Technology In A Moment of Danger: The Transborder Immigrant Tool Early on in Borderlands: La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua notes the unnatural,

contingent, and violent nature of the U.S. Southwest border with Mexico:
With the victory of the U.S. forces over the Mexican in the U.S.-Mexican war, los norte amiercanos pushed the Texas border down 100 miles, from el ro Nueces to el ro Grande.... The border fence that divides the Mexican people was born on February 2, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. It left 100,000 Mexican citizens on this side, annexed by conquest along with the land.1 While this violent, hierarchical bordering that structures the U.S. Southwest borderlands, navigating, surviving, and resisting in the borderlands for Chicanas often requires the border-straddling technique Anzaldua calls code-switching, or being able to translate, adapt, and deploy multiple languages. 2 In Anzalduas alternative, oppositional cartography, code-switching means blending Mexican and Anglo language and culture into a bastard language. In the decades since the publication of Anzaludas book, the proliferation of digital technologies, and our increasing reliance on them for our economic, social, and cultural processes, has changed our understanding of code to include the texts that program the digital. Digital technologies and the codes/languages on which they rely, by being able to more clearly, robustly, and flexibly render maps and geographies visible and accessible than previous cartographic techniques, have also become central to how people experience borders. U.S. Every order of power assumes with it a

set of technologies, techniques, and relationships. Likewise, maps presuppose technologies and social formations. A standard political map, for instance, assumes the nation-citizen dyad (and excludes the
1 2

Anzalda, Borderlands: La Frontera, 29. Ibid., 20.

illegal non-citizen), but also requires the policing of borders and the technology of the state in order to have any grounding in reality. Customs and Border Protection and anti-immigrant vigilante groups have
deployed policing technologies on the border that rely on digital technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.3 However, these codes, while often leveraged by hierarchical, racist, gendering power structures, can also be switched. For example, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a GSP cellphone application unsettles

common approaches to digital code. It is a walking tool developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group that includes academics, coders, poets, and performers. A border disturbance gesture, it re-imagines and decolonizes our understanding of maps, navigation, information systems, and mobile digital technologies. It accomplishes this by displacing common approaches to the development of maps and software. Instead of producing a commercial product for a general/moneyed audience, or a map system to be used by state enforcement agencies, Electronic Disturbance Theater created the Transborder Immigrant Tool with marginal actors in mind. In particular, it centers its mapping around the conditions and needs of the border-crossing immigrant, and NGOs that stock life-saving water caches in the hot, dry, and fatally dangerous desert borderlands where immigrants cross. The tool re-appropriates GPS technology and navigation by pointing the user to water. The navigation interface on the phone is not a traditional map, but rather a component of a map, a compass rose with a floating arrow above it which points the walking user to the nearest water cache. Taking Audre Lordes notion that poetry is not a luxury, as its point of departure, the tool de-centers the idea that maps are the only or the primary method of navigation and of finding ones bearings.4 It is coded to read poetry by Amy Sara Carroll in order to give immigrants another kind of footing, welcoming the user with poetic sustenance. The tool, in the works since 2007, saw its development stalled in 2009, when anti-immigrant media, citizens, and legislators displayed outrage at a tool, they contend, aids and encourages illegal immigration.5 The Electronic Disturbance Theater received a deluge of hate mail and death threats and UCSD, which had funded the project, and the FBI opened a ten month long investigation and audit of Principal investigator Professor Ricardo Dominguez.6 The investigation was dropped after finding no wrong-doing, and development has resumed but it is unclear if it will ever see the light of day. In any case, the tool represents, both in its intended use but also in the reaction it has elicited from antiimmigrants, a gesture toward a (de-colonial) navigation, technology, and art in a moment of danger.

Pictures of American Border Patrol UAV on Arizona Border - Desert Invasion U.S.; U.S. Border Patrol Is Using Video Games Technology to Help Keep Border Safe | Fox News. 4 The End of Cyberspace: Transborder Immigration Tool. 5 The Art of Crossing Borders: Migrant Rights and Academic Freedom Boom: A Journal of California. 6 Ibid.