Conversations on the Border

In conjunction with Pidgin Palace Arts’ current exhibition, COMPLEX artist David Taylor will be in conversation with activists, poets, scholars and writers. This is a free event.

Artist David Taylor will be in conversation with Susan Briante, Javier Duran, and Dora Rodriguez.

Susan Briante is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Defacing the Monument, her most recent publication in which Briante began taking graduate students to the US-Mexico border in 2016 to research and write about migration issues. What began as essays documenting the crisis turned into a reflection on documentary poetics: the act of witnessing and writing about the suffering of others. Defacing the Monument shows what happens to those who do not hold the “correct” documents and highlights how the archive bears the marks of power. Part documentary, part lyric essay, part primer,Defacing the Monument is an exploration of the many ways

we might tell stories and a guidebook for anyone who believes in what documentary poetics, and all art, can and should do in this moment of crisis.

Javier Duran (PhD) is Professor of Latin-American and Border Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies and the founding director of the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona. He is a specialist in cultural and interdisciplinary studies along the U.S.-Mexico border and a native of the Arizona-Sonora desert region. Dr. Duran is currently working on projects dealing with US-Mexico interdisciplinary transborder collaborations, border culture, necro-politics, human security, migrancy, checkpoints, cultural place-making and Indigenous Humanities.

Dora Rodriguez: In a life-saving attempt to flee El Salvador’s civil war in 1980, Dora Rodriguez was one of thirteen survivors found near death while crossing the border through the Sonoran Desert. By bravely publicizing her story of migration and through her unwavering support for migrants' rights, Dora’s image has been propelled to the forefront of the sanctuary movement in Tucson, AZ. Dora’s focus is to educate communities about the harsh realities migrants face in the desert and to inspire transformative changes to the immigration injustices plaguing our border towns. She serves as the Director of Salvavision, a nonprofit offering aid and support to migrant and deportees.