Arturo Soto (MX) grew up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in the twin cities of Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA), fascinated by how much things had changed in just a generation. Over time, he compiled and narratively shaped his father’s memories, then photographed the sites where they occurred. Border Documents is a personal archive of ordinary events that reveals how emotions become attached to public spaces. Most importantly, the book stands apart from the reductive media coverage of the border that focuses solely on the violence caused by drug trafficking, illegal migration, and corruption. The different temporalities expressed through the mediums of photography and writing produce a vivid account of a territory that plays a vital role in global trade. Oscillating between the personal and the political, Border Documents reminds us, as the critic Edward Soja once remarked, that biographies are geographies as much as they are histories.
