Bringing focus to Mexico-U.S. border rhetoric
Ohio photo exhibit offers a close-up look at America’s controversial southern wall
NEWARK, OHIO The U.S. border wall with Mexico is frequently in the news, but few people have a chance to visit it up close.
Kenneth Madsen, an Ohio State University geography professor and border-wall expert, hopes his new photo exhibit will help bring the border closer to people at a time of heated discussion about the role of the wall, and of barriers in society overall.
Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers opens Wednesday at the LeFevre Art Gallery on the Ohio State campus in Newark.
The free exhibit of 33 postersized pictures features border-wall photos and maps.
“People don’t generally have a chance to see something up close, at that level of detail, to know what’s going on out there,” he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump has held out the possibility of a government shutdown before the November elections over his effort to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, even as Republican congressional leaders publicly urged him away from that path. “Build the wall!” was a rallying cry during Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Madsen has studied the border wall since his graduate-school days 20 years ago. His photo exhibit consists of pictures taken with his iPhone mostly in 2017.
In one image, children play at a Mexican playground beside a barrier in Tijuana while a U.S. border agent watches from the American side. In another, stadium lights atop tall poles oversee a pedestrian barrier stretching for miles along a section of the wall between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora.
U.S. communities tend to grow away from the border wall, while Mexican communities tend to hug them up close, Madsen said. That helps account for large murals along several sections on the Mexican side.
“The social construction of the border is negative and it’s perpetuated by people that have never even seen it, been here, touched it, felt it, crossed it,” said Irasema Coronado, a political science professor at the University of Texas-El Paso and a past president of the Association for Borderland Studies.
Madsen’s exhibit isn’t overtly political, but he notes the irony that wall-building has increased with the rise of globalization.
People don’t generally have a chance to see something up close, at that level of detail, to know what’s going on out there