The University of Texas – El Paso sits on a ridge overlooking a tangled mess of highway overpasses and freight lines, down on to the Anapra neighborhood of Ciudad Juarez. It is for the residents of the latter, the poorest sector of El Paso’s sister city, a constant reminder of the education and progress afforded “Americans”—a future that is at once, painfully close and impossibly far away for the children who stand clutching the thick metals bars of their continental prison. This desert, reeking of death and stained with the blood of Mexican and Central American migrants, punctuated only by jagged mountain peaks that protrude from the brushland like the jaws of a crocodile, once concealed a network of hideouts used by the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Now it's a graveyard.

“Juarez is constantly on fire – the missing women, the cartel wars – and its artists are soaked in the ashes of this burning,” says Monica Lozano, a Mexican American photographer who has documented the border and migrant crossings for 18 years. She becomes emotional when talking about the thousands of missing and murdered women in Juarez, cases that since the late-1990s have been neglected and unsolved, eclipsed by the extreme violence of the cartel wars that erupted in 2011. Monica wraps up her uneaten burrito: “I lose my appetite thinking of this,” she says, followed by a painful chuckle.

Along the Mexican side of the border wall, we detour on to a barren dirt road that leads us to an escarpment looking out over El Paso—a cold, poisonous, metal snake winding through the desert as far as the eye can see. Every day, thousands of Mexicans and Americans cross at one of the four checkpoints along the Rio Grande to work, shop, trade, or visit family on the other side. The people crossing are used to being exploited, their bodies bearing the brunt of American imperialism manifest in the so-called “war on drugs.” Juarez was at one point considered one the most dangerous cities in the world, and El Paso one of the safest. The contradiction is glaring.

Walking in the brush, we happen upon a pile of teddy bears. Nearby, dozens of articles of clothing, seemingly frozen in time swirling ominously in the dust. How did they end up all together? What happened to each of the small humans who hugged them while being dragged through this scorching desert heat? Monica crouches to the ground and snaps photographs for her on-going body of work 

In the recent past, “replacement theory” inspired hate speech oozing from conservative right-wing politicians has resulted in increased anti-Mexican sentiments and corollary violence. In 2019, a 21-year-old white male who had published a white supremacist manifesto on 8chan, gunned down dozens of customers at the Cielo Vista Walmart Supercenter in El Paso, killing 23 and injuring 22 others. At the time it was the worst crime against the Latino community in US history. There is no doubt that virulent statements made by the former president continues to fuel the churning hatred of his acolytes, rabid bigots who believe themselves to be the rightful inheritors of the land their ancestors stole from Mexicans. The absurdity is astounding.

Crossing the pedestrian bridge from Juarez to El Paso, it’s hard not to notice that most of the TSA, police and border patrol are Mexican American. The transition from colorful, textured Juarez to the seemingly endless strip mall that is El Paso is surreal. And there standing on the wall, the “

,” a pejorative meaning sellouts or traitors, act as proxies for their white overlords, paid and promoted to subjugate their own people. The militarized abscess of the border does not warrant optimism, yet there are those like Monica who continue to bring humanity back to their communities through their artistic practice. Committed to the uphill battle for their people’s collective dignity they challenge the dominant, racist narrative by capturing the lived experiences of communities. It seems for many, that any hope for the future of El Paso lies in the soul of its sister city. Monica says: “Juarez has two hearts, its own, and another for the one that is missing in El Paso.”

All images are the sole ownership of Monica Lozano and cannot be republished or reprinted without her consent. To view her work, please visit: www.

La Frontera, US-Mexico Border

A Tale of Two Realities

JANUARY 2023, NORTH OF IRELAND

Birth of La Trenza, Pt. 1

MAY 8, 2023, CIUDAD JUAREZ-EL PASO BORDER

Birth of La Trenza, Pt. 2

We arrived late, and though jet-lagged, we were ecstatic to be in Ireland for the first time. Our friend, singer-songwriter Declan McLaughlin, had arranged a homestay for us to better understand the history of the civil rights struggle and enduring activism in Derry City in the North of Ireland. Paul O'Connor and his amazing family took us in despite the enormous size of our luggage filled with "just in case" objects, mezcal bottles, and gifts from Mexico. The fact that they had invited one Mexican (me) and four had arrived was already becoming a bit of a screwball comedy, but traveling only a few days in Ireland had shown us that Mexican and Irish humor is very similar. We have both grown thick skin and the capacity to maintain humor in the face of tragedy.

