Artists Arturo Damasco painted legendary Mexican actor Carlos López Moctezuma. (Luis Hernández/Borderzine.com)

How to stay connected to your culture when far from home

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As a teenager, all throughout high school I would hear people talking about is how much they want to move somewhere more exciting. I actually have to admit that I agreed with them for a long time. I couldn’t wait to go to school somewhere new and be on my own, which is exactly what I ended up doing. I had been accepted to the University of North Texas in Denton and I moved into my dorm room in August of 2013. I had decided to major in multimedia journalism with a minor in creative writing.

Hidden in plain sight, e-cigs complicate efforts to cut teen tobacco use

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E-cigarettes that look like USB flash drives are making it harder for adults to crack down on their illegal use among minors – even in school hallways. Shacel De La Vega, a 2018 graduate of Coronado High School in El Paso, said it wasn’t hard to get a nicotine boost almost any time on campus using Juuls, slim vaping devices that are the size of a data stick. “Other than just letting us know that it was not allowed, there wasn’t really any sort of system that they had set up to stop us from using it,” De La Vega said. While still in school, De La Vega missed the optional presentation educators gave to students about vaping. Students were told that underage possession of tobacco products is against the law and the school would be cracking down on campus use.

What language do you play in? Online gaming chatter a mix of voices in global matchups

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The success of the early online multi-player games like Doom laid the groundwork for successors like Halo and more recent titles such as Fortnite. Since then, there have been significant improvements in network capabilities that now allow hundreds of thousands of people from English and non-English-speaking countries all over the world to play a game together. So what happens when you connect with someone that speaks a different language than you do? Many players use microphones to communicate so this creates an obvious barrier. But Luis Rodriguez says that there have always been ways to get around such language barriers if a player is willing to look for them.

There’s no home for the holidays for deployed border agent family

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On Nov. 13, nine buses carrying the first large wave of about 350 asylum seekers from the Central American migrant caravan arrived in Tijuana. Michelle Arandas’ mother and stepfather are both Customs and Border Protection agents assigned to the El Paso ports of entry. However, on Nov. 15, Aranda had to drop them off at the airport, where they joined other El Paso CBP officers in boarding a plane to Nogales, Ariz.