Reflections

Our visualizations and data are mere parts of this larger story. As scholars of space, race, gender, and the digital, members of our team are contributing their own reflections on what this project means to them and how they are reacting to the news.

As we have gathered and curated this data and produced these visualizations, we share certain underlying assumptions: the express knowledge that data is imprecise, impure, and as much a tool for incarceration and control as it is for revealing the truth; that maps, which have become of primary importance to our daily life, are themselves highly contingent fabrications, bending the physical reality of the world to our innate need to grasp and process, and dangerously full of altered data.

Hence, in addition to reflections from our own project group, we have reached out to a small group of historians, activists, artists, and writers to provide their own readings of our curated data and visualizations.

We provide all the reflections below in order to help contextualize both our impetus and our efforts.

Lawlessness & Exile.
by Manan Ahmed.
Manan Ahmed is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia University.

Do Not Forget.
by Maira Álvarez.
Maira Álvarez is a Ph.D. Candidate and currently a Research Assistant for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston.

To Map the Human.
by Gaiutra Bahadur.
Gaiutra Bahadur is an American writer. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2014).

Triple D: Desmantelando la mafia, desestabilizando mecanismos y documentado la memoria histórica.
by Sylvia Fernández.
Sylvia Fernández is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston and a Research Fellow with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. She is the co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography.

The Damage is Done: Visualizing Immigrant Child Social Death.
by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández.
Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Associate Professor of American Studies and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration.

Idioms.
by Durba Mitra.
Durba Mitra is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

Mapping Maybe.
by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira.
Moacir P. de Sá Pereira is Assistant Professor / Faculty Fellow of English at New York University.

What We Have, What We Can.
by Roopika Risam
Roopika Risam is an Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2018)