Hello y’all!
I had the honor to attend to a student-professional chat with Michelle Garcia writer, journalist, activist and a regular curiosity led individual. Michelle is a graduate of UT at Austin’s journalism program and has found her life traveling from place to place chasing stories and questions.
“I am the person who always asks why”, she said to a room full of Journalism juniors and seniors. And her latest questions have led her on a quest to write a recognized essay about boderline essays and start production on a documentary on the same subject.
Her essay, On the Texas Borderline, A Solid, if Invisible, Wall, was published in May 2008 as a special report to the Washington Post. The whole essay speaks about Michelles search for her own “ identity, my South Texas culture, the Mexicanness in my Americanness” as she investigates how the construction of the border wall has affected people, their land, their way of life. She inherited a long tradition of Mexican ideology and even though her family became “Texan” a couple generations ago, Michelle still lives with the duality of being Texican.
Land, you see, is everything to us. Our culture is tied to the land. It is passed down as our inheritance, as my father did for me and my siblings, fulfilling his long-held pledge. In these borderlands, the fates of families like mine have hinged on the land. And so my instincts insist this wall is not just about illegal border-crossers, not just about Mexicans. It is, in a deeply historic way, about people like me, people whose identity was forged in generations of struggle over land.
Interesting links
“historical” recount (goes back a couple of years) concerning the Border Wall discussion and statistics that had led to the decision of building the wall.
group that advocates to stop the wall
This photo of the border wall by Diano Cook and Len Jenshel for NatGeo magazine is part of a very interesting article about the border wall and its impact.Here are some interesting things to look at concerning the Border Wall