The Bloody Sunday’s Trust commemorative events at the Free Derry Corner and the Museum of Free Derry inspired us profoundly. The movement is a beacon of remembrance and continued learning about what happened during the conflict and the events of that fateful Sunday morning in January fifty-one years ago. Many painful questions arose among us as we confronted the atrocious scale of lives lost crossing borders--religious or political--in Mexico and beyond. How can 

 speak about the thousands of lives lost on the frontier? How is a community like Derry capable of honoring them in such a profound way? And what meaning(s) can we derive from the stories of those migrants who managed to survive crossing or lay buried in the desert?

En route to the opening of my exhibition 

, we walked the streets of the old walled city of Derry in silence, before encountering a mural of a young girl, Annette McGavigan, who had been shot dead by the British Army at age 14. The mural ignited our collective memory of Daisy, a girl in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, who had crossed the border from Mexico to the United States alone, and how she represented herself as a caged butterfly. It reminded us of all the migrant girls, the death of their innocence, how injustice 

 innocence. We all stood in silence, the same type of silence we experienced six months earlier when we had driven to the border wall near Ciudad Juarez.

I don’t speak through words, I speak through my eyes, that is my true language. I stood with the microphone, staring at the images hanging on the walls, connecting to the photos I had made, going back to the instant of taking the frame, what was happening around me and how it felt. From there I spoke, from what my eyes have seen at home to what they were now witnessing in this new place. One we had never visited before, but that made us all feel so much at home, so easily. We felt the comfort, closeness, and strength--sadness and humor all coalescing at the same time.

We had the opportunity to connect with leaders from the North West Migrants Forum during their weekly Social Café. We spoke with members and visitors, families, adults and kids, who had migrated to the North of Ireland from Russia, Ethiopia, Iran, Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, and elsewhere. Their stories echoed with familiarity, their circumstances were nearly an identical reflection of those who come to the U.S. from Central America and Mexico--the cruelty, the annulation of human rights, and the trauma they live with after crossing the border. There is the loss of freedom, the scarcity of resources, and a vanishing sense of trust and belonging. We tried to absorb as many migrant testimonials as possible, and in the end we cemented future collaboration with the Migrants Forum.

"La Trenza” is a physical and conceptual weaving of objects and clothing that have either crossed borders or been lost along the way. As we collaborate with new communities, the braid begins growing in different directions, becoming more powerful as it unifies stories and entangles migrants and their parallel journeys in different parts of the world. Whether they survived the crossing or not, braiding their stories and their most intimate objects of survival allows us to commemorate 

in places where humans enforce arbitrary borders, from the heavily militarized to the nearly invisible.

I spent a couple of years steering clear of border issues during Covid, due to my inability to keep my eyes open and continue documenting those agonizing realities. But while in the North of Ireland, I asked our host Paul, "How have you been capable of fighting for civil rights for so long? Where do you get the strength to keep going?" He responded, "I will give you the key, it's simple and it's one word: humor!” We took his words to heart as a welcoming gift and reminded ourselves to never let go of this key.

Braiding Histories of Struggle

Two buzzards circle gracefully above dozens of crosses adorned with Mexican, Salvadorian, and Guatemalan flags. Bottles of water, framed photographs, religious ornaments, toys, and teddy bears sanctify this makeshift graveyard. On June 27th, a tractor trailer was found abandoned on this dusty stretch of service road. Inside were piles of bodies of migrants being smuggled to the United States, left to suffocate and die of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Many of the dead were children and young adults fleeing poverty and gang violence, en route with the promise of a better life.

Quintana Road runs parallel to the Interstate 35, a major trade route that begins in Laredo, Texas on the Mexico border and travels north through the centre of the country to Duluth, Minnesota on the Canadian border. It is a dead end. “La boca del lobo” (“the mouth of the wolf") is how some locals describe this dark, isolated stretch of road, readymade for human traffickers to exploit. Aside from the buzzards, there are few signs of life here, save for those like us, who have come to pay respects and absorb the gravity of 53 stolen lives, and the countless families left devastated with no recourse.

In the middle of the DIY memorial, a small cross with a message: "

R.I.P. 53. How many more deaths Gregg Abbott?

" - a reference to the current and much reviled governor of Texas, whose border patrol policies (also for his stance on abortion and gun control) have made the migrant passage north even more treacherous. Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz as expected, blamed the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies, skirting the responsibility for the malicious practices of Border Patrol agents whose well-documented litany of abuses has made a brutal and inhumane situation exponentially more disgusting and unimaginable.

Abbott and Cruz stand tall in the milieu of right-wing conservative lunatics (the left isn’t much better these days) who have taken a stranglehold over the nation—deranged and cruel “representatives” who spend their time dismantling the legal protections and human rights of “minority” communities. They are pushing forward, in no uncertain terms, an ugly, violent agenda of white supremacy, conjuring eugenics and utilizing a cabal of race traders to facilitate the expedited degradation of the country’s moral fabric towards a militarized, fascist state. The one they always dreamed of; the one they feel entitled to as a birthright.

