiting the border region experienced was reflected in the
cultural production emerging during this time. Perhaps one of the best examples of this
negotiation is seen in the work of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo
(BAW/TAF), a collective of artists from the San Diego/Tijuana area that explored the
complexities that made up the border experience. On October 12
th
, 1986, the collective staged a
site-specific performance in Playas de Tijuana, the place where San Ysidro and Tijuana meet at
the Pacific Ocean. At this time, the border wall did not extend out to the beach, and thus
beachgoers could cross between countries as they walked along the sand. For the performance,
the BAW/TAF staged a communal meal across the invisible international border at the beach.
The artists placed a table that was painted to resemble a freeway segment so that its length
straddled the part of the beach where the border was ephemerally situated (Fig 1.3). Before sitting
down, the artists rotated the table 90 degrees so that the length of the table was now perpendicular
to the border. Running from north to south, this symbolic table rearrangement referenced the
notion of free movement and passage that asserts the reality of the border as a space of movement
and fluidity. After this first rearrangement of the table, the artists moved it again so that it
straddled the border once more. The artists participating in the performance then sat at the table
based on their nationality—Mexicans on the Mexican side of the border and Americans and
Chicano/as on the US side. After being briefly seated, people sitting on both sides of the table
exchanged places, undermining the border as a physical divide and also situating themselves in a
foreign territory, alluring to a feeling of dislocation and insecurity. Once sitting, artists exchanged
food across the border, shared a meal, and held hands. The act of sitting at the table and sharing a
meal alludes to conceptions of the domestic, stability, and safety. In staging this act literally
across the international boundary, the BAW/TAF symbolically generated a situation associated
with home (sharing a meal) while being physically situated in an antithetical location correlated
with uncertainty and foreignness.
18
This performative act epitomizes the constant negotiation defining the border experience
and also unveils the mediation that would become a signature strategy used by artists to
conceptualize Tijuana and the border. Although the BAW/TAF’s performance, The End of the
Line, clearly demonstrated the complex dialogue between the border’s role as a place of home
and its function as a space of flow and movement, it did not directly position the border in a
grounded context. Instead, artistic production approached the border as the indeterminate zone of
fission structuring the negotiation between the two functions it now had. This conceptualization
of the border as an “in-between” would deepen the void of locality already existent in the border
and would also furnish an exotic appeal for border cultural production that would draw
international attention and set the course for the emergence of a new art historically christened
genre—“border art.”

19
Figure 1.3

BAW/TAF, The End of the Line, 1986. Photograph provenance: California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives,
Department of Special Collections, Donald Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.

20
Border Art & The Culture of the ‘In-Between’
CHAPTER 2

2.1. Early Border Art (1980-1990)

The BAW/TAF rose to become one of the iconic emblems of cultural production at the
U.S.-Mexico border during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The group, founded in 1984 by
Michael Schnorr, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, David Avalos, Victor Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Jude
Eberhart, and Sara-Jo Berman was associated with the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park
in San Diego. Since its founding, the group dedicated itself to exploring the complexities and
political dimensions of the Mexican-American border as well as proposing a utopic conception of
a borderless border region. Their various projects often took the form of spectacle-like
performances and were rooted in the traditions of conceptual art. Until this time, most of the
previous art that responded to the border condition had used strategies of folk art or popular
culture for its representation, which is why the BAW/TAF is often credited as being one of the
first conceptual artist collectives at the U.S.-Mexico border.
16
Their projects began to draw
international attention and soon the collective was invited to participate in shows at Galeria de La
Raza in San Francisco, Artists Space in New York, and even the Venice Biennale in 1990. While
their active participation and involvement with the larger artistic community grew, soon members
of the collective began exploring their independent careers and the cohesiveness of their
collaborations diminished. New members began to join and others continued to leave, causing
rapid changes that weakened the collective’s voice and even imposed logistical complexities for
maintaining their until then active career.
Although the collective did not remain as active as during the years after its
establishment, it still played a critical role in the development of border art. Their
conceptualization of the border as an “in-between” zone and their often-elaborate performances

16
For a complete history of the BAW/TAF see their archival website: http://www.borderartworkshop.com.

21
that were shown around the world through international commissions induced a curiosity amongst
the contemporary art world as well as generated a tension amongst artistic communities in both
San Diego and Tijuana. The collective’s minimal yet poignant visibility drew many curators and
other cultural producers to look toward the border in search of other artists or practices that
responded to the timely appeal of borders and global structures. However, artists on both sides of
the border raised concerns about the misrepresentation of border practices and the way the
BAW/TAF was being singularly used to frame a border perspective.
17
This not only led to many
disagreements between the collective and other artists, but it also raised various questions about
the proper representation of border artists and about the ownership of the region’s cultural
economy. The intensifying momentum and tension around the border were reinforced by various
exhibitions that local cultural institutions like the Centro Cultural de La Raza and the Museum of
Contemporary Art, San Diego were organizing, and that although provided interesting approaches
to engage with border artists, still failed to provide a cohesive understanding of the broader
region. There seemed to remain a need for an explanation of these cultural practices, or perhaps
an answer to the overlapping voices attempting to define them. Such response would come in
1992 as a new project by Installation Gallery in San Diego—inSite.

2.2. The Legacy of inSite (1992-2001)
In 1992, Ernest Silva and Mark Quint working in conjunction with Installation Gallery in
San Diego developed inSite—a project that would use the U.S.-Mexico border as a platform of
inquiry for new models of artistic production and contemporary cultural strategies. This venture
commissioned new work in a bicultural setting, although a majority of the projects were staged in
San Diego, and hoped to “validate the potential for reflection sparked by artwork inserted into

17
For account of the early conflicts the BAW/TAF had with other artists in the region see: George Yúdice, The
Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), Chapter 9.

22
specific sites both public and private.”
18
What began as a two-month project configured as a web
of installations at distinct sites and venues throughout the San Diego/Tijuana region quickly grew
to become one of the many experimental large-scale exhibition projects established around the
world during the early 1990’s. Since its inception, inSite has had a total of five incarnations, each
distinct in both structure and conceptualization. The project’s second iteration in 1994 was
conceived in the midst of the polarizing political climate forged by the signing of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the development of the maquiladora industry, and
the intensification around the issue of immigration. This second staging of the project included
new commissions by nearly 100 artists at over 39 sites and spanned for a period of three months.
Structured as a binational collaboration, inSite94 was organized by Installation Gallery, the
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT). All other
participating partner organizations and venues curated their own projects and were kept informed
about the development of the larger project scheme through continual meetings of an established
organizing committee.
19
The platform for this manifestation of inSite approached the site of the
U.S.-Mexico border as a focal point for its engagement and placed an “emphasis on site-specific
installations that referenced the region’s historical, social, political, and geographical
specificity.”
20
Marcos Ramirez ERRE’s project for inSite94, Century 21, embodied the logic of
the exhibition platform while also unwittingly foreshadowing the broader implications this
version of the exhibition would have on the local cultural topography (Figure 2.1).
Responding to the economic and political complexities molding the rapidly changing
Tijuana city-space, ERRE conceived a public installation backdropped against Tijuana’s most
notable cultural institution, the CECUT. ERRE’s public intervention materialized the unearthed

18
“IN/SITE92 History,” inSite05 website, http://www.insite05.org (accessed March 22, 2009).

19
“inSite94 History”, inSite05 website, http://www.insite05.org (accessed March 22, 2009).

20
Ibid.

23
history of Tijuana’s informal shack-home settlements in the form of one of these provisional
dwellings. Complete with a dirt lot and fenced in by rows of old tires collected from one of many
Tijuana junkyards, this seemingly unsanctioned architectural appendage took the threads of free
trade, transnationalism, illegality, land ownership, and economic exchange that weave Tijuana’s
ostracized accounts of community displacement associated with its then recent urban
development, and needled them into the visible fabric of the city’s cultural center. Standing side
by side, in visual confrontation, the vernacular architecture of ERRE’s intervention and the
monumental spherical icon of the CECUT uncomfortably endured each other as they negotiated
between unremembered local pasts and future global possibilities.
This provocative gesture of inserting Tijuana’s periphery into the both physical and
symbolic cultural center of the city, although not intended by ERRE, also operated as a poetic
anticipation of the rapid transmutations that Tijuana’s fluid cultural membrane would undergo.
For many artists like ERRE, inSite94 provided a platform for their until then localized practices
to engage with the broader public and discourse of the globalized art community. Just like
Century 21, inSite94 would help bring the marginally unrecognized artistic strategies of the U.S.-
Mexico border to the center stage of the international art community. What was now to be seen
was whether these practices could continue to perform to the rhythm of an internationalized
artistic discourse, or just like Tijuana’s informal shack-home settlements, fade back into relative
obscurity.

24
Figure 2.1

Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Century 21, 1994. Photograph courtesy of Marcos Ramirez ERRE. Reproduced with
permission.

It was in this new globalized milieu that the inSite project would take a new course. The
growing discourse about globalization and the rapidly growing information revolution would
bring to question the now fragile concepts of borders & frontiers, nation-states, and site as a
permanent location. What arose in this climate of interconnected global economies and cyber
markets was a discourse marked by themes of space, temporality, the local vs. the global, and the
notion of a world without borders. These interrogations of site, fixity, and permanence would
echo in the conceptual approach the inSite project would develop for its next manifestations.
25
While the first two versions of the project engaged with the logic of installation and site-
specificity, the organizers of the inSite project realized, like Nestor Garcia Canclini states in his
essay contribution to the project’s 1997 catalogue, that “changes in the ways [they] live[d],
move[d] about, and communicate[d] [made] it clear that there [were] no longer any nation-bound
identities, nor single stable urban essence, nor fixed territories for art to represent.”
21
Rather than
focus on the impact of art inserted into a myriad of spatial contexts like the project’s original
mission called for, the third iteration in 1997 aimed to be “an investigation of public space—as
subject to be explored, not merely as a site for locating works,”
22
and its fourth iteration in 2000
went even further and intended to operate as an almost cartographical experiment that would
reveal flows across the border, hoping to map “the trafficking [of] goods and people, frustrations
and dreams [in order to reveal] new possibilities of linking people and places.”
23

These conceptual shifts of the inSite project were accompanied by structural changes that
morphed the project from a local investigation of border cultural and artistic practices to a new
type of international art event. In 1997, a curatorial team was introduced to the exhibition model
with hopes of giving conceptual guidance to the wide array of critical perspectives that the
project’s collaborators brought to inSite. A residency program was set in place to acquaint both
curators and artists with the region, and the roster of invited artists grew to include not just artists
living in San Diego/Tijuana, but also some of the most well known practitioners of the
contemporary art world including Vito Acconci, Francis Alÿs, Allen Kaprow, Andrea Fraser,
Mark Dion, Allen Sekula, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, amongst others. This progressive growth of

21
Nestor Garcia Canclini, “De-Urbanized Art, Border De-Installations,” in INSITE97: Private Time in Public
Space/Tiempo privado en espacio público, ed. Sally Yard, trans. Sandra del Castillo (China: Palace Press International,
1998), 47.

