As we get ready to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Anza Expedition, the Anza Trail has teamed up with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. This organization is a global network of historic sites, museums, and memorials from around the world dedicated to protecting human rights. In March 2024, we held a workshop with the Sites of Conscience and our southern Arizona partners to learn how to tell more inclusive stories, form new partnerships, and connect through personal experiences.
One of the outcomes was to practice what we learned by creating a new project with one of our partners. We chose to work with Mission Garden, a non-profit agricultural heritage space. Mission Garden overlays where the Indigenous village of Cuk Son used to be, the once-18th-century garden of Mission San Augustin del Tucson, and was a campsite along the Anza Trail. In May, during the Garden's San Ysidro Festival, we introduced an experimental pop-up program to encourage visitors to connect to deep and complex histories through their own experiences on the land. We placed three temporary posters throughout the gardens with first-hand quotes, followed by reflective questions for visitors to ponder.
We engaged with 23 attendees who completed the pop-up program during the festival. While most participants were retirees, we also received feedback from a few individuals in their twenties and thirties. Overall, the feedback was positive: attendees suggested that the content should be mandatory for volunteers, the program should be permanently available in the Garden, and the questions posed were painful yet essential. Constructive comments included recommendations for sharper questions and a need for more guidance and direction in experiencing the signage.
By working together, we hope to make the story of the Anza expedition more complete and meaningful for everyone. Have you tried new ways to engage visitors at your site!? We would love to hear about it! If you want to learn more about using dialogic questions to engage visitors, please reach out – we're eager to talk more about it!