The border establishes the limit between self and other, whether the self is an individual or a nation. Geographic borders establish the limits of what any given society assumes ownership of. Maps are the most common visual expression of this human need to define the parameters of our physical world. Much art can be read as "maps" of different borders. Modern and contemporary artists have shown intense interest in appropriating maps and redrawing borders because of drastic cultural change related to their own lives: the socio-political upheavals experienced by so many peoples and countries across the world as a result of wars, conquests, and colonialism. These artist-inspired maps chart an alternative vision of global power relations that defy Euro-American hegemony.

In the late 1920s, the Surrealist Map of the World placed the Oceanic islands at the center of the globe, marginalizing the status of Europe and the United States. Significantly, the Surrealist map-makers placed the French word perdu, meaning "lost" or "ruined," across the continent of Latin America—as though the art and culture of that region were unpresentable.

Although Latin American art had been collected in Europe since the conquest, it has only been in the last half of the twentieth century that Latin American and Latino Artists have become central players in the global marketplace of art and culture. Images that remap the world or cross borders intrigue Latino and Latin American artists, who find themselves barely "on the map," and whose countries and cultures of origin may still bear the stigma of being considered perdu in the global imaginary.

The so-called Upside-down Map (1943) by the Uruguayan modernist Joaquin Torres Garcia became an icon in the history of Latin American re-visions of the world order. Placing the South Pole at the top of the globe, Garcia's map was a visual affirmation that he had created a modern "school of the south" in Montevideo that could rival whatever experimentation was going on in Paris or New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Many current artists and curators in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States continue this model of creating art centers in "peripheral" areas. Consider the phenomenal success of the Biennales held in Havana (Cuba), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), and San Juan (Puerto Rico) to recognize that positions are evening out in the global art scene. The sharp distinction between "mainstream" and "subculture" art is eroding, helped in part by some major art institutions founded by Puerto Ricans and Chicanos in once marginalized neighborhoods—the periphery—like East Harlem in New York City and East Los Angeles in California.

Yet, the issue of where the top is or who is on top seems beside the point for most contemporary Latino and Latin American artists, and so their images shift from the literal map to other kinds of images. What fuels the imaginations of recent artists is examining the process of crossing geographical, social, sexual, and psychological borders, and its implications on our sense of self and national identity. In looking at the work of artists of Latin American descent in the United States, I am struck by the repetition of certain tropes, especially the image of the "illegal" immigrant passing into this country by crossing a body of water, whether the Rio Grande from Mexico, or on a rubber raft across the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean. Artists of Mexican, Cuban, and Dominican descent seem to feel a special responsibility to describe the fates of illegal immigrants—even when the artists themselves were born and raised in the United States or entered the country with the proper visas and passports. The work by Latino artists from those groups is concerned with the experience of their compatriots who pass into the United States, the trauma of crossing and living as "illegals" under the suspicion of criminal trespass. For the past twenty years, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a Mexican performance artist, activist, and theorist, has been producing one of the most influential bodies of work on the topic of "illegal" border crossings. Much of Gomez-Peña's activism emphasizes the absurdity of policing borders in an age that has been de-territorialized by global capitalism and advanced technologies. Adopting the persona of "Border Brujo" ("Border Shaman"), Gomez-Peña has worked collaboratively with other artists in border cities like Tijuana (Mexico) and San Diego (California) to form a Border Arts Workshop in which participants staged public performances along the U.S. and Mexican borderline that dealt with the mythologies associated with immigration and crossing into "foreign" territory.

The gambler is also a figure that Latino artists use to describe a Latino immigrant's experience in the United States. Gambling evokes both the real betting games (numbers, dice, domino, races) popular among many immigrants, and the metaphor of risk and uncertainty. Anaida Hernandez's touching installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, Illegal Games (1999), had visitors spin roulette wheels marked with the possible scenarios a new immigrant might face on these shores: deportation, dying in transit, or toiling at a job far below the minimum wage.

Another predominant theme in Latino art in the United States is cultural fragmentation, and healing that fragmentation by piecing together disparate memories and experiences. The highly layered art of Juan Sanchez, for example, functions like a montage of the Puerto Rican experience. On the one hand, his mixed media paintings and installations reflect pride in a cultural identity that is bi-coastal and bilingual; and on the other hand, his work is critical of the socio-political forces that drove so many Puerto Ricans to leave their homeland.

Another theme of fragmentation deals with the distinction not only between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, Mexico, or other countries of origin, but within the Latino identity, between and among those Latino nationalities themselves. Pepón Osorio's installation Transboricua (1999) broadened the artist's concern with Puerto Rican identity to a global level. Noting that more Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York City and the northeast are becoming mixed, integrating Puerto Ricans with other Latin American populations, Osorio asked a group of multi-ethnic Latino children to describe their parents, themselves, and what they thought their future would be in the United States. Based on the children's description, he created a life-sized male figure whose costume combined the national symbols from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico-to name a few. Osorio installed the figure in a cage, using the cage both to symbolize the containment of this new "transcultural" human being and to pique the audience's curiosity about why and how public access to art and information is withheld. Transboricua (the name combines "trans," meaning crossing, and "Boricua," referring to Puerto Rican identity) appeared first in a department store in East Harlem and later in the galleries of El Museo del Barrio. For some viewers, the Transboricua figure represented a utopian ideal-the "Pan-American" male of the future-for others the statue was a monstrous mishmash of discrete Latino identities. That contradiction of audience responses represents the double edge of borders themselves: are they limits we should overcome, or a definition we need? This installation marked a new and transgressive turn in Osorio's work that directed itself to the Latino audience's sense of defensiveness and territoriality among and between themselves. Transboricua foreshadows the kind of border crossing that will capture the attention of younger Latino artists in the United States. This generation must come to terms with crossing borders, not only in relation to a North American audience, but also to other kinds of Latinos, as the Latin American population in the United States becomes larger and more multinational.

The challenge for the millennial generation will be to address and deconstruct the kinds of borders that stand in their way, while recognizing that life without borders is practically impossible. Human beings are psychologically "programmed" to create borders around themselves. The border establishes the limit between self and other, answering the question: what is inside and what is outside my domain? You cannot have a notion of self without a notion of the other. Conversely, it is equally human to want to transgress and transcend borders—to imagine going beyond our limitations. In the end, the Latino artists who will sustain our interest are those that confront these conflicting desires.

Yasmin Ramirez is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center of CUNY, and consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York City.