Rematerialization: Anticolonial Collective Memory through Latinx Digital Art

Cog•nate Collective intervenes in questions of bordering through digital video, soundscapes, (including radio broadcasts), sculptural works, writing, and performance. In a 2019 artist communiqué for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, they reflected on one long-term goal to rework the notion of citizenship through their praxis.

Their iterative approach takes shape in several open-ended, ongoing projects that collect, archive, and reimagine testimony and representations of the historical borderlands. Working against the fracturing paradigm of borders, their projects critically reposition the generative capacities of connections engendered by the material and sociocultural thresholds of borders.

And will be again…is a mixed-media installation that displays five commercial-grade scrolling LED signs spaced out on a black wall, perpendicular with a single-channel video screen on an adjacent wall (see figure 2).¹² The digital video, titled Circumlocution: Border/Circunlocución: Frontera (2021), features a series of long, still takes of the same type of scrolling LED sign displaying poetic texts in English and Spanish atop significant sites of border violence and rebellion. On the ground, a speaker plays translations of the eponymous excerpt from Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

Through the scrolling LED signs mounted on the wall, viewers visually apprehend a seemingly commercial or institutional message, yet the digital video and amplified sound elements of the installation present complexity beyond such an initial impression. At first glance, the installation might recall the text-based works of prominent feminist conceptual artists Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger, who have used the formats and aesthetics of commercial signs in order to critique systems of domination that coalesce in everyday encounters with public displays of text produced by the state and by corporations. Cog•nate Collective’s use of the quotidian, commercially situated LED signs opens analytic throughlines to familiar uses of the medium in public safety notices or advertising, as Holzer and Kruger have done.¹³ In And will be again…, such an appropriation of the LED sign connotes geopolitical spatial ordering. Consider the similar LED signs prompting border crossers to have their documents ready, directing vehicles into checkpoints, or providing wait times at border points of entry; programmable digital signs have become part of the media infrastructures that enforce borders. In the advertising inflection of the sign, the installation surfaces the contested histories of who has laid claims to border lands and waters, on what terms, and whose safety along the border matters. Cog•nate Collective plays up the novel quality of using such a popular advertising medium for lands long settled, bought, evacuated, transformed, exploited, and contested through poetic, intergenerational anticolonial memories.

Through the title of the installation, Cog•nate Collective emphasizes Gloria Anzaldúa’s affirmation of Indigenous futures never fully severed from the past. In digitally programming and sounding out five different Indigenous language translations of an excerpt from “The Homeland: Aztlán,” which appeared in her 1987 collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, the installation creates political and digital modes of recognition across Latinx and Indigenous border communities through cultural transmission and display. And will be again…remediates a poetic passage appearing in the first few pages of Borderlands/La Frontera: “This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again.” In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa eschews popular hierarchies of prose over poetry or even words over images. She blends essay, poetry, drawings, cultural critique, and autobiography to theorize the psychological, cultural, and spiritual impacts of the historical US-Mexico border in its racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed capacities. Throughout, she deftly weaves her sociohistorical analysis between her corporeal experiences and an emergent framework for Latinx identity shaped by the border.¹⁴

And will be again…approaches Latinx and Indigenous coalition-building through language and place, including the tensions and potential limitations of such antiborder coalitions. As the guiding figure of the piece, it is crucial to stress how Anzaldúa herself grappled with questions of solidarity, overlapping histories, and incommensurabilities among Latinx and Indigenous representational politics.¹⁵ Her later works look back at her earlier attachment to mestizaje and acknowledge the concept’s shortfalls in the context of her search for a new label that could encompass her aims in writing. In 2001, three years before her death, she articulated her approach as “modernizing Mexican indigenous traditions.”¹⁶ For many critics, though, a radical feminist and queer methodology still could not salvage Anzaldúa’s attachment to mestizaje given its history as a colonial racializing project that depends on the eradication of Indigenous people. Emphasizing the critiques lodged against Anzaldúa’s framework is key to unpacking the interventions regarding Latinx and Indigenous collectivity in And will be again…, but I do not mean to suggest that there is a final consensus regarding mestizaje in Anzaldúa’s signature theory of la frontera.¹⁷ Indeed, as Josefina Saldaña-Portillo summarizes the frustrating paradox in Borderlands/La Frontera: “mestizaje is deployed to produce a biological tie with pre-Aztec Indians rather than a political tie with contemporary U.S. Native Americans or Mexican Indians. Consequently, in this system of representation, indigenous subjectivity is once again put under erasure.”¹⁸ Cog•nate Collective challenges this system of representation and seeks to nourish social and political relationships through translation and sonic work.

