Lines less determined

by Daryl Meador.

In Volume 2 of Torn Apart/Separados, “Lines” visualizes the U.S. state removal of immigrants. Appropriately dark and oblique shapes mark the powerful, dynamic imposition of these forced displacements. This map’s aesthetics garner an appropriately menacing perception of these removals, evoking the violence of the action itself.

The aesthetics of these mapped displacements remind me of the border wall—forceful, obdurate, and aspiring to be frictionless in their stolid paths. They recall the “Newtonian mechanical ideal of a trajectory—perfectly hard, straight, smooth, and frictionless,” an ideal first made manifest by the railroad’s brute force as it expanded Westward in the nineteenth century, overcoming natural obstacles in its path and accelerating its own form of population removal.¹

In contrast to these preeminently linear trajectories, for roughly 1,200 miles between Texas and Mexico, the border is demarcated by the winding, wavering path of the Rio Grande River, the Río Bravo Del Norte by its Spanish name. This watercourse joins Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas, a region where bicycling is gaining popularity as a mode of transportation, a recreational activity, and a form of community building. My own research, built through many bicycle rides and comprised of both writing and filmmaking, is invested in how both the river and the bicycle manifest types of movement that are indeterminate and fluid, challenging the optic, striated logics that enforce power here in violent ways.

Several years ago I was lucky to be introduced to members of the Doble Rueda bicycling collective that operates in Matamoros. Since then I’ve joined many of their weekly 15km social bicycle rides, manifestations of hundreds of people who reverberate with music, blinking lights, and cheers. Doble Rueda’s committed group of organizers undertake the daunting task of facilitating the large, weekly rides. They rotate from the back to the front of the group, taking turns plugging intersections with their bodies so the mass of bicycles can flow through. The collective prioritizes new riders, asking them to ride in the front of the group to set the speed, and they don’t leave anyone behind. The rides often take a slow pace, but they aren’t intent on getting anywhere fast. They are rather intent on cycling their route together.

A cheer often heard on these rides is an exuberantly yelled “¡Aburrido!” I’ve heard that this expression originated in the group’s first rides, five years ago, when just a few cyclists took to the streets together and one of them remarked that their small group was “boring.” Now, when the cheer is emitted, it is echoed throughout the peripatetic crowd, reverberating ironically as a lively cacophony. The cheer transforms Matamoros, a city that is often demonized and sensationalized in the media, into just another everyday place.

I’m deeply grateful to Doble Rueda for welcoming me into their rides, offering their friendship and collaboration in documenting their valuable strategies and activities. I remain attentive to my own positionality as an American academic in this place—in part exploring the unique encounter afforded by the bicycle. Bicycling is not an equalizing force, but as a spatial and embodied practice, it manifests rich and textured understandings of difference.

Bicycling, as a sensorially rich experience, exceeds the visual, a valuable intervention on the border, where modes of visualization are often harnessed to the state system of surveillance and detainment, the expansive regime that is so valuably mapped by Torn Apart/Separados. The impermeable border that this system enforces works in tandem with NAFTA’s system of economic exploitation, indicating the underlying greed that subtends these overlapping regimes of power. Within these striated logics that are optic, planned, and controlled, the bicycle unfolds a landscape that is dynamic and lively, full of mobile flows that are prosaic, lateral, and aleatory. These movements do not erase the geo-political dividing line that lays nearby but they challenge its impasse, harnessing instead the bicycles’ capacity for embodied, collective movement in a terrain so often defined by restriction.

The status of international border has been imposed upon the Río Bravo Del Norte since 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that the exact demarcation would officially lay along the river’s deepest channel. Nine years of early binational surveys failed to determine the exact depths of the river, in part because the river’s “propensity for rapid and profound changes” to its course, causing irritating discrepancies in early attempts to map it as a border.² The river has indeed proven to be a slippery national container.

While the Río Bravo’s force has been tamed, over time, by dams and reservoirs, it continues to defy human attempts to demarcate it as a hard border. Eighty miles upstream from Brownsville, the river surrounds Los Ebanos on three sides, and during large floods it turns the city into an island. This risk of floods deterred the construction of the border wall through Los Ebanos in 2007, although in recent months the government has renewed its attempts. Aleida Flores Garcia, whose property was spared in 2007 from the wall’s planned imposition due to the river’s wiliness, told reporters recently, “As the river gives, the river takes away.”

The wall already runs through Brownsville, manifested in 18-foot, rust-colored steel bars that are embedded in cement below the earth. The wall can’t match the river’s serpentine path, however, and its linear trajectory effectively cuts off access to thousands of acres of public and private land, including a nature preserve, a golf course, and many residential plots. One such plot is owned by Dr. Eloisa García Támez, a member of the indigenous Lipan Apache community whose ancestral land overlaps both sides of the river. This wall, and the community’s public opposition to it, is just one of the manifold “catastrophes that indigenous women here have been experiencing en masse since 1520,” reminds Margo Támez.³

This wall manifests the Newtonian ideal that the border regime aspires to be, imposing it with force, and evoking, as Shannon Mattern describes, “pre-linguistic proclamations of power and control, tyrannical speech acts” formed here in steel. This wall’s forceful materiality is made ironic by its intermittent path and baseless justifications, contradictions that reveal its ultimate xenophobic and greedy aims. Ed Casey has aptly described that in this place, “avarice joins forces with fear and racism,” creating a border regime that is subsumed by corruption.⁴

While in Brownsville, access to the river is now prohibited, in Matamoros the river remains easily accessible, retaining its presence as something other than a border. A friend told me a local anecdote in Matamoros—el que toma agua Del Río Bravo siempre regresa (those who drink the water of the Río Bravo always return). A path atop the river’s levee is often traversed by recreational cyclists. Makeshift mountain bike paths zig and zag up and down the river’s banks, coming perilously close to the water’s edge.

I’ll end this reflection with a short video. It begins with a poem, written and narrated by local-Matamoros musician Luna León, as she reflects on her personal experiences bicycling in Matamoros, illustrated with footage captured via GoPro while bicycling in the city. The GoPro has proven a useful tool of visualization in this research given its predisposition for vertiginous perspectives, even that of “free-fall,” in which, as Hito Steyerl describes, the lines of linear perspective, themselves so complicit in colonial control, begin to collapse, and “new types of visuality arise.”⁵ The video ends with an exploratory bicycle ride on the banks of the Río Bravo. Here, my friend and I haphazardly tied my camera to a stick with some old earbud headphones and dipped it into the river’s placid water. Up close, the river is not a demarcating a line but a complex, aqueous, material landscape, its serpentine flow proceeding toward the sea. Ed Casey describes, “nature favors a serpentine flow in any river, creek or stream, so as to distribute nutrients and modulate the flow of energy within the system.”⁶ It strikes me that bicycling, as well, favors a serpentine path.