SPRING 2022

Arte, Cultura y Frontera with Galeria Mitotera

May 10, 2022

On Tuesday, May 10th Confluencenter and Galeria Mitotera hosted their last Show & Tell of the semester at MSA Annex! This Show & Tell was all about local art! Our audience were part of an insightful conversation with three local Tucson, Native, and LatinX artists Ruben Urrea Moreno, Aliana "Rogue" Peirce, Elijah Garcia as they spoke on their work and motivation for creating art.

Local south Tucson art gallery founders Melissa Brown-Dominguez and Mel Dominguez also took to the mic to show their plans under their Fronteridades funded project, the I-19 Border Arts Collective.

Watch the livestream

Ruben Urrea Moreno (@rubenumoreno)
Elijah Garcia (@emgk77)
Alaina "Rogue" Peirce, (@roguetucsonart)
Mel Dominguez & Melissa Brown-Dominguez (Galeria Mitotera)

Fronterizas: Reporting on the Border

March 30, 2022

In this virtual Show & Tell we hear directly from our panelists made of women with experience interacting with and reporting on borderland communities in Arizona and beyond. Each will speak on their valuable experiences, journalistic perspectives, and tell their stories in a panel discussion. A Q&A session will proceed afterwards.

The panel group is made up of the following:

Liliana Soto
- Award-winning journalist Liliana Soto is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona School of Journalism, an assistant director for the school's Bilingual Journalism Program and a freelance bilingual multimedia journalist.
  - She has 10 years of experience in broadcast news in English and Spanish with a specialization in bilingual investigative journalism, immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border, Latino issues, marginalized communities, and Mexican-centric Latin Culture.
Kendal Blust
- Kendal Blust, an Arizona native, currently reports from KJZZ’s bureau in Hermosillo, Sonora, focusing on business and economic relationships between Arizona and northern Mexico.
Angela Gervasi
- Angela Gervasi is a writer, audio producer and photographer, currently working as a reporter for the Nogales International, a local newspaper covering the vibrant border communities of Ambos Nogales and Santa Cruz County.
Maritza Felix
- Maritza L. Felix is an award-winning freelance journalist, producer and writer in Arizona. She is the founder of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service that connects people in Arizona and Sonora primarily through WhatsApp and social media. She is co-producer and co-host of Comadres al Aire.

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Fronterizas: Strategies for Creativity and Persistence

February 23, 2022

In this virtual Show & Tell we hear directly from our panelists made of women from the border. Each will present their accomplishments, and work they are currently doing to uplift border communities in Ambos Nogales and Douglas, AZ, and address border issues through creative artforms.

Stephanie Bermudez, Founder & CEO at Startup Unidos - Stephanie Bermudez is an Ambos Nogales native and latinx women responsible for Startup Unidos, an organization built to cultivate collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship in underserved border communities since 2015.

Stephanie is actively working with startups and aspiring youth across the Arizona-Sonora by developing and implementing Startup Unidos entrepreneurial and workforce education, capacity building and youth programs; such as, Waste Not: Borderlands Innovations in Food Waste Management, Emprende Amigo and Borderoots.

Her innovative ideas create cross-border communities and environments that expand on binational relationships to encourage collaboration and co-inspiration. She focuses on building up entrepreneurial communities and networks; including events, training, consulting, and research that extends beyond Southern Arizona.

Jenea Sanchez, co-founder of Border Arts Corridor (BAC) - M. Jenea Sanchez is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reflects her lived experiences as a border resident of Douglas, AZ / Agua Prieta, SON. She is a fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s Leadership Institute, a fellow of Mellon-Fronteridades Creative Scholars program, and the Communications Manager for the Art Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. Sanchez’s work has been exhibited at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Arizona Art Museum, MOCA Tucson, and the U.S. - Mexico Border fence.

She is co-founder of Border Arts Corridor (BAC), a 501 (c) 3 non-profit arts organization providing the borderlands community an immersive arts district through bi-national art walks, workshops, performances, public dialogues, and artist residencies. BAC was awarded a Governor’s Arts Award in 2016 and has been featured in the New York Times for producing binational art installations and performances on the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
Susana Sedgwick, local filmmaker - Susana Sedgwick has made four films on the US/Mexico border in Nogales over the last ten years. Two are short documentaries that can be seen on YouTube; Tonito, and The Wall. Her feature length films, N'achoLand, (Slang for not your land), and The Last Straw, (An allegory about Western water and energy waste), have been shown at the Nogales Film festival.

Her background is in Cultural Anthropology, which over time morphed into performance art, writing and filmmaking. Susan is bilingual which enables her to reach out to voiceless migrants from Cuba, Mexico, Central America and more, whose stories she collects while volunteering, subsequently becoming friends and keeping up with some of them. It is her great hope to help escalate cultural collaboration between the two Nogales, taking down the wall between us and replacing concertina wire with open air concerts and art.

Watch the livestream

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