Fronteridades Part 1: Plantando la Semilla
This six-part series on the Fronteridades program is sponsored by the University of Arizona Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry
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Dr. Javier Duran, Director of the University of Arizona Confluencecenter photographed at the El Tiradito shrine in Tucson, Arizona. Photo credit: Dominic Rischard
Under the heat of the Tucson mid-afternoon sun, a small house at 1133 E. Helen sits in the shadow of the massive footprint of the Eller College of Business at the University of Arizona. One building sits high atop a mountain of stairs propped on giant steel columns and showing off row upon row of glass windows. The other is surrounded by a small brick wall and a metal gate that closes with the flick of a latch.
Inside the small house, Dr. Javier Duran and the team at the University of Arizona Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry are investing in the work of researchers, academics and community members who are challenging mainstream narratives and elevating the voices of the people living in and crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We are one of the best kept secrets of the University of Arizona,” says Dr. Javier Duran, director of the center.
Duran’s team is collaborating with communities and scholars along the border reshape the false narratives that surround the U.S. border with Mexico.
“Our brand is built through connection through communities,” says Duran.
For that brand value, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Confluencenter $800,000 in 2019 to launch the Fronteridades program. Two years later, it gave the center another $1.5 million, expanding the work of scholars and undergraduates, artists, human rights advocates and community leaders working on changing mainstream border narratives.
Like all things that exist along the border—people, language, customs, music—the word Fronteridades is a hybrid, a mix of la frontera y las humanidades.
El Tiradito and the Sonoran Desert as spaces for magic and healing
As part of the Fronteridades grants, last September the Confluencecenter funded Teatro Dignidad, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and local playright Elaine Romero to create and put on a theatre performance interweaving three narratives at the site of El Tiradito, the wishing shrine. Photo credit: Coalición de Derechos Humanos
“The borderlands provide opportunities for human beings to become resourceful, resilient and creative,” says Dr. Duran during our conversation at the El Tiradito Shrine in downtown Tucson.
In the late 1800s a man by the name of Juan Oliveras married the daughter of a wealthy rancher. Oliveras later fell in love with his mother-in-law and the two had an affair. The rancher, after finding out of the affair, killed both of them. Legend says that their bodies are buried at El Tiradito.
El Tiradito is a place revered by Tucson’s Mexican American community, where the faithful pray for lost causes and light candles for both the living and the dead. Each year, the Coalición de Derechos Humanos remembers migrants who have lost their lives to the Sonoran Desert. This is one of many harsh truths about the desert.
At the same time, the desert has been a source of life for millennia.
Dr. Robin Reineke is a forensic and cultural anthropologist, and a Fronteridades Faculty Fellow in 2021. The fellowship helped Dr. Reineke interview forensic volunteers and civic forensic experts who searched the desert for human remains. Despite the nature of her work, Dr. Reineke pushes back against the narrative of the desert as a place of despair. Photo credit: Dominic Rischard
The borderlands are places where multiple truths coexist.
“There is magic and healing in this space despite the fact that it has become a zone where hundreds…thousands of people lose their lives crossing,” says Dr. Robin Reineke, a Fronteridades Faculty Fellow whose work is helping to bring new awareness to the border. She is an Assistant Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center and Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology, at the University of Arizona.
“There are so many layers of history in this space,” says Reineke. “One story that is not right is that the desert is killing people and is responsible for all these horrors of death and disappearance of migrants.”
In fact, it is U.S. policies and law enforcement practices that are responsible for the deaths across the desert, she explains.
“The desert borderlands have sustained life for thousands of years. The desert borderlands are sacred places, providing places, nurturing places that have facilitated relationships and resilience,” says Reineke.
However, distorted narratives have been constructed through U.S. policy. Narratives that she hopes to shift.
Juanita Sandoval is a Fronteridades Graduate Fellow researching the ways that migrant shelters can become spaces of knowledge and learning. Photo credit: Dominic Rischard
The Fronteridades Program at the Confluencenter also funds emerging researchers like Graduate Fellow Juanita Sandoval, whose work seeks to better understand the inner workings of migrant shelters at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The things that people learn and the knowledge that is shared…giving these stories a voice is really important,” says Sandoval.
A doctoral student in the Teaching Learning and Sociocultural Studies Department at the University of Arizona, Sandoval is researching the role that migrant shelters in Sonora, Mexico play as spaces for both learning and activism.
Casual observers of the border might think about migrant shelters as places of triage and emergency response dealing with a rising global humanitarian crisis. Yet for Sandoval, the albergues are complex spaces.
“I learned about other shelters and how they are connected as systems,” says Sandoval. “They are fascinating places the world needs to understand.”
Funding from the Confluencenter is giving Sandoval the resources to travel back and forth to Sonora to research, and also to attend conferences and present her findings. She acknowledges how difficult it is to find grant funding to study the borderlands. This burden is compounded by the hard things she has to see along the way.