I have witnessed the darkness of society in places all over the world: in slums, refugee camps, and war zones. Yet standing across from this ad-hoc monument to the loss of innocent life - the doppelgänger to the Alamo, a monument celebrating human depravity in “the greatest country in the world,” - I felt in that moment truly defeated, immobilized by a poisonous cocktail of sadness and rage. All the politics and policies, all the lip-service to social change, all the thoughts and prayers, cannot offer a solution to the black hole of human greed. Power and money are the only governing principles in this so-called democracy, and seemingly everywhere else in the world. The US’ greatest export: selfish individualism and violent ambivalence, now the essential fabric of globalization. I honestly do not see a way forward or a way out, but I am reminded that 

We stand in silence watching the buzzards, wiping away the tears that evaporate more quickly than the sweat that pours down our backs in the scorching desert heat. “They aren’t so pretty up close,” my friend says. “But they fly beautifully, doing their work cleaning up after the world.”

Mouth of the Wolf

It waits in the line in which you are standing. Is it silent? Is it slow? Are you thinking hard about what you are going to say? How many questions will you need to answer correctly to gain entrance?

Where I grew up, the bottom of my street ran down to the River Foyle. On the other side was the Republic of Ireland. I could see it, just across the water. I have been crossing borders all my life. I’m not sure how old I was when I first realised that the practice of drawing lines on maps is not only used to cause confusion, wage war, and exert control, but also to divide communities, homes, farms, families, and cultures. Drawing lines has long been part of the British imperial arsenal. We see the outworking of a number of these borders in Sri Lanka, India, the Middle East, and here on the island of Ireland.

, I see myself again at the river’s edge, looking across from my home to my aspirations of what Ireland will be like when that line has been removed. Derry City in the North of Ireland sits on the British-controlled side of that line, a border which runs for a couple of hundred miles through and around six counties.

I cross that manmade border a number of times each week. Sometimes for work, sometimes to see family, who live on both sides. We are now at the point where the city of Derry overlaps this line, you can walk between both without knowing, only the traffic signs notify you that something has changed. And even that was hard won. That’s where I live, at the edge of the British Empire. My eyes fixed on a future free of this 800-year nightmare that has consistently delivered misery and suffering to most of the people on this island.

As a child and young adult, I would drive into this large military facility at the border crossing were my father would routinely be questioned. Always the same questions. The same questions I would face as an adult crossing borders around the world years later: 

What is your name? Address? Where are you coming from? Where are you going? What were you doing there? Who were you with?

 This is part of the daily ritual that people living within the empire—and for the millions of people who live along these lines—must deal with day in and day out in their own homeland.

My father never said much when we would be pulled in to be searched by the police and army. He would hand over his ID, answer their questions with a simple yes or no. My father was an Irish Republican. He never said much about it, but later when I became more familiar with the coded language that people here use, I realised it was all there. His disdain for the empire, its police, and its army. I’m not sure how he felt about armed Republicanism, but that’s another story.

After the formulation of the Good Friday agreement in the late '90s and the ending of a decades-long military campaign by the Irish Republican Army, the normalisation of peace here in the northeastern corner of this little island meant that crossing the border became something that was only noticeable by someone saying, 

 Through great struggle, people here now see a clearer, peaceful path to ending the hold that Great Britain has exerted upon us. I wonder how today's young adults would have coped with the hassle of life here in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

Brexit has been the red flag of late, with the consequence being that UK’s only contested land border with the European Union is now once again across the island of Ireland. No one wants a return to the old days of armed men in uniforms asking invasive questions, well maybe not everyone. It seems there are more than a few who remain loyal to overlords, and who would love nothing more a return to the dark days of our past. So, the conclusion has been to put the border in the Irish sea, where many feel it belongs, but this is not good enough for the small group of unionists who see it as another step towards the unification of the island, and so refuse to take part in the shared government (it’s funny that this is also the first time that they are no longer the majority).

Throughout my life I have stood on and crossed those lines. I’ve walked, bused, driven, and flown over many borders and even been arrested at a couple. I will never forget the checkpoints between Derry and Donegal or Tyrone and Monaghan. I pass the spot just outside Aughnacloy, where young Aidan McAnespie was shot in the back and murdered by a British solider in 1988 just for being on the border. I see the same people working along that thin line, stopping people, interrogating their business, their movements, their intentions—stationed there to maintain the divisive stranglehold of Empire.

I have always felt the importance of that line on the map, as palpably as you could feel the release after crossing.

