(Graphic Design by Raul R. Saenz)

My personal Fever Chart perspective on the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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EL PASO – I am extremely content to have been part of this risky play, The Fever Chart. It changed my perspective of the Arab-Israeli conflict and I hope the production taught other young minds to not be oblivious to a continuing war that is happening this very second. The Arabs and the Israelis have been ripping each other to threads ever since I can remember. War kills love and joy, along with piles of people. And the only question I ask myself is this.

Pickets and hunger strikers demand a kidnapped family’s safe return

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EL PASO — The Spanish words on white poster-board picket signs carried by Nancy Gonzalez cry out for “Justice and peace for Cd. Juarez.”

To the left of Gonzalez, on a busy downtown sidewalk Selfa Chew holds up a poster with a blood-red handprint overlapping a peaceful white dove. Person after person walk by, some hesitant and others curious as they scan through the words of rage on the posters. Then they continue on with their day. Every Friday from 2p.m. to 3 p.m., a group of individuals gathers in front of the Mexican Consulate building in downtown El Paso to remind the community of the assassinations and kidnappings of innocent people taking place right across the bridge in Cd.

Compassion undermines the border-wall of separation

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And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But oh if I were young again
And held her in my arms
– William Butler Yeats, Politics

When Ghandi decided to protest the salt tax (unfair because it affected the poor more than the rich – they’d lose salt from sweat, and need to consume more) he walked 240 miles to the ocean. He would get his own salt. It was on the beaches, already his, part of the eternal harmony between humans and the earth. I imagine him on the coast, overwhelmed by the radiance of the light bouncing between the water, sky, and shore. He picks up a tiny lump of salt.

This Saturday, people from Juarez, El Paso, or elsewhere (myself an east-coaster, studying at UTEP) joined together in solidarity at the border fence, just off Sunland Park Drive. Gandhi’s march and the event at the fence are both expressions of a solidarity that underlies our species.

Border residents demand an end to drug-war violence

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SUNDLAND PARK, N.M. — Without crossing the U.S.–Mexico line, demonstrators from the two nations gathered January 29 on both sides of the border fence at Anapra on the Mexican side and Sunland Park on the U.S. side to rail against the violence in Juarez that has killed thousands in the past four years. The drug-spawned violence has moved the El Paso community to take a stand along their neighbors to show that the city under siege is not alone. “No more spattered blood. No más sangre,” they shouted. The chants for peace and justice on each side of the border pervaded the atmosphere that Saturday morning.