Thin Edge of Barbwire : Pedagogical Strategies Against Borders by Heath Schultz

“Thin Edge of Barbwire,” a reference to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry, doubles as the title of this paper and a collaborative art project undertaken by university art students resulting in the creation of a 30’ wall. This project was, in effect, a response to the Trump presidency and students’ fear of increased violence on the border. This paper describes in detail the month-long unit that included readings, dialog, and creative responses to recent histories of the border and students’ personal relationship to violence on the border. I use the project as a case study to consider antiracist pedagogies, confronting white-supremacy in the classroom, and successes and failures of the project. Finally, I reflect broadly on the role of creative and artistic response to political crises. 

ednesday, November 9, 2016, was likely the most difficult day of teaching I have experienced.Like many, I went to bed late on Tuesdayelection day-after watching the proof of white reactionary politics unfold in the form of state after state turning red on elaborate television graphics late into the night.On Wednesday morning, I moved in silence as I had my coffee, rode the bus into campus, and walked up the five flights of stairs to my office.All of the blue-voting teachers were in the hall talking in astonished whispers before class.Aghast and confused, many were as heartbroken that their would-be savior Hillary Clinton lost as they were horrified that the uber-capitalist and crypto-fascist won.Not with her any more than I was against him, I nodded hello while avoiding getting pulled into the conversation.By the time class started, I had not said a word all morning and, despite my desire to sit in silence, I had to face the students.
I was teaching art courses to first-year university students at a fairly well-to-do public university in Texas.Students were diverse both racially and economicallysome from poor and working-class backgrounds and some from the richest suburbs of Houston and Dallas.Several were Latinx/Chicanx students who have experienced the violence and emotional trauma of the enforcement of the border personally, something Trump promised to escalate along with reactionary xenophobic racism.I have no recollection of my original plan for the session that day.Off script, I asked students if they wanted to talk about the election.I confessed I did not know what to say or how to facilitate our conversation but that I was happy to make space for them to process their feelings in a collective setting.Student after student expressed astonishment at the results of the election; a few expressed utter horror and fear.Two instances in particular stand out from this difficult post-election Wednesday morning.In one, a young Mexican-born man spoke of his family having been broken up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and told us that he had not seen his father in several years as a result.Another student, a working-class Latina from El Paso, told a story of being late for a class that was held in a large lecture hall and having no choice but to sit between two young white men.Over her body they discussed their enthusiasm for Trump and how important it was that he build his wall.This student is shy and generally quiet in class, so it surprised me when she ended her story by saying, "when I walk into a room of all white people, I feel really nervous and uncomfortable."This was a brave thing to say to her majority white peers and white teacher.Although difficult to hear, it was not these stories that made November 9, 2016 particularly awful; it was the subtext of hopelessness that plagued all of us.It was the fact that I felt I had nothing to offer them; my only response to their sadness was an even bleaker view.I had only fear that their fears, and then some, would come true.
As much as I wish it were possible, I do not believe the classroom is a "safe space" in the sense that we can protect vulnerable students from state-sanctioned violence or hostile racist environments.The students know this, too.For this particular group of students, memories linger on campus of several racist assaults within the last few years.
Most students could, off the top of their head, describe the time when white students threw bleach balloons at black students from their apartment balconies; 1 the time when the Young Conservatives of Texas organized a "Catch an Illegal Immigrant" game; 2 and the time when white students threw glass bottles at a black student from apartment balconies while yelling from above: "fuck you n*****." 3 Or, more generally, that the university still only hosts four percent African-American students. 4It wouldn't surprise these students, then, that in just a few months the neo-fascist group American Vanguard would launch a state-wide "Texas Offensive" targeting Texas universities with recruitment and flyering campaigns. 5The classroom does not exist outside of the world we live in, and in this shadow of Trump's election, that felt more true than ever.I had nothing to offer these students who feared for their personal safety, feared for their family being torn apart, feared for unknown forms of racism on the horizon.This paper chronicles a creative project I developed in direct response to this feeling of helplessness.When viewed in isolation, a meager response, yet I understand this small effort as one of sustained efforts to short-circuit the reproduction of racist ideologies in visual culture and the classroom.

