Geopolitics

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Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography

of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain,
California

Jared Margulies

To cite this article: Jared Margulies (2023): Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic
Geography of the US–Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California, Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2023.2170788

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2170788

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Published online: 30 Jan 2023.

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GEOPOLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2170788

Sounding Out Borderscapes: A Sonic Geography of the US–

Mexico Border at Otay Mountain, California
Jared Margulies
Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Alabama, USA

ABSTRACT
This article presents a sonic, more-than-human geography of
the US–Mexico borderlands. I draw on creative practice to make
an empirical contribution to critical border studies. Listening to
border architecture offers a way to analyse the politics of border
landscapes as they reverberate with sound. Sonic methods
assert the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and
additional valences of violence enacted through border land­
scapes and atmospheres. Through field recordings I show how
sounds carry political significations and might draw listeners
into new political possibilities. Listening is an opportunity to
scan the breadth of the landscape for spaces in resisting the
border’s imposition on place. Through sound, the political ecol­
ogy of critical border studies becomes more proximate, mate­
rial, and apparent. As an approach to witnessing the border as
a tangible entity yet encountered atmospherically and as
a relational and topological field, sounding the border refracts
its sensory affects – the border as experience.

First there was nothing. Nothing but a frayed strip of cement over the white earth. Then
she made out two mountains colliding in the back of beyond: like they’d come from who
knows where and were headed to anyone’s guess but had come together at that intense
point in the nothingness and insisted on crashing noisily against each other, though the
oblivious might think they simply stood there in silence.

–Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World

Introduction
How can listening to the border generate new insights for critically approach­
ing borders ‘ . . . not as a taken-for-granted entity, but precisely as a site of
investigation’ (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728)? A more-than-
human approach to border studies holds promise for expanding attention to
the costs and consequences of state practices of bordering, the kinds of lives
and ‘things’ enrolled in (re)producing forms of violent territorial separation, as

CONTACT Jared Margulies jdmargulies@ua.edu Department of Geography, University of Alabama,

Tuscaloosa, USA
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2170788
© 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 J. MARGULIES

well as assemblages of resistance to acts of bordering (Boyce 2016; Sundberg

2011; Sundberg and Kaserman 2007). But more-than-human approaches to
border studies remain more theoretically developed in the texts of academic
journals than the methods for how to engage with borders in ‘more-than-
human’ or ‘more-than-representational’ registers (Müller et al. 2015). I see
engagement with forms of creative practices for furthering the aims of critical
border studies to explore how borders are more than ‘lines in the sand’, and
how the border ‘. . . is never simply “present”, nor fully established, nor
obviously accessible. Rather, it is manifold and in a constant state of becoming’
(Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728). Learning to learn from sound
(among other senses) is an important mode of atmospheric and relational
attunement for ‘decentring’ the border as a particular mode of territorial
thinking (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728). The primary objective
of this article is to contribute to a growing body of scholarship in more-than-
human border studies through attention to the border’s sonic dimensions,
inclusive of both its living and nonliving elements.
I draw on insights from sonic and listening geographies as a reply to Juanita
Sundberg’s (2011, 333) call for engaging with more creative methodologies for
attuning to the composition of borders. As Müller notes, ‘ . . . one cannot but
diagnose that political geographers have been rather timid in abandoning the
seductive security and comforting conventions of the cherished academic
paper for livelier forms of presencing research. . .’ (2015, 417). Practices of
multisensory engagement are a form of theorising-in-place. The recognition of
borders and border-making as exceeding knowing through textual analyses
alone expands opportunities for producing new knowledge about who or what
is involved in bordering practices, as well as forms of struggle and resistance to
these efforts. Sundberg also argues that geographers and other border studies
scholars should engage with forms of knowledge production that unsteady
dominant approaches to academic inquiry, i.e. those drawing only on Euro-
Western knowledge systems and conventional research methodologies (2011;
2014; and see Boyce 2016). ‘At stake is the emergence of a new, more
collaborative and therefore accountable ecological politics’ (Sundberg 2011,
333). I approach that task here through listening to the border.
I went to the US–Mexico border to experiment with other ways of ‘presen­
cing’ (making present) the border (Müller et al. 2015, 411). My engagement in
this region was urged forward by a creative prompting to approach the study
of borders through less conventional methods and artistic practice. As Natalie
Loveless writes, ‘a research-creational approach insists that . . . artistic produc­
tion is no longer solely an object of scholarly inquiry but is itself [a] legitimate
form of research and dissemination . . . [their emphasis]’ (Loveless 2019). I was
drawn to Otay Mountain in part because it is home to a variety of rare and
endemic plants found nowhere else in the world, even just a few miles away
(Figure 1). In coming to learn about the mountain and its suddenly threatened
 GEOPOLITICS 3

Figure 1. A view from Otay Mountain. Photo by the author. A 360-degree short film from Otay
Mountain can be viewed online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teQ_hvjv1gA.

conservation status due to renewed efforts to build a wall through this pro­
tected wilderness area, it was impossible to ignore the competing claims of
sovereignty over this place, which collide with xenophobia, racism, and the
asserting of white supremacy through bordering (Jones 2016, 2021). On Otay
Mountain I encountered the reproduction of insecurity and death in a difficult
and dangerous terrain for people attempting to cross the border that have been
pushed into increasingly ‘hostile terrain’ to do so (Boyce, Chambers, and
Launius 2019; De León 2015). At the same time, I recognised that the impor­
tance of this landscape for endemic plant conservation imbued it with other
territorial significations of protection, and so I was drawn to the place as a site
for thinking about how life is (or is not) valued within a framework of multi­
species justice (Chao, Kirksey, and Bolender 2022).1
Several interventions related to the study of noise and sound at the border
draw out key ideas for thinking about the wider assemblage of actors and
things that in total constitute spaces of bordering and the enactment of border
practices (Kun 2000, 2011; Brooks 2020; Ozguc 2020). I approached this work
as an opportunity to closely listen as an affective experience untethered from
claims to accurately reproduce the sonic landscape while at the same time
recognising the deeply material existence of sound (Gallagher 2016; Gallagher
4 J. MARGULIES

and Prior 2014; Revill 2016). Noise and sound are not only a mode of attuning
to the presence of the border but also have parts to play in reworking land­
scapes as violent and securitised spatial domains of the state.
In what follows, I first review contemporary debates about more-than-
human geographies and theorising borders within geopolitics and political
geography through more-than-human and critical border studies. I then dis­
cuss my efforts to think about listening at the US–Mexico border through
a series of interventions I conducted between 2018 and 2020 at Otay Mountain
in San Diego County, California, the traditional lands of the Kumeyaay
Nation. This work resulted in both the production of a physical zine and
multisensory installation entitled ‘Welcome to Otay Mountain’ for the 2019
‘No Walls, No Bans, No Borders’ exhibition in Baltimore, MD, at the Peale
Centre curated by Rebel Lens Bmore, and a 38 minute commissioned sounds­
cape for the US National Building Museum’s 2021–2023 exhibition ‘The Wall/
El Muro: What is a Border Wall?’ I draw on my experiences developing these
works as forms of creative and political geographic practice to produce
a multisensorial reading of the borderlands. Through practices of listening
and field recording, I tune into the living and nonliving elements of border
architecture and landscape to analyse the material qualities of border infra­
structures and the politics of borderscapes as they reverberate with sound. As
an approach to witnessing the border as a tangible entity yet encountered
atmospherically and as a relational and topological field, sounding the border
refracts its sensory affects, or the border as experience.

