Arizona-Sonora Borderlands, Palimpsest of Cultures

FAIN: BH-281213-21

Arizona Board of Regents (Tucson, AZ 85721-0073)
Jeffrey M. Banister (Project Director: March 2021 to present)
Jennifer Lei Jenkins (Co Project Director: August 2021 to present)

Two one-week workshops for 72 educators on the history, ecology, and cultures of the Arizona-Sonora borderland region. 

This new project will bring K-12 educators to the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands for one week in summer 2022 to study the history, arts, environments, and plural cultures of the region in the context of past habitation and present conditions of tri-national (U.S., Mexico, Native Nations) coexistence. We pose the framing question: how do place, space, and identity intermingle in this region’s millennia of layered written, oral, aural, and visual histories to construct its futures? Given current conversations about the nature of the US-Mexico border and global migration more generally, the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands present a compelling and real-time learning-lab in layered histories, cultures, arts, ecologies, and current events of the region.