How would you describe your relationship with this territory?
I understand my relationship with the land in historical terms: my family has lived here for generations, for several centuries, and that has given me a sense of belonging to this place. Without it, I’d feel like an imposter. Obviously, one can relate to a land as an immigrant; I’ve had this experience in other places. However, when it comes to the desert, this historical connection empowers me to explore and create within the land that has also been walked by my ancestors.
What is the most interesting discovery you’ve made about the desert so far?
Back in 2012, when I was studying in Tijuana and would come back to the desert to walk around and take pictures, I felt like I was photographing something that couldn’t be seen: as if it was hidden beneath the surface and the earth was emanating it. Rather than seeking an explanation, I followed my intuition and captured whatever it was — inexplicable and undefinable, yet something that seemed very important.
When I began working with the organization “El Colectivo Madres Buscadoras de Sonora” (The Collective of Searching Mothers of Sonora) in 2019, I found a way to make sense of this feeling, and it was through the lens of violence. In 2012, "Madres Buscadoras" didn’t exist yet, nor did anyone talk much about clandestine graves. The places I had visited and photographed — where I had felt something had happened — turned out to be the same areas where we later dug holes. The energy emanating from the ground was bodies. At least that’s how I interpret it.
The notion of the body is often deeply intertwined with that of land, because the body can also be a colonized territory, or the land a violated body. What’s your perspective on the relationship between the body and land? Does it always have to do with hostility and violence?
For the most part, my approach leans in that direction because I believe that it’s inscribed in every particle of this land. Though it wasn’t a fully conscious choice, my practice has been deeply rooted in a specific territory and arises from the act of traversing it. I’ve also realized that what I’ve been trying to do isn’t about being someone who investigates a land, but about being someone who belongs to that terrain and is interwoven with it. In other words, my research proposal would be: “I am part of this.”
The moment I act on my freedom to explore this land, despite the context of violence, I claim a different vision of this territory, and therefore another possibility for existing within it. If you let violence and fear paralyze you, you surrender the land. By inhabiting this desert — going to the store, taking my daughter to kindergarten here, being part of the local community — I seek ways to understand this land differently, in a non-violent way.
When it comes to interacting with space, the way we move through a territory can reveal vastly different perspectives. For you, in exploring a territory as complex and intricate as the desert, what do you think are the best ways to deepen your vision to understand the land better?
To me, it comes down to two ideas. One is a piece of advice from my grandfather: always have deep respect for the desert because it’s treacherous. The other is an approach I’ve been discovering in recent years through plants. I’ve learned that desert plants can serve as a code to navigate this land. Once you grasp the marvel of a living being surviving 24 hours in such an environment, you realize it can’t be taken for granted. It’s not just “a desert plant designed to endure.” Even desert plants struggle to cope with the new climatic realities.
These new realities encompass a variety of aspects — political, social, cultural, and obviously ecological. Based on your observations, how has the desert changed over the past several decades?
The desert — particularly the border desert, which I know best — has become a hyper-surveilled territory. In the past, it was seen as an open space, a frontier, a "no man's land" — an expansive territory that wasn’t controlled and, according to myths, was a place to be "conquered" or "fought over" to claim it. Today, every square kilometer belongs to someone, whether through legal or illegal means. The vastness of this land enables a unique form of surveillance, with monitoring conducted both from the ground and from the air. Once an open territory, the desert has now become enclosed.
In ecological terms, the desert is the frontline of what’s to come. Any change in the environment — a slight variation in climate, aquifers, or atmosphere — becomes immediately noticeable here. The desert is an extremely fragile ecosystem, despite often being associated with resilience and toughness. While it’s true that, from an evolutionary perspective, plants have developed astonishing adaptations to survive with minimal water, they also depend on highly specific conditions. If those conditions shift, even slightly, the entire ecosystem is affected — this is what makes it a very special location for all kinds of research.
How do you develop the concept of temporality in your work, particularly in connecting productive time with geological time in the context of the desert?
The place where we are born shapes our connection to time in a particular way. In the case of the desert, this relationship is quite interesting. At least in my experience growing up here, time felt much slower under conditions of extreme heat. In this region, people often take pride in enduring the heat, as if it were a form of collective heroism. While most now live with air conditioning, many of us still remember what life was like without it. That brutal heat of over 50 degrees profoundly impacts your body, your mind, your entire existence. It follows you wherever you go. That impossibility of escape shapes a different perception of time, one that seems to move much slower due to the intensity of the heat and the way you endure it. Slow time fascinates me because it breaks from the logic of fast time that dominates the lives of many of us. For me, the slowest time is geological time.
I have a strong interest in geological diagrams called 'stratigraphies.' These are visual interpretations of what happens underground. Stratigraphies are created using wave signals sent into the subsurface, which travel through rocks and return as lines or graphs. What’s interesting is that these waves take a long time to reach their destination and come back, and that slowness already speaks to a different kind of time unfolding in that very place.