Tuning into the More-Than-Human Border

More-than-human geographies name an interest in how spaces ought to be
conceived as a ‘relational achievement’ refusing disarticulation of the ‘human’
from rest of the living world and vice versa (Larsen and Johnson 2017; Panelli
2010; Whatmore 2002; Whatmore and Thorne 1998, 437). Writing in this
vein, which shares close affinities with posthumanist theory, seeks to recognise
that what composes the human is in excess of the atomistic human subject, just
as social life is constituted through the encounters of an array of living and
nonliving things (Barad 2003). Yet both projects historically have failed to
recognise their role in reasserting Eurocentric knowledge dominance at the
expense of both Indigenous scholarship and other non-Western knowledge
systems (Sundberg 2014; Todd 2016; Watts 2013). For instance, Vanessa Watts
argues for how efforts to ‘implode’ human-nonhuman binaries and distinc­
tions within the Euro-Western canon still produce abstracted engagements
with Indigenous knowledge that reassert colonial thinking (Watts 2013, 28).
As Zoe Todd makes clear, Indigenous knowledges are marginalised or alto­
gether ignored across many key texts in the posthumanist tradition even
though they may draw heavily and extensively on ideas, cosmologies, and
 GEOPOLITICS 5

ways of knowing deeply informed by both Indigenous and non-Western

thought (2016, 8).
As several important interventions alongside Todd’s (2016) highlight, there
are a wide variety of knowledge systems that emphasise ecological relationality
and do not recognise the human/nature binary these Euro-Western intellec­
tual projects seek to undo (Country et al. 2016; King 2019; Larsen and Johnson
2017).2 For instance, Larsen and Johnson understand place as ‘. . . a conscious
being itself’ and as ‘. . . the lived-in, cared-for places where people and other
beings dwell . . .’ (11). Place, for Larson and Johnson, speaks to the challenges
of seeking forms of coexistence inclusive of the human and nonhuman beings
and nonliving entities that compose the world. ‘Place calls us to the challenge
of living together’ (2017, 1). Such a recognition of the mutual becomings of the
human and nonhuman in and as place is also characterised by what Watt’s
calls ‘Place-Thought’. Place-Thought is ‘. . . the non-distinctive space where
place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be
separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and
thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the exten­
sions of these thoughts’ (Watts 2013, 21). For both Watts and Larsen and
Johnson, taking the charge of more-than-human geographies seriously
demands an insistence on recognising the agencies of place. I acknowledge
some of these critiques at the outset as a non-Indigenous scholarbecause
I approach them as a serious demand to reconsider how the project of more-
than-human geography and its future trajectory are framed, engaged with, and
therefore (re)called into being.
Several articles employing a more-than-human approach to border studies
engage with questions of ‘monstrous’ human-animal subjects and the animal­
isation of refugees (Minca 2021; Sakr 2018). In contrast to these studies and
their focus on the (de)stabilisation and co-constitution of the category of ‘the
human’ (e.g. Squire 2014, 2015), here I am focused on discussions within
critical border studies that engage how borders are enacted, experienced, and
resisted by an array of living and nonliving things that together comprise their
‘sociality’ (Boyce 2016; Haraway 2008; Sundberg 2011). As David Rossiter
argued in their study of the ‘socio-material networks of borders’, there is
a need for ‘. . . an inquiry into the political ecology of borders . . . where the
socio-material networks and assemblages that constitute border space, its
products, and effects are of primary concern’ (2011, 107–108). Such an
approach speaks to the project of posthumanist political ecologies, concerned
with ensuring ‘. . .that the broader post-humanism turn in human geography is
equipped to engage critically with enactments of injustice while drawing
attention to human and non-human forms of life that are colonised, disen­
franchised, or impoverished through unequal relationships of power’
(Margulies and Bersaglio 2018, 103).
6 J. MARGULIES

Sharing affinities with posthumanist political ecology, work within feminist

geopolitics has drawn attention to the visceral and ‘fleshy’ dimensions of
geopolitics, which pushes scholars to imagine bodies (human or otherwise)
as sites of geopolitical contestation and territorialisation (Dixon 2014, 2016;
Sharp 2021; Squire 2020). Rachael Squire, for instance, examines through the
study of marine animals and their ‘fleshy affordances’ how experimental US
Navy efforts to make undersea life inhabitable for people were both pursued
through animal capacities and agencies as well as thwarted by their unruly and
unwanted behaviours (Squire 2020). Bringing together scholarship on fleshy
geopolitics with more-than-human political ecologies, Hannah Dickinson
(2022) offers an analysis of illicit trade and laundering of beluga sturgeon
caviar, and how the material qualities of caviar and sturgeon fish shape the
illicit caviar trade and enforcement responses to it in Europe. Dickinson’s
analysis reveals how things not often imagined as possessing political capa­
cities – including the discorporate, fleshy matter of sturgeon – can nevertheless
reconfigure geopolitical outcomes (2022). These works reveal the distinctly
materialist and lively qualities of living beings as shaping, thwarting, and even
resisting geopolitical activities, though they are both restricted to considering
biological elements of what constitutes a more-than-human world. This is
a kind of geopolitics understood not only as the work of ‘grand practices of the
state’ but also as practices that enlace and reverberate through place, bodies,
and matter, reconfiguring more-than-human encounters such as geopolitical
efforts of territorialisation, separation, and enforcement (Squire 2020, 8).
Of work that directly engages with more-than-human approaches to border
studies, the US–Mexico borderlands are a strong empirical focus. A major
intervention was Sundberg’s analysis of how two different feline species
mattered ‘tremendously’ in re-shaping US enforcement of the US–Mexico
border in collaboration with a host of other human actors and the landscape
of the borderlands (2011, 331). Sundberg’s analysis shows how ‘. . . those
classified as nonhumans – whether living or inert – cannot be backdrops to
(geo)political affairs but are integral to and constitutive of them. Accordingly,
agency is reframed as collective performance, rather than the product of
individual intention’ (2011, 332). Sundberg’s intervention aligns with produc­
tive engagements between animal geographies and political geography explor­
ing how animal mobilities and agencies co-produce uneven geographies and
political outcomes (Hobson 2007; Margulies and Karanth 2018; Srinivasan
2016). Turning from animals to the physical geography of borders and its
nonliving elements, Geoff Boyce wrote a posthumanist analysis of the terrain
of the Sonoran Desert (2016). Boyce’s analysis demonstrates that as much as
the United States may seek to enrol the rugged terrain and harsh climate of the
desert to ‘funnel’ and divert unauthorised border crossers, ‘. . . the climate,
topography, and inhabitants of the border region have never fully cooperated.
Instead, even as they pose formidable obstacles to unauthorised crossers, these
 GEOPOLITICS 7

