Centering the Boundary

Alyssa Quintanilla responds to Chapter 4—Contests of Intellectual Authority (1850-1890) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.

Before the Wall

Along Arizona’s border with New Mexico, just East of Douglas, AZ, lies Guadalupe Canyon, a beautiful and vast expanse that’s part of the Peloncillo mountain range. Once a unified and seemingly pristine wilderness, the area was radically altered during the 2016 Trump administration’s efforts to create roads, move equipment, and build the so-called “border wall.” To be sure, there were fences in the area and Border Patrol in the region, particularly to the West in the San Bernardino Wildlife Refuge, but the difficulty of the terrain made it an unlikely route for immigration. The peaks and valleys of the canyonlands are overgrown with cactuses and brush, and are dense with high grasses. The area was not impassable, but attempts to build the wall in the region resulted in large parts of Guadalupe Canyon being blasted away, leaving the area more accessible than ever.

Approximately a mile west of Guadalupe Canyon, along a newly created road, is a break in the wall. Flimsy barbed wire stretches across the gap, directly in front of Border Marker 73, a stone obelisk created to mark the boundary between the United States and Mexico after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The obelisk, one of 276 that line the border, serves as an indication of the imagined boundary between the two countries, but the surrounding wall makes clear the more recent efforts of the United States to turn it into a solidified reality. The boundary marker is a forgotten object around which the wall, along every part of the border, is built.

Forgotten, but not destroyed. The break in the wall surrounding Border Marker 73 is stark, but by law every obelisk must be accessible for maintenance purposes. Standing in a remote part of the Sonoran Desert, Border Marker 73, is a reminder not just of the symbolic meaning of national borders, but also of the literal construction of the nation-state. The obelisks, many of which are now unreachable because of the border wall, present the material conditions of “building” a nation. They were originally erected in the mid-nineteenth century and have served as an indication of the border line despite being behind various fences, barriers, and walls (just beyond Border Marker 73, for instance, is a ranch on the Mexican side of the border).

Centering the United States-Mexico border within ideas of American intellectual history by way of the boundary markers allows us to rethink the nation-state itself: physically, visually, and materially. Through them, we can reconceptualize a geopolitical, spatial, and intellectual beginning and end of the nation-state. These markers mark the exertion of two settler-colonial states working in tandem to create a boundary.[1] Yet, in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History, the Mexican-United States boundary is nowhere to be found. What does an examination of the material construction of the boundary and the accompanying documentation (sketches and survey imagery) raise as critical questions about the literal, material construction of the state and the shifting centrality of the border within the American political imaginary? How does the material construction of the nation-state and the political imaginary it supports relate to intellectual formations of American intellectual history?

Turning to Boundary Marker 73 and the other boundary markers asks us to pay closer attention to how the United States’ territorial concerns relate to the ideas that have “made” it.  Because they mark a boundary, the boundary markers both clarify and muddle the idea of the border itself. They at once affix the border in the landscape, and in doing so, they also convey the fictionality of borders. Borders must be asserted. They are not preordained.

The boundary markers along the US-Mexican border and the documentation that surrounds them reveal the contradictory logics of creating boundaries. The markers were initially built to blend into the landscape, yet they serve as an ideological origin of the imposition of the bordering in the desert. Over time, the idea of a seemingly natural or inevitable border, as it is represented in the accompanying surveying documentation, falls away in favor of bigger and more imposing structures. Each attempt to create the border—physically through the stone monuments, visually through the sketches, and materially through the wall—raises the question of how we understand the bounds of the nation-state. As markers both representational and literal, they reveal the symbolic dimensions of the idea of nationhood in their very materiality.

Due Precision

The story of the boundary markers begins after the end of the Mexican American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. The treaty stipulated the creation of the boundary as a “line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both republics”.[2] The line, however, could not be actualized through authoritative maps alone, nor was the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo boundary sufficient as a boundary to the West. Instead, the countries resolved that there should be “ground landmarks” that disrupted the seemingly open frontier to serve as an indication of the beginning and end of the nation-states.

