Creating Sonic Resistance

Valeria Luiselli’s Echoes from the Borderlands uses sound to unsettle our sense of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis

By Rebecca Cadenhead '23
OFA Staff Blogger

It takes around 24 hours to drive the length of the U.S.-Mexico border. In one sense, this is a dividing line created and maintained by violence; along the way there are sites of ecological catastrophe, memorials to expansionist wars and the unavoidable evidence of continuing human tragedy on a massive scale. There is also resistance at the border: demonstrations at detention centers, water bottles left for migrants by local ranchers.

Writer and Harvard visiting professor Valeria Luiselli aims to capture this complexity with the performance and sound piece Echoes from the Borderlands. The piece is still a work in progress, which Luiselli estimates may take 10 years to finish. But when it’s complete, it will be a 24-hour sonic journey that takes listeners across the length of the border. Luiselli has compressed the first 12 hours into a 72-minute display that she will show on February 16 at Harvard’s ArtLab. The performance is part of ArtsThursdays, a new initiative from Harvard University Committee on the Arts that puts on a free arts event every Thursday night.

Echoes from the Borderland is a composite of Luiselli’s own writing, archival sound taken from various places such as old advertisements and her own family, and the sound of the border itself – birds, rocks, water, wind, insects and people. The sound changes in accordance with the geographical progression of the journey. “I conceive of my practice as a writer as something very porous, where everything just kind of comes in,” Luiselli says. A similar concept applies here; Luiselli is less interested in imparting takeaways than encouraging attendees to “listen and understand the process of something and the layers that compose it.”

Of course, Luiselli does have aims for the piece, primary of which is disturbing our sense of the border as natural. “Just a little while ago, the border did not exist,” says Luiselli. “But since it has existed, it has created enormous violence.”

Fifteen minutes in, the performance reaches the Salton Sea, a lake in Southern California close to the border which was once a resort destination but was eventually ruined by agricultural runoff and lake drainage. It is now a major producer of toxic dust in the Los Angeles area. Luiselli signals that we have reached the lake by playing the sound of fierce, arid wind and swarming colonies of mosquitos, onto which she then plays an advertisement for the lake from the 1960s. “What you're hearing is the present where it's a no man's land. And then on top of that is there a history that's promising the opposite of what you're hearing,” says Luiselli.

The piece is performed by four narrators who Luiselli says all have different “gazes” on the border. For example, while one speaker narrates in a personal-essay-ish way, another will explain the history of the border. One of the narrators is Luiselli’s own daughter, who Luiselli has been recording since she was 5. She is now 13. The piece has become something of a collaboration between the two; Luiselli says that after her daughter’s birth, “it was either I worked with her, or I worked against motherhood.”

A particularly haunting recording was taken when the girl was 6 years old and explains, in Luiselli’s daughter’s own words, what a detention center is. “A detention center is sort of like a jail for children. And adults and teenagers,” it begins. Her voice is confident, but devastatingly young. “[Federal agents] ask [migrants] questions, and they're very violent to them, very rude. We actually don't really know why they hate them. They just don't want them in the country.”

Echoes from the Borderlands is not meant to inspire hopelessness. There are also stories of resilience and survival, prominently featured across its sonic landscape. In addition to the violence of the border, Luiselli says that the piece is also intended to display “stories of resistance in the Borderlands and resilience. Be it in the form of everyday life, collective organized resistance, or resistance through storytelling.”