Buh Bye Kristi Noem, and who the heck is Markwayne Mullin? Trump's new pick for DHS secretary. Plus, an epic novel about the U.S. and Mexico's joint erasure of Apachería, and historian and author Lydia Otero on Tucson's racial and urban history, and more.
Historian and writer Lydia Otero on growing up in the borderlands, Tucson's racial and urban history, and their most recent book, Storied Property: María Cordova's Casa.
Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel, Now I Surrender, is an epic about the U.S. and Mexico’s joint erasure of Apachería.
Arizona's San Rafael Valley and other critical wildlife corridors in the borderlands are targeted by the Trump Administration for new wall construction.
The Trump administration has begun issuing contracts for border wall construction. During the first Trump administration, contractors dynamited mountains and depleted groundwater, including the Quitobaquito, a sacred spring for the Tohono O’odham tribal nation, to produce concrete for the wall. Under the Real ID Act, dozens of laws protecting the environment, endangered species, and clean air and water can be waived for the wall’s construction. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has already begun filing waivers.
Earlier this month, Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, discovered that one of the sections slated for the upcoming border wall is southern Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, a critical wildlife corridor for endangered species, including jaguars. “It’s an ecological catastrophe,” he said of the proposed construction in the grassland valley. Meza spends much of his time traveling the borderlands documenting wildlife and the impacts of the border wall on an ecosystem under extreme stress from climate change and militarization.
In this podcast, Meza discusses the proposed wall construction and its impact on the San Rafael Valley, as well as other areas where the wall is slated to be built. He also shares what biologists and conservationists are learning about the effects on wildlife and the environment from previous wall construction, and how this knowledge will inform their work in the future.
What You Can Do
Sign a Sierra Club petition against the building of border wall in Arizona’s San Rafael Valley. Sign here.
Contact your congressional leaders and express your opposition to further border wall construction. Contact them here.
Walking from a blasted mountain top--a planned site for new border wall construction--to a makeshift military camp along the border in a remote part of southern Arizona led to a tense yet revelatory moment.
Logan Phillips was born in Tombstone, Arizona—a town best known for Old West-themed gunfight tourism. In his new book, Reckon, Phillips explores his relationship to the unusual setting of his childhood through themes of masculinity, history, and land.
While menacing Venezuela and Greenland, an “unbound” Trump has unleashed the empire on itself in Minneapolis.
In the spirit of broadening the analysis beyond ICE, Border Chronicle cofounders Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller discuss the
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
