Under the Shadow of the Wall

My sub-compact car rattled and knocked as it bounced along a dirt road that snaked its way through the desert near Douglas, Arizona. Through my passenger-side window, I could start to see the recently installed, massive copper-colored border wall peeking out from the space between the hills of this rolling landscape dotted with ancient rock, small cacti, twiggy trees, and dry brush. As I got closer to the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge, I pulled my car off the road and squeezed it into a small clearing between two spindly mesquite trees and stepped out into the mild but dry winter air.

About 100 yards ahead of me was a tightly packed series of vertical steel beams that reached twenty feet up toward the clear sky and stretched off horizontally in either direction. I could hear quails gently cooing in the creosote bushes next to me and in the distance, the gentle drone and slight glimmer of semi-trucks could be seen and heard as they slowly crawled across the Carretera Federal 2 that wound its way along the border of Mexico and the United States. Other than that, it was quiet; dead quiet.

I began to cautiously walk towards the wall, continually checking over my shoulder for any sign of workers or Border Patrol agents. I felt like I was trespassing—which I probably was—but there were no posted signs or obstructions other than the massive wall itself. I glimpsed through the narrow bars at the Mexican side and the landscape looked the same—the same dirt, the same rocks, the same mountains, and, as the details retreated into smudgy infinity, the same gradient of dull browns and greens so indicative of the Sonoran Desert.

This was my first experience interacting with the border wall—a grotesque structure that continues to stand at our southern border. I had initially only wanted to put together a photo essay that would document this artifact at the tail-end of the Trump era, but after setting foot in the scrub brush of the Arizona borderlands, I immediately intuited that a film must accompany my photographs. There’s something visceral, raw, and immediate about a film that I knew would be lacking in my accompanying photography.

In a way, this film exists as my bittersweet goodbye to the Sonoran Desert—a unique and naturally gorgeous environment that I have witnessed being slowly ground up and disemboweled by real estate developers, mining corporations, and energy executives over the course of my thirty-six years here. In the summer of 2022, my family and I will pack up our things and return to New York, leaving behind the place where I was born and grew up. In many inescapable ways, I will always be a desert rat, but this is not the same place I trekked through as a child. It isn’t the same magnificent desolation that I explored as a teenager. It isn’t the setting of raw vivacity I would, as an adult, frequently pitch a tent inside of and just stand in awe.

But it could be.

As my mentor David Graeber used to say: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”