Home

Tumba este duro¡: Art, Re-presentation, and Solidarity at the U.S.-Mexico Border

February 13, 2026

Border walls are destructive infrastructures used to surveil, dehumanize, and violate urban communities. As physical embodiments of abusive state power and technocapitalist militarism, these walls engender infrastructural violence (Rodgers and O’Neil 2012). Yet just as borders engender the necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) of nation-states, they are also arenas of enduring struggles for justice and sovereignty. Borders, then, are not only infrastructures of violence and sovereign power but potential “sites of new political possibilities” (Brambilla and Jones 2020, 292). In this short essay, I examine how muralists at the U.S.-Mexico border wall appropriate its infrastructure to expose the border’s inherent contradictions, contest racial discourses of immigration, and visualize new political possibilities. Specifically, I analyze how deported artists in Tijuana, Mexico paint and annotate (Kalir 2025) the wall at Friendship Park, Playas de TIjuana, particularly where the structure bifurcates Tijuana and  San Diego, California. The muralists re-present the wall, demonstrating how artistic intervention can undermine infrastructural and discursive violence in walled cities.