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A meandering water body is crossed by five children. The water is shallow, and a few rock steps allow passage. People contemplating the landscape can be seen nearby.

Thesis: ENTRE FUTUROS: Más allá de las Fronteras y las Cicatrices del Río Bravo / In-Between Futures: Beyond Frontiers and Scars in the Rio Bravo

Miriam Hernández Medina’s (MLA II) Thesis: “Entre futuros” reimagines the fixed border on the Río Bravo between Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. As the river shifted course, land disputes led to its channelization, leaving, since the 1930s, hundreds of cut-off meanders as “hydroghosts”—scars in both landscape and lived experience. These traces become a lens to argue that violent and rigid border-making fix an inherently fluctuating river landscape while erasing centuries of shared histories, memories, and identities.

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Collection of household and studio items related to clay production

Lo Que Sabe el Barro: From Clay to Fire

This research by MCI Fellow Andrea Martinez traces extraction, craft, labor, and reuse across Oaxaca, Saltillo, and Mexico City. Rather than locating rupture between artisanal and industrial practice, it proposes a material continuum, a framework for understanding how ancestral knowledge is not lost but translated through landscapes, labor, and economies.

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Black-and-white photo of a woman shaping clay on a table

Clay as Living Archive

What can a planner learn from a pot? MCI Fellow Lys Otárola (MUP ’26) presents her 2025 research arguing that the pottery practice of Oaxaca’s red clay communities constitutes a living archive of design intelligence, a system in which social infrastructure, embodied knowledge, communal governance, and ecological reciprocity are not separate concerns but a single, integrated practice.

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Pink-toned photo of clouds with overlaid text

De la Porqueria al Público / From Pigsty to Publics

MCI ’25 Summer Fellows Gemrisha Anantham and Miriam Hernandez Medina’s research investigates the contamination of the Yucatán Peninsula’s karst aquifer by the region’s pork industry, a project that shifted in direction after repeated access to pig farms, from small operations to major producers like Kekén, was denied due to biosecurity protocols and producer wariness stemming from recent regulatory crackdowns.

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Avocado Urbanisms

Avocado Urbanisms Gerardo Corona is pursuing a Master of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard GSD. He is an architect […]

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