Borderland artists, poets, journalists and other regional “culture bearers” will gather in Tucson this weekend for a symposium challenging dominant media narratives about the US-Mexico border by centering the work of those who live and create there.
The two-day symposium includes a free public event on Saturday night at Tucson’s Museum of Contemporary Art to celebrate the launch of University of Arizona’s “Reclaiming the Border Narrative” digital archive, a grant-funded online project three years in the making.
Archival work empowers community members to collect and preserve their own stories and creative work, said Javier Duran, founding director of the UA’s Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry, an archival partner in the project. It aims to elevate voices from the border and fill gaps in the historical record through collaboration with dozens of borderlands creators.
“Archives are not just esoteric spaces that are kept in an institution or library, but archives are also a way to build community,” Duran said. “Border narratives not only get neglected, but hijacked, by mainstream media. … This is an attempt to bring the local narratives of the border into a more prominent light.”
Saturday’s celebration will feature a keynote address by renowned Mexican-American author and poet Luis Alberto Urrea. Among his works are the nonfiction book, “The Devil’s Highway,” the true story of a group of 26 migrants’ deadly 2001 journey through the southern Arizona desert, and the novel, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter,” a fictionalized account of Urrea’s own family legend, which he spent 20 years researching and writing.
For those with deep roots in the borderlands, national media coverage often rings false and unfamiliar, says Maritza Félix, Mexican journalist and founder of Conecta Arizona, a nonprofit bilingual news outlet based in Phoenix. Félix, who launched Conecta Arizona during the pandemic, will be a speaker and panel moderator during the symposium’s invitation-only portion.
In panel discussions across the country, Félix said she’ll often start by asking, “What is the first thing you think of when I say the word ‘border’?”
In New York, the response is often “asylum seekers,” Félix said. “If I ask in Portland, they’ll say drugs and smuggling and coyotes.”
But the answer is different in border communities where, for many, daily life and family ties routinely transcend the physical border barrier, she said.
“If I ask this question (about what the word ‘border’ brings to mind) in southern Texas or Arizona, they will say: my wedding dress, the tamales, my kids’ soccer tournament that they have across the border. They say music, and love,” she said. “So it matters who tells the story.”
This weekend’s symposium stems from the larger “Reclaiming the Border Narrative” project, a partnership between the Ford Foundation and The Center for Cultural Power, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.
The Center for Cultural Power, led by women of color and based in Oakland, Calif., offers fellowships and training to mostly indigenous artists and artists of color, many of whom will be featured in the Tucson symposium, said Favianna Rodriguez, co-founder and president of the nonprofit.
“We believe very strongly in the power of art and culture to challenge engrained, dominant narratives that stand in the way of progress,” Rodriguez said. “When you Google the border region, so much of the content — the TV shows, the articles, the cultural content — is not reflecting the stories of the people who live there and who are experiencing a very resilient and beautiful region.”
Politicians show up in border region for photo ops in front of the border wall, using the region as a political prop, said Duran of the UA’s Confluence Center.
“We have a lot of people coming from different places to create a border representation that is convenient for their agendas,” he said. “The border is not just immigration. We have our largest commercial partner next door (in Mexico.) There’s a lot of interdependence in many different aspects that get overlooked, and that includes culture and the arts.”
The UA’s Confluence Center is an interdisciplinary center that facilitates research and creative projects through mini-grants, and much of the work it supports has gravitated toward border issues, Duran said. In 2018, the center got a $800,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project called Fronteridades, which elevates local border narratives.
Their work got the attention of the Ford Foundation, Duran said, which awarded a $1.18 million grant to the university in 2022 for the digital archive project. Grantees of the project will finally get a chance to meet in person during the Tucson symposium, he said.
“Imagine another way”
A few decades ago, the border region was dramatically different, Rodriguez said. Today, a militarized border barrier divides human and animal populations, severing interconnected ecosystems and complicating cross-border exchange, she said.
“There is room for us to imagine another way, and that is our power as cultural creators. We don’t assume these narratives are frozen in place. They are the status quo, but the status quo can shift,” she said. “It’s going to take other kinds of stories to shift that (perception).”
Uplifting artists, as well as “culture bearers” — people who are the keepers of ancestral traditions, such as maintaining an indigenous language — can help others “imagine another way forward,” Rodriguez said.
This weekend’s symposium, which features a keynote address by award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, also focuses on the importance of representative journalism that reflects the lived experiences of its subjects, rather than externally imposed narratives, organizers say.
For Félix, it’s crucial to meet binational news consumers on the platforms they actually use. During the pandemic, her relatives in Mexico were receiving and sharing a lot of misinformation related to COVID-19 through the WhatsApp messaging platform, she said.
With the help of a grant from the “Reclaiming the Border Narrative” project, Félix decided to publish Conecta Arizona’s journalism on the WhatsApp messaging app, which is widely used throughout Latin America not only for personal communication, but for sharing memes and news stories through large group chats and channels. Her “Conecta Arizona” channel, and its related “Cruzando Líneas“ podcast, now reaches thousands of people, she said.
“WhatsApp is our jam. It’s where our community is,” she said.
Félix also hosts daily “cafecitos” on WhatsApp, in the form of a group chat that she opens up to member participation for one hour each day, in order to hear from her readers on the topics they’re interested in, from the Oscars to politics, she said.
She’s now training community members in reporting techniques, fact-checking and journalism ethics, she said.
“For us, it’s not just the story,” she said. “It is crucial to understand the most valuable thing is who tells the story, as well.”
