Abstract

Welcome to Otay Mountain is an alternative field guide to the Otay Mountain Wilderness Area in San Diego County, California near the US-Mexico border. It was created after visiting Otay Mountain in February 2019 shortly after the Trump administration declared a National Emergency at the border. Welcome to Otay Mountain offers a political ecology reading of the US-Mexico border through the lens of rare and endemic plant conservation. It asks readers to consider a political moment in which plants may be afforded more legal protections than asylum seekers attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Risograph printed at Baltimore Print Studios in Baltimore, MD in April 2019. In 2023, a related text which discusses the zine and approaching more-than-human borderscapes through sound recording and listening was published in the journal Geopolitics: Margulies, J. (2024). Sounding out borderscapes: A sonic geography of the US–Mexico border at Otay Mountain, California. Geopolitics, 29(2), 520-551.

Printing

This zine was originally produced as a 3 color Risograph print, which requires printing multiple black and white versions with different layers. However, the scanned copy reflects the printed full color form. The zine is 40 pages, so can be printed for double-sides booklet printing. The original scale of the zine was 3x5”.