Mellon’s Millions Trashing American Citizenship and Borders
- The Foundation’s Attempt to Subvert the American Idea Does Not Stop with Revisionist History
March 2025
The Mellon Foundation is not a fan of borders, citizenship, nor culture, unless that culture belongs to anyone other than Americans.
Under the auspices of their Arts and Culture category for grant-making, Mellon announced in the Fall of 2024 its Frontera Culture Fund, “a $25 million commitment to support the creative and historically rich work of artists and cultural leaders living and creating in the U.S.-Mexico border region and tribal communities.”
The fund’s goal is to show the “dynamic cultural landscape of border communities” and support more authentic representations of the borderlands. Crucially, the fund supports transborder collaboration and organizations on both sides of the border.”
In a press release, Elizabeth Alexander, the President of the Mellon Foundation, said, “The U.S./Mexico borderlands are home to an abundance of cultures and creative traditions, yet remain a region minimally funded by arts philanthropies in the United States,” which she vows to change with Mellon’s millions.
If all this sounds innocuous so far, read on. It’s really quite pernicious.
Mellon stays loyal to its new-found social justice vision here in choosing recipients of the Frontera Fund. The inaugural group of grantees for the Frontera Culture Fund were selected based on their “vital contributions to the region's cultural life and their integration of arts with essential community needs, including racial and climate justice, migrant and refugee rights, LGBTQ+ rights, Indigenous cultural sovereignty, public memory, and community health.”
Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander describes the border as “a physical barrier that represents centuries of racialized policies and policing, and remains an ongoing site of contestation and separation.” Alexander is in effect saying it is racist for the U.S. to have a border and it should it not be policed for national security.
“Countering Trumpism’s dark border narratives will be of prime importance for social justice funders in the coming months and years, and it’s heartening to see that the Mellon Foundation was already taking on that challenge even before Trump’s victory,” states Martha Ramirez, writing for Inside Philanthropy.
Ramirez claims “the border is often described as a place of chaos, crisis, and fear. President-elect Donald Trump made divisive and fear-laden rhetoric on immigration a cornerstone of his campaign, vowing to drastically increase enforcement, including enacting mass deportations, ending President Joe Biden’s humanitarian programs and resuming construction of the border wall.”
In other words, Mellon wants to use its money to fund artists and cultural leaders who will contradict the rhetoric and narrative that the border is chaotic and dangerous, even though it absolutely is – here (terrorism), here (assaults on border guards), and here (child sex trafficking). The most recent act of terror on the U.S. border is the death of a Texas rancher and another man by an IED planted by a Mexican drug cartel.
It appears Mellon wants to see illegal immigration and the breaking of our laws glorified.
Perhaps Mellon should take note of the crime perpetrated on Americans by those who have violated, not only our border laws, but our human rights laws. The first bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this year, tragically, had to be the Laken Riley Act to combat these atrocities.
More Mellon Millions in the Mix
Continuing its donations in the borderlands through its Higher Learning area of grant-making, Mellon has funded a complicated project at the University of California at San Diego focused on “equitable urban development, K-12 education, and environmental literacy and climate.” The university received a grant of $5,000,000 for its “Community Stations Network”.
The Network links “universities and communities” again, “on both sides of the San Diego border”
On its website, Mellon describes the University of California at San Diego’s “Community Stations Network,” as “sanctuary spaces for the protection of both people and nature.”
UCSD Professors Fanna Forman, professor of Political Theory and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice and Teddy Cruz, professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, are co-leaders on the project.
Together they urge a reimagining of national boundaries for occupants of both sides. Referencing a map they’ve created, Forman declares excitedly: “We've erased the line visually. The border simply becomes a set of watersheds. Imagine what the entire continental US border looks like when it's reconceptualized as watersheds instead of a metal fence. It opens questions about our interdependence.”
Moving Beyond Art to Advocacy
The project includes four community stations that will cultivate “potential solutions for issues as varied as labor equity, environmental justice, and political/economic displacement” the professors claim affect the residents of the communities where the stations are located.
Those four stations are: EarthLab Community Station, Casa Community Station, Alacran, and the Divina Community Stations
“The first station, Earth Lab, was built reflecting Mellon’s investment in collaborative education and research; its progress has been leveraged to allow the program to build flexible community housing. Flanked by a public space made up of a communal theater that was adapted from a 1920s church and that has become a symbol of civic pride, the station also features an open-air classroom, pavilions with technology infrastructure provided by the university that fosters long distance learning, and a series of accessory buildings that contain programming for citizenship” but, not the kind of citizenship we are accustomed to, “orientation, community services, and art-making.”
