Bienvenido! Welcome
Fronteridades: Border Cultures & Performances Working Group is a collaborative taller (workshop) that convenes faculty, staff, students, and community partners in and around the University of Arizona who are interested in sharing ideas, research, teaching, cultural productions, and social activism centered in the humanities about and from the US-Mexico border.
As conveners of this new project, we do not believe it is necessary nor helpful to draw a line that separates "hard core realities" of border politics, economics, legislation, demographics, and environment from the symbolic productions and all forms of artful and inventive representations -- both positive and negative -- that frame how the border is invoked and apprehended both as a matter of national policy and personal value.
In the introduction to the anthology Writing on the Edge: A Borderlands Reader (University of Arizona Press, 2003) Tucson-based writer and editor Tom Miller maps out the strange and peculiar ways by which the border has become -- for better or for worse, for outsiders and insiders alike -- a "bulging metaphor." Yet, as Miller points out, despite the inflated and inflected modes of speech that give border-talking today a unique scope and texture, an "integrity" of voice, sentimiento, imaginaries, and possibilities that ranges from romantic, obsessive, phobic and hopeful to harsh and precise exists and circulates everyday around these lands.
Join us in learning more about how research and cultural work in the humanities is being carried out at and through the University of Arizona. This is a work in progress and a new initiative, so we have much to learn and clarify as far as how this site and the work we each do in fronteras and humanidades can be developed and shared.
Send your comments, announcements, ideas, or questions to bordercultures@u.arizona.edu. Gracias.
Fronteridades is a project funded by The Southwest Center at the University of Arizona, as part of its program on Southwest Folklore Studies which includes teaching, research, publishing, and public programming.
Special thanks to Stuart Glogoff, Senior Consultant, Learning Technologies, for creating this website and serving as advisor and webmaster.
