Vanishing Time: Portable Country
I. The Drain
Vanishing Time (VT) = seventeen years
My father went to an art house cinema in Caracas that used to be teeming with young people. I wonder if that is what he sought there, the youth slipping from the faces around him. That night, he only encountered puro viejo: the old, left behind in the mass exodus, escaping into the movie theatre. The expression my father uses is “The country’s gone down the drain.”
What shocks me about my father’s referent is not the migratory outpour it suggests, which I have been documenting over the past year from the outside, from my adopted country, Mexico. I have witnessed how the young and not-so-young of my native Venezuela flee en masse their homeland, which has become a place of “insile”—the condition of feeling exiled within one’s own country.
What shocks me is the point of view of my insiled father, his own youth fading before his eyes in the mirror. He looks down the drain into which the country he knew has vanished, the way his daughter vanished from his life seventeen years ago. The way seven million people have over the last decade.
After experiencing the reality of displaced people in América, the continent, they are headed to America, the country, the idea, the ideal. América ends here. America begins here.
At the wall. El muro.
II. The Wall
VT = zero
The U.S.-Mexico border wall is measured in time; more specifically, in “vanishing time.” Vanishing time, a technical term, is defined by the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as “the distance between the border and the point at which an illegal border crosser could blend into the local populace.” In other words, the amount of time it takes a person to cross the border and disappear into the local population, becoming untraceable.
I visited the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso border on May II, 2023, the expiration date of the pandemic measure that blocked asylum requests in the United States: Title 42. At Gate 42-as if the title had materialized as a portal-hundreds of migrants stood in the interstice between the Río Bravo/Grande and the wall that steels its political course.
From afar, people seemed to be climbing on top of each other, as if to surmount the wall. On a closer look, I realized people had been ordered to toss away their possessions into two large bins. It bordered on the ceremonial, this divesting. All belongings were thrown into a blanket, swung from side to side, and then catapulted to the top of the pile. Mounting absences on one side, mounting presences on the other.
From the southern bank of the river, crowds of reporters mirrored the congregation, waiting for Title 42 (set to end at midnight) to plummet with the sun, a sun the migrants endured by the wall, watching it cross overhead. In El Paso, I saw a week-long wait by the wall imprinted in the motley tan of a toddler’s face, with white blotches here and there that his mother’s licked thumb failed to erase.
At the edge of the river, I met Alex, a photographer from New York. We had both been pacing upstream and downstream, photographing-redundantly-a scene that, in its stillness, seemed like a photograph itself.
“Do you think it was worth it? Coming all the way here?” he asked.
“Right, this whole American dream,” I began to say, thinking about the migratory phenomenon and my own failed attempt at building a life in the U.S., then realizing he meant whether our independent reporting could bring anything new to the eyes of the world, already fixed on the border. I replied something along the lines of “Time will tell.”
III. The Gilded City
VT = a little less than a month
Yuvi gets lost in the city on the way to meet me. He arrived in New York a little less than a month ago. I gave him directions for the subway, but he is carrying a motorcycle helmet. As we go through the revolving doors into the Guggenheim Museum, having exchanged little more than a greeting, Yuvi holds out his hand and shows me a gold ring—or, crucially, a golden ring, because it is this distinction that is troubling him. Under the rotunda spiralling above, our attention is directed at the monumental circle in his palm.
Yuvi was in the street when a man in an SUV stopped beside him and rolled down his window. The driver needed to buy gas and, with an air of urgency, offered Yuvi the gold ring in exchange for cash. As we purchase our museum tickets, Yuvi tries to rationalize the incident: The man’s gas gauge showed his tank was indeed empty; therefore, the 18K inscription on the thick, hefty ring must also speak the truth. Yuvi wanted to believe this sort of quick transaction, this alchemy, this shortcut to gold, was not unusual in New York. The man said he would settle for a hundred dollars. Yuvi had emptied his pockets.
“Forty,” he replies when I ask, wincing, how much he handed over.
We begin our climb up the circular ramp, rimmed with artwork made in the so-called golden years of Venezuela.
I came back to New York, after a year away, to find a city in which social transience throbbed more palpably than ever. In the evenings, I attended several farewell parties where I dodged requests about cool stuff for expats1 to do in Mexico City once word spread I lived there. During the day, I walked around looking for migrant shelters, or “chesters,” as they’re referred to in Venezuelan jargon.2
I met Yuvi for the first time next door to where I was staying, outside a chester migrants refer to as “El Castillo.” With the armoury turrets reflecting on his sunglasses, Yuvi whispered words in English coming through his earphones like an incantation, to pass the time.
IV. Spirals
VT = Forty—
The texts for the Guggenheim’s exhibition Gego: Measuring Infinity are all in English. I translate for Yuvi the life of Gego—short for Gertrud Goldschmidt—a German-born artist who, fleeing Nazi persecution, migrated to Venezuela, where she established herself and developed her artistic practice over a four decade career.
Taking in the array of structures lined up in the first ring of the exhibition and the years of work whirling to the upper levels of the museum, Yuvi mutters, “Forty . . .”
