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Everywhere With CRE2 S01 Ep 03: Hostile Terrain and Migrant Deaths

Everywhere With CRE2 S01 Ep 03: Hostile Terrain and Migrant Deaths

Podcast with The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2)

In this episode guest host Michael Esposito, Assistant Professor of Sociology in Arts & Sciences, talks with Professor Tabea Linhard (Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies), Mattie Gottbrath (Coordinator for International Programming, Arts &Sciences) and Clarissa Gaona Romero (class of 2023) about the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit they coordinated on the Danforth campus. The conversation looks at immigration policy along the southwestern border, the meanings of borders, and explores how this participatory exhibit is part of a larger effort to pay homage to the lives lost.

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Reflecting on “Hostile Terrain 94”

Written by John Moore for The Ampersand, WUSTL

The exhibition HT94, which documents the migrant crisis along the U.S.–Mexico border, returns to campus August 21. Organizers Tabea Linhard and Mattie Gottbrath share why the installation’s message is more poignant than ever.

Hostile Terrain 94 mourns each life lost on the southern border

Hostile Terrain 94 mourns each life lost on the southern border

Written by Lydia McKelvie for Student Life, WUSTL

“As an observer, this piece makes me think about the nature of art and activism. There is mourning and protest reflected in the process of the piece as much as there is in the viewing of it.”

¿Quién me presta una escalera?

¿Quién me presta una escalera?

Written by Tabea Linhard (Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies, WUSTL)

“As we were getting ready to install Hostile Terrain 94 at the Danforth University Center in April of 2021, it turned out that getting hold of a ladder on a campus with covid restrictions in place would be a challenge. In my quest to solve this problem, the verses that open Antonio Machado’s poem “La saeta” (1912), widely recognizable thanks to the version that singer songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat popularized in 1969, came to mind…”

Public Health for Undocumented and Documented Migrants through a HT94 Lens

Public Health for Undocumented and Documented Migrants through a HT94 Lens

Written by Tishiya Carey (BA Candidate, WUSTL)

“To really understand the Hostile Terrain 94 Project and its correlation to immigrant access to public healthcare, I focused on the status and stance of the healthcare system particularly regarding undocumented Latinx immigrants and how that functions in relation to the Hostile Terrain 94 project.”

Manila and Orange

Manila and Orange

Written by Rosie Lopolito (BA Candidate, English, WUSTL)

“Looking at that wall of tags tears out your tongue

But a breath over 3,200 pins dare you to speak.

The wall bulges in a frozen gasp,

An inhale that won’t be released.”

Hostile Terrain 94: Holding a Life in your Hand

Hostile Terrain 94: Holding a Life in your Hand

Written by Mattie Gottbrath (Coordinator for International Programming, WUSTL)

The participatory exhibit grants us the opportunity to tangibly feel the lives we hold in our hands every day. Hostile Terrain 94 invites us to create an authentic, personal connection with the issue of migration: a connection that energizes us to foster change within this terrain that we claim as our country.

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My Baby

Art Performance by Mee Jey

Millions of people leave their homes and undertake arduous journeys in search of better future. Thousands die or go missing and just as many bodies are found that remain unidentified. According to Hindu belief system, if a dead is not given a due farewell, the soul wanders on the mortal world, suffering in pain. Assuming the role of a Ghost Mother, I am giving these lost-souls a due remembrance by renaming them as ‘MY BABY’ and helping them to rest in peace in the ‘Other World’.

Recordar en tiempos de pandemia

Recordar en tiempos de pandemia

Escrito por Karla P. Aguilar Velásquez (PhD Candidate, Hispanic Studies, WUSTL)

Sostendremos en nuestras manos los nombres de varios de los millones de migrantes que mueren en las más extremas condiciones en la frontera desértica entre México y Estados Unidos…Pero es justo ahora, en este día a día de la pandemia donde la empatía ha mostrado ser clave para la supervivencia donde se hace más urgente reflexionar por nuestras insospechadas interdependencias.”

Feet, Hands, and Tongues: Reading Cristina Rivera Garza in Oct. 2020

Feet, Hands, and Tongues: Reading Cristina Rivera Garza in Oct. 2020

Written by Jenny Wu (MA Candidate, Art History and Archaeology, WUSTL)

Cristina Rivera Garza’s latest collection of essays, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press on October 6, 2020, grapples with the U.S. and Mexico’s long history of violent erasure and with those hauntings and traces that persist in the pain of memory.”

HT94: Something More than Mourning

HT94: Something More than Mourning

Written by Jay Buchanan (MA Candidate, Theater and Performance Studies, WUSTL)

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a communal art project that engages the human toll of United States anti-immigration policy at host sites across several continents. In this essay I summarize the scholarship and organizing that informs HT94. I also call the WUSTL and broader HT94 communities to think about the breadth of the project’s significance. 

Collective mourning and remembrance: Hostile Terrain 94

Collective mourning and remembrance: Hostile Terrain 94

Written by Keishi Foecke for The Ampersand

“While St. Louis is not located near the border in Arizona, event organizers Tabea Linhard and Mattie Gottbrath both feel that it is still important to bring the exhibit to Washington University.”