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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
when I was searching for an architecture
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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
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could communicate ideas 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
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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 (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,
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there are success
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and there are failures.
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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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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
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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 so long as he carried
his passport in hand (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 in between."
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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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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
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 just
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 ?,
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a frozen treat, from a vendor
just a couple feet away,
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food and money is exchanged
through the wall,
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entirely normal event
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made illegal by that line drawn on a map
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and a couple of 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 envision this binational library,
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I wanted to imagine a space where
one could share books and information
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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 side
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
in thinking about using
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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 then 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,
I've had the opportunity
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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)