The following activities will help your students begin investigating borders in their own communities and to think about how these boundaries affect their lives and identities. They are reprinted with permission from the Smithsonian Institution Center for Cultural and Folklife Heritage.
1. Draw a map of the neighborhood around your school or home. Examine its borders or boundaries. How did you decide where to stop drawing? What marks these borders (fences, roads, rivers, parking lots)? What lies beyond these borders? How is it different from what is inside your mapped area? How is it the same? Do you need to cross these borders? What happens when you cross them?
2. The map on p. 1 provides a closer look at the geographical region of the U.S.-Mexico border. How many states in the United States does the border run along? How many states in Mexico does the border run along? What geographic features help to define the border? If you are not from the border region, obtain a map of your home city, county, or state. Discuss the borders of your own region.
3. What does the word identity mean? Write down several ideas. Can you think of other words that might come from the same root (i.e., identify, identification, identical)?
Look up the word identity in a dictionary. Compare definitions from different dictionaries.
Based on your own experience, do you agree or disagree with the meaning in the dictionary? Do the dictionary definitions cover situations that you have experienced? What would you add?
If you disagree with some points of the dictionary meaning, or find the definition incomplete, rewrite the entry to reflect your own ideas.
4. Read the following statement from Enrique Lamadrid, a folklorist from New Mexico.
We continually negotiate our identity, every day of our lives, every time we open our mouths. My name is Enrique Lamadrid. I’m from New Mexico. Every time I open my mouth, I have to decide whether to talk to people in Spanish or English. When I was growing up, to some people I was Rick, to other people Enrique. It’s a dual identity, but it’s not cut in the middle. Both of these ends meet, and there is a unity to all of that. All of us have experienced that, I’m sure.
What does Enrique mean when he says we "negotiate our identity"? How does the way someone expresses him/herself identify him/her? If you speak more than one language, have you had an experience similar to Enrique’s? What is a "dual identity"? How can someone be more than one person at the same time? Have you experienced this feeling?
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