Urban Borderlands (Anth 183) is a community-based research course in which students are productively and meaningfully engaged in service learning by conducting original research documenting the history and incorporation of the Latino communities in Cambridge and Somerville.  Because few if any written sources are available, this research is necessarily based almost entirely on oral histories and interviews with community leaders and residents. Tufts students working in teams are paired up with Latino/a high school students from Cambridge or Somerville, who (in the case of Cambridge) are participants in the Ahora youth leadership program, run under the aegis of the Latino-oriented multi-service agency Concilio Hispano, or (in the case of Somerville) youth associated with the Welcome Project, a community based initiative based in the Mystic Public Housing Development.

At the end of the semester, students present their final results at a community forum/reception to which all those involved in the project are invited. Their written reports are duplicated and distributed to relevant individuals and agencies, and deposited in Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, which has posted them as PDFs on a web site so that future students and researchers can make use of the data; to read or download these reports, visit http://dca.tufts.edu/features/urban/

Since the goal of the project is to produce materials that can be circulated as widely as possible, students have also created multi-media projects based on their research.  These include web pages  and digital stories.