Dead End

Blog overview

“Dead End” is an archeovisual journey along the USA-Mexico border that aims at investigating its impact on people’s lives, culture, and history, perceived as elements of a common higher narrative. Precisely, the dead end. The documentary work features captures from Google Streetview taken on both sides of the border as well as archival material such as postcards and prints. The imagery has been combined with quotes from ordinary people and historical characters, excerpts from government documents, interviews, poems, and song lyrics which bear witness of the historical, cultural, and poetic dimension that these places along the border evoke.

What it is Like to Do Journalism in Tijuana

By Nicola Moscelli

There is a magazine based in Tijuana that is printed north of the border, in the San Diego area, and then distributed south of the border in the major cities of Baja California. This has nothing to do with printing convenience or quality, but rather with avoiding reprisals from organized crime. Its name is Zeta …...

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The Alamo, Santa Anna and the Chewing Gum

By Nicola Moscelli

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” – John Wayne, American actor In 1836, the Alamo Mission in San Antonio (Texas) was the theater of a furious and tragic battle between Texan rebels and the Mexican regular army in the context of Texas’ secession from Mexico. That battle is remembered in US …...

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A Netherworld in Brownsville

By Nicola Moscelli

“I was very angry. How can they do that? How is that possible in the United States that they can do this, put up a fence in front of our land, and then keep us in here? You know, lock us in?” — D’Ann Loop, American farmer and land owner beyond the border fence in …...

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Itchy trigger fingers in Ambos Nogales

By Nicola Moscelli

August 27, 1918 Your name is Zeferino Gil Lamadrid, a well-known Mexican carpenter from Nogales, Sonora. It is about 4 PM on an unbearably hot summer day, and you are finally heading back home from some business on the other side of the border with a bulky package under your arm. For you – and …...

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