Writing in the Era of Exhibitionist Violence
A longtime border journalist reckons with a democracy under siege.
Power appeared in Brownsville, Texas with space-age visions made possible through old-fashioned pollution. It arrived in the form of state regulators and the well-credentialed staff from resident rocket ship maker, SpaceX. The stated order of business: a petition filed by SpaceX to secure a permit to legally dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of industrially treated municipal water into nearby wetlands and a wilderness of “outstanding natural beauty.” And that is how the state, SpaceX, and residents, many of whom lived within its blast range, faced off inside a civic center.
They approached the microphone in turns—birders, fishermen, laborers—pressing for details about the toxicity of the released water and got no answer. They asked if Mexico had been consulted about the discharge likely to enter international waters—it had not. They scoffed when it was revealed that the sampling and testing of wastewater to ensure compliance with the law was conducted by a contractor paid by SpaceX.
They came prepared, and I had misjudged the scene. Between the Little League game underway outside and the bowl of cookies and sign-in sheet at the door, I believed myself to be attending a small-town, community event. But instead I was witnessing people from “one of the poorest counties” in Texas confronting state agents and proxies for the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
With their questions, residents insisted on a rule of law unbowed by wealth or power. In work boots and faded jeans they demanded functioning institutions and accountability—and I nearly missed it—as they asserted the civic power that undergirds democracy.
‘Big D’ democracy manifested, in those days before the 2024 election, as a debate topic. Billionaire Mark Cuban, a Democratic donor, and TV anchor, Joe Scarborough appeared on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” to parse the threats to democracy—but only after the men turned giddy at footage of oversized-looking chopsticks successfully recapturing a returning SpaceX rocket.
The feat they praised as a marvel of American ingenuity involved raining down debris and rocket fuel on federally protected habitat, a nesting site for migrating birds. And it struck me how easily in the course of defending democracy a person can stare straight into violence and destruction—and applaud.
Within a nation undergoing a crisis of democracy the writer—the reporter, the trained witness—may, even unwittingly, act as the enforcers of the status quo, accepting the official narrative, the government frame, its lens for interpreting its violence. The writer reckons with a democracy under siege within the disputed territory of meaning and morality, of contested interpretations in the swell of exhibitionist state violence.
Masked men—presumably US federal agents—tackle boys, push women to the ground, and zip-tie children. They shatter car windows and rappel from a helicopter. A girl struggles to carry water through the ruins of Gaza; the target of a missile, she is obliterated. Look here, the state seems to communicate—witness what I can do, without limit, with impunity.
Government officials refer to the violent scenes as “immigration enforcement” which are then labeled in news reports as “ICE raids.” They deny that the girl in the image is the victim of a genocide, while opinion writers debate the legal qualifications of genocide, not the staggering civilian death toll, an illegal aid blockade, or war crimes. But the images of state violence mingle in our media feeds, a relentless stream of lawlessness.
Within this context, the “priorities of the writer,” in the words of Uruguayan poet and journalist Mario Benedetti, merit scrutiny. In a collection of essays written in the prelude to the 1973–85 civic-military dictatorship backed by the US, and published under the title, “El Escritor Latinoamericano y La Revolución Posible,” Benedetti grappled with the social purpose of the writer in an era of censorship and academic purges as fascism took hold.
In times of emergency, writers and intellectuals undergo the “arduous transit” of self-definition, wrote Benedetti. Careful to avoid issuing blanket condemnations or moralizing, he predicted that in his country, a “dividing line will pass between intellectuals who strictly adhere to inherited schematics and others who decide to rethink the situation, rethinking themselves.”
In the US, our defining moment follows a century of media narratives that justified racist violence and a calamitous “war on terror.” With “representation” and “diversity” seemingly no longer priorities, we risk myopia and succumbing to ingrained “schematics.” “It can’t be forgotten that, with some more, others less,” writes Benedetti, loosely translated here by me, “we have been educated in the social context and pedagogy absolutely dominated by the bourgeoisie.” Within the context of state violence, even the most dedicated journalists grasp at its reliable conventions.
“Interview with gardener,” read a headline that referred to Narciso Barranco, who was tackled and beaten by immigration agents. Tellingly, Barranco’s son Alejandro, a Marine veteran, told NBC that if he had treated civilians similarly while in the service, “it would have been a war crime.” Another article entitled ‘Journalist deported’ described the conclusion of Mario Guevara’s ordeal following his arrest while covering a protest in Atlanta. A government attorney had argued in court that Guevara presented a danger to the US because he filmed law enforcement operations. He was ordered deported. Guevara, upon arriving in El Salvador after a prolonged detention, described the US treatment of detainees as torture.
More than eliciting mere sympathy, the violence inflicted on the “gardener” and immigrant reporter compels a collective reckoning with the implications of state violence, with the fact that deportation was used to expel a journalist, a witness, and with the prospect that citizens and immigrants—many Latino—are the targets of a dirty war.
At a crossroads of purpose, the writer can become complicit in moving the line of the tolerable and condonable, contributing to a sense that violence is inevitable. In its report “Our Genocide,” the Israeli human rights group B’tselem attributed the “scale of crimes” committed in Gaza to a “deep moral and cognitive distortion that has taken root within Israeli society.” A pattern of dehumanizing policies and distorted narratives, according to the report, “enabled” a blindness to state violence.
In a video posted online from Gaza, Palestinian journalist and filmmaker Nour Al-Saqa rejected the likely sympathies of the faraway witness to insist on the accountable witness, instead. “Don’t feel sorry for us,” she said. “Your bombs kill children. Feel sorry for yourselves for not having enough influence in your own countries to stop it.”
Meanwhile, we are seeing signs of a resistance to state-sponsored distortions in independent news reports that contest the nature of violence. In Los Angeles, local reporters have prioritized, in the words of Benedetti, “el interés del pueblo.” Mariah Castañeda, the co-founder of LA Public Press, initially responded to the occupation of her city by walking its streets. “I was just trying to figure out what we were seeing,” she told me. “I’m here to listen.”
Subsequent coverage by the LA Public Press adopted terms used by Angelenos, “abductions” and “kidnappings,” contested by “protectors” defending “the soul of our people.” Their coverage centered on “how to navigate living in an ICE-occupied neighborhood.” And they expressed solidarity with Palestinian journalists writing: “Press freedom is not negotiable—in Gaza, in Los Angeles, or anywhere else.”
At the well-respected and tenacious outlet, L.A. Taco, the “Daily Memo” alerts residents to ICE operations and challenges official narratives. “When citizens are ‘disappeared’ into unmarked vans,” wrote Max Benavidez, “when whole neighborhoods live in fear of masked agents—it is no longer policing. It is the machinery of authoritarianism grinding into place.”
Such assertions emerge from sites of confrontation and expressions of civic power, on the streets facing the heavily armed or industry-accommodating state regulators at a civic center on the border. They are formulated by writers who recognize violence when they see it, and power in all forms, periodistas comprometidas and writers of conscience.
Michelle Garcia is a native South Texan and award-winning journalist and essayist. You can read more of her work here. This essay was previously published in The Approach.
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The additional challenge, with social media and the increasing sophistication of AI-generated content, is that people can more easily rationalize dismissing whatever horror pops up on their screens if it doesn't square with their worldview, rendering the already hard task of truth tellers that much harder.
Wow...thank you Michelle. Well said.