About

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.”
(“Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.”)
—Gloria Anzaldúa in This Bridge Called My Back, 1983

Standing next to the border wall in Nogales, Mexico. Photograph by Amanda Potter

I started this blog after returning from a spring break research trip across the U.S.-Mexico border. During the journey I thought a lot about the physical and social landscape that shapes, not only nation-states, but our daily lives. I began to see the border as, not just a fence dividing two adjacent nations, but something far less tangible yet ever-present in my own community. Because of the social barriers that determine who “belongs,” newcomers have more to cross than just an arbitrary geographical location.

So this is how and why Katherine Schaller and I began video-recording the physical borderlands. We hoped to capture stories–stories of people, groups, institutions, and government agencies that construct and deconstruct borders. But we could not capture everyone and sometimes, even when we could, we chose to put away our cameras. How to do you record people who are silent? What is the purpose of documenting the undocumented? I realized, then, the power in the ability to be seen, to see, and to show.

With a camera in my hand, I have the power to interpret and represent certain realities and perspectives. The images I produce are ethnographic data with a lifespan much longer than human memory. So I started wondering, can I use this power for good? If so, where and how?

Sewon Christina Chung is a Sociology and Literary & Cultural Studies double-major at the College of William & Mary.