 Starting with my routine announcement, I'm welcoming you to the colloquium. I'm Scott Osterwald, Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade. We're welcoming you to tonight's colloquium and just to again to go over the ground rules with Zoom. We run this as a webinar, which means that the members of the CMS graduate program and faculty are on as panelists just so that they can participate in the conversation after the presentation. If we recognize you as somebody from the MIT community, we'll try to promote you to panelists as well. If you remain a guest, you're also welcome to participate. We just ask you to ask questions in the queue. But you're more than welcome to be here this week and every week for the colloquium. With that, I will turn things over to Professor Vivek Bald who's going to actually introduce tonight's colloquium. Thank you, Scott. Well, it's really a pleasure to be able to welcome Mauricio Cardero to the colloquium. It's been a pleasure to have Mauricio as part of the CMS community for the last few years. Just a little about Mauricio, he has worked in the arts and underground scene since the 1980s. He established the fanzine caution and served as the education coordinator and program director at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In France, he opened his own art gallery in Tour. Returning to the US, he served as executive director at the Revolving Museum and was also a founding director of Mill Number Five, an indoor Victorian streetscape, which I'd like to hear a bit more about in the Q&A. Cardero now teaches comics primarily and is a part-time lecturer at MIT. He's currently teaching making comics and sequential art and lecturing in the visual story graphic novel. His work has been published in Double Nichols Forever, Dollars and Sense, MIT's Grad X comic series and the fashion Institute of Technologies, Black Stories Matter. Border X, a crisis in graphic detail is available at all major online retailers and through the website, borderx.com. And we're gonna hear about Border X. Just now. Just now. Just now. I think I've lost audio. You can hear me? Great, okay. So I'm just gonna let this roll. Yeah. Hi, I'm Mauricio Cordero. I'm a lecturer at MIT. I teach a course on comics production. I'm also the founder and the editor of Border X. Today, I'll be in conversation with Professor James Parity as well as Professor Warren Binford, who is the president and the founder of Project Amplify. We'll also hear from several of the artists who contributed to this volume. And first, we'll hear a special message from someone whose actions really inspired me to take action, Senator Jeffrey Merkley from Oregon. Welcome to today's presentation of the Border X project. I'm Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, and the topic is one I'm personally very invested in. Two years ago, just days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration's zero tolerance policy, which criminalized refugees and purposefully traumatized children for fleeing persecution and unspeakable violence, I flew down to the border to see the situation for myself. I walked through a customs and border protection patrol station where I saw rows of chain link cages filled with young children. I stopped in front of one where young boys were lining up by height, the youngest in front. He was just knee high to a grasshopper, maybe four years old at most. I couldn't believe what I saw in that facility. I could not believe that our government, the US government was deliberately traumatizing children, ripping them out of their parents' arms to discourage refugee families from seeking safe harbor in the United States. It still haunts me today. It should haunt every American. I also went to visit another facility where I'd heard that hundreds of boys, perhaps as many as a thousand, were being held who had been separated from their parents. I couldn't imagine a thousand boys incarcerated in that former Walmart. And I couldn't imagine the experiences they'd gone through at the hands of our government. I wanted to find out the details. The onsite manager agreed to come outside and talk to me, but instead he called the police to have me escorted off the policy, off the property. Well, when he did that, millions of Americans were watching on Facebook Live. And those Americans wondered, just as I was wondering, what is our government hiding behind those locked doors? Never before would I have believed that our government, the United States of America would plunge ahead with a strategy of traumatizing children deliberately. But it was real. By the end of the year, more than 15,000 refugee children were held in camps across our nation. Today, at this moment, our American government has still been unable to reunite more than 600 of them with their parents. And all of those children, all those many thousands, still have to live with the trauma of their experiences inflicted at the hands of our government. The child separation was only the beginning of the Trump administration's war on refugees. As we all know, there were many more pieces of that policy. But it's up to us now, with Trump heading out the door to confront the pain and suffering, to do all we can to remedy the pain and suffering of those children and do all we can to restore fairness and justice to the immigration system. We need to ensure that policies like child separation never ever happen again. I know that that's why many of you have come to this gathering today. Thank you. Thank you for working to understand the cruelty unleashed on our southern border and how we can work together to end it. Working together, let's relight Lady Liberty's torch. Why don't you say something about what got you thinking about comics and borders? The origin was really anger and rage that I was feeling. And I hadn't felt this angry since I was a teenager, rebelling against Reagan and Bush and growing up in BC around politics. I mean, that was meat and potatoes down there. We thought about politics all the time, even as a high school student. And back then, the rage was directed towards music. So I realized that, if I was going to bring any sort of substantial record or evidence of my rebellion, it had to be in the form of a comic book. And so I started to directly contact a few friends and say, hey, what do you think about this? And the response was overwhelmingly positive. But I was just curious if there was some set of episodes or something that set this off. I think the first incident was Senator Jeff Merkley trying to get into the detention camp and being turned away. And it wasn't at all what he said on camera as he was turned away. It was the absence of footage from inside the border camp seeing how much the political structure and our government had caved into this new doctrine that was very, I feel racist, very anti-asylum. These are people who are, in most cases, fleeing a situation that is unlivable, untenable for them and their families and they're trying to make a better life. But as we know, the person who is in the White House right now referred to them as rapists and murderers and drug dealers. Not having a view inside the camps concerned me knowing that just about everything that comes out of that person's mouth is either projection or just a lie. My tweets weren't going anywhere, you know? And certainly didn't satisfy that