A Contested Land: A Conversation with Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas

CC and DDR: C. J., can you comment from a different perspective, perhaps drawing on the research for your book, Border Land, Border Water?

C. J. Alvarez: Part of what makes Amistad Dam interesting to me is that it is several things at the same time. It is simultaneously a cultural site, like Juan has explained, and it has this catastrophic dimension to it because of the ecological ramifications of flooding, and the implications that has for the rock art in the canyons.

At the same time, the dam has also delivered many people downstream from floods that they experienced before the dam went into place. It is also a very unusual example of collaboration between the United States and Mexican governments. We think about the border as this place of tension and confrontation between the two governments, and in many cases it is. But in the case of this dam, much less so. Half of it is in Mexico, half in the United States, built by both Mexican and American workers and engineers. So I think that it’s a very ambiguous space. It provides this benefit for people living downstream, but at the same time it also creates the circumstances for destruction.

It’s interesting to think about the observatory and the Permian Basin together, because the Permian Basin emits light through the flares that Juan was just talking about, and also through the artificial lighting that they use at night to illuminate the platforms for the derricks and pumpjacks. This is the exact opposite of the observatory, which is supposed to be dark at all times. So there’s this tension there, between the light emitted from the basin and the requirement for darkness that the observatory has. And the observatory, in collaboration with towns and businesses and government institutions and private landowners in the Big Bend area, has succeeded in keeping the skies very dark in this part of West Texas. To me, it’s such an interesting tension: the observatory is, literally, a dark sky preserve—in some ways the most ancient state of things, which is just darkness at night, with illumination solely by heavenly bodies. And the Permian Basin is doing the exact opposite: trying to take something ancient and convert it into something utilitarian and modern as fast as possible.

CA: I think that, for a lot of people living in Texas, it’s a real challenge to think expansively about time. I think that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that history starts when the state of Texas came into being. And I think about what you were saying, Juan, that the existence of the United States and Mexico is another impediment to understanding deeper time, because it’s easy to fall into these national narratives. But from an ecological point of view, thinking about time immemorial as a way of understanding the landscape and the people who lived there is just a different way of measuring time in the desert. It’s a landscape that is simultaneously very hardy—like each individual plant is hardy because it’s been adapted to a stressful environment—but at the same time very fragile. And it’s a landscape that takes a long time to heal when you manipulate it with things like cattle grazing and dam building.

I think that the more we can think about the passage of time in ways that do not reinforce nationalist narratives and that are not driven by the history of infrastructure, the more we will be able to have sophisticated conversations. Which means thinking about the way that non-human entities experience time, the very slow growth of many desert plants, the ancient history of the Rio Grande and its tributaries. And, like Juan was saying, the long-term occupation of people way before there were such things as the United States, or Mexico, or Spain, or any of the political configurations that we often default to as a way of organizing territory and identity.

JM: It is also a matter of recognizing assumptions that can lead to the romanticizing of cultures of this land, especially because of what white settlers have done to us as a people, and what they keep doing. The state of Texas still keeps us out of sight, out of mind. We were fighting one of the disposal wells (depleted oil wells used to dispose of waste fluids like brines) up in Pecos County, and we held them off for almost two, three months, until the person in charge of handling the claims decided that we didn’t have enough qualified and certified experts to do what we were trying to do. She even questioned who I am and was saying that she needed more information, even though she could write a book from the stuff that we handed her.

We were concerned about them naming the disposal well after one of the Comanche chiefs; they were going to call it Chief Big Hump. I’m going, “My gosh, why are they doing this?” I mean, that’s totally racist. That’s going against everything that we are. If you read about Chief Big Hump, he didn’t want anything to do with a disposal well.

And then I started realizing that they did the same thing with the Yellowtail Dam up in Montana. Robert Yellowtail, chairman of the Crow Tribe, was totally against the dam, and they still named it after him.⁴ It’s one of those things that seem like a slap in the face. They are saying: we’re going to need the water, we need this, we need that...and just forget y’all. Forget about your lands, forget about your burial grounds.

Projects: Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas is on view at MoMA through January 2.