BorderLore is the theme and emphasis of the Southwest Center’s Folklore program under the specific vision and interest of the current SWC’s Folklorist: Dr. Maribel Alvarez

As such, it is the umbrella under which the Southwest Center produces and leads a number of programmatic initiatives, research projects, and public scholarship activities

BorderLore is also the name of an electronic newsletter sent monthly to approximately 2,500 subscribers.

BorderLore Mission Statement

The mission of BorderLore is to ocument, interpret, and disseminate knowledge about the texture of everyday life in the US-Mexico Borderlands by bringing into focus the unique artful expressions in words, customs, and artifacts of the people of this region in order to foster critical reflection and enhance opportunities for cultural equity and respect.

The Border: Suggested Lines of Inquiry

We do not believe it is necessary nor helpful to draw a line that separates “hard core realities” of border politics, economics, legislation, demographics, and environment from the symbolic productions and all forms of artful and inventive representations — both positive and negative — that frame how the border is invoked and apprehended both as a matter of national policy and personal value.

Despite the inflated and inflected modes of speech that give border-talking today a unique scope and texture, an integrity of voice, sentimiento, imaginaries, and possibilities that ranges from romantic, obsessive, phobic and hopeful to harsh and precise still exists and circulates everyday around these lands.

Although multiple bodies of work anchor the intellectual project of representing, knowing, and understanding the border and the various forms of gendered, political, sexual, economic, folkloric, historical and expressive cultural productions and consumptions that it generates and that in turn generate “it,” for every well-honed metaphor or empirical assertion, dozens of surreptitious acts, words, images, stories, schemes, and other inventive re-workings of borderland experiences and meanings appear and re-appear.

Alternatively illuminating and burdening, these happenings of border-life and consciousness can be apprehended as “performances” of everyday life (at panaderias and curio shops, at the movies, in the evening news, at immigration detention centers, at cantinas and taco stands, through deportations and appropriations, in classrooms and bookstores, across make-shift art galleries and storefront cabarets, at tire shops and backyard barbeques, by means of helicopters and legislation).

The social sciences have yielded their fair share of data to help us unpack these complex dynamics: from geography, anthropology, history, psychology, education, and economics we have learned how to apprehend borders as thickly-layered formations.

The humanities weight in, as well, to this critical project. It is through language, aesthetics, stories, memory, beliefs, sounds, crafts, rituals, and imaginations – in other words, by paying attention to the symbolic raw material of which all forms of representations are made-that anything and everything border-linked and border-engendered “makes sense” or militates against “reason,” as the case may be.