Digital Archive
The Reclaiming the Border Narrative Digital Archive is a community-focused archive centering the diversity and multidimensionality of experiences that transcend dominant narratives and counter externally imposed perceptions of life in the US-Mexico borderlands. The archive amplifies the creative and intellectual processes of artists, advocates, journalists, and cultural practitioners dedicated to advancing migrant justice in border communities.
The archive was developed in collaboration with participants from the Reclaiming the Border Narrative: Storytelling and Cultural Power for Migrant Justice grantee cohort. The voices, stories, and creative expressions represented in this collection belong to historically marginalized communities who have long endured exclusionary and extractive practices. As a leading archival repository of primary source collections on the US-Mexico borderlands, the Reclaiming the Border Narrative Digital Archive is part of the University of Arizona Libraries’ Special Collections ongoing effort to address gaps in the archival record demonstrating an ethic of care that is attentive to self-representation and documentation created by and for the communities represented in the archives.
As archival partners, it is our intention to build and sustain a reciprocal relationship with contributors to this developing digital archive. We understand our role as facilitators in the co-creation, activation, and ethical stewardship of a digital space for border communities’ cultural resources. Our collaborative approach to preservation of and access to these community-created archival materials includes post-custodial approaches to archiving as described in the three sources below. We endeavor to balance archival best-practices while being responsive to the differing archiving priorities and needs of each contributor and their user communities.