We've got new merch! Pedro Rios documents the gradual walling off of Friendship Park in San Diego, and Amy Juan on long-distance running and resilience for the Tohono O'odham plus more from across the borderlands.
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Each year since 1995, the Tohono O’odham Nation has held the Unity Run. “These runs,” Amy Juan says,“not only have their purpose as prayer for the people and the land but also put us on the ground to actually see what is happening” on the border.
Al Otro Lado's executive director discusses what’s to come this election year: more of the CBP One app and open-air border prisons, along with a hyper-distorted fearmongering narrative of overwhelm.
So, dear listeners, it is time to continue preparing ourselves for 2024 (check out Melissa’s Tuesday piece). As we know, during an election year the border tends to be a place where distorted narratives flourish on the fertile ground of misinformation, and we can expect plenty of that this year, as border expert Erika Pinheiro tells us in this episode. Some of you certainly remember Erika’s first appearance on The Border Chronicle podcast in 2022, where she offered her insight on the chilling impacts of surveillance. She is the executive director of Al Otro Lado, an organization that provides legal and humanitarian assistance to refugees, migrants, and deportees.
In this interview, she offers an on-the-ground perspective from the California-Mexico border, assessing both 2023 border trends while pondering and prophesizing about what we might expect in 2024.
Erika stresses that we have to look at “how the border is being framed,” which lately has been “this narrative of border chaos and overwhelm.” This narrative comes, she says, while enforcement agencies have more resources than ever before and while fewer people crossed the border in 2023. Yet “this narrative of overwhelm is not challenged by the media by and large.” She wants that to change, as you’ll see here, and offers specific examples of what we can do.
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Each year since 1995, the Tohono O’odham Nation has held the Unity Run. “These runs,” Amy Juan says,“not only have their purpose as prayer for the people and the land but also put us on the ground to actually see what is happening” on the border.
For more than two decades, San Diego resident Pedro Rios has documented the gradual walling off of the binational International Friendship Park. Now the Trump administration is sealing the rest of California’s border with Mexico.
A few days after the United States launched Operation Epic Fury in Iran, the Border Patrol changed its policy on visits to the border wall, denying a church group permission to pray there, “for their own safety.”
The Colibrí Center for Human Rights was a vital link between families and their missing loved ones. But now it's gone dark.
Independent news, culture and context from the U.S.-Mexico border.
