Border Land, Border Water
Part work of philosophy, part history, C. J. Alvarez’s Border Land, Border Water traces the ideological and physical forces that shaped—and continue to shape—the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Alvarez clearly states that, despite being so distinct on a map, the border defies a singular identity or categorization. In Border Land, Alvarez hopes to “recover the heterogeneity and diversity of a space often cast as monolithic” (11). The book succeeds in this endeavor, partly by accomplishing goals set out in the introduction, first, to draw out the connections between the control of water and the control of people. Second, to elucidate the development of construction and infrastructure along the border. In his approach, Alvarez bridges the disciplines of social/political history and environmental history.
Alvarez’s style and treatment of his subject are dense and academic, and the chapters largely proceed chronologically, rather than tracing a particular line of argument. This is intentional, Alvarez writes, because “construction was often taking place simultaneously at multiple sites on the border, but toward different ends” (12). The cumulative structure suits the subject matter in the sense that, as Alvarez puts it, the border is a site of accretion. Like a construction site, it has become more built up over time. Further, the border displays a trend Alvarez calls “compensatory building,” which means that the structures built on the border have repeatedly proved inadequate or have created a new set of problems. New structures were then devised to address problems created by the initial structures. While Alvarez uses the phrase “compensatory building” to refer to the physical structures along the border, the idea applies to the social and political forces at work along the border as well.
Alvarez describes a shift in the first quarter of the twentieth century as the border transformed from a site of neutrality to a site of defense. During the Mexican Revolution, much of border policing was dedicated to preventing the flow of guns from America to Mexico. As Alvarez succinctly puts it, “the army was on the border in large part to police the activities of American citizens, especially gunrunners” (62). Post-Revolution, border policing became permanent.
“Military history is intrinsically linked to environmental history,” Alvarez writes. “From the point of view of officers and soldiers, questions about topography, hydrology, and climate are of constant concern not only for combat but for supply trains, communication, and patrolling” (66). The Army took advantage of the remoteness and space of the border region to train troops. Thus began what Alvarez calls the militarization of the border region—which he links to current border policing practices today. There is a long history of the military choosing environments that are conducive to testing weapons, vehicles, chemicals, etc. Remoteness of one kind or another is necessary for both secrecy and the protection of civilians. Ironically, the absence of water, the very thing that kept the border sparsely populated, was a problem technology solved, thus rendering the desert more livable while also making it less useful to the military (67). Much of the improvement and expansion of transportation and water infrastructures was for military purposes (83). Alvarez posits that, while many historians discuss the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol as a function of worries about immigration, the system was in place long before immigration was the primary concern (91-92).
Alvarez shows the ways in which almost every event, every policy, every structure, along the border is a response to a previous event, policy, or structure. The book traces cause and effect: what begins as cattle management turns into people management; what begins as water management also turns into people management, and vice-versa. Through all of this, cultural change occupies the background of the story, and it comes to the fore in the later chapters, particularly as Alvarez describes how Nixon’s drug war affected border policing.
While Alvarez doesn’t spell it out as a distinct thesis, he also describes a pattern of technological advances changing the way the border region was treated. For example, more accurate mapping, the advent of motor vehicles, and the building of roads, all produced an increased ability to monitor and change the physical environment and the people moving through it. These technological advances later included surveillance and more elaborate fencing. In short, a dearth of technology allowed the border to be more malleable and less controlled over a century ago, but, over time, the U.S. physically controlled or monitored even the most remote regions.
As with improved infrastructure, improved construction methods allowed more of the landscape—including water—to be tamed. Alvarez’s discussion of water weaves the political with the environmental, and both of these threads show the ways in which management of water once involved both the U.S. and Mexico, but now involves the U.S. almost exclusively. As Alvarez notes, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified:
If, by the examinations which may be made, it should be ascertained to be practicable and advantageous to construct a road, canal or railway…the Governments of both Republics will form an agreement regarding its construction, in order that it may serve equally for the use and advantage of both countries (20–21)
Twenty pages later, Alvarez wryly notes: “The document was silent, however, on what should happen if a border river changed course, thereby ceding territory to one country or another” (42).
