Border Songs: Bringing the Immigration Crisis to the Classroom with Music

Abstract

During fall semester of 2010, I began taking students on five-day field trips to the Arizona–Mexico border. One part of these trips involves meeting with sound sculptor Glenn Weyant, who plays the border wall as a musical instrument. Weyant attaches contact microphones to the wall and plays it, sometimes bowing the steel structure with a cello bow, and other times playing it rhythmically with what he calls “instruments of mass percussion.