The Program

As many of you probably already know, I’m off to study the borderlands. This blog will chronicle my life over the next four months.

As a student of the Border Studies Program I will examine the current political and economic climate of the borderlands and hopefully gain an understanding of past and current models that are being implemented in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands as well as along other borders throughout the world. The program is based out of the southern Arizona borderlands city of Tucson. Tucson is a great location for a program focused on immigration because it hosts an array of organizations involved in everything from human rights and civil liberties to the environmental impact of the militarization of the border.

There are four components to the program.
1) Academic:
We will be taking four classes. The Roots and Routes of Migration course involves both a Tucson-based study of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and a study of immigration issues in Guatemala and southern Mexico. In this course we will be meeting people who are involved in immigration and hopefully they can help to answer questions as to why migration occurs, the problems it entails, and what solutions communities are coming up with. The second class is Research Methodology. In it we will learn all about oral history and ethnographic interviewing techniques which will aid us in conducting our independent research projects. Our third class is our Independent Research Project. We each design a research project that focuses on a topic of our choice, though it obviously must relate to immigration. The last class is called Identity, Privilege, & Social Change and is designed for us to discuss issues such as privilege, power, identity, sexuality, gender, etc and to help us understand the local, regional, and transnational contexts of our social change work.

2) Travel:
We will be going on several excursions throughout the semester. The first is a day trip to Nogales, Sonora which is a common crossing point into the U.S. for migrants. Originally we were scheduled to spend more than one day there but recent violence and increasing civilian deaths have shortened our stay. We will be staying away from public places and will only stop at specific locations. On another trip we will travel to Altar, Sonora where migrants from throughout Mexico as well as Central America pass through, often times hiring a coyote to navigate the desert from here to a point across the border. Our longest excursion is about a month of travel through both Mexico and Guatemala. We will be visiting Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guatemala City, and Xela as well as some other towns along the way. Our last organized excursion is a short 2-3 day trip to a point along the border that is yet to be decided. The location will depend on our desires as well as the safety level.

3) Field Study:
We will each complete 100+ hours of work at an organization in Tucson. I will be working with La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos which is an organization that focuses on human rights issues. I will be helping them with labor abuse cases (I am both excited and nervous!). More to come when I start on Monday.

4) Home stay
We are each living with a different host family in Tucson. My mother’s name is Isa and my father is Sergio. Isa works at a domestic violence center and sells clothes. Sergio drives a cement truck and drives to the coast to pick up fresh shrimp which he sells in the interior. I have three sisters—the oldest is 17 and her name happens to be Jessica. And they have a small poodle named Gucci. I am super excited to meet them.