Happy 250th America! In a new podcast, Melissa and Todd discuss surveillance, and unconstitutional policing migrating into the country's interior, and ancient rock art faces demolition in Texas. Plus more news from across the border region.
Border Chronicle founders, Todd and Melissa, talk about how law enforcement surveillance, high-speed chases instigated by Border Patrol, unwarranted searches and seizures, and other heavy-handed policing that border communities have endured for decades has now moved into the interior of the country.
A $2.6 billion border barrier through Texas' Lower Pecos Canyonlands has archaeologists warning that irreplaceable indigenous rock art and sacred sites could be destroyed.
How apocalyptic mass fantasies stoked by Hollywood and the media help fuel the border industrial complex
Right now there are more border walls on Earth than there have ever been in the planet’s history. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were 15, now there are 77 around the world. As border scholar Jenny Stümer says in the following podcast, “In order to build border walls you need the support of a lot of people, in order to get that you have to tap into a particular imaginary.” The narrative so often depicted in that imaginary is all over the movies and media: as the end of the world looms near, only a wall can “save us.”
You might recognize Jenny’s name from the open thread on “wall sickness” that we did here at The Border Chronicle on November 30. If you haven’t seen that yet, I strongly encourage you to go back and check it out, there was a wealth of information shared by Jenny and the other panelists. That open thread was inspired by a panel titled “The Psychological and Mental Dimensions of Border Walls” from a conference at the University of Quebec in Montreal in October.
Jenny works at the University of Heidelberg in the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Besides being a border scholar, she has a PhD in film and media studies. Her book Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, and Art (published earlier this year) brings that convergence of film and borders together, especially—as she will explain—in this age of catastrophic climate change.
In this conversation we begin with the media and movies and actors like Brad Pitt stopping zombie uprisings using border walls such as was the case in World War Z. That’s where we start, but after that our discussion goes deep and in multiple—and sometimes inspiring and revealing—directions.
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Border Chronicle founders, Todd and Melissa, talk about how law enforcement surveillance, high-speed chases instigated by Border Patrol, unwarranted searches and seizures, and other heavy-handed policing that border communities have endured for decades has now moved into the interior of the country.
A $2.6 billion border barrier through Texas' Lower Pecos Canyonlands has archaeologists warning that irreplaceable indigenous rock art and sacred sites could be destroyed.
This conversation, hosted by Todd Miller, about a great borderlands adobe brick building project is going great, until Jacques Servin—of the political performance artist trickster and activist troupe called the Yes Men—fails to grasp the meaning of the term "border security."
This month, Hull’s worst fears came true as contractors for Southwest Valley Constructors and Kiewit started bulldozing and scraping land near her home to construct a 30-foot border wall.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
