Valeria Luiselli, Harvard College Visiting Professor of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration in the Department of English, is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. At ArtLab, Valeria will work with collaborators to develop Echoes From The Borderlands. This sound piece documents the history of violence against land and bodies in the US-Mexico borderlands. Echoes From The Borderlands works like a sonic road trip that begins in the pounding waves of the Pacific Ocean on the Tijuana /San Diego border and moves eastward for 24 hours –from sunrise to sunrise– until it reaches the wetlands of the Texan coast. By merging narratives, soundscapes, voices, melodies, rhythms, archival recordings, and sound constellations, the piece connects issues that have marked the borderlands, such as the genocide of native peoples, nuclear testing, migration, femicide, vigilantism, human trafficking, and mass detention. However, these stories of plundering and exploitation are also met with stories of resilience and resistance.
Valeria is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Carnegie Medal, American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Echoes from the Borderlands was performed as an ArtsThursday event in February 2023.