Despite the imperial delusions of Donald Trump, even against them, there is a vast territory, poorly known, but excessively mitigated: the border between Mexico and the United States. It is much more than a line in the maps, more than the Colorado and Bravo rivers (called the Texans), more than the cities of fear and violence, rather than the swarms of migrants stranded in camps that collide with walls and fences. If you look with geographical and social amplitude, you can think of a Third country
as has already been suggested. They have not lacked topographs, photographers, journalists, musicians and literary narrators.
On the American side, obsessive witnesses of the country
Border as Cormac McCarthy, Ry Cooder, Charles Bowden or William T. Vollmann. To this payroll we must add to Byron Brauchli, photographer and visual artist established long in Xalapa, Veracruz, and that among other projects has developed the intimate record of a great landscape north of the line of destinations shared between its two countries. The book Tours, and the exhibition of the same name in the Veracruz capital, opened on May 31 at the Ramón Alva de la Channel gallery, is placed away from the thrilling records mentioned above. In fact, it is an experience that refers us to the symphonist of the American landscape Ansel Adams, although in a deliberately lower tone.
Do not portray people, but places. Each section of the route is preceded by a map. We go from Colorado (North and South) to New Mexico and its Limits with Texas, to the border between Texas and Tamaulipas. But as the researcher Laura González-Flores writes in her documented prologue, The maps and photos say so much or more of those who produced them that they describe
.
What is a territory and who belongs? The indigenous reality of Mexico, and even more tragically that of the United States, teaches that people and territory are (or were) one. Against them they have operated the Spanish and British colonialisms of the past and those of both national states. In a dramatic way, Brauchli’s routes happen in territories that were Mexico until, through an unfair and unequal war, they were invaded by the northern country and today constitute an immense portion of their territory.
Does not have the maniacopic vision of Imperial, The formidable mamotreto of Vollmann (1344 pages), dedicated only to a region in southern California. Nor, Bowden’s torn observation that from so much attesting life and death in Chihuahua thundered body and soul. He returned to the poetic gaze in his beloved deserts of Chihuahua and Arizona, although his heart ended up exploding in 2014; He could never get out of Juarez, despite his end Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez.
Brauchli’s path is leisurely, devoid of human presence, almost lyrical and extremely personal. As González-Flores points out, this book brings together several observers in one: geographer, naturalist scientist, mountaineer, romantic traveler, artist, meditator, migrant. And photographer: mountains, valleys, trees, riverbank and beaches (specifically Baghdad, Tamaulipas, in the last confine with the swamp of the pigeons, Texas).
The artisanal will of its plates is not minor. Invoking Carlos Jurado, he recovers techniques of the old photographic century razed by the digital tide and now artificial intelligence. They are lonely tours in nature not rarely desolate from the southern United States that fascinates Wim Wenders. Under the peaceful landscapes and stages of Brauchli beat the disputes over the waters of the Colorado and the human sovereignty of the Bravo, rivers that he follows from its sources in the north. The first to its exit crow in Baja California, and the second drawing the strange border line of the brave, tomb of migrants, of murdered and killed.
Brauchli does not seek blood, stays with the ground, stone, water, the hard vegetation of this third
country, inhabited by Mexicans and Americans, imbricated beyond the new Trumpian xenophobia and criminal decomposition on both sides. The book reiterates the presence of bridges: that may be the hidden message of Tours so personal.