As the mainstream representations of the contested space of the U.S.-Mexico border often neglect to reflect the diversity of border stories and miss rhetorical dimension, the aim of this paper is to analyze Ana Teresa Fernández’s most recent act of border artivism – her performance, At the Edge of Distance (2022) and its documentation, from the visual rhetoric’s perspective. This analysis is to examine the argumentative power of images created by the artist as well as their function. The article explores versatile border stories Fernández’s paintings convey and analyzes how they function as a call for action – to challenge hostipitality Latinx experience in the U.S. and replace it with acts of transborder conviviality.

Odwołując się do tezy D. Roberta DeChaine’a zawartej w „Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US-Mexico Border”, w której autor postuluje zwrócenie uwagi na retoryczne funkcje granic artykuł analizuje polemikę z doksą granicy. W artykule omówione są wybrane przykłady artystycznego aktywizmu (artivism) z pogranicza meksykańsko-amerykańskiego oraz w obrębie Morza Śródziemnego od 2000 roku. Retoryczne znaczenie granicy, związane z wartościami, przekonaniami i postawami rozumiane jest jako doksa pogranicza, wpływająca na społeczne postrzeganie granic i migrantów. Omawiane w artykule prace artystów kwestionują związane z granicami narracje i podważają zasadność granic ze względu na ich szkodliwe skutki: tworzenie podziałów między ludźmi, społecznościami i środowiskiem naturalnym.

Even though border scholars have for a long time reached a consensus regarding arbitrariness of borders as artificial human constructs, it seems that in the second decade of the twenty-first century “political borders separating peoples remain pervasive and problematic” (Ganster 2016, xv). Globalization and people’s flows at the beginning of the twenty-first century both opened some borders to international trade or services and at the same time turned other borders into almost completely impenetrable territories with its status reinforced by legislation and militarization, with the U.S.-Mexican border as the best example of the play between those antagonistic forces pulling together and pushing apart at the same time people and spaces on both sides of the border. As such the U.S.-Mexico border “provides a paradigmatic case of global border development” (2016, xvi) and hence the purpose of this paper is to analyze how the transformations of the concept of the border that took place at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries are reflected in American popular media on the basis of the TV series, The Bridge (2013-2014). In addition, the article will also examine the way the region is presented in the series, thus creating specific borderlands tales and contributing to the scholarship on the border.