Borderlands Learning - Beth Lowry

Since around the third week of this semester, I have been experiencing a sense of apprehension when I look forward to my return to the small liberal arts school I attend in Ohio. In these weeks spent in the Borderlands and farther south, my eyes are opening to a new reality about our country and indeed our world that is all too easy to ignore when one dwells among well manicured college grounds nestled among the rolling hills of Amish country.

The landscape of Tucson - the saguaros and cloudless winter skies and parched redbrown earth - is so dramatically distinct from that which I have occupied for the first 20 years of my formal education. Even more dramatic, though, is the contrast between the nature of the education I have received during those many years, and the learning environment in which I am now ensconced. Like most who are privileged enough to have the opportunity to pursue higher education, I have spent a great deal of time learning in classrooms, from text books and lectures and overhead projectors. It is a landscape of facts and figures, syllabi and grading rubrics. By my sophomore year at Kenyon, I could define import-substitution industrialization on my history midterm and spit out a a ten page paper on the implementation of neoliberalism in Mexico and call myself a Latin American Studies major, and a GOOD one at that, with a GPA that put my name on the Merit List semester after semester. And so coming to the Borderlands with these definitions and historical processes ingrained in my mind I felt well prepared, sure and confident in my world analysis.

Yet the landscape of my education with Border Studies has caused me to question and rethink, indeed unlearn, nearly everything I had learned about Latin America until now. This learning process has most assuredly been informed and enhanced by facts and figures, but in Gambier, Ohio, those facts don't manifest themselves so visibly as I have seen on the border and the communities we passed through this past month on our travel seminar. In these places, we did not so much learn the facts of militarization and the figures of free trade agreements as we did see and feel them. Leaving Mexico, I have a more profound sense for the impacts of neoliberalism there in a way that no letter grade could communicate. There is no formal or personal affirmation for owning that knowledge, but there is a lot of guilt and frustration.

The excerpts that my peers have shared of their individual and our collective experiences this semester give shape to that newly defined landscape of the way we learn about the world and our role within it, one that is fraught with confusion and sorrow that are at times overwhelming. And this is where that aforementioned dread begins to take root. It is a dread of having to reconcile these two landscapes, to return to a midwestern campus with the weight of the Borderlands reality bearing heavily upon my mind and heart. I hope that in these coming five weeks we will continue to develop a better sense of how to navigate this challenge, but a more realistic part of me recognizes that reconciling the realities learned here with the way I learn after this semester is a process that will be part of the rest of my life, wherever I find myself.