A Pair Of Tucsonans Collaborate On A Look At Mexico Today. By Gregory McNamee A FEW YEARS ago, just before the passage of NAFTA, a group of street artists in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, painted a provocative mural they called "Brigada por la Paz." That peace brigade was straight out of the history books, featuring Villa and Carranza and Juarez himself, but it also included cholos and refugees, street toughs and priests and capitalists--a cast of characters straight out of the present, and guaranteed to trouble a border patrolman's dreams. The mural raised eyebrows, and hackles. Not long after it went up, someone--the president of a multinational corporation, some say--took exception to its hard populist message. And so, in the dark of night, a team of municipal employees covered the mural with a thick coat of tan paint. Tucson psychiatrist and photographer Virgil Hancock got there before the city employees did. "Brigada por la Paz," a masterpiece of folk art, graces the cover of his new book Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge (UA Southwest Center/University of New Mexico Press, $24.95) and sets the tone for the images within it. Made up of 40 images taken throughout Chihuahua between 1990 and 1994, during the height of the spectacularly corrupt Salinas regime, Hancock's book is a fine documentary that captures the feel of the dusty, sparse Chihuahuan Desert and its booming cities. A long essay by Tucson writer Charles Bowden--who has just won a prestigious Lannan Foundation award in recognition of his body of work--accompanies Hancock's photographs. Bowden's vision of Chihuahua is darker than Hancock's, more attuned to the Mexico of Robert Rodriguez's film Desperado (shot in the neighboring state of Coahuila) than the tequila-and-bullfights blandishments of the tourist board. Bowden spends much of his time examining the premise that the boundaries of nation-states, "the places of imaginary lines...backed by heat sensors, wire, guns, and law" are disintegrating in the maw of history. "This is the place of the edge," he continues, "the ground where the power of the nations recedes and the drive of the human beings accelerates. It is largely a hot and dry place, brown is the basic color, and here and there big mountains rise up and wave green knobs at the sky." The driven human beings with whom Bowden talks are not so much the NAFTA boosters and green-revolution apostles and exponents of the new transnational information economy, but the familiar figures of the past who, Bowden reckons, will define the future: the drug runners and pimps, the drunk turistas and First World runaways, the politicos and rancheros of the cattle-scarred Mexican state. His text likely will please the Ciudad Juarez Chamber of Commerce about as much as "Brigada por la Paz" did. Hancock's remarkable photographs, depicting the bustling streets of Ciudad Chihuahua, the tawny hills of Hidalgo del Parral and points in between, may likely have the same effect; unsparing and truthful, they offer a view of Mexico far removed from that of the travel-agency poster, and in many ways far more attractive. Virgil Hancock and Charles Bowden sign Chihuahua: Pictures from the Edge from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday, November 1, at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth Ave. Call 624-7370 for information.

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