Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide by C. J. Alvarez (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide by C. J. Alvarez Germán Pallares-Avitia (bio) C. J. Alvarez Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019 301 pages, 34 black-and-white illustrations, 21 maps ISBN: 9781477319000, $54.00 HB ISBN: 9781477319024, $35.94 PB ISBN: 9781477319031, $29.95 EB During the past few years, a proliferation of publications around border issues were inspired by the racist, anti-immigrant discourse surrounding the United States’ border with México. Scholars, designers, planners, and architects focused on finding solutions to the “border problem”; these solutions typically simplified the México/U.S. border into a line, and the border problems into the figure of the immigrant. Revisions of a border history that focused on the political delineation of the borderline supported the design solution proposed for the border. Although social, political, and anthropological histories of the México/U.S. border have been produced, few books focusing on the history of its built environment have been published. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide by C. J. Alvarez, an associate professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, offers one of the first approaches to the history of construction along the border, emphasizing the infrastructure that helped to define, transform, and secure it. Alvarez’s book, winner of the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Award in 2020 for the book that made the most significant contribution to the study of vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes, examines the American and Mexican governments’ efforts to build infrastructure along the border, with a primary focus on the American side. These projects, intended to control and modify nature, were seen as modernizing agents. Controlling the unruly and unpredictable nature of rivers, deserts, plains, and mountains symbolized dominance of the colonialist nation-state over the uncivilized natural environment. Over time, these projects led to the development of infrastructure that varied from divisive to transformative and connective. Border Land, Border Water brings into perspective the politics of the binational negotiations that these projects demanded. It explores how, in the construction of the borderline, both countries constructed infrastructure that reflected the different foreign policies of the historical periods when they were built. Alvarez especially focuses on bringing to light the American political apparatus behind the infrastructural projects for water works, dams, bridges, and highways that delineated the border. By acknowledging the borderline as a capitalist colonial structure that is anchored in land grabbing, private property, and control, Alvarez historicizes its mechanisms for controlling the flow of nature, people, and merchandise. [End Page 151] Instead of organizing the chapters of this book by the typology of its built projects or by the institutions that participated in their conception and construction, Alvarez organizes chapters chronologically. This strategy helps the reader to better understand the evolution of the built environment around the border. It narrates a historical account of the border from geographical and political perspectives: from the tracing of the border line resulting from the 1836 Texan independence and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the final settling of the actual borderline in 1963 when the territory of El Chamizal was returned to México, and the project for the channeling of the Rio Grande was executed. The exhaustive research in Border Land, Border Water can be divided into three main sections. The first section consists of an account of the projects that were executed in order to delineate and demarcate the border. The book’s second section deals mainly with infrastructural projects—those designed to control the flow of nature, border water, and the flow of people—dams, river straightening, fence building, and the first attempts to militarize the border. In the last section, Alvarez explores projects that he defines as “compensatory building” that were intended to “mitigate the unsustainable results of the previous” building projects, as well as to what degree the political forces behind them disturbed and radically altered the inherently systemic territorial landscapes of the trans-border areas (4). In recounting...