Border Stories, Online Spaces: Digital Activism and Resistance Journalism through BorderlandsDH
By Annette Zapata, PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant, Hispanic Studies Department, University of Houston
I grew up on the US-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley-Tamaulipas area. My world was surrounded by family, trips to the other side, great food, bilingual conversation. But it also involved surveillance, something that was so normalized that I didn’t question why I had to tell the uniformed people I was a citizen just passing through. I wasn’t aware of how others saw the border until I left my sheltered home for college. United Fronteras is a space that allows for all aspects of the US-Mexico border to be seen, including my region that, prior to the recent push for ecological destruction with a wall was most known for its spring break destination, South Padre Island, (for information read: Article 1, Article 2).This digital humanities project brings together projects that provide various perspectives of the border regions, their histories, communities, environment and politics.
The Borderlands Digital Humanities resources/projects I am highlighting here are “Uncaged Art” from the University of Texas El Paso’s Institute of Oral History, Poets Against Walls Collective, and Neta. They are countering the national narrative through digital activism, using platforms to visualize other stories. While these projects are producing and sharing their own knowledges, they are utilizing commercial platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo and other materials such as blogs and social media that are not always considered DH sustainable platforms. As Roopika Risam notes,“the framing of digital humanities public discourse has obscured [their] value for the digital cultural record” (5). Nonetheless, these projects are “intervening in the digital cultural record – to tell new stories, shed light on counter-histories, and create spaces for communities to produce and share their own knowledges should they wish” (5) by contesting the mainstream narratives while proposing a broader notion of DH. Risam states, “[Postcolonial] digital humanities scholarship includes a range of methods and practices in media, mapping, scholarly communications, and cultural heritage that complicate the existing state of the digital cultural record” (13). These projects represent a digital humanities that is being used as a form to resist the erasure of their stories and to do activism through digital platforms.
The three projects mentioned previously complicate that state by providing a space for community voices through the use of journalism, poetry, oral history and/or testimony, allowing for participation in performances, interviewing community members on local issues, and informing the community about events such as art exhibits and protests in the US-Mexico border area. Neta, based in the Rio Grande Valley and an independent digital platform led by people of color in the United States, uses a digital platform to provide news about the community, events in the area, and cultural and political interviews, podcasts and stories. Here we see articles on LGBT and women’s rights issues on the main page, with links to folklore podcasts and immigration topics on the side. Poets Against Walls, is led by writers from the South Texas area and performs poetry readings in different areas of the border and at events of solidarity for border residents and immigrants and gives access to them on their YouTube channel and through Facebook. Together this collective “seeks to do and create ‘work that matters’ as per the late Valley writer and visionary Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and through [their] resistencia, help cultivate social change” (Facebook). UTEP’s Institute of Oral History conducts and makes available interviews and their transcriptions and produces videos and podcasts, focusing on issues happening in the US-Mexico border region. Here we see a few of their projects, including “Uncaged Art”, an art installation comprised of donated art from the now closed Tornillo child detention center or “La Frontera Speaks Podcast”, “that explores the history of asylum seekers and refugees as well as the contemporary stories of people who have come to the US-Mexico border in search of a better life” (website).
This type of digital activism represents resistance journalism, which is “a type of citizen journalism that can be used to create a platform for marginalized voices to expose and dissent structures of oppression, disseminate experiential knowledges of poverty, and mobilize activism as a way to invert the ‘hierarchy of access’ and subvert the political power structure of dominant narratives” (Vicent and Straub 2). Additionally, these projects use social media platforms, as Cindy Vincent and Sara Straub describe, “[to] create a space for dissension, allowing the negotiation of political power and cultivating a richer understanding of the power and potential of digital media technologies for democratization and an engaged citizenry” (2). Not only are the creators of these projects sharing their knowledge, they are also engaging the community in political, cultural and historical ways that are usually not included in mainstream media. This intention is made clear in their mission statements.
Moreover, these projects use storytelling as a weapon to contest the monolithic narratives of the border and grow the community’s awareness of the world to create change, solidarity and consciousness at a local and global level. As Cherríe Moraga notes, one of our oldest written traditions resides on the indigenous ground on the spoken word . . . MeXicanas and MeXicanos have always told stories aloud: as weapons against traíciones, as historical accounts and prophetic warnings, as preachers and teachers against wrongdoing, as songs of celebration, as exhalations of laughter, as prayer in the presence of the divine. And through this storytelling one’s awareness of the world and its meanings grows and changes. (“Prólogo”) The way these creators use DH is opening the path for communities to share their own stories, a way to understand Borderlands Digital Humanities.
My hope is that the border projects collected in United Fronteras, in its 1st phase of the Mexico-United States border, inspires inhabitants of the border regions to create their own projects to show the world what their piece of home is like, continuing the story telling tradition with the new technologies available to us.
Annette Zapata presented about this topic in the 2019 Digital Humanities Forum at the University of Kansas. To access the full presentation (Minute 17:30-28) visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sldwGqYEcY&feature=youtu.be
References
Moraga, Cherríe. “Prólogo: A Living Codex.” A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010. Duke University Press, 2011, x-xv.
Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2019.
Vicent, Cindy and Sara Straub. “Structures of Dissent: Social Media, Resistance Journalism, and the Mobilization of Poverty Activism.” *Social Media and Politics: A New Way to Participate in the Political Process, edited by Glenn W. Richardson, Jr., vol 2. Praeger, 2017, pp.1-20.