rage. And so that DIY punk rock spirit came back to me and I said, well, I've got to make all this concrete and found out about Project Amplify who published testimony of migrants that were presented in Flores versus Barr. The construction of artistic work requires a kind of a suspension of rage and some of the emotions that might lead to starting it. So how did that work? Well, when I opened up the project to the world at large, I realized I was getting a lot of rage back and that's when I installed a ban on the word Trump. And that is where the rage turned into productivity. It started with rage and then quickly became compassion and then I realized I had to steer the ship. You can only raise so much in a piece before it becomes literal to be art and then becomes a form of almost propaganda or something like that. There's this long history of Americans trying to figure out how they're going to exist in a world that is way more complicated than some may understand. As far as indigenous, there are hundreds of indigenous people on every continent of the globe. And this is one focus that you have on this particular location, but it sort of stands. Does it not for a kind of universal problem that has to do with borders? Absolutely. And at the very beginning, I made the decision to include science fiction and fiction as one of the sections that we would have in the final work to get to the universal truths in this struggle. We need fiction, we need science fiction, we need allegories that go beyond the headlines and beyond this moment and even beyond this planet. And so I really enjoyed curating that section and finding the artists. It was wonderful to get so many different points of view looking inward and modalities, you know, science fiction, straight documentary, some reportage and personal work. Since you're bridging on some of these questions, maybe say a little more about the process of making this. How does a person decide and then go about making a collection like this? Yeah, well, when you get to the point where the rage outweighs common sense, I think that's where you get started. I found myself kind of alone at the beginning and then people did step up as the project grew. So I guess that the first step is deciding what you're going to do it and defining it and scale it to what your abilities are. Or the way I did it was naively scaling it way above my abilities and having to grow into those abilities. So, you know, I have experience in producing comics and putting them together. I know all the tech specs, et cetera. But there's a much greater learning curve in terms of hurting 70 contributors. And these contributors sometimes, I mean, a comic is not always done just by a single author. And generally it's done by, there's an anchor, there's a colorist, there's someone who deals with the actual narratives, the bubbles and all the things that, so how did that all work out? Did most of these get done by, I noticed that almost all of them have multiple constructors. There are multiple people involved. Right, well, that was part of what took a lot of legwork at the beginning was playing matchmaker. Now, there were people that came with a team and were ready to go. In a few cases, there was existing work that we could just take and reprint where the artist had all the rights to reprint. So that happened. But I did play matchmaker and really took time to read scripts, pass them along to a pencil or artist. And at that point we determined whether the artist would take on the entire project or if I had to go out and find a letter or colorist. So really trying to find what a comfortable or doable workload was for each participant. There were a few people that were just really helpful. Royal Torres, for example, was one person who stepped up and helped a lot with the editing and he got a lot of teams together, tied up a lot of loose ends. I'm curious about the organization, which I think is very, very effective, but you have the exhibits, which are sort of reviews, interviews, and things of that sort that were captured. These are testimonials. But then you have the response and you have the context and then ruminations and then a series of posters. So I'm just curious about that collection, which I think is a rich variety of possibilities for this form. As the work began to arrive, I saw a pattern emerge and the pattern strengthened over time into what seemed like four good sections for the book. The four sections are the exhibits, the response, the context, and ruminations. So I felt that the factual and most heart-wrenching work should appear at the beginning of the book to establish what we're talking about when we say migrant crisis. The exhibits are based on verbatim transcripts of migrant experiences in the detention camp. And these testimonies were presented to the Supreme Court in the ongoing Flores v. Bar case to mitigate the devastating nature of these testimonies. I chose to highlight agents and agencies that are working to create hope by aiding migrants in the field. And so the response section collects a few of those stories. Then the context section collects personal reflections and historic accounts to try to offer a broad contextual background for the volume. The last section, the ruminations, offers fiction, allegory, metaphor, and adaptation to get at some of the underlying themes and universal truths that we can find in the crisis. And closing out the volume, there is a small section of posters that were created especially for the collection in the vein of sort of work's progress administration, sort of war era posters. Do you have any kind of expectations for the impact of a piece of work like this or is it kind of more diffused, kind of cultural awareness or how do you think about impact? One impact I'd hope for is precisely what we're talking about today. Sharing this model with the public in hopes of inspiring the replication for other social causes. Another is to create a graphic history of this moment so that we don't forget these atrocities that are being carried out in the name of the US. Also bearing witness to the suffering and torment endured by the subjects in this book who've got so much to offer or society yet they're treated like criminals for seeking a better life. Asylum is not a crime. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor, yet it seems like they're being punished for a felony or some other serious crime. Finally, we set out to help a non-profit and the one we decided on, the South Texas Human Rights Center is a really good example of an organization with an extremely modest budget and they're creating a real benefit to society. The funds we've collected and the proceeds that we continue to generate have gone to help them carry out their mission and we'll hear a bit more about the South Texas Human Rights Center later on in the presentation. How does distribution work and things of that sort? The question about distribution format came up immediately. Should I try to find a publisher and potentially wait years to see any sort of result or take a risk and self-publish and rely mostly on word of mouth? I chose the latter and despite many difficulties, delays, complications, some of them due to COVID, in the end I think it was the best choice. By using a print-on-demand service, we had a lower risk than vanity printing and we were able to get the volume into production eight months after the start of the project. So that's eight months to contact all the contributors, create the content, edit, design, and lay out and get it to print and distribution. Also by serving as the publisher, we can continue to generate profit which goes to fund the South Texas Human Rights Center and the title is currently being distributed worldwide. So it's available for about the same cost as buying it here in the U.S. So I'd say the benefits are similar to the traditional publishing route but with a much higher revenue stream and lower risks. It sort of gives a new meaning to public art in the creation and collaborating together to try to address issues that are really outstanding and urgent and we need more of this, not less. This is a pioneering effort, I would say, just from what I know about comics. So you've kind of invented a new process. It's a really brilliant project. Thank you. I'm very, very glad that it happened and I hope you continue. Let's get started. So, Warren, can you tell me a little bit about the origin of Project Amplify? How it got started, why it got started, when it got started and what the mission is. Yes, Project Amplify was started in the summer of 2019 after approximately a dozen of us left the Clint Border Patrol facility where we had discovered over 350 children being kept in a windowless warehouse, a loading dock, jail cells and tents in the desert. The children were hungry, they were filthy, they had been severely neglected, there was no one supervising them, they were sleeping on concrete floors, concrete blocks next to open toilets. They had been taken away from family members and were basically left alone to take care of each other. There was widespread illness, there was a flu and respiratory illness that was going around, there was a license gestation. And we went to the public about what we had discovered because the situation had gotten so dangerous and so extreme under President Trump's administration in the year leading up to that summer of 2019, at least seven children had died in government custody or shortly after they had been released from government custody and we were afraid that more children were going to die. The president denounced it as fake news, said that our accounts were grossly exaggerated. He and Vice President Pence assured that the children were well taken care of which was not true and they put Vice President Pence both on the Sunday talking head shows and then Air Force Two and flew him down to Texas where he toured another facility, they dressed the children in government issued brightly colored sweatsuits and then had the children pose for the camera and wave and give a thumbs up that they were being well taken care of. And we realized that there was a false counter narrative that was being advanced with the highest levels of government and wondered how it was that we could counter that narrative so that these children's experiences and their histories were not erased. And we decided to create a website and post all of the publicly available testimonies of the children on that website so that any member of the public who wanted to inform themselves could go and read the children's accounts and discover for themselves what the truth was, what the children said in their own words. And then we called out to artists and writers and musicians and everyday Americans and asked them to read the children's accounts and find ways to amplify their voices. What was different in 2019 than previous years? Yeah, so I started visiting the camps in 2017. You know, sometimes children are in cages and sometimes they're in jail cells. So it's important for people to understand that there are many facilities in which these children are being capped and none of them that I visited are appropriate for children. And what was different about what happened in the last four years is the number of children who were being held, the length of time in which they were being held, the number of children who were being removed from their families, including their parents, and the level of abuse they were experiencing and the number of deaths. Prior to the children who died in 2018 and 2019, no child had died in, you know, immigrant child, you know, condition and died in German custody in almost a decade. And we saw approximately seven children that we know of, you know, there may have been more, but we know of seven children who had died in the year leading up to our visit to Flint in June 2019. So that's what we were saying, conditions so bad that children were literally dying. And it was, you know, last year alone in 2019, there were approximately 69,000 children. Who have been detained by the US government. And that was a significantly increased number from what we've seen in years past. So are they committing a crime by crossing the board? No, it depends. When someone comes to the United States for the purpose of finding asylum, they are not required to have documentation. So people who are coming to the United States to claim asylum for that purpose are not committing the crime. They have the right to do that under US law. They have the right to do that under international law. However, if someone is coming to the United States for the purpose of, for example, getting a job, they are committing a crime. And that crime is a misdemeanor. It's the equivalent of playing your radio too loud or music too loud. And so what that means is when the Trump administration implemented the zero tolerance policy and said, we're going to take children away from anybody who processed the border without consideration of a, whether or not they're coming for asylum, they were essentially violating the law. And then when they took children away from people who weren't here for claiming asylum, but for jobs, literally they were taking their children away for a misdemeanor that was the equivalent of playing their music too loud. Starting in January, 2019, they started to implement what's called the Migrant Protection Protocols also known as Remain in Mexico. And many of the children and families that normally would be in the United States while their asylum things are being heard are being sent to these very dangerous border towns in Mexico that are controlled by gangs, that are controlled by cartels, where there's a lot of human trafficking. Remember that Expo is one of the lead source countries for human trafficking in America. And rather than keep the children in the United States with their family, their parents, other loved ones, they're sending them to these really dangerous border towns and then keeping them there for what could be a two, three, four, or five-year process. In March, 2020, the Trump administration basically started to block all arrivals to the United States and blamed it on COVID, which is so ironic because this administration doesn't recognize the severity or danger of COVID. The hundreds of children that we do know about are actually being kept in blockade and kept in black box locations, such as hotels. And so we're having a really hard time tracking those children. Is it worse, you know, being in a tent in Mexico with your parents for several years, you know, or what's likely to be, you know, several years, or is it worse to be separated from your parents for, you know, 89 days, which is the average, was the average under