I wonder how long this piece took her,” he says.
Time, compressed around his finger, prolonged in the hoops of the museum.
I emphasize a line in the exhibition text that reads, “It was in this context that Gego began her new life in her adopted home of Venezuela, where she had arrived as a displaced person, unfamiliar with the language and culture.” Yuvi smiles, indulging me.
We walk up the modernist ramp, which aptly frames the story of Venezuela’s modernization—built around notions of progress—that contextualizes Gego’s retrospective.
Yuvi, who was living in Bogotá when he decided to join the exodus to the United States, is originally from the oil-rich city of Maracaibo. Venezuela’s wealth was pumped, in large part, from the soil of his home region.3 The narrative of the country’s booming development is undermined by Yuvi’s ascent north, in his flight from our down-spiralling country.
The Venezuelan pursuit of modernity found expression in the kinetic art movement known as cinetismo, whose matter is movement itself-or rather the illusion of movement,4 as seen in Gego’s optical play.
V. El Castillo
VT = one month or less
Yuvi was hanging around the castle-like armoury, among a group of migrant newcomers, by a couple of parked motorcycles they used for deliveries. “It’s the only source of income here right now,” one of them was explaining to me when a man who joined the group blurted out: “I know you. You are the chama from El Basurero.”
I had met Jesús two months before in El Basurero (“The Dumpster”), a barren land located an hour and a half north of Mexico City, where the northbound train La Bestia (“The Beast”) makes a stop.
“How’s your mom,” Jesús asked me. I cringed as I remembered I had driven with my mother to the infamous Basurero. We had arrived at this key point in the migrant cartography after following word-of- mouth directions to the unmapped location.
VI. El Basurero
VT = minus one month, more or less
I followed a panda who rode on her father’s shoulders along the tracks of La Bestia to El Basurero. Under her onesie, the little girl wore a New York Rangers shirt. She held on to her dad’s Yankees hat as they walked the iron path that somehow connects the fields of the State of Mexico to New York City.
The uncharted train station of El Basurero is located by a mountain of waste. In an adjacent clearing, enfolded in blankets, sweaters, and plastic bags, a dispersed crowd of about a hundred people, mostly Venezuelan, waited for the train.
There is no timetable, no schedule for La Bestia—or, more correctly, the plural Bestias, which slide north to south, south to north, brushing against the quotidian, through everyday life.
The fear of being discarded in this land, on this soil, seeped to the core, like the chill of the rain, a fear of disappearing in this country of disappearances. They wished to vanish beyond, to vanish at the other side of the border. Not here. Not here.
My camera prompted mixed reactions. Some covered their faces or turned around; others smiled and posed, asking for a picture, eager to leave a trace and to be seen, even here.
A man in his fifties, past the average age of early twenties, said into my camera: “Long live Maduro, that son of a bitch. They stole all the millions in the world. And they ask why we are escaping. Such a rich country, and we’re in such need in an alien country.” His voice broke. He donned a makeshift raincoat made out of a slit trash bag and muttered another ironic “Viva Chávez.” The hopeless wail, variations of which I had encountered before, resonated with acute poignancy in the middle of this wasteland.
“It doesn’t matter, the garbage. There are a lot of people here who are professionals too,” shouted a man standing by the train tracks wearing a plastic bag, as though reminding society that despite the abject scenery, the refugee is not refuse.
With graffiti murals painted on its cars, the train parades like a new iteration of kinetic art: an expression of a country on the move. On my way to El Basurero, a couple of large skulls painted on The Beast passed by, bearing a reminder of its epithet: “el tren de la muerte.”
VII. Track of Time
VT = minus seventeen years
“Let’s take a photo together by the castle,” Jesús proposed, proceeding to fill me in on his accidented northbound train ride from El Basurero to the U.S.- Mexico border. The linear logic of his account suddenly derailed when he said: “The train left us in a little town right before Tapachula.”
If Jesús weren’t in New York, I would have thought he had boarded a southbound Beast, arriving, again, in Tapachula, by the Guatemala-Mexico border. When I attempted to organize the spatiotemporal jumble in his mind, he insisted: “I’m telling you everything that happened since we met in El Basurero, the bit from which I went forward.” He repeated, “I reached Tapachula. I entered through Piedras Negras.” His memory seemed to have collapsed the whole country between the two polar border towns.
Retracing the contested geography, my thoughts ran backward in time, through the region where my own migratory journey had begun, seventeen years ago, when my mother and I moved from Caracas to Monclova, a small town in the north of Mexico cut through by the federal highway and the railway. In February 2023, I went back to Monclova and took the bus to the Piedras Negras–Eagle Pass border. In the desert topography, framed by the bus window like a diorama, I recognized the outlines of mountains I had photographed many times. But it was the invisible subtext of this landscape, the geologic horizons of the gas-rich Burgos Basin, that had brought my mother and me here in 2006. When the bus passed the roadside station of Hermanas, where the headquarters of the seismic gas-prospecting company was located, I recalled how the office building, fringed by the railway, would quake every time the train approached. I would not have imagined that, on the tracks where my fifteen-year- old self left coins (including ill-fated bolívares, which would reach the world’s highest inflation rate) for the train to flatten into souvenirs, my remote homeland would one day speed by, piecemeal, aboard La Bestia.
