Objectives

The mission of United Fronteras is to bring together active and inactive works that leverage digital components to document the borderlands from multiple perspectives (literature, archives, art, oral histories, music, among others) from pre-colonial times to the twenty-first century. The selected projects will be featured through a digital map and various visualizations that will offer audiences a unique opportunity to meaningfully engage in the multi-dimensional layers of border spaces through multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional, community-based, and individual collaborations. This platform will also establish and maintain a digital record of projects that encompass the borderlands.

In the first phase of the project, the visualization will include brief descriptions of each documented project in Spanish and English. As we continue expanding the world map visualization, we aim to include additional languages. The goal of this initial phase is to bring together past, current, and developing projects with a digital component across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This phase also contains projects that have been created in past and recent years, that showcase relevant discourses of resistance and activism as well others that exhibit the local, regional and/or national cultural patrimony through various historical periods.

The goal of this project is to serve as a valuable resource for encountering the border and its diverse practices and to seek out the critical work held in this complex region. The project will create alternate spaces and provide resources related to the borderlands, thus becoming an intervention to negative representations of its communities, cultures, and space.

Global Borderlands

Borders are imaginary, geographic and man-made divisions that separate lands, people, and cultures. Borderlands are regions surrounding these imaginary yet enforced boundaries, where a third space, as proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa, is born. This third space is formed not only by the geographic land that it encompasses, but also by intersecting historical, cultural, linguistic, political, religious, economic, and transnational systems. It is important to observe and trace these intersections and their corresponding power systems and dynamics along this complex region that are interrelated but not always co-dependent. This arises from interactions, contacts, exchanges, and relations between the various components of identities that are in constant change and challenge established systems locally, nationally, and internationally. United Fronteras provides a digital directory of projects that document borderland regions using digital and/or technological components.

Currently, this project will map a third space through works that utilize a digital component on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The notion of a divided borderland is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she states, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [is an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country-a border culture” (25). Her third country metaphor predominantly describes a U.S. borderlands’ perspective; while the Mexican border is not fully considered, the wound continues to bleed. However, the third country that Anzaldúa references is cemented on a complex system of coexisting networks shaped by migrants and adjacent communities from both Mexico and the U.S. We believe that the notion of borderlands and border culture are a shared entity built by various communities since pre-colonial times, and not a divided region—as seen by many—or peripheral to the north and south. Through the visualization of the physical border from pre-colonial times to the present, this digital directory will trace the historical, cultural, social, political, and ecological changes that have taken place as the boundary shifts, whether these changes are caused by political motives or through community resistance.

This is a living Mission Statement that will evolve as the project continues to develop