Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula's Dead Letter Office (1997) unfolds as a fragmented photographic narrative in which political and economic scenarios from San Diego and Baja California intersect within a shared geography. Between San Diego and Ensenada, industrial sites, maquiladoras, cruise ships, military presence, and maritime infrastructure form a single system of influence. The power dynamics behind the global trade in the Pacific and tourism are shaped by political economy.

Within this shifting terrain, spaces of leisure and production blur into one another. Cruise ships drift past industrial ports, factories and maquiladoras sit within reach of naval surveillance, and the coastal route between San Diego and Ensenada becomes a corridor where commodities, workers, and images circulate together. Sekula’s essay does not simply document these sites; it reveals a territory structured by overlapping regimes of mobility and control, where the promise of global exchange remains inseparable from the conditions of labor and power that sustain it.