Register now for virtual Show & Tell “Border Scholarship”

March 25, 2021
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Join us for our next virtual Show & Tell event, Tuesday, April 6th, 5:30-7:00PM AZ time (PDT).

Register here!

The University of Arizona is a leading institution for creative and innovative scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico border, with graduate students at the forefront of many community-engaged projects. At our next virtual Show & Tell event, five border-engaged graduate student scholars from diverse disciplines will share their stories and future directions for deepening  understandings of our border region.

Dr. Michelle Tellez, Assistant Professor of Mexican American Studies, will moderate this participatory virtual event.

Five panelists will present on their current projects, followed by audience Q+A:

Gloria Flores  |  Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Pendular Borders: A Work on Dance and Female Border-Crossing 

Pendular Borders challenges border-crossing dynamics through what I coin as a ‘binational pendulum-like mobility’. This project will reveal through the practice of dance and bodily movement the multiple identities and experiences lived by women who continuously traverse the US-Mexico Border. This project will deliver 1) a dance performance; 2) a collection of visual, performed and written testimonies made available on a website; 3) an article on the community-based methodology developed for Pendular Borders. This work portrays the ways in which stories of immigrants are part of the contemporary global history, and serves as an important example of how dance activates change and invites participation across socio-economic, political, racial and cultural backgrounds.

Luis Carrión |  Department of Latin American Studies

Mexican Migrants Return South: Transborder Testimonials of Resilience and Adaptation from New Arrival Community in Mexico City

This ethnographic film project focuses on return-migrants living and working in the burgeoning community in downtown Mexico City known as "Little LA." In recent years, 1.5 generation undocumented migrants -those brought across the border as young infants and living in the U.S.- have been forced to cross the border back to Mexico. Although they are "Mexican," these fully Americanized trans-border migrants are accustomed to living in the U.S., and they struggle to ground their identity in the sprawling urban landscape of one of the world's largest cities. This film asks, How does the collective trauma of deportation lead to community-building and the creation of a unified sense of belonging hundreds of miles from the U.S. Mexico border? 

 

Diana Peralta  |  Fred Fox School of Music

Songs of Eagles and Stars

In the present climate, the importance of being involved in border healing has increased. My project uses this as the basis of its purpose: The objective is to record two videos with songs carefully chosen after specific research to clearly identify the characteristic link of the people from this border-zone through time. The videos will bring together musicians from both sides of the border, and the songs will be sung in the two languages (Spanish and English) using the words appropriate for each cultural identity. These videos will be edited so we can see images from both countries and the singers and musicians in their own atmospheres and circumstances.

Daniela Torres Cirina  |  Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT)

Transnational Voices: Multimodal Narratives From The Borderlands

In this project, I will collect, analyze and showcase multimodal narratives of Spanish as Heritage Language students, from Intermediate level courses, that reflect on their multicultural and multilingual identities. A multimodal narrative is a way of composing that does not privilege just the linguistic form. Using this approach, students will have the opportunity to express their cultural and linguistic diversities through multiple modes (texts, sounds, visuals, movements and gestures). The multimodal nature of these narratives will have the potential to blossom multilingual ways of creating meaning by students, which sometimes can be difficult to achieve through traditional composing pedagogies. The process of developing their narratives, followed by the recognition they will receive by being displayed to the public, will honor the students’ life experiences, their family ties, their communities and culture.

Cindy Trejo  |   Department of Mexican American Studies

Logro Educativo Testimonios

The US-Mexico border is surrounded by false narratives of Mexican immigrants and their drain on society. This project highlights six scholars from the border town of San Luis to challenge this false majoritarian message. This project will highlight intimate, thought-provoking individual experiences beginning with their junior high early college program to becoming college graduates. Now, young professionals or graduate students their stories will advance understanding of education as a means of social justice, especially for borderland, first-generation and underrepresented students in higher education. Because images from television, movies, and documentary film, rarely highlight underrepresented minorities as valuable citizens and a foundation of strength to our country (Parker, 2012), this project will create new ways of promoting the cultural wealth and resources that inspire and support academic development. Logro Educativo Testimonios is a creative project that illuminates and honors the voices of scholarly People of Color through storytelling performance.

See full Spring 2021 Show & Tell event schedule here.