POST BOND
This is a book about a space of narrow passage. The space is narrower than the span of a tack.
It is the space between two words on a page:
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The narrow space made by a breath of wind between two particular words:
POST BOND
It is the space bar between these two words on a particular page, taped to a cinder block wall inside a prison. The cinder block wall is adjacent to a metal counter and a sliding window. The window attendant takes bond payments after the name of the obligor has been inscribed in a visitation ledger at the armed post. The space bar on the page on the cinder block wall after the armed post is encircled with barbed wire.
POST BOND is an excavation of ongoing United States empire through a history of how two words— POST and BOND— arrived in one site that is now airport property in east El Paso, TX. This is the current site of the El Paso International Airport runway, the NASA Johnson Space Center Forward Operating Location, the United States Postal Service air mail exchange, and the El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention). Through a spatial analysis of proximate federal institutions and following routes of transportation, capital, and language, this study aims to understand the intersecting historical roles of the postal service, immigration enforcement and NASA in transforming this space into port and prison. This hybrid project incorporates historical research, essay and documentary poetry.
This research began through a 2021-2022 UTEP/EPCC Mellon Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellowship, Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories. POST BOND has since been supported by the Harvard University History Department, the Huntington Library, the Mellon-funded Visualizing Abolition Dissertation Workshop, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Poetry Excerpt
‘Hawkins Boulevard’ from Post Bond, Tripwire Journal 18: Archive Fervor, September 2021 (PDF)
Related Essays
Post Colonialism
Boston Review, September 2024
ICE deportation flights continue out of El Paso airport despite COVID-19
El Paso Matters, May 2020