A cartography of loss in the Borderlands

Concrete fills the landscape at Mexicali, Baja California’s Civic Center, just blocks south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Alongside the neo-brutalist building runs a six-lane boulevard, Calzada de los Presidentes. But on the other side of the calzada, where a dirt slope leads to a line of dilapidated homes, there’s something odd: Every lot has an old hand-built retaining wall. Some are made of stacks of tires, others of corrugated metal panels, wood and other debris.

The retaining walls were built back when the boulevard was a river, according to artist and researcher Jessica Sevilla, who remembers the river from her childhood. For decades, the New River collected Mexicali’s sewage and agricultural runoff and carried it north to the Salton Sea. It was one of North America’s most contaminated waterways. So, in 1998 and 1999, under pressure from the U.S., the city confined the river to a metal tube and paved its former bed, creating the boulevard. The retaining walls, no longer necessary, are gradually falling down.  

Throughout the Colorado River Basin and the arid West, communities are reckoning with loss: Reservoirs are dropping rapidly, rivers don’t flow like they used to, and bodies of water like the Salton Sea and the Great Salt Lake threaten to disappear altogether. These changes — these losses — are especially apparent in the Mexicali Valley, which lies between California’s Imperial Valley, with its thirsty alfalfa fields, and the desiccated Colorado River Delta.

Sevilla and two other local artists and curators, Rosela del Bosque and Mayté Miranda, have taken on the task of remembering the region’s departed waters. Since 2020, the women have overseen the Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado, or Colorado River Family Album, a project that brings together contemporary art, environmental education and historical research to document bodies of water that are disappearing or are already gone.

 Mexicali was founded in 1903 to house the Mexican and Chinese workforce that developed California’s Imperial Valley, building its irrigation canals and tending its vast farm fields. After that, the city remained a migration destination, especially for job-seekers from elsewhere in Mexico.

“If you look at the history of this region, it’s a history of big projects by investors from the U.S.,” said Sevilla, “and our grandparents getting the idea that they should come be the workforce.” Mexicali was a place they could reinvent themselves; there was always work to be found.

Today, the city is home to 700,000 people, with an economy largely fueled by the many maquiladoras — assembly plants for U.S. companies — scattered throughout the metropolitan area.

Cars dominate Mexicali; very few neighborhoods even have sidewalks. Along the border wall at the north end of the city, the streets are packed with pharmacies, plastic surgeons and Chinese restaurants that cater to tourists from the U.S. From there, the city sprawls out along boulevards and highways, with residential neighborhoods, industrial areas and strip malls flowing into one another without clear separation.  

 The city’s remote location and border-related economy help shape the art that’s created here. “It’s a city that tells you to go work in a maquila, not to make culture,” said del Bosque. “The culture infrastructure here is very emergent and super self-made.”

“It’s a city that tells you to go work in a maquila, not to make culture.”

The Family Album was started during the pandemic. Sevilla often drove to the Colorado River Delta and visited the Laguna Salada, a dry lakebed into which the Colorado River once frequently overflowed. She began to feel an urgent need to raise awareness about the loss of the waterways.

She joined forces with Miranda and del Bosque, whom she knew through Planta Libre, the art gallery and project space where they both work as curators. They named the project the Family Album to signal its focus on personal connections to the landscape — “to show that our relationship with the Colorado River and the landscape of Mexicali is that of a relative,” as Sevilla put it.

“It’s really beautiful to learn that two blocks away, where now there’s a highway, there used to be shrimp and a place you could fish,” she added. “Or to hear that the Alamo Canal, which now is pretty much always dry, used to freeze over.”

In 2024, an exhibition at Planta Libre will collect archival documents and artwork that engages with water and its loss. Local artists will lead a series of walks in the surrounding region so that visitors can develop their own relationship with it. “There’s a closeness with the ecosystem that our generation didn’t have,” said del Bosque, “but that is now starting to be built.”

In early December, Sevilla and del Bosque took me to see some of the lost and vanishing bodies of water they are documenting. We drove south from Mexicali toward the western side of the delta. To the east, they pointed out Constellation Brands, a controversial plant that bottles beer for export. To the west, the Cucapah Mountains — named for the local Indigenous community — rose along the highway.

The land belongs to ejidos, or communal farming communities. In the United States, the right to roam and camp freely on public land is largely taken for granted, but here, the women of the Family Album have to conduct their research in a context of insecurity. “You can’t just go driving around on back roads,” said Sevilla. Organized crime groups guard certain parcels of land, and the women’s friends have been stopped and questioned before.

We reached the Hardy River, which drains agricultural runoff from the Mexicali Valley into the Colorado River. Lt. R.W.H. Hardy, an English traveler and author, named the river after himself when he was sent to Mexico in 1825 by the General Pearl and Coral Fishery Association of London to search for lucrative pearl deposits. The women pointed out cachanilla, or arrowweed, a willow-like riparian shrub whose name is also used to describe people from Mexicali. Then we climbed a hill and looked out toward the Laguna Salada. The Cucapah name for the laguna, they told me, means “water behind the mountains.”

On the drive back, we wound our way through ejidos and eventually reached the Cerro Prieto Geothermal Power Station. Sevilla and del Bosque called it the “cloud factory,” after the vast white plumes of water vapor it constantly spewed out.

Cerro Prieto was the first geothermal plant in Latin America, though initially a large portion of the power it generated was exported to the United States. Alongside it lay a shallow, colorful puddle — the remnant of a lake that was once the New River’s headwaters, del Bosque said. Now, it’s just a watery ghost, another feature of a landscape lost to the asymmetrical relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.

For del Bosque, Sevilla, Miranda and their community of collaborators, the absence of the Colorado River and the waters it nourished forms a cartography of loss that is written on the landscape. Their mission is to make those absences visible — to keep their memories alive, and to imagine possibilities for the future.

 “They are bodies of water that have been exploited and that may never recover their normal ecology — they’ve experienced irreversible damage,” said del Bosque. “Loss is woven into everything we do.”

Caroline Tracey is a journalist who covers the Southwestern U.S., Mexico and their Borderlands. In 2022-2023, she was High Country News’ Climate Justice Fellow. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Follow her on Twitter @ce_tracey. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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