While the Border Patrol grew in scope and power, Alvarez notes that the control of water shifted in similar ways, showing again the mirroring of the control of humans and the control of nature:
The International Boundary Commission (IBC), renamed the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) in 1944, transformed from a bureaucracy dedicated primarily to small land claims arbitration along the border rivers to an engineering agency that executed massive reconfigurations of the physical shape and flow capacity of the Rio Grande and beyond (95).
The control of nature in turn had much to do with the interests of capitalism, such as the expansion of agriculture, which could be considered a human structure in the border region, where large-scale commercial agriculture could only exist with the miracles of engineering. As Alvarez puts it, “those who dominated water dominated people” (97). Alvarez connects agriculture to an influx of laborers from Mexico in order to meet the demands of the farms. The demand for labor outweighed the fear of immigrants (98). Alvarez repeatedly makes clear that the U.S. government considered the land of the border region in many ways, but never as a site of human beings, unless those humans were “other,” and therefore not important.
One of Alvarez’s more compelling arguments is that attitudes toward particular landscapes are inextricably woven with attitudes toward the people who live in those landscapes. Alvarez describes what he calls “ecosystem bias,” the dislike of the desert, which was not simply due to the difficulty of surviving in the arid, seemingly inhospitable climate, but also a manifestation of racial bias against the indigenous peoples who were able to survive there. A dangerous landscape is filled with dangerous
people. This particular argument fits in with Alvarez’s idea that efforts to control the border are twofold: controlling nature and controlling people, and these two elements are treated similarly.
Border Water traces a trajectory of development and progress that at first seems innocuous, but it only remains so as long as humans lack the technology to intensify their control of nature. Alvarez demonstrates that escalation occurs incrementally, and that it is not the result of single policies or choices. The greatest value of this book is perhaps the fact that it traces so methodically the piecemeal changes to a landscape that is now unrecognizable as the landscape of 200 years ago. While that could be said of countless landscapes, Alvarez chooses a case study that is timely and that deserves to be elucidated as other parts of the country grapple with the role and behavior of law enforcement, the effects of climate change and environmental change, and the prospect of a giant black wall, impermeable to almost every force, being built across a delicate ecosystem.
Alvarez’s case study applies more broadly to other landscapes and other contexts and provides methods and avenues for thinking about them. One might apply many of his arguments to landscapes of sea level rise, for example, or to the melting of polar ice to allow passage where no passage was possible before. Alvarez obliquely makes the case that our political systems and arrangements must accommodate nature—or forever fight it. This book is not overtly political, but it is difficult to read Alvarez’s history of the border region and its landscape without concluding that politically motivated choices have resulted in environmental, human, and cultural degradation, rather than benefits to society.
I described this book as part work of philosophy because it brings up larger questions of how we think about landscape, what constitutes nothingness, what is the “other,” and to what extent we become inured to changes in the landscape. At a certain point, we normalize the surveillance and the violence inherent in how we control the border, but Alvarez performs the useful task of highlighting how very strange these practices really are, and how long a journey, full of many turns, led to this point.
Border Water is likely to be of interest to scholars interested in western water or the changing role and power of law enforcement, or to readers like me, who are interested in the ways in which military activities play a role in conservation and ecology. One of the qualities that narrows the book’s audience is the absence of a human narrative to focus the subject matter and provide cohesion. Yet despite the fact that it is not in any way a leisurely or casual read, Border Water is important to a broader audience, particular at this moment, when the pressures of development collide with the natural world in myriad and ever-increasing ways.
Biography
J.D. Ho has an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, and other journals.
© 2020 J.D. Ho, used by permission
Technoculture Volume 10-11 (2020-2021)
