In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Countering negative narratives with an event that honors interconnectedness and subverts the border in Agua Prieta/Douglas, and a contested hotel--in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley--that is of great importance for Mexican American civil rights.
There is a reckoning with history happening at an old hotel with a horrific past and the RGV's first and only civil rights museum.
“I feel it’s my duty to notify the world of the atrocities that are occurring because of the border wall extension, and the increase in the border wall height," he says.
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.”
In this week's podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle's new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A vivid depiction of what has been happening during the last eight weeks of resistance against border wall construction in southern Arizona’s San Rafael Valley.
Wall Watch combines geospatial mapping, archival research, and community participation to provide the public with an accurate, continually updated record of border wall construction along nearly 2,000 miles of the international border.
As floodwaters swept hundreds of one-ton border buoys downstream, international bridges closed, commerce slowed, and officials struggled to get answers from DHS about a project advancing despite local opposition, environmental concerns, and treaty questions.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