22
Carmen Cuenca and Michael Krichman, “Preface,” in INSITE97: Private Time in Public Space/Tiempo privado en
espacio público, ed. Sally Yard, trans. Sandra del Castillo (China: Palace Press International, 1998), 8.

23
Susan Buck-Morss, Ivo Mesquita, Osvaldo Sanchez, Sally Yard, “Curatorial Statement/Marco curatorial,” in insite
2000-2001: Parajes fugitivos/Fugitive Sites, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Mexico: Offset Rebosán S.A. de C.V., 2002), 22.

26
the project increased its press coverage and reviews. The 1997 version of the project alone
received “over twenty reviews and feature articles in journals like Art in America, Art Nexus,
Artfocus, Artforum, ARTnews, Contemporary Art, Flash Art, International Contemporary Art,
New Art Examiner, Public Art Review, Sculpture, and World Sculpture News, as well as the most
important newspapers in Los Angeles, Mexico City, São Paulo, and Toronto.”
24
George Yúdice,
cultural scholar and professor of American Studies at New York University argues that this
international attention by the mainstream art world established the legitimacy of inSite since
“legitimacy can be established only by discursive strategies,”
25
thus, the thorough notice given to
the project christened a new type of border art that was no longer associated with a few
Tijuana/San Diego artists’ raw and disjointed practices, but instead was now associated with a set
of themes and concepts put forth by the evolving inSite platforms. Faced with drastically
different, even contradicting curatorial platforms with every model of the inSite project, critics
and art historians according to Yúdice, thought that the “proper response seem[ed] to be a
thematics of unveiling, of probing an underlying reality that [was] not the work itself but to which
the work refer[red] and it perhaps affect[ed]. Reviewers tend[ed] to cast their gaze over the wildly
varying projects and attempt to discern a set of themes that underpin[ned] the[ir] heterogeneity.
This [was] done by exercising an allegorical and/or metaphorical discernment that yield[ed]
insight into the otherwise ungraspable whole. In this sense, most of the writing about inS[ite] is
quite traditional, even art historical.”
26
From the emphasis on the geographical and sociopolitical
complexities of the site, to the discussion of space as subject, to the engagement with cross-
border flows, inSite’s frame of the border condition helped create a legitimate context for border

24
George Yúdice, The Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 288.

25
George Yúdice, The Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 289.

26
George Yúdice, The Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 313.

27
artistic practices. Soon, just like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc became a symbol of early public art
practices in the United States, projects like Marcos Ramirez ERRE’s Toy an Horse (Fig. 2.2) and
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Tijuana Projection/Proyección en Tijuana (Fig. 2.3) became iconic
representations of border art. Although artists like the BAW/TAF had previously responded to the
complexities molding the border’s rugged physical and socio-spatial terrain, the discourse
emerging from the inSite exhibition seemed to operate autonomously, establishing conceptual
criteria for what could and could not be affiliated with contemporary border artistic practices. The
work of the BAW/TAF and other artists like Richard Lou who had worked in the region for years
was pushed into a historical vacuum, making way for the now relevant practices showcased by
the premiere contemporary art project in the San Diego/Tijuana border.
The density of discourse that emerged from these projects gave way to various clichés
that were soon used to place the practices showcased by inSite in the broader conversation of
contemporary art. The field of ‘border art’ seemed to be ossifying, and the organizers of the inSite
project, responding to both this emerging rigidity and the art world’s need for novel and
appealing approaches, knew that a different route was necessary for its next iteration. It was in
this environment that Osvaldo Sanchez, the artistic director of the 2005 version of the project
would undertake the difficult challenge of pushing away from the classification of border artistic
practices that the inSite project itself had helped structure. In order to take on such endeavor,
Sanchez would try to shift focus from the artwork as an object to be viewed and analyzed to an
investigation of the public fabric of the region. This exercise however, although conceptually
effective, would not be able to deconstruct inSite’s well-established branding mechanisms, and
would also give insight into the problems the exhibition model itself created that eventually
nurtured the project’s categorization process of artistic practices.

28
Figure 2.2

Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Toy an Horse, 1997. Photograph courtesy of Marcos Ramirez ERRE. Reproduced with
permission.

Figure 2.3

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection/Proyección en Tijuana, 2001. Photograph provenance: inSite Archive.

29
2.3. Cultural Practices in the Public Sphere: inSite05

While the four first incarnations of the exhibition gestured to the fluctuating formations
and re-formations of the border, its last and most recent reiteration significantly drifted from an
exploration of the border in and of itself. Osvaldo Sanchez, artistic director of the 2005 inSite
Interventions, expressed concern for the enormous amount of local artistic production at the
border that referenced clichéd representations of the borders trendy and over exhausted
conceptualizations.
27
Rather than provide a concrete curatorial framework for artists to respond
to, Sanchez hoped to employ a heuristic paradigm for the interventions—a process-driven
exploration that would analyze the ‘informal’ in the region in order to “involve a more profound
understanding of certain local tactics of resistance . . . against the entropic vortex of the border
region.”
28
This engagement would “encourage low key interventions and consciously reject an
exhibition format and an art world public as the principal audience for the projects.”
29
This
process, according to Sanchez, would require an interrogation of conventional notions of
authorship and representation, and a critical separation from the art world. Artists would then be
allowed to abandon the idea of the object as a final product in order to “stimulate dis-alienating
experiences at the heart of urban flows without attempting to represent or aestheticize them.”
30

These experiences would instead unveil hidden social and economic processes, invisible
itineraries, and practices of everyday life. Reflecting the fragilities, collisions, and contradictions

27
Although the 2005 version of inSite was structured as a three-tiered platform that aside from the Interventions
included an exhibition and a series of conversations, this thesis will focus solely on the Interventions component of the
exhibition. This branch of the project received the largest response from the contemporary art world as seen from the
extensive critical press coverage it received compared to the other components of the exhibition.

28
Osvaldo Sanchez, Fading Tracers, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book
Division 2006), 42.

29
Osvaldo Sanchez, Fading Tracers, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book
Division, 2006), 46.

30
Osvaldo Sanchez, Fading Tracers, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book
Division, 2006), 44.

30
of the public fabric at the border.
31
Above all, the curatorial team for the interventions wanted to
avoid exoticizing the border as a “territorial icon,”
32
which would make it much easier for artists
to be subject to the pull of the border, thus, making them susceptible to respond with yet another
clichéd or chic conceptualization. An intensive residency program was deployed over a period of
two years in order to facilitate this exploratory process. During four residency periods, lasting an
average of six weeks each, “artists had the opportunity to explore their experiences of being
outsiders”
33
while they attempted to familiarize themselves with the region, and worked with the
curatorial team and the interlocutors in the development of their proposals and during the
production process of their interventions. Yet “not all the artists and not every one involved in
inSite05 were comfortable with inscribing the projects at a low key level”
34
and “the restrictive
temporal framework of inSite as an event also forced a specific rhythm and accelerated and/or
shortened processes whose timings should have been determined by the nature of the projects
themselves”
35
not by the time frame of the overall event, marked by the progression of “inaugural
discourses, ‘special events weekends,’ [and] formal and informal tours to ‘see’ [these] quasi-
invisible projects, at the ‘opening’ moment.”
36
Despite the curatorial team’s attempts to steer
artists away from the pull of the border by rejecting the traditional exhibition model, the
interventions developed through a time-bound exhibition event framework. This caused many of
the projects and the Interventions component as a whole to become a time-encapsulated space,

31
Refer to Sanchez’s essay, Fading Tracers, in inSite05 exhibition catalogue for his definition of ‘public fabric.’

32
Term used by Osvaldo Sanchez during the third garage talk of the exhibition that took place October 23, 2005. He
was responding to a question that asked if he had been successful in avoiding an eroticization of the border.

33
Residencies Description, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book Division,
2006), 25.

34
Osvaldo Sanchez, Fading Tracers, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book
Division, 2006), 46.

35
Ibid.

36
Osvaldo Sanchez, Fading Tracers, in [Situational] Public, ed. Osvaldo Sanchez (Manitoba, Canada: Friesens Book
Division, 2006), 47.

31
activating the border the projects aimed to avoid and thus, never reaching the critical distance that
Sanchez hoped for.

2.4. Temporal Restrictions of the Large-Scale Exhibition Model
In order to establish how in rejecting the exhibition model, yet facing temporal restraints,
the interventions of the 2005 version of inSite gave rise to a distinct spatiality, it is important to
consider the impact of time in the processes of spatial formation. Anthropologist Marc Augè,
author of Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, defines ‘non-places’
as those places dealing only with individuals, but not with societal form.
37
It is when individuals
come together, he argues, that they foment the social and organize places in which identities,
relations, and history are embodied. Considering the construction of permanent locations devoted
to the representation and sometimes process-based practices of art through Augè’s framework,
scholar Alfredo Cramerotti maps an understanding of how in the absence of one ‘fixed’ location,
like in the case of the process-based interventions of inSite, the restraints of temporality function
to spatialize a time-bound exhibition event. Regarding the relations created by museums and
fixed venues, Cramerotti states that:
These relations are not organically social. They are ‘constructed,’ instilled from the very
moment in which visitors enter the building, ‘expecting’ to engage in discourses and so
‘setting’ their senses, language, and bodies in order to receive ‘the message.’ On this
basis, permanent museums and art venues are closer to non-places than places, in the
same way as airports, tollbooths, motorway structures, and supermarkets are for example
where visitors/passengers/customers enter the building expecting to ‘set’ a level of
relations pertinent the space, then consume or trade what is on offer, and leave again.
[Defining] ‘fixed’ spaces for art dialogues as ‘non-places,’ we could then define the
‘temporary’ spaces of interaction created by time-bound exhibitions (biennials,
triennials, quinquennials, and so on) as other-spaces, making use of the term coined by
Foucault.
38

37
Alfredo Cramerotti, “Mediating spaces: some considerations on the spaces of large-scale art exhibitions,”
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 2, no. 1: 53.

