The Border Chronicle

Alejandra Spector is a practicing psychotherapist and licensed master social worker, from El Paso, Texas. Spector, who now lives in Austin, grew up in a bilingual family of border activists. Her father, Carlos Spector, is a well-known asylum and human rights lawyer, and her mother, Sandra Spector, is a longtime community organizer who runs the family’s law practice.

Social justice work can be incredibly rewarding. But it can also lead to burn out and take a physical and mental toll. Spector stresses the importance of self-care. “Are you eating enough, drinking enough water, and getting enough sleep? Are you finding things you enjoy outside of social justice work?” she says. “Having people who really know and care about you is important. Who is in your life, and who is helping you?”

Her therapy practice reflects her border upbringing by focusing on the mental health impacts of systemic oppression, racism, and forced displacement, which leads to migration. Most of her clients are people of color, including DACA recipients who are struggling with complicated stressors outside their control. “A lot of therapists don’t have any sort of political analysis, and that hurts people,” Spector says. “I always ask, ‘Are you internalizing and blaming yourself for something that is actually systemic?’ A lot of depression and anxiety we’re seeing is about the world we live in.”

Show notes:

* Mexicanos en Exilio

* The Ulysses Syndrome

* The Juarez Valley

The Border Chronicle depends on its readers and listeners to continue. Support border journalism by becoming a paid subscriber today for just $6 a month or $60 a year.

We’d like to give a special welcome to our new audio editor Steev Hise and give a huge thanks to Hannah Gaber for her work with us over the last several months. As always in this volatile arena of journalism, it is hard for us to do anything coherent without our team behind the scenes!

The Longer Story of the Border Patrol Killing of a Tohono O’odham Man: A Podcast with Amy Juan

The Tohono O’odham leader and thinker describes the May 18 killing of Raymond Mattia and the long context of border militarization that led to it.

On May 18, Raymond Mattia stepped out of his house after he saw the U.S. Border Patrol arrive. He lived in the small community of Ali Chuk (also known as Menagers Dam), located about one mile from the U.S.-Mexico international boundary on the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona. Mattia had called the Border Patrol a few hours earlier to report people moving through his land. He was about two feet from his front door, witnesses said, when agents fired, hitting him 38 times.

Tohono O’odham leader and thinker Amy Juan joins us today to discuss what happened from an on-the-ground perspective, drawing from the testimony of Ali Chuk’s community members. She also explains the context of the incident, in what she calls “one the most militarized communities” on the Nation, where the Border Patrol has been increasing its presence for decades.

Amy has been one of my go-to people on border issues for more than decade. I met her after she helped found the organization Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network to raise awareness about and take action on the Border Patrol’s militarization of her community. Now she is the administrative manager at the San Xavier Cooperative Farm and the tribal and community liaison in Arizona for the International Indian Treaty Council, where she focuses on border issues, among other things. To note, Amy was also the guest for The Border Chronicle’s first ever podcast in September 2021.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In 2020, Dr. Alexander Tenorio, a neurosurgeon based in San Diego, noticed a sharp increase in people suffering traumatic brain and spinal injuries. These cases, he soon discovered, were the result of people falling from the newly expanded and elevated border wall.

Under the Trump administration, the border wall’s height was raised to 30 feet, which has challenged border hospitals and had deadly consequences for migrants. Falls from the border wall have left many paralyzed or unable to function independently. Most of the injured are in their 20s and 30s and are their families’ breadwinners, so the debilitating injuries have a devastating ripple effect throughout communities.

In April, Tenorio wrote an opinion editorial for the Los Angeles Times about the record number of traumatic injuries he’s treated due to falls from the border wall. In the editorial, he cited a recent report by the Mexican government that 646 Mexican nationals were hurt or killed crossing the border from 2020 to 2022, and that the main cause of injury “was wall-related.”