As much as I wish it were possible, I do not believe the classroom is a "safe space" in the sense that we can protect vulnerable students from statesanctioned violence or hostile racist
environments.

Situating the Wall
Being located in Texas, many students were especially concerned with the looming threat of Trump building a wall and the corresponding escalation of racism.With this in mind, I developed an idea for a project in spring 2017: as artists, sculptors, and designers, we would build our own wall.I figured the best way to approach Trump's new presidency was collectively and unambiguously.I designed a three-and-a-half-week unit that created a space for students to inform themselves of the complexities of the border and process their opinions and feelings through dialog, collaboration, and making.I approached this project deliberately and consciously as a white arts educator who believes anti-racist pedagogy is required in all fields, not just in Ethnic Studies, to combat white supremacy.As I am writing this in early 2018, I learn that Oscar Monge, an American Indian Studies scholar teaching at San Diego State University, was "found guilty of harassing" a white student on the basis of her being white.Among other actions, the lecturer was forced to submit a report to a state investigator outlining how whiteness was a historical construct and how white supremacy as a political ideology operates in our society. 6 in the increasingly long book of horror stories of repression, retaliation, and death threats present in the recent cases of Steven Salaita, George Ciccariello-Maher, Lisa Durden, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, among others. 7What Monge's still-in-progress case illustrates is the greater difficulty instructors of color and women have in the classroom challenging white supremacy, especially when the embodiment of white supremacy is directly challenged at the personal-emotional level.White students often reserve a special anger for any instructor that is not a white straight male who disrupts their understanding of white supremacy.This renders those instructors especially vulnerable to the dangers of our contemporary political climate that can include loss of job, not getting tenure, or (the threat of) physical violence. 8One lesson I have learned from these stories is that white instructors, especially men, must take responsibility for unmaking white supremacy in the classroom.

One lesson I have learned from these stories is that white instructors, especially men, must take responsibility for unmaking white supremacy in the classroom.
Histories of the Border / Building the Wall I called this unit "Thin Edge of Barbwire" after Gloria Anzaldúa, and I will recount it below by first sharing the readings, discussions, and exercises that led up to working on our wall installation.In this way, this paper will formally mimic our time spent in the classroom.
We began with significant reading and discussion in order to contextualize an artistic project that could only come in its wake.These discussions ranged greatly and included the political history of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border; the historical logic of the border and its enforcement; the emotional toll of colonialism and continual border enforcement; and creative responses to these social, political, emotional, and poetic registers.I utilized this interdisciplinary approach to recognize that political struggles operate on different terrains: there is as much of an emotional content to racism as there is a political content to the history of the border. 9 began this unit by reading journalist Todd Miller's short essay "The Border Wall Already Exists." 10 Miller discusses the history of the U.S.-Mexico border with particular emphasis on the border wall since 1994 and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).Miller begins his article by chronicling Bill Clinton's legacy as the original wall builder.Clinton was responsible for the first efforts to physically separate the U.S. and Mexico, which came in the form of a chain-link fence built from old landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars.This fence would separate Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico and Nogales, Arizona, in the US.With the expectation that NAFTA would cause adverse effects on Mexican workers, this fence was designed to preemptively curb the influx of immigration that would come in NAFTA's wake.Clinton's prediction was correct: farmers could not compete with subsidized agribusinesses like Cargill, and retailers like Walmart and Sam's Club drove prices up and put small businesses out of business, for example.It was no surprise that Clinton also oversaw an increase in border controls (personnel, surveillance, geographic reach, and other resources) by fifty percent. 11As is now fairly well understood, the walls constructed by the Clinton administration, along with increased patrol and surveillance technologies, were implemented upon traditional paths of migration in urban areas like San Diego, Nogales, Brownsville, and El Paso.These new border security efforts cut off urban cross-points, forcing migrants into harsh and remote deserts of Arizona and similarly hostile environments, resulting in the death of at least 6,000 people and in 2,500 missing persons since 2000. 12ny students were surprised to learn that the Democratic party has historically supported increased surveillance on the border.For example, the majority of the 700 miles of wall that currently exists on the border was the consequence of the 2006 Republican-sponsored Secure Fence Act, for which then-Senator Hillary Clinton voted in support.More startling is the 2.5 million people Obama had deported during his presidency, more than any other president in history. 