Latines who cross the Mexican border into the United States regularly confront misconceptions about immigration and life at the edge of two countries. The idea of crossing the border invokes ideas of suffering, trauma, violence, and oppression. But the reality is that life at the border, border cities, and the act of crossing the border have many other dimensions and perspectives beyond sorrow.
In 2020, the Reclaiming the Border Narrative Project came to fruition to address and combat these one-dimensional narratives. The project — a partnership among the Ford Foundation with Borealis Philanthropy, The Center for Cultural Power, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures — supports artists who work with the concept of the borderlands and border life to shift the narrative through cultural production.
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Below, four fellows of the project talk about their career trajectory and how their current work is attempting to challenge normative narratives around migration, borders, and Latine people.
I am a first-generation immigrant, born to Salvadoran and Mexican parents. I have dedicated my life to being an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. I began my art practice as an exploration of myself through self-portraiture. After that, I started working on a transnational perspectives project through my studies at UC San Diego. I was living in the borderlands but with the privilege of being a U.S. citizen – I was in a unique position to document borderland life outside of the U.S. because of my ability to travel across borders freely.
Both in Bogotá, Colombia, and in Ciudad de México, Mexico, I documented social movements, with a specific focus on trans women and nonbinary folks who struggle for their rights in their territories. Later, I traveled to Ciudad de Juarez, Chihuahua, and Tijuana, where I photographed transgender communities that strive to maintain autonomy, dignity, and self-determination in a socio-political climate that co-opts their collective movement and refuses their livelihoods in the same breath.
While documenting these spaces and bodies of resistance, I shattered a lot of my own misconceptions about border life. For example, while many people focus on migrants from Central America who travel to Mexico to cross into the U.S., the reality is that many Mexicans from other cities across the country also travel to border cities because of the opportunities that come from being close to the border.
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"My work centers on empowerment, pleasure, and desire because of the stark contrast these elements make against more traditional narratives of suffering, victimization, and criminalization when it comes to trans, gender expansive and intersex people."
Xelestiál Moreno-Luz
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Another misconception became clear through my work with Natasha, a Guatemalan migrant. It is commonly believed that migrants cross into the U.S. because they want to leave their home country and never return, but Natasha didn’t want to leave Guatemala at all. She only left her home country because she wanted to start a new life after her transition and find a chosen family that accepts her as she is. Natasha expressed to me that she would prefer to stay in Guatemala, but when she transitioned, she lost everything.
My work centers on empowerment, pleasure, and desire because of the stark contrast these elements make against more traditional narratives of suffering, victimization, and criminalization when it comes to trans, gender expansive and intersex people. Trans women rarely get to work in the spaces in which I am currently working. Ultimately, I've had to make and force these spaces to become a reality.
I grew up living in poverty in Mexico, and I always thought filmmaking was something only for rich white people. My family and I migrated to the U.S. when I was 18 to pursue a better life, which meant I had to live as an undocumented immigrant. U.S. society made me feel inferior because I was undocumented, so I spent most of my 20s depressed, feeling like I wasn’t worth anything.
One day, I found a movement of protesters, advocates, and activists who were fighting for immigrant rights and LGBTQI+ rights. Many of them were going to college despite being undocumented, which inspired me to pursue further education. After getting my GED, I was accepted into college, where I studied filmmaking.
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After I graduated, I had a new problem: How will I be hired by studios if I am undocumented? That’s when I came across this YouTube web series called Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae. I felt so inspired. I realized I don’t need to wait for studios to hire me — I can write my own story. I wanted my work to be joyful and not to center the sad stories of suffering that are usually told in mainstream media, which are unfortunately part of our struggle. But beyond that, we're just like everyone else. We fall in love; we have sex. And Hollywood doesn't know that or doesn't want to acknowledge that.
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"Perfection is impossible, and undocumented people are imperfect humans. We still deserve respect."
Armando Ibanez
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So I created an award-winning web series about the life of an undocumented queer Mexican server who is very imperfect called Undocumented Tales. I wanted the protagonist to be imperfect to challenge society’s expectations that undocumented immigrants need to be perfect to receive a little bit of respect and dignity. Perfection is impossible, and undocumented people are imperfect humans. We still deserve respect.