“I have seen a lot of sad things…I met a man who rode the train from Chiapas to Sonora, in Caborca where La Bestia stops,” adds Sandoval.
La Bestia is the name of the train that migrants hitchhike on to traverse the more than 1,400 miles that separate the lush jungles of the state of Chiapas to the arid landscapes of the Sonoran Desert.
Despite the trauma migrants experience, Sandoval calls attention to the ways that migrants in the albergues come together, socialize and even play. She remembers seeing a group of migrants sitting together around a large cooler enjoying each other’s company while playing a game of UNO. A moment of levity and normalcy while playing a game where one’s fortunes can change with the draw of a hand.
Like Reineke, Sandoval also sees beauty in the desert. “The borderlands is an area full of history and cultural knowledge. The space has been inhabited for millennia and has always been a confluence of trade, culture and ideas…it is a very beautiful place environmentally, linguistically, culturally and artistically.”
Melissa Brown-Dominguez, Fronteridades Scholar and co-founder of Galería Mitotera photographed at the historic Sosa-Carrillo House in Tucson. Photo credit: Dominic Rischard
The I-19 highway is a 60-mile stretch of hot asphalt that separates the city of Tucson from Nogales, Arizona, and its sister city on the other side of the border: Nogales, Sonora. Today that same corridor is also known as the I-19 Arts Collective, which is bringing together artists thanks to funding from the Fronteridades program.
An innovative cross-border arts partnership is being forged thanks to participation from faculty from the University of Arizona School of Art, the Museo de Arte in Nogales, Sonora and Galeria Mitotera’s co-founders—Melissa Brown-Dominguez and Mel Dominguez.
The Mels, as they are affectionately known are behind an explosion of local murals, grant competitions and art residencies, and even hosting Latinx chingonas like Latino USA’s Maria Hinojosa at their home in the City of South Tucson, after a Confluencenter event.
Galeria Mitotera, located in the City of South Tucson, made a name for itself in Tucson’s art scene in 2018, filling a much needed void in the Latinx art and culture space.
“The City of South Tucson has a tremendous history: Indigenous history, Chicano, Latino, Mexican history,” says Melissa Brown-Dominguez. “It is so beautiful how communities still hold strong to that. Folks don’t forget about the history and the sense of place.”
Los Angeles Chicano folk band, Las Cafeteras playing outside of Galeria Mitotera in 2021, by then a popular barrio hangout in the City of South Tucson. Photo credit: Clara Migoya
Thanks to the generous tranches of funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Fronteridades program at the Confluencenter is infusing creativity into communities themselves, unlike traditional grants that only fund research within the walls of academia.
“We are so grateful for the partnership with the Confluencenter because we are able to reach out to communities of artists that we didn’t have the resources to previously,” says Brown-Dominguez. “We connect artists along the I-19 corridor from Tucson to Nogales, cross-pollinating and getting them to get to know each other and learn. In Nogales, Mexico we are working with a collective of female artists. It started out with four women, and now it’s up to 25,” says Brown-Dominguez.
Melissa Brown-Dominguez thinks of herself as the project manager, while Mel Dominguez is the big dreamer.
Mel “Melo” Dominguez is a renowned street artist who got their start in Los Angeles and now calls South Tucson home. Photo credit: Dominic Rischard
Dominguez explains why the Fronteridades funding is a critical resource, especially for communities and local artists that play an important role as catalysts for new artists coming up in the art scene, “The Confluencenter is putting value on the work.”
“Before it was just me being a mitotex. Me knocking on doors saying, ‘Are you guys still alive in there?!’ The Confluencenter supercharged that ability to focus on mature artists like myself so I can help others invest in themselves.”
Within earshot of Dominguez’s comment at the historic Sosa-Carrillo House during El Sur’s photoshoot, Brown-Dominguez agrees.
“The Confluencenter allows us to dream. They trust us, they see our vision and what we want to accomplish. They remind us that we are doing amazing things. ‘Just keep going!’ they say, while providing us with workshops and training tools to be better leaders and facilitators.”
In 2024, the Mels are doing just that, working with a group of all-Indigenous female muralists that specialize in graffiti. The project will beautify a public housing project to bring life, culture and story into the one square mile City of South Tucson, where its residents have experienced a history of disinvestment for decades.
Mel Dominguez and Melissa Brown-Dominguez at their home in the City of South Tucson in 2022 with Dr. Javier Duran and a delegation of Chicanx and Latinx leaders hosting Latino USA host, Maria Hinojosa after a Confluencecnter event. Photo credit: Galeria Mitotera.
“We have the ability to tell the story of what’s happening in the borderlands. So much of mainstream media might say one thing, when in fact, there is a whole other story happening,” adds Dominguez.
"The Confluencenter enables us to have that exercise. We are the authors and researchers of our own history and story as it’s taking place.”
