After they found discarded passports near the U.S. border wall with Mexico, graduate students and Professor David Taylor from the University of Arizona School of Art decided to create signs in different languages with the message: “Keep your passport | Guard your papers | Save your identity.”

“In only 15 minutes, we saw some 20 passports from all over the world, from places like Nigeria, Congo, Bangladesh, India and Cameroon,” Taylor said. “It’s a strategy, on the advice of the cartel guides, for migrants to have a better chance at pleading asylum. But border humanitarians maintain there’s no scenario in which that helps people. In fact, you want to have your documentation.”

So, in November, Taylor typeset poster boards in a dozen languages with an accompanying graphic designed by Assistant Professor Nicole Antebi. Some in the class then helped him post the signs at the end of the border wall, east of Sasabe, Arizona.

The project was just a small part of Taylor’s field-study graduate class (ART 504), which lets students explore the Sonoran Desert borderlands and understand its ecology, people, history and narratives.

His fall 2024 course, titled “Border as Network,” included weekend field trips to Southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico — including the San Rafael Valley, Bisbee and Naco, Ambos Nogales, Patagonia and Hermosillo. Students also visited San Xavier del Bac and barrios in downtown Tucson, toured museums and attended several photography and art lectures.

“I grew up in Tucson and have been to a lot of these places before, but I was really excited to take this class because I wanted to see them through a new lens … and really understand the systems that make up the border,” said Porter McDonald, one of a dozen grad students in the course.

MFA student Andrés Caballero, a Fulbright scholar from Mexico City, took photos in Nogales for an earlier fellowship project about Lucha Libre wrestling. Going on the field trips in Taylor’s class also helped Caballero “put a face” to the borderlands, rather than relying on information from others that could be inaccurate or biased.

“You don’t understand what the spaces truly look like until you’re there,” Caballero said.

At mid-2024, the United Nations Refugee Agency database estimated there were 122.6 million people forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order — including 37.9 million refugees and 8 million asylum seekers.

“You don’t have a yardstick for global migration until you’re standing at the end of the border wall, and you realize that you’re surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of passports that people discover,” Taylor said.

The professor typeset signs in Bengali, Italian, Nepali, Sudanese, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Thai, Lao, Chinese, Arabic and English.

After seeing the discarded passports, a student “said this amazing thing to me,” he recalled. “What does it mean for somebody to travel around the world and shed their identity in this spot?”

That statement helped Taylor realize the emotional impact his class has had on his students — and himself.

“The trips are a real bonding experience for the students,” he said. “It can be very heavy content, but within that, it’s a real joy and privilege to get to work with them.”

Taylor is part of the School of Art’s Photography, Video and Imaging program, which is ranked third in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. He holds the experiential learning course every three or so years.

Students plan to showcase their work from last semester’s class in a public presentation this spring.

“There’s a lot of writing, photographing and sketching happening,” said Taylor, whose past classes included trips to Tijuana and Winkelman, Arizona, which would have stayed a border town if not for the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, when the U.S. acquired southern Arizona from Mexico.

The field trips help students become “seasoned border travelers” and can inspire future MFA thesis projects — such as those by acclaimed Southwest-based artists Bella Maria Varela (MFA ’21) and Mariel Miranda (MFA ’23), he said.  

The course parallels Taylor’s own research projects. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, the photographer and now associate dean for the College of Fine Arts has focused on the borderlands’ nature and changing circumstances for over two decades.

In 2023, he helped launch a public archive, “Detained,” containing the stories of asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants incarcerated in Arizona. In 2024, his installation “Complex” also documented the industrialization of borderland security regimes.

“The whole class is about unflattening the narratives of the U.S.-Mexico border and the Sonoran Desert borderlands,” Taylor said, “whether it be environmental, the history of labor and mining, Buffalo Soldiers and their role in the settlement or conquest of the West, or trips to San Xavier del Bac and thinking about Spanish settlement, or going to the barrios in downtown Tucson and learning about urban renewal in the 1970s and the dislocation of the barrios.”

Here’s a closer look at some of the field trips:

San Rafael Valley

Students and Taylor camped here, not far from the border in eastern Santa Cruz County. With rolling hills, native grasslands and oak trees, the valley forms the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River, which flows south into Sonora, Mexico, before turning back north into the U.S. and joining the Gila River.

“It’s rugged, beautiful and one of my favorite places in all of Arizona,” Taylor said.