The creation of these markers came about in several waves, the most notable of which were the first International Boundary Commission from 1849 to 1855 and the second from 1891 to 1896.[3] While both commissions were meant to “create” or “enact” the boundary line by surveying and constructing the boundary markers, the accompanying reports from both demonstrate the need to visualize the border beyond the space itself. Both reports, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey from 1859 and The Report of the Boundary Commission Upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary Between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891-1896, are embellished and imagistic documents. Consequently, the boundary markers not only mark the actual terrain, but also the government literature about it. In doing so, they demonstrate how the creation of the border is not merely about the physical enactment of the settler-colonial state on the landscape, but also about the ability to catalogue and capture the very idea of the border. Documentation is not merely the representation of ideas; it enacts them. The images reproduced on paper or in reports matter as much as obelisks planted on the earth. The materiality of the nation neither begins nor ends at the boundary markers themselves; rather, it is mediated by the nation’s ability to conceptualize, enact, and visualize its borders in multiple forms.

Surveyors Arthur Schott and John Wyess, both of whom were part of the first International Boundary Commission from 1849 to 1885, provided sketches, or “Views” of the border. These sketches provide two remarkably different approaches to visualizing the border, but in both, the boundary markers are presented as part of the landscape. The sketches serve as representational links between the idea of a demarcation between the United States and Mexico and its materialization. They show that the border was not a fixed or seemingly naturalized idea; rather, it had to be created through iterations of physical labor, symbolic visualization, and multiple types of materialization. It had to quite literally be sketched before it could become a reality. The history of visualizing the boundary markers is not merely a history of the United States-Mexico border, then, but also a way of glimpsing how nation-states writ large arise as ideas.

Views of the Border

After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the first attempts to survey and chart the boundary between the United States and Mexico were marred by constant conflict.[4] Tensions over funding, disagreements about routes, and disputes over the precision of measuring instruments often placed Mexican and American groups at odds as they attempted to work together to both chart and survey the proposed boundary line.[5] The desert environment added another layer of difficulty as the commission was ill-prepared for the harshness of the landscape, experienced delays in federal funding, and a lack of water.[6] Still, the commissions carried on with the work from both 1849 to 1855 and from 1891 to 1896. This included documenting the landscape, placing markers, and surveying the area. The resulting report from the first commission in 1859, published in three volumes, includes illustrations of geological reports, botany, flora, fauna, and sketches of the boundary markers or views from the boundary markers.[7] Survey leaders relied upon the inclusion of sketches, views, and other images within early American survey reports were used “to make the work more visible and accessible.”[8] All of the images in the boundary report from 1859, from the views of the monuments to the detailed drawings of various plants from the region, suggest an impulse to study and catalogue. These representations proved as much a part of a colonial approach by both the United States and Mexico as efforts to survey the land geographically. The placement of the images in official government documentation reveals the multifaceted way the US reached for control over the border, and by extension, what would become the territory of the American Southwest.

While Major William Emory’s name dominates the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey from 1859, he relied heavily on civilian surveyors to chart, draft, sketch, and document the commission’s journey. Sketches or “views” of and from the boundary markers are present through the report, and as scholar Robin Kelsey writes, “The views linked maps to monuments, the territorial line as a graphic fact to the territorial line as a string of locations on the earth.”[9] The views proved to be a critical part of the report, serving as visual instructions for locating the boundary markers for future commissions. Emory considered the views of and from the monuments vital to the report as pictorial evidence of both the labor of the boundary survey.[10] The views “had little to do with materially constructing monuments; instead, they virtually reconstructed the survey to confirm its achievements.”[11] Similar to the portability of the maps and charts used by surveyors, the illustrations were movable representations of the borderlands’ environment and the markers’ location. In effect, the “views” were an attempt to fix the border in place and assert its permanence as a site of state power. To depict the space and transport it visually as a matter of surveying is part of the colonizing perspectives attached to the border. 

The 1849-1857 boundary commission placed 53 boundary markers, and the Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey contains 64 views of and from the markers.[12] These sketches range from topographical images meant to show the boundary marker in relation to the vastness of the desert environment, typically created by Weyss. Zoomed-in images that emphasized the flora and fauna of the region are intertwined with the markers themselves or are left as distinct features in the foreground, typically created by Schott.

