Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

“The Front” is a community gallery space promoting “arte y cultura” meters from the San Ysidro/Tijuana crossing, the most trafficked point of the US-Mexico border and one of the world’s busiest international divides. As such, it navigates multiple fraught understandings of community, place, belonging, tradition, and heritage for a region deeply-immersed in migratory flows and transcultural realities. Its umbrella organization is “Casa Familiar,” a 40+ year-old nonprofit providing San Ysidrans—a mostly working-class Latinx neighborhood historically underserved by San Diego’s public services—with housing, education, immigration, childcare, and other community services. And while “the Front” vigorously targets this local constituency, it also integrates freely with regional contemporary art scenes (including LA and Tijuana) through modern art/design/technology events in its sparse, sleek white-walled interior. This multivalency—or, more specifically, the double consciousness “the Front” mobilizes in confronting sites of such highly-fractured identity—is where this study departs. I trace this particularity to work of pre-interdisciplinarian W.E.B Du Bois, whose reconciling of African heritage within European-dominated societies necessitates multiple readings of experiential life. “The Front” strikes a similar balance: annual “Día de Los Muertos” celebrations, traditional dance events, Phillipino-Mexican-American young artist showcases, experimental cross-border collaborations, and curatorial internships for local high schoolers all negotiate opacities between cultural capitals of the contemporary art world and traditions and heritages of immigrant life, reimagining both in the process and forging a stronger San Ysidran community.