Rolando Girodengo



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@rgirodengo
Rio Grande River



Year
Location
Status
2022
MEX - US Border
Research Project


Historically cities have been founded around rivers; Paris, Rome, London, Florence are some examples that come to mind. They provided the necessary infrastructure and transportation for cities to flourish, many times becoming an iconic element within the city’s imaginary for locals and visitors. Most of the US-Mexico Border is divided by the Rio Grande River. While it is thought of as a stark delimitation of national territory, morphologically the city has continued to develop in a similar fashion to those mentioned before. Even its name – Rio Grande River – is a literal example of the lived condition of the border cities. It is grammatically correct but ultimately redundant. These cites inhabit a space that caters to both identities and in doing so a new identity is created. The Border, more than being a clear demarcation between the United States and Mexico has transformed into a Venn-Diagram Intersection of both.

In 1961 the administration of Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos created the National Border Program that aimed to invest on 13 cities along the US-Mexico Border to create a “dignified entrance to Latin America”. Within its objectives it had the intent to “diminish and almost erase the depressing and sometimes denigrating contrast that existed between the Mexican and North American communities.”. In some of these cities the blurring of the boundary was a success. This project aims to look at the morphological, economic and cultural characteristics that blur the boundaries between sister cities along the border. In these cities, it is interesting to see the presence of streets south of the border with names like Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. The same can be said of neighborhoods north of the border, that carry Spanish names. In some cities, the urban grid is the same on both sides of the border. The project aims to illustrate how many of these cities were developed together and exhibit a shared culture and history through an urban analysis and mappings.

The outcome of the project is a series of analogically-interactive maps that illustrate the unifying nature of these Border Cities. By using an anaglyph technique, the series of mappings produced erase the physical border and show these cities as one. In the example shown here, street names are mapped in both Nuevo Laredo, Tam. and Laredo, TX. Streets in Spanish are shown in red and streets in English are shown in blue. When a red color gel is applied to the map (or worn as glasses) only the blue is shown, and vice versa. When displayed, the visitor is invited to wear glasses with red and blue color gels, in the hopes of sparking a conversation of the value of biases and revealing connections across the Border.