Introducing the 2023 Fronteridades Fellows

The Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry is pleased to announce 11 individuals have been selected to take part in Fronteridades: Nurturing Collaborative Intersections in the U.S-Mexico Border through a second installment of the Fronteridades Fellowship program which awards a total of $104,000 for the completion of research projects concerning the Arizona-Sonora borderlands and its communities.

The Fronteridades Fellowship Program funds UArizona faculty members and graduate students working on interdisciplinary research projects that explore, analyze, and elevate the lived experiences, cultural resources, and border dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

“We are grateful for the support of our funders, the Mellon Foundation, and of our campus colleagues who have helped make the second round of fellowships a reality,” said Dr. Javier Duran, Confluencenter director. “The selection committee focused on choosing applicants whose work spoke to the greater goal and core mission of Fronteridades. We are positive that each project will challenge all of us to think critically about the border region, its multidimensionality and complexity.”

Fellows' projects focus on building new public understanding and interpretation of the U.S.-Mexico border dynamics, tensions, innovations, dreams, and realities, positively impacting border communities. In this round, selected individuals represent diverse disciplines across UArizona campus, including graduate students and faculty members from the colleges of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Humanities, Fine Arts, and Education.

The first round of fellowships in 2019 consisted of $135,000 in funding for 15 fellows who carried out interdisciplinary research projects and scholarly creative activities focused on the U.S.-Mexico border.  Learn more about the 2021 Fronteridades Fellowships.

In this round, projects will consist of the creation, collection, and dissemination of poems, oral histories, cultural maps, and curricula on a wide range of topics, including migration, placemaking and identity, flood justice, food justice, soundscapes, incarceration, and language usage.

2023 Graduate Fellows

Lucas Belury; doctoral student, Geography, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Project: Digital Humanities, Flood Justice, and the US-Mexico Borderlands

Linda Choi; doctoral student, Geography, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Project: A Place on Morley Avenue

Nathan Cordova; master’s student, Photography, Video and Imaging, College of Fine Arts
Project: Ghosts and Shadows

Jazmin Gonzalez; master’s student, Latin American Studies, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Project: Consumiendo Identidad: documentation and cultural mapping of Mercados in the Southwest borderlands

Jorge Manzanilla; doctoral student, Cultural Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, College of Humanities
Project: The poetics of migrations

Enrique Olivares-Pelayo; doctoral student, Geography, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Project: Running "Raza": Defining and Performing Racialized Identity Inside Borderlands Prisons

Juanita Sandoval; doctoral student, Teaching Learning and Sociocultural Studies, College of Education
Project: Migrant Shelters as Spaces of Pedagogy: Understanding Educational Practices in Migrant Shelters at the U.S./Mexico Border

Linfei Yi; doctoral student, East Asian Studies, College of Humanities
Project: Hybridities: Languages and Identities of Chinese Americans in the Borderlands amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

2023 Faculty Fellows

Wanda Alarcón, Ph.D., Gender and Women’s Studies, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Project: Amplifying Chicana Soundscapes: Tuning into Gloria Anzaldúa ́s Borderlands/La Frontera

Elizabeth Oglesby, Ph.D., Latin American Studies & Alejandro Nava, Ph.D. Latin American Studies & Religious Studies, College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and College of Humanities
Project: Asylum and Humanitarianism Along the Arizona Border