Brenda Isela Ceniceros Ortiz’s article Mapear la frontera: los ecos del obturador desde el borde delivers a methodological and conceptual intervention into the study of border urbanism, using Ciudad Juárez as a lens to explore the multivocality of territorial perception. Anchored in the interdisciplinary field of urban cultural studies, Ceniceros Ortiz treats the border not as a line but as a porous, affective landscape, one shaped by complex interactions between identity, geography, and memory. Her methodology combines photo walks and visual narrative analysis, allowing residents to articulate spatial meaning through images, revealing not only their surroundings but their interpretations, emotions, and claims to space. By foregrounding perception as a political act, the author challenges dominant mappings that reduce border cities to zones of exception, danger, or transit. Instead, she presents a polyphonic geography where residents produce their own cognitive maps—subjective, situated, and relational. Drawing from theorists such as Kevin Lynch, Nelly Richard, and Pablo Vila, the article highlights the imaginability of space: how personal, emotive, and cultural resonances shape our spatial orientation and identity. Photography, here, becomes more than a recording tool; it is a reflexive mechanism through which individuals assert epistemic agency and participate in the semiotic construction of their urban worlds. Thus, mapping the border is not only a spatial task but a political and symbolic one, where the act of seeing is entangled with processes of belonging, exclusion, and resistance.
Ceniceros Ortiz, B.I. (2018) ‘Mapear la frontera: los ecos del obturador desde el borde’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 8(1), pp.9–23.
