Burroughs described [Mexico] as a place of vicious queers. Artaud, as a country that would destroy the West. Artaud was right. -Heriberto Yepez

That quote opens the pamphlet primer to The Border Again, an exhibition of Tijuana-based artists and artists for whom the California-Mexico border is a creative influence, currently on view at Human Resources. Much of the work is powerful and arresting. Video, projects, photographs, assemblages, and sculptures fill the space, offering different material perspectives on the lived and metaphoric border, while at the same time maintaining a defiant resistance to the current militarized U.S. border policy.

The pamphlet, Border Art: A Primer, touches on these political topics: the contradictions of “postborder” art, hypocritical valorizations of cultural hybridity, NAFTA, militarization of border security, and the challenges of identity and free expression. Upstairs, a darkly comic, tongue-in-cheek video by Mariah Garnett, Roberto Sifuentes, and Chicano artist-poet legend Guillermo Gómez-Peña called “Mexercise” had viewers in stitches, and contrasted with the more somber tone below.