Welcome to the first Weekly Roundup on our new website! You may have noticed something slightly different about our Thursday post with the wonderful review by Caroline Tracey of Mexicali author Elma Correa’s award-winning Donde termina el verano. That’s because it was our first post on our new site operated by Indiegraf Media, an independent publisher based in Canada. We’ve come a long way from 2021, when Todd and I first launched The Border Chronicle on Substack. We started this publication, because as veteran border journalists, we saw there was a huge void in sustained coverage of the region, and news reflecting the experiences and perspectives of border communities. We grinded away for years while working other jobs. Finally, in 2026, with a grant from The MacArthur Foundation we were able to transition to working full time at The Border Chronicle, a dream we’ve had since launching nearly five years ago.

We’re here today because of you, our readers. And we want to thank you for your support. More than 1,100 of you support our growing newsroom with a paid subscription, and it means a lot. And if you’re reading this and on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber or giving a donation, we hope that you will support our fledgling independent newsroom. It’s just $6 a month or $59 a year. And every dollar supports our on-the-ground reporting, and the very talented journalists on our team— all of them from the border region. We’re also expanding our arts & culture coverage to highlight the ingenuity and creativity of the borderlands. Our new borderlands poetry series, with the generous support of The Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona will launch next week, and we couldn’t be more excited about it.

Now more than ever, we need sustained and in-depth coverage on the southern border as the Trump administration dynamites mountains, bulldozes through the iconic Big Bend National Park, and destroys grassland valleys to build not just one, but two border walls. That’s why we launched our community-powered mapping project Wall Watch this month so that border residents can document these fast-moving developments at the border, and we’ve published several investigations on border wall construction over the last year. And we’ll be providing you with updates soon on developments on Tohono O’odham land and the resistance movement growing in Lochiel in southern Arizona as well as Big Bend in Texas. But the region is vast—nearly 2,000 miles—and it takes time, money and effort. Your support will make a huge difference.

One more ask of you, dear reader: let us know what you think of the new site. The operation of our new site is a bit more sophisticated than our previous sites, and we’re definitely still on a learning curve. As we refine things over the coming days we would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have on the reader experience. You can email us at theborderchronicle@protonmail.com.

Thank you and have a wonderful weekend!

This Week in The Border Chronicle:

In a Mexicali Novel, a Secret and an Unraveling Childhood Friendship

Elma Correa’s award-winning Donde termina el verano follows two girls from the working-class outskirts of Mexicali whose friendship, guilt and memories are shaped by a childhood disappearance and the borderlands around them. By Caroline Tracey

Wall Watch: Mapping Trump’s $46 Billion Border Mega-Project

In this week’s podcast, Melissa del Bosque and Geographer Dugan Meyer explain how the Border Chronicle’s new project, Wall Watch, helps residents document and understand the massive construction project underway at the U.S.-Mexico border.