Bilingual Dinosaurs! emerged from a series of interviews conducted by Michael Mares Mendoza with cultural leaders, activists, professors, immigrant artists, writers, musicians, and a paleontologist, exploring bilingual identity, migration, and adaptation through the imagined voices of dinosaurs living during the late Cretaceous period. Interviewees selected the dinosaur they wished to be, named their dinosaur, and shaped its perspective—blending humor with reflections on environmental change and contemporary migration.
Each dinosaur was realized as a 3D animated character, textured and given talking animations by Karina Teruya, and brought to life through augzoo’s location-based augmented reality platform, architected by Neema Rezaee, Chief Technology Officer and lead systems architect of augzoo. The AR experiences were deployed across sites in Big Bend National Park, with on-location video captured to accompany the staged reading and align visuals with each speaker’s imagined dinosaur. Directed by Celeste Guzman Mendoza, the work draws inspiration from traditions of bilingual performance and community storytelling.