Borders and frontiers provoke a variety of meanings, narrations, constructions of time, space and identities, and imagined and lived spaces. When confronting a physical border the movement of the body, the transitory movements of thinking, imagination, desires, and needs, are abruptly interrupted. A larger power entity, most often a nation-state, decides how far one can advance beyond a territorial border and, even within one’s own country, what spaces one can access.

Situations and associations connected with the term ‘border’ are diverse: access or exclusion; waiting for hours, days, and years, or completely in vain; the search for uncontrolled and free access and exit; "green" borders; and "open" borders. But it is not only fortified and reinforced borders that prevent movement. New borders and boundaries are established all the time along ethnic, class, and gender-specific differences, according to diverse cultural practices and backgrounds, and in line with different languages and educational systems. The complex and multiple life of the border comprises contradictions, intersections, the visibility of border crossings, as well as the development of cultural and transnational identities and diversities that are embedded in these border zones.

Insights, questions, and goals:

The Transborder Archive is intended to review and revise the concept of the archive and its mechanisms of representation. It will engage various public spheres in a discourse regarding what constitutes an archive. This discourse will stimulate critical reflection about archives and make evident the complex questions that are generated by transborder issues:

What is an archive and how are the histories of archives determined?

How are archives related to memory and the production of history and knowledge and their hegemonic power?

What is archived by whom and for whom?

Who is speaking and who is addressed?

Where and why is something archived?

Who "owns" what material and who has access to the archive?

What is left out and why?

What is archived on each side of the border?

Rather than a notion of the archive as an enclosed entity, the archive is understood here as an open and continuing process that includes the production of new material. The Transborder Archive employs a transdisciplinary approach and includes information that refers not only to state, border, and immigration politics, and migrant labor, but also to class, gender, race, and the cultural diversity that constitutes border zones, border life, and everyday existence.

The Transborder Archive will be operated as a mobile unit that will move between organizations, institutions, academic and non-academic archives, and university and public libraries. Furthermore, it will be connected to individual researchers and activists, as well as cultural and community centers and grassroots initiatives that focus on specific border issues in San Diego-Tijuana and the California-Baja California region. The mobile unit will intertwine printed matter, such as texts, books, postcards, and photographs, and online resources, films, videos, and oral histories. These oral histories will be conducted with people working in existing local archives and with the people who are the subjects of these archives. In conjunction with the transborder objective of inSite, the Transborder Archive will connect existing archival structures in order to create a temporary transdisciplinary network, dialogue, and a forum for exchange.

By visiting different localities in San Diego and Tijuana during its public operation, the Transborder Archive will open up a space for events, talks, discussions, and film screenings that will address diverse audiences.

An online archive, which would act as a networking platform for organizations, groups, archives, libraries, individuals, etc. whose work concerns border issues in San Diego-Tijuana and would link together academic and nonacademic transborder resources, could serve as a potential outcome of the Transborder Archive. In the long term, the aim is to construct a diverse and international archive that would consist of materials from various border regions from around the world, including the Palestinian-Israeli border region in Ramallah; the Indian-Pakistani border; the border region in the very north of Europe (Norway, Finland, Russland); and the Sino-Vietnamese border, to name just a few. The Transborder Archive could serve as a case study that could be transferred to other border zones, serving to make the structural similarities and specific differences of border regions visible.

—Ute Meta Bauer

Exhibitions
Athnaeum Music & Arts Library La Jolla, San Diego. From September 24 to November 13, 2005.
Centro Cultural Tijuana. From August 27 to November 13, 2005.

Project consultants
Beth Bird, Bulbo, Yvonne P. Doderer, Norma Iglesias, Fred Lonidier.

Design
José Manuel Cruz.

Design assistant
Andrea Iglesias.

Interns
Jessica Finsterwalder and José Luis de La Cruz Domínguez.

inSite production
Daniel Martínez, Márgara de León, Joy Decena, Zlatan Vukosavljevic, Esmeralda Ceballos.

CECUT
Abril Castro, Equipo museográfico CECUT.

