Abstract
This chapter analyzes how leaders in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas use the story of the creation of The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) to deborder the region. The UTRGV story epitomizes a borderlands model of partnerships, working across interregional, language, cultural, industry and nonprofit, and national differences to address educational, economic, and health care inequalities imposed by state and federal policies. UTRGV builds on the Valley’s unique strengths as a neighbor to Mexico, with national and international attention for its successes as a bicultural, binational, and bilingual university. Leaders use UTRGV as a model of collaboration instructive for the nation to challenge discourse that peripheries adjacent to the Global South are failed modernity projects. The UTRGV story brings together two scholarly approaches to borders and borderlands, flows and friction, to suggest a new way that borderlands are productive spaces: partnerships across communities historically inscribed in opposition.
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Notes
- 1.
This number varies depending on whether satellite campuses and campuses on military bases are included. I am reporting only those colleges and universities with a significant footprint in the physical landscape of higher education in San Antonio. This number is also subject to increase with new branches and satellite campuses of other universities opening in San Antonio, e.g., University of Houston. It does not include online universities.
- 2.
Sums are from enrollment data publically available on university websites in 2019.
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Fleuriet, K.J. (2021). Crossing Borders: Partnerships and the Story of UTRGV. In: Rhetoric and Reality on the U.S.—Mexico Border. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63557-2_8
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