The view was suddenly overlaid with the face of a boy who was travelling with his mother on the bus. We interacted through the reflection in the window, which was layered by the desert skyline and the train tracks running parallel to the highway. Very close to Piedras Negras, the bus stopped by an immigration checkpoint, where they made everyone descend with our belongings. The officials asked the boy’s family to step aside. His mother began to cry when the agent said, “You cannot continue your journey.” Back in my window seat, as we completed the last stretch to the border, the train erupted into view, overtaking the bus. I thought of the boy and his mother, forced to continue their mutilated journey on La Bestia.
VIII. Reticulárea
VT = city3
I convened with Alex, the photographer I had met at the border, to visit other migrant chesters in Manhattan. Alex proposed we make our way through the urban grid, starting downtown or uptown.
“Downtown,” I suggested, not quite ready to go back to my old neighbourhood on the Upper West Side and sink into the past like stepping into fresh cement.
We began our urban ascent near Canal Street, where Alex ran into a friend—a painter whom I also happened to know. The mutual acquaintance, a tangible link in the mesh of urban intersections, made me sense that a measure of truly inhabiting a society might be the number of encounters and re-encounters woven into our everyday.
In a community garden, where we wolfed down Japanese sandwiches, Alex told me about his Korean grandparents. In the present situation at the border and in the city, he sees the past: an echo of what his grandparents went through when they first arrived in the U.S. I had wondered what had drawn him to the border the day we met, what personal pull it also exerted on him.
We passed by a tree being cut down on the sidewalk. Alex took a photo of the trunk-turning-stump. He knew that tree, he said. We were moving across three urban planes. New York was at once Alex’s hometown, the town I used to call home, and a city not at home in itself, reckoning with the dissolution of its right-to-shelter law amid the migratory inflow testing its safety nets.
Airy, gossamer, the volumes of interlinked wire float against the blank walls of the Guggenheim’s main exhibition room like adumbrations on the verge of vanishing or devolving into thought. Spheres, columns, layerings, like architectural sketches of space-time. Asymptotes brushing infinity.
Gego’s iconic Reticulárea pieces are netlike structures that shun rigid materials and frameworks, following the expansive, rhizomatic, decentralizing impulse that expanded her artistic practice. In the way the collective imaginary has woven constellations, the abstract retículas offer themselves to the viewer’s imagination, latching on to our network of referents.
Trails that ascend and descend. Twists and turns. Footpaths. Neural pathways. Streets and avenues. City grid. Nodal points. Chester network. Safety net. Narrative manifold.
A firm believer in manual crafts—manualidades she encouraged in her architecture students—Gego twisted and linked her Reticuláreas entirely by hand. Yuvi appreciates the handwork, pointing out the delicate balance and intricacy of Gego’s malleable structures and laughing when he sees a piece forming a jumble of wires: “A motorcycle mechanism,” he suggests.
Yuvi’s hands are lined with remnants of automotive grease from the motorcycle he fixed earlier and drove here through the retícula of the city. A couple of days before, Yuvi had taken me through the innards of another scooter, patiently singling out each wire.
IX. Machines
VT = (Transient Time)n
We located a chester close to where Alex attended elementary school, by Tompkins Square, a park he didn’t frequent as a kid, dominated as it was by drug violence.
Amid several motorcycles parked outside the chester, a man speaking on the phone caught my ear. Originally from La Guaira, Venezuela, Andrew journeyed from Chile to Florida, which he left to come to New York when Governor Ron DeSantis tightened immigration controls. He had been in the city for little more than a month, he told us from the seat of the motorcycle he had recently bought to make deliveries.
“We are illegal legals,” Andrew explained. Andrew and the other bikers staying at the chester were waiting for their asylum applications to be processed before applying for licence plates. Still, they ventured the streets on their unregistered scooters, which the police seized daily. “From Thirtieth Street upward it’s a guillotine every day.”
When I met Yuvi outside El Castillo, where word had spread that he was a motorcycle mechanic, he asked if I wanted to see the “spare parts” his first client had instructed him to use.
The scooters lay belly up, with their electrical entrails hanging against an empty lot, on the sidewalk that connected my friends’ apartment to El Castillo. One of the bikes had been completely dismantled. The other one, Yuvi gauged, was nearly intact. “This one has value,” he said, naming the parts. Engine. Transmission. Brake pump. Grips. He had only extracted some screws.
Yuvi referred to the wires as “ramales” or branches. “The electric charge, which is twelve watts, comes through here. If it exceeds twelve watts, the whole bike burns out.” Yuvi’s index finger tracked the imaginary spark that activates the circuit, bringing it from steadiness to motion (the change in voltage is called transience) and back to steadiness.5
Yuvi picked out a thicker wire. “This one is worth money, this branch: around two hundred dollars.” He walked away from the ruins of the motorbike, as if refusing to get entangled in anything illegal. Yuvi has voiced his concerns about the survival of migrants in the city, of the probabilities of stumbling outside the law and facing incarceration or deportation. Time sequestered, undone, wasted.
