Dr. Daniel Arreola
US-Mexico Borderlands Specialist
Arizona State University
Dr. Arreola was raised in Santa Monica,
California and traveled throughout the state
visiting various family members. Through walks
along the beach and neighborhoods and
spending summers on the ranch, his
grandfathers instilled in young Daniel the desire
to travel and learn more about the people and
the landscape. This desire for understanding
people and place is manifest in his work today,
predominately in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Although he has experience in other regions in
the world, Dr. Arreola’s main focus is in the USMexico Borderlands, where he is one of the
world’s experts. He has lived and worked in
three of the four states bordering Mexico, and
continually travels to the US-Mexico border to
update his regional repertoire.
As with any geographer, chief among his tasks
are fieldwork and travel. Using these tools of the trade, Dr. Arreola shares his
scholastic knowledge of cultural insight and his love of this region. His scholarly work
portrays a down-to-earth, enjoyable-to-read style that makes him unique among
academics.
With Students at Border Marker #1, El Paso, TX
As a cultural geographer, Dr. Arreola’s goal, his quest, is to understand how people
make, shape, influence, and change their place. To aid in his quest, he uses archival
research, often times becoming familiar with the local libraries, museums and historical
sites. This type of re-search, he says, helps generate the questions that drive his
search of the contemporary landscape and describe it as geographers have done for
millennia.
Building on his historical re-search, Dr. Arreola goes into the field—the true place of a
geographer—and investigates spatial phenomena first-hand: from re-mapping old
colonial settlement patterns to re-examining migration routes of (often) over looked
people. In every instance, his prowess as a cultural geographer is enhanced by his
thoroughness in fieldwork.
His current research activities revolve around the US-Mexico Borderland’s visual
landscape. This ongoing task focuses on using historical postcards of border towns that
can be analyzed against contemporary landscapes to reveal often amazing and drastic
changes through time.
On a recent re-photo excursion to Puerto Peñasco, Mexico
Drawing on his immense collection of thousands of historic postcards of the US-Mexico
Borderlands, Dr. Arreola can reexamine and assess the landscapes from 1920 to the
current day, tracking changes and making comparisons between the years. Alongside
the visual landscape assessment, he searches for local residents who may have been
present when the historic photograph (postcards) was taken. Then, he meticulously
records their memories, charting them alongside the visual landscape, adding richer
aspects to the often misunderstood US-Mexico Borderlands region.