Alex La Pierre: Borderlandia, Citizen-Level Diplomacy

Our guest for this episode of JSW Radio is Alex La Pierre. Alex is co-founding director, with his wife Rocío La Pierre, of the binational, Southern Arizona-based non-profit organization, Borderlandia. Borderlandia’s mission is to expand public understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through a diversity of activities, including, especially, educational tours in southern Arizona and in Sonora, Mexico. I ask Alex about this work and about his view of public history more broadly. We also discuss how perceptions of the borderlands region seem to become more distorted the farther away one gets, and how Borderlandia’s work aims to combat this distorting effect of distance and politics. https://www.borderlandia.org/