“That’s why I’m learning English. It took me two months to get here. I walked, I went hungry . . . To come here and waste my time?” he says. “No, he would die, my father.”
Time is Yuvi’s gold standard; English, his form of vanishing.
When Yuvi told him of his plans to come to New York City, his father, who had migrated to Spain, assured him he wouldn’t find work as a mechanic: “Bikes don’t even need fixing over there . . .” Yuvi sent him a video of the two dismantled bikes, to which his father replied in disbelief: “That’s in New York?”
Yuvi also thought New York would be different. “I come from a place where people make a living from that: stealing motorbikes,” he told me. “But over there, bikes are stolen from people who have fought hard for five or six years to get something. It’s as if, for instance, you worked a whole year to buy a camera, and then someone just comes and steals it, takes off the lenses and throws it away.” Yuvi measures the value of things—motorcycles, my camera, each of Gego’s pieces—in units of time.
On the Guggenheim’s ramp, Gego’s Chorros (Streams), made of iron and aluminum rods, cascade freely. In them, Yuvi sees radial rims of motorcycle wheels. I imagine Gego taking the wheels of the scooters apart, bunching the spokes together, breaking their cyclical motion in a suspended fall. I imagine Yuvi recomposing the chorros into scooter wheels.
Yuvi asks me where my family is. I tell him my mother is in Mexico City.
“And your father?”
I tell him my father lives between Caracas and Maracaibo, where Yuvi is from. My father believes the oil industry will revive in its historic epicentre, where the first field blew out, shooting a black chorro upward. My father, who like most Venezuelans has had to wait for gasoline in the standstill of kilo- metres-long lines—often, over three days waiting to pour forty litres of gas—believes petroleum chorros and natural gas will shoot out again someday.
My father’s motorcycle has been stranded in the workshop for four years due to a lack of spare parts in Venezuela. He rides his bicycle around Caracas, sometimes forty kilometres to carry out errands. He sends me a picture of my younger self—around the time I vanished from the country—on his motorcycle, before it fell into motionlessness.
When I hear a motorcycle switching on, the starter transmits a small electric shock to a neural ramal in my brain that activates an early sonic memory. My first impressions of Caracas took place in the front seat of my father’s motorcycle. I vividly recall falling off it as a toddler, his arms around me, and scraping our skins against the city.
X. Time Machine
VT = minus a journey
In First Park on the Lower East Side, ten-year-old Abdiel from Barquisimeto, Venezuela, borrowed Alex’s film camera, glued his eye to the lens, and peered in through the viewfinder, inverting its function.
As he flipped the camera and snapped a picture now and then, he said he wanted to build a time machine and proceeded to describe the mechanism: “You grab a camera and put it in the fridge, along with other stuff. You plug it in, and the fridge turns on, spins, spins, spins. I get into the fridge, spin a lot and arrive. I can’t touch anything,” he said.
I asked him where the time machine had taken us.
“Home,” he replied, referring to Barquisimeto. “There’s another me that isn’t myself. I kill him. He’s an impostor . . . I’m going to move to Colombia again. I’m not going to walk through the jungle.” Abdiel assured me that once he returned to the past, the time machine would explode.
Abdiel’s four-year-old brother, Yaxiel, interrupted him to tell a story about a boy who drowned in one of the rivers of the Darién. Using the present tense, he described how the boy is sucked into a hole at the bottom of the river, which is like a vortex or a drain. The little boy drowns, then comes back to life, again and again and again. Bored by his brother’s circular story, Abdiel intervenes: “You were drowning.”
The word Abdiel uses for fridge is nevera, the term employed by Venezuelans to refer to detention centres at the U.S.-Mexico border.6 The linguistic components of Abdiel’s machine signal two pivotal points in the migrant narrative: the nevera, which freezes the journey on the northern border of Mexico, after crossing the Río Bravo/Grande, and the cámara that Abdiel must have boarded to go across the Suchiate River, on the Mexico-Guatemala border.
XI. Cámara
VT = minus Mexico
“¡Cámara!” the raft steerers yelled from the river. Standing on the northern bank of the Suchiate, I interpreted the cries as a call to stop exposing their unchecked border crossings and hid my camera. I soon realized they were offering a ride on their rafts across the river.
As he pushed with a setting pole our cámara, a small barge made of planks fastened to tire tubes, Tasmania, my camarero, recalled that, at the peak of the migratory flow, four hundred or more Venezuelans were crossing the Suchiate daily. As we approached the Guatemalan shore, he pointed to a family of four waiting for a Mexico-bound cámara.
I called them neighbours when they told me the part of Caracas they came from. They boarded Tasmania’s cámara, and we glided back to the Mexican side across the invisible borderline. As the parents scanned the shore for immigration officials, their little boy looked straight into my camera as I took a still of our crossing. Soon after we landed and said goodbye, the family vanished from sight into Mexico, where they continued to float.
