Secrets of the Agave
a Climate Justice Storytelling Project
a working model for fostering interactions, lessons, and solutions across local and transnational contexts. It features everyday experts as primary (re)sources in identifying, collectively combatting, and reimagining climate change through practices of ecological and community sustainability. secrets of the agave centers Climate Justice, which insists on a shift from a discourse on greenhouse gases and melting ice caps into a civil rights movement with the people and communities most vulnerable to climate impacts at its heart.
secrets of the agave centers everyday stories from the US-Mexico borderlands. People of color and those experiencing poverty are disproportionately affected by climate change and climate change mitigation policy. Their everyday stories, experiential and traditional knowledges, however, are missing from the data; their presence is only based on deficit-driven demographics. This project offers their distinct cultural perspectives that fortify, animate, and complicate data sets. As artist and researcher Mimi Onuoha argues, “That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to. It’s in these things that we find cultural and colloquial hints of what is deemed important. Spots that we’ve left blank reveal our hidden social biases and indifferences.” This project intervenes in those indifferences.
Onuoha, M. (2018). “On Missing Datasets.” https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets
secrets of the agave builds on on our early film project that documented perspectives and practices that emerged from people living along the Juárez, Chihuahua/El Paso, Texas/Anthony, New Mexico borders where two countries and three states converge along the river with more than two names…
coming soon
experience
videos and digital records
submit
your own stories
share
the perspectives
support
the project