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An Iconic Survey of the Border Funklands:1975-2011
Love Bug In The Border Desert
Love in the Desert 2011
by Bruce Berman
El Paso and Russell Lee and the border (3 blocks)
© Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Swimming pool at Armijo Park, El Paso, Texas, 1949
AIDS balloon at the border
AIDs balloon at the border, El Paso – June 27, 2008
Primavera in the borderlands
White Sands National Monument, NM – March 20, 2008
Spring has sprung in the desert. If only for a moment…time to play.
Election Views From The North (Of The Border)
Blogmeister’s Note: This is a piece written by a friend of The Border Blog. He is a Mexican National, a university student who attends the university in El Paso and a good guy. Especially, if one is looking for an insight, note the second to last paragraph and multiple it by the millions.
The BB welcomes all viewpoints, especially this one . Thank you, Javier :
Why I Voted For Felipe Calderon
I was listening to my aunt Lupe while we were driving down Periferico
Sur highway about a month ago in Mexico City. She told me about Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (editor:AMLO), the presidential candidate (at the time), and how he managed to obtain the votes of lots of people in Mexico City by offering social assistance to senior (over 65) people and single moms while he was the city’s mayor.
BORDER FENCE SUNSET
Border fence, El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, November 2022 by ©Bruce Berman
BORDER BOOTY
Border (enhanced)booty, El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, April 2022
Photograph and Text by Bruce Berman
Who knew? And, in pink, yet!
Betcha there have been many surprises.
ALEX WEBB ON THE JUAREZ-EL PASO BORDER
Alex Webb
Man in Juarez. Chihuahua. 1975
BORDER WOMEN
Love them. Always have. Strength. Endurance. Verve. Strongest people on this planet.
U.S./MEXICO BORDER: BORDER MONUMENT #258
Border Artist Paints Magnificent Horror
Please view this video about Rigoberto Gonzales. His paintings are horrible and important.
The Great Border Storm of 2011: El Paso – Juarez
The Great Border Storm of 2011, El Paso-Juarez
by Bruce Berman ©2011
EL PASO –It was an amazing storm. Hard to believe it happened. Zero temperatures (in El Paso!!!!). Ice. Snow. Irregular electricity. No internet. Intermittent Gas (for some people). Highways closed. Jobs (including mine. I haven’t been to NMSU since last Tuesday! Bummer! I like it) canceled. Everything closed. Voluntary curfew (requested). Went on for three to five days (depending on which part of this freaky happening we’re talking about, and, when it was all over, yesterday, it wasn’t over because there were major outages of water (I’m going to get that shower eventually…like today!).
Now I think it’ll be El Paso again and we’ll be in shorts T Shirts and swamp coolers, squishy asphalt, hoods up and steaming radiators and complaining about the heat in no time at all.
Like I said, it was like a dream and hard to believe it ever happened.
Border Beauties
[flagallery gid=3 name=”Gallery”]
February 13, 2010, the day before the Day of San Valentin – El Paso, Texas
Photographs by Bruce Berman
Pipo’s Hair Salon and School held a beauty competition and the best of the best turned out to coif, spray, paint and shape the “models,” in a competition that determined who was the most beautiful and who was the best beauty maker.
The night’s Dj, a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq was overheard telling the photographer (me), “I’ve seen a lot of things but I have never ever seen anything like this.
Not even in Iraq.
The border always has a twist. But this event, at least to your correspondent, seemed to make sense.
In journalism, they always teach you to ask, “Why?”
I guess the question here is, Why Not?
Border Story: The Artist Flees
The Artist, 1st Day on el lado norte – 01/01/2010
EL PASO –
New Years Day. A time for “beginnings.”
I hope. Should be.
She is an extraordinary artist. A force of nature. A giver. A maker of strong things and deep inspiration. Unmovable. A force.
The sicarios came to her studio in Juarez right before Christmas. The new scourge. “Start paying up or we’ll kill you and burn your studio down when we’re finished,” they said
This is the studio she willed into existence. Up against the mountain in Juarez she created a wall of tile and mirrors, mosaic sculpture, a thing for Juarez like nothing else. A monument. A love gesture to the city of her heart and to the heart of many of us in la frontera.
Their threat wasn’t idle. Not in these hard times in Juarez. Shortly before, the storekeeper down the street, refused to pay. She was murdered.
The Artist called her family in El Paso. They came with a pickup. All in a day. She took as much of her art as she could. She fled Juarez. Her Father, in 1910, a hundred years before, after Villa issued a death warrant, also ran from Juarez. “Fleeing runs in my blood,” she says, as we talk, in her new refuge, in El Paso.
Border Magic Eye
Cordula at the fence, March 23, 2009
Anapra, NM/Colonia Anapra, Juarez, Chihuahua
Yesterday I worked with an incredible journalist from Der Spiegel (the German equivalent of Time). She is German, from the north of Germany. Works out of the DC Bureau. Sharp and smart and witty and ironic and puro journalist. We did a story at Fort Bliss. She was bright and lively and brave and charming and funny and we’d had a successful day and did a great story together. She wanted to see “El Paso.”
So we head for the border (I’m a one trick pony. To me, the border is El Paso).
Sweet Border: Illegal and Bad
Sweet Border, Anapra, NM/Colonia Anapra, Juarez Chihuahua-Feb. 2009
Life goes on.