the Trump administration until recently and kept in border patrol facilities, you know, or Walmart, but then reunited with your family after that. And I guess what I come down is that both of these are horrible and neither one of them is acceptable. And what we really need to do is under a new administration and with a new Congress, we need to create legal protections to make sure that the brutality that children have been subjected to under this administration never happens again. And I've already spoken with Senator Murphy's office about working together to, you know, draft legislation that makes sure that this never happens again. We need to get to the root problem. Part of the root problem is trying to support security in the children's home countries so that they don't need to migrate. But for those who do need to migrate to make sure that they are treated humanely throughout the asylum process, we also, you know, Michael Bohenach of Human Rights Watch and I also are working on a policy piece that describes how to undo all of the damage that's been done by the Trump administration. And we hope to have that published in January. And I mean, we're already seeing such a severe draw in students, foreign students coming to the United States to study. And it's a huge brain drain, frankly, that you know this, you work at MIT. You know, this is something that we've relied on for years, which is, you know, an open academy globally so that people could come here and then there could be a vibrant exchange of ideas. This is what the whole Fulbright program is about. And so they really are, you know, creating a tremendous impediment to enrichment of America by having, you know, an open flow of global ideas and global talent. So, you know, what we know is that when you isolate people, they go quite mad. You know, we see this with the Unabomber, we see this with other isolations that human beings are inherently social creatures who need interaction with others. We need interactions in order to be exposed to fresh ideas. We need interaction with others in order to inspire creativity. We need to not lock ourselves up in a basement for so many reasons. I mean, literally we're already going quite mad. Just, you know, in the months that we've been in lockdown and in the months that we've tried to, you know, engage with people who have different ideas than we have, it has become so unhealthy and so toxic that I think it's, it gives us a vision of what life would be like in the United States. So, you know, I think it's really important to have a vision of what life would be like in the United States. So, you know, we have a vision of what life would be like in the United States if we continue to further isolate ourselves both as a country and as different groups within the country who have political ideas that might not be consistent with others. Why or how can arts help? Yeah. So, it's so interesting because I'm not an artist. I'm not particularly creative and yet I can look at a work of art and I can resonate in every poorer of my being. There are times when I can't read another sad story and yet I can look at a picture and be completely open and absorb the story or the image that that art conveys. Artists can simply create an image, create a sound, tell a story that can silence the noise and allow a truth to be known. And I appreciate the courage that they have to do things like read the stories of the, you know, read the declarations, the testimonies of the children who have been abused at the border allow that trauma into their being and to transform the child's trauma through secondary exposure trauma in order to help get the children's stories out. Is the news media in particular helping the situation at the border? So, I have to say that I think that the news media has really, really helped us with certain getting the truth out about certain stories. So, the separation of children from their parents and making sure that the public knew about children who were being abused in the Clint border patrol facility and neglected down there. The media has really disappointed me as far as, you know, educating the public about what was going on with the children who were being sent to Mexico or not Mexican and, you know, including many who don't speak Spanish. I wish that the media understood better that the children in Mexico are in a constructive U.S. custody because they have asylum hearings pending, you know, that they are asylum, and that the other refugees basically and that they, 89% of them have families or other loved ones in the United States who can take care of them in regular homes and send them to schools while their asylum claims are being heard and instead they're being kept in tents and, you know, cartels control the areas. You know, two of the children that a colleague of mine and his team interviewed, they were killed or the interviewers playing had even left the grant, you know, in Tijuana. And so these children's lives are at risk. They're not receiving access to education, which they have a right to. And there is the likelihood that they will remain there for years. You know, the entire world has recognized that children have a right to all these things, that children have a right to family integrity, that children have a right to be in a secure environment, that they have a right to education and that they have a right to, you know, safety, you know, from prosecution and to be free of abuse and neglect. And whether you're talking about the U.S. facilities in the United States that I visited, or whether you talk about, you know, the camps and other facilities where children are being sent by the U.S. government to Mexico, none of these meet the children's rights that have been recognized under the National Rights of Child, which has been ratified by every country in the world, but one, the people who have seen, you know, who have seen Border Acts and have seen some of the other projects have expressed so much appreciation and such a strong emotional response to these different projects. And they're so appreciative of all the artists who have contributed to them. I think that they have played a key role in helping to motivate people to get off the boat and to call for a change in leadership. I think that, you know, the mistreatment of children in migration and of families has been identified as a key issue to, you know, suburban women in swing states. And I think that to the extent that those women, those voters find out about and come to understand what's been done to these children and their families that it can have a dispositive impact on this election. So every artist, every musician, every writer, everyone who has put up one of the children's quotes on a long sign, or in Philadelphia and elsewhere, the skywriters who have sent messages, you know, in the skies behind their planes during major public events. I think all of these people should know that at best they may have contributed to change the outcome of this election and in doing so changing the course of history. They have helped to make sure that there is an accurate history of what was done to these children, and in doing so they have not only honored our nation in making sure that we understand what we've done and what we have tragically allowed to happen, but that these children's identities and experiences are honored and