Como Caminamos (How we Walk)
A collaborative project by Jessica Monroe and Daniel García Ordaz exploring place, memory, language, ecology, and lived experience in the Rio Grande Valley.
This project grows out of an ongoing written exchange between painter Jessica Monroe and poet Daniel García Ordaz. Through conversation, images, and reflection, we use collaborative autoethnography to think through how personal experience connects to larger histories, communities, and landscapes. This page offers background on the project, introduces the artists, and invites community participation.
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Collaborative autoethnography is a way of learning through lived experience, reflection, and dialogue.
In this project, that means we write with and through our own experiences while also listening closely to each other. The work moves between the personal and the collective: family histories, language, politics, ecology, class, identity, and everyday life in the Rio Grande Valley all become part of the conversation.
Rather than treating theory as something separate from lived reality, we use it as a tool to better understand what is already present in our lives and communities.
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This collaboration takes shape through an evolving shared document in which writing, images, and ideas are layered over time. Instead of exchanging polished responses one at a time, we return to the same space again and again, adding, interrupting, revising, and responding across multiple passes.
The result is not a single argument or finished statement. It is a living record of thought in motion: a space where resonance, contrast, memory, and inquiry remain visible.
For the public event, we are opening that process outward. We want to create space for conversation and for community members to reflect on their own experiences of place, culture, language, inheritance, and belonging.
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The Rio Grande Valley holds many overlapping histories and ways of seeing. It is shaped by border realities, migration, family memory, ecological change, labor, language, faith, inequality, and deep cultural knowledge. This project begins from the idea that people already carry important forms of knowledge about these realities in their bodies, memories, and daily lives.
By creating a space for reflection and exchange, we hope to honor those ways of knowing and to make room for nuance, contradiction, and connection. This work follows other artists and thinking dedicated to advancing our understanding of the uniqueness of border identities and feels especially relevant during this time of political and social unrest in the United States.
Meet the artists
Jessica Monroe
Jessica Monroe is a South Texas artist whose work is rooted in landscape, perception, ecology, and embodied attention. Through painting, drawing, and research-based projects, she explores how lived experience, environment, and systems of relation shape the way we understand ourselves and the world.
Painter
Daniel García Ordaz
Daniel García Ordaz is a poet from the Rio Grande Valley whose work engages language, memory, identity, culture, and place. His writing often moves between the intimate and the political, drawing on personal experience while opening onto larger questions of history and community.
PoetArtworks Inspired
These works emerge directly from the ongoing dialogue at the center of Como Caminamos. The collages and word clouds are not illustrations of the text, but parallel forms of thinking—ways of processing language, memory, and lived experience through visual means.
Across the work, moments of tension, grief, and rupture sit alongside color, texture, and growth. Rather than resolving these conditions, the pieces hold them together, allowing contradiction and complexity to remain visible.
Through this process, the project has opened a shift in perception: an increasing awareness of people, communities, and cultures as interrelated systems—dynamic, layered, and dependent on one another. What begins in conversation moves outward into form, where fragments accumulate, overlap, and reorganize into something that could not have been planned in advance.
Invitation to community contributions
We invite community members to contribute short written responses, photographs, audio, or other forms of documentation related to the themes of the project. Selected contributions may be featured on this page, in future project documentation, and in related publications or presentations, with permission.
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We invite community members to contribute short written responses, photographs, audio, or other forms of documentation related to the themes of the project.
Possible prompts:
What does this place teach you?
What histories do you carry that shape how you move through the Valley?
How do language, family, or landscape shape your sense of self?
What feels overlooked but important in your community?
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By submitting material, you confirm that the work is your own or that you have permission to share it. Selected contributions may be featured on this website and, depending on your selections above, may be shared in project documentation or incorporated into new artworks (including collage and writing). Contributors retain copyright to their work.
If your contribution is selected, we may display it on this website and may include it in future project documentation, presentations, or publications only in the ways you agree to below.
Contributors may choose:
website display only
website + social media
website + future exhibition/publication/project documentation
anonymous or named credit
For contributors under 18, a parent or guardian must provide written permission before any submission is published.