This 5min9sec radio doc gives a quick introduction to the ideas behind the No Borders Camp, the purpose of the No Borders Camp, and then takes a sound walk through the border at Calexico with Mario Alejandro Cobar.
Seth Porcello, Elliot Liu, Mario Alejandro Cobar
The sound of a border is very often the sound of those who are divided trying to communicate; the human voices that break the silence. When I was in the Golan Heights I recorded the sounds of families who were separated by the minefield between Israel and Syria shouting through bullhorns to each other on opposite sides. They came in the mornings, when it was quietest, so that they could hear the echoes clearly as they bounced across the valley. Here in Calexico/Mexicali the sound is not the shouting heard through a bullhorn, but the private whispers of loved ones and acquaintances as they lean into to wall. But as is always the case, the sound of the border extends much farther than just the sounds heard at a barrier, or the echoes heard through a valley. The sound of a border extends through the entire geography which it marks, and the entire world which it separates. It is the sound of a border ballad as well as the border patrol, and it can be heard in the immigrant rights movement as well as the movement of migrants and farm workers through the Sonoran desert. Borders have always been places of intense movement and interaction, where cultures meet and freely appropriate. What's new about these borders, like the one in Golan and Fortress North America is that they attempt to interrupt that process. Their sounds reflect this. While it took Mario and I less than a minute to walk into Mexico, it took me almost 40mins to get back out afterwards, and that was with a US passport. For many in Mexicali, this is a daily commute - which is to say that the border system is a part and an extension of the economic system in the southwest. From migrant workers, to Maquiladora refugees, to small time entrepreneurs and smugglers buying low in Calexico and selling high in Mexicali, it is inherently a part of the neo-liberal ideology of free capital and stuck people.
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