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.
What happens when you are in love but a massive border apparatus is in your way? Listen here to find out.
The holiday season abounds with stories of couples and loved ones going great distances to be together, often with great feelings of love and romance. But what happens when there is a global border apparatus in the way?
Well, today we have the perfect person to talk to about that: author, writer, and journalist Anna Lekas Miller. In this podcast, she explains how people attempt to manage this daunting circumstance, sometimes against all odds. She starts the conversation talking about her own romance and how that inspired her new book, Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World. She tells us about how she fell in love with Syrian journalist Salem Rizk, now her husband, in Istanbul. Just as their romance was getting started, the Turkish government began a crackdown on both Syrians and journalists, of which Salem was both. Authorities kicked him out of the country. As Anna puts it, they went from “fun and flirty” to “how are we going to be together?”
This forced Anna to think about other people across the world who are in a similar situation: in love but divided by borderlines. Here, she gives us a taste of the stories she details in the book, and while doing that she talks about passports, statelessness, Gaza, and the strange plot twist with her own attempts to get papers with Salem.
At the end, Anna offers a solution. One that, rest assured, would be a wonderful holiday gift for so many people:
“If we had this political imagination to decriminalize borders the way that something like marijuana has been decriminalized in many places in the United States, I think that could change a lot of people’s lives for the better.”
Help The Border Chronicle meet its goal of 10 more paid subscribers in December. It will go directly to reporting from the borderlands.
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.
Worried about the future of democracy in the United States? Look to Indigenous histories; they have much to teach us about the struggle between liberty and empire.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
