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Wicking the Line:

The Garden as a Site for Rethinking Collective Critical Practices of Bottom-up

Intervention in Colonia San Bernardo and San Diego

By Sara Solaimani, PhD student in Art History, Theory and Criticism

University of California, San Diego

As Norma Iglesias Prieto has reported, the geopolitical Tijuana-San Diego

Border, studied by many, is the busiest in the world and experiences more frequent

crossings than any other.1

Figure 1: Photo of Tijuana-San Diego Border (Photo by Alex Kershaw)

1 Iglesias Prieto, Norma. Emergencias: Visual Arts in Tijuana, Vol.1: Lost Contextos Urbanos Glo-cales y la

Creatividad. Tijuana: Centro Cultural de Tijuana, 2008.61

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Of all the bodies that cross it, the most unregulated, disobedient and illegal body

is the collective body of water that carries toxic industrial runoff into canyons and into

the Estuary, spreads disease, tears down dwellings and rips away at pieces of the

border fence. Attempts to temper this hydrological force include canalization, damming,

and strategic release but with rain and massive flooding in the wintertime, isolation of

elements and regulation or slows of flows seem a spatial impossibility. Visual artists

have responded to ecological spatial inescapabilities and relentless practices of

survival, marking their work with the materials of contamination, carving it out of the

antagonistic architecture that leads to instability and alienation.2

Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s

installations question physical,

metaphorical, and experiential borders,

with the larger reference point of the

geopolitical US-Mexico constructed divide.

The Front/Century 21, ERRE’s debut

installation with inSite’94 was erected on

the plaza of El Centro Cultural de Tijuana

(CECUT) in Zona Rio (The River District).

CECUT, built in 1982, is the main

commercial art institution in Tijuana,

2 The projects, blogs, and formal textual authorities on the transborder urban development project that have informed this paper are those of: Manuel Valenzuela Arce, Norma Iglesias Prieto, Teddy Cruz, Rene Peralta, Colegio de la Frontera Norte, and la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California.

Figure 2: Water in San Bernardo (Photo by Matthew Savitsky)

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generating tourism and economic benefits for the state. It has a controversial history of

political relations, and although many artists owe their widespread exposure to its

presence, some have at various times accused it of nepotism and corrupt practices.

Figure 3: Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Century 21 (1994) from Rene Peralta’s Pensamientos Genericos blog

Century 21 trespassed and encroached on the pristine development of the neo-

global project of CECUT, and reversed the catastrophic history of the Tijuana floods for

one home, drawing it back into existence from the act of his spatial imagination. He

used real squat architectural practice to weave back in a piece of Cartolandia

(Cardboard Land) that vibrates with the spirit and aesthetic of those homes wiped out by

the violent and unannounced opening of Rodriguez Dam in 1979 and the ensuing

deadly floods, killing over a hundred people, twenty-five of which whom washed up on

San Diego’s shores. Cartolandia was the informal settlement created and inhabited in

large part by people who had come to Tijuana to answer the post-WWII manual labor

demand.

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4: Cartolandia circa 1970 (From the Tijuana Government Website)

ERRE put Cartolandia back Figure onto its original ground, using the same

industrial and commercial byproducts used by the original Cartolandia squatters, and

powering it up through the common practice of stealing electricity. CECUT became the

host and the target at the same time as institution of creativity that houses artistic

practices that challenge power and control. The structure stands where creativity once

served as a

mechanism for

survival, becoming

an ironic iconic

reminder of the

violent erasure of

the former heart of

Tijuana.

Figure 5: Construction of CECUT

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ERRE is insisting here: how did the

history and concept of this space change

abruptly, unnaturally, and forcedly? It was a

series of decisions from above a pragmatic

effort to wipe the city slate clean and

institutionalize everything from the ground

up, including creativity. Century 21 blended

the line between past and present realities with its surreal functionality. People could

enter and watch TV, eat, sit and rest, make use of the working electricity and running

water, activating squatting as a direct response to erasure. Century 21 for me sparked

a conversation about making use of the materials that are dumped in the space around

informal infrastructures amongst and against the monstrous mass of institutionalized

structure generated by growing neoliberalism. Used furniture, clothesline, ladder, t-

shirt, old tires, and weathered plywood seasoned the piece with the spirit of Cartolandia

at Tijuana’s center as people entered and exited its spaces. ERRE shouted a

desperate cry for a moment of restitution, which he could only reach through inviting the

ghost of Cartolandia to rise to haunt “New Tijuana.” Rene Peralta said: “In front of

CECUT, it brought up the way in which institutions of culture hide violent history with a

civilized wagon in architectonic form” reaching the conclusion “Century 21 intended to

de-contextualize both structures by making apparent and visible the formal and spatio-

temporal tension inherent in the large context of the city”3 Kate Bonansinga said in

3 Peralta, Rene. "Tijuana's Haunt." pensamientos genericos. 11 8, 2008.

http://generica.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html (accessed 2 15, 2013).

