react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Tulare Lake, California, once the central source of water for the San Joaquin Valley, has reemerged in the popular imagination as a haunting reminder of California’s changing relationship with water, environmental extraction, and regional identity. During the unprecedented rains of 2023, Tulare Lake expanded to fill its nineteenth century perimeters and reached media attention as “a phantom lake,” returning to claim its ancient land after years of colonization. The socio-spatial phenomenon of Tulare Lake is a story that can be traced back centuries through entangled livelihoods, infrastructures, farming and folklore. This article discusses two dynamic ethnoarcheological models enacted at Tulare Lake, California, and the analogous contested site of Lake Texcoco, Mexico City, which reactivate a migratory potential of place-making, territorialization, and archival practice. In the multi-temporal epistemologies of these charged and complicated sites, their work demarcates the lakebed as an interstitial and migratory space built from multiplicities of community, materiality and belonging.