Project background
When it was time to choose a capstone, I thought about the musicians I’d photographed on the street in Mexico. I enjoyed the photos, but they felt incomplete without the stories of the people in them.
More often than not, I think musicians on both sides of the border are reduced to popular stereotypes for whatever the popular notion of a musical genre is. For Americans at home in the U.S. or as tourists in Mexico, the mariachi is a visual souvenir, a confirmation of their idea of Mexico. The guitarist, hoofing it for tips at the restaurant, is a loud interruption during a dinner conversation. For the Mexican teenager, punk rock is a sufficiently aggressive alternative to heavy metal when rebelling against parents.
But people are always more than simple stereotypes about their craft. The guitarist who offers songs at your table is also an attorney. The punk rocker for whom the music is more than a genre lives the music as a way of life and a community. The kid on a farm who dreamed of leaving and becoming a musician. The high schooler who chooses mariachi over orchestra and finds self-representation and learns business and leadership skills.
And so on.
Bordernote focuses on musicians’ personal stories, not genres, skill levels, or popularity.
Between April 2025 and March 2026, I visited places in the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora to work on Bordernote. During this period, I told everyone I encountered — barbers, desk clerks, drivers, dollar-store cashiers, priests, tattoo artists, printers, cooks, school teachers, baristas, and wait staff — about the project. Might they know anyone? I messaged musicians on social media accounts and stopped them in taquerias. Would they talk to me for an hour? Would they sit for a portrait? I drew on contacts I’d made in the Bilingual Journalism Program when I assigned myself to the Journalism School’s non-existent mariachi beat.
By sharing these stories, I hope we gain a clearer, more complete picture of who they are.
Richard Whitmer is an independent journalist and documentary photographer based in Tucson, Arizona, and Hermosillo, Sonora. Through photographs and personal narratives, his work explores the people and communities of the Arizona–Sonora borderlands, with a particular interest in identity, memory, work, and belonging. Before turning his focus to independent documentary projects, he spent more than two decades creating digital communications for nonprofits, universities, and businesses. He holds an M.A. in Bilingual Journalism from the University of Arizona, where he completed Bordernote, a documentary project featuring the stories of musicians from the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.