Figure 6: El Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT)

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2008 that ERRE “brought the economic periphery of the border to center stage.” In a

way, this shows how the spatial and conceptual come together in the piece, giving it de-

monumentalizing meaning and complexity in the realm of analyzing our spaces and

questioning borders.4

In the case of ERRE’s piece and in the context of Tijuana’s Zona Río, Century

21© becomes a lie, a joke—in the face of thousands who lost their livelihoods, and who

became displaced for the building of what stands there today. The logical truth is that

Cartolandia will never happen again. After all the construction, though it is technically

congruent to a Cartolandia house, is not a Cartolandia house, and it surely is not a

house in its original context of Cartolandia because that would be a spatio-temperal

impossibility. The moment of that experience of the critical drive for survival is gone at

once and the demolition of Cartolandia, like the mass destruction of the ancient Amazon

ecosystem, is complete. The dark and depressing overtone makes this violent change

feel irreversible. Recovering its spirit, however, is not impossible and in fact can be

done in an instant in a thought or a memory of its resilience and its sacrifice. According

to Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, it is precisely here, that the individual

human narrative and the power of the emotions, memory or the recollection of past

experiences come into play.

ERRE was able to express the duality and the multiplicity his inner elements

through artistic production by expressing his own condition as a subject of perceived

and conceived urban spaces, while displaying the “antagonism that haunts” the border

4 Bonansinga, Kate. "Art as Opinion: Marcos Ramirez ERRE." Art Lies, 2008.

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and his home Tijuana. This reveals and questions the absurdity of the realities that

restrict our human movement, and is the image that appears through the lens of the

inner and outer occluded other. We see the limitations this hyper-speed neo-global

boom has meant for alternative concepts of development in the south borderlands. In

the spirit of widening the looking glass, ERRE is recuperating cries from the silence by

holding space for them to rise through Cartolandia’s memory. This piece would pave

the way for other public artists in Tijuana to rethink and occupy spaces in alternative

ways in the face of the catastrophic and deadly ecological effects of the border.5

For YonkeArt’s September 2002 event, Yonke Life, Tijuana junkyard Nuevo

Ferrari was transformed into a laboratory for multi-sensory collaborative conceptions of

new sounds, images, and uses of space. Headlights were re-constructed as projectors,

and car hoods became backdrops against which independent local films were screened.

I mention this collaborative event because it speaks to an important moment in

Tijuanense and the greater regional history of youth, countercultures and practice. But

more importantly, it is a model of collaboration that has spread north of the border, and

with its alternative embracing of the hazardous ecological effects from the other side to

affect and inspire other art practices in the region.

Tijuana-based artist, Jaime Ruiz Otis, who makes his principle media, aesthetic

tools, and palette from industrial waste, has conceived projects such as his 2012

Polystyrene Characters6, a language made entirely out of the discarded polystyrene

pieces found in Chinese factory dumps. These prints are transferred straight onto the

5 Solaimani, Sara. Master's Thesis: Culture, Art, and the Transborder Experience: Marcos Ramirez ERRE's Art

Practices. San Diego: San Diego State University Montezuma Publishing, 2011: 78-86 6 http://capitalismoamarillo.net/practicas/

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wall and transform the interior space into a monolithic tablet encoded with a new

language of industry. Interestingly, according to the observations of the piece’s visitors

some of the polystyrene characters turned to bear a striking resemblance to actual

Chinese alphabet.

Figure 7: Jaime Ruiz Otis, Polystyrene Characters (2012) (From Capitalismo Amarillo Website)

Ruiz Otis makes a commentary that translates the waste into a new medium to

communicate a space of his experience to the viewer.

