In a UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative Capstone titled “El Muro que Migra (The Wall that Migrates),” urban humanities students focused on the Westlake neighborhood in Los Angeles and the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, where students developed situated, collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-modal research that is meant to provide engaged, scholarly, and creative projects around the theme of spatial justice and immigration in the context of Westlake and Tijuana. Students were tasked with creating a virtual and urban art installation that highlights the links that tie Tijuana and Westlake (LA) as two paradigmatic sites that dialogue with each other and whose identity is indelibly marked by migration. The group looked at Westlake and Tijuana as places that function as both a gateway and a destination point to the US in general and Los Angeles in particular. In close collaboration with the Tijuana-based multi-media collective Dignicraft (José Luis Figueroa, Omar Foglio, and Paola Rodríguez) and UCLA Labor Center Project Director Gaspar Rivera Salgado, students looked closely into the social, political, cultural, and spatial dynamics of documented and undocumented immigrants in both places. A field trip to Tijuana was organized in May 2022 as an important part of the research process.
