What We're Learning About How Funders Can Support Truth-Telling on the Border
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a mural erected by Rio Grande International Study Center aimed at preventing the building of an additional border wall in Laredo, Texas. RGISC’s mission is to preserve and protect the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo watershed and environment through awareness and education. RGISC is a grantee of the Center for Cultural Power's Border Narratives Project. Photo: Rio Grande International Study Center
“The hungry machine of us vs. them will tell you beauty doesn’t live in these badlands, but they’re wrong. Ask different questions. Ask the artists, the journalists, the migrant justice workers: What are you seeing and hearing?”
— Rubi Orozco, Border Manifesto, Southwest Folklife Alliance
"It’s imperative for people to know how incredibly beautiful and resilient borderland ecology and communities are."
In the United States, the southern border with Mexico is a place etched into imagination and identity, but usually not in a healthy way. It’s a polarizing lightning rod for larger debates about migration, safety and the economy. Political commentators and popular media flatten the border and reduce it to a site of chaos, criminal activity and victimhood. These entrenched cultural narratives by outsiders perpetuate a vision of the border as a place of smuggling, drug cartels and death. They stoke fear and pity and erase the fullness, humanity and beauty of the diverse communities living at the border.
What’s missing from the media coverage are the authentic voices and stories of people who call the borderlands home; their hopes, dreams and aspirations; their love for their communities and the land; and their vision for the future and the solutions they know will work. The border is about so much more than immigration.
It’s time for truth-telling about the border. It’s time for funders to invest more deeply in culture, artists and storytellers to reclaim the border narratives and fund community-driven solutions.
At the Center for Cultural Power and the Ford Foundation, we approach challenges by listening first. Our role is to invest in communities so they can drive their own solutions, strategy and community-building. We’re investing in border-based organizers, artists and storytellers to explore what’s needed to disrupt negative stereotypes and point us to a future where the border region and its people thrive.
Here’s what we’ve learned philanthropy can do to help reclaim the stories being told about the U.S.-Mexico border.
Fund a full spectrum of changemakers and organizations to tell their own stories.
The stories we tell about the border matter — and who tells them matters the most.
We believe that communities living at the border should have agency and autonomy over the stories being told about their lives. To enable this change, leaders in philanthropy should provide unrestricted funding to a diverse range of artists, storytellers and the organizations that support them in our border communities to counteract the one-sided perspective of chaos and crisis.
Consider the writing of Naomi Ortiz, the digital media of Evan Apodaca or the interdisciplinary work of Xelestiál Moreno-Luz. Their work invites audiences into life at the border, sharing everything from mundane and relatable everyday experiences to their perspectives on the political outlook in the region, and offers a hope-based vision of the future.
Artistry and storytelling are underutilized and powerful tools for border organizers, including front-line immigrant rights groups. They are needed to break through prevailing border stories in the media and attract different audiences that are not necessarily reading about the border and immigration every day. Funders should provide community organizers and activists in the region with resources for cultural strategy staffing, training and making connections to artists and cultural strategists. Working in concert, these actors can shift mindsets to heal, challenge the status quo, and reshape border culture and policy.
Invest in message testing and evaluation that is culturally responsive and participatory.
We know that art is a powerful tool to shape the way people view the world — but how we deliver our message is a critical piece of this puzzle.
Message testing helps determine the most effective content, identify the audiences that can actually be persuaded, and which platform to use and how to adapt. As part of our work to fund and uplift stories showing the border on its own terms, the Center for Cultural Power worked with artists and community organizers from the region to create a message and content testing system. Specifically, we used dedicated Swayable tools to test early content adapted from the Border Futures Guide, a briefing book and narrative-change tool designed to shift how people think about the border.
The results were promising — content moved audiences to have a greater understanding of the risk it takes to migrate to the U.S. and an increased likelihood of taking action to support undocumented immigrants.
An example of this unfolded in New Mexico. We were able to test the persuasive capacity of art created by the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center displayed in the rotunda of the New Mexico Legislature. The art depicted a comic-book-style story of superhero Victor, a young asylum seeker in the U.S. who was sent to a detention center because of his undocumented status and experienced harsh conditions, which affected his mental and physical health. The excerpt showed Victor’s endurance, survival and ability to break through harsh limitations and serve others like him who are subject to the same conditions.
Responses to this art using our message-testing tools showed a 6.1 point increase in recognition that detention centers for immigrants can be dangerous for mental and physical health and a 5.7 point increase in the likelihood of supporting legislation that allows undocumented immigrants between the ages of 18 and 21 to become documented.
As of April 2023, a bill for which NMILC advocated allowing undocumented youth and children to apply for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) up until the age of 21, passed with bipartisan support and has been signed into law. This case study demonstrates the potential of creative arts to change both mindsets and political outcomes.
The above tactics give artists and changemakers the tools they need to keep telling their stories. But how can we ensure those stories are heard? To do this, we need greater partnership with press in and beyond the border region. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Radio Bilingue, Texas Observer, The Texas Tribune and Trucha are already telling border stories. Philanthropy has the power to invest in these newsrooms to expand community-led journalism that centers artists and organizers as experts on their own lived experience.
Reclaiming the border narrative requires a multipronged approach. Only if funders work together and take direction from border communities can we help foster a humanizing worldview on migration that reflects the dignity, truth, aspirations and struggles of migrants and the people of the borderlands.
If we start by investing in artists, the organizations that support them, and solutions to ensure their stories are reaching the right audiences, we can reshape the dominant cultural narrative, push for the policy outcomes we want to see, and build a future with economic stability for everyone living along our southern border.
Favianna Rodriguez is an artist, organizer, social justice activist and co-founder and president of the Center for Cultural Power.
Lane Harwell is Senior Program Officer of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program.
Anita Khashu is Director of Ford’s Gender, Ethnic, and Racial Justice program.
