Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California

ABSTRACT

This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of the US–Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to border architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and additional valences of violence enacted through border landscapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the border’s imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecology of critical border studies becomes more proximate, material, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts its sensory affects – the border as experience.

Acknowledgements

This work has benefitted tremendously from feedback and encouragement from Rob St. John, to whom I always remain indebted for encouraging me to think with creativity and art. I wish to thank three exceptional anonymous peer reviewers for their critical, generous, and extremely helpful suggestions and ideas on previous iterations of this paper, as well as the patient support of Editor Dr Nancy Hiemstra for managing and evaluating my submission. This work benefitted greatly from an early presentation and rich discussion with students in Sera Boeno's Research Studio course at Moore College of Art and Design in April 2020. I also wish to thank colleagues at the San Diego Natural History Museum for their suggestions and advice on field recording locations on Otay Mountain. I wish to thank my comrades with the BIOSEC project, especially Francis Massé and Rosaleen Duffy, for encouragement and support of these ideas at their earliest stages of development.Any errors remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2170788

Notes

1. My place in the world as a white, cis-male, native English speaking American citizen and researcher matters to this article, especially in relation to how I recount my experiences as a listening subject at the border. While not illegal to undertake the field recordings I describe in this article, my experience is that CBP law enforcement agents actively discourage the presence of visitors on Otay Mountain today, and many of the roads I travelled to do so contained no trespassing signs (even though it is public land), in addition to being regularly patrolled by CBP. There was therefore a feeling of riskiness underpinning this work, and my time on the mountain was marked by uneasiness. The risks I engaged in to conduct this work (imagined or legitimate) were mediated by the privileges afforded to me by my passport and my positionality.

2. Because these critiques are well-described extensively elsewhere, I direct readers to a useful and recent review of these Eurocentric and white tendencies in relation to posthumanist political ecology in Pallister-Wilkins (2022) as it links directly to the subject of borders and less textual research methodologies.

3. While I do not engage with the border as a smellscape in this article, I intend to in a future intervention based on additional efforts to know the border through olfaction.

4. Defenders of Wildlife, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and Sierra Club v. Elaine Duke and US Department of Homeland Security. Complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief. Filed September 14, 2017, US District Court, Southern District of California; Center for Biological Diversity; Notice of Violations of the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act in Relation to Border Wall Prototype Project. June 01, 2017. Sent to US Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Interior, US Customs and Border Protection, and US Fish and Wildlife Service.

5. Interviews took place as part of a broader project on plant conservation and illegal wildlife trade. All interviews were conducted in 2018 in accordance with ethics approvals from the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield under ethics approval #016909.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Research Council Horizon 2020 [# 694995]