Border Cities Between Life and Death: Ciudad Juárez and El Paso

This text contains a reflection on the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, from an unconventional reading within the Social Sciences. It is about capturing those physical and imaginary elements such as the wall, so that through notions such as border, emotional, degradation, decomposition, abandonment, and other categories, an interpretation of the urban, citizen, and border frameworks that are put into play is developed these types of geographic regions. In addition to going beyond the academic tradition of geopolitics and culture as a starting point for any explanation of border phenomena. This time, the bet is on an interpretation that speaks of the life and death of both cities based on the aesthetic practices of geopoetics and urban imaginaries that constitute an “other way” of reading the reality of two cities that to the south and to the north of each of their countries (the United States and México) make up the current phenomenon of the gradual death of cities. The urbicide.

Authors and Affiliations

1. National Open and Distance University (UNAD), Bogotá, Colombia

   Mauricio Vera-Sánchez

2. Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (UACJ), Ciudad Juárez, México

   Luis Alfonso Herrera-Robles

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mauricio Vera-Sánchez .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador

   Fernando Carrión Mena

2. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador

   Paulina Cepeda Pico

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