The sketches suggest a kind of beginning, or a construction through their very composition. This has to do not with how they position the markers against the landscape so much as within it. Much of the landscape is often positioned as uninterrupted by the force of the settler-colonial state. Some are stone pyramids, but most are merely piles of rocks, with the stones collected from the surrounding areas. This is particularly the case with the most remote areas of the newly formed boundary. The boundary markers are made up of and blend into the landscape that surrounds them. This portrayal suggests not an imposition of state power, but rather the natural progression of the nation-state out of nature itself. Sketches allowed artificial assertions of the nation-state to now appear timeless, as if they belonged for some authentic reason when in fact they were arbitrary and imposed.

Differences and Similarities

The juxtaposition of styles between the two surveyors is also important because it tells us crucial things about the imagined and intellectual conception of the boundary line and how its depiction is folded into our contemporary understanding of the United States-Mexico border. The contrast between the two surveyors’ approaches ultimately collides to demonstrate how the border’s initial conception is perceived as a seemingly natural progression. The two different styles, Weyss’s removed and Schott’s up-close, combine to incorporate the geographic space itself as an essential part of nation-building.

Weyss’s images follow more conventional and traditional standards of survey imagery by emphasizing topography, landscape, and scale. His sketches suggest a more removed perspective, which is critical given that the purpose of the images was to provide future surveyors with a sense of where the boundary line was surveyed and how to find the boundary markers.[13] The images position the boundary markers amongst the overwhelming and vast landscape that surrounds them. Most of the drawings of the boundary markers themselves place them as small flags in the distance, pyramids in the midground, or piles of rocks that are nearly indistinguishable from their surrounding environment. What dominates these images, unsurprisingly, are the topographical features of the desert spaces that comprise the borderlands. These are, after all, survey images designed for use in navigating the space and documenting the site of the border. Consequently, Weyss’s images reflect the idea of the border as elsewhere and position it on the edges of the nation itself. The boundary markers disrupt the landscape but are so far out of sight and so small in relation to the environment that they position the border as seemingly unreachable. What matters to Weyss is not necessarily the boundary markers themselves, but the topographical measurements they were meant to represent.

By contrast, Schott’s images of the boundary markers, the environment, and the very concept of the border are close-up and intimate. Unlike with Weyss, scholars have noted the peculiarity of Schott’s style, emphasizing that the views from the monuments allowed surveyors “to see this particular view, [by] hav[ing] to stand at such and such a location on the boundary”.[14] Schott, a naturalist by training, served as an assistant surveyor for much of the survey.[15] His images not only place the viewer on the ground, but also amongst the desert landscape.

In his work, Schott privileges the flora and fauna in the region, particularly cactuses, brush, and sometimes skeletons, and quite literally pushes the topography into the background. The plants within Schott’s images are highly detailed, depicting a kind of intimacy with the landscape and the importance of proximity within the act of surveying. In effect, to depict the boundary region was not about capturing the boundary line, but the newness of the cactuses, rocks, and the boundary markers in relation to them.

While Weyss’s work emphasizes the specificity of the boundary line on the ground, Schott’s images take a more celestial turn by indicating the border in the sky through the placement of a star.[16] Schott’s images draw together the heavenly and the terrestrial as essential to manifesting the border itself. Thus, the creation of the boundary was a “matter of both Manifest Destiny and natural process…the American expansion it formalized, was in accord with both heaven and earth”.[17] Through Schott’s sketches of the boundary and the boundary markers, we see the enactment of Westward expansion as both natural and divine.

Despite their contrasts, what both Schott and Weyss’ images capture is the idea of the boundary markers as part of the landscape. They become seemingly “natural” objects. For example, “View from the Monument Marking of the Terminal Point of Boundary on Parallel 31° 47 – Looking South Along the Meridian” by Weyss captures two boundary markers: one in the foreground and the other in the distance. The boundary markers are positioned as part of the landscape in two ways. First, the boundary marker in the foreground is constructed solely out of rocks and positioned amongst the desert brush that surrounds it. Unlike many of the other boundary markers, Weyss did not give this particular boundary marker a flag, allowing the boundary to blend with the landscape that surrounds it and further emphasizing its materiality as an object constructed out of naturally occurring matter. Second, the flag in the background blends in with the nearby peaks. The flag, which serves as an indication of the boundary marker and the line itself, becomes part of the landscape, allowing the border to seemingly come from the space itself. Even from a removed position, Weyss’s approach shows the boundary markers as part of the natural landscape, literally created through the use of organic materials, and positions the border as inevitable.

