In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are featuring one recent Humanities for All grantee’s project, Border Click. Josemar Gonzalez, co-founder of Border Click, shares more about this project that connects two nations (Tijuana and San Diego) through art and conversation.
What was your goal for Border Click?
The goal of Border Click was to create a digital living archive of the everyday complexities of the transborder experience through the eyes of those who cross the border every day either for school, work, family, or love.
What did you want to achieve?
We wanted to tell a story that is rarely told in order to change the narrative about people who cross the border every day—a story told through photography and art—and use it as a tool to advocate for change and social justice.
How did you involve the public?
We did a series of workshops where we invited stakeholders and people from the transborder community in the fields of Education the Arts and National Security to be together in a space to have a conversation. In these workshops we broke into groups and used VTS to break down the images in our archive and understand our perception of what living between the border is like. At the end, a series of demands created by the participants and the community were presented and used this document as a tool to create accountability and advocate for progress.
What does the future hold for your project?
Border Click is a living archive, which means that is constantly growing. We are adding images and stories daily through social media and other online platforms. Documentation of our lives in the 21st century is a common thing; we are all now more sensitive to visuals and different symbols. The goal of Border Click is to go to the source of when we start to create our beliefs at a young age. We want to take Border Click to middle schools and high schools in border cities and expand this archive, helping tell a story that we have only begun to really understand.