Sponsors
Goethe Institut Mexiko, Athenaeum Music and Arts Libraby, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

For providing materials and for research advice we are deeply indebted to: Archivo Histórico de Tijuana, Jose Gabriel Rivera Delgado, Athenaeum Music & Arts Library/Erika Torri, Bulbo, Casa del Migrante en Tijuana/ Gilberto Martínez Anay and Luis Kindzierski, La Casa de la Cultura en Altamira/Elsa Arnaiz, Silvia Jaimez, Centro Cultural de la Raza/Viviana Enrique Acosta, Nancy Rodríguez, Centro Madre Asunta para Mujeres Migrantes/Sister Lisot Chema, CITTAC/Colectiva Feminista Binacional/ Carmen Valadez, Jaime Cota Aguilar, Connie García, COLEF/Humberto Berumen, Nora Bringas, Alfonso Caraveo, Fiamma Cordero di Montezemolo, Silvia López, Guillermo Meneses, Rudolfo Cruz Rineiro, José Manuel Valenzuela, Rafael Vela, Laura Velasco, Nancy Utley, Environmental Health Coalition/Jorge Osuna, Amelia Simpson, Joy Williams • Grupo de Protección al Migrante Beta, Evenor Medrano, Instituto de la Cultura Baja California/Armando García Orso, Carmen Segura, La Línea, Maclovio Rojas, Media Arts Center San Diego/Robert Bodle and teen producers, NaCO, The Midge Costanza Institute for the Study of Politics and Public Policy, Pressless/Javier Guerra, Roberto Partida, SANDAG/Ronald Saenz, San Diego Historical Society Research Library, San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, San Diego Maquiladora Workers’ Solidarity Network/ Enrique Davalos, San Diego Public Library/ Richard Crawford, Marc Chery, Ralph Delauro, Dawn Porfirio-Milton, San Diego Women’s History Museum and Educational Center/ Dawn Marsh Riggs, Eneri Rodríguez, SDSU/ Nannette Bell, Prisca Bermudez, Cristina Favretto, Paul Ganster, James Gerber, Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Harry Johnson, Marita Johnson, Cecilia Puerto, Kathleen Robles, Elizabeth Saenz-Ackermann, Patrick Sullivan, Spica*/ Gabriela Fuentes Aymes, Sociedad de Historia de Tijuana/ Gilberto Ríos, Mario Córdova Torres, Sergio Vázquez, UCSD/ Lynda Claassen, Steve Fagin, Fred Lonidier, Kim Schwenk, Visual Arts Department, Universidad Iberoamericana Tijuana/Javier Torres Alcalá, Ariel Mascareño, José Saldaña, Marcus Pfund, David Ungerleider, USD Transborder Institute/Stephen Elliott, Kyla Lackie, David Shirk, Paul Turounet, Voces de la Maquila/Sylvia Calatayud Cataño, Women Make Movies /David Bacon, Ursula Biemann, Beth Bird, Kaucyila Brooke, Abril Castro, Raúl Cárdenas, Mike Davis, Sergio de la Torre, María Teresa Fernández, Hans Fjellstad, Evangeline Griego/About Time Productions, Grrrl Zines A-Go-Go, Amar Kanwar, Annie Knight, Lula Lewis, Valeriano López Domínguez, Coral Mac Farland Thuet, Virginia MacFarland, Juliana Maxim and Can Bisel, Helena Maleno, Alex Muñoz, Producciones Nicobis, Victor Rins, Raúl Rodríguez González, Héctor Sánchez, Angela Sanders, Adriana Trujillo, Hannah Weyer, Bern Scherer.

Venues
Centro Cultural Tijuana, CECUT
Universidad Iberoamericana, Biblioteca Loyola
San Diego Public Library, San Ysidro Branch
Malcolm X Library Performing Arts Center, San Diego
Atheneum Music & Arts Library, LA Jolla, San Diego
Centro Madre Asunta para Mujeres Migrantes, Tijuana
Centro de información para trabajadores y trabajadoras, Tijuana
University of California, San Diego library walk
Casa de la Cultura en Tijuana en Altamira
Instituto de Cultura Baja California, Tijuana
Maclovio Rojas, Aguas Calientes Community Center, Tijuana
San Diego State University, Open Air Theatre Walkway
Centro Cultural La Raza, San Diego