And will be again…necessitates relationship building with Tongva and Kumeyaay language protectors of the Tijuana, Mexico/San Diego, California and Los Angeles regions. In connecting multiple histories of Indigenous dispossession and forced migration spawned by the US-Mexico border, Cog•nate Collective also situates Latinx meaning-making through relationship building with Mixtec, Zapotec, and Kaqchikel culture bearers. In effect, the collective linguistically maps the US-Mexico border into Los Angeles through its layered approach to border histories: Tongva translations represent Los Angeles as the unceded, ancestral homelands of Tongva peoples; Kumeyaay translations index their nation’s traditional homelands across the historical US-Mexico geopolitical borderline; and Mixtec, Zapotec (both from what is now southern Mexico), and Kaqchikel (from what is now central Guatemala) communities in Los Angeles are foregrounded through translations in their respective languages.¹⁹ During an in-person event discussing the contributions of the installation, Tina Orduno Calderon (Gabrielino Tongva, Chumash, and Yoeme descent) nuances the discussion of anticolonial paradigms, explaining how “respect of territory” prior to colonization sustained robust exchange and hosting guests without the need for borders to claim land.²⁰ She elaborates on the historical dimensions of language, describing some of the challenges in translating Anzaldúa’s text: “We can say the words ‘our land,’ but it’s not possession.”²¹ Translation does not emerge from a predetermined dataset for Cog•nate Collective to apply to the installation, but rather becomes a provocation to build place-based relationships.

The installation’s video, Circumlocution: Border, starts with white text on a black background, defining in English and Spanish two meanings for the term “circumlocution” as “the use of many words where fewer would do” and “in language acquisition: speaking around, or describing an idea to bridge a lexical gap.”²² Seven long takes with diegetic sound follow using the same compositional formula in different locations: a scrolling LED sign, similar to the ones mounted in the installation, takes up the bottom third of the screen, foregrounded against exterior long shots. In each shot, the sign offers poetic meditations on the meanings and impacts of the US-Mexico border, such as “A ruin built by people who lived by their own fear” and “hogar, agridulce hogar (home, bittersweet home).” These appear in English and Spanish, and the sign alternates between the two languages without pausing to translate one into the other. Although only appearing visually, this linguistic switching between Spanish and English in the scrolling text enacts the “disordered sound” of Latinx ways of thinking across colonial languages.²³

Circumlocution: Border does not reveal the location of the video’s long shots of exterior space, but Cog•nate Collective’s artist statement on the piece describes their significance in the layered histories of empire and exploitation at the US-Mexico border. The video moves through San Diego via Presidio Park, Old Mission Dam, Otay Mesa Industrial Park, and a neighborhood called Nestor. In Tijuana, the video depicts Ciudad Industrial Mesa de Otay, and the neighborhood Colonia Obrera.²⁴ Overall, these places map sites of settler colonial violence, starting with the first Spanish mission and site of Kumeyaay rebellion (Presidio Park), lingering on areas on both sides of the border economically devastated by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and emphasizing the environmental devastation connected to geopolitical impositions.

In one scene of Circumlocution: Border, the scrolling LED sign sits atop what’s known as Smuggler’s Gulch in the southernmost part of San Diego at the international border (see figure 3). Discarded plastic water bottles poke out of a nearby pile of wood planks and sticks. In the background, two kinds of infrastructural barriers run parallel behind and above the sign. The mechanical movement of the sign’s text is, quite eerily, the only movement happening on screen. It reads: “El encontrarse en un estado entre la risa y el llanto. A fallacy shaped like empire. Como la luz que despidió una estrella que ha dejado de existir, el hecho de un mundo que ya murió. A place that nature will one day retake. El cuerpo atravesado como territorio.”²⁵ The liminality of the poetic text is echoed in the environmental history of the location notoriously known for its clandestine migration passage. Where a thriving canyon estuary once supported biodiverse life, Customs and Border Protection in 2008 spent fifty-eight million dollars and loaded 72,000 dump trucks of dirt to fill, flatten, and fence.²⁶ Despite years-long protests to protect the estuary, the 2005 Real ID Act bulldozed the need for environmental assessments required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Clean Water Act. Migratory memories would need to be repatterned.

Per the film’s text, nature is indeed retaking the area, with a vengeance. When heavy rain falls, sewage contaminated floods plague the area given the shoddy, rushed construction redirecting water flows during the canyon filling. In response to this, the California Coastal Commission has proposed the installation of concrete “sediment ponds,” but residents decry the plan’s effects on polluting the aquifer and creating airborne dust.²⁷

Cog•nate Collective’s attention to sound in And will be again…rematerializes intersectional histories of the border through its oppositional treatment of language as free-for-all data. As is the case of contemporary data scraping machine learning systems, data mining for large-scale neural networks flattens the epistemological differences across language systems, particularly those of Indigenous languages entangled with geographic and cultural specificity. Although they are visually distinguished by color on the wall, the scrolling LED signs are limited to uniform characters to display translations of Anzaldúa’s text. The sound recording of the translations, simultaneously broadcast on a pirated radio transmission, emphasizes the range, tensions, and plurality of expressing Anzaldúa’s ideas in different languages of the borderlands.

Overall, each reader’s voice delivers the translation with care, slowing down the sensory impression communicated by the fast-scrolling LED signs mounted on the wall of the installation. The readings are spaced roughly one minute apart from one another, on loop, with a fainter crackle-like sound filling the sonic space between translations. In their artist statement, Cog•nate Collective describes three elements composing their robust, yet understated, soundscape immersing visitors in the installation: “Very low frequency naturally occurring radio waves produced by the clash/refraction of solar flares on the ionosphere of earth’s atmosphere (a border of sorts between earth and outer-space),” recordings made from buried microphones in border sites featured in the video, and field recordings across the San Diego and Tijuana sites in the video.²⁸ The indexical border sounds draw on a long geologic timeline. This gesture speculates a sensory experience of the historical borderlands before settler border regimes. Combined with the translations, this indexing of the material borderlands rematerializes a new set of data points and sensory impressions to make Latinx and Indigenous survival along the borderlands and waters perceptible.

The indexical border sounds draw visitors into an especially attentive mode, enriching the installation’s soundscape with defamiliarizing noise. Noise, according to Alex E. Chávez, “operates as an evaluative category for sounds that are, at best, considered culturally incomprehensible or, at worst, deemed to possess unassimilable and alien meanings thought to be of no social value.”²⁹ Through the epistemic violence of borders, Indigenous languages have been rendered as noise. And will be again…rematerializes collective Kumeyaay, Tongva, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Kaqchikel anticolonial memories through translating, recording, and broadcasting their languages. The indexical border “noise” grounds the readers’ voices into a planetary scale of the historical borderlands, further distinguishing their interventions from mere adaptations or easy translations of Anzaldúa’s text.

Varied linguistic constructions of the Indigenous dialects make for a more complicated relationship than mere phonetic correlation between the LED signs and the sound recordings. In the installation, the uniform pacing between hearing each translation establishes an element of steadiness, a kind of familiarity in the looping soundscape even if the languages’ aurality are new to visitors. The rhythm and sound mixing of volume levels supports a coherence across the varied human and more-than-human sources, encouraging inquiry around the sounds between the readers’ voices. Put another way, there’s nothing filler about the indexical, “noisy” sounds; its relative quiet is complementary and nuanced, rather than empty. This creates a perceptual attention to the sounding out of border histories, reverberating across the ways in which language and land inform each other in an anticolonial poetics of border landscape.

In their sonic emphasis on language and land, Cog•nate Collective destabilizes visual preoccupations of the borderlands. This is an important aesthetic and political choice because of the ways in which white supremacy has indulged the visual as the highest empirical and evidentiary sense. Vision has been weaponized in the impositions of dispossessing racial geographies.³⁰ Through sound, And will be again…retrieves anticolonial collective memories of Kumeyaay, Tongva, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and Kaqchikel resistance. Rematerializing these voices with Anzaldúa’s text and the video component of the installation suggests their inextricable vitality alongside Latinx survival in the historical borderlands. Rematerializing Latinx and Indigenous anticolonial memories calls attention to their forced fragmentation and enforced silencing, showing how “‘Other’ geographic evidence is buried, plowed over, forgotten, renamed, and relocated” as required to maintain settler colonial border regimes.³¹ In this process, the temporal dimensions of the installation deny a hierarchy of anticolonial memories between Indigenous and Latinx modes of border resistance. Anzaldúa’s assurance forges a contemporary, lived sense of Indigenous futurity in collaboration and collectivity with Latinx struggles in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Today, the neural networks of border surveillance technologies rely on increasingly large datasets to screen, capture, and police the mobility of people on the move, especially around but certainly not limited to the US-Mexico border. Preceding such advanced machine learning systems, data capture throughout the historical US-Mexico borderlands has been a key mechanism to facilitate racialized and gendered regimes of policing mobility, citizenship, and claims to political rights. For instance, Kelly Lytle Hernández documents Border Patrol tracking practices that gamified matching a footprint with the person’s gender, race, and national origin. One Border Patrol officer explained the racialized logic behind his datafication of footprints: “A Mexican always walks heavy on the outside of his feet. When he walks, he puts his foot down on the heel first and then rolls it off—Indians will do that, too.”³² The production of data points from many different facets of life in the borderlands is no longer bounded to the geographic proximity to the US-Mexico border. The more data collected, the higher the profit incentive is to widen the capture and use of the data. Settler accounting for and theft of natural resources, mapmaking, Indigenous language acquisition, and technologies of sustainability—to name just a few historical areas of robust data extraction—have produced genocide, ecological crisis, and narrowed life chances especially around geopolitical borders.

Digitally recomputing new visual and listening practices, as Cog•nate Collective’s installation does, reroutes perceptual attention to the border’s entangled social, cultural, and environmental histories in an act of countermapping. Dorothy Kidd details how countermapping “engages in mapping in ways that upset power relations” and is “similar to other forms of data activism, in which data is used as a techne to create knowledge about the world, denounce dominant representations, shed light on discrimination and injustice, and establish alternative and social categories.”³³ In their rematerialization of the border’s lived, linguistic geographies, Cog•nate Collective countermaps the viewer’s sensory relationship to place.

The emphasis on sound in the works of Cog•nate Collective is crucial to their reparative acts of rematerialization. Machine learning systems using massive datasets are often described through the metaphor of symphony, espousing harmonious synchronization and mastery across varied source data. Robin James explains this penchant for classical musical metaphor by data scientists, noting how an emphasis on “mathematical similarities between the physics of sound and the metaphysics of predictive analytics” operates on “laypeople’s musical understanding of sound to translate the complex math behind data analytics into familiar and accessible nonquantitative terms.”³⁴ Rather than pursue a symphonic rendering of geographically emplaced anticolonial collective memories and coalition-building, Cog•nate Collective contends with the challenges, tensions, and labor of reparative rematerialization. Their installations use sound in ways that align more with what Emma K. Russell and Bree Carlton call counter-carceral acoustemologies. Acknowledging the border-crossing nature of sound, “counter-carceral acoustemologies signal the creation of alternative ‘soundtracks,’ of resistance,” such as “protest noise, radio technology, rhythm and music,” which “reveal and momentarily displace carceral-spatial control.”³⁵ And will be again…catalyzes necessary provocations that despite borders’ historical violence—to communities, to knowledge systems, to the environment—settler colonialism is not the last word or the inevitable way of life.

I have primarily discussed rematerialization regarding its computer science meaning; however, the term is also used in other relevant fields. In geography studies, rematerialization signals a “recognition of the way that the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ intertwine and interact in all manner of promiscuous combinations.”³⁶ And will be again…is concerned with the contested historical valence of land as both a material and social force for Latinx and Indigenous communities affected by bordering regimes. In this way, the installation exceeds a mere ecological concern in its depictions of natural and built environments.

This geographical definition of rematerialization is significant in the context of recent rhetorical strategies that argue against borders primarily through the lens of ecological destruction caused by wall infrastructures. Following bordering policies spectacularized by the US government during the Trump administration (2016–2020), migratory disruptions and flood-causing soil erosion, among other concerns with the border’s flora and fauna, have received increasing attention within an antiborder framework. Increasingly, such an argument is made ahistorically without connecting ecological border violence to migrant justice or Indigenous sovereignty. Amid this popularization of prioritizing the well-being of more-than-human life in the border lands and waters, Cog•nate Collective contends with ecofeminism and environmental racism.

Ecofeminism provides an intersectional, human, and more-than-human approach to “transforming the conditions that give rise in the first place to the carceral geographies embodied in such things as prisons, policing, land grabs, residential segregation, disproportionate health vulnerabilities, and environmental degradation.”³⁷ To this list, I would of course add borders. Foundational strains of ecofeminist thought have rightly earned criticism: the notion of collapsing nature and woman yields a problematic biologic essentialism, and the foundational whiteness of the movement historically ignored women of color thinkers and the environmental problems of communities of color.³⁸ Writing in 1997, Dorceta Taylor chronicled the insufficiencies of both the environmental justice movement and the ecofeminist movement to analyze the interconnected harms of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and environmental degradation. But, she noted, “There is a slight glimmer of hope that change is possible” given that “a few ecofeminists have started making references to many feminisms and ecofeminisms.”³⁹ To this end, Taylor reflected on the environmental justice movement’s 1981 rallying behind white zip codes’ protests against the state of California spraying pesticide to mitigate Mediterranean fruit flies. This was after environmental justice advocates abandoned the United Farm Workers’ struggles to halt spraying workers with pesticides (since it was a labor issue, not an environmental issue), but they used data collected from Latina farm workers’ pesticide-related birth defects.⁴⁰ Amid these overlapping forms of oppression, ecofeminism usefully explained the linkages and the rationale as to why certain people’s safety in which places mattered more than others.

An ecofeminist approach to the ecological borderlands, according to Christina Holmes, might “urge that our problematic representational patterns be dislodged and that we begin to vision new worlds.”⁴¹ Technology and imagination are imperative to such envisioning. Tracing genealogies of Chicana feminism, Holmes describes how “Chicana and Mexican American scholars, artists, and activists working in the ecological borderlands have cited spirituality as a technology.”⁴² My reading of And will be again…situates memory as a spiritual technology that sparks imaginative, anticolonial ways of building place-based relationships. Such a reading draws on Anzaldúa’s ideas about the vital force of ancestral experiences and the erotics of communion with lands and beings. Felicity Amaya Schaeffer synthesizes Anzaldúa’s “technologies for knowing-beyond” and the role that spirituality and memory play: “we learn alternative knowledges and become otherwise through dreams, visions, the imagination, and meditation—knowledge practices discredited as fantasy or primitive belief by Western science.”⁴³

An ecofeminist approach to “imagine otherwise,” to return to the first scrolling LED sign in the video, must also contend with digital memory. In computer science, memory is a quantifiable matter that also refers to the storage and location of data.⁴⁴ Memory is a core component for algorithms, as it dictates the amount of data stored and instructions processed. As emergent techniques for mass data aggregation produce exponentially larger datasets, increased memory usage can stall algorithmic computational steps by taking up increasing physical space and time for data retrieval. Memory-loading algorithms slow down command chains and require more space to store data. A trade-off between available memory storage and computational complexity creates the need for new operations of memory retrieval; computer scientists have experimented with methods for working around memory bottlenecks since the 1960s.⁴⁵ The techno-utopian drives of speed and lightness continue to motivate computer scientists to explore alternative ways to process large amounts of data without compromising the algorithm’s complexity.

Feminist analyses demonstrate the environmental and social costs of quantum computing: the materiality of computer memory and, by extension, algorithmic potential occupies land, redirects water from communities to cool data servers, and exploits labor in predictably uneven ways.⁴⁶ Optimized digital memory has material consequences and militarized implications. Indeed, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), responsible for the Department of Defense’s research and development in military technologies, has been a key source of funding experiments in memory optimization. As such, it is important to consider the militarized applications of memory optimization and how memory budgets are structured into digital colonialism.

The affective, sensorial dimensions of And will be again…rematerialize anticolonial collective memories as “never-killed” values for viewers to recompute in their aesthetic encounter of the US-Mexico borderlands. By way of conclusion, I contextualize the significance of Cog•nate Collective’s installation amid practices of data discrimination that fortify US borders. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contracts with technology companies to algorithmically surveil social media posts. Details of DHS’s use of social media data extracted through Giant Oak Search Technologies (GOST) from 2014 to 2022, made public through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, show that surveilled subjects are assigned a score based in part on “potentially derogatory online activity.”⁴⁷ The rationale for such extensive monitoring fits within the established antiterrorist securitization paradigm, which has long enabled discrimination and violence directed at minoritized individuals and communities. Automated mechanisms required for GOST to scrape, screen, and score individuals present opportunities for anticolonial expressions to be rendered as derogatory. DHS’s extensive search for derogatory data within social media profiles is part of what Juan De Lara describes as “the deployment of virtual border enforcement systems [that] drives the need for new forms of human labor to conceptualize, build, and implement these technologies.”⁴⁸ Giant Oak Inc., the company that contracts GOST, maintains the motto, “We see the people behind the data.” The identification and data capture evinced by the multiple inflections of “seeing” is starkly opposed to the forms of historically engaged solidarity building that Cog•nate Collective produces in their audiovisual rendering of “the people behind the data” through anticolonial histories, collective memories, and poetics of the US-Mexico border.

Latinx resistance to the violence of the US-Mexico’s enforcing binary of in or out has crucially drawn from Indigenous strategies of self-determination, even as settler dispossession and surveilled restrictions to mobility have affected our histories and methods of struggle and survivance differently.⁴⁹ Still, we have both fought back and spilled blood against the technomediations of the US-Mexico border since its invention. In its rematerialization of anticolonial collective memory, And will be again…enacts Lisa Lowe’s argument that “the ‘coloniality’ of modern world history is not a brute binary division, but rather one that operates through precisely spatialized and temporalized processes of both differentiation and connection.”⁵⁰ Latinx and Indigenous communities continue to show how the border’s binary of in or out is an untenable pretense on stolen land with knowledges and kinship that precede the legal fiction of a geopolitical border.