same forces, objects, and conditions continuously disrupt, frustrate, and con­
strain enforcement operations’ (2016, 257).
Staying within the terrain itself, Peter Nyers argued for attention to the
agencies of materials rarely recognised as ‘actors’ at the border, not only in
creating the border but also in unsettling its stability and coherence. Nyer’s
commentary aligns with (without engaging) recognition of nonhuman agency
as advocated in interventions by Indigenous scholars such as Watts (2013).
Through a short analysis of dirt’s mobilities, Nyers describes the unmaking of
Smuggler’s Gulch about 15 miles to the west of Otay Mountain along the San
Diego/Tijuana border (2012). Nyers describes how the steep terrain that
previously afforded unauthorised migrants the ability to subvert border fen­
cing and surveillance was filled in as part of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The
filling in of valleys, canyons, and gulches with enormous quantities of dirt
involved the literal cutting off of nearby mountaintops. One consequence of
these fill-in projects has been to push migrants to cross the border further east,
towards places like Otay Mountain. Nyers’ intervention also speaks to a recent
theorising in political geography about the overlooked role of verticality in
studies of the political geography of surveillance (Enns, Bersaglio, and
Karmushu 2022; Massé 2018). But dirt has not only moved at the behest of
more ‘traditional’ geopolitical actors like the DHS, dirt also moves of its own
accord. Dirt makes its agency known in response to state efforts to only
understand dirt as an inert material that requires reconfiguration to support
bordering infrastructure projects. As Nyers explains, ‘. . . the utilisation of dirt
as an ally in border policing is never complete, and can take turns that human
agents may not expect . . .’ (2012, 4).
These studies show how close attention to the nonhuman at the border does
not merely present a new view of the borderlands, but how these other-than-
human actors shape bordering practices and forms of territory-making and
unmaking. A more-than-human approach to theorising border studies con­
tributes to a ‘. . . broadening of the agenda of border studies beyond the
anthropocentric’ (Fleischmann forthcoming, 2). This in turn speaks to how
the concept of borderscapes has emerged as an important intervention for both
critical and more-than-human border studies (Brambilla 2015).
The concept of borderscapes has been popularised within critical border
studies to challenge a variety of taken-for-granted assumptions about borders,
their spatiality, and persistence (Brambilla 2015; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr
2007). Borderscapes, as Brambilla argues, offer a way to conceputalise and
study borders that are attentive to their malleability and ever-shifting empla­
cement in the landscape. Borderscapes destabilise borders conceptually as
static and existing things; the term indexes how borders are also fluid, mobile,
and impermanent. This orientation of borders sets an explicit political horizon
for borderscapes, which counter borders as clear ‘lines in the sand’ (Nyers
2012). The borderscape concept calls for the need to ‘. . . describe new
8 J. MARGULIES

geographies and socio-spatial identities that, as a result of negotiations

between identity and territorial claims and counterclaims, challenge the mod­
ern geopolitical, territorialist imaginary’ (Brambilla 2015, 15; and see Perera
2007).
In the vein of this argument, Pallister-Wilkins, through their analysis of an
Alpine ‘whitescape’ in the French-Italian borderlands, analyzes a popular
recreational landscape as a racialised landscape of migrant insecurity (2022).
They describe how work on borderscapes ‘. . . has yet to take seriously the role
of the more-than-human as a social actor in the (re)production of borders­
capes’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2022, 4). Pallister-Wilkins draws on cycling and
hiking as mobile methodologies for encountering the production of
a racialised landscape that welcomes white recreationalists to enjoy mountain
sports while marking unauthorised border crossers (especially brown and
black migrants crossing the Mediterranean) as ‘out of place’ (2022). I see
their intervention as aligned with more theoretical work on critical phenom­
enology concerned with engaging with knowledge production through forms
of bodily practice attentive to social differences (Kinkaid 2020, 2021). Aligned
with such an approach, I turn to listening and field recording to experience the
border in sonic registers, to bear witness to a profoundly transformed land­
scape, yet one which continues to reverberate with resistance to its remaking as
a violent space of bordering and exclusion.

A Moment for Sound

Geographer’s engagement with sound, music, and listening has grown drama­
tically (Doughty, Duffy, and Harada 2019; Gallagher, Kanngieser, and Prior
2017). Much of the scholarly engagement in geography concerning sound has
focused on listening, and, in particular, the practice of listening that engages
with music, both in terms of how music shapes place and how the space of
music shapes geographies (Jasper 2020). Beyond music, there is also an interest
in studying how sound-making practices shape spaces as well, for instance,
how the use of the voice activates political and social spaces (Kanngieser 2012;
Paiva and Cachinho 2022). Across these studies that engage with the activities
of listening as well as sound-making there is a growing emphasis on under­
standing how ‘space is made in sound’ (Revill 2016, 253). Where Jasper
describes how the study of sonic architectures offers insights into how sound
transforms space and design, attention to the infrastructure of sound also
reveals how ‘bodies are also materials through which sound travels . . . giving it
presence. Thus, sound invokes a relational conception of space in which the
human body is at once a listening body and an “organic” element of an
architectural space that gives sound a spatial form’ (Jasper 2020, 1128). In
my analysis that follows, we will also see how listening into the architecture of
the border opens new readings of the material qualities of border
 GEOPOLITICS 9

infrastructures and consequently the politics of border landscapes as they

reverberate with sound, as well as how the terrain of a particular border shapes
the experience of the border’s sonic qualities.
An important dimension of contemporary work in sonic geographies
focuses on how sounds are not only shaped by their environments (built or
otherwise) but how sound is also a register through which the environment’s
qualities and capacities can be discerned, which is to say, how sounds make
space (for important reviews, see Paiva 2018; Revill 2016). For instance, Jasper
has shown how early experiments in acoustic ecology in post-war Berlin
engaged with using vegetation to reshape the sonic geographies of the city
and the dampening of unwanted urban noise (Jasper 2018). Others have
turned to sound as a vital aspect of environmental sensing, or knowing spaces
otherwise. MacFarlane approaches noise as a way of reading the uneven
geographies of Seattle through questions of noise pollution, development,
and sonic exceedances (MacFarlane 2020a). In an important intervention,
Duffy, Waitt and Harada advocate for ‘visceral sonic mapping’ as a research
method that can respond to the lack of methodological guidance in how
geographers might better attune to sound as a critical dimension of how
space is sensed and experienced (2016, 49). This critical phenomenological
approach for attuning to the making of space through sound aligns with how
Revill approaches sound as processual force: an ephemeral, embodied, and
affective experience of place through its sounds, but one that can be studied
and analysed to advance understanding of social life (2016).
Revill’s approach to thinking carefully about the material and acoustic
qualities of sound in how places are experienced aligns with my interest in
experimenting with field recordings and forms of listening at the border to
analyse the border beyond the Cartesian or visual domain (2006, 241). This
approach highlights an important dimension of sound in contrast with the
visual: thinking time and space as distinctive domains becomes unthinkable in
sound because, ‘sounds are only recognisable as such in the moment of their
making, unfolding elaboration, the sensing and the memory of that
moment. . .Thus sound provides an important and distinctive case with
which to examine some of the issues raised by theorisations of relational
space and its socio-material making’ (Revill 2016, 241). In discussing my
creative interventions through listening, I find my experiences are in line
with Gallagher’s arguments that field recordings register as simultaneously
representational, performative, and affective (2015, 561). But further, in line
with Kanngieser’s work in listening geographies, we can understand listening
as a particular way of knowing and encountering place in registers that may
remain inaccessible through sight and touch alone. As Kanngieser writes, ‘an
orientation towards the sonic aspects of geo-political and economic processes
opens up a means to work with dense materials in ways that do not seek to
enclose or reduce their multivalencies, but that can hold in conjunction
10 J. MARGULIES

historical and contemporary tendencies with situational specificities’ (2014, 6).

This is an effort to explore the explicitly political within sensuous geographies
that are often rendered as less-than-political by drawing attention to their
multisensorial qualities.

