Valeria Luiselli echoes the sounds of the border

The drive from the western end of the U.S.-Mexico border—from the Tijuana-San Diego region—to the mouth of the Rio Grande in the Gulf of Mexico, between the states of Texas and Tamaulipas, takes approximately 24 hours.

What sounds surround one of the world's busiest borders? What stories do those who have materialized or who suffer from a demarcation that has ceased to be imaginary and has become a recalcitrant fence that grows ever taller and thicker, becoming impassable?

For five years, writer Valeria Luiselli, composer Leonardo Heiblum, and audiovisual producer Ricardo Giraldo have flanked the region, collecting sounds, trills, rumbles, murmurs, and laments that can be heard throughout the sometimes turbulent, sometimes secretive, and even unsociable territory that straddles four borders in the United States and six on the Mexican side.

A project supported by Harvard

The result of this project is called “Echoes from the borderlands,” an ensemble of sounds, reflective texts, and images that gather together and extend over the same 24 hours, and seem like inexhaustible experiences from an archive.

However, for dissemination reasons, this group has adapted a much shorter version to continue spreading the echoes of the border into the interior of both countries.

One of these echoes was heard this weekend at the Teatro de la Ciudad in Querétaro , as part of the tenth edition of the Hay Festival, which took place in the capital of Bajío state and several municipalities throughout the state. Valeria, Leonardo, and Ricardo's project was one of the highlights of the program.

“Echoes from the Borderlands” is a project developed at ArtLab and supported by the Harvard Committee on the Arts. Luiselli is currently a visiting professor of Ethnicity, Indigenism, and Migration at Harvard University.

Of whales and atomic bombs

What was presented in the capital of Querétaro was a fine synthesis of the sounds collected along the border crossing, between the coast of Tijuana–San Diego and Ciudad Juárez–El Paso.

The Teatro de la Ciudad dims its lights. Speakers have been placed at audience level and throughout the stalls. On the stage, there is a table with three seats and strange sound and video equipment. It's like a concert of the most unusual instruments, recorded some 2,600 kilometers away.

Valeria, Leonardo, and Ricardo take their places. Each one addresses one of the three facets of this project. The writer was responsible for writing some travel memoirs, a logbook, and a series of reflections that the project has provoked over the years, which she now reads interspersed with the sounds that the composer—like a true conductor—has strung together like a symphony, like a performative presentation, with aesthetics and not just as an archival exhibition. For his part, Ricardo breaks into the darkness of the stage with dozens of photographs he has taken along the way, all of them corresponding to the sounds that make their way through the archives of this collective.

This sonic, visual, and oral journey captures the harmonious and glorious song that whales echo from the depths of the Pacific. It also documents the fury of storms, the waters rushing through the river, the hubbub of the crossing points between the two nations, and the clamor of the earth, captured with a series of geophones, technological devices capable of capturing terrestrial vibrations.

“The piece begins underwater, in Tijuana-San Diego, with the migration of whales. It rises to the beach and then travels all over California, the copper mines in Arizona, the Tohono-O'odham Nation, which is next to a military testing site. Then New Mexico, especially the Mezcal Apache reservation, which is also next to a testing site. It was there that the United States government dropped the first nuclear bomb before dropping it on Hiroshima. And we went to talk to the descendants of those who were alive when the bomb was dropped. We collected testimonies from people; the sounds of coyotes, both animals and humans,” Valeria Luiselli said at a press conference prior to the project's presentation.

Tensions between two lands

Much of this journey has been recorded on the US side of the border. Fewer sounds have been captured on the Mexican side, except at crossing points between the two nations: in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Ciudad Juárez, for example.

Luiselli explains that "sadly, we haven't traveled freely through Mexico by road for reasons that, as journalists, you know very well; that is, the dangers of some roads."

Another of the hostilities that this project poses for those with Mexican roots but who are residents of the United States is the current political hostilities and the way in which hate speech toward migrant populations has intensified.

This is the case of Luiselli, who has lived in New York for two decades and who, she admits, “for the first time in 20 years, I am considering not publishing a book I am currently writing in the United States. The book is a kind of follow-up to the essay 'The Lost Children' (Sexto piso, 2016). A few years after publishing that one, I entered the detention center system (in the United States) to teach writing classes with undocumented teenagers. During that time, I didn't write anything about it because the people who allowed me in told me: 'You can't publish anything about that now, until at least five years have passed.' Those years have passed, but right now we are where we are (in a critical situation spread by Donald Trump's speeches), and this is a book that, without a doubt, would put me on a radar that I don't want to be on in the United States. On the other hand, cowardice has never been my thing. So, it seems a little atypical of me to have this reluctance, and it makes me angry,” says the author of works such as “Los ingrávidos” (2011) and “Desierto sonoro” (2019).

And he concludes: “I feel I should publish it in Mexico first. Most people in the United States are monolingual and ignorant, and they won't read it if I publish it in Spanish. This is the first time I've ever faced something like this in my life. In many periods of human history, writers have had to deal with this (a kind of self-censorship). It's just that no one expected to face something like this in our hemisphere.”

More about the project creators

Valeria Luiselli

She is the author of books such as:

“Sound desert”

“The Weightless”

“The story of my teeth”

“The Lost Boys”

Leonardo Heiblum

Winner of an Oscar and has done sound and music for films such as:

“Desert inside”

“Letters from a distance”

“The smallest place”

"Storm"

“In the hole”

Ricardo Giraldo

He has been a programmer for:

Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival (FICCO)

Traveling Documentary Tour.

He is the director of Podcasts at The Gulf Stream

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PHRASE

"Sadly, we haven't traveled freely through Mexico by road for reasons that, as journalists, you know very well; namely, the dangers of some roads."

“Sadly, we haven't traveled freely through Mexico by road for reasons that, as journalists, you know very well; namely, the dangers of some roads”: Valeria Luiselli, writer.