Partnerships

Galeria Mitotera (Mel Dominguez Art LLC) is an art gallery and community space celebrating southern Arizona's Latinx culture, uplifting artists of color, and creating a safe space for community members and artists to inspire one another through art and togetherness. It provides art programming that highlights the culture in the City of South Tucson and the Southside in a welcoming way for the community. Galeria Mitotera seeks out and connects with our community's Latinx and Indigenous artists and makers. It gives them the support they need to create their art and art business and showcase their artwork. In addition, Galeria Mitotera coordinates and serves as a central hub for the I-19 Arts Collective, where local art groups, museums, and Ambos Nogales partners collaborate to create new border arts grant competitions and residencies. It also holds exhibitions and artist convenings.

The Museo de Arte builds on the 2019-2021 Fronteridades microgrant program Nuevos Creadores to support public art projects by emerging artists in northern Sonora, Mexico border communities. Museo de Arte partners with the binational I-19 Arts Collective and UArizona's College of Fine Arts faculty members to showcase the awarded projects. In addition, Museo de Arte coordinates with the Confluencenter to exhibit their work.

The Coalición de Derechos Humanos (CDH) is a human rights advocacy organization dedicated to organizing a democratic, all-inclusive, and effective community response to the long-lived violations of residents of our border communities. CDH creates processes that uplift community voices and provides space for dialogue and discussion of ideas to bring change to policies and practices that violate community human rights. CDH participates in state, local, national, and international efforts for advocating, teaching, and helping communities reclaim their rights. With 30 years of experience, CDH develops positive, respectful, and dynamic border narratives. CDH partners with the Confluencenter to elevate migrant and asylum-seekers narratives through plays, the collection of migrant and refugee testimonies, the creation of a border mural, and the creation of a monument commemorating migrants who have lost their lives crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

March Waters Inc. is a creative content production studio led by photojournalist Gareth Smit working in partnership with UArizona Regents' Professor and Professor in Linguistics Ofelia Zepeda to implement the O'odham Arts Exchange: Where the Clouds are Formed project. The O'odham Arts Exchange is a collaborative documentary art project that combines photography, poetry, and critical text. It invites O'odham artists and community responses to create a place for dialogue and reflection about how the U.S.-Mexico border has divided the ancestral lands of the Tohono O'odham.

The Gender and Women Studies department is partnering with the Confluencter to elevate the Black voices from the U.S.-Mexico border, critical to the history and contemporary understandings of 'place' (and experience) in the Southwest.

The department of Gender and Women Studies at the University of Arizona promotes and supports teaching, research, and outreach that works to contest the historical, ongoing, and pervasive gender-based oppressions within society. The Gender and Women's Studies department aims to be an evolving interdisciplinary forum for:

• The integration of feminist approaches to all possible areas of scholarly investigation.
• The study of the constitution of women's lives in diverse social contexts.
• The analysis of feminisms.
• The exploration of women's movements.
• The study of the inextricably interconnected processes by which social formations such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation are constructed.

David Taylor, professor, and Alejandro Macias, Assistant Professor of the College of Fine Arts, support the development of the I-19 Arts Collective program. They also advise the Border Scholars program, which includes graduate and faculty fellowships and undergraduate internship. 

Dr. Robin Reineke, Assistant Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center, and Colin Deeds, Assistant Director at the Latin American Studies department, advise the graduate and faculty fellowships programs, part of the Border Scholars program. 

Dr. Daniel Martinez, Associate Professor at the School of Sociology, assists on the Border Scholar program and coordinates a lecture series by the UArizona’s Binational Migration Institute.

Image

During 2019-2021 and in conjunction with the Southwest Folklife Alliance, Fronteridades supported and expanded the efforts of VozFrontera, a center for youth engagement, leadership, and local arts incubation in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, in addition to other border arts support. VozFrontera has established a pipeline of border youth scholars and professionals to educational opportunities. In addition to sustaining the breadth of its efforts in ambos Nogales, VozFrontera has expanded its activity to Douglas/Agua Prieta further east on the border.