A River of Memories: Preserving Lived Experience in the Borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas

FAIN: PN-296007-24

Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York (New York, NY 10032-3725)
Peter S Bearman (Project Director: May 2023 to present)

The creation of four long-form oral history interviews from each of the four counties in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, conducted by ENTRE, a film center and regional archive in the area.

A River of Memories co-creates a new regional archive of the Rio Grande Valley, which is a bi-national borderland between the United States and Mexico. Our goal is to locate, curate, and organize new historical materials (images, home movies, and oral histories) into a digital archive that can bring to local and national awareness the remarkable but little-known vitality of life in the region. We will offer the skills and resources necessary for locals in the Rio Grande Valley to become donors, narrators, historians, and archivists of this collection. Our reconstructive archival and memory work will be documentary and relational, and it will establish trust between the community and the archive. Through this project, we will infuse local culture in the Rio Grande Valley with long-term resilience in the face of difficult environmental and socio-economic change and provide transformative insights to catalyze Humanities work in other borderlands across the United States.