Name: Season 4: Salon del RGV: May 14: Featuring René A. Ballesteros
Start: 2026-05-14T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-05-14T21:00:00-05:00
Location: CommonSpace

$Season 4: Salon del RGV: May 14: Featuring Ren\u00e9 A. Ballesteros$

The public is invited to join our artsy and intellectual casual Salon del RGV conversations on the 2nd Thursday of each month from 7 to 9 p.m. at CommonSpace coffee shop in McAllen.
Our May 14th Featured Speaker is René Antonio Ballesteros, who will present “Mapping History: Digital Heritage and GIS in the South Texas Borderlands.”
Digital mapping is an incredible tool to present place based histories, events and cultural data. This presentation highlights how community engagement, oral histories and archival preservation can help document and display history, ancestral heritage, historic events through webmaps and online storytelling. The presentation features the Conjunto Creciendo ArcGIS Online Storymap, part of The Abuelas Project hosted by Latinos in Heritage Conservation, the Historical Evolution of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo from 1897 to 2026, georeferenced archaeological survey maps of El Capote Ranch.
René Antonio Ballesteros is a Culturalist, Memory Worker, Preservationist, and Fundraiser who currently serves as the Development Manager for Latinos in Heritage Conservation (LHC). Raised in the borderlands, he is a graduate of Lamar Academy’s IB program and holds a Bachelor’s in Anthropology from UTPA and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from UTRGV. He previously served as the Community Engagement Officer at the Museum of South Texas History (MOSTHistory) and currently serves as a Commissioner and Publicity Chair for the Hidalgo County Historical Commission.
The Featured Artist will be announced soon.
Our featured nonprofit is yet to be determined.
Salon del RGV is brought to you by the Seven To Eight Poetry Project, a program of the McAllen Poet Laureate, Daniel García Ordaz.
“Salon” sa•lon noun 1. an artful conversation held monthly where artists, writers, and arts professionals, and arts and philosophy-minded individuals come together to bond, network and get out of their heads for a little while. It is a conversation; a support group; sometimes a counseling session; always a networking extravaganza; an experimental lab for new ideas; a place to learn and grow by leaps and bounds as an artist and a professional.