13However, students were most surprised by, and completely unaware of, the history of the Tohono O'odham Nation, whose land was split by the creation of the border in 1853."Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones.This is our reality," a spokesperson told Congress in 2008. 14is historical context helped facilitate a conversation that resisted platitudes and uninformed talking points.Insisting on engaging with history and political policy also encouraged students to take responsibility for any ignorance they might have on a given topic, even if that ignorance might be the result of their environment of infotainment.To facilitate our discussion, I wrote questions that guided students in a reconstruction of the article's important points.I broke students into groups and assigned them one or two questions, encouraged using outside sources if needed, and tasked them with providing a detailed 'report-back' to the class.Below is a selection of the questions: On the surface the questions are diverse but deliberately designed to encourage drawing connections between them as we discussed each one in class.The research and discussion format allowed students to do original research, discuss and develop their own opinions in a group setting, and make their own connections between content and personal experiences.This strategy also created a framework for an intersectional analysis of the border to emerge by asking students to think not only about immigration from Mexico, but economic policies like NAFTA, continual colonial violence on the lands of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and the xenophobia of Trump's travel ban, among others.
Using Miller as a baseline for some recent historical context, I next asked students to read the first chapter of Gloria Anzaldúa's Chicana feminist classic Borderlands/La Frontera. 15Anzaldúa added both a broader historical as well as a poetic dimension to our ongoing conversation.Anzaldúa establishes a brief history of indigenous peoples who migrated through and/or settled in what we now call the U.S. Southwest dating back to 35,000 B.C.She describes the violence and colonialism of Hernán Cortés in the 16 th century, and the U.S.-Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, and she eventually brings us into recent times describing then-contemporary struggles of migrants (the book was written in 1987, but her writing continues to resonate).With Anzaldúa now in the mix of our conversations, students were obliged to consider colonialism and global power as articulators of and enforcers of borders and to look at the violence they have inflicted on indigenous peoples.For example, as a class we spent a significant amount of time discussing this passage: 1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo, a culture running down the length of my body, taking fence rods in my flesh, splits me splits me me raja me raja 16 It is a beautifully written passage that directly associates borders with violence.A wound is evidence of a cut-a slicing of the landscape across an entire continentthat lashes into a culture, a pueblo, the flesh.Anzaldúa's language eloquently associates the violence on the landscape with the violence on the body, the community.
Reflective of her experience growing up Chicana in the U.S. Southwest, Anzaldúa wrote Borderlands/La Frontera in a mixture of Spanish and English.When approached formally, the combination suggests that an appropriate expression of her experience requires a movement between, and the usage of both, languages.For an instructor, this presents an interesting challenge in the otherwise English-speaking classroom.I asked the students to do their best to translate using the tools they had available to them and consider how Anzaldúa's culturally specific bilingual writing is important to the meaning of the text.I asked them to reflect on the moments they failed to understand.How might that failure also be important?From the outset, I thought this would be a good exercise for non-Spanish-speaking students because it required a consideration of language as an aspect of how meaning is created.Put another way, it calls attention to the hegemony of English in the university classroom and American culture.This is especially important when discussed in relation to a history of colonial imposition that Anzaldúa brings to the surface: languages as expressions of culture and culture as expressions of resistance.Although I assigned and led a discussion on Borderlands/La Frontera, as a non-Spanish-speaking instructor (I had to try to translate everything for myself, too), I was not an expert.Although I did not anticipate or expect it, many Spanish-speaking students eagerly translated Anzaldúa for the class.Deferring to the expertise of students turned the traditional classroom hierarchy upside-down, shifting the expertise entirely away from me.In the best instances, students that identified with Anzaldúa translated her writing by using their own stories to describe the cultural context of their Chicanx perspective.Unpacking the specificity of a single word could lead a student to share stories of growing up in El Paso and how comprehending that story was important to understanding Anzaldúa.In these moments, comprehension wasn't objective but contextual, narrative, and multi-generational and access to that knowledge required cross-cultural sharing within the classroom.This decentering of English also necessarily destabilized whiteness and the privileged educational background that comes with it, if only for a moment, in a deeply meaningful way.With the help of students who understood the cultural nuances of Anzaldúa, the classroom was encouraged to recognize that white and/or American culture is not the culture but a culture, and an imperialist culture at that.