Here in the desert, or in certain parts of it, I see geology laid bare. For example, in Caborca, there’s a rock that is among the oldest on the continent, and it’s just there, fully exposed for anyone to see. That raw, obscene geological presence forces you to confront and reflect on another kind of time.
I would like to approach the topic of heat through the speculative theory of hyperobjects developed by philosopher Timothy Morton, considering it as an entity in its own right — something present in our lives, whether we like it or not, almost like a character of the desert. Can we think of heat not only as an environmental issue but also as a metaphysical condition? How do you understand it?
When connected with memory, heat transforms into something else. One of the first works I showed in my exhibition was a series of overexposed photos. I remember lying under the sun as a child: it felt so immense, so overwhelming — even the sky looked white — that it left an overexposed image in my memory. Heat is the sibling of light, as it’s the sun’s light that generates this heat. Here in Sonora, the heat is dry; it burns.
Over time, I started searching for family photos and collected those that were overexposed. In a way, they seemed more faithful to reality than the others, which weren’t. As a child, I thought there must necessarily be a difference: if a body tires faster here, then in places where it’s not so hot, societies must be more productive. So, I wondered, what kind of society or people are forged out of these conditions?
There is also another aspect that interests me: sweat. Sweat as something unavoidable that makes you conscious of your body. Things related to the body and heat bring you into the present, into the materiality of that instant. Paradoxically, the desert also has a reputation as a spiritual retreat, a concept popularized by images like those of Foucault on LSD in Death Valley. But even if a revelation occurs, the effect is achieved only through the profound physical encounter with oneself. By becoming exhausted, completely drained, the body finds this spirituality. For me, it’s an experience of the inescapable materiality of the body in the present moment. However, for some people, it also becomes something transcendental. One possibility enables the other.
Do you remember when we talked about how many associate the desert landscape with abandonment? You offered a different perspective on the customs of the people who live in this area, like the fact that they have two homes they use depending on the season. I’d like to explore this 'double life' of desert inhabitants and how this particularity shapes their way of thinking and acting.
I often think about the processes of colonization in the desert. When the Spanish missionaries and army arrived, they didn’t find any people. On one hand, this made it easier to take control of the territory, as it appeared empty. On the other, it posed challenges because there was no one to colonize. To some extent, this absence became a form of resistance, rooted in a way of life that wasn’t tied to a single place of residence. Having two homes was an adaptive strategy for surviving the harsh desert conditions.
I believe this notion of 'abandoned' territory influenced how power was exercised in this region: unlike other parts of Mexico, it wasn’t expressed through architecture. Here, structures were temporary, built with materials like adobe that weren’t meant to last. This choice reflected not a lack of skill but a profound understanding of the local climate.
One might assume there were no empires here, like the Aztec Empire, but there were — though their forms of control differed. The Comanches, for example, lived among the ruins of other empires and economically dominated populations without constructing architecture. They moved across northern Mexico and the southern United States, adapting to each space they occupied. To me, the ability to create life outside the framework of architecture fosters entirely different relationships with space.
It also relates to the possibility of observing this vast space stretching to the horizon, which may influence how people think and act. On the other hand, the landscape is so dominant in the desert that, in a sense, it erases any ambition to dominate it through architecture. Instead, what we see here are architectural spaces entirely subordinated to the environment, where architecture doesn’t seek to impose itself but rather to adapt…
Yes, it pushes you to establish a dialogue with the environment. Anything that isn’t built in harmony with this territory will make you suffer — from the heat or the cold. So, it can be seen as a playground for testing strategies in the face of extreme conditions.
What you say about observing the horizon reminds me of westerns and their quintessential Hollywood colonial landscape. There's a famous scene in The Searchers where a woman with a rifle spots five horses approaching from a distance. That moment creates a sense of anticipation, as you can see them from afar: the dust in the distance signals something is coming. It evokes different thoughts and forms a distinct relationship with space.
And also the way of seeing things, right? I once spoke with a man from the Zona de Silencio who shared his very claustrophobic experience of visiting Chiapas, where he couldn’t see beyond a few meters due to the thick vegetation blocking his view. It also seems to me that these kinds of territories, so drastic and extreme, generate their own mythologies and spiritualities. I’m not referring to Carlos Castañeda or the expectations that come from an external perspective, but rather to another kind of connection between nature, spirituality, and tradition — the mythological aspect shaped by the territory.
For me, animals provide the connection. There are no other beings that link these two realities like animals do. The desert is one thing by day and another by night, because the animals are essentially nocturnal. Even despite the sun and heat, migrants prefer to walk during the day because nighttime feels much more dangerous due to a variety of sounds and activities that can be frightening.
For many of us living in the desert, animals are seen as signs or omens, signaling that something is about to happen. The coyote, the owl, the toad, the roadrunner — all the desert animals carry meanings beyond merely crossing your path. Whether this way of perceiving the environment is useful to you or not, if you incorporate it into the structure of the land you're already familiar with, everything starts to make much more sense. It's like understanding that there are internal rules to this territory, rules you can continually learn more about, but will never fully master. You can grasp them to some extent, but there will always be something unknown that emerges.
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