Frances Leonard

The Border is a given of life in Texas, and this is because Texas has not always been Texas. The boundary line was first drawn in 1836, during the Texas Revolution, and redrawn farther south in 1848, in accord with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the War of the Yanqui Invasionóor the Mexican War, as people north of the border name it.

But the Border is not merely a line; it is a place, where Mexicans and Texans have lived together for upwards of 150 years. It is a region that people pass through to come north or go south, carrying their linguistic and social habits with them. These aspects of culture meet, mix, blend, and magnify as they are shared by more and more people. As one travels south through Texas, one hears less English, more Spanishóor, to the horror of proper Spanish-speaking peoples, a mixture of the two languages in one sentence, one phrase, one word. This is the Border vocalized.

To repeat, the Border is a given of life in Texas, and the Texas Council for the Humanities has placed a high priority on humanities programs and resources that deal with the Mexican heritage of Texas. But Mexican heritage does not mean recent history, any more than it means that the Border is a line that follows the Rio Grande from El Paso to Brownsville. This heritage goes back more than 3,000 years, and it takes in peoples and languages unknown to us. Thus, the TCH has supported such projects as "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries" and "Unknown Mexico," which stay south of the present borderline. In addition, the Council has supported exhibits and films on the Mexican War, exhibits and public programs on the mapping of Texas and the Southwest, and exhibits and programs on Latino literature in the United States. All of these are part of the Mexican heritage of Texas. And all of these are the subjects of photo-and-text panel exhibits circulated for public programs by the Texas Humanities Resource Center.

The website, is an outgrowth of THRC's collection of exhibits. Specifically, it is the end result of a long process of investigating how these exhibits could relate to forms of electronic media that were emerging as the 1990s began. Through a planning grant from NEH, staff concluded that the exhibits could be "repurposed" to digital format. But for what purpose? The emergence of the Internet as a medium for transmitting images as well as words provided the answer.

Border Studies is a collection of eight exhibits that relate to the Texas-U.S. Southwest-Mexican border, plus one exhibit that focuses on the Canadian/U.S. border. As distant as it may seem, the Canadian border offers a wonderful perspective for interpreting the U.S./Mexican border, and one of the goals in pairing the two exhibits, "Border Studies" and "Between Friends," was to encourage a thoughtful comparison of the two zones. (The term "Border Studies" names both the collection of nine exhibits and one singular exhibit in the collection; perhaps this duplication is confusing, but it seemed unavoidable as the collection was developed.)

Each exhibit in the collection is accompanied by an essay, by learning activities and teacher's guides, and by references to other websites of outstanding relevance. In addition, there are interactive games to accompany many of the exhibits. At present, and perhaps forever, the website is a work in progress. In addition to the Border Studies collection, Humanities Interactive will house eight (or more) additional collections of exhibits on varied themes, and each collection will offer a comparable variety of corollary materials.

Putting an exhibit on the Internet means that one is reaching new and oftentimes unidentifiable audiences, perhaps at times when a typical humanities program has to close down for the night. It means, too, that one is using new formats and rethinking traditional procedures of communicating with the public. It is an exciting adventure to be involved with the evolving nature of public humanities programming.

About this contributor
Frances M. Leonard is director of the Texas Humanities Resource Center and project director of the Humanities-Interactive.org digitizing project. She has been on the staff of the Texas Council for the Humanities since 1978.