141 Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 38:1 Spring 2013 © University of California Regents We Morph War into Magic The Story of the Border Fence Mural, a Community Art Project in Calexico-Mexicali Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo But the skin of the earth is seamless. —Gloria Anzaldúa I write to remember. —Cherríe Moraga I am looking at a picture of my great-great-grandfather. It was taken some- time in the 1880s. He sits on a horse at the US-Mexico border with the expanse of the Sonoran desert landscape all around. A palm tree to his right marks “the line,” la línea. When I first came across the photograph, I was struck by the way it seemed to signal the shifting configuration of the landscape along the border. While leading scholars in border studies focus on the borderlands as a constant site of transition, there is a presumed static element in play, the US-Mexico border fence/wall (Lugo 2008). Although the borderline is perceived as static because it mostly has not moved since the end of the US-Mexican War defined it and the US Army Corps of Engineers mapped it, its making persists and its meaning remains in con- stant flux. The photograph offers insight into sociohistorical shifts in the configuration of the border landscape. It evokes the ways in which the US nation-project, through its b/ordering of “the line,” marks lands and bodies with anchors of meaning. Border making along the US-Mexico border is a geopolitical project that chisels and sutures peoples, communities, and lands through interconnected forms of violence that inscribe the bordered sexual politics of gender racialities (Alba and Guzmán 2010; Fregoso and Bejarano 2010; Guidotti-Hernandez 2011; Lugo 2008; Monárrez Fragoso and Tabuenca Córdoba 2007).