The Aural Border

Twenty years ago, Josh Kun wrote an essay in which he described ‘the aural
border’, or understanding the ‘US–Mexico border as a field of sound, a terrain
of musicality and music-making, of static and noise, of melodic convergence
and dissonant clashing’ (2000, 2). Kun was most interested in the music of the
US–Mexico border and the various artists whose sounds, music, and lyrics
engage with border politics in producing the aural border. In a later essay, Kun
expanded on the idea of the aural border to ‘listening to the line’ to ask what it
means to ‘think about the border as a sonic territory? How can listening to the
line help us to better understand the line itself as a political geography, as well
as the worlds and cultures that permeate and surround the line as a sound
environment?’ (2011, 19). As Kun noted, while borders are most typically
conceived in both spatial and visual terms, they are also ‘sonic spaces and sonic
practices . . . And the material border itself, as a physical mechanism of
separation, slowing, and classification, as visceral and severe political archi­
tecture, is a noisy thing’ (2011, 21).
For Kun, the US–Mexico border at Tijuana is unambiguously characterised
by a particular set of sounds that together comprise in Schafer’s terms its
soundscape (Schafer 1993 [1977]). Describing Tijuana’s Colonia Federal, Kun
tells us that one sound in particular, ‘the repeating industrial, steel clank of the
checkpoint turnstile that grates and knocks with each person who walks
through it’, is ‘the border as sound’ (Kun 2011, 17). Again, drawing from
Schafer’s classic work on soundscapes, this ‘clank of the turnstile’ for Kun is
the ‘soundmark’ of the border, the characteristic acoustic trace of place as its
unique sonic provenance. But soundscapes are made up of much more than
soundmarks, and following Schafer, the border is also marked by ‘keynotes’ —
those common and pervasive sounds that fill out the sonic environment,
shaping its identity and character. Kun writes that the keynotes of the
Tijuana border include “the barked pitches of vendors, the alms pleas of
orphanage buskers, the rattling mufflers of beat-down flatbeds, the bass
booms of tourist Escalades, and the ricochet concerts that travel through
open windows carrying bits of banda sinaloense, Lil Wayne, Jose Jose, and
Camila’ (2000, 18). For Kun, these sounds tell ‘border stories’, stories of
migration, job insecurity, the ‘narco-capitalist hustle’, school, and the mun­
dane drudgery of work that demands moving across a heavily securitised
international border (2000, 18).
 GEOPOLITICS 11

I find Kun’s work generative in part because of how evocatively true it is.
This ‘clank’ is not only familiar but also visceral and embodied, it is the sound
of bordering as an affective and embodied reminder of exclusion, control, and
power. As Schafer wrote, ‘keynote sounds do not have to be listened to
consciously; they are overhead but cannot be overlooked, for keynote sounds
become listening habits in spite of themselves’ (1994[1977], 9). There is sonic
psychology at work here in this repetitive clanking for those who find them­
selves navigating this official border crossing as a repetitive and mundane
hustle or site of trauma. We can experience senses prior to their full registra­
tion in the conscious domain. Sounds might not be listened to consciously, but
that does not mean they are not doing significant work in other registers
(Merleau-Ponty 2013 [1945], 236–39). As Duffy, Waitt, and Harada argue, ‘. . .
sound provides critical geographers with a means of focussing on the relation­
ality of social-spatial everyday life that is simultaneously structured by con­
scious thought and discursive practice, and non-conscious, visceral or gut
responses’ (2016, 49).
I foreground my efforts of sounding the border by first engaging with Kun’s
work because the spaces and sounds of the border I am working with are very
different and provide meaningful contrasts to this aural border as a licit
border – where every clank of the turnstile is also the sound of known,
tabulated, and authorised passage. But what about listening to the border as
a porous and emergent border, one where the political geography of the border
is not marked by a ‘clank’ but the whistle of wind through a newly erected and
hastily assembled border wall? This is a border marked by the sudden chop of
a surveillance helicopter, the spinning out of truck’s wheels on loose gravel as
a CBP vehicle takes off from its surveillance outpost on Otay Mountain, and
the aromatic smells of laurel sumac and tecate cypress mixed with the diesel
fumes left in the wake of border wall contractor trucks.3 The ephemeral and
resonant qualities of these border sounds both shape the borderlands and are
shaped by the terrain through which they are experienced. As Revill notes, ‘the
physical complexity of sound suggests that even the most tranquil of sonic
spaces can be heterophonic and unruly, providing a ground for conflict and
contest which is difficult to either manage or resolve. . .The valence and
mutability of sound in space and time provide it with the qualities of lively if
often unstable political agency’ (Revill 2016, 247–248). Turning to Otay
Mountain, I sought to tune into the border open to the possibility that its
sonic sphere could be instructive for how borderscapes are conceived and
experienced as geopolitical landscapes.

Welcome to Otay Mountain

Otay Mountain is a landscape layered with significations of place-making that
also make competing claims over how the mountain is known. Otay Mountain
12 J. MARGULIES

is the highest peak of the San Ysidro Mountains, which span the US–Mexico
border. It is a federally designated Wilderness Area of the United States and
managed by the US Bureau of Land Management. Within a wider view of the
landscape, Otay Mesa features growing housing subdivisions, urbanisation,
and industries related to cross-border trade, as well as a sizeable prison
complex. On the Mexican side of the border, Otay Mountain’s landscape
connects with Cerro San Isidro, which abuts a residential zone of eastern
Tijuana. Within the functional regional economy of an international borders­
cape, Otay Mesa and Tijuana feature many of the kinds of industries one finds
along other urban border zones, including a concentration of transportation
and import/export industries, including the Tijuana International Airport.
The name Otay originates from the Kumeyaay language, likely either from
otai meaning ‘brush’ or ‘brushy’ or etaay meaning ‘big’, although Otay
Mountain was previously recorded as being known in Kumeyaay as Huu,
meaning ‘the nose’ (Garduño 2017; Shipek 1985). The etymology of Otay
reminds us that while Otay Mountain possesses overlapping meanings of
place, it is also an Indigenous place. The Kumeyaay Nation’s lands reach
from what is today the city of San Diego and outlying areas to 60 miles
south into Mexico, interrupted today by the U.S.-Mexico border (Kumeyaay.
com n.d.). Just to the east of Otay Mountain is Kuuchamaa, otherwise known
as Tecate Peak, the geographic and spiritual centre of Kumeyaay cosmology
(Shipek 1985; kldc.org n.d.).
Although Kuuchamaa is considered the most sacred mountain in
Kumeyaay life, Shipeck also described how Huu (Otay) features as part of
this broader sacred landscape (Shipek 1985). More recently, Garduño
described how the importance of key landscape features for the Kumeyaay is
interrupted by the securitised border infrastructure between what is now the
United States and Mexico (Garduño 2017, 103). In 2018, US Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) announced a major expansion of the border wall
beginning in the Pacific Ocean (the wall extends into the sea) and reaching as
far east as Otay Mountain, reflecting, in the agency’s view, ‘CBP’s unwavering
commitment to secure our borders and protect our nation’ in line with the
Secure Fence Act of 2006 (USCBP 2018).
Otay Mountain is composed of a rugged terrain that is also highly surveilled
as a route of passage from Mexico to the United States for those risking
unauthorised border crossings (Figure 2). In learning about the history of
Otay Mountain, I became especially captivated by stories of well-meaning
botanists and conservationists who were attempting to stop the construction
of the border wall by filing complaints and formal notices with various federal
agencies in the name of rare plant and animal species protection.4 Their
motivations were to stop the border construction because of the damage it
would cause to a threatened ecosystem and the conservation of rare and
threatened plants. But also, as interviews with key expert witnesses indicated,
 GEOPOLITICS 13

Figure 2. A view looking east from the western side of Otay Mountain. In the background on the
right you can see the US–Mexico border wall, a residential area of Tijuana behind it, and the new
wall running up through Otay Mountain. Photo by the author.

