MSMU’s Women at the Los Angeles-Tijuana (WALAT) Border Project is a three-year humanities initiative to study and preserve the history and culture of women at the Los Angeles-Tijuana border. (2022-2025)

The Los Angeles-San Diego-Tijuana urban agglomeration is the largest, most dynamic urban enclave in the US-Mexico borderland, a region rich in the history of women with complex ethnic identities.

The “WALAT Border Project” explores these intricacies by establishing the following:

Curriculum for a New Academic Minor: Development of a new WALAT Border Project minor, Gender and Border Studies, highlighting women’s experiences at the border. This minor includes new multidisciplinary humanities courses on the experience of women at the Los Angeles-Tijuana border, embedded with humanities undergraduate research opportunities.

Academic Working Group: Formation of a WALAT Border Project Humanities Academic Working Group comprised of MSMU faculty and faculty partners at other universities in Southern California and Baja.

Research Symposium: Launch of a WALAT Research Symposium in the third and final year of the project. These activities ensure engagement in the content by a wide range of scholars and the public and also encourage the participation of emerging undergraduate scholars.

Research Repository: Creation and curation of an online, accessible WALAT Research Repository. The project team shares digital materials, research, and student presentations with the MSMU community, its partners, and the general public through presentations of both student and faculty research, publications resulting from the research projects, edited and published conference proceedings, and the online and open-access research repository.

This project has been funded through a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) grant awarded in 2022.