For Beihua Guo, a first-year MFA candidate in Photography, Video and Imaging, the San Rafael Valley was his first introduction to the border area.

“The landscape was so serene and pristine that it seemed impossible to associate it with violence or crime,” Guo said. “That night, I also saw the most stunning Milky Way I’ve ever experienced.”

Previously based in Los Angeles and Shanghai, Guo holds a BA in studio art and environmental analysis from Pitzer College in Claremont, California. His work has been exhibited internationally and he’s been awarded artist residencies in Yellowstone, Lassen Volcanic, and Petrified Forest National Parks.

Before the fall semester started, Guo took a self-portrait photo at Jacumba Hot Springs at the California-Mexico border, which was a major crossing point for Chinese migrants in 2023. “I could feel the rising tension and increased surveillance in the area,” he said. “Diesel generators ran constantly, and there were powerful floodlights.”

“I’m interested in continuing to document the evolving political climate and landscapes along the border while exploring my identity as an immigrant,” Guo said.

Camp Naco and Buffalo Soldier Cemetery

For MFA students Semoria Mosley and Maya Jackson, their research interests in Photography, Video and Imaging as well as African-American history intersected perfectly during these two trips, Taylor said.

The Buffalo Soldiers, a group of African American army regiments, fought Native Americans to help settlers move west in the late 1800s and defended the border during the Mexican Revolution at Camp Naco near Bisbee, where students also toured the Copper Queen Mine.

Students also visited a Buffalo Soldier cemetery, about a mile north where they had found the passports. From 1916 to 1921, the black soldiers of the 10^th Cavalry were a fixture around the nearby town of Arivaca. Several soldiers were laid to rest in the desert, although there’s no hard evidence as to what killed them. Some historians have said they died from the flu epidemic of 1918.

Jackson, a landscape-based, conceptual photographer from Richmond, Virginia, said it “would be powerful, even on a community level, for more people to have the experiences we had” to better grasp the borderlands’ beauty and challenges.

Mosley, a social justice-oriented photojournalist who grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, said she spent the semester “trying to understand the desert from a spiritual point of view — how it’s continuously rebirthing itself and going through these renewal cycles.”

“It’s interesting how the animals, desert and water — and the cities built around them — are being altered forever,” Mosley said.

Hermosillo, Sonora

Students visited massive aquaculture projects, including where they cultivate fish and camarones, in Hermosillo. “The class saw the places where they terraform the desert to let the sea into the desert,,” Taylor said. “We literally went and had seafood in the afternoon on the beach.”

The class also met students from Unison — the University of Sonora — took an architecture tour and heard how the campus operates.

“They also saw some incredible photography exhibitions there,” Taylor said. “They toured the Ford Maquiladora factories, where all the Mavericks and Broncos that you see in U.S. dealerships. And they met the people who inspect the car carriers before they come across the border to make sure drugs aren’t being smuggled.”

Patagonia

During their final trip, students visited Patagonia, about 50 miles south of Tucson, where the Borderlands Restoration Network is located and retired University of Arizona research scientist Gary Nabhan has a five-acre homestead.

The Borderlands Restoration Network, which includes a wildlife preserve, aims to help rebuild healthy ecosystems, restore habitat for plants and wildlife and reconnect border communities to the land through educational programs.

Alexis Joy Hagestad, a Photography, Video and Imaging MFA student from Missoula, Montana, was intrigued by the animal crossings at the border, along with bats and butterflies who’ve seen their migration paths to and from Mexico affected by the border wall.

Hagestad, whose recent project involves using photography and digital imaging techniques to isolate the bodies of burned trees from old fire scars, said meeting Nabhan at his homestead “was really a transformative experience for me.”

“He has so much wisdom and so much hope,” Hagestad said about Nabhan, a renowned Southwest agricultural ecologist, ethnobotanist and author who is considered a pioneer in the local food and heirloom seed-saving movements.

In his 2024 book, “Against the American Grain: A Borderlands History of Resistance,” Nabahn wrote about “how cultural resistance — aside from political action — needs to occur whenever the dominating forces of industry, governance or media oppress or suppress the very people most in need.”

“I sometimes forget that hope is something I can feel,” Hagestad said on the final day of class, a roundtable discussion in the School of Art building. “We can make differences in a certain way, regardless of the situation is.”

After comments like that one, Taylor paused to reflect on the semester.

“I can’t begin to express the gratitude and the honor I feel to have spent these shared spaces with you,” he told the students.