While the Suchiate might allow a smooth passage, Mexico stretches ahead as a nearly insurmountable border. According to a journalist I met amid a northbound migrant caravan, the country resembles a game of snakes and ladders. On that occasion, I had been caught in a torrent of hundreds of people heading north on foot—an impromptu “ladder”—in the heat of noon, defying immigration controls. On the coastal federal highway running through the isthmus of Mexico, I followed a family whose children wore hats made of cardboard and whose mother had a tattoo across the isthmus of her neck, a throbbing word: Vida.
XII. Square of Time
VT = πr2
Time has a circular quality in the main square of Tapachula, Chiapas, the first point of arrival for migrants in southern Mexico. It is square one for new- comers who have just crossed the Suchiate, but also for seasoned migrants who are, sometimes repeatedly, returned to this point by the undertow of migration controls thwarting their northbound attempts.
Sitting in the main kiosk or axis of the square, Yohangel, from Valencia, Venezuela, showed me the tattoo on his right forearm, a cartographic design of a sea and a compass. Once he made it to Miami, he would add a ship: “Because it’s like me being in Mexico now: swimming against the current. I’m always trying and always showing up in the same place.”
The square is overseen by a clock atop the old municipal palace, which functions as a museum documenting the “historical” migratory waves of the city, oblivious to the floating population residing at its doorstep. The windows of the exhibition room frame the main square and the hundreds of migrants, mainly from Venezuela and Haiti, living outside, conscious of the clock, waiting to move on.
The visible invisibility of this transient state reminded me of a sight in Reynosa, where Haitian migrants filled their buckets from a faucet belong- ing to the municipal archives building, which was located near a shelter on the southern bank of the Río Bravo. The only trace of this floating population in the city’s archival records would have to be inferred from the building’s water utility bill. Inside, the archives boast a copy of the document proclaiming Reynosa a city, having reached the number of inhabitants required to attain the official denomination. The untraceable or untraced migratory flow passing through Reynosa had probably, quietly, rendered it a city long before.
Eva walked around the square of Tapachula selling candy she carried in a cardboard box. She had come from Monagas, Venezuela, toiling on foot through the Darién, and planned to spend her upcoming eighty-fifth birthday in a couple of weeks, on December 31, in the United States—some twenty-five hundred kilometres away. In the same square, a four-month-old baby, the youngest member of a family from Valencia, admired the spiralling Christmas lights, which a group of teenage migrants plug their phones into for charging.
XIII. Times Square
VT = around the clock × n
In the heart of Times Square, Franyerlin took her toy horse-drawn carriage for a spin around the pedestrian plaza, where she and her family spend their days wait- ing to process their work permits as the city swirls and rushes by.
“Tres minutos,” Alex said after taking her portrait and handing her the square of Polaroid film.
As we waited for the image to develop, Franyerlin’s mother reflected on movement determined by money and time.
In Venezuela, “everything moves in dollars,” she explained. A passport, she calculated, costs around $350 per person—in a country where the minimum wage is less than five dollars per month. “And time,” she added. Having neither, they had joined the multitudes fleeing on foot.
Three minutes later, Franyerlin passed around her developed portrait. Even under the gleam and simulacra of Las Pantallas—“The Screens,” as the migrant cartography has mapped this pinnacle—the Polaroid picture held its staying power.
In the square of film, it had taken time for her to appear. Where and when would her vanishing into the population take place, take time?
“Okay, do it. Quick!” Elmo prompted us in Spanish, pushing back the woolly head. She had initially resisted Alex’s portrait, hinting that she could be punished for showing her face. As we waited for the photo to develop, the woman joined a cast of other costumed characters gathering around a man opening a duffel bag full of products. Spider-Man, Captain America, and two Elmos passed around the items and handed back cash to the man, whose legs were covered in sores. On the Polaroid film, the woman’s face emerged from the red fur, sweaty and urgent.
For years, Alex had been saving these sheets of instant film. As we move through town, he makes portraits of the people we meet, gifting them tan- gible images and keeping some for himself. When they peel the instant photographs, still humid, still fresh, the negative side of the print reveals a sepia counterportrait. Smeared with the chemical patina of the developer emulsion, the negative mirrors the original image, capturing the essence of life in the city: phantasmagoric, instantly past.
Three singers, from Cumaná and La Guaira, beamed at the Polaroid of Darlys’s two-month-old baby. Osmelis placed the fresh photo next to the newborn, leaning over on her crutches. She had lost her prosthetic leg in a river in the Darién when her canoe capsized. Luisiana, her friend, said the river had tried to snatch her children away from her twice. “They’re in school now,” she reassured me. They carried their speaker down the A train entrance and disappeared into the ground.
XIV. River of Time
Vanishing Rate = 520,000 people/year7
Midas-like, Yuvi places his ringed hand on the golden fountain at the Guggenheim, pushes the faucet, and drinks, beading the basin with droplets. Straightening up, he leaves his thumb pressed, the stream flowing into the lustrous drain, and recalls a faucet at the edge of the Darién jungle around which migrants gather to collect fresh water.
