Jonalex Herrera told a TEDx Ciudad Juárez audience how a Venezuelan who arrived in 2002 ended up defending a border story that an American director had quietly drained of its meaning.
The talk asks what technology can do beyond impressing people: whether it can hold identity in place, connect communities, and make a culture legible in a format someone will actually sit through. Herrera — Jonathan Alexander Herrera Pernalete on the programme — answers it with his own migration, then hands the question to the audience.
The event record is at TEDxCiudadJuarez on TED, and the company's announcement of the talk is still up as the original New Discovery article.
Identity, belonging, and the decision to give back through art and technology.
He was born in Caracas and studied graphic design there. By 2002 he was in Ciudad Juárez studying systems engineering; in 2007 he left a manager's job for art; by 2009 he was studying digital film, animation and visual effects at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
A screenwriting teacher pulled one of his scripts — Más de uno, built on real events at the Juárez–El Paso border — into a collaborative thesis project. The American director, who did not know Mexico, drifted the story away from what it was about, and Herrera felt for the first time that its authenticity was his to defend. In 2012, one semester short of graduating and without the university behind him, he shot Más de uno again in Juárez, near where the events had happened.
After graduating he worked in New York and Miami and entered the film in festivals. It took first place at the Festival Internacional de Juárez, where his father accepted the award from the actor Joaquín Cosío. Press in Juárez and El Paso called him Venezuelan by birth and Juarense at heart, which is the sentence that settled the question of where he belonged.
From his own path to a question for everyone: what part do you play in this?
Herrera came back in 2018. He points to the migrant flows crossing the border, citing more than 200,000 people since 2020, and to the bureaucratic, social and immigration obstacles he had run into himself. His answer was to give something back through art and technology, one project at a time.
In 2020 that was Ruta Norte: Identidad Fronteriza, an immersive virtual reality documentary that puts a viewer face to face with migrant accounts. In 2022 he led the technology behind Juárez Aumentada, an augmented reality app that gathers the city's monuments and historic centres together with the stories attached to them, for Juarenses by birth and by arrival alike.
His argument is that a narrative can build a border or a connection, and that everyone has a part in cultural integration from wherever they already stand: an accountant can help a new arrival with their taxes, and a new arrival can pass on farming practice to the neighbours. He asks migrants to contribute rather than wait, and closes on empathy and initiative as what a community is made of.
The speaker profile ran through industry, culture and immersive storytelling.
The announcement did not present a generic founder. It described a route through multimedia development, AR and VR production, collaborations with private companies, and public-facing cultural work — industrial engagements, state-level initiatives in Chihuahua, and projects with large brands and entertainment properties.
The projects the talk is standing on.
A speaking slot is worth what the work behind it is worth. The themes Herrera took on stage — cultural identity, and what technology is for — run straight into Juárez Aumentada and Ruta Norte, where immersive media was pointed at civic and cultural access rather than at a client's product launch.
The same capability pays industrial work: Johnson & Johnson is the plant-floor version of the stack behind both cultural projects. About carries the current shape of the company around that founder timeline.