Before there were lines along the Rio Grande

As we hear heart-wrenching stories of migrants risking their lives and families being separated along the US-Mexico border, a historical perspective enables us to understand how these liminal spaces were imagined in an era before electronic surveillance and satellite imagery. Drawing on the rich collection of rare books and maps at the JCB, curators and librarians will provide a critical context for how northern Mexico and what would become the southern United States was experienced during a colonial era that predated the modern nation-state. Please join Bertie Mandelblatt (Curator of Maps and Prints) and Kim Nusco (Assistant Librarian for Research and Reference Services) to discuss shifting representations of the US-Mexico borderlands. A selection of materials selected by former JCB Fellow Cynthia Radding (professor of colonial Latin American history at UNC-Chapel Hill) will help contextualize the JCB's collections for a broader conversation on the borderland regions of northern Mexico and the southwestern US. 

This program is part of a three-day series in collaboration with the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown. The series asks us to consider the uses to which maps, data, and visualizations are put in the stories we tell about place, identity, and migration. Please join us for other events in the series on November 1 and November 6.