A New U.S.-Mexico Border? Imagining a Binational Region Called MEXUS

[FSogol]

Architects are frequently accused of being out of touch, but this might take the prize:

May 23 -- LA JOLLA -- Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman aren't the sort of urbanists to get squeamish over a little raw sewage.
In 2011, the pair led a curious procession of 300 day-trippers from San Diego's side of the border through a drainage pipe to Tijuana .
The pipe connects a natural preserve on the U.S. side with higher elevation canyonlands to the south. A video on the website of San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts , where Cruz and Forman exhibited their work last year, shows a pair of immigration agents at a folding table stamping passports as a stream of dingy wastewater cascades beside them.

Forman and Cruz don't look at the U.S. - Mexico border as a dividing line. They look at it as a region -- one with a shared culture, economy and environment. That vision is why they were chosen as one of seven design teams to be featured in the U.S. Pavilion's official exhibition, "Dimensions of Citizenship," at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens Saturday.

For this project, Cruz and Forman have re-imagined the U.S. - Mexico border. Starting with the by-now familiar undulating shape of the dividing line, they erased the narrow political boundary and created a new 154,000 square-mile border region they call "MEXUS."

Entire story here:
https://www.architecturalrecord.com/external_headlines/story?region=ar&story_id=i_ryYNUAhO3pwjxKb1D8uthXS1zK6y_HUR_hJmvZvjGK9MYpJhmvA-60CCyaPJ9-hvExGdDDEE9A1MmSTWIvcDdsppIwASYvCOvm17onnFYuHOsi5fGx8RPS-gRkbn-Q&images_premium=1&define_caption=1&ajs_uid=8443F3931723I7S&ajs_trait_oebid=3782E0258467B1M

Let me be the first to sing: Bum, bum bum, deep in the heart of Mexus!

[lapfog_1]

1. As someone who sometimes lives near the border

two observations...

1. The Mexico US border is not one region... San Diego / Tijuana is much different than Douglas Arizona / Aqua Prieta which is different than El Paso / Ciudad Juarez ( although I am not that familiar with that border region ).

2. When I went to a "Congress on your Corner" brief meeting with Gabby Giffords in Douglas, there were many "Tea Party" assholes there and some locals (Mexican American). The Tea Party people were already shouting at the locals telling them "GO BACK TO MEXICO"... and one elderly man commented to me as we waited to meet the Congresswoman that "My family has been on the same land for 7 generations... we didn't migrate anywhere... the border did." I think they would be happy to have the Gadsden Purchase undone and all of the land returned to Mexico.