Borderland is a series that examines the US-Mexican border and how its existence influences the cultural and physical landscape. My move to the border state of California prompted this work.

The border between the US and Mexico is a physical and psychological barrier beginning at the Pacific Ocean, snaking through the desert southwest and ending in the Gulf of Mexico. Borderland, the zone existing near the frontier, is a place of messy vitality resulting from the collision of cultures living within its boundaries. To live in the borderland is to live at the end of the country, the last place before another place starts.

This body of work was created on the northern side of the border where the human tide flows and contradictions abound. I traveled the border in search of cultural phenomena and found that the border is but an idea, a negotiation between people taking sides. With this work, I was drawn to the margins of towns and edges of deserts in search of the borders vernacular character. 

I moved from town to town as an anonymous visitor and met people who wanted to escape, to disappear, managing to find comfort in the harshness of the desert. As I wandered about this region I always had a sixth sense of Mexico. Down south, the line is vague with families and traditions straddling both worlds; the line is infused with the frontier traditions of guns and bibles struggling to reconcile with the Feast of Guadalupe and Dia de los Muertos. In an era where fear makes policy, an impenetrable fence is being built to stop the northern flow, but fences are full of doors when dreams move people.

This work is intended to reveal the unseen border with photographs that communicate the human longing for home and cultural identity. These images are meant to challenge the viewer to imagine truths beyond the simplified issue of immigration.