I’m originally from Laredo, a city on the Mexican border, in southern Texas. My mother was a migrant who moved to Laredo. My trajectory has been all about understanding my experience and understanding the border context. I'm still trying to understand it now, along with building true representations of who we are at the border. I have mostly done this through illustrating children’s books and designing political posters.
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I am currently living in Brownsville, Texas, another border city. Recently, artist Monica Sosa and I put together a two-month exhibition called Nuestra Delta Magica: Settler Imaginaries & Community Resistance, where we told the erased history of colonialism in South Texas while also addressing the racial and environmental injustices currently happening in the Rio Grande Valley. Our intention with this was to combat settler-colonial narratives that persist in the territory, which tend to obscure the ongoing colonial violence the Rio Grande Valley is still experiencing through gentrification and environmental racism. I believe in the importance of digging up these histories to show that the violence we experience today is not coincidental but a part of a larger colonial project.
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"I love to use visual storytelling to share history so it’s more accessible for folks to understand that the narratives that are imposed on South Texas are not only untrue but they purposefully erase Indigenous histories."
Nansi Guevara
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For my Center for Cultural Power’s Border Narratives project, I am working on an animation that will bring past histories and the current violence of the territory of Rio Grande Valley together. The Magic Yali is an animated film about a young Indigenous girl who lives in the Rio Grande delta in South Texas. She witnesses the changes happening in her home and travels to the past and sees important parallels between the past and the present. I love to use visual storytelling to share history so it’s more accessible for folks to understand that the narratives that are imposed on South Texas are not only untrue but they purposefully erase Indigenous histories. This project is currently in production, and it’s a collective work of remembering.
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I am a queer two-spirit singer-songwriter from the Chihuahuan Desert borderlands of El Paso, Texas; Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Chihuahua, Mexico; and La Union, New Mexico. At 12, I announced to my parents that I was going to make music for the rest of my life. Since then, I have treated my musical production as a lifelong relationship. I have always felt that it was really important that music reflects my perspective as someone whose life revolves around maintaining community on both sides of the border.
I grew up listening to corridos y rancheras, and there are so many bodies in these genres that are not being represented accurately if at all — children, animals, plants, queerness. For example, any time I’ve heard El Paso depicted in songs, it tends to revolve around bank robberies, tumbleweeds, or pistols.
Juarez tends to be depicted as a place where you spend money and drive around with an AK-47 (cuerno’s de chivo), and the desert is an empty, barren space where migrants cross the border and often die, which is a reality but not the only one. The desert is, more often than not, associated with death. It tends to be a hopeless depiction of the place many call home. My work seeks to present other narratives, as well, that include the people, beings, and ecosystems that inhabit this territory.
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"The desert is, more often than not, associated with death. It tends to be a hopeless depiction of the place many call home. My work seeks to present other narratives, as well, that include the people, beings, and ecosystems that inhabit this territory."
Amalia Mondragon
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I am currently working on a concept album funded by NALAC and The Ford Foundation through the Border Narrative Change grant. This work is titled Transfronteriz, and it’s about looking at life, music, lyrics, and soundscapes through a transfronteriz, two-spirit perspective on the Chihuahuan Desert, the border, and the areas we transit within. A transfronteriz is a person who lives and navigates both sides of the border as a way of life, and a two-spirit person is a person who identifies as both male and female.
Through this album, I want to establish that there is life here on the Chihuahuan Desert border — that we are regular people who live everyday lives. We go through heartbreak. We dream. We have ideas. We treasure the plants. We have relationships with the desert that are intimate and spiritual. We have full lives in the desert. We have full lives on the border and life here isn’t just about migration and militarization. The album is divided into two parts: my masculine materialization — which I call Tereso Perfecto Contreras — and my feminine persona, which is Amalia Mondragón. The point is to spark conversation about how we genderize bodies, music, genres, and the border.
Interviews have been edited for clarity and brevity.