DRAWING THE LINE
Cathy Lee Crane
The backstory.
I was born in Arizona. I played in empty irrigation ditches. I was raised by a bilingual mother who taught me Spanish. Still, I had never been to the borderlands until we crossed in a passenger train at night through Nogales in 1974. There are no more passenger trains that cross this border. These are some of the images that hung as backdrop while reading the history of the US/Mexico border; research that began while on a Border Arts Residency in La Union, New Mexico during 2017.
The Boundary Survey Commission of 1851 was a binational commission charged with marking the Western boundary between Mexico and the United States following the Mexican-American War; a war driven by the delusion of a Manifest Destiny; that sea-to-shining-sea myth founding a nation still anything but United. Once on the ground, the commissioners found that the Disturnell Map attached to the Treaty Hidalgo that concluded the US invasion of Mexico in 1848 (and the annexation of half of Mexico’s territory) was unreliable. The point called Passo del Norte was not where it was supposed to be. The fact that the survey commission could not agree on the initial point for the line they had been commissioned to draw, has been a crucial conceptual guide to this decidedly nonlinear project.
Shaped by historical and archival research, developing a new work continues to be a visceral act of inhabiting locations rendered in writings of fiction and history. Drawing the Line began by driving through/ past / to, meeting, asking, being pointed elsewhere. The project began, in collaboration with archeologist, cartographer, artist Bochay Drum, as a series of interviews with border dwellers. They seed each channel of this installation.