“If you go there, to Bajo Chiquito, it’s an impressive sight,” he says, pinching the gold-like gush as he recalls a line of a thousand people, most of them sick from drinking river water, waiting to fill bottles and buckets. If so much as a leak appears when someone is filling up, someone else rushes in to collect it, Yuvi says.
As we continue making our way up the exhibition, Yuvi’s mind marches on through the Darién.
“There’s a climb called La Llorona,” he says.
“Because people cry?” I ask bluntly.
“¿Que si no?” he scoffs. “People die.”
One reaches Bajo Chiquito by canoe through the river, Yuvi says. A United Nations camp attempts to keep track of the migratory flow, which has already been panned by coyotes and locals seeking to extract every valuable nugget from the human stream.
XV. Timeline
VT = five days to two years—and counting
The line of people waiting for a bed outside the Roosevelt Hotel turned the corner. As Alex took portraits of migrants from Mauritania, Senegal, Venezuela, and Morocco who stepped out of the line to pose, Rosángela remarked on his Polaroid: “His camera. It’s so beautiful.” Her son, whom she left behind in Cumaná, Venezuela, wants to study photography. “But he’s over there.” She and her partner, Henri, had been waiting outside the shelter for five days, stricken through in my photograph by the belt of the stanchion, resting their backs against an ad that read, “You’re not here”—the not partly hidden by her body.
The line extended all the way to the end of the block, where Sai was hanging out by a large garbage bin. Faded, his Venezuelan accent bore traces of his passage through Mexico. Wearing an American-flag hat, Sai looked up at the skyscrapers on Vanderbilt Avenue, where his mother, Yuly, called out, “Almuerzo!” She was selling lunches stored in the icebox that Sai was looking after. They had been living in New York for two years, but when she lost her job, they had been forced to go back to chesters. Yuly and Sai are staying at the Roosevelt Hotel, blending in with the newcomers.
The chesters work to stay invisible as the city attempts to absorb displacement crises not fully clocked by the rest of the world. But millions of people cannot simply vanish.
XVI. Squares and Spheres
VT = zero × eight
Eight Squares (1961), one of Gego’s pieces, is formed by parallel lines that, superimposed, create the visual reverberation that characterizes cinetismo.
Many of Gego’s earlier works resonate with the kinetic sculptures of Venezuelan artist Jesús Soto (1923–2005), who sought to expand the amount of time the viewer spent interacting with an artwork, experimenting with their involvement in the piece. In his Penetrables, structures composed of strands suspended from a frame, he invited the viewer to vanish into the piece, shredding the solidity of the body passing through its components.
Yuvi points out the multiple dimensions of the squares.
“They go up, they go down.”
Like a ladder. Serpientes y escaleras.
The structural elements of the U.S.-Mexico border suddenly emerge in Gego’s works. The wall, released from gravity, function, impedance, and denial, floats, now ascending, now slithering down.
Vanishing time is built into the eight prototypes of the Southwest border wall. The models and materials are tested by CBP officials for “how penetrable they are” and their capacity of “impedance and denial” of illegal entry.
When we pass by a more intricate—impenetrable—piece of Gego’s, Yuvi remarks: “If they put up one of these things no one will get through.” We begin measuring Gego’s structures in their capacity for impedance and denial, in vanishing time.
“That’s how they are. Just like that,” Yuvi says, pointing to one of Gego’s Spheres. “You open it up like that, and go in.”
Back in May 2023, as Title 42 was set to expire, I had seen people desperately cutting through the razor-wire perimeter to reach the border-wall gate. Once past the first fence, people were divided into groups and encircled by more concertina wire rolled out by the guards. The first sliver of America proper: a border within a border within a border. Barbed spheres within spheres within spheres.
The steel bars and wire loops of the wall vibrate in the eye, shredding the skyline of El Paso, as one walks along the river. The wall, measured in vanishing time and number of encounters, made kinetic by the movement of the observer, of the trespasser.
The gaps in the wall are filled with numbered automatic gates. That same day in May, a family who had crossed the Río Bravo/Grande seeking to solicit asylum at Gate 42 had been directed to the next gate, several kilometres away. The gate numbers on the border wall are proportional to the danger faced on the southern side, which is regularly cruised by coyotes and cartels. The family marched eastward, along the flow of the river that delimits Global South and Global North, seeking an opening in the sixfold razor-wire barrier.
Later in the day, during the golden hour, I re-encountered the same family, split up and wounded by the fanged fence, which had cut through the skin of the child.
I ask Yuvi how he got the scar that zigzags from the corner of his mouth, across his left cheek, down to his neck.
“A knife slash,” he replies. He was eighteen years old.
Yuvi had undergone two surgeries in the Clínica San Benito in Maracaibo, where medical supplies, as in the rest of the country, are scarce, if not unattainable.