By comparison, Schott’s more intimate views position the boundary markers as intertwined with the cactuses that surround them. Again, the boundary markers are created from rocks, but they are rarely at the center of his images. Instead, he places them amongst the cactuses, constructed objects woven into the natural beauty of the newly surveyed and conquered landscape. Oftentimes, cactuses overlap the boundary markers, branches cut across the flags, or the bases of the markers themselves are obscured by a layer of nature. Schott rarely captured one boundary marker in relation to the other, instead emphasizing the physicality and immediacy of the one in front of him and using the star to show from where the commission had journeyed. The strangeness of Schott’s approach is most apparent when considering how the prominence of the natural environment undercuts the relevance of the boundary markers.

In depicting the boundary markers, both Schott and Weyss capture the seeming inevitability of the United States as a settler-colonial state. The act not only of surveying and documenting, but also cataloguing and representing the border by way of boundary markers suggests the desire to surveil the space, claim it as territory, and enact upon it as if the boundary has always been there.

The images show the conception of the border as a byproduct of the nation-state itself, as if the landscape had produced it. The boundary markers and their accompanying images are one of the first ways in which the idea of the US-Mexico border was turned into a seeming actuality. Sketching them allowed them to seem to point to the future out of the past geospatially. Once drawn as emerging out of the landscape itself, they could be repeatedly built upon, both physically and ideologically. They serve as a reminder—they mark—that it is not enough merely to place a marker in the ground; nations must also repeatedly document the boundary marker, they must draw it, picture it, portray it, to make us see it as an indication of territoriality. The nation-state begins as a sketch of a seemingly naturally occurring inevitability, a pile of rocks that can become a wall.

Crossing the Borderlands

In the summer of 2023, I set out to find as many of the boundary markers along the Arizona-Mexico border as safely possible.[18] The reality of finding and photographing the boundary markers now is radically different from that of the boundary commissions in the nineteenth century. There are countless roads that run along the border, and the space is populated in ways the early map makers never thought possible.[19] Most critically, in many areas, the border is no longer an imagined line between boundary markers. In fact, to find most of the boundary markers, you have to look through the border wall itself. It is nearly impossible to reach, photograph, or depict the boundary markers as isolated objects. Instead, attempting to find the boundary markers shows how the border is an amalgamation of structures (material, legal, and cultural) that have increasingly encroached upon the boundary markers.

Over time, what constitutes the idea of the United States-Mexico border has moved from the line created by the boundary markers to towering barriers. The move toward physical fortification has displaced the significance of the boundary markers, which still technically serve as the legal border between the two countries. Searching for the boundary markers now requires looking not for the border itself, but rather for interruptions in the wall, for flood doors, or for gaps. The very literal act of looking for the border requires navigating the multiple barriers, including various layers of surveillance, that have taken shape around the boundary markers.

Because the boundary markers designate the “official” border between the two countries, the United States remains responsible for their upkeep despite continuous attempts to create a complete and solid border wall.[20] After the second International Boundary Commission from 1892 to 1896, the stone markers were reinforced with mortar. Many were even replaced by cast-iron obelisks. Fashioned to withstand the elements and the passage of time, most are now inaccessible to the public. Formed to blend in with the natural landscape to assert its seeming permanence, they are the border’s forgotten beginning, pushed to the background by a new desire to establish a fully bounded and enclosed nation-state. New desires and new ideas beget new objects.