Art at the Border
It is of little surprise that many artists have engaged with the problematics of the border in their artwork.The approaches vary widely and offer a breadth of profound thinking in regards to the violence of the border and the role it plays in our society.Once we had a better understanding of the historical, social, and political context of the border as described in the previous section, I introduced students to a number of artists that grapple with the border through their work.Below I will share two projects that helped establish a conceptual grounding for students' sculptural project of collectively building a wall.In general, I discussed artists' projects that would help students consider particular aspects of the wall they would soon build.For example: how can materials be used in a meaningful manner?How can the design of a wall be subverted?How can the concept of a wall or border be relocated to resonate with those who do not live in the borderlands?
One powerful example of a meaningful use of materials is Margarita Cabrera's community-engaged project entitled Space In Between.The project has seen a few different iterations, but typically Cabrera collaborates with an immigrant community in order to create replicas of native desert plants indigenous to the U.S. Southwest.These sculptural desert plants are sewn together with border patrol uniforms and displayed in traditional Mexican terra cotta pots.The collaborators of this project often use embroidery to reflect on their own experience crossing the border. 17Of particular interest to our class was Cabrera's use of border patrol uniforms, providing a poetic and illustrative example of how material carries meaning.We discussed how the material of these uniforms works as a symbol of the policing of brown bodies and a broader symbol of enforcement of the US border securitization.As we know from Anzaldúa, the violence on the landscape is also violence on the body.It is the border patrol that will not allow the 1,950 mile-long wound to heal-again and again they pick the scabs.By inviting immigrant women to collaborate, converse around the table with their stories of migration, unmake border patrol uniforms and restore the landscape with an offering of native plants, Cabrera and her collaborators do not erase state violence but instead transform oppressive objects into objects of healing.These symbols are remade into that which can return to the land and no longer control the stories of the women that lived them; the plants bear the marks of their struggle and stories of their crossing.These are the stories buried in the landscape.
We also looked to Ana Teresa Fernández's Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border), created in 2011, a performative action documented with photographs.
In these photographs Fernández, a Mexican-born artist, is seen on a precarious ladder painting the large fence on the border separating Playas de Tijuana from San Diego's Border Field State Park.Predictably, in another photograph, border patrol appears to stop her and ask questions, although she is apparently able to complete her task.The result is an approximately 20-foot section of the border fence now painted sky blue.When viewed from a distance, the section of the fence disappears into the beach and sky.If this is a utopian gesture that falsely promises a gateway, it is also the creation of a harsh juxtaposition that exposes the formal ugliness and political cruelty of the border wall.Students and I discussed how one might subvert the formal qualities of a wall through design decisions.How could a wall be designed to fail?How could altering oppressive landmarks on the border be transformed through creative means to become objects of possibility, of liberation?Fernández provides one possibility.
Thin Edge of Barbwire, or: How to Build an Anti-Wall Wall With Students As described above, my goal before beginning our collaborative project of building a wall was to provide a working understanding of the socio-political forms of violence-and resistance to that violence-that converge on the border.From the perspective of an arts educator concerned with justice, it was important to marry aesthetic and affective creative production with this politically informed specificity.By doing so, we made the classroom a space that refused generalization and liberal universal humanism (we're all the same!) and encouraged students to think through the aesthetic and affective in political terms.Only when students were capable of conversing eloquently and with an informed specificity did I feel it was no longer harmful to make creative work responding to violence on the border.I was working with approximately 40 students between two sections of the same course.Students worked in groups of three totaling 14 groups.I asked students to construct a section of the wall at approximately 4' x 2' and flat on the sides, which allowed us to easily assemble the wall and break it down in different locations.Beyond these basic specifications, I further prompted students with the following: Based on our conversations regarding the various issues borders present us with, your group will conceptualize and complete a sculptural response to borders.You should consider the meaning of materials, process, and design when developing your project.Your section of the wall must be two-sided; these can be mirrored or dialog with one another depending on your idea.Consider the following questions: Will your section of the wall be subversive  Students presented sketches and written proposals to the class before they began building, which helped to articulate their section of the wall both formally and conceptually.These presentations engaged the class in a new round of discussion based on their proposed designs.This allowed for further reflection and conversation, and also offered possibilities for response.Finally, after much discussion and planning, the students began building.