amplified. I just appreciate so much the role that comics have played and the comics artists have played. When I first reached out and asked the public to do this, I did not imagine the overwhelming support that we've seen from comics artists, you know, from South Park to Boarder X to the illustrations in the children's book and I am so grateful to all of you for contributing your talents, so thank you so much for amplifying your voices. And thank you so much. When I started Boarder X, I had not yet heard of Project Amplify. It was really the linchpin that brought a lot of people in that couldn't commit to longer pieces and it really helped us get those first few comics that then grew out the rest of the project. So thank you so much for all your work with Project Amplify and everything else that you're doing. Oh, thank you Mauricio. I appreciate you so much. You're welcome. Hello, this is Eddie Canales. I'm the director of the South Texas Center that is located in Brooks County and Falfurias is the county seat of Brooks County. Brooks County has demonstrated to be over the last 10 years the apex of migrant deaths and we have a humanitarian crisis of migrant bodies and the skeleton remains being recovered in Brooks County this year. It has been 32 bodies and skeleton remains have been recovered. This demonstrates a humanitarian crisis that exists on the US-Mexico border and in that note that crisis is demonstrated by the Boarder X comic book anthology and comic book form received by a lot of my colleague members of our organization individuals and our universities, NGOs that are reviewing and taking the anthology and using it in their classroom and using it to educate the community and also decision makers and stakeholders. Without the Boarder X we would not have the tool that has been developed by Maricio Cordero and his colleagues in terms of highlighting the crisis that exists at the border and the different issues that are very prevalent. Thank you very much for your attention on this short video. If you need any questions call or look at the South Texas Human Rights Center our Facebook page and our website. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is David Lasky I am a graphic novelist. I've been making graphic novels and comics for about 30 years. For Boarder X I adapted the testimony of a 15 year old girl who was detained seeking entrance into the U.S. and placed in a giant cage with many other children at the Clint Border Facility near El Paso, Texas. In one page I tried to give a visual look at her experience and amplify her voice in this way because I am outraged that the U.S. is separating children and parents putting children in cages and not able to reunite them with parents it's disgusting and as an artist I wanted something I could do besides just signing internet petitions so this was a way to use my skills to try to help and I hope it will make a difference for children like this girl who just want a better life in our country. My name is Brian Delay I teach the history of the U.S. Mexican Borderlands at UC Berkeley and I had the good pleasure of meeting Mauricio Cordero last year in 2019 at Stanford University where I was a fellow and we got to talking about our shared love of comic books I been a big comic book fan my whole life and managed a comic book store for a few years before I went to graduate school and he mentioned this remarkable, exciting project that he had been spearheading Borderax to raise awareness and raise money for immigrant rights on the border and he invited me to think about whether or not I might be able to come up with some kind of a short piece based in history and after thinking about it for a while I decided that it would be interesting to write a short script about a remarkable Mexican figure he was a general and a scientist named Manuel Mierre Taran and in the early 1830s he tried to convince his superiors in the Mexican government that something terrible was about to happen in Texas that the colonists that the country had invited into Texas were going to rebel and that the country that Mexico was going to lose Texas forever and he failed, he failed to convince them to take the action that they needed and he killed himself so it seemed like a relevant story for thinking about the crisis on the border today because in Manuel Mierre Taran's time it was an immigration crisis it's just that the immigration crisis was coming from the United States so I came up with the script and to my great delight Mauricio agreed to do the artwork himself and so the finished product is the piece in Border X called Texas Killed Him and it was a great experience working with Mauricio and being part of this wonderful collection I'm David Martin Davies and I'm Yvette Benavides we are proud to have contributed our journalism to Border X a crisis in graphic detail in my story water stations save lives Consuelo Terra's incredible artwork brought to life the story that I found in south Texas where Eddie Canales founder of the south of Texas human rights center builds and maintains water stations in the desert without them many more immigrants would die of thirst kittens and cages is my story which documents how children are forced to represent themselves in US immigration court and the utter lack of concern for their safety and their lives Chris Doray's artwork captures the array of emotions that I experienced while covering the story without a doubt more people need to see these graphic journalism stories and gain a better understanding of the atrocities that are happening on America's southern border many thanks to Mauricio Cordero for spearheading this ambitious project and making it a reality hi I'm Samantha Stevenson and I'm one of the contributors to the Border X comics anthology it was important to me to be part of this project as an immigrant I wanted to help in some way and this gave me the opportunity to help in raising money for the south Texas human rights center and also to help raise awareness about what's happening at the border I think for myself sometimes it's to even acknowledge what's happening can be so deeply and profoundly distressing that sometimes we just turn away because we just don't know what to do it's I'm not a lawyer I'm not a politician I'm an artist and musician so to be given this opportunity to actually contribute in some way to help was just great and the process of reading the declarations was deeply disturbing to really see what is happening there and I think it's important that art the performance arts the visual arts the creative process to be able to bring these things to light is very powerful also I think it's really interesting to have it as a comics anthology because it's something that you can hold in your hand you can read in the quiet wherever it is that you are it's not a news report in someone else's voice there are a lot of words being thrown at you and I find that perhaps there's a certain connection that can happen there that can be pretty powerful Hi, this is Donna Barr and I'm speaking for Mauricio Cordera's project His Border X that will help support actions against the treatment of asylum seekers in the United States and on our borders and I'm the author of The Desert Beach and I've done a lot of work in comics many projects over the years and I thought this was a very worthwhile project my one page that I did