Overview

Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC) is a personal commitment to border communities. This digital mapping project conceptualizes founders Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia A. Fernández’s fronteriza/transfronteriza knowledge from the U.S.-Mexico region, as well as their academic background in border, literary, and archival studies at the intersection of digital technologies. The project was founded in 2017 by then-graduate students Álvarez and Fernández as an independent, non-funded, and non-institutional project. As a transborderlands digital humanities project, BAC is dedicated to locating, mapping, and facilitating access to 19th and mid-20th century newspapers from 1808 to the 1930s from the United States-Mexico border region. BAC visualizes and deepens the understanding of the region, its communities, and histories through primary sources incorporated in a digital map. Through this digital map, a transborder digital archive is created that unites local, national, and bi-national histories in a territory that has faced various geopolitical transitions. The map allows users to interact with the geopolitical transitions/movements of the region and encourage the user to explore, understand and question the content’s borderlands newspapers in different ways: geographically, historically, politically, socially and culturally . The project thus serves as an alternative conceptual tool for presenting the notion of a fluid region and challenges established by nationalistic narratives. 

Publications

Álvarez, M. E., & Fernández, S. A. (2017). Borderlands Archives Cartography. https://uh-ir.tdl.org/handle/10657/2292

Jiménez, L. G., Álvarez, M. E., & Fernández, S. (2019). Language and translation practices of Spanish-language newspapers published in the U.S. borderlands between 1808 and 1930. Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association, 14(2), 218–242. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.00039.gas

Reviews

Ortiz, N. N. (2020). Review: Borderlands Archives Cartography. Reviews in Digital Humanities, I(4–5). https://doi.org/10.21428/3e88f64f.45e743ab