38
Ibid.

32
Considering the time-bound model in which the Interventions component of inSite05 was
situated, then it can be argued like Irit Rogoff states in her discussion of borders in Terra Infirma:
Geography’s Visual Culture, that in the raptures of these experiential interventions, inSite
animated the evacuated border it aimed to avoid by spatializing it as an other-space or like
Foucault terms, a heterotopia of internal contradictions—an ongoing processual engagement in a
definite temporal period. This constraint allowed the Interventions component to become an
example of “the ultimate heterotopia: a real phenomenon where no social structure is
implemented, because of their impermanent nature, [thus] the visitors’ relation with this space
[becomes] heavily mediated through written information and non-visual language formats,
[supplementing] a lack of first-hand ‘real-experiences’ data, which the visitors cannot otherwise
have except inside this structure.”
39

2.4. Heterotopia Realized: The Special Events Weekends

Looking at one of the special events weekends organized by inSite better demonstrates
the spatialization of this heterotopia that activated the border. Although originally inSite did not
intend to follow a traditional exhibition model, discussions between the curatorial team and the
interlocutors for the interventions raised a series of questions about the methods through which an
audience could be engaged with these processes, and if that engagement was needed at all in light
of the overall paradigm for the interventions. The position of inSite within the art world however,
and the temporal restraints of the exhibition did create an art world public for the projects. Donna
Conwell, associate curator of the inSite05 Interventions states that there was much discussion
about how to mediate these process-based works to an art world public without ossifying them as
art pieces or involving touring objects like past incarnations of inSite had done.
40
The ongoing

39
Alfredo Cramerotti, “Mediating spaces: some considerations on the spaces of large-scale art exhibitions,”
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 2, no. 1: 53.

40
Donna Conwell, personal correspondence to author, May 7, 2008.
33
discussions and questions posed eventually led to the development of a series of special events
weekends to constitute a public phase of the exhibition. This created many contradictions since
while attempting to frame these process-based works to an art world audience; the interventions
were conceptually aiming to distance themselves from a conventional art exhibition model.
Perhaps these contradictions are best illustrated in inSite05’s website description of these special
events weekends. While stating, “inSite 05 is not based on a traditional biennial model [and]
artists’ projects have developed as processes of collaboration and engagement in the region with
varying levels of visibility, [thus], many of the projects cannot be ‘viewed’ on a conventional
tour,”
41
the main page for potential visitors for these weekends stated that “two years of artist
residencies culminate [in the] Fall in four key weekends of public programming which highlight
new works of art throughout San Diego and Tijuana.”
42

Endeavoring to prevent a traditional exhibition model, these special events weekends had
an almost baby mobile-like structure—a series of events, conversations, and tours dangling
fluidly from a central anchor event (usually a performance or a spectacle-like display of one of
the interventions). The opening weekend, the first in the series, officially launched the public
phase of the exhibition and took place from August 25-28, 2005. The weekend included the
opening of Ute Meta Bauer’s Mobile Transborder Archive, the Farsites museum exhibition, and
the infoSITE’s, as well as tour buses to some interventions including Mark Bradford’s Maleteros
project (Fig. 2.4). The events were anchored by the human cannonball performance for Javier
Tellez’s One Flew Over The Void/(Bala Perdida) project (Fig. 2.5). The scheduling of the events
and the impossibility to see or participate in all of them due to time constraints affected the
relational experience of visitors. The visitors got to see the large performance events or
participate in conversation gatherings and tour to see some of the interventions, however, their

41
inSite05 website, http://www.insite05.org (accessed March 22, 2009).

42
Ibid.

34
participation lacked the first-hand experience of the ongoing engagement processes the
interventions were developed through and sometimes continued to be developed through even
after these special events weekends. Many of these projects were organized around the notion of
the ‘networked site,’ that is to say they were located at various points and sometimes these points
allowed for the projects to be experienced as artworks as with the performance of the human
cannonball, however, at other points, like Tellez’s ongoing workshops with mental patients, the
project was not experienced as art. What the special events weekends did was to highlight those
points where the projects were experienced as artworks and thus they created ‘exhibition
moments’ where the projects became ossified as art objects/events since the emphasis from the
overall development process of the projects was removed during these events. Thus, the
mediation through the rest of the network of points in the Interventions component was not direct,
but rather like Cramerotti states, mediated by written and non-visual methods—the guide books
produced for the weekends, the informational sheets for each intervention, and the other
publications inSite produced.
Artist Boyadjiev “point[s] out how documentation, exhibition catalogues, or any other
publications are not enough to fill the ‘space’ that exists between the works in a show, and even
less to fill the ‘void’ between the art world and the real world.”
43
Although perhaps it is possible
that a public might understand the context of these artists’ processes through publications without
directly experiencing them, and perhaps other publics can engage at different points of the
project, it is also important to maintain an overarching context of the entire development process
to avoid their contextualization as art objects/events. If there is no mediation for people to
understand the entire network directly somehow, then there is a risk that just like the projects
were ossified as artworks, that the interventions could become ossified and understood as a

43
Alfredo Cramerotti, “Mediating spaces: some considerations on the spaces of large-scale art exhibitions,”
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 2, no. 1: 52.

35
traditional exhibition composed by this network of special events weekends. Yúdice notes that
“of the 650 reviews and critical essays written about inSITE94, inSITE97, and the preparations
for the inSITE2000, not one deals with the year-long preparations, negotiations with public,
private, and community organizations, the acquisition of permissions, and so on that make [an
intervention] possible,”
44
and thus, the legitimacy of the inSite project in the larger artistic
discourse was still established discursively through the publications that focused on the works
themselves, generating yet another conceptualization of these projects as border art practices. So
while Sanchez and the rest of the curatorial team of inSite05 tried to separate the interventions
from the representations of the border, their positioning in art historical discourse still tied them
as another model of border art practices, and the distance and understanding of these projects as
ongoing processes never materialized. inSite maintained its position as a generator, or like Yúdice
terms, a maquiladora for border art.

44
George Yúdice, The Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 326.

36
Figure 2.4

Mark Bradford, Maleteros, 2005. Photograph provenance: inSite Archive.

37
Figure 2.5

Javier Tellez, One Flew Over The Void/(Bala Perdida), 2005. Photograph provenance: inSite Archive.

2.5. Post-inSite Tijuana—Thoughts & Reflections
Determining the benefits and negative implications inSite had on the cultural ecology of
the region is a task too broad to accomplish in this thesis, so rather than engage in an evaluation
of the project, I will focus on some of the conditions the inSite project created for artists and other
cultural practitioners who still remain in the region and whose entire practices and context was
affected by this project, specifically, the transformations it brought to the Mexican cultural
landscape and the fixity of context it left for Tijuana artists.
Prior to the inSite exhibition, support for cultural projects in Mexico was very much
contingent on the political climate of the country. President Salinas de Gortari launched a major
support campaign for cultural development in the early 1990’s, however, its focus was on
establishing a cohesive national identity and thus the support was largely focused on folk arts and
38
other traditional forms of government-approved cultural practices that highlighted tradition and
enforced a cohesive national identity. The support inSite received from U.S. cultural institutions
pushed Mexican government agencies, now attempting to situate themselves as active participants
of a global economy to fund contemporary practices that did not align with the national cultural
agenda, thus opening up possibilities for more contemporary projects all around Mexico. Curators
in Mexico who until then had extraordinary control over most of the exhibitions and cultural
programs in the country also lost some of this authority as inSite “endowed the figure of the
curator, particularly, the ‘independent’ curator, with a salience that [had] only recently emerged
in Mexico.”
45

Now while the inSite project opened up opportunities for contemporary practices and
encouraged their support by the Mexican government, the fixity and branding of border artistic
practices that it created also gave rise to many complications for Tijuana artists. The few Tijuana
artists that received major attention through their participation now had exhibiting opportunities
internationally, but this did not happen to the many others who were only invited once when their
work seemed relevant to the discourse inSite explored. Also, the artists who rose to the
international stage have remained classified as border artists—their broader conceptual strategies
attached to the themes and concepts popularized by inSite. Since its last iteration, many changes
have occurred in the border region, specially in Tijuana, and both artists that participated in the
project at one point in their careers and others who are just emerging have turned to different
practices to respond to their lived conditions, yet these strategies remain largely unknown. It is as
if every time border artistic practices are engaged with, inSite still discursively appears,
strengthening its hold on the categorization of these practices and sustaining a condition of
historical amnesia that in no way references or establishes contemporary practices past its own

45
George Yúdice, The Expediencey of Culture: Uses of Culture In The Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003), 309.

39
iterations. It is in this post-inSite Tijuana, with its inelastic perceptions of border artistic practices,
that I revisit the city’s cultural turf to respond to some of the unanswered questions left behind by
the inSite projects and to provide a more local context for a broader perspective of Tijuana artists’
practices.

