Pensamientos Genericos

Reopening Generica

I started this blog in 2003 as a way to think through Tijuana and the border. At the time, it was less about producing arguments and more about registering conditions. The city, its informal logics, its political economy, and its constant negotiation with constraint made architecture impossible to treat as a closed discipline. That starting point still matters.

What changes now is not the subject, but the position from which I am writing.

Oklahoma enters this project as a productive displacement. It operates under a different political economy, different land logics, and a very different academic apparatus. Those differences are not incidental. They make certain assumptions visible that would otherwise remain naturalized. Writing from here introduces distance and contrast, and that contrast sharpens rather than weakens the questions that originally emerged at the border.

This also changes the nature of the writing. I am no longer only describing conditions from proximity. I am embedded in other systems simultaneously. Academic structures, pedagogical frameworks, institutional expectations, and emerging technologies are not external objects of critique. They are part of the environment in which the work now unfolds. That embeddedness complicates the position, but it also makes it more precise and engaging.

AI enters the blog in this way. Not as a topic to be covered, and not as a celebration of tools, but as a condition that reshapes how architecture is represented, taught, and imagined. It affects labor, authorship, and decision-making in ways that are still uneven and unresolved. Writing from within that shift matters more than commenting on it from a distance.

The border, then, is no longer only a geographic reference. It becomes a way of thinking across mismatched systems, uneven developments, and competing imaginaries. Tijuana and Oklahoma are not opposites. They are sites that reveal each other through contrast.

This is not a restart in the sense of beginning again. The archive remains. Older texts stay as they are, with their limitations intact. New writing will sit next to them, sometimes aligned, sometimes in tension. Time is part of the material here, not something to be edited out.

Generica continues as a space to think, test, and observe. The questions persist. The conditions have changed.