Seesaws briefly straddle U.S. border with Mexico, and smiles shine through
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — For a brief moment — just a half-hour over the weekend — a simple piece of playground equipment served as a bridge between the United States and Mexico.
In images and videos that were circulating on social media this week, children smiled and giggled with glee as they bobbed up and down on three pink seesaws that had been inserted through the steel slats of a section of border wall in Sunland Park, N.M.
“Actions that take place on one side have a direct consequence on the other side,” Ronald Rael, one of the architects who designed the border seesaws, wrote in an Instagram post describing the unusual installation.
The project points to how artists and architects are responding to President Donald Trump’s efforts to build a wall along the border, in addition to border barriers constructed during the administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
In images and videos, children on both sides of the border could be seen playing on three seesaws along a portion of an older section of border wall in Sunland Park, near New Mexico’s border with Texas and sprawling El Paso. In social media posts featuring the seesaws, the wall seemed to be an afterthought rather than a barrier limiting contact between those who live in its shadow.
Placed between the steel slats on the border fence in Sunland Park, the seesaws were observed by Border Patrol agents and Mexican soldiers, according to Artnet News.
Rael, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an associate professor of architecture at San Jose State University, originally designed their “TeeterTotter Wall” in 2009.
The architects have also designed a “Burrito Wall” intervention that would allow a food cart to be inserted into the border wall, and a “Wildlife Wall” with gaps to ensure the “free movement of critically endangered species between Mexico and the U.S.”
The section of the border where the seesaws were installed has been a flash point in the Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized immigration. In April, members of a right-wing militia detained migrants in Sunland Park, and in May a group that is collecting private donations for a border wall came there to erect its first section of fencing on private land.
The seesaw installation made the small city of 14,500 the setting for a different kind of border venture.
“This displays creativity in making the most of the wall that’s been built in our midst,” said Javier Perea, Sunland Park’s mayor. “And it showcases the fact that people live along the border and get along pretty well with each other despite the wall.”