In November 2012, Tijuana colectivo Torolab launched their community

sustainability-building project FarmLab/Laboratorio La Granja Transfronteriza in Camino

Verde, one of the most dangerous and disparate neighborhoods in Mexico. FarmLab is

an elaborate project plan to get Camino Verde residents organized in growing their own

food, and using the fresh ingredients to make an array of products like healthy jams and

salsas. Once packaged, the products enter a chain of production that requires human

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exchange, they are sold at market and transformed into capital for residents. This

collaboration has been an inspiration to our group, and the goal is to build a closer

relationship to Torolab as its well-researched project is most closely related to our

practice and aims. Torolab’s text for Farmlab reads:

The Transborder FarmLab is a non-profit project developed by Torolab. Based in

one of the most violent perimeters in the State –according to Federal

Governement statistics, it aims to help combat poverty through art, culture,

training, exchange, shared knowledge and the generation of economic models

that empower citizens for territorial and social transformation.7

This communication and spatial engagement means different things for different people,

and plays an important role in revealing the degree of transborderness of each

individual put through the laboratory. For UCSD Visual Artists working last quarter in

Cañon Laureles producing registers of labor, to cite the title of Jaime Ruiz Otis’ series of

industrial material prints, the landscape was not easy to internalize, the borders were

difficult to traverse. Lesley Stern, Professor of the Public Space: Gardens Seminar Fall

Quarter 2012, engaged graduate students in fieldwork that raised questions around

theories of the Garden and canyons as gardens. Students read and developed

discourse around rethinking the garden and gardening as engagements/practices of

public space.

How could gardens act as metaphors, catalysts, links to recalling personal

histories, to memories? Are canyons gardens? Students looked closely at the

Transborder region as a chain of endangered canyons, invaginations of the landscape

7 http://torolab.org/blog/transborder-farmlab-opening/

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that border precious wetlands, where native plants and animals thrive. In Tijuana’s

canyons waters flood, industrial liquid waste collects, and people squat, or are relocated

to other canyons. The canyons could alternatively be thought of as maternal, concave

spaces of protection. They become homes, they become ecological territories where

interests collide and merge all at once. Students and faculty expressed interests to

continue this research in a more organized manner, venturing farther into the center of

our transborder region. Our Special Topics course Winter 2013 gave students the

opportunity to follow this path to achieving a greater transborder index.

In our past fieldwork, we had learned of the imperative demand for a vegetable

gardening design that could be

sustainable in informal canyon

settlements. The central challenge to

gardening in the site is precisely the

plague of toxic water that spreads into

everything during floods, along with long

bouts of drought in dry seasons.

Professor Stern’s long-term ecological

research interest in the regional

borderlands and conversations with

students resulted in an idea for a

possible scalable solution to the specific problem at hand. A wicking garden is a water-

conserving design that incorporates layers through which water is wicked up to the

vegetables from a reservoir below. It had been done in Alice Springs, Australia, which

Figure 8: The Wicking Garden (Photo by Nichole Speciale)

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has a dry, hot climate similar to that of Tijuana. With this and other factors in mind,

could wicking be a sustainable practice in canyons in Tijuana? In the interest of

continuing an established relationship between UCSD and regional NGO Alter Terra,

we considered Colonia San Bernardo, Tijuana as a proposed project site.

Figure 9: Colonia San Bernardo (Photo by Alex Kershaw)

It was important to have controls for our experiment

in different locations of the region, on both sides of

the border, so we revalorized whatever material

available to make wicking vegetable gardens at

home to mirror those we would be building in

Tijuana.

Figure 10: Dominic Miller building a wicking garden bed (Photo by Nicole Speciale)

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But what would it mean to make a connection through collaborative vegetable

gardening in a landscape in this context where subjective alienation of the artist and the

impossibility of representation as Trinh Minh Ha expresses in Woman/Native/Other8, is

ever present and felt? Were we entering as artists or rather as something else? Some

group members did not have adequate language skills or knowledge of the territory to

be mobile and independent in Tijuana. These factors further complexified naming,

framing, describing our project.

To navigate, using Professor Stern’s guidance we coordinated with community

partners. Our group attended talks from many environmental experts including

Professor Oscar Romo of the Tijuana River Estuary and Alter Terra, the environmental

8 Minh-ha, Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and

Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Figure 11: Headed to Laureles

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NGO in Colonia San Bernardo, Cañon Laureles. Of the two million Tijuanense

residents and the two million San Diego residents, San Diegans use on average 10

times the water our Tijuanense neighbors use. We have learned how people are

tracing the lines to the origins of the pathogens, heavy metals, organics, and dioxins in

the water and soil in these settlements.