“The Casa station is a cooperative effort in increasing community capacities for political action via a public space that is programmed with collaborative productions of theater, music, and visual arts. The goal is to use these humanities-based practices to change public perceptions and public policy, where community members (particularly children) become stewards of amplifying the injustices that they face every day, becoming politically aware and agile in the process.”
“Alacrán has become a proto-typical example of the program’s commitment to blurring the lines between research, teaching, and service” and the Divina Station, “the only high school in the entire region, home to more than 85,000 people. Highly focused on the environment, the school’s orientation is intended to give the university strong links to the young people of the community.”
To translate, Casa and Divina are where the university will train kids to be political activists, not focus on English or Math.
“The project’s programming is” [highly focused] “on young people as the cross-border citizens of the future.” As long as the cartels don’t get them first.
Those receiving this grant are redefining citizenship. “Citizenship is more a way of inhabiting a place together and sharing interests and aspirations. We're always rethinking citizenship with these young people. How can we reimagine the space that we're inhabiting and how we share it? Children are going to be thinking differently about borders and interconnection in the future simply because our world cannot tolerate the current geopolitical pattern. They're the new thinkers. They're experiencing reality differently in new ways.”
As one of our Guardians of History describes Mellon’s borderlands grants: “It begins to look like they (the Mellon Foundation) really are a deadly enemy to the geographic integrity of this country, and maybe in other ways as well. They really do see any boundaries at all as expressions of racial hatred and intolerance. It is an extreme combination of total liberal naïveté, Marxism, and hatred of our Country and Constitution.”
Reimagining borders out of existence. Cultivating “cross-border citizens” (whatever that means). Talking up sanctuary and other illegal alien ‘rights’. Promoting political advocacy and action. Changing public policy from what Americans elected our new President to do. Grooming child activists for the Left and robbing them of their childhood in the process. Mellon has strayed a long way from its original mission to promote the arts and humanities, with deleterious results.
The way in which the Mellon Foundation distributes its millions, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, signals contempt for American citizenship, border security and, for that matter, the nation’s borders themselves. Like A Man Without A Country, Mellon is a foundation without a country, truly at sea but always tacking Left.
- The Foundation’s Attempt to Subvert the American Idea Does Not Stop with Revisionist History
March 2025
The Mellon Foundation is not a fan of borders, citizenship, nor culture, unless that culture belongs to anyone other than Americans.
Under the auspices of their Arts and Culture category for grant-making, Mellon announced in the Fall of 2024 its Frontera Culture Fund, “a $25 million commitment to support the creative and historically rich work of artists and cultural leaders living and creating in the U.S.-Mexico border region and tribal communities.”
The fund’s goal is to show the “dynamic cultural landscape of border communities” and support more authentic representations of the borderlands. Crucially, the fund supports transborder collaboration and organizations on both sides of the border.”
In a press release, Elizabeth Alexander, the President of the Mellon Foundation, said, “The U.S./Mexico borderlands are home to an abundance of cultures and creative traditions, yet remain a region minimally funded by arts philanthropies in the United States,” which she vows to change with Mellon’s millions.
If all this sounds innocuous so far, read on. It’s really quite pernicious.
Mellon stays loyal to its new-found social justice vision here in choosing recipients of the Frontera Fund. The inaugural group of grantees for the Frontera Culture Fund were selected based on their “vital contributions to the region's cultural life and their integration of arts with essential community needs, including racial and climate justice, migrant and refugee rights, LGBTQ+ rights, Indigenous cultural sovereignty, public memory, and community health.”
Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander describes the border as “a physical barrier that represents centuries of racialized policies and policing, and remains an ongoing site of contestation and separation.” Alexander is in effect saying it is racist for the U.S. to have a border and it should it not be policed for national security.
“Countering Trumpism’s dark border narratives will be of prime importance for social justice funders in the coming months and years, and it’s heartening to see that the Mellon Foundation was already taking on that challenge even before Trump’s victory,” states Martha Ramirez, writing for Inside Philanthropy.
Ramirez claims “the border is often described as a place of chaos, crisis, and fear. President-elect Donald Trump made divisive and fear-laden rhetoric on immigration a cornerstone of his campaign, vowing to drastically increase enforcement, including enacting mass deportations, ending President Joe Biden’s humanitarian programs and resuming construction of the border wall.”
