Arturo Soto grew up listening to his father’s stories about his youth in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (USA). Through photographs and texts, Border Documents depicts sites his father associates with specific memories. Their collaboration emphasizes everyday occurrences that reveal how personal emotions become embedded in public spaces, although these tender stories also capture the time before technology dominated our lives. Perhaps most importantly, the book departs from the media’s reductive focus on the region, which tends to foreground the violence produced by drug trafficking, illegal migration, and corruption.

In the book, Soto’s images from the streets of Juárez and El Paso are combined with the memories of his father (written by Soto). The anachronistic interplay between text and images has an alienating and catching effect, that separates us from the present-day notions on this border region.

Oscillating between the personal and the political, Border Documents reminds us, as the critic Edward Soja once remarked, that biographies are geographies as much as they are histories.