By Shane Lynch, American Studies PhD student, University of Kansas
United Fronteras “Mex-USA Digital Exhibit” is an innovative form of registering information from areas around the Mexico and United States borderlands that incorporates digital projects from multiple perspectives. This bilingual site offers a reimagined look at the Mexico-USA borderlands from pre-colonial to modern day, which is illustrated through projects that have technical and/or digital components. The exhibit is an ongoing public dialogue that is recording and categorizing sites that are in-progress, active, and inactive. This consensual archive maps the past, present, and future through various forms of digital media is an inventive way of creating a digital cultural record for public usage.
Documenting the borderlands through this nonconventional method creates a space for conversation that builds on localized knowledges to wide spectrum of scholarship. The exhibit showcases not only mapping projects from across the borderlands, but activism, recordings, and histories from different perspectives. The website is in English and also available in Spanish/Español. The exhibit is easy to navigate due to the minimum computing structure. The site provides a thumbnail of the projects it is presenting and metadata about the project gathered from the project’s website or directly from creator/team. The United Frontera team built the site with Wax and it was deposited into GitHub, a minimal computing method. This expands the usability of the site and offers this conversation to a wider audience. Overall, this borderland project creates a space for multiple voices that are expressed in different technological and digital formats to create a localized perspective to a multinational perspective.
The multiple perspectives represented in the 1st phase of United Fronteras are digital interpretations of the past, present, and future. This site highlights projects from pre-colonial era, for example, Native Land is a mapping project that shows Indigenous Nations areas before colonialism. This diverse project also provides various archives, such as The Bexar Archives Online 1717-1805, which is a digital record of official Spanish documents that from Coahuila and Texas (Mexican state) and the Spanish province of Texas. The exhibit moves the conversation to the present with projects like the Puente Human Rights Movement out of Phoenix, Arizona. Their ongoing battle against the unjust actions taking place currently at Mexico-USA border is evolving activism. Another example, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival is an opportunity for pressing social issues to be expressed visually. The festivals give a voice to the subaltern through short films that expand the cinematic arts. An intriguing in-progress work is the Family Reunion Project which provides undocumented immigrants and their family virtual reality postcards. The pre-recorded immersive 360° VR Postcards can be rendered photogrammetrically into 3D recreations of rooms. These examples, along with the other exciting projects provided in the exhibit promote a variousness of perspectives through digital and technical projects.
United Fronteras is a cross institution and interdisciplinary team that not only provided the exhibit, but work to provide more information to continue to recreate the image of the Mexican-USA borderlands and other border regions. Its exhibit represents a digital cultural record that initiates an ongoing dialogue to areas that are in constant change.
Additionally, it is an ongoing project that is a consensual archive of localized and international systems of knowledge. The information contained in this cultural record contains voices from multiple backgrounds, thus providing different prospective from multiple sources. These sources have been evaluated by United Fronteras team and get permission to use the projects in the archive. The site provides links of the projects and others such as Twitter and email, when available. This promotes dialogue between the public and projects that can be useful in furthering the conversion of the Mexico-USA border and the many aspects associated with that region. The “Mexico-USA exhibit” provides multiple forms of information that illustrate the diversity of the borderlands.
This reinterpretation of history is good source of materials for research into the borderlands that range from primary sources, such as official state documents to art. This range of interpretation provides the viewer to explore different aspect of a general area through multiple time periods. The United Fronteras “Mexico- USA Exhibit” is an excellent recourse of history, activism, and multiple knowledge systems from different points in time.
Work cited
United Fronteras. 2020. https://unitedfronteras.github.io/. 8-6-20.
“United Fronteras Mex-USA Exhibit.” United Fronteras. 2020. https://unitedfronteras.github.io/ufexhibition_mexusa/. 8-6-20.