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In July, 2024, La Semilla Food Center, a land-based, community-rooted, and food justice nonprofit organization based in Anthony, NM, partnered with the Southwest Folklife Alliance, alongside the Tohono O'odham Young Voices Podcast, for the ClimateLore oral history project. ClimateLore sought to advance cultural and community resilience by documenting oral histories of climate risk, loss, and adaptation in two desert regions of the US-Mexico borderlands. Oral historians affiliated with La Semilla Food Center and Tohono O'odham Young Voices Podcast visited each other's communities and trained together on oral history ethics, environmental oral histories, and centering community in local histories and archives, climate science, and folklore studies. Tasked with gathering oral histories in the Paso del Norte region of the Chihuahuan Desert, La Semilla worked with five local oral historians, with varying experiences and skill sets, to interview narrators hailing from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, and Southern New Mexico from the fall of 2024 through early 2025. Interviews focused on climate histories, threats to folklife and cultural heritage practices, and adaptive strategies. The narrators encompass a diverse group of local farmers and growers, cultural practitioners, educators, and land environment stewards.

La Semilla's oral history project was coordinated by Michelle E. Carreon and Rubí Orozco Santos.

This project, and the amplification of these stories across the Paso del Norte region, was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wildseeds Fund. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this oral history collection do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

To learn more about La Semilla's work across the Paso del Norte region, click on the button below.