We are being watched. I don’t know from where, but eyes are on us. Maybe that’s just the feeling I get whenever I come into contact with the "authorities." The feeling that you are not part of the state or country where you live. Crossing a line, any line between counties, between communities, class, the line that they believe they must defend.

The sun couldn’t have gotten any hotter. We'd been driving off the main road for about five miles away and kept going until we could go no further. At the end of the road, I stepped out of the air-conditioned car to face the largest wall I’d ever seen. It stretched on forever, its massive metal rods casting an enormous shadow in the dust and sand. Everything else was baked white in the desert sun.

Two faces appeared between the bars, children living a stone’s throw away in Ciudad Juarez. We had been speaking with them for a little over ten minutes, when a border patrol truck pulled up a few meters away. How they knew we were there was beyond me, I hadn’t seen any cameras on the road. But there ye go…

They asked me the same questions I’ve been answering all my life: 

 And as always, I played dumb and nice. I stood so they could see my hands, I answered their questions. I could see the confusion in their eyes: 

What’s this Irish fella doing in the middle of the desert looking at a fence? 

I explained where I’m from, that I have family nearby, and I wanted to see the wall that President Trump built. Just saying his name politely reassured the border cops that I’m one of the Good Guys.

They hung about for a while and then cleared off. Like a scene from an old western, I watched the dust rise and fall as they disappeared on the horizon, wondering if my skin was darker would the result have been different.

Later that day, we crossed the border and drove back out into the Chihuahua desert, miles and miles across the sun-bleached sand. Walking along the Mexican side of the border wall, we came upon a graveyard of empty water bottles, tattered clothes, and children’s toys scattered in the desert. That close to the Rio Grande and El Paso, they must have seen the lights of a new life. I find it hard to keep my shit together, the tattered clothes and toys slowly being eaten by the sand, slowly disappearing like the people who carried them. I walk away from the group and cry; my tears won’t help anyone.

As I walked with the others (Mike Ryan, Michael Marinez, Sidd Joag, and the our local hosts, Monica Lozano, Iris Morales, Mabel Weber, Adriana Alvarez) back across the border crossing at El Paso in the blistering heat, I couldn’t help but notice the look of faces struggling to get by, fighting for the right to be seen and heard, not left at the border to die. As I walked with them I saw firsthand the inhumane way they are treated at the borders, at shopping malls, in stores, by good God-fearing Christians, by well-armed White people, by the police, by the State. I’ve seen that look before on the faces that surround me every day in Derry.

The next day we made pilgrimage to a Walmart in El Paso where 23 people were gunned down by a White supremacist who espoused Great Replacement theory and was emboldened by the vitriol of hate-mongers like Mr Dump.

About a mile outside of San Antonio, we walked along the Wall of Crosses, 53 people left to die in a shipping container abandoned on a service road just south of this beautiful city on the 27th of June 2022. I wonder where the Civil Rights Movement went: Did it die on a deserted road in the blistering sun or is it with the Christians, hiding with thoughts and prayers in air-conditioned churches?

As the plane took off from El Paso International Airport, I looked out the window to see where I’d been from the air, and even from the sky it’s clear where the border is.

It’s hard to keep moving forward in a world that seems to be falling apart. Throughout my life I have witnessed horrific acts of brutality. I’ve lost family and friends in the conflict that surrounded me growing up. I’ve seen the people who are there to protect, kill.

Some of the things I’ve begun to understand during a lifetime of border crossings have saddened me to the core. I have felt helpless, powerless, and worse. I have tried to close my eyes to many of the injustices I have seen. I have turned my back and walked away on people who are 

. Maybe to protect myself because I knew there was nothing I could do. And it’s more than simple altruism, pretending that people are fundamentally good or things will always get better. It’s the "doing" that makes a difference. The tending of a garden, supporting a friend, making art, singing, dancing, acknowledging the value of life in all its forms. Enjoying the life you have, sharing that enjoyment with the people around you. The very act of living has become an act of defiance. But I remember: Some people stand up, fight back. They are the people often discredited as in the news as “terrorists, rapists, and drug dealers.”

Standing in the sun, I was reminded of the stories of the coffin ships and the thousands and thousands of poor Irish who almost made it across the ocean. Like these poor souls, they paid for the chance of a better life with their lives. My people have wilted in the shadow of the Empire. While in the U.S., if you are a person of colour—any colour but White—you are rendered invisible.

It’s the same road that runs across every border, but the traffic is not always going in the direction you want it to. And you are not always travelling in the direction you want. Whether standing on a shore, a bus stop, an airport or a train station….

That’s how we find out who has privilege. If you have never noticed, you are that privilege.

North of Ireland

The Unwelcome

Portraits of solidarity and sacrifice from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.

What Remains