Tenorio and other physicians and researchers are studying the phenomenon. To date, they’ve published two studies looking at patients on the California-Mexico border, and Tenorio says they plan to extend their research to include the rest of the nearly 2,000-mile-long border, as well as cases from Mexico.

“As a neurosurgeon,” Tenorio says, “I feel it’s my duty to notify the world of the atrocities that are occurring because of the border wall extension. The increase in the border wall height has led to a humanitarian crisis and international public health crisis.”

Help the The Border Chronicle reach its goal of 25 new paid subscribers by supporting us today. It’s just $6 a month or $60 a year. A deal!

Greetings from the Border Security Expo in El Paso, Texas. This annual convention brings private industry together with high brass from Customs and Border Protection. It will serve as an interesting backdrop to tonight’s lifting of Title 42 (at 11:59 p.m.). So stay tuned for stories on this in the coming weeks.

On May 25, we will be hosting an online discussion forum on water, climate change, and the border. Save the date! We are still talking to potential panelists and determining the exact time, so more details will come soon.

Into the Heart of Narcopolitics and Journalism: A Podcast with Melissa del Bosque

Border Chronicle founder Melissa del Bosque talks at length about a harrowing article she wrote on the murder of Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach.

For the first time in the history of The Border Chronicle, Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller have done a podcast together. Don’t worry, it comes with the requisite banter, especially at the beginning. But the brunt of the conversation is a deep dive into Melissa’s chilling, page-turning article in The New Yorker, “A Covert Mission to Solve a Mexican Journalist’s Murder,” published in April.

We talk at length about the harrowing story of Miroslava Breach, the Mexican journalist who covered stories that upset the powerful and who, in March 2017, was murdered in the city of Chihuahua. We look into the narcopolitics Breach was covering in the Sierra Tarahumara and the emergence of a secret collective that helped bring her killers to justice. Melissa reflects on this story, how she wrote the article, and what it means to her as a border journalist.

The Border Chronicle needs your help to reach its goal of 30 paid subscribers this month, so that we can continue reporting. Become a paid subscriber today for just $6 a month or $60 a year. We appreciate ya!

Texas is once again in the throes of its biennial legislative session, which will wrap up at the end of May. One of the more dangerously authoritarian bills introduced this session is HB 20, authored by Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), which would create armed citizen militias under the control of the governor. Their mission would be to hunt down undocumented people. Bob Libal, a longtime immigration and criminal justice reform activist based in Austin, attended the bill’s hearing on April 13 at the Texas Legislature, where nearly 300 people signed up in opposition. Despite this, at least 52 Republicans in the Texas House have signed on to HB 20. Libal, now a U.S. consultant for the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch, talks about how the passage of HB 20 would set a dangerous authoritarian precedent. “They would be setting up a system where people who believe that undocumented migrants are invaders could be enforcing this Texas-specific immigration proposal—and they’d be armed,” he says.

The Border Chronicle is 100-percent reader-supported. Help us provide more coverage about the U.S.-Mexico border by supporting our work with a paid subscription for just $6 a month or $60 annually (a deal!)

Launching from last week’s Q&A with Sonny Singh, a Sikh musician and educator, we delve into his role in the film From Here, an eloquent and moving documentary that follows the stories of four children of immigrants who confront racism, xenophobia, and an oppressive immigration system with creativity and activism. Sonny is a musician with the band Red Baraat. In 2022 he released a solo album called Chardi Kala—in which he returns to the Sikh devotional music of his childhood (which we discuss at length in this podcast). Sonny has also spent decades working as an educator on social justice issues.

For listeners in southern Arizona: the film discussed below, From Here, will be showing in Ajo on April 14 at the Ajo Plaza Rec Room at 7 p.m., in Tucson at the Loft Theatre on April 15 at 2 p.m., and in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University on April 17 at 4 p.m. Click here for other screenings in New York, California, and in Europe.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The U.S. government is doubling down and expanding its surveillance technology in border communities. But many residents don’t know the extent to which they’re being watched, given that the government rarely seeks their input.