these conservation actors wanted to stop the wall construction on humanitar­

ian grounds but believed they had greater legal capacity and legitimacy to do
so through protecting threatened species.5 This ‘pragmatic’ approach has
a disturbing clarity in relation to the possible rights afforded to endangered
plants in contrast with those lives marked as an imagined threat to a white
ethno-nationalist conjuring of the United States (Jones 2021).
Following my first visit to Otay Mountain, I produced a zine called
‘Welcome to Otay Mountain: An Alternative Field Guide’, which served as
a creative vehicle to grapple with disturbing questions about a landscape in
which certain rare plant species may be afforded greater political protections
than people (Figure 3). I wanted to understand the mountain and the varieties
of kinds of life that call the mountain home better, to examine what Franklin
Ginn (2014, 537) describes as a ‘a redistributed sense of ethical and political
possibility’ that might emerge ‘from encounters between species’. But in so
doing, I sought to engage with this environment as a more-than-human
border and the concomitant violence and harm that results from these prac­
tices, where borders serve as spaces of enclosure and death that privilege
certain racialised lives over others. To this end, while the zine describes
a variety of rare and endemic plants found on Otay Mountain, it also presents
14 J. MARGULIES

Figure 3. Scanned pages (clockwise from top left: 9, 5, 17, 16) from the zine ‘Welcome to Otay
Mountain’. the complete zine can be viewed digitally here https://issuu.com/jmargulies/docs/
scanned_otay_zine_hires.

a list of people – both named and unnamed – who have been killed by US
Customs and Border Protection since 2003.
Taking these mortal and violent stakes seriously while also extending this
thinking into nonhuman realms demands not only sensitive theorising of
landscapes and the political geographies that shape and reshape them but
also methodologies open to a wider possibility of sensorial attunement and
 GEOPOLITICS 15

affective experience. Since my aim was to develop a more-than-human analy­

sis of encountering the border, I also needed to extend my sensorial thinking
beyond the dominant visual and textual modes of research and analysis in
political geography and geopolitics. This move is in line with a growing body
of work on theorising encounters. As Helen Wilson notes (2017, 459), ‘a
concern with encounter has necessarily moved beyond an interest in face-to-
face physical contact and demonstrated how the other is brought into intimate
contact without necessarily being visible or physically present’. Listening
seems an especially noteworthy mode of sensorial attunement to presencing
what is often beyond the visible spectrum (Kanngieser 2015; Revill 2016).
Encountering the border, I experimented with a variety of modes of sensing
to both get a ‘feel’ for the border as a political ecology, but also to disrupt it as
an over-determined boundary, to understand how borders materially exist as
porous, permeable, and even mobile spaces while also reproducing and rein­
forcing differences and violence. I found sound recording and listening to be
especially appropriate modes of creative inquiry that permit access to knowing
and encountering places in registers both different and at times inaccessible
from other ways of knowing in geography (Gallagher 2015). As Kenngeiser
writes:

Sound is not just about hearing and responding, or communicating. It is about becoming
aware of registers that are unfamiliar, inaccessible, and maybe even monstrous; registers
that are wholly indifferent to the play of human drama. Sound is not only of the human,
it undermines human exceptionalism; everything vibrates on some frequency and is
touched by vibration, regardless of how imperceptible to human sensibility this might be
(2015, 81).

In pursuing this sonic intervention, I wanted to contribute to the growing

literature on what listening might offer to political geography and the study of
borders through these moments of encounter with the ‘sonoric landscape’
(Leppert 2012, 409), where sounds not only carry political significations but
might also draw listeners into new political possibilities (Duffy, Waitt, and
Harada 2016; Kanngieser 2014; Waitt, Ryan, and Farbotko 2014). As Waitt
et al. note, ‘Places are not only shaped by sound, but also sound is crucial to the
ways in which bodies shape space’ (2016, 298). This in turn speaks to how
human and nonhuman lives shape the spaces of the borderlands and what they
might also become. Attending to these possibilities is, among other things, an
opportunity to scan the great breadth of the sonoric landscape for openings,
gaps, and spaces in resisting the border’s imposition on place.
16 J. MARGULIES

Sounding Out the Border

In Lost Children Archive, a novel in which Valeria Luiselli describes a pair of
sound recording documentarians trying to capture the sounds of the US–
Mexico border crisis. She writes how:
Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not
only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds,
which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space
through the sounds overlaid upon us (2020, 39).

Luiselli’s description blurs distinctions between sound and touch through

attention to how we navigate space sensorially through its sounds. Crucially,
she also distinguishes how we come to experience space as sound. As Schafer
describes:
Touch is the most personal of the senses. Hearing and touch meet where the lower
frequencies of audible sound pass over to tactile vibrations (at about 20 hertz). Hearing is
a way of touching at a distance and the intimacy of the first sense is fused with sociability
whenever people gather together to hear something special (Schafer 1993 [1977], 11).

Staying with hearing as touching at a distance, we can see how attention to the
sonic border is more than an aesthetic expression of borders or one only
restricted to their material presence (Madsen 2011). Instead, the border as
sonic imposition is a bodily experience in the auditory realm, a space of
contact in a different register of ‘touch’ that nevertheless asserts the border’s
physical presence (Revill 2016). This speaks to work by scholars who have
focused on the political possibilities and potentials of sound, for instance, as
they emerge between bodies in protest or political speech and activism
(Kanngieser 2012; Waitt, Ryan, and Farbotko 2014). While conducting
a field recording at Otay, I wrote the following description that attempts to
describe approaching the border in this way:
I set up my recording equipment in the canyon, just out of sight of the road as it curves in
and then away from the border to the South. Facing North there is a small trickle of water
moving along the canyon floor. The sun moves into the canyon in the early light, insects
and flies awake and fill my headphones with buzzing as they whizz past the microphones
I’ve arranged on the ground. Trills, chirps, peeps, and more complex birdsongs punc­
tuate the mixing sounds of gurgling water, the low hum of airplanes, the occasional
snapping of a branch or gust of wind, the dive-bombing of a winged insect. There is
something unnervingly noisy yet still in this quiet place until you sit and let your ears
open to the diversity of sounds in this place of dangerous passage, where people attempt
to cross the border across the rough and challenging terrain, where the highway hums in
the unseen distance and jets whir overhead (Fieldnotes, February 7, 2020).

Listening back to a 38 minute soundscape from Copper Canyon on Otay

Mountain, which was commissioned for the US National Building
Museum’s exhibit ‘The Wall/El Muro: What is a Border Wall’ and you are
 GEOPOLITICS 17

Figure 4. Location of field recording at Otay Mountain. Foreground shows small canyon stream
with algae and tattered clothing on a log. In background is audio recording setup inside the
canyon. Photo by the author.