When students were finished, we collectively installed our wall in the main thoroughfare of the art building.We assembled the 14 sections of the wall, which totaled about 30' in length with distinct "U.S." and "Mexico" sides (see Figure 2 below).The completed installation served, albeit on a microscale, as a functional wall and disallowed viewers to cross without walking all the way around.
As you can see in the images below, students' responses to the project included a Día de Muertos altar to the 6,000 lost or dead in the desert, an ironic rock climbing wall with one side much easier than the other, a barbwire desertscape, and a wall-sized dreamcatcher.Deviating from U.S. academic sculptural norms, many students utilized and expressed diverse aesthetic approaches like sign painting, graffiti, altars, and papier-mâché.Similar to Margarita Cabrera, many students used narrative elements in their installations, with one memorable example from a student who wrote a letter to his father whom he has not seen in over a decade because his father is imprisoned in Mexico.This letter can only be read when one sits in a penitentiary style communication booth.In a myriad of ways, what students expressed above all is a sincerity both in the formal qualities of the work and the content.
It is important to reiterate and emphasize that this project was undertaken in a first-year art course for university students.It is no surprise that the unit was not without some conflict and problems.Many of our discussions maintained problematic understandings of Latinx culture and issues as they relate to the border.For example, early in our discussions a few students likened Mexican immigrants to thieves "sneaking into the back door of your home."In this instance, I intervened to challenge the students' racialized conception of the criminal, asking them to consider how U.S. popular culture creates images of the criminal as black and brown.I put together a few slides from popular films for the next course to help illustrate this point.The best way to combat this problematic thinking, however, was to allow the readings to do what they were designed to do.In our case, Gloria Anzaldúa's historical intervention countered the students' comments entirely by illustrating how colonialism was the original act of violence.This project was a response to the felt helplessness on November 9, 2017, to Trump, to the continual escalation of violence in U.S. socio-political culture.I believe the project's success was rooted in normalizing critical discourse.We resisted treating this content an exotic field of study peripheral to what we 'normally study' in art education.
We took seriously different cultural understandings and experiences of the border with attention to how they are defined by the asymmetrical power relations developed through history. 19I believe it is a step in the right direction that recognizes there is no anti-racist classroom unless that classroom is actively deconstructing white supremacy and establishing possibilities for non-hegemonic knowledges to grow, gather steam, and join forces.The fragility of critique in the classroom is the difficulty of sustaining that critique.Critical pedagogy requires the reiteration and elaboration of an intersectional approach to learning that is fostered the next semester, the next year, the next decade.The creation of projects like the one I've described above must be coupled with critical practices that are integrated into everyday practices of the classroom."Thin Edge of Barbwire" becomes a failure if students recall it as "that time we talked about the border" rather than "one of the first times we talked critically about racism, power, and history." At the end of our unit I shared a poem by Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga called "The Welder." 20I thought the metaphor of fusion as possibility for solidarity by way of poetry was a good summation to our time constructing pedagogies against the border.In the final lines of Moraga's poem, she offers this: I am the welder.I understand the capacity of heat to change the shape of things.I am suited to work within the realm of sparks out of control.I am the welder.I am taking the power into my own hands.

FIGURE 2 :
FIGURE 2: THIN EDGE OF BARBWIRE, DETAIL.TOP IMAGES ARE MADE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BEING IN MEXICO, WHILE THE CORRESPONDING BOTTOM IMAGES ARE MADE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BEING IN THE U.S.
culture as well as students' political sensibilities.The question is how to consistently find ways to work in the seams of the syllabus and curriculum to do so.