Life and Perils of an Aspiring Journalist on the Border

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EL PASO — As a journalism student, I don’t think I’ve ever been so humiliated as I was the other day as I was taking some video and a few photos of vehicles and people crossing over the International Bridge of the United States. In the end of October (2009), I was on the verge of completing a story for a news editing class as an assignment. In order to turn it in I needed about two minutes worth of footage mainly of the International Bridge, and to think about it, the article that I was writing had nothing to do with terrorism, Border Patrol, or even drug cartels. The story I was covering was simply about students who cross the bridge every morning to attend the University of Texas at El Paso. Anyhow, back to the morning as I like to call it “the attack accompanied with humiliation”, I walked up to where people in the US pay a few cents to walk over the bridge to Mexico.

Voces del narcotráfico salen de las sombras en el libro Drug War Zone

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EL PASO — Las voces humanas y los elementos insólitos del narcotráfico se entretejen en las historias del libro Drug War Zone, el más reciente proyecto literario de Howard Campbell, profesor de antropología de la Universidad de Texas en El Paso (UTEP). El proyecto literario comenzó en el 2005 antes de que comenzara la conocida guerra entre carteles en Ciudad Juárez — “Si vi venir la situación de Juárez porque varios conocidos me advirtieron de ella. Creo que lo más impactante de esto es ver que esta guerra parece no tener fin, yo solía creer en la idea de Vicente Fox, pero ahora ¿cuál es la solución” dijo Campbell. Las escenas presentadas introducen al lector con testimonios y sus historias personales en el sórdido mundo del narcotráfico, escenas que muestran la cara oculta y desapercibida: la cara humana de las drogas. “Seis aviones más arribaron, de uno de ellos emergió El Chapo, vestido en sus tradicionales jeans, chaleco, gorra de baseball, un rifle cuerno de chivo AK-47 pegado a su pecho  y una pistola que le combinaba a su atuendo en su cinto”  (Campbell).

From the ‘Other Australia’: An Austrian in El Paso

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After a month or so of experiencing severe cultural shock and asking myself whether I had really been sent to a place within the United States, I started to regard this city as the single most fascinating place I had ever been to —both from a personal perspective as well as from a professional perspective (I am a graduate student of geography).

Lessons From the Border for our Corner of the Nation

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JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. — When I went to college we rarely discussed immigration. Border politics didn’t enter my thoughts as I headed to Big Bend National Park on a student-run rafting trip, a last escape before graduation from Texas A&M in 1978. As we crawled into sleeping bags on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, I thought the water looked low for rafting. Later that night, Spanish voices broke the silence.