About the Exhibit
This exhibit is a window to United Fronteras, a digital directory of projects documenting contacts and divergences in the Mexico and the United States border region from pre-colonial times to the 21st century. This digital cultural record shows this area from different perspectives, which include literature, archives, art, oral histories, music, etc., and compiles active, inactive, and in development platforms that make use of digital and/or technological components.
The intent is to bring together past, current, and ongoing works to initiate a dialogue about the United States-Mexico border. This sample contains initiatives that have been created in recent years and which represent relevant discourses of resistance and activism, as well as previously projects founded that highlight the local, regional and/or national cultural heritage of the area. In addition to temporary initiatives that were exhibited in public spaces or in local museums.
It is a digital cultural record that takes advantage of the principles of minimal computing to contribute to the democratization of knowledge, understanding that “the digital cultural record is constructed and disseminated publicly, online, in a digital milieu beset with its own politics of identity” (Risam 6).
The goal is to investigate the critical work carried out in this complex region and create alternative spaces that provide resources and information about this area. In addition, it seeks to redraw the border by opposing negative representations of its territories, communities and cultures.
This exhibit represents the culmination of our first phase. To get here we followed these steps:
- We identified projects that a) talked/contained material about the border and b) had at least one digital or technological component.
- We created metadata for the projects based on the information provided in each project’s site.
- We contacted the authors to inform them about this initiative and to request permission to publish and incorporate their projects in this exhibit.
- The collaborators were divided into a data team (in charge of debugging the projects’ data), a narrative team (responsible for the content of the page) and a technical team (in charge of the minimal computing needed to create the site).
In our next phase we are working on a number of experiments to unmap the borderlands using our data. Stay tuned!
In this exhibit we divide projects into three categories: Active, Inactive and In-Progress.
Active Projects
Active projects are considered to be those that are currently available to the public on any Internet platform, including social networks, and that are continuously nourished or updated, but that have reached a certain level of stability. Among them are: NativeLand, Border Perspective, Mexican Genealogy, Ecos del Desierto or NetaRGV and many others.
Above: Native Land
Inactive Projects
Inactive projects are those that were successfully collected when the link worked but is now broken, were taken as references from other sites, or they stop updating. In this category, there are The Immigration Project, Sultanita Literaria, Ediciones El Lobo y El Cordero, and Border Crossers, among others.
Above: The Immigration Project
In-Progress
There are some projects in development such as Native Texans: The Coahuiltecan Speakers of the San Antonio Mission, Migri Map, Undocumented Migration Project, and United Fronteras itself.
How to cite the project
United Fronteras. 2020. https://unitedfronteras.github.io/. Accessed [DATE].
How to cite the exhibit
“United Fronteras Mex-USA Exhibit.” United Fronteras. 2020. https://unitedfronteras.github.io/ufexhibition_mexusa/. Accessed [DATE].
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed., Aunt Lute Books, 2012.
Castillo, Debra A. and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed, State University of New York Press, 2015.
Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2019.
Works Consulted
Torn Apart/Separados.2018. Accessed May 13, 2020. https://xpmethod.plaintext.in/torn-apart/volume/1/
Álvarez, Maira and Sylvia Fernández. Borderlands Archives Cartography. 2017. Accessed May 13, 2020.
https://www.bacartography.org/
Gil, Alex. Around DH in 80 Days. Accessed May 13, 2020. http://arounddh.elotroalex.com/
Losh, Elizabeth and Jacqueline Wernimont, editors. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. “Introduction.” University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
New York University Press, 2018.