Bifurcated Borderlands

Abstract

The El Paso, Texas-Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua border region, colloquially known as the Borderplex, is one of the largest binational regions in the western hemisphere. Despite the two aforementioned sister cities having immediate adjacency to one another, complex geopolitics, historic treaties, and infrastructures have created systemic inequities for individuals who live adjacent to the border and cross it for opportunity on a daily basis. The geopolitical division bifurcates a singular region into a patchwork of lives, occupations, and families. The Chamizal Dispute concerns hundreds of acres of land in this border region that have shifted ownership throughout its history. Due to the wording of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which established the border as the midpoint in the Rio Grande, flooding that would eventually shift the river’s course subsequently shifted the border. A 1964 resolution between the United States and Mexico redrew the border and encouraged the implementation of infrastructure as a proxy for the boundary. In the process, approximately 5,600 people living in El Paso at the Chamizal were uprooted, with land ceded to Mexico. Since the agreement, layers of infrastructure have been compounded, reinforcing and solidifying the border’s presence, ranging from highways to metal walls capped with barbed wire. Furthermore, this thesis aims to analyze and critique the infrastructures that have created such a stark dichotomy between the two cities in this border community through the medium of housing. Formally comprehending the different definitions of family in a region with a high percentage of multi-generational households, the thesis further defines housing through design as a means of creating equity through access and of formally contrasting porosities with the symbol and solidity of the infrastructural border.