Yet the shift to building a wall instead of sticking with boundary markers made of stone makes plain the impossibility of a true border. The wall is often not, in fact, placed on the border line. It rises in front of the legal border, in some areas quite far in front. The wall is not the border. It is a physical attempt at bordering, but it is not the legal boundary between the two nations. Rather, the turn to building a wall speaks to the ongoing symbolic dimensions of material artifacts meant to establish the nation-state. The wall, today, has visually displaced nearly all earlier conceptions of the border in the American political imagination. While Schott and Weyss depicted the boundary markers as part of the environment, the wall now interrupts the landscape to emphasize the unnatural form of the border itself. Under various administrations, the federal government of the United States has destroyed countless protected landscapes in various attempts to transform the border from a fiction to a physical reality. This has proven difficult, if not impossible. The landscape simply refuses it. Nonetheless, the move from boundary markers to a wall is an intellectual and ideological development that continues to rely upon the border’s visuality and materiality. The boundary marker sketchers once sought to position the border as a natural phenomenon, a manifest destiny. Now the United States wants to portray the border as something artificial, a marker of the nation-state’s power to insulate and banish, to become impermeable and impenetrable. This is destiny more asserted than manifested. The wall is an anxious and cruel partition pounded into the ground rather than rising up from it like a pile of rocks. As in other places around the world, so too at the US-Mexico borderlands: the resort to higher and more imposing structures at the edges suggests the changing symbolic dimensions of the nation-state’s inner psyche.[21] Look to the borders and find the core of the country.

As Ratner-Rosenhagen writes, “Ideas are never frozen in time and place, nor are they vapors in some otherworldly, transcendent realm. Rather, they are historical forces that move—and thereby change— from one interlocutor to another, one place to another, and even on time to period to another”.[22] The boundary markers remind us that even heavy, stone objects are never, despite how they appear, locked in history. As the views created by Weyss and Schott make clear, the United States-Mexico border was envisioned and implemented. It was an idea projected onto the landscape even as it showed the boundary rising up from it. The illustrators asserted what it would mean for the United States to claim what is now the American Southwest.

More than that, the boundary markers shift our understanding of beginnings and origins. They help us to see how ideas such as “the border” become realized from a complex history of creating, sketching, building, materializing, rendering, viewing, and, thus, manifesting the nation-state. Historically marking boundaries that seemed unmarked by history asks us to adjust “the ideas that made America” in the nineteenth century. Marking the twenty-first with an ominous, soaring edifice reveals that the ideas continue to be made today as much on the margins, in the borderlands, as at the center of society.

About the Author

Alyssa Quintanilla (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. Her book project, currently entitled Markers, Monuments, Memorials in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, centers on the performances and practices of mourning and the objects created to remember, acknowledge, and visualize the dead. She is also the creator of Vistas de la Frontera, a digital memorial for migrants who have died while crossing the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. Her work has been published in Lateral Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, and The Digital Review. She is currently the David J. Weber Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies. The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the US Government.

Notes

[1] I use the term “settler colonialism” from Patrick Wolf, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4 (December 2006): 387–409. For Wolfe, the creation of a settler colonial state establishes an “invasion that is a structure not an event” based on the access to territoriality (388). The enactment of settler-colonialism along the United States-Mexico border, specifically during its creation, is entirely about creating a structure to access, own, and control the territory of what would become the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. 

[2] “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848),” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo.

[3] Eighteen additional markers were added between 1894 and 1975. To avoid confusion the new markers are associated with an original number, but with an addition of a letter (for instance, ex 123A is located West of Nogales, Arizona, less than a mile from 123 which is on the other side of the port of entry); see Leon Claire Metz, Border: The U.S.-Mexico Line (El Paso, Tex: Mangan Books, 1989).

[4] Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

[5] Rebert. Metz.

[6] Rebert.

[7] Paula Rebert, “A Civilian Surveyor on the United States-Mexico Boundary: The Case of Arthur Schott,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155, 4 (2011): 466.

[8] Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 61.

[9] Kelsey, 26.

[10] Kelsey, 65.

[11] Kelsey, 61.

[12] Rebert; Kelsey; Metz.

[13] Rebert; Kelsey.

[14] Kelsey, 27.

[15] Rebert; Kelsey.

[16] Kelsey.

[17] Kelsey, 67.

[18] Photographer David Taylor had previously catalogued all 276 boundary markers in his collection Monuments: 276 View of the United States/Mexico Border from 215.

[19] As historian Rachel St. John notes, “one of the members of the Joint United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, [wrote] ‘much of this country, that by those residing at a distance is imaged to be a perfect paradise, is a sterile waste, utterly worthless for any purpose than to constitute a barrier or natural line of demarcation between two neighboring nations’”(3); see Rachel St John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 19.

[20] The maintenance of the boundary markers is one of the responsibilities of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) and the Comisión Internacional De Límites y Aguas Entre México y Estados Unido (CILA).

[21] Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

[22] Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America, 5.

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