Adam Golfer

Golfer’s Magic Valley (2018–ongoing) is a sonically-rich mediation on the interactions between landscape and the human at the Texas Mexico border, a border which is invisible beyond the presence of the Rio Grande River yet powerfully haunts and hurts the land, people, and cultures it delineates and divides. The constantly-moving roving-eye of the camera captures happenings along the river–bird watchers, conservationists, wildlife, migrant apprehensions by border patrol, wall construction sites, and surveillance technologies–all interwoven with radio broadcasts and overheard fragments of conversation.

Statement

The designation “Magic Valley” was coined in the first decades of the 20th century, when land prospectors in south Texas manifested the idea that citrus farming was the future of the Rio Grande Valley. Developers aimed to lure Anglo farmers from across the Midwest with the promise of cheap Mexican labor and limitless financial opportunities. New suburb-towns of Anglo-only transplants sprouted up along the roads between Rio Grande City (a former US Military fort) and Brownsville, on the Gulf, as the area was rapidly transformed into an idea, complete with non-native palm trees, which were brought in and planted everywhere.

“Magic Valley” is an atmospheric landscape-essay film which looks at the contested landscape of the Rio Grande Valley, a region rattled by migration and climate change, and cleaved apart by the ongoing construction of the separation wall dividing the US from Mexico. The film looks at the effects that border militarization, institutional surveillance and man-made development have had on one of the most diverse local ecologies on the planet, fighting for survival.

Every day the border is in the news. Violent, xenophobic language warning of an ‘invasion,’ by the current administration has stoked deep paranoia and fear around the Rio Grande, which has translated into US military units being stationed along the river. Border control has been broadly weaponized to view all migrants as criminals, whether seeking asylum or not. The consequences of this rhetoric are mortal for both people and the natural environment. Time and again, eminent domain is invoked to seize public and private land from various National Wildlife Refuges in the name of homeland security, causing immeasurable devastation to the natural landscape.

In “Magic Valley”, the camera silently observes the violence these crises have wrought, roaming wearily through the borderlands, where masses of people and animals move back and forth across the river on land and in the sky. We observe happenings along the river through a series of interconnected vignettes: migrant crossings, bird migration, ornithologists, conservationists, wildlife, border patrol agents, radio broadcasts, wall construction sites, and surveillance technologies are intercut with overheard fragments of conversation by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents who describe the procedural quality of their day-to-day work, as they endlessly drive around the river boundary. Simultaneously, conservationists from across the region describe the challenges of their efforts to protect the wildlife corridors from encroaching wall construction and land seizure. The film wades through a temporal space, where banality gives way to alienation, displacement and fear. The film asks who and what is permitted to move across a landscape whose borders have been imposed on it by humans, not nature. The land is the land no matter where the river bends.