This piece is concerned with the “not here yet,” what is on the horizon, perhaps what we cannot even conceptualize yet in our work and in the fight for justice—the illegibilities. My academic work takes me into the archive of border violence to “uncover” the historical record and write about it; my first book was about gender and sexual violence along the US-Mexico border throughout the long nineteenth century. That work was isolating. By contrast, my organizing work has put me front and center within community. I cocreated a collective called fronteristxs: we are a collective of artist and writers working to abolish the prison industrial complex and migrant detention complex here in New Mexico. Here, I want to think about what lies “in between finding” for us as scholars, activists, and artists. What comes of the excess of violent dispossession, illogical imprisonment, and neoliberal policies? What comes from the affect of illegibility? Do these moments of illegibility give us something—a roadmap, a clue—to seeing and doing things differently?
The fronteristxs collective is concerned with what is the “not yet” on the horizon of the abolition movement, meaning we interrogate the space between the liberal discourse of “equality” and the conservative discourse of an “eye for an eye.” We attempt to bridge art, language, performance, and affect through our presence in the communities most affected by the carceral state. Through art installations within our communities, we take cues from José Esteban Muñoz by asking ourselves, “What does it feel like to be a problem?”1 Our work uses the ephemerality of art to confront the entrenchment of the carceral state; our installations disrupt the legibility of affect to open the possibility of change. It is no secret that New Mexico struggles when it comes to education, child welfare, and poverty. However, it is less known that New Mexico incarcerates its people, especially migrants and refugees, at a rate 18.7 percent higher than the national rate, with higher rates of privatized incarceration as well.2 In 2021, New Mexico relied on private prisons more than any other state: 43 percent of people incarcerated in New Mexico are in private prisons, including migrant and refugee detainees, compared to the nationwide percentage of 8.5. In 2023, the governor converted three of those private prisons into state-run facilities; lawmakers are now asking how New Mexico is going to afford to run those now state-owned prisons at a steep cost.3 In 2020, 73 percent of all people in immigration detention were confined to privately run facilities. So fronteristxs has been working to abolish the prison industrial complex for quite some time now, partnering with community organizations like Prison Divest NM, Anti-war Coalition, Free Them All NM Coalition, White Coats for Black and Indigenous Lives, Teachers against Childhood Detention, Millions for Prisoners NM, Save the Kids from Incarceration, and No Border Wall Coalition to create on-the-ground, material solutions to the precarious and dangerous incarceration problem in New Mexico.
Our first project, in 2020, was to creatively bring awareness to the dire COVID-19 conditions in jails, prisons, and detentions across New Mexico by aligning with the national and local #FreeThemAll movement to demand release of detained migrants and incarcerated people. Our art actions included demanding that the state “FREE THEM” in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Bernalillo County, the Second Judicial District Court in Albuquerque, and the New Mexico State Capitol in Santa Fe (fig. 1). On August 1, we installed a public sculpture at the New Mexico State Capitol building in protest. The sculpture, depicting two groups of children playing tug-of-war, was momentarily disrupted with the installation of a cage around it, reframing it as one group of children pulling the other half out of the cage to FREE THEM (fig. 2).
Fronteristxs has also been working with the Prison Divest NM Coalition to demand that the state's public educational retirement fund divest from private prison corporations. We created a digital billboard for Interstate 40, staged projections of a live VJ performance on the former county jail, organized a large banner drop in downtown Albuquerque, and created digital graphics as a form of public education (fig. 3). To reach those who don't have reliable internet access—too often those impacted most by the carceral system—we posted physical fliers in English and Spanish in neighborhoods to connect with folks who may not appear in the digital orbits dictated by social media algorithms. The campaign successfully pressured the board to vote to divest on October 16, 2020. The NMERB (New Mexico Educational Retirement Board), which manages a $13 billion dollar fund, is the first public pension fund in the southwestern United States to divest from private prisons.
These are just two of the art actions grounded in collective experimentation that we have staged since our inception. Here, the fleeting ephemera of art installations responds to what Diana Taylor asks: “How do we live and respond ethically to [the] systemic brutality, knowing full well that many of us are embedded in it and benefit from the economic equalities it produces?”4 They square the contingency of the aesthetic experience against contemporary conditions and acknowledge our complicity within existing systems. How do we intervene in democratic neoliberal ideology as scholar-activists who benefit from the structures that displace, dispossess, and kill our family members and the very people we are attempting to free?
The fronteristxs collective looks toward the “not yet” on the horizon of the abolition movement. We are looking for the “not here yet” in art, language, performance, and affect by enabling imaginaries that do not yet exist in the world. Fronteristxs attempts to “[map] belonging through exhausted narratives of identity,” and our work has attempted to document the problems of society.5 This means that we are attempting to create narratives and art that are not within or outside of identity politics or representation but beside these things. Our art examines the problem of being a problem and has an affective register where people feel a lot of things. While installing projects, we have been harassed, threatened, congratulated, cheered on, given death threats, and aided, and we have grappled with many more material consequences of emotion. Yet this affect of “problem-ness” creates an unsettling dialogue that allows us to imagine openings for change. For us, affect is the psychologized concept of emotion in relation to a politically effective theory of affect. The affective turn that fronteristxs uses leaves people angry, rageful, hopeful, empowered, and disgusted. The difference between feelings and affect is that fronteristxs takes these subsets of moods and sentiments and turns them into “long lasting affective constellations.”6 We have witnessed this projection outward, as people transmit their feelings into the social sphere. Fronteristxs “draws on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in the minds not prior to language but constitutive of it.”7 We have many times asked ourselves: What is the flipside of legibility in our neoliberal nation-state?
Notes
“New Mexico Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/NM.html (accessed September 15, 2023).
Muñoz, Sense of Brown, 37.
