About

Local newsrooms have been decimated in recent years, along with the decline of accurate, community-based reporting. Much of the void has been filled with propaganda and misinformation generated by people who don’t live on the U.S.-Mexico border, let alone care about it. What we get instead is “border theater,” which is the cynical manipulation of information and imagery to burnish political careers or boost media ratings at the expense of our communities.

The Border Chronicle would like to change that. We are Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller, and we’re both longtime journalists based in Tucson, Arizona, who have spent decades writing about border communities in Mexico and the United States. Cumulatively, we have 40 years in the field reporting for media outlets from The New York Times to In These Times and writing books about the region. And we could do another 40 years, because we are endlessly fascinated by the beauty of the borderlands and the ingenuity of the people who live and travel through here. 

We launched The Border Chronicle in 2021 because we believe that the U.S.-Mexico border needs an independent outlet that covers the entire region with the complexity and nuance that it deserves.  And from the perspectives of the people who live here and migrate through the region. Our staff consists of experienced local journalists rooted in their border communities who report on the big issues challenging our region, such as climate change, economic inequality, government surveillance, and the rapid growth of the border security industrial complex. We also feature arts coverage that amplifies the richness and diversity of border culture.

Original Reporting from a Border Perspective

The Border Chronicle publishes original, on-the-ground reporting, arts & culture and analysis, and commentary every Tuesday and Thursday and on Friday a news roundup with our latest articles and news from across the region, which you will receive via email. We also host a bi-weekly podcast where we talk to fascinating fronterizos/as, artists, activists, asylum seekers and others. Our goal is to challenge preconceived notions about the borderlands, even our own. We want to create a community of ideas so that we can break free of the “crisis” narrative that does such a disservice to our region.

Our Granito de Arena

We’ve been around long enough to understand that this is an enormous task. It’s a big region and a 1,954-mile-long international border. To make The Border Chronicle successful, we need your help.  We are an independent membership-run publication that relies on its readers to survive.  Please subscribe. Most of The Border Chronicle is free. For paid subscribers we’ll be offering something extra, including online discussions with invited border experts, access to our full archive and our podcast. Please join us as a paid subscriber for $6 a month or at a discounted yearly rate of $59. Even better, become a founding member for $250 so we can file more open-records requests and call out those elected officials who consistently fail border communities. We need your support to make The Border Chronicle sustainable so that we can provide more local, fact-based information from the border, hire more journalists, and cover more territory.

The Border Chronicle is not just for residents of the border but for anyone who cares deeply about the state of the world. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands are a place where the local meets the national and the international. It is a place where U.S. foreign and domestic policies can be hashed out and cross-border solidarity strengthened.

We Want to Hear from You

Let us know how we’re doing. Also, if you’ve got a story idea or something you think we should dig into, write us an email at TheBorderChronicle@protonmail.com or go the old-school route and send a letter to 9095 E. Tanque Verde Rd. Suite 171-157, Tucson, AZ 85749. (We like letters!)

More about The Border Chronicle’s Founders

Before moving to Tucson in March 2021—after spending a couple of eventful (i.e., pandemic) years in Mexico City—Melissa del Bosque lived in Austin, Texas. From 2007 to 2018 she worked for The Texas Observer, a statewide progressive magazine, where she won an Emmy, National Magazine Award, and several other national journalism prizes for her reporting on the Texas-Mexico border. Before that she lived in the border city of McAllen, Texas, where she worked for the daily paper The Monitor. For five years she also worked in the Texas Senate as the communications director for Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa and as a policy analyst focusing on health and the environment. Since 2018, Melissa has worked as an independent investigative reporter, and her work has been featured in ProPublica, The New Yorker, and The Intercept. She is also the author of the nonfiction book Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty. Born in Los Angeles and raised in San Diego, California, Melissa is completely enamored with the tropical Sonoran Desert and Sonoran food, but her first love will always be Texas-Mexican food.

Todd Miller has researched and written about border issues for more than two decades, the last 10 as an independent journalist and writer. He is a longtime resident of Tucson, Arizona, but also spent many years living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, and grew up in the Buffalo/Niagara Falls region (yes, a long-suffering Bills fan), staring across the U.S. border into Canada. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TomDispatch, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, and Al Jazeera English, among others. Todd has authored four books: Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World without Borders (City Lights, 2021); Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border around the World (Verso, 2019); Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014); and Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017), which was awarded the 2018 Izzy Award for Excellence in Independent Journalism. He’s a contributing editor on border issues for NACLA Report on the Americas. He’s also a Scorpio, which at least partially explains the logo.