Borderzine (https://borderzine.com/category/featured/page/31/)
Located in the southeastern corner of California in the border town of Calexico, Calexico High School draws students from its sister city, Mexicali, among other places. Students who need extra help with the language go to particular courses depending on their skill level.
“We have solar energy, we have a tank-less water heater,” said Rodiles. “We also have artificial grass so we don’t waste water.” At the outset of his energy-efficient venture, Rodiles said capital was the greatest challenge. However, he said returns on his investments were seen early on.
“Because their families are not wanting them to take that step of independence,” Shavers said. She explained that women of the border face special issues that people elsewhere wouldn’t such as health issues and mainly trying to find their identity as Mexican-Americans. “While their traditions are Mexican and they have a lot of language and culture, ethnic foods, and music and things, they are really more American than they are Mexican because their expectations, their rights as women are based heavily on what they live in the United States,” she said. Shavers said young women of Hispanic descent aren’t driven to succeed. They don’t get as much encouragement from their families to go off to college and become successful.
The dramatic shift in how people access the news today raises a question about how democracy and the flow of information will interact in the years ahead. A large segment of the population is moving away from traditional news outlets to alternative news sources. Some have been assembled by traditional news organizations delivering information in print, on television and on the radio as well as via the Internet and mobile devices. Others include the thousands of blogs created by journalists, activists and citizens on the Internet. Readers and viewers, especially the younger ones, don’t want to pick up their news in the morning from their doorstep or wait for the dinnertime newscast. They want their up-to-the-minute news on demand, when it works for them.
El año 2008 quedará grabado para siempre en todos los juarenses que día a día sobreviven la guerra a muerte entre narcotraficantes en conflicto por controlar en la frontera el negocio más lucrativo de narcotráfico en México.
During four years in Nazi concentration camps, Kaplan survived by using his wits, borrowing, trading, and stealing.
Fifty-year-old Linda S. Martinez is a newspaper carrier for the El Paso Times and is far from the 1950’s stereotype of a 12-year-old boy on his bicycle making extra money for baseball cards. She needs the money she has been earning for nearly 20 years on this job to live on and fears that with newspapers closing left and right her job could be ending and a very difficult search for new employment could be starting.
The high-tech gear at Herman Seufert’s fifth grade class classroom is not just for show. Students use the computers to post blogs, create their own photo slideshows, and even talk to classes in East Texas. The blogs range from a private journal of thoughts to homework assignments. Everything the students do is eventually posted on a wiki page so that the world can see it.
Hanksmedia.com is the first fully-operational online high school newspaper in the El Paso area. It is the digital version of the student magazine Scriptoria and like all online publications it is updated daily.
EL PASO — El 20 de febrero se presentaron en la Universidad de Texas de El Paso los periodistas Alfredo Corchado y Gerardo Reyes como parte de los talleres Watchdog Workshop de la organización IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). Su plática trató de la cobertura periodística del crimen organizado, narcotráfico y lavado de dinero, un tema por demás popular en nuestra zona fronteriza. El periodista Alfredo Corchado comenzó la plática con los pormenores de su experiencia cubriendo el crimen organizado: “Si uno quiere estudiar el crimen organizado se necesita hacerlo como a una organización, como si fuera Starbucks o McDonald’s. Son (sic) una corporación con funciones completas, el 50% de sus ganancias regresan a sus operaciones. Al igual que una corporación, ellos creen en la buena calidad y en la publicidad, necesitan un vocero que le diga a los medios como quieren su historia y otro vocero para infiltrarse en los partidos políticos” dijo Corchado.
La violencia está a la orden del día en ciudad Juárez desde comienzos del año 2008. El año pasado murieron violentamente 5300 personas en México, de las cuales 1500 fueron ejecutadas en ciudad Juárez. Hasta el día de hoy la ciudad se maneja como una entidad sin ley, donde los ciudadanos día a día corren el peligro de ser asaltados o que su integridad sea amenazada.
Aquel martes que deambulé por Ciudad Juárez vi algunas funerarias. Una de ellas, Perches, ofrecía ataúdes de metal o laminados en pan de oro. Recuerdo que el gerente del local sólo tenía una queja con respecto a la situación: la morgue oficial, el SEMEFO, no podía con tanta necropsia y le remitían los cadáveres tarde y con gotero. Pero era comprensivo con la situación y se armaba de paciencia.
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico –They’re back, still tired, still poor, still yearning, huddling in line in the hundred-degree sun in the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert not far from the nearly dry cement ditch that splits the heart of a bicultural community into two alien political entities, El Paso to the north and Juárez to the south. Still tired, still poor, still yearning, on this fiery afternoon in early June several dozen men and one Maria linger in line outside the ground-floor office of Coordinación de Atención a Migrantes at city hall, an office Juárez mayor Jose Reyes Ferríz opened last November to orient repatriated migrants and keep them safe from an established industry of cheating money changers, hookers and other swindlers. This modest and very transitory halfway-haven, a single room with two cubicles, a dozen chairs and two telephones on a corner table, welcomes the disoriented deportees back, gives them temporary identification papers, lunch money and a bus ticket away from the preying lure of Juárez, away from the tempting border, further down into Mexico, back to their home towns. The faces in the queue are not waiting faces. Tired eyes tighten into lizard eyes in faces that strain to make an effort to look for cover in case they need shelter.