Confluencias: Voices and Visions of the Arizona-Sonora Border funds individuals, collectives and organizations conducting their work in the I-19 Corridor from Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona, to Tucson, and Southern Arizona, including Douglas-Agua Prieta and tribal members from the Tohono O'odham Nation and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Funded community members work on art and education-based projects exploring the shifting political, social, cultural, and personal landscapes of the moment. Proposals lift the stories and amplify the voices of people living on the Arizona-Sonora border.
Andres Caballero
IN PLACE
IN PLACE is a multimedia installation that recreates a Mexican family’s dining room from the borderlands. The work combines a full-scale domestic environment with two contrasting video elements: one grounded in oral histories and the reenactment of family’s memories, and the other generated in real time through computer-vision systems that scan and track visitors. Together, these moving images establish a tension between lived experience and automated observation, redirecting the gaze from intimate domestic life to the bodies of those who enter the space. By placing family, technology, and memory in direct confrontation, the project examines the endurance of presence and resilience under constant monitoring in the region. The goal is to present IN PLACE outside of the museum context and bring it into communities along the Arizona-Sonora border, beginning with a presentation at the Grand Theater in Douglas, Arizona. A central objective of this stage is to expand the project’s materials through new oral histories gathered at each location. As well as getting professional documentation inside each of the venues it is shown. As the installation travels, it becomes both a site intervention and a platform for communal participation, allowing local participants to share stories connected to domestic life, memory, and everyday experience in the borderlands.
Héctor Emmanuel Carrizoza Romero
Muralismo contemporáneo. Memorias culturales de Nogales, Sonora
El objetivo de este proyecto busca recopilar, conservar y justificar la importancia del muralismo en Nogales Sonora. Creando un compendio de 5 murales realizados por 5 artistas locales en los últimos 5 años que sean relevantes para la ciudad. Incluir un análisis profundo de cada obra, entrevistando al autor en un formato de entrevista donde contestarán preguntas específicas sobre su técnica, intención, significado de su obra, además de resaltar sus inquietudes sobre cómo es ser un artista en la frontera. Para la realización de este compendio se realizará una encuesta ciudadana online de unas 100 personas para dar contexto al lector sobre la percepción actual del arte urbano en su ciudad.
Anna Flores
Natty's Shuttle Service
Natty’s Shuttle Service is a poetry project using poetic inquiry methods to collect audio recordings of passengers riding a regional shuttle service between Phoenix, Tucson, and Nogales. The project captures the mundane and human logistics of these long-standing commutes, which include homecomings, work, ceremony, shopping, and family care, as well as life after separation or deportation. By speaking with children, elders, drivers, and daily commuters, the project captures reflections on labor, ceremony, and relational networks. Recordings are transcribed and interwoven with original poems, producing a hybrid literary work. This work challenges the stereotypes and interrogation imposed on border-dwelling communities and mixed-status families like my own. My writing practice considers language as a common good to be worked with individually and communally. This project continues my practice of working with language communally, while deepening my exploration of how poetry grasps embodied experiences of the borderlands.
Universidad de Sonora & Colegio de la Frontera Norte Nogales
Voces de la Frontera: narrativas transfronterizas desde el arte y la educación
Dolores Aragón de la Universidad de Sonora e Hilda García del Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Nogales presentan el proyecto Voces de la Frontera. El proyecto tiene como objetivo amplificar las voces de artistas y educadores de Ambos Nogales (Nogales, Sonora y Nogales, Arizona) mediante la producción de una serie de programas de radio que documenten y difundan narrativas locales en la región fronteriza Sonora–Arizona pero con alcance regional. De manera específica, este proyecto tiene los siguientes objetivos específicos: i) visibilizar perspectivas culturales y educativas subrepresentadas en Ambos Nogales; ii) fortalecer el diálogo transfronterizo entre actores comunitarios, académicos y culturales; y iii) promover la producción de conocimiento desde la comunidad a través de medios accesibles.
Andrea Esmeralda Hernandez Pina and Gema Julieth Hernandez Pina
Border Voices Archive: Stories of Daily Transborder Students
Border Voices Archive is a community-based and seed-artistic storytelling initiative that centers and elevates the lived experiences of transborder students who cross daily between Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona to attend school in the United States. The main objective is to create a collective archive that brings forward voices often absent from public representation of border life. Through conversations, photographic portraits, and short written narratives, this project is a collective and personal effort that will plant the seed for developing an IRB proposal to expand this project capacity as part of a long-standing effort. The project is co-led by two sisters who have personally experienced this transborder educational reality. The project is grounded on sharing their experiences and revealing that, while daily student border crossing is a common phenomenon in Nogales, it is rarely expressed through the voices of those who live it. As a seed project, the sisters’ efforts will be centered around documenting self-reflections and having informal conversations with other students who experience the same journey. Their stories will be treated as lived expressions that will be carefully shaped into short written pieces or audio that reflect the rhythm, challenges, and meaning of “cruzar al otro lado.” The final product will be the Border Voices Archive, a curated artistic collection presented in both digital and print formats where the sisters’ testimonios will be documented and additional reflections from informal conversations will be included as part of the archive.
Oscar Fabian Jimenez Mares
The Alchemy of Dust
The Alchemy of Dust is a documentary project, a visual log of transmutation: how collective effort turns harshness into fertility, and how, in times marked by division, community is sown like the finest of harvests. The story takes us to the border region of Sonora, specifically to the community that connects Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Here, for more than two decades, Douglaprieta Trabaja (DPT) has operated—a community project founded in 2004 that defies the logic of the border as a wall. In its beginnings, the project had two locations, one on each side of the international line. Between 2011 and 2013, the Douglas location disintegrated, leaving only the work on the Mexican side standing. That physical rupture, that dividing wall, becomes the backdrop for the project. Yet the heart of the documentary does not beat in the wound of separation, but in the scar that the community has woven around it.
