During my undergraduate years at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), I rarely made my way to the university’s library. For my research, I often used the library’s digital resources without much thought. Those resources had always been available to me, and I had never taken a moment to consider just how those digital resources made their way to me.

Before the summer of this year, I had only set foot inside the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) perhaps once or twice. Unfortunately, I do not recall what prompted me to enter a building that I had passed on several occasions to and from the English Department's Hudspeth Hall and the UTEP University Library.

I have been a resident of the Borderland all my life, graduating from El Paso High School in 2012, earning my B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2016, and working towards my M.A. throughout the current pandemic. I remember listening attentively to my history classes, learning of the great endeavors of the nation’s founding fathers, the wars that shaped the state of Texas as we know it, and wrapping up the school year with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. This is what has been traditionally taught throughout Texas, yet it is hardly a complete story.

America is now in the throes of an opioid epidemic.  To some of us, it seems to have swooped down from nowhere, a mysterious plague that descended on the United states seemingly overnight.  But, of course, we know that's not the case.  We know it was the result of numerous events and factors, interconnected and complex, that occurred over a series of decades.

This is my first year as part of the Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP, and when I began in the program, I was very curious about meeting my team and learning about our research topic. I was assigned to work with Zaira Crisafulli, an El Paso Community College (EPCC) English professor, Malia Nelson, a student at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and Jireh Nelson, a dual credit student at EPCC.