“Hopes and dreams toward survival”: art and security at the US–Mexico border

Abstract

Poetry, for Lorde, is the very foundation upon which women shape the world, delimit its possibilities, and imagine its future. Experimental poet Amy Sara Carroll drew on Lorde’s account of poetry’s life-sustaining properties as she wrote “The Desert Survival Series”/“La Serie De Sobrevivencia Del Desierto,” a collection of 24 “pared down prose poems,” as part of a collaboration with the art and activist group Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) for the new media artwork Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT). The TBT is a mobile phone application that EDT members Micha Cárdenas, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum designed in 2007 to “[provide] GPS coordinates and survival poetry to immigrants crossing the US–Mexico border [...]” (EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab 2017, 2). While prototypes of the application were installed and tested on iMotorola burner phones, the TBT was never put into practical operation. Nonetheless, as art, it invites us to imagine an alternative future for the US–Mexico borderlands – a practice that migrant studies scholar Aimee Bahng terms “speculating the border” (2018, 53). In such a future, GPS coordinates direct migrants to the location of water caches left in the Sonoran Desert by NGOs, while the survival poems, translated into multiple languages and stored as audio files, convey spoken words. One of the survival poems explains how, alone in the desert, one could gather rainwater from “the broad leaves of yucca and agave”/“las