Linda Laird & Husi Cazares
Supporting Language and Cultural Retention on the Tohono O’odham Nation
The goal of the project is to support and encourage language and cultural retention in Tohono O’odham families by providing books that show their culture in their language. Desert Ink Press, a project of Books for Classrooms has published five bilingual Tohono Oodham/English books by Husi Cazares and Kerri Ann Cazares. Each book includes a glossary and a QR code for Tohono O’odham pronunciation practice. Philip Joe Plays Waila: Tohono O’odham Dance Music My First Book of O’odham Ha”icu Doakum/Animals My First Book of O’odham Mamastagi/Colors My First Book of O’odham Nunamilo/Numbers My First Book of O’odham Nanko Ma:s Ce:ksan/Shapes The books will be given at no charge directly to families through literacy events coordinated by the O’odham Ni’oki Ki: Language Center at Tohono O’odham Community College this summer at four community literacy events throughout the Tohono O’odham Nation. The events will be held at the Tohono Odham Cultural Museum, Salt River Public Library, Hanam Ke:k Recreation Center and San Xavier Education Center.
Maria Leyva, Santos Leyva and Johny Gary
Uu Woi Wakila/The Skinny Coyote: Seven Stories from Hiak Vatwe
Uu Woi Wakila/The Skinny Coyote is an illustrated bilingual storybook of Hiaki (Yaqui) children’s stories, as told by elder Santos Leyva. We have selected seven of the many stories told by Mr. Leyva, all of which feature the Skinny Coyote as the main character. These traditional stories are the birthright of every Hiaki child but are not available to most tribal members due to language attrition and the shift away from the oral storytelling tradition. Furthermore, printed materials in the Hiaki language are few and far between, and this book could be helpful to tribal members working towards bringing the Hiaki language into their home and lives. Finally, they are great stories suited for children of all ages and ethnicities, and appropriate to share broadly, to share the rich Hiaki storytelling tradition with the world.
Berlin Loa, Christopher Loa and Isabel Vargas
Intangible Sun: Chicano Art and Storytelling
Intangible Sun is a community-centered art exhibit and engagement event that explores Chicano culture in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands through the lens of borderlands theory. The project’s primary goals are: (1) to amplify the lived experiences, artistic expressions, and cultural knowledge of Chicanos in borderlands communities; (2) to create a collaborative space where artists, storytellers, and residents can share narratives that challenge dominant representations of Chicanos; and (3) to foster dialogue and reflection on identity, hybridity, migration, and belonging of and by Chicano identity. Grounded in borderlands theory, particularly the understanding of the border as a dynamic, lived space rather than a fixed line, this project views the region as a site of cultural convergence, resilience, and creativity. The exhibit will emphasize interdisciplinary approaches to understanding border life, highlighting the intersections of history, politics, and everyday lived experience.
Claudia Mariel Miranda Ramirez
Can we dance to the rhythm of factory machines?
Can we dance to the rhythm of factory machines? proposes the development of a sound-based sculptural installation. The work expands a research project I have been developing over the past two years on border communities, labor, and the forms of epistemic resistance that emerge among women working in industrial factory environments. Over the past two years, I have collected a series of audio interviews with factory workers in which we discuss everyday strategies of survival, forms of collective organization within workplaces, and the ways women support each other within their communities. These testimonies contribute to a living archive of workers’ knowledge and experience. The proposed artwork transforms this research into a sound-based sculptural installation. activating the exhibition space with an immersive composition made from industrial rhythms and human voices. Sound becomes a form of archival practice in this installation: the mechanical cadence of production lines intertwines with workers’ testimonies, revealing how bodies, machines, and time become synchronized through labor.
Evan Long Martin-Casler
Punking Borders: Chicanismo in Sonoran Alternative Music Scenes
This project hopes to document the very special cultural synthesis that typifies the punk scenes in Sonoran Arizona. Blending subcultural practices associated with Chicano culture—e.g., lowriders, aesthetic and lyrical references to Aztlan—and those associated with punk culture—e.g., impromptu venues, loud music, modified and outlandish fashion—the alternative music scenes in Sonoran Arizona shows that the divides between these subcultures have always been purely conceptual and not practical or actual. In truth, in this region, these scenes have always been imbricated, bonded by shared values of do-it-yourself culture, close community engagement, and skepticism of mainstream authority structures. This project hopes to shine a light on the local history of these scenes in Arizona, especially as they are often more readily associated with other cities, and it hopes to highlight key figures in the region who are currently working to uplift and further synthesize these communities, a synthesis that is especially urgent now, as coalitional politics and resource sharing are valuable frameworks for helping our community members threatened by police, ICE, and increasing wealth inequality.
Salvavasion
Through Our Own Lens: Photography & Animation Workshop
Through Our Own Lens: Border Youth Photography & Animation Lab is a one‑week summer workshop designed specifically for young teens ages 11–14 who are from families supported through the work of Salvavision. The project introduces participants to photography and animation as tools for creative expression, storytelling, and cultural reflection. The workshop goals are: 1) Provide young teens with hands-on instruction in photography and animation within a supportive learning environment. 2) Encourage participants to observe and reflect on their everyday surroundings, relationships, and experiences of the border through image-making. 3) Build foundational artistic skills—including visual storytelling, design, composition, image creation, image sequencing and storytelling. 4) Foster confidence, curiosity, collaboration, and a sense of belonging through creative exploration.