BorderSenses celebrates 15 years of showcasing literary arts community

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ELPASO ­– One snowy day in 2000, a trio of UTEP Creative Writing MFA students set up 50 chairs for a public event to release a local literary journal. Amit Ghosh, Jonathan Gonzales and Joseph Martinez were astonished when 90 local attendees showed up for their “goofy” idea, the first edition of BorderSenses. “The project (cost) was $339. Each of us put in exactly $113. I still have the paper,” grinned Ghosh, a former teacher who now works in the Information Technology field.

U.S. speech and debate teams dig deep for material to overcome literary void of Latino voices

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EL PASO — For a while now, UTEP’s Speech and Debate team has faced a lack of literary diversity and its inaccessibility for use in competitive speeches and interpretive events. With a minimal amount of dramatic literature that focuses on people of color, specifically Hispanics, the team has had to deal with a deficiency of available texts by and about people of color for student speeches and competitions. Despite the lack of diverse materials, the University of Texas at El Paso team has traveled the nation for forensic competitions from Portland, Oregon, to Gainesville, Florida, presenting speeches on a variety of topics important to college students: from new medical technologies, race, LGBTQ and identity issues, among many others. In its more than 30 year history, the UTEP team has won hundreds of speech awards nationwide. “The first thing that we really start with is figuring out an event and a topic,” said Carlos Tarin, associate director of the Speech and Debate program in the Department of Communication.