In other words, Mellon wants to use its money to fund artists and cultural leaders who will contradict the rhetoric and narrative that the border is chaotic and dangerous, even though it absolutely is – here (terrorism), here (assaults on border guards), and here (child sex trafficking). The most recent act of terror on the U.S. border is the death of a Texas rancher and another man by an IED planted by a Mexican drug cartel.
It appears Mellon wants to see illegal immigration and the breaking of our laws glorified.
Perhaps Mellon should take note of the crime perpetrated on Americans by those who have violated, not only our border laws, but our human rights laws. The first bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this year, tragically, had to be the Laken Riley Act to combat these atrocities.
More Mellon Millions in the Mix
Continuing its donations in the borderlands through its Higher Learning area of grant-making, Mellon has funded a complicated project at the University of California at San Diego focused on “equitable urban development, K-12 education, and environmental literacy and climate.” The university received a grant of $5,000,000 for its “Community Stations Network”.
The Network links “universities and communities” again, “on both sides of the San Diego border”
On its website, Mellon describes the University of California at San Diego’s “Community Stations Network,” as “sanctuary spaces for the protection of both people and nature.”
UCSD Professors Fanna Forman, professor of Political Theory and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice and Teddy Cruz, professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego, are co-leaders on the project.
Together they urge a reimagining of national boundaries for occupants of both sides. Referencing a map they’ve created, Forman declares excitedly: “We've erased the line visually. The border simply becomes a set of watersheds. Imagine what the entire continental US border looks like when it's reconceptualized as watersheds instead of a metal fence. It opens questions about our interdependence.”
Moving Beyond Art to Advocacy
The project includes four community stations that will cultivate “potential solutions for issues as varied as labor equity, environmental justice, and political/economic displacement” the professors claim affect the residents of the communities where the stations are located.
Those four stations are: EarthLab Community Station, Casa Community Station, Alacran, and the Divina Community Stations
“The first station, Earth Lab, was built reflecting Mellon’s investment in collaborative education and research; its progress has been leveraged to allow the program to build flexible community housing. Flanked by a public space made up of a communal theater that was adapted from a 1920s church and that has become a symbol of civic pride, the station also features an open-air classroom, pavilions with technology infrastructure provided by the university that fosters long distance learning, and a series of accessory buildings that contain programming for citizenship” but, not the kind of citizenship we are accustomed to, “orientation, community services, and art-making.”
“The Casa station is a cooperative effort in increasing community capacities for political action via a public space that is programmed with collaborative productions of theater, music, and visual arts. The goal is to use these humanities-based practices to change public perceptions and public policy, where community members (particularly children) become stewards of amplifying the injustices that they face every day, becoming politically aware and agile in the process.”
“Alacrán has become a proto-typical example of the program’s commitment to blurring the lines between research, teaching, and service” and the Divina Station, “the only high school in the entire region, home to more than 85,000 people. Highly focused on the environment, the school’s orientation is intended to give the university strong links to the young people of the community.”
To translate, Casa and Divina are where the university will train kids to be political activists, not focus on English or Math.
“The project’s programming is” [highly focused] “on young people as the cross-border citizens of the future.” As long as the cartels don’t get them first.
Those receiving this grant are redefining citizenship. “Citizenship is more a way of inhabiting a place together and sharing interests and aspirations. We're always rethinking citizenship with these young people. How can we reimagine the space that we're inhabiting and how we share it? Children are going to be thinking differently about borders and interconnection in the future simply because our world cannot tolerate the current geopolitical pattern. They're the new thinkers. They're experiencing reality differently in new ways.”
As one of our Guardians of History describes Mellon’s borderlands grants: “It begins to look like they (the Mellon Foundation) really are a deadly enemy to the geographic integrity of this country, and maybe in other ways as well. They really do see any boundaries at all as expressions of racial hatred and intolerance. It is an extreme combination of total liberal naïveté, Marxism, and hatred of our Country and Constitution.”
Reimagining borders out of existence. Cultivating “cross-border citizens” (whatever that means). Talking up sanctuary and other illegal alien ‘rights’. Promoting political advocacy and action. Changing public policy from what Americans elected our new President to do. Grooming child activists for the Left and robbing them of their childhood in the process. Mellon has strayed a long way from its original mission to promote the arts and humanities, with deleterious results.
The way in which the Mellon Foundation distributes its millions, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, signals contempt for American citizenship, border security and, for that matter, the nation’s borders themselves. Like A Man Without A Country, Mellon is a foundation without a country, truly at sea but always tacking Left.