Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Frontera ed. by Katherine G. Morrisey and John-Michael Warner

When the editors of this engaging collection of essays on the US-Mexico borderlands talk in their introduction of "interdisciplinary conversation," the phrase captures well the scholarship and the spirit of this book. This is a highly accessible compilation of interpretive work on borderland (especially historical) visualization, capturing a range of disciplinary approaches from a variety of authors. It also offers a truly inter-disciplinary model, with a thoughtful introduction and excellent introductory section essays, transcribing a meaningful dialogue between two scholars. This edited book is a model of how interdisciplinary scholarship can be done, and—given the subject matter—how relevant and appropriate that approach can be. As geographers we should explore works such as these that push our natural inclination for open-minded engagement toward further-reaching scholarly terrains such as the more avowedly artistic (as the second half of this book does).

Historical geographers will find the subject of this collection—the ways the Mexico/US frontier has been visualized in history and the present—interesting and important. The book is divided into two sections. The first considers the broader histories of the built environment in these borderlands, with an excellent dialogue of an introduction ("A Conversation on Border Landscapes through Time") and three focused chapters. The second presents some of the art histories—including examinations of art installations or performance art—of the borderland. In both cases this is a thought-provoking reminder of the symbolic, creative, emotional power of the border, beyond its more traditional (and, as the authors rightly point out, remote) political or economic conception. The border—including, and beyond, the "wall"—is a material phenomenon in a landscape. This book vividly directs our attention to the ways that materiality has been visualized and interpreted.

While the second section opens geographers' eyes to the artistic and creative interrogations of this frontier in interesting ways (with essays on the border wall as canvas, on a film project, and a GPS-powered "transborder immigrant tool," for instance), the first section contains work of particular historical value. A couple of chapters point to how worthwhile it can be to take an explicitly "visual" approach to historical geography. A discussion by Mary Mendoza ("Fencing the Line: Race, Environment, and the Changing Visual Landscape at the U.S.-Mexico Divide") connects the fences and fortifications constructed in the early years of the twentieth century aimed at checking the spread of cattle ticks with the demarcation and construction of racial difference. "The story of tick eradication at the U.S.-Mexico border," she writes, "reveals how nature, at its most fundamental level, can be seen at the center of racial discourse" generating, and supported by, the "construction of a racialized and imposing border control apparatus" (68). This fusion of nature, landscape, and human prejudice around the material built practices at this moment in border history is brilliantly described and effectively illustrated.

Katherine Morrissey's essay, "Monuments, Photographs, and Maps: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Border in the 1890s," in the same section will also spark geographers' interest. In a fascinating account she shows the use of photography in the 1890s to record the establishment of border "monuments"—obelisks built to (hopefully) fix the (hopefully) accurate location of the line, at various points. This work is an effective discussion of the International Boundary Commission and the efforts at demarcation in that period. It illustrates another way in which the border is actually created and made physical. It also illustrates the assumed power of the "visual," both in terms of the monuments themselves and the official use of photographic records to check and support border location claims. But Morrissey takes the analysis further and compares images taken by the Mexican section photographers with those by the American photographers, giving a thoughtful account of the differences of perspective—a fascinatingly humanistic interpretation of this oft en (inter-)nationalized, abstracted political space.

Collection chapters such as these demonstrate the geographical relevance of the visual approach to examining a borderland. And the power of geography and the "visual" in tandem for spurring meaningful interdisciplinary work is laid out here clearly to see. The book offers a valuable taste of the kinds of work that can be done with this topic and this approach—and the only critique would be that there is surely room for even more interpretive essays on similar topics in this collection. This book takes a political construction, a border, and vividly reminds us, through the visual and artistic frames, of its physical creation and form, and its symbolic power. This integration is so apt for something that is both a political weapon and an everyday human structure, as a border so manifestly can be. And while this interdisciplinary and multilevel approach shares the visual as a topic, the very structure of the book—with its "conversational" essays and open-minded spirit—echoes that same sense of meaningful and necessary cross-disciplinary engagement. This book is of clear interest to anyone wishing to learn more about USMexico border and borderland history, to the way it has been represented and created, and to those seeking a transformative way of doing and presenting history.