POST BOND: One Square Mile in El Paso, TX

POST BOND is an excavation of ongoing United States empire through a history of one square mile in east El Paso, TX and its accreted federal institutions. This is the current site of the El Paso International Airport runway, the NASA Johnson Space Center Forward Operating Location, the United States Postal Service air mail exchange, and the El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention). Through a spatial analysis of proximate federal institutions and following routes of transportation, capital, and language, this study aims to understand the intersecting historical roles of the postal service, customs enforcement, immigration enforcement and NASA in transforming this space into frontier, port, and prison. This hybrid project incorporates historical research, essay and documentary poetry.

Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative funding in 2023-2024 will support research alongside a public workshop offering in collaboration with Giancarlo Huapaya in Spring 2024, ‘Counter-mapping: Documenting Space in Visual Poetry,’ taught between the Woodbury Poetry Room and the Harvard Map Collection.

Researcher: Honora Spicer