Border Youth Tennis Exchange: Stories From Both Sides of the U.S. – Mexico Border

By Charlie Cutler

Editors’s Note: Border Youth Tennis Exchange (BYTE) recently partnered with StoryCenter to develop a 12-lesson curriculum for creating digital stories on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In this post, BYTE founder Charlie Cutler talks about the project and about BYTE’s mission, which is to connect kids and communities across the border using tennis classes and academic activities, and help border residents contribute meaningfully to national dialogues.

It’s no secret that issues surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border (NAFTA, immigration, security, DACA, etc.) are at the heart of current national policy debates in the United States. No matter your politics, the border is a wedge that divides and defines. Partisan debates hijack direly needed conversations and create stereotypes and straw men that undermine humane solutions to transnational challenges. Sadly, conflict and fear sell. As a result, we’ve seen truthful community narratives cede ground and space to a constant stream of uninformed opinions and emotionally [mis]driven arguments.

To combat these trends, BYTE partnered with StoryCenter to inspire young people to create and share original border content. Over the span of three months, we guided groups of nine- to eleven-year-olds through digital storytelling workshops, successfully compiling forty-five fully produced digital poems spanning both sides of the border. The workshops were conducted using art supplies and Google Nexus tablets, progressing from script writing and portrait drawing to photo/video capturing and editing. The children also recorded audio voiceovers and chose music accompaniments to drive the plots and feel of their narratives.

One of the most interesting aspects of BYTE’s fall workshops was the opportunity to highlight the fact that BYTE student-athletes come in all shapes and sizes. Angelica is a former Catholic nun and the current Director of Casa Hogar para niñas la Madre Conchita, a girls’ shelter in Nogales, Sonora State, Mexico. Angelica chose to create a digital story along with her girls, and together they produced a lovely narrative describing the faith that drives her work and her dreams of brotherhood and unity for humanity.

Seven-year-old Cesar Edwardo was our youngest participating BYTE student-athlete. He walks to BYTE in the mornings with his grandmother and two older brothers who are also in the program. (Cesar's school day begins at 1 p.m.) While Angelica used her artistic talents to portray hopes for humanity, Cesar Edwardo played with colors and photo filters to affirm his knowledge that “aliens son verdaderos” (aliens are real!).

A dedicated team of high school interns mentored their younger colleagues through the digital storytelling process, and it was impressive watching them help BYTE student-athletes engage with their past, their likes, and their homes. Story editing was completed just days before Christmas, 2017, and BYTE hosted showcases in both countries to celebrate the end of the term.

First, each group watched their own videos, offering encouragement and asking questions regarding each author’s artistic choices. Afterwards, they watched the stories from across the border, writing down notes and comments to be transported and given to their friends on the other side.

Daniel, a student-athlete in BYTE's Arizona cohort, writes a note to Yaiza after watching her digital story about life in Nogales, Sonora (MX).

Yaiza, a bright ten-year-old from BYTE’s Don Bosco (Mexico) cohort, summed up the project beautifully, commenting on Luis’s video, “me encanta eres igual que yo” (“I love that you are the same as me”), from BYTE’s Boys & Girls Club group in Arizona. At BYTE, we couldn’t have been prouder of them both, and the comment encouraged our team to see that we are having the impact we had hoped for.

As menacing as it is for the larger body-politic to malign border communities and mischaracterize them as dangerous and violent, the potential harm is even more insidious when communities that live only miles apart are separated by fear, anxiety, and mistrust. BYTE hopes to show through the stories that a child playing tennis or learning to use digital tools looks very similar, whether in Mexico or Arizona. We feel the type of self-reflection that Yaiza displayed can go a long way toward healing physical and emotional divides that hurt border communities and distract from compassionate solutions.

BYTE will continue to connect kids and use its programs to highlight truthful border stories. We aim to be a platform for border residents to more accurately paint and distribute pictures of their lives. We believe that sports and learning are non-partisan, universal concepts; and, as divisive as border politics can often seem, it is important to remember the names and faces of the young people that represent the future of these communities.

Thank you StoryCenter for giving us the tools to inspire and create, and for being a partner in promoting binational grassroots collaboration.

View BYTE Stories in Spanish …

… or in English …