Figure 12: Photo collage of elements in San Bernardo (various photographers)

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Gayatri Spivak often stresses the importance of learning as opposed to just learning

about the duality9 inherent to our contemporary Lacanian construct of the real and

symbolic in a bloody and bordered world. Becoming increasingly transborder means

knowing this duality as a time-space condition, living it as an imposed condition on

one’s life and precious time. Here the investment of time in a space of practice (for us,

spending time in Cañon Laureles) becomes crucial.

We heard the narratives of maquiladora workers who have lived through health

violations and sexual abuse. During interviews, residents have expressed conditions of

complete immobility in the canyon, inaccessibility when floods hit and sustainability—it

is not safe to walk outside or try to drive up to attend work during rains. Services are

scarce; garbage trucks cannot access some areas and so people must cart their trash

far distances and uphill to dumpsites. And after all of this work to get trash out of the

canyon, it faces social dumping from outsider unknown sources. We heard of the real

vulnerability and the fear of violent crime. But out of these problems of livability, I think

the thing that has been able to pry a space big enough to crawl out from is the creativity

it entails to navigate this space with the problem of too much or too little water that is

always too contaminated. Interviews with community members revealed that they are

experts of gardening in containers, water recycling techniques and have vast knowledge

of which water can be reused in which ways safely.

9 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1 and 275

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Figure 13: San Bernardo Residents garden in buckets (Photo by Matthew Savitsky)

We continue to teach each other what we know, about the macro- and micro- histories

of the borderlands in the pre- and post-NAFTA context, about alternative models of

ethnography, collaborative art practice, and theories of space and intervention, about

planting seeds, Spanish, and building with hands.

Some questions that arose during the initial phase of the project were, is this

an intervention? What should our intervention look like? What should the nature of

it be? Some members of our group such as artist Matt Savitsky, expressed less

desire to go with any personal plans or agenda for art collaboration. He wanted to

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“be in the space” and spend time allowing his senses to be disrupted, to respond

and readjust to the Laureles Canyon images, sounds, and smells. How could he

think about a “creative product” when “the matter at hand was so pragmatic?”10 Kate

Clark expressed feelings of being a body in the space as a functional entity for

production.11 How could our activities in the canyon be conceptualized as art

practice when there was such a straight-forward functional task before us—one that

required no creativity on our part to help choreograph it? Perhaps we could

conceive that we were paving the way for an alternate Marxian mode of production?

Members of our group shared that they were too involved in the research to be

thinking about art at all, at least just yet.

Figure 14: Sara Solaimani working with children in San Bernardo and her son Diako (Photo by Alex Kershaw)

10 Phone conversation with Matthew Savitsky 2/19/2013 11 Meeting with Garden group 2/17/2013

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Here it is relevant to mention Claire Bishop, who cited Thomas Hirschhorn in her

article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. Hirschhorn’s theory of active versus

interactive work resonates with the way it has felt to be in the canyon working with

our bodies, using our creative communication skills and other forms of language to

compensate where traditional language fails us, or does not lend itself to be learned

easily.

I do not want to do an interactive work. I want to do an active work. To me, the

most important activity that an art work can provoke is the activity of thinking.

Figure 15: Labor (various Photographers)

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Andy Warhol's Big Electric Chair (1967) makes me think, but it is a painting on a

museum wall. An active work requires that I first give of myself. 12

During discussions of what to present and how to collaborate on products for

the UCSD Visual Arts Department’s annual Open Studios show, we finally agreed to

name it Wicking13, a central problematic was the question of representation in this

specific context. PhD Art Practice student Alex Kershaw, who normally spends from

six months to three-years in a space before generating creative work for exhibition,

took issue with using documentation to represent something so early in our

interaction with the community. He assumed all video and sound footage was for

the purpose of informing us, and when faced with the ethics of whether/how to use

this material, asked the questions:

1. Why do we want to make this representation? What is the purpose? 2. Is our subject the wicking gardens, the people of Laureles, us, the

ecology? While in reality these are not easily separated, time-based media has a nasty of habit prizing these elements apart.

