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• • • Simulacra Stops Here S tanding in Tijuana on the invisible line dividing Mexico from the States, I felt viscerally what I'd once nodded at intellectually, an image from Guillermo G6mez-Pena's Border Brujo: the border as wound. After nightfall especially, the fracture is clearly visible. All light to the south. All dark to the north. All ramshackle houses and cacophony and food smells to the south. All silence to the north, punctuated by the occasional Border Patrol helicopter. I'd arrived before dusk in Tijuana's oldest neighborhood with members of the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo. Made up of Mexican, Chicano, and Anglo artists from the San DiegolTijuana area, BAW/TAF has used the border as its stage, its think tank, its muse since 1984. As artist Robert Sanchez explained, "We want to participate in the history of the border instead of just being defined by it." We parked next to the easily crossed wire fence marking it here and walked the rest of the rutted dirt road, down into Canyon Zapata. Here was an unofficial checkpoint on the road to el norte. No souvenir stand. No duty-free shop. People sat at several makeshift refreshment stalls with plastic tarp ceilings. They were drinking soda or beer, eating tacos -and waiting. Waiting for darkness and the chance to run for it, the chance to be undocumented in the U.S.A. Technically, they were already sitting in California. The fence had been dismantled in Canyon Zapata. About a hundred yards into U.S. territory lay the flatland used by neighborhood residents as a soccer field, though the rusted husk of an auto sat nearly dead center. Beyond that field, perched on a mesa, were three Border Patrol trucks. "It's not a war zone, even though the first thing you see is a helicopter ," artist Berta Jottar told me. "That's the U.S. perspective, We sell tacos." She pointed out how the Border Patrol had "landscaped" 192 REGENERATE ART the area, creating ruts and cliffs so no one could drive through. It was a no-man's land. And no-woman's land. The artists, who've worked in the canyon a number of times, always begin by asking permission to do so at each of the stalls. Then they recruit performers from among those waiting to cross. Certainly this was a context for art guaranteed to overwhelm the art. A performance could be nothing but diversion before the larger drama ahead. As the border graffiti once quoted by Gomez-Pena puts it: "Simulacra stops here." That day, the artists planned a simple tug-of-war across the border, which they'd marked with a broken line of chalk or corn starch. To six people, artist Richard Lou handed out silky wrestling masks which were half American flag, half Mexican flag, to represent the Border Artists. Then a dozen or so people got paper MIGRA masks, actual photocopies of the Border Patrol headgear that comes equipped with infrared lenses. At the center of the black rope they all began to pull was a round map of the Western hemisphere. Like real life, the game was lopsided in favor of the migra, but nearly half of them were seven- or eight-year-old boys. And they were barefoot . After five or ten minutes of struggle, four young men rushed out from the cheering crowd to help the Border Art side, these illegal entrants making them easy winners. The sun was setting. Vendors began pulling their tarps down. Children romped into the soccer field, and people around me put jackets on, though it was still quite warm. No one had a bag or even a backpack . "They cannot. They have to run," said Berta. This crossing point was a dangerous one, someone explained to me later. There were vigilantes. We made our way back up the hill and there, next to the wire fence, Berta found one of the "border sutures" the group planted inJuly. BAWl TAF had decided to stitch the border. For a month, they'd zigzagged over it in a bus, all the way from the Gulf to the Pacific. Traveling with a large Xerox machine, a dirt bike, and video equipment, they were constantly pulled over by the Border Patrol. What were they doing? Interviewing people on both sides of the line. Burying about twenty large steel staples, trying to make sure they got one prong in Mexico and one prong in...

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