encouraged to listen to as you read this article (Online Supplemental Material),

I’m struck by how noisy it is compared to remembering this as a relatively
quiet place when I recorded it (Figure 4). Not noisy in the way ‘purist’
soundscape recordists speak of noise – the anthropogenic sounds or ‘anthro­
phony’ (Pijanowski et al. 2011, 203) that some would argue destroys any
serious effort of recording ‘natural soundscapes’, in Schafer’s words (2003
[1977]). Nor do I mean the noise produced through the recording itself – the
self-generated distortions and sounds created by field recording equipment
and microphones during the production of the field recording. The recordings
are noisy in that they are immensely active, filled with both the ‘biophony’ (the
sounds of biological life) and ‘geophany’ (the sounds of the nonliving earth) of
the canyon and the reverberations of these sounds between the canyon sides
(Krause 1987; Pijanowski et al. 2011).
I use the word noise here to convey a sense of totality of sound that
challenges my capacity to distil or identify its constitutive sources, in a way
that can even become overwhelming when one listens intensely and closely. In
18 J. MARGULIES

a creative reading of incarcerated refugees as ‘noisy-subjects’ which destabilise

and transgress the border apparatus, Umut Ozguc draws on the work of
Michel Serres to explore the potential of noisy-subjects to produce the border
as a ‘third-space’, one ‘. . . that acknowledges the indeterminate and continu­
ously shifting forms of the border without “flattening power-relations”’
(Ozguc 2020, 80). While noise is most often theorised in critical scholarship
in relation to capitalism and studies of urban spaces, Ozguc draws our atten­
tion to how noise can disrupt and unsettle borders. ‘Noise shows us the
complexity of the border, which we tend to think of as an enclosed system,
or a linear line (or a network) of points . . . When we put such understanding
of noise at the centre of the analysis, we no longer perceive the border as
constituted by stable entities’ (Ozguc 2020, 83–84). When listening to the
recorded soundscape, the breadth of sounds that flood the ears all at once can
make it difficult to discern the specific sources of the sounds or where they
emerge from. This sentiment is described by Auguyard and Torgue as the
‘ubiquity’ of sound (2006, 130–31). As Revill notes, ubiquity connotes ‘. . . the
paradoxical perception of a sound that we cannot locate, but which we know
intuitively has a localised source for its production . . .’ (Revill 2016, 249).
While I recognise this sense of ubiquity in the recording and its noisy
qualities, it is still possible to orient listening to isolated and distinguished
sounds: a particular bird, a rush of wind in leaves, an insect in flight; they
become layered compositions inviting the listener to choose their way through
the soundscape as spatial compositions rendered in sound. Returning to
Luiselli (2020, 39), the sounds do more than describe space, they present
space as a sonic experience ‘overlaid upon us’. Trying to disaggregate what
I perceived as ‘noise’ into categories of known sounds with localisable origins
generated a moment for recognising the more-than-human borderscapes in
acoustic registers, as I wrote in my field notes:

Bird wings flutter in manzanita and wild sage brush. A California gnatcatcher calls.
A yellow-breasted chat whistles, a wrentit sings out its accelerating half octave song—
peep peep peep-pee-pee-peepeepee.

Planes coming to land miles away in San Diego sound like distant hums. Torn jackets
and shirts cling to thorny thickets. The stream is barely a trickle; its barely rained in
months. Suddenly, a surveillance helicopter’s loud CHOP-CHOP-CHOP cuts through
the quiet calls of birds and water and breeze as it whips into view over the canyon ridge,
clipping the levels on my field recorder. It circles several times, then departs
(Field notes, February 7, 2020).

Sounds create space alongside enabling a reading of the physical landscape

through its sounds. At the same time, listening to the shape of the border is
non-linear – even though my fieldnotes might be read as a chronological
journaling of sounds one after the other, this was merely my best effort as
a kind of ecological journal to log them as I sat and listened. The borderscape
 GEOPOLITICS 19

also has a sonic shape that extends well beyond the wall itself through the
surveillance apparatus extending outward above and around it. The border
soundscape alerts listeners to the border’s imposition sonically and psychically
in space, just as it alerts listeners to how the border apparatus disrupts an
endemic mountain ecology. Hearing the helicopter’s chop before it careened
over the canyon ridge and the sudden whoosh of CBP truck tyres as they spun-
out on hastily constructed gravel roads beyond my line of sight alerted me to
the shape of Otay Mountain as an ecological preserve remade into a mountain
rigged up as a surveillance post. This sense of things, living or otherwise,
having geometries formed in sound was understood by Merleau-Ponty, who
wrote: ‘we see the rigidity and the fragility of the glass and, when it breaks with
a crystal-clear sound, this sound is borne by the visible glass’ (2013 [1945],
276). In parallel, we can see the mountain remade otherwise through hearing
the novel sounds of the security apparatus that have reshaped it. At the same
time, these sounds are shaped by the terrain of the mountain; the deflection
and echoing of sound waves off steep ravines made locating the precise origins
of a sound (even a helicopter) more challenging – sound and space shape one
another precisely in the moment in which sounds are registered as the
experience of place.

Listening to a Void
After several hours of field recording while crouching between boulders out of
sight, I attempted listening to the border wall itself (Figure 5). Inspired by
environmental sound recording work by interdisciplinary sound artist and
geographer Rob St John (St John 2020; 2021; St John and Ferraby 2019) and
sound artist Richard Lerman (Lerman 2015, 59), the latter of whom has
previously ‘recorded the fence’, I wanted to explore the materiality of the
wall through how sound reverberated through it, mediating and producing
an acoustics of bordering through infrastructure. Lerman (2015, 62) describes
his work as ‘“extended location recording”, gathering the sound and soul of
a place’. In Lerman’s creative practice, ‘Recording the fence becomes an audio
art of bearing witness, an acoustic testimony to the political architecture of
border divisions’ (Kun 2011, 30). The question prompting this experiment was
how I might understand or appreciate the materiality of the seemingly immo­
bile border through its sonic presentation as opposed to its visual presence.
After applying contact/piezo microphones to the wall, I turned up the levels
on my sound interface and listened. I was disappointed at first when I heard
nothing. Even though the wind produced a unique whistle through the slats of
the wall, this sound did not register through the wall itself. Contact micro­
phones only sense vibrations moving through solid objects or materials, rather
than through the air, like conventional microphones. This wall is technically
a fence, in that it is made of evenly spaced slatted steel, but it is not the
20 J. MARGULIES

Figure 5. The border wall under construction at Otay Mountain. This inverted image, meant to
highlight the wall’s imposition on the landscape, was only possible because at the time of my visit
in 2020 construction of the wall was not yet complete, permitting me to stand with one foot on
each side of the border. Photo by the author.

resonate, flexible chain link and razor wire of Lerman’s fences in Arizona
where he was able to capture all kinds of life amplified through the fence
itself – wire being an incredible conductor of sound, unlike steel bollards. The
steel bollards that comprise the wall, while hollow higher-up, are filled with
rebar-reinforced concrete at their base. This fence was impervious to the
banging of my fist (though it is not to reciprocal saws with strong blades)
and it did not resonate with the force of the wind moving against it (Figure 6).
Despite this lack of perceptible sound in trying to listen to the wall, it
occurred to me that this silence nevertheless contained spatial, if not audible,
depth. It was composed of a weight, a potent void set in the landscape. Sound,
as Revill (2016, 245) notes, does not possess the physical properties of light,
which permit it to exist within a vacuum; we are only made aware of sound’s
material presence through its mediation by other material things and actors.
‘Yet sound also forms an immersive medium through which worlds are
experienced’ (Revill 2016, 245). I approach the close listening of the material
qualities of the wall as productive even where audible sound is absent. Voids
are not a negation of place: such voids hold political potential, revealing and
 GEOPOLITICS 21

Figure 6. Attaching contact microphones to the border wall was an experiment in presencing the
border, yet it did not elicit audible sounds due to the material qualities of the metal, concrete, and
rebar. This contrasted markedly with the sounds which would have resonated through the razor
wire strung across the top of the wall. Photo by the author.

insisting on the impossibility of producing a clear distinction between insides

and outsides, interiors and exteriors. ‘Placing the void’ is to appreciate
a topological theory of bordering as a processual enactment that reveals
connections between ‘there’ and ‘here’ rather than only their separations.
Topological approaches to borders, contra ideas of borders as Cartesian
markers of inclusion and exclusion, map interiors and exteriors upon each
other, demonstrating their inseparable connections (Blum and Secor 2011,
2016; Lally and Bergmann 2021). As Kingsbury and Secor (2011, 11) write in
an important intervention on the geography of voids:

If the void is the limit of place, it is a (dis)placed limit, one that – like the border in recent
work in political geography (Bigo 2008; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012). . .is everywhere
and nowhere, the unlocalisable principle that makes all localisation possible, drawing the
boundary between exterior and interior at the same time as it expresses the impossibility
of maintaining such a distinction.