3. Who does this representation serve, and how? 4. What do we want to communicate to our audience? 5. Would people in Laureles like being mediated, represented through video

and sound to a foreign audience? 6. From whose perspective is the ‘narrative’ told? 7. On what aspects of the project should the video focus?14

To this I would add, where can any agency be recorded? Can it be found in the

object? Returning to Kershaw’s first question in search of possible answers, one

objective would be to make a representation of what many from ‘our’ side of the

border never see, to reveal an ignorance, a denial of the more ‘conditioned’ inner

12Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." The MIT Press, 2004: 51-79. 13 Samara Kaplan conceived this title and brought it to the group. 14 Alex Kershaw’s TED post 2/20/2013 entitled “Thoughts on Project Documentation.”

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self manifested outwardly in the act of ignoring the actual physical unevenness of

development across borders in the real. Our subject of research is the dynamic of

all others’ interactions with each other, observations, and the way each one judges

the other’s actions, comportment across the border. Ecology, or ‘the environment’ is

the political lie of equal and mutual concern for al planetary life. Laureles is not the

subject, but rather one of the many transborderlands laboratories in which we view

each other in new light, stained by the crossing. Responding on behalf of the others,

it is fair to say that we never intended to represent Laureles or its residents exactly,

but rather to document and learn from each other’s experiences in the canyon. We

want to communicate that we are taking steps to become increasingly transborder,

and that we realize that the questions we ask in interview may easily fall into a

pattern of perpetual colonizing mechanisms for entire narratives of Laureles’

community speakers. Keeping all of this in mind, and to answer the last question, for

the Wicking Show at UCSD Open Studios, the negotiation of the group led to an

agreement that the only photo and video of Laureles community members included

in the show would be the raw and somewhat awkward impromptu interview that

children Mario and Aaron Castañeda Hernandez conducted with Matthew Savitsky,

and Kershaw’s strategically-timed photograph that revealed Mario and Aaron’s

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skepticism.

Figure 16: From left to right: Mario and Aaron Castañeda, Emily Sevier, Kate Clark, Diako Solaimani, Sara Solaimani, Dominic Miller, Anya Gallaccio, Samara Kaplan, and Matthew Savitsky (Photo by Alex Kershaw)

They stood at the edge of the frame suspended in a crossroads between opposing

spatio-temporalities, looking at the others suspiciously out of the corners of their

eyes. In this context, where is the intersection between a body doing ecological

ethnographic, and physical labor and art? Could it be in a common material reality

or central object like water or the wicking garden? How can this become a

theoretical crux or hinge to help inform the transborder spatial development of the

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project in its next phases?

Figure 17: Wicking Buckets (Photo by Matthew Savitsky)

Interestingly, in the first few weeks of Phase three of the wicking gardens

some of the gardens were not being sustained, but rather families chose to unearth

the sprouted vegetables and plant them directly into the contaminated soil that our

design precisely tried to evade. The next meeting with the Laureles project

collaborators was a think tank and a review back over the first two phases of the

gardens and feedback on how to proceed as a transborder group. The group now

continues forward with eagerness to rethink the design of the garden to make it

more sustainable, but more importantly, how to keep critical theoretical

developments evenly distributed across the transborder space and accessible on

both sides of the divide.

Rather than insisting on finding answers at this stage, the project will ponder

more deeply these critical questions in hopes of finding new modes of regional

spatial engagement and production. In the meantime, I carry on in the spirit of The

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Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, who argued, that through a poetic

experience of the space, language is freed from its colonizing inevitability: “Space

that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space

subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its

positivity but with all its partiality of the imagination.”15 It is a challenge indeed to

squeeze the specific physical spatial realities I have seen of Tijuana, of the other

side, of the violent transborder flows and slows into my imagination, but what

Bachelard refers to is the de-neutralizing effect on “space that has been seized upon

by the imagination.” As artists and theorists, are we de-neutralizing the space

through our registers of labor? That the transborder collective body of water, is both

others inflicting upon each other is a fact. In the contemporary context, where we

have seen social dumping of the most horrendous sort, will sustainability ever be

more than an ephemerality? Is our goal the field practice of answering a real

physical problem, or does it extend beyond to re-present and reimagine the space

we have lived?

15 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: the Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places.

Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. p.xxxvi

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank profoundly Professor Lesley Stern and the UCSD Visual Arts

Department, Professor Anya Gallaccio, Professor Oscar Romo and NGO Alter Terra,

the warm and community of San Bernardo, with special thanks to Nora Hernandez

Aguilar, Jesus Castañeda Castro, Mario and Aaron Castañeda Hernandez without

whom this project and publication would not be possible. I would like to extend my

gratitude to my dear colleagues Emily Sevier, Matt Savitsky, Alex Kershaw, and Nichole

Speciale for sharing their critical photographs that cast a radiating gaze more deeply

within and further out toward a particular sensibility that enriches this narrative as no

words could.

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References

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: the Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1994.

Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." The MIT Press, 2004: 51-79.

Bonansinga, Kate. "Art as Opinion: Marcos Ramirez ERRE." Art Lies, 2008.

Cardenas, Raul. torolab.org. n.d. http://torolab.org/blog/transborder-farmlab-opening/ (accessed 2

2013).

Cruz, Teddy. "Political Equator." Political Equator. Tijuana/San Ysidro: UCSD, 2011.

Iglesias Prieto, Norma. Emergencias: Visual Arts in Tijuana, Vol.1: Lost Contextos Urbanos Glo-cales y la

Creatividad. Tijuana: Centro Cultural de Tijuana, 2008.

Minh-ha, Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington and

Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Peralta, Rene. "Tijuana's Haunt." pensamientos genericos. 11 8, 2008.

http://generica.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html (accessed 2 15, 2013).

Solaimani, Sara. Master's Thesis: Culture, Art, and the Transborder Experience: Marcos Ramirez ERRE's

Art Practices. San Diego: San Diego State University Montezuma Publishing, 2011.

Spivak, Gayatri. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

2012.

Valenzuela Arce, Manuel. Empapados de Sereno: El Movimiento Urbano Popular en Baja California

(1928-1988) (Drenched in Night Dew: The Popular Uban Movement in Baja California (1928-

1988)). Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1991.

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Sara Solaimani Journal Entry: reflections from the field-Colonia San Bernardo

What happens in TJ stays in TJ....not quite! I remember being a silly little 18

year-old undergrad at UCSD in the early 2000's and putting on my "TJ jeans" to cross

the border, get trashed and dance with misinformed belligerent marines who were

attracted to my Middle Eastern fetishized image. With microhistories in the making,

propelled through the flow of people, products, water, and waste, the ecological

question is one on which the transborder community cannot refuse to

cooperate/collaborate, in which to see the common interest. Realistically, the

overwhelming inescapability of the most dangerous and abject physical manifestations

of this waste encroaches upon and defines the everyday practices of Tijuanenses. The

double-bind between the desire to help and the acknowledgment of the asymmetrical

construction of the borderlands is one that I have been battling with for a long time.

Our UCSD/Alter Terra/San Bernardo collaborative project needs a name, needs

direction, but if we name it, give it direction, are we colonizing? As I dug my hands into

the unknown territory of Mexican soil, and made my body work, made my mouth speak

the colonial language to instruct the community how to help themselves, I was mentally

paralyzed by the paradoxical "nature" of what it meant to be a privileged subject of this

region who wanted to "help." Who the hell am I? The Laureles group has undertaken

this project because we all know that the only trace of restitution possible, in the

perpetual state of neoglobal aftermath, comes from below, from the bottom up, as Elana

Zilberg described it. What does that mean exactly?

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To attempt to replant myself into the other territory, I must be ready for the deep

alienation that I will experience, and hope that my roots will not be rejected by the heavy

tainted soil who has formed a tough exterior crust so as to dull the pain of bloody land-

partitioning, foreign invasion and neglect by its own government and foreclosed

inhabitants. I must pray that the floods of the angry goddesses will not waterlog me,

wash me up into a sewer to be forgotten forever. I don't have the skills to do this on my

own. I have not been taught these strategies of self-sustenance in the middle of a war

zone. I do not know how to build my house or grow my own food, how to educate

myself outside of institutional education. I have no immunities to these microbes

swimming around in the mud. I am disoriented and paranoid. I cannot find my way

around nameless streets by pure landmark. Each time we step out of the taxi in Colonia

San Bernardo, the silvery smile of Doña Tomasa awaits, and as I greet her politely,

attempting to blend in as "her friendly neighbor," her smile catches a bit of sunlight that

reflects back my way and pierces my paranoid soul. She sees right through me, and

laughs coolly.