“I remember the woman who operated on me. Her name is Grenolis Nava. I’ll never forget her name.”
I imagine Grenolis Nava stitching Yuvi’s face by hand, twice, with precious suture wire.
“Where can one ask if this is or isn’t gold?” Yuvi asks, stroking his ring.
XVII. Waterline
VT = Christopher 1, 2, 3 . . .
“Do you think it’s bad to have one of these?” Kelly showed me her wedding band.
“You mean, with the lightning?” I asked, as we hurried to reach her chester, a repurposed hotel, before the electrical storm gathering above us hit Brooklyn. Neither of us were keen on testing the electromagnetic properties of gold.
I tried to reassure Kelly about the wedding ring and, with even less certainty, about the deportation order her husband had received that morning. Picking up her pace, Kelly pushed the stroller carrying her toddler, Christopher, who shifted restlessly in his seat. He had grown since the last time I had seen him.
I first met Kelly and Christopher in the middle of a road in Tapachula. Nearly fainting from the heat and the added weight of her one-year-old, Kelly stopped me to ask for directions. She was searching for the detention centre where her Peruvian husband was being held. As we looked for the immigration facilities, Kelly told me Christopher was a twin. His brother had died in Venezuela.
Four months later, at the other end of the country, I was walking through a migrant camp set up by the Matamoros-Brownsville border when, to my shock, Kelly emerged from a tent she had been living in for the past two months. From the interior, Christopher smiled. They had been sent back south several times by Mexican immigration officials, who routinely detain migrants travelling on buses, but had finally made it to the northern border on the train. Christopher turned two recently—and barely; Kelly said he had almost frozen to death aboard The Beast.
I slid down a slope of trash that cascaded from the migrant camp on the southern bank of the river. Covered by water lilies, the border was a green path of treacherous solidity. The river disappeared under a thick aquatic forest. Attempting to get closer to a group of teenage swimmers, I stepped on a cluster of lilies, which quickly gave way under my weight, and sank into the Río Bravo, holding my camera above the waterline.
XVIII. Descent
VT = a while ago
As we descend the Guggenheim ramp, Yuvi asks me to teach him how to ask for a job in English. He has been trying “Give to me work.”
We walk down the platform, regressing through the years of Gego’s career.
“Give me a job,” he says.
“Give me a job,” I repeat.
“Give me a job.”
“Give me a job.”
“This one does look like the barrier,” Yuvi says when we pass a smaller artwork.
With haptic curiosity, he extends his hand to test the rigidity and malleability of each part of the piece, feeling its negative space.
Yuvi had penetrated the wall in the Piedras Negras–Eagle Pass border. Before he crossed, a cartel member took his cellphone, seizing the narrative of his past and the lifeline to his uncertain future. The first thing Yuvi did in the United States, once he was released from custody and dropped off in the streets of Texas, was cry. He called his father, who sold his motorbike for Yuvi to buy a ticket to San Antonio, where he received help from an organization to reach New York.
I notice a quiver in Gego’s piece and realize it is not my perception activating its illusory motion. It is moving, vibrating.
“No touching!” hollers a guard nearby.
“Yuvi, we can’t touch it.”
“Oh, I touched that bit a while ago.”
The piece bears the trace of Yuvi’s transient touch for another moment before it is stilled.
XIX. Mujeres
VT = a life
On the Upper West Side, I spotted a Venezuelan mother and her two children waiting on a stoop for her sister to come out of the chester across the street. As I attempted to convince her to let us take a picture—which she refused, explaining she had already gone viral in the news—her sister showed up and cried out: “Mujeeeer, ¿qué haces aquí?”
I had met Mariangel six months before in El Paso, outside the Sacred Heart Church, where she prepared arepas that drew crowds of both migrants and locals.
“Remember my husband?” Mariangel asked as a man approached, jingling his car keys.
He greeted us and looked at Alex’s photographic equipment scattered by his car. “Everyone has a camera over here, huh?”
He drove almost three hours every day to Long Island to work painting houses.
“Nueva York no es como lo pintan,” he sighed, explaining that everything he earned dissolved between high gas prices and traffic tickets. Invisible traffic cameras captured his oblivious trespassings.
“I can’t take it anymore, the cameras. Tchk. Tchk. Tchk. So much debt. Do you live around here?” he asked me.
“I used to,” I replied.
In El Paso, Mariangel cooked through the day, all day, every day, even on her birthday. Between choppings and stirrings, she told me about the rivers she had crossed and how her husband pulled her out of the water in the Darién, where she nearly drowned. One day, as we waited for the pool of frying oil to heat up, she mentioned she had lost her unborn baby in Mexico. Heavily pregnant as she was, in an attempt to escape the immigration officials chasing after them, she had plunged into a river.
Gego embodied and materialized in-betweenness. After locking up her house in Germany, she threw her key into the Alster River. It has been suggested that Gego’s works reflect a quest for the structure she couldn’t find in her adopted country, a country intent on building its own structures. The notion of Venezuela as a “portable” country is revisited in the exhibition catalogue: “Venezuela: a country with no sense of history, with a chaotic and conflictive present that, at the time, already alluded to impermanence, immediacy, short-term thinking, and constant flux. A country that writer and playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas compared to a campsite or hotel.”
