Ronald Rael, a professor of architecture and Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, speaks Tuesday night about how the border wall unites people during his keynote address in the UTRGV Albert L. Jeffers Theatre on the Edinburg campus. Isabel Morales/THE RIDER PHOTOS
Ronald Rael, Professor and Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley told a UTRGV audience Tuesday night how the borderlands are a place of unity despite the general perception that they are a place of separation.
Rael, author of “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary” (University of California Press, 2017) was the keynote speaker for the Sawyer Seminar Series, where more than 60 people gathered at the UTRGV Albert L. Jeffers Theatre and via Zoom to hear his lecture.
The seminar, titled “The US -Mexico Border Regime: Trauma, Hospitality, Art and Protest,” discussed dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico border and associated externalization policies through panels Tuesday and Wednesday.
Luis R. Torres-Hostos, dean of the School of Social Work at UTRGV, organized the seminar series in conjunction with Carrie Preston, associate director of the Center on Forced Displacement and director of Kilachand Honors College at Boston University.
During his presentation, Rael spoke about the “Teeter-Totter Wall,” an idea he had with Virginia San Fratello, the chair of the Department of Design at San Jose State University, in 2009.
For about 40 minutes on July 28, 2019, American and Mexican families played on three pink seesaws straddling the U.S.-Mexican border at El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Rael said everyone was laughing and having fun at the seesaws.
“Within eight minutes, the Border Patrol arrived and said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ he said. “We said, ‘We are having an event with the families.’ They said, ‘OK’ and they just pulled off to the side and watched. Very soon after that, the Mexican National Guard arrived heavily armed. And they, too, said, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And we said, ‘We are having an event with the families.’”
He said the moms on the Mexican side were more aggressive.
“They [were] like, ‘Get out of here.’ … ‘We are just having fun,’” Rael said. “Then I invited [the] Border Patrol and the Mexican National Guard to ride the teeter-totter together. But they said that that wouldn’t be very professional. So they didn’t do it. But no one ever told us to take it down. We never asked permission to do it.”
The Teeter-Totter Wall was the “overall winner of the Beazley Designs of the Year competition for 2020, which considered 74 projects by designers from around the world,” according to the Associated Press.
During an interview with The Rider, Rael said he has always been interested in the border.
“Where I am from in Colorado was once the border between the United States and Mexico,” he said. “And so that history of that being borderline still exists. And in my adult life, I traveled away frequently to the contemporary U.S.- Mexican border.”
He said he saw the similarities between the “two worlds.”
“It became very interesting to me to think about the future of this border,” Rael said. “To think about what happens over time and space and geography, and the traumas and issues of the borderlines. And so that’s been a long-term interest of mine.”
Asked if he believes the wall is architecture, he quoted the philosopher Noam Chomsky and said the wall is an “architecture of violence.”
“Architecture affects the spaces around it,” Rael said. “And while it affects those spaces negatively, and the people negatively, this is why I call it an architecture of violence. And it’s really not my term calling it architecture violence.”
Rael said the wall serves as a tool to bring people together.
“I think that despite the goals of the wall to keep people separated apart, it actually serves [as] an attractor,” he said. “The wall is a focal point to talk about their togetherness. This is a landscape that’s divided cities that are divided communities that are divided. … In this case, there’s a steel wall. But there are so many creative ways that people have engaged that wall to show that we are still connected to people on the other side.”
Asked if he is working on any projects, Rael replied he is working on the “Teeter-Totter House.”
“It imagines the world after the border wall disappears, and what to do with the millions of tons of steel,” Rael said. “And could you do something productive with that steel? For example, making a house. So I’ve built a house out of steel that came from an imagined version of the border wall, and thinking about how the wall might transform some day into something nonviolent and something productive and useful.”
Philosophy senior Sofi Homes said she came to the presentation because she read about the seesaw in one of her classes.
“I thought that was really interesting,” Homes said. “That’s why I came. Like, this is something that I am genuinely, like, interested in.”
Ernesto Morua, a graphic design sophomore, said he liked Rael’s Teeter-Totter Wall project.
“Well, I came here for my humanities class for extra credit for my final but actually got interested because of what he did like a seesaw thing.”