40
PART II: ¡Aquí Empieza La Patria!—Revisiting Tijuana

Nation Without A State: Notes From The Home Front
CHAPTER 3

3.1. The Cartel Wars & The Militarization of the Border

Mexico’s history of drug trafficking stems back to the 1980’s when the crackdown of
the Colombian cartels’ transport routes in Florida and the Caribbean forced the South American
traffickers to shift operations to Mexico. The Mexican organizations were first paid in cash for
their work in transporting large cocaine shipments, however, by the mid-1980’s the Mexican
cartels requested they be paid with the product they were transporting. The Mexican cartels
became not just transporting units but also local distributors of drugs throughout most of Mexico.
In order to achieve their distribution the Mexican cartels set up intricate networks both
domestically and internationally and also forged alliances with corrupt government officials, most
of whom were associated with the PRI, a political party that dominated most of Mexico’s local
and national politics. This connection with government agencies allowed for safe transport and
distribution of drugs and also prevented violent confrontations between law enforcement and the
cartels. In 1989, the PRI’s declining political grasp and the arrest of Miguel Angel Felix-
Arellano, the leader of Mexico’s cocaine business prompted an internal battle for power amongst
leaders of the Mexican cartels. The infighting and power vacuums generated a split amongst the
criminal organizations, leaving four major organizations that are responsible for Tijuana’s current
violence—the Tijuana, Gulf, Sinaloa, and Juarez cartels.
While in prison, Arellano-Felix made a pact with the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel
Cardenas, and the cartel operations were arranged in two rival blocks. The Tijuana and Gulf
cartels were now engaged in a bloody conflict with the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels. President
Vicente Fox initiated a small but ineffective crackdown of the cartels by sending a small number
41
of federal troops to interrupt their illicit trafficking. The solidified relationship with government
agencies and officials all across Mexico made any significant disturbance to the cartels a practical
impossibility and also helped maintain the infighting in the shadows and for the most part
contained. In 2006, the election of Mexican President Felipe Calderon brought a drastic change to
this situation. Calderon publicly declared a war against the cartels and sent large numbers of
troops to cities all across Mexico while also launching an anti-corruption campaign in an effort to
attack the networks the cartels had with government officials who havened their operations.
Cartel organizations, already battling each other, were now facing a two-front conflict. Key
corrupt government officials began to get arrested, large seizures of drugs began to occur
frequently, and main leaders of their organizations were now being captured. Facing these
crackdowns, the two main blocks of the cartel organizations began developing violent security
units to help them combat each other and also law enforcement agencies.
The cartels turned to Mexico’s elite army units and began offering higher pay if they
broke their ties to the federal army and worked for them. The Tijuana and Gulf cartels established
a wing they called the ‘Zetas’—a group of former elite soldiers trained by US and European
special tactical units in counterinsurgency and specialized warfare while the Sinaloa and Juarez
cartels established a counter unit they termed the ‘Negros.’ Since January 2001, the cartels have
recruited about 100,000 former army soldiers who are highly skilled and know the internal
operations of Mexico’s defense system. These organizations have turned to brutal tactics like
kidnappings, murder-for-hire, beheadings, and dissolving bodies in sulfuric acid in order to
combat the government’s crackdown of the drug trafficking routes. As the government continues
its cartel war and more leaders of the cartels are captured, restructures of these organizations
occur rapidly, causing shifts in allegiances and power vacuums that lead to even greater
escalations of violence. To date, the Mexican federal government has sent nearly 45,000 troops to
different parts of the country and decommissioned entire municipal police units as they shift
42
authority to federal forces. This firing of police forces, paired up with the cartels hiring campaign
of deserted law enforcement officers and their influence in government affairs has blurred
distinctions between law and lawlessness, and forced a militarization of the border; generating the
perfect scenario for what many are calling a civil war.
46

3.2. The Quarantined City

The media coverage of this ongoing bloody dispute has drawn much attention to the
area and forced governments around the world to consider the implications of a failing Mexican
state. The 2008 Joint Operating Environment Report, a document put together by the U.S. Joint
Forces Command and intended to inform on future global trends, shocks, and contexts from the
angle of the operations of war stated that “in terms of worst scenarios for the Joint Force and
indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden
collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.”
47
The worsening conditions and the serious considerations this
cartel war is drawing from other nations has shifted the language used by media outlets and
government agencies when referencing the border. The discourse of transnationalism, labor
markets, fluid exchanges, and commerce has recently become a language of containment and
exclusion. The focus of discussions of the border is no longer centered on facilitating trade and
exchanges but instead on securing the border and ensuring that this ongoing violence does not
‘spill over’ into the United States. It is as if the border that once was seemingly invisible is re-
materializing and returning to its function of a clearly defined demarcation.
This discursive isolation is evident in the coverage of Tijuana’s current situation and
also in the symbolic gestures of the U.S. government’s policies, position papers, and recently

46
For a full history of the cartel wars and up to date information on daily developments, please see: “Mexico Under
Seige,” Los Angeles Times website, http://www.latimes.com (accessed August 10, 2009).

47
United States Joint Forces Command, Joint Operating Environment, report prepared at the request of the U.S.
Department of Defense, 2008, 36.

43
passed border reforms. Following the cartel war coverage on CNN for nearly two years, headlines
have shifted to embody a language that parallels the one used in the coverage of the two wars the
United States is waging in the Middle East. Headlines in early February and March 2008 state
“Drug violence spins Mexico toward ‘civil war,’” the city of Juarez “has become one of the major
battlegrounds” of the carnage in Mexico, “Mexicans seeking asylum,” in war-like conditions
along the border, and “Mexico’s Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over, Alarming U.S.”
48
Toward
April of 2008, coverage shifted to the responses of the U.S. government, giving an insight into the
official position the Obama administration would take in regards to border policy. Headlines
began to state: “Violent spillover from Mexico is focus of House hearing,” “hearing focuses on
security on the border, preventing spread of violence,” “Obama would consider sending the
National Guard to the border if the situation escalates,” and the “US, Canada, France, Italy, and
Germany have issued alerts about travel to Mexico.”
49
The depiction of Tijuana and the larger
border region has positioned the area as a war zone to be avoided, inducing a type of
psychological response that associates the border with insecurity, violent threats, fear, and that
strengthens the apparent need to avoid the region and ensure that its conditions remain repressed
within itself.
This discursive isolation spurring in regards to the border region has slowly begun to
materialize on both sides of the divide. On the U.S. side, travel warnings have been issued by the
State Department urging citizens to avoid certain areas in Mexico, passport restrictions have been
made stricter and are highly enforced, inspections at the ports of entry are extensive and now
even occur when vehicles are waiting to cross into Mexico (Fig. 3.1), and U.S. soldiers stationed

48
Headlines covering the escalation of violence at the U.S.-Mexico border were monitored and collected over the span
of two years. For a full list of headlines covering the mentioned time period (February-March 2008) please see:
http://www.cnn.com, and search “cartel wars.”

49
Headlines covering the escalation of violence at the U.S.-Mexico border were monitored and collected over the span
of two years. For a full list of headlines covering the mentioned time period (April-June 2008) please see:
http://www.cnn.com, and search “cartel wars.”

44
in bases near the border are no longer allowed to travel to Mexico. Policies to fortify the border
and prevent the flow of drugs have already begun, with the most notable being the Merida
Initiative which according to a statement by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Roberta S.
Jacobson before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee is a large assistance program “in which the Department of State, working in close
collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and Justice, USAID and other agencies,
seek to provide Mexico with equipment, training, and technology assistance to enhance Mexico’s
ability to interdict and stop illicit drugs, arms and human trafficking; to improve public security
and law enforcement; and to strengthen institution building and the rule of law.”
50
These policies,
in tandem with the discursive image of Tijuana that has generated a sense of fear and insecurity,
have discouraged and made it more difficult for people to visit, as evidenced by the low tourist
numbers and the ghostly images of empty wait lines at the border checkpoint. Strategies for
cultivating free trade have become strategies to disturb the flow of weapons and money from the
US to Mexico, policies to facilitate tourism and travel have become administrative obstacles and
tougher review processes for visa and passport acquisitions, and fantasies of spring break trips
and beach front resorts have turned to nightmares of dismembered American tourists. Although
the consideration of Tijuana as a dangerous city has deep historical roots, this recent
intensification has converted Tijuana from a close neighboring city to an almost fictional and
distant war zone clearly outline by the border wall that contains it. It is from this position of an
isolated city that I reconsider Tijuana as an autonomous locale. The discourse of transnationalism
and border-crossing, although still important in understanding border dynamics is a much smaller
component of the local conditions in the city. Rather than focus on these same discussions I will
focus on the daily realities of Tijuana—a city-space defined by its physical and discursive
separations from the rest of Mexico and the United States.

50
Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mexico and the Merida
Initiative, 111
th
Cong., 1
st
sess., March 18, 2009.
45
Figure 3.1

Vehicle inspection at the San Ysidro point of entry. Photograph courtesy of Omar Pimienta. Reproduced with
permission.

3.3. Tijuana’s State of Exception & The (Im)possibilities of the Public Sphere

In this reconsideration of Tijuana, the historical engagement with the inhabitants of the
city and their relationship to the larger global economy will also shift to a reconsideration of
Tijuana’s residents not just as actors in a global performance but as citizens of this well-defined
city, bringing focus to “the political relationship of tijuanenses to the city.”
51
Tijuana’s political
history, like Lucia Sanroman explains in a 2008 unpublished manuscript titled “Evasive
Maneuvers: Citizens and Aliens Under the State of Exception,” has been one of continual
permissiveness. Commenting on this shadowy political climate, Sanroman states:
This environment of ‘tolerance’ rather than evolving from a historical exercise of
democratic participation by an educated and integrated civil society—such as has taken

51
Lucia Sanroman, “Evasive Maneuvers: Citizens and Aliens Under the State of Exception,” unpublished manuscript,
2008, 7.

46
place in Amsterdam, for example, another city that is, like Tijuana, recognized as a place
of tolerance to drugs and prostitution—has evolved from the absolute and, one could
argue, deliberate confusion of the role of the citizen as fully conscious participant. From
its inception as a city of vice, gambling, and sex in the 1920s and 1930s, to the
establishment of the special economic zone in the 1960s, to the hijacking of geography
by unscrupulous developers, and finally the institution of Narco power as de-facto sub-
government force—there have been a series of legal exceptions made in this region
which have constitutionally demarcated it as outside the national norm. Excepting the
integration of Narcos, all the conditions mentioned above have occurred legally, even if
some of the most nefarious and outrageous examples of each have transpired outside the
limitations imposed by regulations. In the case of the establishment of maquiladoras, for
example, national labor laws were circumvented, including the neutralization of labor
unions and collective bargaining agreements—two legacies of the Mexican Revolution
and central tenets of post-Revolutionary Mexico. Tijuana has been historically
established as a series of exclusion[s] from the legal constitution of the country that have
created a state of exception as defined by Giorgio Agamben: a suspension of the law that
nevertheless ratifies the rule of law.
52

This state of exception, Sanroman states, is “a pragmatic response to extreme internal
conflicts—generally reaction to insurrection, civil war, and resistance—by which law is
adjourned to redress a temporary situation. This creates a paradox by which government
establishes a status that is at once within and outside the law . . . [and] within the state of
exception the historic responsibilities between government and citizens are mystified.”
53
In
Tijuana’s current situation, this intrinsic state of exception complicates the role of the state even
further since the long-standing trajectory of corruption and historic interconnection between the
cartel organizations and government officers and agencies make it nearly impossible to
distinguish between those upholding the law and those violating it. This situation has recently
become more evident with cases of former law enforcement agents passing as officers on duty to
commit crimes and to help cartel operations.