The sonic void of the steel bollards as registered through contact microphones
were contaminated with the presence of the border as the alienation of place
22 J. MARGULIES

without marking the border as the negation of place (Kingsbury and Secor
2021, 11).
The void in the space of anticipated sounds of border infrastructure reso­
nates with Macfarlane’s (2020) arguments about sonic methods as a critical
and reflexive approach to the study of negative geographies (Mann 2008).
Mann describes this negativity through necessity: ‘A geography of necessity,
then, is a negative geography; grasping the historically necessary is a negative
process. In its relentlessness, restlessness, unwillingness to settle – in the
dialectic as such – this geography is of course active, crafting the world, but
this is not the opposite of negative. The negative is, rather, the very process of
encountering and changing the world’ (929). What is being presented here
through the idea of negative geographies, thinking with sound, is critique as
a refusal to approach sound in a purely phenomenological form in which there
is only a direct perception of the sound itself to be known and perceived by the
listener; instead, there is both a materiality and political economy to sound
(MacFarlane 2020a, 2020b; Revill 2016). This is well evidenced by MacFarlane,
who describes their attempts to map out the sonic geographies of King
County, Washington (MacFarlane 2020b). MacFarlane discovered that noise
exceedance data, rather than representing which demographic groups of the
city were prone to noise pollution (sonic exceedances), instead pointed to the
uneven geographies of sonic monitoring based on where construction and
urban development were occurring (more often in higher income and gentri­
fying neighbourhoods). This pattern was further mediated by race, class, and
gender. ‘Here, sonic methods were useful not in what they captured but in
what they failed to capture. It was their silence that encouraged critical
reflection and revealed a need for further, more comprehensive research’
(302). This leads MacFarlane to conclude, ‘Sonic methods are valuable for
what they allow us to negatively detect; that is, to think. When reflexive, they
can provide geographers with a cognitive map of spaces that do not appear
within the official soundscapes of the state’ (302). In listening yet hearing
‘nothing’ in the steel bollards, a negative sonic geography of the borderlands
was presenced.
The border is a manifestation of the violence of settler colonialism and its
attendant border making practices that not only produce spaces of insecurity,
danger, and death for migrants but serves as a mechanism of further displace­
ment and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the US–Mexico borderlands,
such as the Kumeyaay and Tohono O’odham from both land and the mobility
access to land affords (Gentry et al. 2019; Launius and Boyce 2021; Madsen
2014). Such practices work to disrupt, alienate, and destroy formerly united
communities, producing, for instance, Ambos Nogales, a community split by
the border between Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona, or alternatively,
a rupture between the Tohono O’odham Nation found today in both Mexico
and the United States (Cadava 2011, 383). While it is politically vital to
 GEOPOLITICS 23

recognise the profoundly damaging toll of the border as a material presence on

the landscape, sonic attention to the border as a wider field of activity –
inclusive of its omnipresent hums, intermittent chops, and potent sonic
absences – encompass a range of border-making practices. These practices
enfold border crossers, CBP agents, steel bollards, and rare plants, among
many others, as meaningful actors within the shaping of a landscape as
borderscape and the pursuit of an enlivened critical border studies project
(Brambilla 2015; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012; Parker and Vaughan-Williams
2009). Practices of listening speak to calls for methodological opportunities to
reimagine both the ‘border as method’ and as a ‘multidimensional choreo­
graphy’ composed against Cartesian and Euclidean thinking and ways of
seeing borderscapes within critical border studies (Brambilla 2015, 27–28;
Mezzadra and Neilson 2012, 59–60).

Listening to the Flat Line of Surveillance

Listening to the border not only reveals its void-like qualities but also its
extension into (sonic) fields. In his writing on the invention of new sounds
beginning in the industrial and extending into the electrical revolution,
Schafer introduces the idea of the ‘The flat line in sound’ (1994 [1977], 78).
The flat line, Schafer explains, is when ‘the body of the sound is prolonged and
unchanging, it is reproduced by the graphic level recorder as an extended
horizonal line’ (1994 [1977], 78). This contrasts with more ‘natural’ sounds
that as he puts it are ‘born’, then ‘flourish’, and ‘die’ (78). But flat-line sounds
have no such rhythm discernible to human ears.
Listening back to my field recordings of a place far removed from the kind
of border soundscape Kun writes about just miles away at the Tijuana check­
point, Otay’s soundscape also differs from the much more remote borderscape
of Lerman’s desert wires in Arizona marking ‘the line’. Instead, Otay
Mountain presents an interesting set of contrasts as a border soundscape.
On the one hand, the recordings are filled with the sounds of a vital, living
place. But underneath these sounds of birds and wind and water are also an
omnipresent but barely noticeable drone—a near constant thrum of airplanes
taking off and landing in Tijuana and San Diego, interspersed by less frequent
and more punctuated throbs of helicopter blades circling Otay and the border.
This melding of sounds in Otay’s soundscape is the contradiction of the near
constant flow of people in and through the airspace of the border, the move­
ment of ‘kinetic elites’ in Kun’s (2011, 20) phrasing, in stark contrast to the
immobility the border aims to, yet ultimately fails to produce or entirely
control, but still at a great cost to human and nonhuman life. As Gallagher,
Kanngieser, and Prior (2017, 622) write, ‘expanded listening does not remove
the human, but rather allows other things to flood in as well’. What flooded in
at Otay Mountain was the sonic experience of a mountain being remade as
24 J. MARGULIES

a violent site of geopolitical theatre and surveillance, while nevertheless one

with a flourishing of endemic and abundant life made suddenly far more
precarious and dangerous through the border’s violent remaking of place.
This is the sonic ‘atmosphere’ of Otay as a more-than-human borderscape
(Lorimer, Hodgetts, and Barua 2019), in which the ‘more-than-human’ is not
merely an agglomeration of human and nonhuman into a novel category, but
a recognition that what is supposed as constituting ‘the human’ has always
involved a constellation of living and nonliving entities, some more present
and immediate than others (Lorimer, Hodgetts, and Barua 2019; Luna 2018;
McCormack 2018).
What felt profoundly absent to me in these recordings, however, was
a singular ‘soundmark’ of the landscape, like Kun’s turnstile ‘clank’ at the
Tijuana border. Listening back, instead, is the paradox, the mixing of the hum
of surveillance sounds and flows of people overhead mixed with the biophony
and geophany of Otay Mountain that to me resonates as Otay Mountain today.
But where the steel bollards resonated as a void, the location where I recorded
also featured a gap of dozens of yards where the walls had yet to be brought
together as a unified line. I could easily walk back-and-forth between the US
and Mexico while looking at a giant wall meant to stop unauthorised migrants

