An exhibit in Santa Cruz County aims to showcase the heritage of that part of the state. "Beyond Fronteras" includes an exhibition at the Santa Cruz County courthouse in Nogales, as well as an online component that focuses on areas like the region’s people, history and ecosystem.
Carlos Parra, coordinator and curator of the "Beyond Fronteras" project and assistant professor of history at the University of Arizona, says the project has a specific focus on the humanities, targeted especially at middle and high school students. Parra was born and raised in Nogales and taught high school there.
Parra joined The Show to talk about how this was more than a project to him — it was personal, and dealt with his community.
Full conversation
CARLOS PARRA: No, no, I, I agree. I, let's say, Mark, you know, I'm born and raised in Nogales. I grew up on both sides in both Nogales, Arizona, Nogales, Mexico, and I taught there as well, when I first worked as a high school teacher. So it was definitely really personal, and certainly coming of age in the period after 9/11, sort of these growing anxieties about what the border represents, right, you know, how do you define border security.
Communities like Nogales, and I think many listeners might have families either down there in places like Douglas or like, you know, out in Yuma, San Luis, they can kind of relate to this, you know, border communities have been sort of on the receiving end of negative stereotypes for quite a while, for pretty much a generation at this point, you know, if not longer.
And when a lot of folks from the interior of Arizona, the interior of the U.S. come to places like Nogales or other Arizona border towns, there's these negative stereotypes is how dangerous is it here? You know, how safe is it here, and when a lot of these folks come in, they'd see that it's really, it doesn't quite live up to the hype that's presented in films like “Sicario,” you know, like, for example.
So one of the things that we really wanted to do, and as you correctly know, no, it's a very personal way was really present best of who we are, you know, in terms of our our community and its terms of its natural and its cultural history in Nogales in Santa Cruz County. And try to use that as a socially responsible way of having young people greatly greater sense of self, and a greater interest in the humanities.
MARK BRODIE: So when you talk about using the humanities, using the environment, is that how you try to sort of move beyond the stereotype that a lot of folks have of this part of Arizona and, and, you know, maybe help students understand, no, no, this is, yes, there is a border here, but we're about more than that.
PARRA: Well, you know, for example, one of the, Arizona state content standards and social studies looks at, you know, the westward expansion, which obviously includes the development of what became the U.S.-Mexican border. Speaking as someone who, as I've mentioned, and grew up in Nogales and taught there, when we grow up down there, you don't really understand those things.
You, you, you grew up with this general knowledge that there was conflict between the two nations that led to the demarcating of the border, but we don't know exactly how it happened. And you know, it's hard enough to teach local history in places like Phoenix. I'm sure perhaps some of your listeners might be, you know, social studies education in Phoenix probably it's really hard to find good material. But in a place like Phoenix, you have more people writing on it. You have just a little bit more scholarship, there's there's more resources that exist. I'm in a place so I'm like, Nogales, that's really not quite the case.
BRODIE: What surprised you about what the students found and what they came up with?
PARRA: Sure, sure. So, one of the initiatives that we did to recruit, you know, the sort of student contributions, student involvement into our, our overall project, multimedia project was an initiative called My History Mi comunidad that we specifically framed in a Spanglish term, in Spanglish terms because that's the that's the real lingua franca for most people who grow up in Nogales in Santa Cruz County. It's not English that's your first language, it's not Spanish that's your first language, it's Spanglish.
So we wanted something represented that and we thought that perhaps that might make our invitation to the students seem a little less intimidating. So when our students, who are primarily high school age, we had quite a bit of middle schoolers, contributing, for example, poems or artwork to us.
I'll give you two quick examples. A significant contingent of students from the alternative high school in Nogales Pearson High School wrote poems reflecting on life growing up again in the U.S.-Mexico border town. A lot of them, some of them were in Spanglish. A lot of them wrote reflections, you know, short poems or short poems, saying, you know, what they felt about growing up in Nogales, that they felt safe there, that they felt a good life of the love of life, but being with their families, some of them talked about, you know, their love of the Sonoran hot dogs, some of them talked about crossing the border, you know, to go see their families in Nogales, Mexico, and, just some really beautiful heartfelt, writings that our students shared with us.
Some of them talked about how the border can also present this really intimidating, menacing sort of aspect in our local culture that we have no control over, you know, the external forces, whether the political forces or forces related to immigration, economics. Really shape the way that our community functions.
Another group of students also created paintings for us, through one of their, one of the programs that we offered in painting celebrating the local natural and cultural history of Santa Cruz County, which we have on permanent display at our exhibition. One of the most notable ones for me, there's two paintings in particular that these young people created.
One of them celebrated the natural history of Santa Cruz County by having the endangered jaguar appear, as well as the kudamundi, having depictions of birds at the the northern limit of their migratory sort of habitats like the elegant trogon, really beautiful vibrant painting, as well as another painting that a similar painting that him and his students created celebrating the arrival of the railroad in Nogales in 1882.
So it was really beautiful to see kids literally investing themselves in terms of, well, there's the physical aspect of this of actually creating these paintings, but there's also the larger sort of cognitive engagement at work here.
BRODIE: I'm curious about the cognitive aspect you mentioned because it, it kind of makes me think back to what you said just a couple of moments ago about how when you were coming of age in Nogales after 9/11, sort of grappling with, like, what does it mean to be from here and to live here? What does a border mean? It sounds like those are maybe in some ways the questions that you were encouraging, even if it was maybe sort of passively encouraging these students to also consider.
PARRA: What we really want them to take it seriously again, when you grow up anywhere, just like how similar to that, how, when you consider how many Arizona or like Phoenix residents, maybe lifelong residents of our city and never been to the Grand Canyon, right? You kind of have to have like a structured educational opportunity to be able to really understand what these things really represent.
And you do need, you know, this sort of like a, you know, mention like art appreciation sort of like learning, but there's also, you know, humanities or local history appreciation when it goes into how you know, so water doesn't grow in any other part of the world, you know, like, for example, or how unique the Grand Canyon is. And similarly, when you grow up in a place like Nogales, or like Douglas or like Yuma, San Luis, you take the border fence for granted because it's oh, that's, that's just a regular part of growing up in this type of community.
But to understand why it was the border created in the first place in the 1850s. And when you have these negative images of the border, it's really dangerous, chaotic place, it hides the longer history that's there, and the more richer history, it's right there, if you just dig a little bit beneath the surface, and we want young people to understand that, you know, how unique they are to grow up in a community where you have to be bicultural to be successful.
If you really want to run a successful business in a place like Nogales, you have to be able to engage American and Mexican customers or audiences as it were, you know, on, on their level. And we, we really want the kids to recognize that cultural capital so that when they grow up later on into the world, you know, it's a, that they can really recognize where they're coming from and really use that as a source of pride rather than a source of embarrassment or rather as a source of sort of like a cultural deficit. We really don't want them to leave our community thinking that.