52
Lucia Sanroman, “Evasive Maneuvers: Citizens and Aliens Under the State of Exception,” unpublished manuscript,
2008, 7-8.

53
Lucia Sanroman, “Evasive Maneuvers: Citizens and Aliens Under the State of Exception,” unpublished manuscript,
2008, 8-9.

47
This growing violence occurring in these unique political intricacies “unsettles social
roles vis-à-vis the state and transforms the interior political discourse from one of rights and
responsibilities of the city towards its inhabitants to one of [city as] state protector,” however in a
situation as nebulous as Tijuana’s, the inability to clearly elucidate who is responsible for
protecting citizens and upholding laws and governance, even the role of the state as protector is
completely shattered. The blurring between the cartel organizations and the state have made the
state almost unrecognizable, debunking its traditional roles, and raising questions about
democratic participation, citizenship, and the preservation of basic rights.
In this Tijuana, where the mobilization of fear has become an almost palpable condition
of psychological control not only is the deterioration of the state apparent in its basic
responsibilities to its citizens, but also in its traditional function of establishing democratic
processes and upholding a public sphere for civil engagement. The formation and transformation
of the public sphere in modern nation states is a complex and highly debated topic, however, for
the purposes of this investigation, the subject will be approached from a very basic interpretive
analysis. According to the seminal yet problematic writings of Habermas, the public sphere was a
space where mediation occurred “between the private concerns of individuals in their familial,
economic, and social life . . . [and] the demands and concerns of social and public life.”
54
This
space was articulated as “an organ of information and political debate [and physically
materialized in venues] such as parliaments, political clubs, literary salons, public assemblies,
pubs and coffee houses, meeting halls, and other public spaces where socio-political discussions
took place.”
55
This sphere according to Douglas Kellner made possible “a realm of public opinion
that opposed state power”
56
and that allowed for the free and open expression of citizens.

54
Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,”
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html (accessed April 10, 2009), 3.

55
Douglas Kellner, “Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention,”
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html (accessed April 10, 2009), 3-4.
48
In Tijuana’s current situation, where the state is desperately attempting to maintain its
grasp while cartel organizations and their government affiliates are waging constant attacks
against it, guaranteeing a space where opposition might be possible is not considered a favorable
option in the struggle to maintain authority. The militarization of the border, although at times
effective in disrupting cartel operations, has also increased agitation and dissent amongst the
population in Tijuana who now have two armed influences keeping close watch on daily life (Fig.
3.2). The attempt to maintain sovereignty has nearly shattered viable possibilities for a public
sphere in this militarized city. The activation of fear as a mechanism of control has begun to
affect citizen’s ability for free expression, and also transformed the physical structure of the city
itself, enhancing a tough policy of containment that only keeps aggrandizing as do cartel attacks.
Hajer and Reijndorp argue in In Search of New Public Domain, that “the control of the
fear of violence has become a weighty theme in the expansion and rearrangement of the city,”
57
a
claim now visible in Tijuana where entire colonias and local neighborhoods have been sectioned
off into military districts as part of the government’s defense restructure to battle organized
crime. The sights of heavily armed federal troops around Tijuana have become a daily reality for
tijuanenses and physical civic spaces that were once used for peaceful protests or civil
congregations have now even been host to large military artillery units during major tactical
operations. All this, paired with the substantial use of intelligence warfare from both sides, has
left many tijuanenses fearing the repercussions of any suspicion of association with the cartels or
even with the government itself. As mutilated bodies are found daily with notes that warn: “this is
what happens to snitches,” the fear of being misinterpreted or wrongly associated has taken an

56
Ibid.

57
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002), 9.

49
unprecedented dimension and induced an ominous silence that only feeds the ambiguity
surrounding the distinction between law and lawlessness.

Figure 3.2

Tijuanenses protest violence and corruption. Photograph provenance: Baja Racing News LIVE!,
http://www.bajasafari.blogspot.com (accessed August 3, 2009).

50
As one approaches the border checkpoint from either San Ysidro or Tijuana, if carefully
observant, one can see amongst the large advertisements and signage, a rugged and archaically
seeming watchtower structure hovering over the city sky (Fig. 3.3). This peaceful and deserted
icon stands as a monument to the violence and anarchic climate of the city. As one examines the
structure, it is unclear whether it is actually functional, and if so, even more unclear who is being
watched and who is watching. This intimate relationship that evokes doubt and anxiety amongst
passersby is a parallel of daily life in Tijuana. The invisible watchful eyes of both the government
and the cartels are given shape and form by Marcos Ramirez ERRE through ICE/EYES TOWER,
only one of the many responses artists are now putting forth as they struggle to maintain their
right of free expression and simultaneously renegotiate their roles as citizens in a nation without a
state. ERRE’s watchtower is a humble representation of the historically rooted challenge artists in
Tijuana have faced as they searched for spaces to develop their practices. Although now the lack
of these physical and conceptual spaces is due to escalating violence and a militarization of the
city, artists in Tijuana have had to previously respond to the lack of these spaces in different
contexts. In order to later return to how artists in Tijuana are now using space as a moldable
material to respond to their current conditions, a historical overview of this type of practice will
be discussed in order to situate artists’ explorations of spatial constructs as inherent strategies in
Tijuana’s artistic practices.

51
Figure 3.3

Marcos Ramirez ERRE, ICE/EYES TOWER (in progress), 2008. Photograph by Cesar Garcia. Reproduced with
permission of Marcos Ramirez ERRE.

52
Tijuana’s Cultural Economy
CHAPTER 4

4.1. Tijuana’s Cultural Infrastructure: The Artist as Architect

Tijuana artists have historically responded to the city and their experience by creating
spaces, both physical and conceptual from which to practice from. The lack of a cultural
infrastructure in the city has inspired many cultural producers to respond to this lack of support
through their work, just as they would respond to any other contextual condition they experienced
in their daily lives. In mapping the development of Tijuana’s cultural community, Pedro Ochoa
Palacio states that “despite its lack of a minimal cultural infrastructure designed to satisfy the
needs of the population, Tijuana was able to gestate in a manner admittedly very gradual, a
cultural movement all its own.”
58
This inherent strategy of artists to explore the creation of spatial
constructs from which to then expand their practices from was the main mechanism that gave rise
to this organic cultural infrastructure. With no major institutional support until the mid-1980s,
Tijuana artists were able to cultivate a myriad of spaces for creative production that firmly
established them as the architects of the city’s cultural master plan.
Early development of cultural spaces in Tijuana came about during the early 1920’s
when major cultural projects such as the Panama California Exposition in Balboa Park in San
Diego and the establishment of the Mutualist Center of Zaragoza in Tijuana took place. The
Mutualist Center served as Tijuana’s first interdisciplinary cultural and civic center and for years
supported theater, cinema, and hosted a library.
59
The development of these projects induced a
rise in cultural voices in Tijuana, specifically a group of journalists, writers, students, and
teachers with an interest in the arts and culture. Patricio Bayardo would call this generation of

58
Pedro Ochoa Palacio, “Notes on the Cultural Development of Tijuana,” in Strange New World: Art and Design from
Tijuana, ed. Rachel Teagle (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2007), 236.

59
Pedro Ochoa Palacio, “Notes on the Cultural Development of Tijuana,” in Strange New World: Art and Design from
Tijuana, ed. Rachel Teagle (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2007), 237.

53
new cultural actors Generación Trashumante (the Trans-human generation).
60
This generation
soon began using the radio to diffuse cultural news and also to start dramatized radio
programming in Tijuana. This increase in cultural information came paired with the rise of
Revolution Ave. in the 1940’s—a main corridor of theaters, cinemas, and social nightclubs that
supported classical music performances and hosted major music and performing arts presenters.
Although the focus of early spaces was on supporting music and the performing arts, soon, visual
artists would begin negotiating the use of these spaces and appropriating them to include the
support of their practices in these major developments. Visual artists began using old and
abandoned movie houses to exhibit their work and also negotiated with theater owners and turned
the lobby areas of many of the famous theaters into exhibition spaces. Some artists were even
able to negotiate residency periods and developed entire bodies of work in these lobby spaces,
giving access to their artistic process to the large theater audiences.
61

Ruben Vizcaíno, a writer and journalist with an interest in cultural diffusion became an
iconic figure in Tijuana during these developments in the 1940s and forged alliances and
cultivated support for a formalization of the city’s cultural spaces. Toward the 1960s and 1970s,
various Universities began setting up cultural centers and programs and local government also
began to show support for the city’s diverse and flourishing cultural practices. The support
however, was still geared more towards music and performing arts, with genres like theater,
dance, and musical performance receiving the most attention and financial support. Toward the
1980s, this growing momentum came to a climax with the opening of the city’s first cultural
center, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT). The spherical architecture of the CECUT
became a symbol of the city’s commitment to cultural practices, yet the national cultural agenda
dominated much of what the center supported or was able to showcase. The emphasis remained

60
Ibid.

61
Ibid.

54
on supporting theater and introducing local and international dance companies. The center also
became a hub for film and for the city’s opera. With a void still present for visual artists, many
older practitioners began to establish their own spaces to develop their practices and to support a
younger generation of visual artists. Felipe Almada, a well-known local painter opened up his
studio and converted it into a space for congregation and for the promotion of visual art practices.
El Nopal Centenario as it came to be known was only one of the responses that artists put forth
during this time when support of visual art practices was sporadic, Pedro Ochoa Palacio states
that “alternative spaces [were] often the cardinal points of cultural production and promotion in
the city . . . [some included] El Lugar del Nopal, El Perro Azul, La Casa de la Trova, Galeria
Nina Moreno, El Juglar and later others, like the Antigua Bodega de Papel, Café de la Opera, and
La Casa de la 9, which function[ed] as galleries, cinema clubs, concert halls, but above all [were]
distinguished by an ambience of freedom.”
62
This freedom, in large part created by the absence of
any institutional support models for the visual arts, allowed Tijuana artists to experiment with
space as a material, allowing many of them to consider these new constructs extensions of their
broader practices, rather than oppositional spaces to established cultural structures. This strategy
of spatial creation became critical in developing Tijuana’s cultural scene and also a historically
rooted tactic in Tijuana artists’ conceptual development, and one that has constantly resurfaced in
the past years. Considering this important role artists and the development of their practices had
in the creation of Tijuana’s cultural landscape, a historical overview of the alternative art space
movement will now be provided in order to more clearly differentiate these spatial exercises and
to establish a position from where these exercises can be revisited in the context of contemporary
Tijuana.

