Meandering Rio Commons

This is a place to observe the meandering history of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo river over the last 200 years.
Click on any stories below to view publicly contributed data, stories, and poetry.
All the GIS files and data is open source and open access for free usage.

GitHub

Public Contributions

Meanders

This project began with Land Arts of the American West in 2020. In collaboration with Land Arts of the American West, and a cohort of independant scholars, academics, artists, poets, and architects, the meander map of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo river was created.


To learn about the process of creating the meanders, and for a full list of the contributors to the project, see Chris Taylor's essay titled, Drawing Time: Making the Rio Meander Map.


This short video displays a brief explanation of the process that was taken to create the meander map of the Rio Grande/Bravo river.


To use the data from the project, see the
dataset downloads and sources page


Stories

Interacting with the map is best done by clicking on one of the stories on the page, or one of the location buttons on the top right corner of the map. The popup text, while holding your mouse over certain areas, either tells you what year the river is from, what structure is there (border fence), or what indigenous land/language is native to that area (thank you native-land.ca)

The data from the meandering project was largley retrieved from surveys and maps that are undeniably linked to colonial histories. A database of all the digitized archives and information that was collected and synthesized from the Meander project is open access and free to use.

Patrick O'Shea and Jose Villaneuva have begun digital project, with the goal of expanding the stories that reside in the land & water beyond the data that already exists. That is why we hope that others will contribute their stories and research to this page.