has to do with the fact that we are well on our way into the same processes used as in Nazi Germany in the treatment of asylum seekers or people of color or women or anyone else it's the same processes and so that's what I wanted to emphasize in my page that I did for Border X Comics are a really good medium for activism because you can take very complex ideas boil them down and express them simply and directly and concisely using words and images for example I think about those little cards that are sometimes on posters about what to do when someone is choking there isn't even language but there is essentially a comic that is expressing something very complex simply to a wide audience the same is true with activism in comics where you're trying to get an idea across to an audience a variety of ages a variety of languages and this medium allows you to do that it also allows you to disseminate you can do it in paper and I think that comics really taps into the visual language that people are used to and can consume easily when I first approached the safe passage project the idea for this comic thought it was going to be about the clients coming to America so I set up a round table interview with five of their lawyers and over the course of those interviews we identified specific topics that would be important to their clients had of course nothing to do with them coming to America they already knew about that what they didn't know was what is a pro bono lawyer why should I trust a pro bono lawyer what do I do if I get suspended from school what do I do if I get a ticket very specific questions very specific concerns for their client base after I had all those interviews I had them transcribed then I read over them and using highlighters highlighted the things that I thought would be the most important once I took all of those highlighted things I boiled them down into a comic script into a thumbnail and I handed them off to Peter cupper who was the person who drew the comic and then together we made the comic this comic was then disseminated within courthouses to sister organizations across the United States and could be available digitally and in comic book form I think what border X is doing is such a great example of comics and activism because there was an idea I want to help immigrants there was an organization that was identified to raise money for then the word went out within the comics community who can help me do this comic many people at myself included wanted to contribute and then you have all these stories and of course stories are the building blocks for empathy and without empathy we can't really move forward hi I'm Tom Hart I'm the executive director of the sequential artist workshop we're a grassroots comics organization we're online and in person in Gainesville Florida we teach comics and support any literacy and other projects in the medium I've never been a very good activist I'm afraid I've always half of me is always wished I could be a better activist but the other half of me always stays in the art world I became an artist because I believe in what people have to express I believe in something really innate and beautiful and interesting about the complexity of people I believe in what people are allowed to do I believe I believe that when people are allowed to be themselves allowed to flourish when they have the safety and the permission and the guidance and some inspiration that they do the most profound interesting beautiful things and so my story in comics was strange it was not a reportage it was not a documentary it was not trying to show some stories that haven't already seen it was trying to investigate some of the emotions and some of the back story all of my stories have been fueled by rage rage that this that people aren't treated like people mostly that people aren't treated like they are something valuable that they have something valuable to contribute I've always believed that people do and that people empowered by their community by their broader world will shine beautiful things provide beautiful things create beautiful things and the constant destruction of people's spirits and their physical bodies is the biggest harm anyone can do and we do it constantly as a culture and so my story is as strange as they are the one in Border X is wild as it is is fueled by that rage and that belief that we should be providing for each other so we're gonna as Scott mentioned there is a Q&A that folks who are attendees from outside MIT can can write their questions into and we'll be opening up to questions from everyone on screen right now first I wanted to just step in and ask a question to start things off Mauricio and I'm thinking about the posters that were that you showed early on in this presentation from the DC punk rock scene that you were connected to and particularly the rock against Reagan poster that was a series of shows that happened all over the country really in different punk rock scenes and I really have two questions connected to that one is just about what you what you learned and what you have sort of brought forward as an artist from from those origins within the DC punk scene which was a particularly politically engaged scene compared to others across the country and the other is actually on a broader political level thinking about Reagan and thinking about what the kind of activism that so many were involved in at that moment to tie that to the border crisis right now because I think sometimes what gets lost in press accounts is the historical depth of why people are fleeing from Central America to cross the border which of course does date back to the Reagan era so I was wondering if you could two very different questions from looking at that same poster but if you could talk about those to start off Sure so I was lucky enough to grow up in the punk scene and like you said it was not like the scene in London or New York or anywhere else it was not concerned with fashion it wasn't about having spiky jackets and you know green hair or anything like that it was really about politics and how young people can resist and really rage against politics and credit channel that into creativity and art so early on one show I was 14-15 just standing by the stage and Ian McKay and John Stab and I believe it was Henry Rollins walked up to me and asked me if I was so and so I don't remember what the name was and I was like no but you are in Henry and John Stab those were my idols and to have them actually just be so approachable sort of shaped my attitude towards art and music I wanted to patronize artists who are approachable and sort of down to earth and also I don't have a problem with going up to someone I admire and asking them for something especially when it's for a larger cause wow Reagan so we did have these wonderful shows right there on the mall at first they rock against Reagan then rock against Bush and so every year around the 4th of July or on the 4th of July we have a counter concert almost like the Chicago DNC where the MC5 played outside to sort of counter what was going on inside and those were quite formative and informative concerts and productions there would be tons of flyers given out but also leaflets I first learned about genocide in Guatemala through a millions of dead cops album MDC they had an insert that detailed the atrocities and some of the most graphic disturbing photos that I'd ever seen things that were just not being promoted in the press for obvious reasons they're gruesome photos so that's sort of blunt honesty and no real tie to commercialism so the interest was getting the truth out maybe selling 100 albums but really changing minds more than having a pop single or getting on MTV and the Reagan we could talk all night about Reagan in Central America but really that was something that opened my eyes the punk rock movement opened my eyes to Reagan's policies and really drove me to actually visit Nicaragua in 1990 I believe on a small relief mission right after the war but I'm not a American expert so I'll just kind of leave it at that Thanks Questions Hamba Hi Mauricio, thank you so much for your talk I was wondering there's been a lot of conversation about co-creating with communities and I was wondering if you why did you choose to create this with artists rather than like immigrant communities for instance like create the art with those communities Yeah Well part of it is knowing my skill set and how much time I have I make comics, I know professional artists and I can get into those circles and I really didn't expect to spend the entire year focused on this one project Also there's something about engaging people that aren't engaged in that specific topic that's very powerful I would love to do a project with migrants and there were some migrants involved in border acts and even someone who is here without papers but I won't get too much into that however they already know the history, they know what's happening to them how they're seen by society and so I thought opening it up to other people who might not as Jim points out in the video there are a lot of teams and so for some of the comics we had up to seven people working on a comic all looking at this topic and all learning from it and really absorbing it and if I could create a few more advocates for the border crisis issues I felt that it was a good strategy and they further reached out to their audiences and sort of got the word much further than I could have done on my own does that make sense yeah thank you thank you Javier? Hello everyone, Mauricio thank you for the presentation and for the project my question is do you see any value offering a translated version of the Scientology to Spanish is it feasible even or have you thought about it yes and I've done it so one of the things that I didn't fit into the video is that we had a team of translators who I knew one of them when I lived in France and he got a large group in Barcelona who took every single page and translated so obviously our audience is Latin American so they worked with a few editors I believe in Arizona and one in Mexico to proofread it to take the sort of Castilian aspect out and translate it into more universal Spanish so a few of those have gone out to artists the rest are sitting on my hard drive until tomorrow when I have time again to work on this and we hope to get a new all Spanish edition out I'd like to try to do another fundraiser or somehow figure out a way to fund the printing so we can get them into the remain in Mexico camps so we have a few leads there's a nun who's doing some incredible work on the border like smuggling reading materials and things into the camps and so it's an ongoing process but it's not complete and it's kind of time consuming as well to redo the lettering but luckily we don't have to redo the art so it'll be fourth time thank you thank you other questions well I'll until we have another question I had another question that was more about process and that is I'm curious to hear about the relationship a bit more about the relationship between this project the project I'm forgetting the name of the woman who was speaking about project amplify and the southern Texas human rights group and what were the connections between all three you mentioned in the talk that you were already working on the project before connecting with project amplify but I'm also interested in the connection with the south Texas human rights group it feels like I almost woke up one morning just thinking is anybody paying attention and as I explored just google searches and whatnot I came across project amplify and I think someone might have pointed me the way and I reached out to them and that's when we struck up a sort of partnership on part of the book so they supplied the verbatim transcripts that were presented to the supreme court in florida versus bar and I sifted through those and gave them out to artist teams to illustrate and after that they've just been so supportive warren binford is someone who I can call at any point and just ask her to try to get the word out there or other things she was instrumental in getting senator jeff murphy on board he wrote the prologue to the edition and finally the south texas human rights center I estimated that this project maybe a few hundred to a few thousand dollars not much more and as I was thinking okay so I'll direct the money to races just days after that they did a facebook post and raised $12 million from a single facebook post and I just I don't want to take all this artwork I don't want to take all this work and raise a drop in the ocean I set out to find a very small very lean non-profit and so I consulted guide star and looked for extremely small budgets and I came across an ACLU listing of underfunded projects doing essential work on the border and I was very excited to get to know the organizations and for various reasons two from just comics and Eddie was just great he was like yeah gung ho let's do it and also the mission is it's a difficult one and I like problems I guess it's hard to convince the border for migrants who are crossing the border but also forensic recovery it's difficult to talk about it's uncomfortable and it's hard to pitch so that attracted me I wanted a challenge I wanted people to be aware of what we're really talking about and it's life and death and so that's how I decided on Heather you have a question yeah I have two questions the first one is you mentioned early on your decision to not mention the name of he who must not be named throughout the whole work and I wonder if you could talk more about why you made that decision and how important it was to the project and my other question is less political more just aesthetic we saw such an interesting range of styles and I wonder if you could talk about just a bit more about the decision to use all these different visual styles and one moment I even noticed the back of the current president's head and it looked really like Gary Trudeau draws that hair like thing mongoose sort of device on that person's head so that was a moment where I saw a direct sort of influence of like oh yeah I've seen work that looks like this before and other things I was like I haven't seen anything that looked like this you know it was really unique so I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the aesthetics the aesthetics is simple I just put the project out there and I don't know how I got so lucky the artwork that came back was just really professional and the sort of variety that I wanted early on I considered for about two seconds doing my own book before I even thought of doing an anthology and I thought no it would be one point of view it would be one