Figure 7. Mexico as viewed through the newly erected border slats at Otay Mountain. Photo by the
author.
 GEOPOLITICS 25

from doing so (Figure 7). But this is not meant to simply highlight the futility
of the wall or what it is more performatively meant to assert. In listening to this
line, I also heard how lines extend into fields. The sonic line is not only heard
through the wire or the steel bollard but is a line that stretches up and is heard
all around: the whirring, low hum of the flat line of surveillance that echoes
and refracts across this securitised terrain.
While the hastily erected wall that now crosses much of Otay Mountain may
not reveal audible stories of the borderlands except through the void it asserts
in an otherwise lively space, I nevertheless encountered a vibrant, vital sounds­
cape of multispecies endurance, but one that is underscored by the keynotes of
a military surveillance apparatus. In drawing attention to the soundscape of
the borderscape, the activity embedded in ‘-scape’ serves as an important
reminder of borders as places of processual becoming rather than only inter­
ruptions of what already exists. As Brambilla notes, ‘. . . the notion of “scapes”
is part of a political project of “making” that highlights the ways in which the
borderscape affords particular sets of reproductive practices and shapes poli­
tical subjectivities in a particular manner’ (2015, 24). Listening to the border
speaks to Pallister-Wilkin’s call for greater research on the political ecologies
of borders with attention to the racialising dynamics of borderscapes, as well as
the human and nonhuman actors that together ‘bring into being’ and shape
them (2022, 12).
Attention to borderscapes as places of becoming sonically may also permit
imagining in different registers of possibility: tuning into the sounds of the
birds and rustling of bushes and the wind in the leaves, it is possible to also
tune out the sounds of the flat line of surveillance and imagine Otay Mountain
as a place where the border apparatus ceases to hold relevance as a practice of
Place-Thought (Watts 2013, 21). Perhaps, it is easier to listen for more
emancipatory possibilities than visually imagine them when confronted with
a hastily erected border wall right before your eyes and the ecological destruc­
tion it has wrought. Yet before I left Otay Mountain, I noticed how the erosive
force of the ephemeral stream of copper canyon was imposing itself against the
stability of the wall. So when I go back to this recording it is in part the sound
of the stream, the distant rush of the river, and the calling of canyon wrens
across the ravines that I tune into as the sound of the perseverance of Place-
Thought as Otay Mountain.

Conclusion
Recent interventions in border studies and closely aligned subdisciplines
engage with how to better attend to nonhuman life and the nonliving world
in spatial analyses of politics, and political analyses of space. Inspired by such
work, I became interested in how sonic methodologies might offer insights
into matters of borders and bordering. Methods to meet the theoretical
26 J. MARGULIES

aspirations of more-than-human border studies compel expanding the scope

of social inquiry inclusive of a livelier, raucous, and conventionally more
difficult to access assemblage of life and landscape when only restricted to
visual or textual registers of discernment (Sundberg 2011).
I have suggested that listening and field recordings offer important forms of
embodied knowledge practices of value to critical border studies alongside other
topics of concern in political geography and geopolitics (Kanngieser 2015). Rather
than reasserting Balibar’s familiar suggestion that ‘borders are everywhere’
through attention to borders beyond linear landscape elements in Cartesian
space (Balibar 2002, 71), methodological attention to borders through ‘seeing
like a border’ as Rumford proposes suggests that multisensory practices can
provide meaningful insights into the (re)creation of borderscapes and borders as
threatening the ecological persistence of place (Johnson et al. 2011, 67). Through
attention to sound, Jones and Johnson’s desire to ask ‘where is the border in
border studies?’ draws our ears to borders as lively and life-taking sensuous fields
with their own soundmarks and atmospheric presences (Johnson et al. 2011, 61).
Close attention to the material, lived, and historically specific contexts of borders is
to take up Paarsi’s urging to extend relational and topological theorising of
borders from the generalised and theoretical to the realm of the (literally) concrete,
lived, and placed study of actual borders in the world (Johnson et al. 2011, 62–63).
I see three primary insights resulting from these sonic explorations. First,
sharing close affinities with the work of Sundberg’s (2011), listening to the border
reasserts the living and nonliving qualities of borderscapes and reveals additional
valences of violence enacted on and through landscapes and their atmospheres.
Listening to the border also widens the scope of concern in how borderlands are
composed and disrupted by nonhuman life. Second, listening provides a method
for ‘putting to work’ both topological and relational-oriented approaches to
theorising the spaces and places of border making that moves such theorising
from the universal to the historically contextual, material, and specific. This
relational approach finds alignment with calls from several Indigenous scholars
to question moves to abstraction in more-than-human theorising disarticulated
from place, composed of its living and nonliving elements (Todd 2016; Watts
2013). Finally, drawing on creative interventions, the performance of borders is
well-evidenced as occurring in a variety of sense-registers; seen in this light, the
political ecology of critical border studies is more proximate, material, and appar­
ent; the border as becoming (Brambilla 2015; Ozguc 2020; Rossiter 2011). Even if
borders are understood as being performed, mobile, fluid, and ‘everywhere’,
attuning to the border’s presence within atmospheric fields and multisensory
experience reasserts the border’s material existence through oft-unrecognised
registers. Sounding out the border is a practice of embodied attunement to the
political stakes and consequences of border-making in a more-than-human
world.
 GEOPOLITICS 27

Notes
1. My place in the world as a white, cis-male, native English speaking American citizen and
researcher matters to this article, especially in relation to how I recount my experiences as
a listening subject at the border. While not illegal to undertake the field recordings I describe
in this article, my experience is that CBP law enforcement agents actively discourage the
presence of visitors on Otay Mountain today, and many of the roads I travelled to do so
contained no trespassing signs (even though it is public land), in addition to being regularly
patrolled by CBP. There was therefore a feeling of riskiness underpinning this work, and my
time on the mountain was marked by uneasiness. The risks I engaged in to conduct this work
(imagined or legitimate) were mediated by the privileges afforded to me by my passport and
my positionality.
2. Because these critiques are well-described extensively elsewhere, I direct readers to
a useful and recent review of these Eurocentric and white tendencies in relation to
posthumanist political ecology in Pallister-Wilkins (2022) as it links directly to the
subject of borders and less textual research methodologies.
3. While I do not engage with the border as a smellscape in this article, I intend to in
a future intervention based on additional efforts to know the border through olfaction.
4. Defenders of Wildlife, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and Sierra Club v. Elaine Duke and US
Department of Homeland Security. Complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief. Filed
September 14, 2017, US District Court, Southern District of California; Center for Biological
Diversity; Notice of Violations of the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental
Policy Act in Relation to Border Wall Prototype Project. June 01, 2017. Sent to US
Department of Homeland Security, US Department of Interior, US Customs and Border
Protection, and US Fish and Wildlife Service.
5. Interviews took place as part of a broader project on plant conservation and illegal
wildlife trade. All interviews were conducted in 2018 in accordance with ethics approvals
from the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield under ethics approval
#016909.

Acknowledgements
This work has benefitted tremendously from feedback and encouragement from Rob St. John, to
whom I always remain indebted for encouraging me to think with creativity and art. I wish to
thank three exceptional anonymous peer reviewers for their critical, generous, and extremely
helpful suggestions and ideas on previous iterations of this paper, as well as the patient support of
Editor Dr Nancy Hiemstra for managing and evaluating my submission. This work benefitted
greatly from an early presentation and rich discussion with students in Sera Boeno's Research
Studio course at Moore College of Art and Design in April 2020. I also wish to thank colleagues at
the San Diego Natural History Museum for their suggestions and advice on field recording
locations on Otay Mountain. I wish to thank my comrades with the BIOSEC project, especially
Francis Massé and Rosaleen Duffy, for encouragement and support of these ideas at their earliest
stages of development.Any errors remain my own.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
28 J. MARGULIES

Funding
The work was supported by the European Research Council Horizon 2020 [# 694995]

ORCID
Jared Margulies http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2029-4424

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