This week on Arizona Illustrated… a recap of our 2025 regional Edward R. Murrow Award winning stories; meet the storytellers behind the multimedia Atascosa Borderlands project; see how Sister José Women’s Center is help provide a path to housing for women in need, and Borderlands Theatre is proving art is vital to the Tucson community.
Atascosa Borderlands
Photographer Luke Takata, and naturalist Jack Dash, have collected plants, taken photos and recorded oral histories in the Arizona-Sonora Borderlands since 2017. They have worked alongside ecologists, cattle ranchers, humanitarian aid workers, migrants, hunters, ex-border patrol agents, and Indigenous community members to create an archive of, and to better understand this remote 42-mile section of the US-Mexico border known as the Atascosa Borderlands.
Finding Hope at Sister José Women’s Center
Sister José Women’s Center, a Tucson-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is committed to the mission of aiding and uplifting women experiencing homelessness. At their low-barrier day center, they offer unaccompanied women stability and safety, providing them with a refuge to heal from the harsh realities of life in the United States.
Art is Vital
Borderlands Theater strives to build equitable, joyful, and meaningful collaborations with the local community through innovative theater and responsive cultural programs ingrained in the heritage, narratives, and lived experiences of peoples rooted across the Sonoran Desert. They cut the middlemen and go right to the source so that we can hear the stories of the neglected underdog in our community. They have been invited to be part of a national project called: “One Nation One Project” that took place in 18 cities in the US to bring awareness about the vital connection between arts and wellness. This story gives us a glimpse of what it means to have a community mobilization to do good in our community via art making.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.