Transborder Trajectories
2011-12
8 Giclée Prints (16 x 20 in)
A series that maps the cross-border journey of objects currently sold at the Mercado de Artesanías de La Línea at the Tijuana/San Diego border. In the market, products representing traditionally Mexican symbols, produced in Tijuana or in the interior of Mexico, have been almost entirely replaced by American pop cultural icons like Tweety, Homer Simpson, and Mickey Mouse—shifting the symbolic origin of objects. The physical provenance of the products has also changed, as the market has been flooded with cheap imitations of traditional Mexican goods manufactured outside of Mexico, primarily in China.
These shifts in provenance, both symbolic and physical, came in the wake of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), which increased the ease with which objects/commodities can move across the border. As a result, the long-standing north-oriented trajectory of craft products has been transformed.
Alongside the photograph of the object, and below the maps, are accounts provided by vendors/shop-owners that reveal the ways in which they have adjusted to the changing cultural and economic landscape ushered in through such policies, by carving out their own pathways.