62
Pedro Ochoa Palacio, “Notes on the Cultural Development of Tijuana,” in Strange New World: Art and Design from
Tijuana, ed. Rachel Teagle (San Diego, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2007), 243.

55
4.2. Alternative Art Spaces: New York to Mexico City

The history of alternative art spaces is broad and divergent when considered in an
international context, however, the central thematics of the notion of the ‘alternative’ are laid out
in Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985, a collection of essays edited by Julie Ault that trace the
development of the New York alternative art space movement and thoroughly provide a critical
insight into the oppositional ideology that emerged from such movement. Martin Beck’s
contribution to this volume argues that the shifts in the consideration of ‘space’ across various
disciplines eventually reached art institutions and their established structures during the 1960s
and 1970s. Focusing on the role of the Museum of Modern Art in the activation of this
movement, Beck states:
Coinciding with the expansion and redefinition of space, the political, social, and material
boundaries of the museum—specifically the Museum of Modern Art—were being
heavily contested by the protests and demands of the Art Workers’ Coalition, other
artists’ groups, and individual artists. One consequence of these protests were the
proliferation of artists’ initiatives seeking to explore and create new spaces for the
presentation and distribution of artworks. These spaces needed to reflect the changes
taking place in art and society at large while also meeting the expectations and challenges
posed by such an undertaking.
63

These new artist-initiated spaces came about through these acts of direct opposition to
the limitations imposed by the market and the museum. Artists whose practices were not deemed
commercially viable or responsive to art institutions needs and desires were often brushed off as
irrelevant to critical inquiry, ossifying cultural production structures, and leaving very little room
for experimentation and flexibility. Rather than continue to fall outside the stringent categories
viable for support and engagement, artists began to turn to raw spaces and experiences that
directly contradicted and opposed the established structures interrogating visual art practices.
Beck further states that these raw spaces and experiences “denote a social dimension excluded
from the generic white-cube gallery space . . . and the use [of this descriptive terminology itself]

63
Martin Beck, “Alternative: Space,” in Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota press, 2002), 255.
56
established a particular relationship between alternative art spaces and the regular gallery system,
which because it is generally antiseptic, elitist, manufactured, manipulated, and so on, is the
antithesis of raw.”
64
This opposition to the cultural establishment created an unambiguous divide
where formal cultural institutions would be aligned with the “static, homogenous, and bourgeois,
and the space of the alternative [would be affiliated with the] process-oriented, experimental, and
working class.”
65
This polarity between the institutional and the alternative became a central tenet
of the alternative art space movement and still continues to shape much of the discussion of
alternative art spaces today.
The internationalization of the contemporary art world and the rise of the nomadic artist
and curator during the late 1980s and 1990s became instrumental in bringing this debate of
alternative spaces to other parts of the country. In the case of Mexico, a young generation of
artists educated abroad, began returning home in the mid-1990s only to find a totally stagnant and
government-controlled cultural structure. After President Salinas de Gortari was inaugurated, the
executive branch of the government formed the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes with
a funding branch they called the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. The state interest in
the arts was attached to a shifting national political agenda. The state wanted to use visual culture
to fortify and showcase the nation in order to position the country for its entrance into the free
market.
66
Support for cultural practices was distributed amongst classical disciplines and folk arts
that reinforced a strong and unified national identity. The artists returning home to Mexico after
having studied in Europe and the United States felt that Mexico’s cultural community was being
isolated and systematically excluded from participation with broader critical dialogues shaping
contemporary art. This generation of practitioners who grew up in an age of rapid communication

64
Ibid.

65
Ibid.

66
Vania Macias, “Alternative Spaces in the 1990s,” in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico
1968-1997, ed. Oliver Debroise and Cuauhtemoc Medina (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, 2007), 373.

57
and gained exposure to international practices began to experiment with their own practices and
to produce work that was imbued with sharp political commentary and that directly opposed
official cultural policies. This struggle between a government sponsored cultural program that
supported iconographic and traditional practices and a dissenting generation of artists working in
Mexico City conceived an alternative art space movement in Mexico’s capital. Just like with the
development of alternative art spaces in New York, Mexico’s community of artist-initiated spaces
was shaped as a response to an established system of cultural institutions and commercial market
configurations that suppressed the flexibility and experimentation other contemporary artists were
accessing through self-initiated means.
67

Mexico city began to experience the maturation of a myriad of oppositional initiatives that
included artist collectives, publications, and even gallery spaces. One of the most notable of these
initiatives was an artist-run space founded by Yoshua Okon and Miguel Calderón in an old
bakery, La Panaderia. Okon and Calderón’s space embodies the alternative art space movement
in Mexico and the aggressive provocation the movement made in response to Mexico’s
established cultural institutions. This space, conceived as a social center, brought together the
latest generation of artists, musicians, fashion publications, and incubated radical practice (Fig.
4.1). The space became a safe location for new ‘rebels’ invoking zapatismo, the confrontational
aesthetic of generation X, and the exploration of a new pan-sexual identity (Fig 4.2).
68
Okon and
Calderón’s access to international networks of artists, curators, and other cultural producers,
helped expand the programmatic approach at La Panaderia and also generated important
exchanges between a rising contemporary cultural community in Mexico and the broader global
art public.

67
Vania Macias, “Alternative Spaces in the 1990s,” in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico
1968-1997, ed. Oliver Debroise and Cuauhtemoc Medina (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, 2007), 375.

68
Ibid.

58
While Mexico City continued to be a hub for radical experimentation, the marginal
border region of the country had a contrasting experience when it came to the development of its
own cultural infrastructure. The dense allocation of cultural institutions and programs in
Mexico’s capital was not present in Tijuana and the broader border region. The area’s historic
physical and conceptual marginalization led to many policy implications that often deprived it
from receiving an equal consideration when it came to resource allocation and development. This
is the key difference marking the unique formation of Tijuana’s cultural landscape. While Mexico
City remained connected to the global community and became one of the major urban centers in
the world, Tijuana and other cities along the border remained as earlier detailed, very much
separated from these developments. This isolation that placed Tijuana outside national norms
generated unique contextual conditions that allow us to differentiate between Tijuana artists’
responses to their conditions, and the responses of those of artists working in New York and
Mexico City; thus allowing for a different framework for the analysis of artist-initiated spaces in
this border city.

59
Figure 4.1

Joaquin Segura, take a leak in some gallery corner, 2002. Photograph courtesy of Joaquin Segura. Reproduced with
permission.

60
Figure 4.2

La Panaderia. Photograph provenance: La Panaderia Archive.

4.3. Necessity Knows No Law: Reconsidering The Artist-Run Space

While the alternative art space movement was largely established as this antagonistic
paradigm, the spatial experiments developing in Tijuana since the late 1940’s do not comfortably
sit amongst the conditions informing this oppositional movement. In Ault’s examination of the
conditions that harbored the alternative art space movement in New York (which later informed
this movement in Mexico City), she presents a series of threads that can be directly linked to the
responses put forth by many of the early alternative art spaces. Some of the factors she outlines
include “an abundance . . . of artists; a culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse urban population
in flux; the political context of various civil rights and liberation struggles; the availability of
affordable residential spaces and rents; a plethora of neglected or underutilized urban sites; and
61
the city’s status as a powerful art center.”
69
In relation to Tijuana, many of these conditions were
not present and were not significantly formative in regard to the artist-initiated spaces that spurred
throughout the city’s cultural development. The lack of any formal visual arts programs did not
allow for the professionalization of the artist, and thus, a large and concrete artist community did
not come of age in Tijuana until the late twentieth century. The few early Tijuana artists were
self-taught, and at times, were trained in other disciplines and fields and used artistic production
as merely another means of informing their respective work. The cultural, racial, and ethnic
demographics in Tijuana remained pretty homogenous until the heightening of the free trade
economy, and the underutilized urban sections of the city were largely controlled by the
international industrial plant sector. In contrast to the conditions artists were responding to in
other urban centers, Tijuana artists experimentation with alternative spaces was sparked out of
experimentation and necessity. With no support and no other models to respond to, the organic
growth of artists’ practices eventually led them to develop informal systems and methods of
practicing. Space in a historic perspective, became then another material artists in Tijuana used to
express and inform their conceptual development; an artistic response to an experiential
condition, not a response to an established network of formal structures. These spaces provided a
platform for their personal expression, “to do practically anything they wished, despite economic
restrictions. Whether located in an old house, an artist’s studio, a bakery, a gas station, or an
abandoned storefront, these sites were places for radical experimentation, and their flexibility
allowed artists . . . the chance to give new meaning to the work, to the space, and to the
relationship between the two.”
70
The conflicting history of the artist as curator and/or
administrator was not a prominent topic for artists engaging in these practices since the structural

69
Julie Ault, “For The Record,” in Alternative Art New York: 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002), 6.

70
Vania Macias, “Alternative Spaces in the 1990s,” in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico
1968-1997, ed. Oliver Debroise and Cuauhtemoc Medina (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, 2007), 375.

