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Isn't it fascinating how the simple act of drawing a line on the map
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can transform the way we see and experience the world?
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And how those spaces in between lines, borders,
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become places.
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They become places where language and food and music
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and people of different cultures rub up against each other
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in beautiful and sometimes violent and occasionally really ridiculous ways.
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And those lines drawn on a map
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can actually create scars in the landscape,
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and they can create scars in our memories.
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My interest in borders came about
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when I was searching for an architecture of the borderlands.
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And I was working on several projects along the US-Mexico border,
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designing buildings made out of mud taken right from the ground.
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And I also work on projects that you might say immigrated to this landscape.
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\"Prada Marfa,\" a land-art sculpture
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that crosses the border between art and architecture,
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and it demonstrated to me that architecture could communicate ideas
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that are much more politically and culturally complex,
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that architecture could be satirical and serious at the same time
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and it could speak to the disparities between wealth and poverty
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and what's local and what's foreign.
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And so in my search for an architecture of the borderlands,
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I began to wonder,
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is the wall architecture?
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I began to document my thoughts and visits to the wall
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by creating a series of souvenirs
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to remind us of the time when we built a wall
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and what a crazy idea that was.
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I created border games,
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(Laughter)
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postcards,
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snow globes with little architectural models inside of them,
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and maps that told the story of resilience at the wall
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and sought for ways that design could bring to light the problems
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that the border wall was creating.
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So, is the wall architecture?
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Well, it certainly is a design structure,
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and it's designed at a research facility called FenceLab,
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where they would load vehicles with 10,000 pounds
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and ram them into the wall at 40 miles an hour
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to test the wall's impermeability.
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But there was also counter-research going on on the other side,
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the design of portable drawbridges
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that you could bring right up to the wall
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and allow vehicles to drive right over.
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(Laughter)
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And like with all research projects, there are successes
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and there are failures.
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(Laughter)
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But it's these medieval reactions to the wall --
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drawbridges, for example --
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that are because the wall itself is an arcane, medieval form of architecture.
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It's an overly simplistic response to a complex set of issues.
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And a number of medieval technologies have sprung up along the wall:
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catapults that launch bales of marijuana over the wall
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(Laughter)
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or cannons that shoot packets of cocaine and heroin over the wall.
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Now during medieval times,
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diseased, dead bodies
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were sometimes catapulted over walls as an early form of biological warfare,
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and it's speculated that today,
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humans are being propelled over the wall as a form of immigration.
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A ridiculous idea.
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But the only person ever known to be documented to have launched over the wall
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from Mexico to the United States
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was in fact a US citizen,
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who was given permission to human-cannonball over the wall,
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200 feet,
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so long as he carried his passport in hand
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(Laughter)
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and he landed safely in a net on the other side.
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And my thoughts are inspired by a quote by the architect Hassan Fathy,
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who said,
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\"Architects do not design walls,
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but the spaces between them.\"
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So while I do not think that architects should be designing walls,
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I do think it's important and urgent that they should be paying attention
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to those spaces in between.
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They should be designing for the places and the people, the landscapes
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that the wall endangers.
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Now, people are already rising to this occasion,
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and while the purpose of the wall is to keep people apart and away,
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it's actually bringing people together in some really remarkable ways,
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holding social events like binational yoga classes along the border,
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to bring people together across the divide.
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I call this the monument pose.
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(Laughter)
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And have you ever heard of \"wall y ball\"?
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(Laughter)
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It's a borderland version of volleyball, and it's been played since 1979
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(Laughter)
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along the US-Mexico border
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to celebrate binational heritage.
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And it raises some interesting questions, right?
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Is such a game even legal?
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Does hitting a ball back and forth over the wall constitute illegal trade?
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(Laughter)
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The beauty of volleyball is that it transforms the wall
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into nothing more than a line in the sand
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negotiated by the minds and bodies and spirits of players on both sides.
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And I think it's exactly these kinds of two-sided negotiations
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that are needed to bring down walls that divide.
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Now, throwing the ball over the wall is one thing,
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but throwing rocks over the wall
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has caused damage to Border Patrol vehicles
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and have injured Border Patrol agents,
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and the response from the US side has been drastic.