This month, the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation released new data and an interactive map of surveillance towers, which are part of the “virtual wall.” Melissa speaks with Dave Maass, EFF’s director of investigations, about his organization’s mapping and data project, which tracks the proliferation of surveillance tech at the southern border.

Contrary to public perception, the majority of these surveillance towers aren’t in the middle of nowhere, says Maass. “We hope to provide the evidence that really undermines that myth,” he says of the new project. “Many of [these towers] are in urban areas, residential communities and in the middle of public parks.”

The Border Chronicle is a 100-percent reader-supported publication. Please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber.

Kendal Blust and Murphy Woodhouse have been reporting from Hermosillo, Sonora, for the Phoenix public radio station KJZZ since 2018. They are the only permanent full-time reporters based in the Mexican state of Sonora reporting for a U.S. audience, which let’s be frank, isn’t often aware of what’s happening south of the border.

In the following interview, Kendal and Murphy talk about what it’s been like to report in and on Mexico. They talk about stories they’ve covered, ranging from the joint resolution put forward by Republican congressmen in January to authorize U.S. military force against cartels in Mexico, to tightrope walkers in Sonora, to collaborations with reporters across the hemisphere to cover migrant journeys into the United States. They also talk about sewage problems in Guaymas, unequal vaccine distribution during the pandemic, and the very moving reporting they did after the Covid border closures were lifted.

“We saw extraordinary displays of binational love and longing,” says Murphy.

Throughout the conversation we come back to the theme, again and again, of the importance of cross-border journalism.

The Border Chronicle is 100-percent reader-supported. To support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

In 2019, former President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the border, making border wall construction a top priority. Some of that wall was slated for the city of Laredo, Texas. Tricia Cortez, Executive Director of the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center, based in Laredo, talks about her community’s “David vs. Goliath” battle against the Trump administration’s 30-foot wall. Now her community faces a new onslaught of proposed border wall construction by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The Border Chronicle is 100 percent reader-supported. To support our work consider becoming a paid subscriber for $6 a month or $60 a year. We appreciate you!

This is the last and third part of my series on the border in Kenya. If you missed the first two articles, never fear! The first piece focused on the United States’ externalization of its border to Kenya. The second one comes from a trip I took to the border with Maasai leadership from the Kenyan side. It’s “reporter’s notebook” style. I describe scenes and impressions and add context to a situation where a private company and state-led border building have converged to violently evict people from their ancestral land. Today’s podcast will tie it all together through the voice one of the Maasai leaders who brought me to the border, Meitamei Olol Dapash.

The Colonial Border in the Maasai Mara: A Podcast Interview with Meitamei Olol Dapash

The Maasai leader gives an on-the-ground look at the mass exodus of people from Tanzania after a violent land grab and talks about what the border really means for indigenous people in Africa.

Twenty years ago, Maasai leader Meitamei Olol Dapash snuck across the Kenya-Tanzania border to report on what the Otterlo Business Corporation was doing. In today’s podcast he explains what he saw then: The company was capturing animals, sending them to zoos, and starting a trophy-hunting operation. And now, two decades later, this company wants to expand its business into more land. This has led to attempts by Tanzania to violently evict Maasai communities from their ancestral land.

Last week, I wrote about this ongoing crisis. Here, Meitamei gives a firsthand account of arriving on the scene in June after police attacked Maasai communities. Many people were seriously injured and had to run for their lives. And he describes the humanitarian aid effort.

Meitamei is the director of the Dopoi Center located in the Maasai Mara in Kenya and one of the founders of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research, and Conservation. Meitamei has dedicated his life to working for Maasai culture and land rights. His mother was born in Tanzania, across the colonial border, as he calls it. As Meitamei describes, the Maasai are a “transborder” community, and the international boundary itself was and still is an imposition by European powers.

The Border Chronicle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.