62
development of cultural practices themselves were disjunctured, unique, and ‘home grown’ in
Tijuana. Thus, this ability to manipulate space gave artists the ability to conceive these trials as
just another intrinsic part of their practices, a mechanism for their survival, and thus, positioned
them as artworks themselves. This model of the artist-run space as artwork that is historically
embedded in the development of Tijuana’s cultural sphere is what will be used to revisit
contemporary artistic trends in Tijuana and to foment an insight into how contemporary artists are
responding to the reappearing void in spaces in the militarized city.

63
The Artist-Run Space as Public Domain
CHAPTER 5

5.1. The Public Domain Experience

Considering that the current conditions in Tijuana have affected traditional
conceptualizations of the public sphere in the city, I will consider an alternative model to show
how in the absence of conventional structures for a public sphere, artist-run spaces are operating
as generators of a new type of public sphere—one described by Hajer and Reijndorp as a public
domain. To realize such consideration I will first map the conditions of such public domain using
Hajer and Reijndorp’s writings and then analyze how Estación Tijuana is meeting these
conditions by positioning itself as an extension of Marcos Ramirez ERRE’s practice rather than a
separate curatorial project. According to Hajer and Reijndorp, public domain occurs in spaces
that are valued as locations of shared experience amongst people from different backgrounds and
with different interests. They argue that these spaces can materialize outside traditional urban
spaces and may “well come into being where places represent multiple and incongruent
meanings.”
71
According to Hajer and Reijndorp this variation and difference of perspectives is
what forms the crux of the public domain for the places of public domain are shared by people
who must compromise with others of varying perspectives and ideas in order to share the
experience of being in such domain. Since this negotiation is a formative component of the public
domain, Hajer and Reijndorp state that public domain is not so much a place then, but an
experience; one that occurs “at the boundary between friction and freedom…[and gives rise] to an
opportunity to see things differently, [and for] the presentation of new perspectives.”
72
It is in this
public domain that people can encounter ‘other’ perspectives and negotiate their own with them,

71
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002), 68.

72
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002), 116.

64
thus, giving rise to an opportunity for cultural mobility where changes and modifications to those
perspectives are viable.
These spaces, which according to Hajer and Reijndorp must not just be physical spaces,
but instead must somehow be able to induce these negotiations amongst different perspectives
offer “on the one hand . . . the tension of a confrontation with the unfamiliar, [and] on the other
the liberation of the experience of a different approach.” In a city like Tijuana, where the open
and accessible public sphere has deteriorated and where the sharing of opposing ideas comes with
the danger of violent reprehension from either government or cartel actors, this domain of
exchanges, risks, and confrontations amongst people is what will be applied to this investigation
in order to contextualize the response of artists to their experienced daily realities.

5.2. Estación Tijuana

Considering Hajer and Reijndorp’s framework for a new public domain, I will now turn
to an analysis of Estación Tijuana, an artist-run space founded in 2003 by Marcos Ramirez
ERRE. Using Tijuana artists’ historical strategy of spatial experimentation as a lens, the history of
Estación Tijuana will be mapped as a reflection of the development of ERRE’s broader
conceptual practice. Positioning Estación Tijuana as part of ERRE’s practice as opposed to a
separate administrative or artist-initiated curatorial project will allow for an examination of how
the space, in the tradition of previous antecedents, operates as a work that responds to the city’s
current conditions. In the case of Estación Tijuana, specific attention will be paid to how the
conceptual development of this work generates public domain experiences; directly responding to
the city’s recently shattered public sphere.
Located at the juncture between Mexico and the United States, straddling the most
trafficked border in the world, Estación Tijuana operates from a point of friction between public
artwork and artist-run space. Founded between the inSite 2000 and 2005 iterations, Estación
Tijuana emerged out of the necessity for ongoing local critical exchanges around the notions of
65
contemporary art, architecture, design, urbanism, and popular culture. The foundation of the
space followed in the context of previous artists who responded to their experienced conditions
by forming a space from which to practice from. ERRE, trained as an attorney and self-taught as
an artist had been engaged with some of these early predecessors and began his practice in some
of these early spaces formed by a previous generation of Tijuana visual artists. Applying this
intrinsic strategy, ERRE conceived a space that in many ways reflected the development of his
conceptual practice. While artists with the intention to teach technical skills and professionalize
the visual arts community in Tijuana founded some of these earlier spaces, Estación Tijuana
began with a conceptual foundation anchored by a series of questions, complexities, and
problems informing ERRE’s practice rather than by a rigid or well-defined programmatic
approach.
There are two specific characteristics of ERRE’s practice that resonate in the
development of Estación Tijuana and that form the basis by which it is able to respond to
Tijuana’s current condition through the generation of public domain experiences. The first is
ERRE’s use of interrogative tactics to generate a contemplative and reflective relationships with
his viewers. Rather than provide a definite position or meaning, ERRE’s work often poses
questions to viewers, forcing them to place their own social and political positions in the context
of the work, inducing ambiguity and often charged provocation. ERRE activates both formal and
tangible devices to give form to complex political and social questions, and he characterizes these
forms as ‘constructions that accommodate ideas,’
73
thus, leaving room for the viewer to generate
meaning and their own position as they navigate and encounter these narrative visual constructs.
This approach that ERRE takes in his work is also reflected in the development of Estación
Tijuana. Like stated earlier, rather than having a set program or approach to the management of
the space, Estación Tijuana remains responsive to Tijuana’s cultural landscape and supports a

73
Please see ERRE’s biography in Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana, ed. Rachel Teagle (San Diego,
CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2007).
66
myriad of projects that are not required to align to any specific institutional philosophy or
programmatic goal. From exhibitions to lecture series, residencies, film screenings, and group
critiques, the space puts forth a raw, disjunctured, and irregularly scheduled series of
engagements that bring together people from different backgrounds and disciplines. Just like
ERRE’s conceptual practice puts forth a series of questions that allow viewers to establish their
own position in the context of the work, Estación Tijuana provides for its public(s) cultural events
that generate no answers about complex cultural phenomena but rather, questions, and a space for
exchanges about these questions to occur amongst different people. This tactic of ERRE’s
conceptual work is thus clearly articulated in the formation of Estación Tijuana itself, and allows
for exchanges between different social groups to occur which in turn fulfill one of the
requirements for the generation of public domain experiences according to Hajer and Reijndorp’s
model for a new public domain.
The second aspect of ERRE’s practice that is visible in the development of Estación
Tijuana is his preoccupation with the complexities of language and the difficulty of
communication across cultures. In an interview I conducted with ERRE on the occasion of the
publication of the 2008 California Biennial catalogue, I asked him about his exploration of
language which he described in relation to one of his projects for the Biennial, Signs (Fig. 5.1).
Located in the parking lot of the Orange County Museum of Art, ERRE’s Signs encompassed a
series of modified traffic signs that had been superimposed with the words ‘fear,’ and ‘hate’
amongst others. According to ERRE, government communicates with its citizens through various
types of signage, language and imagery which is immediately accepted by the population as
certain, truthful, and honest. Changing the text in the signs, ERRE hoped to cause a disruption in
his viewers and redirect their attention to more relevant problematics—stopping fear, stopping
hate, etc. The manipulation of text and language in his work according to ERRE is guided by his
desire for “viewers to draw their own conclusions about they see in [his] interventions, rather than
67
agree blindly with [them]. In other words, [he] likes to encourage people to have an opinion.”
74

This interest in the complexities of language and the difficulties that spur when language serves
as a communication tool across cultures and disciplines also manifests itself in the development
of Estación Tijuana. Rather than focusing just on the visual arts, Estación Tijuana brings together
a diverse range of practitioners from different disciplines as part of its series of engagements.
While the space remains responsive to the needs of Tijuana’s cultural community and allows
people from different backgrounds to come together through its network of diverse engagements,
it is ERRE’s interest in the complexity to communicate across languages and disciplines that
actually induce the public domain experiences. Inviting artists, dancers, public officials, and
others who communicate about different disciplines and often in different languages, Estación
Tijuana stimulates the encounters that allow for public domain experiences. Like Hajer and
Reijndorp state, spaces do not automatically operate as public domain, and can often serve as
public domain temporarily while not operating as such at other times. While Estación Tijuana’s
foundation, rooted in raising questions and complexities about cultural phenomena create the
potentiality for public domain experiences to occur, ensuring the diverse and often contradicting
engagements actually allow for the materialization of these experiences.
To better illustrate how these two aspects of ERRE’s conceptual practice allow for
Estación Tijuana to operate as a generator of public domain experiences I will now provide a
brief overview of its recent programming to show how ERRE’s interest of raising questions and
engaging viewers in the context of his work is manifested through the diverse and disjunctured
programming. I will then focus on the lecture series Estación Tijuana has developed to show how
although the space provides the potential for public domain experiences by fostering diverse
cultural engagements, the strategic focus on bringing people from different disciplines who
communicate in languages specialized to their field not only reflect ERRE’s exploration of

74
Cesar Garcia, “Marcos Ramirez ERRE in conversation with Cesar Garcia,” in 2008 California Biennial (Newport
Beach, CA: Orange County Museum of Art, 2008), 174.
68
language and communication but also induces the confrontational encounters that like Hajer and
Reijndorp state, make public domain experiences possible.

Figure 5.1

Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Stop Signs (Pain, Hate, Fear, War), 2006. Photograph courtesy of Marcos Ramirez ERRE.
Reproduced with permission.

