America's Southern Edge
The La Linda International Bridge connects nothing to nothing. Built by Dow Chemical in the 1960s and closed since the 1990s, it sits between massive undeveloped areas carrying multiple official designations: National Park, Área Natural Protegida, Biosphere Region, Dark Sky Reserve. The categories multiply even as the infrastructure decays.
The bridge was once the only border crossing for hundreds of miles before drug and electronics smuggling, the killing of a Mexican customs agent by smugglers, and local fluorite mines losing competitive advantages to China prompted its closure. Villages nearby in Coahuila exist in permanent suspension, and the dysfunctional structure with its underwhelming barricade marks one of the most obscure places on the continent.
I began documenting this region as research on social futures in border regions, though the project became something closer to autoethnography after living in the region for over a decade. I was interested in technological infrastructures and the psychogeography of borders, but also in what happens when rhetoric about a place untethers completely from its physical reality.
After driving to the end of the American road, standing at the midpoint of the unified desert landscape made the national periphery feel like science fiction. A handwritten sign at a roadside store warned "No drones." On the ground, the only material evidence of the nation's limit was a decomposing concrete airstrip and a sunburned metal grill bolted to the bridge.
The work follows several intersecting threads: ecoregions that span the river boundary indifferent to political divisions, trade and logistics networks, the poetics of road endings, the proliferation of surveillance technology in remote areas, and how designations persist where function has stopped.
The region became a site for observing signals of emerging futures in unexpected places. From abandoned buildings in some of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in America, I could watch Blue Origin spacecraft launches with increasing frequency. The contrast between high-velocity space tourism, family migration, and terrestrial stillness revealed something about how technological development distributes itself across geography. The work also reminded me that foresight requires attention to what remains unseen: bad actors, illicit organizations, and the dual-purpose nature of technology, which carries the risk of being used for harm.
As national rhetoric about border crisis intensified, I noticed few commentators had physically visited or could actually describe this specific region. Long think pieces appeared in the media, written by prominent voices, but the actual landscape remained abstract in public imagination. The images in this portfolio capture what I found: a document of a space of suspension, likely to be drastically reshaped and transformed.
Connected projects: U.S. Man and the Biosphere Program, Fantastic Border, graduate research on social futures in border regions
Themes: Peripheral spaces as sites of emerging futures, surveillance and technological infrastructure, ecology and technology, psychogeography of borders, transportation logistics, media literacy.
