Finding the Border in Dayton, OH (July 8th, 2026)
When I first imagined this blog, I assumed I would write my first post somewhere in my hometown, the Rio Grande Valley. It seemed fitting. After all, much of my research, teaching, and writing has centered on the region that raised me. Instead, I am writing this from Dayton, Ohio, a place that, at first glance, appears to have very little to do with borders.
That is probably why it feels like the right place to begin.
My husband currently works in Dayton as the Chief Deputy Clerk for the Montgomery County Courthouse, and before I begin my appointment this fall as Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, we have been spending a little more time here together. I knew very little about Dayton before arriving, so I have spent the last several weeks doing what I usually do whenever I find myself somewhere unfamiliar. I walk around, ask questions, read local history, and pay attention to the things that most people seem to overlook.
One of the first things I noticed was how different the flow of the city feels from the places I have called home. During the middle of the day, the streets become noticeably quiet. There is traffic, but very little congestion. People move through the city without much urgency (something I never experienced before), and there are moments when it feels as though everything has slowed down just enough for you to notice details that would normally disappear in the rush of everyday life.
The quiet made me curious, but another question stayed with me even longer.
As my husband drove us around the city, he would casually mention that we had entered Kettering or Beavercreek before eventually making our way back into Dayton. I remember looking out the window trying to figure out when those transitions had happened. Nothing around me suggested that we had crossed into another municipality. There was no obvious marker that announced one city had ended and another had begun. The roads continued. The neighborhoods blended together. If no one had said anything, I would have assumed we were still in Dayton.
That small moment stayed with me longer than I expected.
Eventually, I found Dayton’s zoning maps and began looking at the city differently. I wanted to know where Dayton officially began and where it officially ended. I traced neighborhood lines, parks, industrial districts, universities, and municipal boundaries, wondering how these divisions came to exist and what they meant for the people who lived within them.
The more I read, the more I realized that I was asking the same questions here that I ask in my research.
How do places become separated?
Who decides where those separations belong?
What happens to the people who live within them?
As I continued reading about Dayton, I learned that much of what I was experiencing reflected the city’s history. Population decline, suburban expansion, changing industries, and decades of inconsistent investment have all shaped the landscape that exists today. Dayton is often described as a Rust Belt city (a place experiencing deindustrialization), but that description alone tells only part of the story.
I spend a great deal of time thinking about borders because they are central to my scholarship, but being here reminded me that borders are not confined to the edges of nation-states. They also exist in cities. They exist between neighborhoods, school districts, rivers, highways, and municipal governments. They influence where resources flow, where communities grow, and how people come to understand the places they call home.
I arrived assuming I was spending a few quiet weeks in the Midwest before returning to South Texas. Instead, I found myself seeing Dayton as its own kind of borderland. The Great Miami River separates neighborhoods, and highways connect people while also creating physical divisions across the city. These are different kinds of borders than the one that runs through the Rio Grande Valley, but they still shape belonging and opportunity.
As I kept reading, another history became central to my understanding of Dayton. Long before Dayton existed as a city, this land was home to Indigenous nations (Shawnee, Miami, Lenape, Wyandot, Ottawa, Seneca, Erie, and Kickapoo) whose histories continue long after treaties and forced removal attempted to erase them. Every place has stories that existed before its current borders, and those stories deserve our attention because they remind us that borders are made by people, and remembered differently depending on who is telling the story.
I think that is what I will remember most about my time here.
I came to Dayton expecting to wait for the next chapter of my life to begin. Instead, Dayton reminded me that every place has something to teach us if we are willing to pay attention. For someone who studies borders, there is something fitting about discovering one where I never expected to find it. It reminded me that borders also exist wherever histories meet, and communities overlap.
Perhaps there is no better place for Writings from the Borderlands to begin than here. Dayton may never be the first place people think of when they hear the word “border,” but it has reminded me that borders are everywhere once you learn how to see them.
Cox Arboretum, Dayton, OH.