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Oscar B. Castillo and Wil Sandss ongoing project BordersCruzadas: A Collaborative Story, on view at the new Community Engagement Hub on Columbia College Chicagos 600 S. Michigan campus, forces viewers to confront ingrained assumptions about American exceptionalism. Part photography, part archival material, BordersCruzadas features Castillo and Sandss documentarian work completed over the past year as they accompanied people fleeing Venezuela and other South American countries to the U.S.-Mexico border.

BordersCruzadas first opened in April 2023 at ART WORKS Projects (where I serve as a board member) as part of EXPO Chicago, when Chicago had received more than 8,000 asylum seekers, the majority from Texas. As of early October, Chicago has welcomed 18,000 total migrants since 2022, with upwards of 1,000 new arrivals a day projected, according to Governor J.B. Pritzker. Chicago has struggled to house everyone, though this lift has been supported robustly by mutual aid volunteers. One group, the Police Station Response Team, spent over $3.4 million of their own money on food, water, and supplies for migrants.

Sands and Castillo themselves initially bonded over a commitment to mutual aid when they met in 2002 squatting in Barcelonas unused buildings, which had been transformed into self-governing communes. It allowed for an incredible amount of creativity [which] then led to some sort of vision of an alternative way of living, recalled Castillo, a native of Venezuela who was in Spain after finishing a psychology degree at Central University of Venezuela. Sands arrived in Barcelona after graduating from Hampshire College to study identity formation amidst the Catalonia national liberation movement and ended up staying nearly a decade in squats with Castillo around Europe.

We were in DIY, punk spaces. . . . We had all this lived experience in spaces on the margins of the social realm and political critique, Sands said. This concept of identity, home, movement, that sort of fluctuation was all part of me . . . part of our reality.

The images and objects included in BorderCruzadas reflect the inclusive spirit of the duos previous work with marginalized and politicized populationsincarcerated folks, indigenous land activistswho are often not centered in discussions of which they are the subject. Both photographers have led participatory photography workshops with communities worldwide and, in Chicago, organized a workshop with Centro Romero for recent immigrants to explore identity through self-portraiture and collage. We are trying not to [leave] anyone out of the conversation who has something that can activate you more in some tender, reflective way, explained Castillo. That part of yourself that says, Okay, this is a human being and not only numbers.

The difference is evident between traditional media coverage of migrants that prioritize illustrating the scale of the crisisof tents dotting public parks, groups huddled in police stationsand Castillo and Sandss tender portraits, intimate enough to see the lines on a face and emotions held in a brow. The majority of images focus on just two to three families or individuals, capturing their miles trodden forward (and often backward) across a continent, threading a web of connections as the duo separates and reunites with familiar faces along their journey.

In one photo, a man reaches for his son on top of a windswept La Bestia (what migrants call a freight train that shuttles riders sitting on top of or between cars), as it snakes through the vast landscape between Chiapas, Mexico and various points on the U.S. border. In the middle of a bushy, burnt orange desert, a young couple and their toddler look straight into the camera as they pose in front of a white bedsheet stretched across two poles for a makeshift background.

Its a question as old as documentary itself: How could any photographer with a conscience take pictures of human suffering without lending a hand?

Their commitment to communal care towards their subjects came before the photography, said Castillo. Sleeping on shared mattresses, lifting each other up as they cross train cars, breaking bread togetherall these things were a no-brainer for the two photographers. It says to participants, You are doing the journey with us, and even if youre not part of us, you are the closest you can be, said Sands. The two keep in touch with several of the people they met along the way, connecting them to resources wherever those folks land and contributing themselves when they can.

Castillo does not see documentary photography as a sanitized, catalog medium. He is not approaching photography as merchandise, not approaching the histories as told to me as a currency that changes hands without the social implications and the commitment of people.

Though photography is a flexible and useful tool, it can be as limited as any medium, said Castillo, explaining the inclusion of materials, sounds, and videos taken from their journey to complement those capacities.

The exhibition includes a piece of a ladder Sands and Castillo found during their journey across South America. This archival material brings the border closer to the audience via the tools people used to evade it, evoking reflection on the porous nature of borders, and what it would take to effectively push against peoples movement. As we can see all over the world and all over history, people can [learn to] walk longer, run faster, and jump higher, Sands commented, on the increased militarization of borders. And its not what we need, we dont need to push people to the limits of their capacity.

While grounded in the individual experience, the collection still situates migration as a global crisis bigger than any one countrys bordersa big-picture perspective that Sands and Castillo have always kept in mind. The two cofounded Fractures Photo back in 2011, a collective that explores critical fractures in these critical systems around the world, namely ecological, economic, political, and social, that will define the 21st century. Were entering a new phase of human migration. In many ways it ties back to what we presented as the premise of Fractures as a collective, said Sands.

As of May 2023, more than 110 million individuals have been forcibly displaced as a result of persecution or conflict mixed with the impacts of climate changethe highest level ever recorded. While Europe hosts one in three of the worlds refugees, the U.S. has only admitted 3.5 million since 1975. Today, struggles and tragedies that once seemed far away are arriving at American doorstops, including Chicago, and yet U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela, the degradation of Central American land by American companies, and economic exploitation of immigrant labor have always been part and parcel of American prosperity and security. A lot of times, people that are actually being impacted and living these experiences are part of the construction of America, said Sands.

BorderCruzadas was originally commissioned by AWP, with enhanced support for this next phase of the project through the Columbia Colleges Diane Dammeyer Fellowship in Photographic Arts and Social Issues, which was inaugurally awarded to Castillo and Sands this year to further their ongoing project. Indeed, the two photographers embody socially engaged art through their lived reality and work, by blurring the line between personal and political, outsiders and insiders, advocating and documenting, but through it all, making tangible the abstract spaces of migration, borders, and identity.

BordersCruzadas: A Collaborative Story Through 10/27: Mon 12:30-6 PM, Tue 9 AM-noon, Wed 1-4 PM, Thu 10 AM-3 PM, Sat 9 AM-2 PM or by appointment, pfitzpatrick@colum.edu, Community Engagement Hub, Columbia College Chicago, 600 S. Michigan, 1st Fl., everyvoicechicago.com/community

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