voice and it would be limited by my reach my scope so I really wanted to do the project in a way that had multiple different viewpoint styles approaches and points of view so that was the aesthetic bit I'm not mentioning it so that person thrives on attention and we don't need to give it any more attention than it gets with a tweet also I'm just continuously frustrated so I was going to include this in the presentation but then it was just getting too long for a little while I was doing a comic based on that person's antics and I couldn't keep it up as soon as I finished a comic the issue was irrelevant because it was replaced by another issue a firing so if I spent hours drawing this one person a week later they were out of the administration and the same sort of dynamic was happening with some of these important issues that we were losing the threat on the migrant crisis because he was doing some other clown show dragging a pony and balancing a ball on his nose and all these other ridiculous things that he does to get attention so I really didn't want his inclusion in this volume to take away any of the energy or attention from where it should be on the individuals who are actually affected by this crisis and we did negotiate that one image that you mentioned I think there might be two appearances in the book and I asked and the artists were very polite and accommodating to not show his face and to not write his name out and I'm glad for it no regrets I think he's implicated enough by his policies and actions that we don't need to name or depict him anymore there's a question from the chat from Caitlin Mauricio thank you for inviting your SAW colleagues to this important discussion how have the children whose stories are amplified in this project responded to seeing the comics well we don't know all the testimony is anonymous for various reasons for the protection of the children so I don't know if any of the children in the exhibits has actually seen the comic and that is what I hope to do later on is try to find a way that can distribute the electronic version and the Spanish version but sadly we just can't get that sort of feedback other questions a question over here hi Mauricio I'm visitor to the lecture very impressive work I'm curious to ask your thought having completed the work and looking back at it at this point how do you situate the other up front to go with it as an independent work and even thinking at the outset about a punk rock perspective governing the aesthetic but what's been realized now the work you have in front of you I'm curious to get your thought about how you see it having similarity or dissimilarity to the kind of stuff Josako has done years ago curious to hear your thoughts about that and how you see the elasticity oh wow Josako I think that I love his work I love what he's done I'm not a journalist I'm not trained in journalism I'm not a historian I make comics so I wouldn't it just wouldn't be my wheelhouse to try to do a sort of in depth project on the border however I have opinions and I have Google so I can't find enough information to provide my viewpoint but really going back to that punk aesthetic it was a very inclusive movement if you had a band that had been rehearsing for three weeks in Falls Church or Alexandria you could be on stage with minor threat or later on Fugazi or some of the key bands so I think this inclusive spirit permeated through the border ex anthology some of the artists are actually first time comic creators and the longer pieces I sort of ripped out of the hands of writers who were like well I've never written a comic before and I was like it'll be okay come on and so we sort of coached them on how to translate their script into comic book form for example Brian Delay he had never done a comic but was really really enthused by comics so I think by providing a large platform getting a lot of different voices and it just harkens back to that DIY spirit thank you I'm sorry did I answer your question? that's good thank you thanks other questions I just want to make a comment I think Joe Sacco would love this comic work out titled paying the land that just came out about a year ago but this is very much Mauricio's a cousin this is the same realm and I think these two comic artists would be very compatible and yeah anyway that's interesting to mention that that's also art that has advocacy but it's art that is formed in a different way but very very similar so anyway it's worth mentioning nice comparison if anyone has Joe Sacco's address I'm happy to send him a copy so I have a question Mauricio I think about sort of having been outraged by the same things you were outraged over the years and one of the things that overall I've come to realize is that how little at least I don't know whether it was ever otherwise but how little accountability there is over time in other words no one's paid a penalty for what the Reagan administration did in Latin America no one's paid a penalty for what's happened and happened in Iraq in the first decade of the century um any thoughts about whether we can whether I mean it's critical that we're you're doing what you're doing to raise awareness of the problems is there any thought about a role art could have in terms of actually trying to bring people to account I guess I'm sorry trying to bring people to account for their crimes yeah yeah well um you know it's tough yeah without getting mystical in karma or anything like that I um we recently saw a shepherd fairy on exhibit in Los Angeles and it was wonderful to revisit scumbags like Nixon and Reagan and all their awfulness um and so I think um that's part of what artists who create political art do is they they preserve the ugliness they don't look away they look straight into that storm and say you know we're watching and we're recording it and um that was one of the goals with Order X is to try to create something um of quality that would endure um past this administration and hey guess what in just like what 60 days um Order X will have endured past this administration and and um I don't know what it means in account of some of the atrocities but to be clear um the order migration crisis has been going on well before um this current so um you know there's a lot of accountability to spread around there okay well we're up on 630 thank you so much for for your time and and for for the putting together the presentation and um and I look forward to being able to to read um to read the to read Order X um and actually that's that's a question and to end with how how can we all get our hands on uh physical copies of Order X? Order X um it's really available through any uh retailer uh mostly online you know that's really stocked on the shelves but if you go to www order-x.com um you can order it through the big players like Amazon and Barnes & Noble's but also through A-Books through Indie Bound through all the smaller distributors and the best thing honestly is just call up your local bookstore and do like a curbside pickup you know and just support them they they need it especially the comic book stores they're really taken ahead so if you're here in Somerville uh Kamikaze is a wonderful place they've been very supportive um and yeah support your local merchants please all right thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining us tonight right