Justin Beal

“The roadrunner was revered as a sacred animal because of the footprint it leaves when walking. Its zygodactyl foot imprints an X with four equal points on the sand that makes it impossible to know in which direction it is moving.” So begins La Sombra de La Tierra, written by the anthropologist Natalia Mendoza for an exhibition of the same name by her partner and frequent collaborator Miguel Fernandez de Castro, presented at the Fundacion Marso, Mexico City, in February 2023.

Mendoza and Fernandez de Castro live and work in the rural town of Altar, in Sonora, a common way station for travelers crossing from Mexico into Arizona. These borderlands are among the least populated places on earth, and among the most heavily surveilled. In recent years, a cottage industry of “slipper” manufacture has established itself in Altar, catering to those hoping to pass through the desert undetected. The slippers—overshoes really—are made of fragments of carpet and camouflage nylon. They are designed to be worn over a migrant’s boots to render their footprints, like the tracks of the roadrunner, illegible in the

desert sand.

The clandestine movement of bodies—human, animal, vehicular—is the central concern of La Sombra de la Tierra. The exhibition’s focal point is a seven-minute film titled Coro: Los Murmullos, which combines footage of workers at sewing machines with scenes from the surrounding desert: unassembled sections of border fence piled in rusty stacks; a Peregrine falcon with leather anklets and jesses; a truck dragging five old tires chained together into an improvised harrow to clear tracks from a sandy road. Sweeping landscapes filmed by drone, the falcon’s mechanical surrogate, are cut together with intimate shots taken in the workshop. At moments, closely cropped details of worn carpet resemble the texture and contour of the desert floor itself…