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Border Patrol agents have fired through the wall,
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killing people throwing rocks on the Mexican side.
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And another response by Border Patrol agents
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is to erect baseball backstops to protect themselves and their vehicles.
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And these backstops became a permanent feature
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in the construction of new walls.
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And I began to wonder if, like volleyball,
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maybe baseball should be a permanent feature at the border,
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and walls could start opening up,
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allowing communities to come across and play,
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and if they hit a home run,
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maybe a Border Patrol agent would pick up the ball and throw it
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back over to the other side.
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A Border Patrol agent buys a raspado, a frozen treat,
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from a vendor just a couple feet away,
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food and money is exchanged through the wall,
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an entirely normal event made illegal by that line drawn on a map
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and a couple millimeters of steel.
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And this scene reminded me of a saying:
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\"If you have more than you need, you should build longer tables
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and not higher walls.\"
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So I created this souvenir to remember the moment that we could share
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food and conversation across the divide.
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A swing allows one to enter and swing over to the other side
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until gravity deports them back to their own country.
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The border and the border wall
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is thought of as a sort of political theater today,
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so perhaps we should invite audiences to that theater,
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to a binational theater where people can come together
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with performers, musicians.
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Maybe the wall is nothing more than an enormous instrument,
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the world's largest xylophone, and we could play down this wall
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with weapons of mass percussion.
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(Laughter)
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When I envisioned this binational library,
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I wanted to imagine a space where one could share
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books and information and knowledge across a divide,
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where the wall was nothing more than a bookshelf.
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And perhaps the best way to illustrate the mutual relationship that we have
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with Mexico and the United States
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is by imagining a teeter-totter,
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where the actions on one side had a direct consequence
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on what happens on the other side,
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because you see, the border itself
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is both a symbolic and literal fulcrum for US-Mexico relations,
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and building walls between neighbors severs those relationships.
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You probably remember this quote, \"Good fences make good neighbors.\"
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It's often thought of as the moral of Robert Frost's poem \"Mending Wall.\"
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But the poem is really about questioning the need for building walls at all.
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It's really a poem about mending human relationships.
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My favorite line is the first one:
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\"Something there is that doesn't love a wall.\"
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Because if there's one thing that's clear to me --
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there are not two sides defined by a wall.
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This is one landscape, divided.
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On one side, it might look like this.
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A man is mowing his lawn while the wall is looming in his backyard.
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And on the other side, it might look like this.
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The wall is the fourth wall of someone's house.
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But the reality is that the wall is cutting through people's lives.
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It is cutting through our private property,
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our public lands,
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our Native American lands, our cities,
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a university,
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our neighborhoods.
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And I couldn't help but wonder
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what it would be like if the wall cut through a house.
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Remember those disparities between wealth and poverty?
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On the right is the average size of a house in El Paso, Texas,
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and on the left is the average size of a house in Juarez.
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And here, the wall cuts directly through the kitchen table.
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And here, the wall cuts through the bed in the bedroom.
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Because I wanted to communicate how the wall is not only dividing places,
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it's dividing people, it's dividing families.
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And the unfortunate politics of the wall
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is today, it is dividing children from their parents.
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You might be familiar with this well-known traffic sign.
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It was designed by graphic designer John Hood,
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a Native American war veteran
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working for the California Department of Transportation.
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And he was tasked with creating a sign to warn motorists
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of immigrants who were stranded alongside the highway
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and who might attempt to run across the road.
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Hood related the plight of the immigrant today
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to that of the Navajo during the Long Walk.
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And this is really a brilliant piece of design activism.
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And he was very careful
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in thinking about using a little girl with pigtails, for example,
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because he thought that's who motorists might empathize with the most,
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and he used the silhouette of the civil rights leader Cesar Chavez
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to create the head of the father.
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I wanted to build upon the brilliance of this sign
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to call attention to the problem of child separation at the border,
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and I made one very simple move.
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I turned the families to face each other.
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And in the last few weeks,
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I've had the opportunity to bring that sign back to the highway
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to tell a story,
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the story of the relationships that we should be mending
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and a reminder that we should be designing
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a reunited states and not a divided states.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)