69
5.3. Between Friction & Possibility: Exhibitions & Lecture Series

ERRE’s interest in eliciting a contemplative relationship with viewers that encourages the
dialogue between their own political and social positions and his work has been a key aspect in
the approach Estación Tijuana has taken to stimulate critical exchanges about contemporary art,
architecture, design, urbanism and popular culture. Rather than establishing a series of exhibition
programs or events, Estación Tijuana cultivates a myriad of cultural engagements that do not
form a cohesive and clear voice for the space. Just like ERRE avoids making overly established
propositions for the meaning of his work, Estación Tijuana provides a network of experiences
that allow its public(s) to engage with diverse practices and social groups and thus engage in a
dialogue that puts forth questions and ambiguity while fostering a climate of indeterminacy.
Although it can be argued that this might be a negative aspect of the space that does not allow it
to have a more influential role in the formative process of Tijuana’s cultural landscape, it is also
important to consider that in avoiding a rigid program and mission, Estación Tijuana avoids
creating a set of expectations that could then possibly contextualize the programs and events
supported as part of an institutional philosophy. Like Cramerotti states, the social relations
created by museums and other art venues are not organic, they are in fact constructed and
“instilled from the very moment in which visitors enter the building, ‘expecting’ to engage in
discourses and so ‘setting’ their senses, language, and bodies in order to receive ‘the message.’
On this basis, permanent museums and art venues are closer to non-places than places, in the
same way as airports, tollbooths, motorway structures, and supermarkets are for example where
visitors/passengers/customers enter the building expecting to ‘set’ a level of relations pertinent
the space, then consume or trade what is on offer, and leave again.”
75
In providing a disjunctured,
periodic, and contradicting series of cultural engagements Estación Tijuana avoids establishing a
rigid set of social relations for its public(s), forcing them to encounter new ideas, positions,

75
Alfredo Cramerotti, “Mediating spaces: some considerations on the spaces of large-scale art exhibitions,”
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, vol. 2, no. 1: 53.
70
individuals, and practices every time they visit the space and thus ensures that critical exchanges
occur amongst different social groups.
Three different engagements hosted by Estación Tijuana demonstrate its disjunctured yet
effective approach to generating critical exchanges and questions about contemporary artistic
practices. The first is Estación Tijuana’s hosting of an off-site project for the 2008 California
Biennial. The project hosted at Estación Tijuana included artists Sam Durant, Aaron Sandnes,
Margaret Honda, Tony Labat, Eamon Ore-Giron and Brenna Youngblood, Walead Beshty, and
My Barbarian (Fig. 5.2). While the off-site project for the Biennial expanded on the exhibition’s
interrogation of regionalism, the main dialogue that the project generated was amongst the local
community of cultural producers who did not have much previous engagement with the artists
and practices showcased in this exhibition project. The opening event of the exhibition included a
day-long series of events that drew a small group of visitors from California’s cultural community
however, the majority of the audience for the exhibition was made up of local artists, curators,
architects, and other cultural practitioners. While many of the artists included in the exhibition are
very well known in other artistic circles, for a majority of Estación Tijuana’s public(s), this was a
new encounter with unknown practices. Serving on Lauri Firstenberg’s curatorial team for the
Biennial, I oversaw installation for this off-site project and received first-hand many of the
questions and concerns some of the local artistic community had in regards to the exhibition.
Questions about the conceptual background of certain artists became evident as discussions
emerged about the concept of the exhibition, the logic behind the selection of the artists, and the
processes of production for some pieces in the exhibition. Some of the regular visitors of Estación
Tijuana who include attorneys, public officials, and other professionals in non-art fields also
initiated discussions about the exhibition and the contrast between the local artists they are used
to interacting with and those included in this show. This project also generated critical exchanges
during its planning process as logistics had to be negotiated between administrators of different
71
institutions that operate distinctly and have different organizational philosophies. Despite the
complex negotiations, the project did generate even if temporarily the conditions for these
encounters, allowing people involved and viewers alike to come in contact with ‘others,’ and
negotiate their own positions during this shared experience with the space.

Figure 5.2

My Barbarian performance at Estación Tijuana. November 1, 2008. Photo courtesy of Estación Tijuana. Reproduced
with permission.

72
The second and third engagements operated in the same manner of generating exchanges
amongst different groups of people however they took very different forms and approaches. The
first of these two was a new commission by Chicago-based artist Luis Sanchez Ramirez entitled
TRANSNACIONAL (Fig. 5.2). For this project, Estación Tijuana commissioned a new two-
channel video and two photographs that aimed to operate as a cartographical experiment that
would map the network of people, ecologies, and relationships molding the border region. Rather
than hosting a guest-curated group show, this in-house commission brought an artist who
although has ties to the border, is experimenting with new representations of border dynamics.
This allowed Estación Tijuana to bring to its publics a new perspective about the border that
generated critical exchanges amongst different generations of cultural practitioners who have
been dealing with the border condition for years. The last of these three events is an off-site
exhibition that Estación Tijuana was commissioned to stage as part of the Subvision Festival for
International Contemporary Art in Hamburg, Germany during August 2009.
76
Rather than
presenting a program aimed to showcase border cultural practices, Estación, Tijuana’s exhibition
for Subvision comprised a network of layered physical and imaginary spatial constructs that
allowed viewer’s to navigate between these spaces and articulate their own moments of border-
crossing as they trafficked between these distinct spatialities. The purpose of this exhibition was
to engage a public that was not familiar with Estación Tijuana through the same approach of
raising questions and generating a position that induced a dialogue with viewers and incorporated
them in the larger context of the show. Like the guest-curated exhibition and the solo
commissions at Estación Tijuana, this project provided another distinct form of engaging a public
while maintaining an interrogative relationship with the public that generates exchanges around
notions of contemporary art and culture.

76
This exhibition was curated by the author.
73
Although the variety and sporadic approach to Estación Tijuana’s programming ensures
that the space remains responsive and continues to pose questions to its public rather than provide
a set organizational philosophy, more than generating the conditions for these confrontations is
necessary in order to generate public domain experiences. Like Hajer and Reijndorp state, certain
conditions must be induced in order to stimulate these exchanges. Estación Tijuana has begun to
take a more active approach to generate these antagonistic encounters by developing a lecture
series that invites various cultural producers and intellectuals to host a dialogue during one night.
Echoing ERRE’s interest in the difficulty of communication across cultures and the complexity of
language, the lecture series brings speakers from all disciplines and backgrounds who often
engage in dialogues specific to their disciplines and thus generate exchanges that reveal the
complexities of cultural practices in Tijuana and give a more directed opportunity for exchanges
that clearly articulate friction and compromise as Estación Tijuana becomes a place of shared
experience for this diverse public during these events. Recent speakers have featured writers like
Heriberto Yepez, architects like Sebastian Mariscal, and artists like Shinpei Takeda (Fig 5.3).
Information about each speaker is posted on the Estación Tijuana blog that then serves as another
avenue for artists to engage and come in contact with these varying practices.

74
Fig. 5.3

Luis Sanchez Ramirez, TRANSNACIONAL (installation view), 2009. Photograph courtesy of Estacion Tijuana.
Reproduced with permission.

Fig. 5.4

Shinpei Takeda presentation at Estación Tijuana. Photograph courtesy of Estación Tijuana. Reproduced with
permission.

75
Conclusion

There are various parallel and complex histories that emerge when considering artist-run
spaces, their trajectories, motives, and even their role as formal institutions within the broader
context of contemporary artistic practices. While the responses that artists in Tijuana are
demonstrating now are not unique to this region, since recent histories of other urban centers
around the world have shown artist-run spaces emerging from the lack of institutional support,
the conditions at the border today require further consideration than simply juxtaposing them to
the broader alternative art space movement. Always considered in flux and within the contexts of
hybridism and transnationalism, Tijuana has been positioned as an exotic terrain where
experimentation is feasible and new art forms are conceived through the intercourse of binational
social, political, and economic forces. In this context, not only is locality lost, but also, the risk of
generalizing about these practices solely through these discourses emerges.
In 2008, Centro Cultural de Tijuana inaugurated EL CUBO, a new wing dedicated to the
promotion of both local and contemporary artistic practices. Thought to be able to provide
constant engagement with the local artistic community while also serving as a link to broader
artistic centers, EL CUBO provided a promising possibility for the future of Tijuana’s cultural
landscape. With the recent political appointment of a new director to the cultural center, the fate
of Tijuana’s cultural landscape remains uncertain, as does the role of various artist-run spaces like
Estación Tijuana that have emerged as extensions of artists practices and in response to the
urgency for accessible and open spaces for artists to cultivate their practices.
The proposition presented in this thesis requires much further investigation and
engagement, but nevertheless sets a different premise for engagement with the city. Considering
Tijuana outside the discourse of transnationalism and bringing attention to local conditions that
are marked by violence and a failing state is critical in understanding the evolution of artistic
76
practices currently underway. Whether or not artist-run spaces are operating as the city’s public
domain today is certainly debatable, and a further probe into how the public domain is
manifesting in other realms such as blogs, social clubs, and the internet is also needed to generate
a more comprehensive perspective of the public sphere, public practice, and freedom of
expression in a militarized city.
The role of the artist as curator and/or administrator and the notion of the artist-run space
as ongoing artwork must be dissected further considering the current trend in artists whose work
takes the form of social practice, urban renewal, or other types of artist-initiated spaces. A deeper
interrogation of this in a broader international context might lead to further considerations and
perhaps a clearer understanding of the conditions that allow artists to develop these types of
practices and their role in the more institutional cultural infrastructure of the contemporary art
world.
What is certain about the proposition this thesis makes is that an immediate necessity
exists to critically engage with the conditions in this border city. Since the last occurrence of a
major international art event, new generations of artists have emerged in Tijuana, new
complexities have transformed the discourses and histories that have established the field of
‘border art,’ and new uncertainties have arisen about the survival of artistic practices and cultural
promotion due to drastic political transformations. Considering Tijuana’s local ecology, perhaps
further interrogations of the propositions laid out in this thesis can be put forth, and new questions
can be considered in relation to the charged political situation artists and are experiencing and its
impact on the possible future of cultural production in Tijuana. The viability of the public sphere
in this complex territory is not yet clear and the search for the new public domain in Tijuana has
not yet come to an end. On the contrary, it has just reached a new beginning.

77
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Asset Metadata

Creator Garcia, Cesar (author)

Core Title "Necessity knows no law": artist-run spaces & the spatial politics of Tijuana's public domain

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 09/21/2009

Defense Date 09/09/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative art spaces,art,Borders,Estacion Tijuana,OAI-PMH Harvest,public art,Public domain,public sphere,Tijuana,U.S.-Mexico border

Place Name Mexico (countries), Tijuana (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Conwell, Donna (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Firstenberg, Lauri (committee member)

Creator Email cesargarcia3@mac.com,garciace@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2606

Unique identifier UC1417577

Identifier etd-Garcia-3272 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-253629 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2606 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Garcia-3272.pdf

Dmrecord 253629

Document Type Thesis

Rights Garcia, Cesar

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu