UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates the connections between materiality, precarity, art and border space by analyzing transborder recycling aesthetics in works of visual art and literature from the U.S.-México border at the turn of the 21st Century. I study the fabrication of border space in art and literature of the Tijuana-San Diego region and how it relates to the border landscape. Specifically, I analyze how the practice of informal recycling, as the methodological action of manually creating assemblages and bricolages out of discarded materials and objects, has the potential to function as a conceptual strategy that transcends the aesthetics of border art and literature by illuminating the economic forces in tension, as well as the contrasting world views within the border landscape. I argue that the cultural productions that explore the phenomenon of transborder recycling can potentially impulse a disruptive discourse into the realm of the arts, and question concepts such as home, property, materiality, obsolescence, labor and identity.Additionally, I argue that artists and writers employ regenerative, and transformative strategies to address an environment of resilience, creativity, and resistance within a complex social framework of scarcity, mass migration along with the political and economic tensions of the border region.