Mexico is a great pueblo. So is El Paso and southern New Mexico.
One reads the newspapers and one thinks the world has gone insane. Particularly here, on the border.
Border Christmas: Grinchy but real!
Border Christmas: Grinchy but real!/El Paso-Dec. 24, 2008
Border gas: two different worlds
Pemex station, Juarez, July 2008
Ciudad Acuna, Mexico
A Mexican border city has begun fining U.S. drivers who cross the border to fill extra drums, tanks or barrels with government-subsidized Mexican fuel.
Border fools and border delights: You gotta look hard
Americo with prayer shawl, yamulke and guitar,
Segundo barrio, El Paso – July 26, 2008
Why do I ever leave my loft?
Went to the gym where a friend of over three years, a retired professor at the local university, someone who has never displayed anything but kindness and goodwill, out of the clear blue, no warning, told me “…the Jews got what they deserved after all the stuff they did as bankers in Germany, don’t you think?”
Wha-a-a-a-a-a?!
Mexico’s other border
SEE VIDEO: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player?titleID=1372185572
Borders. North and south. Mexico is a yin yang of the first order.
See what’s going on on the southern border and get some insights into what’s going on on the northern one.
Article by the always interesting and powerful Charles Bowden with cut-to-the-bone humane photographs by superb Magnum shooter, Alex Webb.
Border story: Miguel, postman and mensch
Miguel, postman and mensch, El Paso – July 2008
Miguel.
Another border encounter.
He’s a savior for me on this day.
Roof Cam: Borderlands Suite
Roof Cam #8, El Paso – June 2008
I’m driving around my city. I’m moving my operation a little to the north of where I am now, north of the border, north of the borderline, north of my reality. I’m already feeling separation depression. So I drive around my turf of 30 years. I don’t have to look anymore, I know the bricks, the cracks, the fault lines. I’ve shot them a million times and re-shot them. I stick the camera out the sunroof and let the car become part of the camera. The car is the camera. and I tour my myth. This is between me and it, not meant for others. All of my work is getting there now, it’s between me and it.
Another distant border in Hell
Please check out: An internationally touring multimedia exhibit on Darfur.
Darfur is another border between Europe and sub-Sahara Africa, between Muslim and Christian, between (whatever is left of) sanity and outright brutal lunacy.
Learn more from some of the world’s best photographers.
$ 39.99 Border
PHOTO OF THE WEEK: June 17-????, 2008
View of el poniente, Juarez, June 2008
World has gone crazy.
Murder and hell in this landscape.
Stop taking your drugs you busted up stinkin’ American pricks!
Border Mass
All Soul’s Day Mass at the border,
Sunland Park, NM/Anapra, Chihuahua
November 2, 2007
All Soul’s Day, Border Mass, NM/Chihuahua border
Nuns on both sides of border fence
Sunland Park, New Mexico/Anapra, Mexico
Today the Bishops of El Paso, Las Cruces, NM and Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico met at the border fence at Sunland Park, NM and Anapra, Chihuahua to protest current immigration policies and to promote understanding for immigrants from Mexico, as well as world wide.
Border Games
Apolino the guard, Paiwas, Nicaragua, 1988
U.S. Border Patrol in S. California developing deadly but ineffective Operation Gatekeeper/Interview with Roberto Martinez – In Motion Magazine
Roberto Martinez is the former director of the U.S./Mexico Border Program. A lifelong Chicano activist, he has spent 30 years monitoring human rights in the San Diego/Tijuana area. In 1992, he was honored as an Intermational Human Rights Monitor by Human Rights Watch, the first U.S. citizen to be honored in such a way.The following essay, published here as a call for a humane U.S. immigration policy, was written as the introduction for the American Friends Service Committee 2003 human rights report.
DAD CAB
Dad Cab, El Paso, Texas, March 2025
Text and Photo by Bruce Berman
For sure, one of the things I like about El Paso, the Border and maybe the culture of the Southwest, is the prevalence of family.
It’s the foundation of that city. Over 80% Latino, it’s a natural outgrowth of that culture.
Here, on a busy street (Hawkins Boulevard), Dad happily gives his niña a ride. From when I first noticed him until he turned a corner I could not, he had walked over a mile!
This wasn’t funzy... it was required transportation.
Dad Cab.
Probably one of the memorable rides of her life.
RUNNING DOG
Running Dog, El Paso, November 2023
Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman
I thought I was bringing “the border” into homes that knew it not.
I no longer think that.
I remember an acquaintance, at an exhibition I had, coming up to me after the show and talk and saying, “Now I really know the border and I’ve lived here all my life.”
I was flattered and felt great gratitude. After all, that was my intention in photography, to show and tell what others didn’t see or know.
He then said, I’d buy a photograph, but my wife just couldn’t see one that fit her new color scheme for our living room.
I didn’t know what to say. What could you say?
I understood that when he said he finally “knew the border,” he actually meant he finally could see how he could use what I saw and made for his own needs and wants.
¿Interesante, eh? It’s OK, but I hope for more.
I’ve come to know that most people overlay themselves on the border–maybe on all photography–and for them whatever is there is what is already embedded there, within them, no matter what the image shows.
So be it.
I look for coherence in what is incoherent and hope that someone–anyone–sees what I saw, felt what I felt, but most importantly, comes to know what I know from it.
I have have no expectations.