Entre futuros / In-between futures. Más allá de las fronteras y las cicatrices en el Río Bravo / Beyond frontiers and scars in the Rio Bravo

Abstract

“Entre futuros” reimagines the fixed border on the Río Bravo between Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. As the river shifted course, land disputes led to channelization, leaving hundreds of cut-off meanders since the 1930s as “hydroghosts”—scars in both landscape and lived experience. These traces become a lens to argue that violent and rigid border-making fixes a fluctuating river landscape while erasing centuries of shared histories, memories, and identities. Against this, the project positions water as a site and agent of repair through shared culture. Centered on El Chamizal—an in-between, divided binational threshold shaped by memories of contest and the river’s echoes—it activates water as a spatial and symbolic force, reconnecting border pilgrims and surrounding communities to the Río while embodying healing. Flowing beyond frontier, the emergent water body enacts cross-border coproduction, opening possibilities for reclamation, nurturing belonging, and sustaining care and beauty across border landscapes.