Our Approach
We center the voices of the people whose lives and traditions we document, prioritizing accuracy and care over spectacle, and treating the act of sharing stories publicly as a responsibility. Our goal through writing, video, audio, field research, and digital publishing is to make the living cultures of our region more visible, understood, and celebrated.
Our process is rooted in listening, observing, building relationships, and documenting with care and rigor. Based in traditions of public folklore and cultural anthropology and borrowing from cultural organizing, these processes privilege firsthand, sustained engagement over secondhand summary and treat those whose lives and experiences are being documented as collaborators rather than subjects of study.
BorderLore
BorderLore is SFA’s free online journal dedicated to documenting, sharing, and elevating folklife in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Published six times per year and reaching more than 9,000 subscribers, the journal covers the full range of living cultural practice in our region: foodways, music and dance, visual and verbal arts, ceremony, occupational traditions, ecology, and the borderlands experience in all its complexity. BorderLore articles have been assigned as classroom reading at the University of Arizona and cited by journalists, researchers, artists, and policy advocates as a trusted record of regional culture.
Current Storytelling Projects
What the River Knows
What the River Knows: Stories of Culture, Place, and Practice along the Santa Cruz River is a series of documentary and participatory interventions to uplift and celebrate the Santa Cruz River as a living entity and source of practical knowledge, regional identity, and cultural memory. The project uses listening sessions, fieldwork expeditions, and multimedia story productions to explore folklife and cultural traditions in communities along the river in Pima and Santa Cruz counties.
SFA Documentary “Supper Club”
A cohort of documentarians working to gather cultural & heritage stories in our region meets bi-monthly for exchanges, skill sharing, and conversation. The gatherings aim to strengthen a network of regional narrators to build narrative power and amplify stories about cultural expressions, rituals, occupational culture, and community-building initiatives in the greater Southwest and US-Mexico border region.
How We belong
By embellishing the ordinary, “How We Belong” offers audio bite-sizes stories (only 3-4 minutes!) of folklife through its various genres (work, play, food, ritual, conversation, adornment, and more) to highlight culture and heritage from the US-Mexico borderlands. How We Belong is a collaboration with KXCI.
Publications
SFA produces a range of print and digital publications that document folklife, share research, and make cultural knowledge accessible to broad audiences. These include community-facing booklets, scholarly ethnographies, research reports, and exhibit catalogues — all designed to be readable and useful beyond academic or institutional audiences.
Explore Our PublicationsStorytelling Program Leadership
Kimi Eisele
Folklorist/Communications Specialist
Kimi is a writer, editor, folklorist, and multidisciplinary artist whose work illuminates kinship between people, cultures, plants, animals, and places. She manages SFA’s communications, curates programs and exhibits, and serves as a writer and editor for BorderLore, SFA’s online journal of borderlands culture and heritage. She is the author of The Lightest Object in the Universe (Algonquin Books,
KimiEisele@Arizona.edu
Past Storytelling Projects
End of Life Programs
The End of Life: Continuum (EOL) projects share cultural knowledge about traditions, expressions, and practices associated with end of life, grief, mourning and death in Southern Arizona’s folk, ethnic, occupational, faith-based and alternative communities.
ClimateLore
ClimateLore was a series of programs and focused investigations on the intersections of climate and culture in the US-Mexico borderlands. It unfolded over four years with three distinct projects and engaged documentary artists, tradition bearers, oral historians, agricultural workers and others in conversations and documentations of climate histories, climate threats to folklife and cultural heritage practices, and adaptive strategies for survival and well-being.
Reclaiming the Border Narrative
(2020-2023)A three-year effort initiated by the Ford Foundation in partnership with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, Borealis Philanthropy, and the Center for Cultural Power, this Initiative is supporting storytelling efforts along the US-Mexico border into to penetrate attentions and expand perceptions about the border region and migration, … Read more
Thrive in the ’05
(2022-2023) In Spring 2022 the City of Tucson’s Mayor and City Council adopted the Thrive in the ’05 Transformation Plan, the culmination of a three-year effort to engage a 2.3-square mile subregion of the 85705 zip code in a place-based, community centered collaboration of businesses, community organizations, and residents. SFA was one of many partners … Read more
Plain View Fellowship
This pilot fellowship program (spring 2021) supported five documentarians and artist-researchers in documenting folklife, culture, and heritage in the Greater Southwest and Northwest Mexico. The program takes its name from folklorist Mary Hufford’s notion that the study of folklife reveals beauty “hidden in plain view” and aims to elevate and illuminate a slice of folklife, … Read more
Tastebud Memories Film
TASTE BUD MEMORIES, a film by Özlem Ayse Özgür | 2018 The social act of eating is part of how we become human. If learning to eat is learning to become a human being, perhaps learning to eat together is learning to become a community. “Taste Bud Memories” is a documentary film focusing on local … Read more
Documentation takes time, trust, and sustained presence in communities.
with support from:
