Laredo and its sister city Nuevo Laredo played host to a convergence of people with a passion for art.
Anca Trandafirescu, assistant professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan chose the Texas/Mexico border as the visiting site for her senior-level architecture students.
“We live at one border,” remarked Trandafirescu, alluding to the border Michigan shares with Canada. “We thought it would be interesting to visit the other.”
Trandafirescu teaches a studio course this semester and wanted her students to visit a location new to them and one where they could possibly be inspired with new ideas for designs intended for public space.
She said Laredo came onto her radar after she experienced the work of Angela Marcela Moran, TAMIU assistant professor of film and photography.
An award-winning documentarian, Moran frequently posts her work on the social networking site MySpace, which is how Trandifirescu found her.
“It just shows the remarkable tool (MySpace) provides for getting an artist’s work out there. You never know who will see it. I wouldn’t have imagined architecture students would see it and be inspired to come here,” Moran said.
The two films that caught Trandafirescu’s attention were “Casa del Migrante” and “Audencia.”
A ten-minute documentary, “Casa del Migrante” reveals the plight of Central American immigrants traveling through Mexico to the United States. Many of them come as far as Nuevo Laredo, where they are caught in a trans-American limbo. That limbo is spent at Casa del Migrante, (Home of the Migrant) a shelter run by the Catholic Diocese of Nuevo Laredo. The shelter and its volunteers, including Moran, provide basic needs and try to spread awareness of the human rights violations many Central American immigrants endure in Mexico.
This human story is what attracted the architecture students.
“The faculty in the department decided this year that the senior architecture studio would have something of an activist bent,” Trandafirescu said a week after the visit. “Not everyone is going to come out of this with a political project, of course, but some of them already are.”
Moran gave Trandafirescu and her students a tour of the shelter. They interacted with the immigrants and even cooked and served lunch, something the immigrants appreciated.
“Something very touching happened,” said Moran. “When we were saying our goodbyes, one of the immigrants told the Michigan students that this was the first time a white person served them. It made people cry.”
The impact remained with the students even as they continued to tour the state. “From Laredo we went on to Marfa,” added Trandafirescu. “But when we got back and I asked my students their favorite part of the trip, hands down they said Nuevo Laredo. Visiting the shelter really touched them in a way that will stay with them for a long time.”
While in Nuevo Laredo, the visiting students also attended a screening of Moran’s documentaries held at Estacion Palabra, Nuevo Laredo’s newest cultural center. “Casa del Migrante” was shown as was “Audiencia.”
With “Audencia,” Moran profiles the culture of lucha libre-or Mexican professional wrestling. The film focuses on the role of the audience and reveals how people lose themselves in the rowdy spectacle of the sport.
“What interested us about “Audiencia” was the idea of cultural transport,” Trandafirescu said. “Laredo is where all these products come to our country, but there is also culture being transported,” she added.
As for future projects, both professors hope to repeat the experience in some fashion.
Because Moran took some of her TAMIU photography students to the shelter, she now feels inspired to take them out of the area.
“Now I want to find money to take the photography students somewhere, ideally somewhere abroad. They need to train their eye on new settings, which will also allow them to return and see their home town with a new artist’s perspective,” she said.
The architecture students from Michigan, on the other hand, may be returning to Nuevo Laredo.
“They have to prepare models of their projects, and we’re trying to see if they can display the models at Estacion Palabra,” said Trandifirescu.
Not only might they show their architectural models, but Trandifirescu mentioned that the office of the Mayor of Nuevo Laredo, upon learning of the project, invited the students to chronicle their experience in essays. The ones who write outstanding essays may be awarded a modest prize.
Outside the realms of film and architecture, the experience also influenced the Michigan students’ views on Mexico and its relationship to the United States, according to Trandifirescu.
“It’s been shocking to hear the reports of the violence in places like Reynosa. It’s so counter to what we experienced in Nuevo Laredo.”