Armando Rascón, who grew up in Calexico, remembers the border between California and Mexico as a place of benign transition; his mother often sent him to Mexico to buy tortillas. Today, of course, crossing the border is like going to the moon: steel grates used during the Gulf War as portable desert landing strips have been installed upright to form a fence. A piece of that fence, a module of the military mindset, hung on a wall in Rascón’s installation, Occupied Aztlán, 1994, next to a small video monitor playing Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil, 1958. Made in and around Calexico—and starring a