A campsite in Matamoros at the edge of the Río Bravo. A chester, like the Roosevelt Hotel, which has been deemed “Little Ellis Island.”
I scanned the sidewalk outside my old apartment building in the Upper West Side where a year ago I had left all the belongings I collected throughout my time in New York. All that wouldn’t fit into my portable life, I left on the pavement, around the mark I was looking for now. I had carved into the fresh cement, in a language not my own, a word: home. I wanted to show Alex I had left a trace in this city.
When we parted ways, concluding our chester dérive, I headed uptown, to the Hispanic Society building in Washington Heights, which has a Penetrable by Jesús Soto. I walked through it before leaving the city I once inhabited.
XX. The End
VT = ∞
The Guggenheim exhibition includes a sheet of Gego’s papers where she brainstormed the term Reticulárea, playfully twisting, breaking, and reconnecting words in Spanish. Revealing her own interpretive possi- bilities for her work, she scribbles: inagotable (inexhaustible), interminable (neverending), ENREDADO (entangled), encadenamiento (chaining), continuativos (continuations), FINIQUITUM, CONSTELLUM, RED, LÍNEA, LINEAL. Under the point of arrival, RETICULÁRIEA, she had tried RED HADA (net fairy), which became REDADA (raid).
Through naming and renaming, Gego’s Reticuláreas swing between entrapment and shelter, closure and expansion. One of the words that catches my eye—an echo of Soto’s Penetrables—is the proposition Habitable. Gego built structures meant not merely to be penetrated but inhabited.
“I built a castle in the air,” reads an early poem by Gego. “It was built and I inhabited it.”
Outside the museum, sitting on his motorcycle, Yuvi scans the city for delivery requests and decides to get closer to home. On his phone’s map, he traces and retraces possible routes back to El Castillo.
Yuvi takes the ring off his finger. He has decided it is fake. He checks his gas gauge. The tank is low on fuel. He reckons it should be enough to make it back. With the twenty dollars I have on me, I buy the golden ring from him.
Yuvi takes off in his red scooter, vanishing into the urban retícula. Later that night, he texts me from a different number and shows me a photo of his phone with the screen shattered after a fall against the city.
- The terms migrant, expat, and immigrant are, purportedly, defined in terms of time, by a person’s “permanence” in their adopted country, as well as economic status. A legal definition of migrant does not exist. The boundaries of the term are fluid, even for the purposes of international law. While immigrantimplies stability and permanence, migrantsuggests an undefined transience, raising the question of whether the term is temporary in the person or the person is temporary in the place-ever-arriving, never fully vanishing (vanishing understood here, regardless of legal status, as an integration or assimilation, to a lesser or greater degree, into the social fabric at the point of arrival). But what does it mean to vanish? And what does it mean to vanish into a country itself sliced by borders of exclusion?
↩︎ - Under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I met Yilver, a twenty-five-yearold Venezuelan who was staying at a chester that housed around two thousand single male migrants. At the border, he had been released by CBP with an ankle tracker, which he was still wearing. Yilver, traceable. Yilver, tattooed on his left hand, is the phonetic translation of Gilbert, embodied and returned to America. Yilver in the flesh, at the chester.
↩︎ - Venezuela’s petroleum-fuelled “progress” is a phenomenon encapsulated by historian Fernando Coronil’s notion of “petro-magic,” which corresponds to the rhetoric of wealth without work embraced by the oil state (self-fashioned as a “magnanimous sorcerer”) and is marked by an illusory modernization that relies on infrastructural spectacle.
↩︎ - A threshold, a border of sorts marking the edge of Venezuela, the floor of the Simón Bolívar International Airport is tiled with a kinetic art mosaic designed by artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. The intersection of parallel red, blue, and green stripes by black diagonals results in a prism in which new colours appear and fuse into the vanishing point of the airport’s lobby. The kinetic effect that activates the airport floor when one traverses it fuses with the diasporic movement of leaving the country—by air, at least. The floor mosaic is a chasm between those able to fly in and out of the country, like I did, and those who must leave by land, like Yuvi.
↩︎ - In an electrical system, a transient state is defined as a momentary change in the flow of current through the circuit. “Transients” are indicators of instability in an electrical system. Transient time, the interruption of steady states, is measured in microseconds. ↩︎
- On March 27, 2023, a fire broke out inside an immigration detention centre in Ciudad Juárez. The smoke marks are still visible on the facade, along with posters and memorials mourning the forty migrants who lost their lives that day in their locked cells. Neveras (“fridges”) on one side of the wall, furnaces on the other. ↩︎
- In 2023, around 520,000 people were reported to have crossed the Darién. ↩︎
ZOE VALERY writes. Sometimes on paper, sometimes on walls, sometimes on screen. Her work has appeared in New England Review, The White Review, American Chordata, The London Magazine, The Common, Longreads, and elsewhere.
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