This week’s readings take up the question of “reporting” in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Both texts come from academic institutions, although with very different approaches. The first text, Human Rights Along the U.S.-Mexico Border, focuses on the human rights violations, especially against women that have been implicitly promoted by US border enforcement and trade policy. The text takes up an analysis of the discourse that surround and frame discussions surrounding US border enforcement policy. The second text, a cross-cultural project between two university journalism programs, takes up the issues surrounding the border through production, opening up multiple avenues of discussion through networked journalistic production. What this project also does is critically engage with the modes of reportage that characterize areas of crisis and conflict. The driving questions that frame this week’s reading concern the ways that the immigrant is figured in non-state discourse. The first text can be seen as performing a humanitarian intervention through an emphasis on the lack of such recognition on behalf of state actors. The second text can be seen as an intervention in the sense that it uses narrative devices as a means of bringing figures of humanity into political discussion and recognition. These two projects both engage in interventions at the level of humanity, by different means and with different implications. This week’s issues are fundamental to current conflicts surrounding U.S. border enforcement and the recognition of human rights along the border.
In Human Rights Along the U.S. Mexico Border, Kathleen Staudt et al. looks at the issue of gendered violence and exploitation as a means of opening up issues formerly unrecognized in nationalist rhetoric and politics. First, the text approaches the issue of violence against women in terms of statistical and testimonial evidence of “everyday violence.” Secondly, at the level of U.S.- Mexico policy, Staudt et al. look at the ways such policies have in fact promotes patriarchal oppressive institutions to the point of hyper-masculine political structures. Staudt further argues that the language surrounding the border is one of “security” and “invasion,” both terms marking a nationalist rhetoric that cover over issues of human rights to both citizens and immigrants. What is so productive about this work is that the authors are particularly concerning with how these discourses of “border threat” and “border security” are not only narrowly confined problems, but more importantly, these discourses rely on the criminalization of the immigrant through crime statistics. Because U.S. border enforcement policy uses crime statistics as the main defense of their policies, the problem of border security become one with equally very narrow set of solutions. Going further, Staudt sees the underlying motives behind such discourses as tied more toward economic interests, rather than criminality:
“’Border Security’ has become the watchword phrase of fear and of bureaucratic and bipartisan political campaign sloganeering, with a private industrial and commercial sector eagerly seeking contracts to work in public-private partnerships to ‘control’ the border” (2).
Because the narrowed problem of the border only allows for an equally narrow set of solutions, to approach the issue of human rights, especially in terms of gendered violence, require a broader framework. For Staudt, the issue of gendered violence is something that does not even fit or count for “official” acts of human rights violations, let only enter into public discourse. To approach human rights violations along the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of women opens up not only the militarization of the border, but also the militarization of everyday life. Put differently, Staudt argues that the absence of discourse surrounding gendered violence is a result of militarized governance of everyday life along the border. In Human Rights Along the U.S. – Mexico Border, the tone of the book is in the style of investigative journalism, which transforms into a policy paper full of recommendations of border enforcement and human rights recognition from state actors. The book, then, can be seen as an intervention in discourse, as it speaks to the issues that border policy disavows through rhetorics of security.
What makes the text’s argument so compelling is the voice that it carries throughout the first half of the book. Through an engagement with the construction of border policy debate as framed by the state, Staudt et al. analyze the dangerous implications of these current framing. By looking at the techniques of discourse, which Staudt et al. take up in the first half of the book, the work takes up issue of reportage as a central problematic. Through the creation or broadening of frameworks through which policy-makers and enforcement discuss border issues, the creation of new discourses allows new sites of discourses to surface, including that of gendered violence and the recognition of dignity to immigrants. This kind of engagement is what the 2010 “Beyond the Border” project takes up. Beyond the Border” is a cross-cultural collaboration between the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism and New York University’s Journalism Institute. The project brings NYU graduate students to the Arizona-Sonora border to report on a variety of issues surround the US-Mexico border including detention, violence, environmental degradation, and racial and ethnic conflicts. In an effort to open the debate on border policy and enforcement to a greater audience with a different perspective that those who live and report within or alongside the border, the project presents itself as one that is focused on the training of “future journalists by giving students tools to report in cross-cultural settings, as well as to teach them how to create journalism that puts issues and events in historical, economic, social, and cultural contexts.”
I have chosen to focus on the “Beyond the Borders” project as a way to think through some of the questions concerning methodologies of reporting, which heavily use the form of narrative as a way of connecting policy norms to the ways they play out in the everyday live of men and women living along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This can be said of the project of journalism more generally. The narrative strategies that journalistic texts mobilize serve both as a device for compelling texts, but also because these texts are concerned with the “everyday” or the way of life for individuals. Journalism “objective” stance coupled with the reliance on narrative as a mode of reporting sets it apart from the kind of writing that humanitarian intervention often becomes involved with. The “human element” that journalism instead mobilizes through its use of narrative can be seen as a different kind of intervention at the level of humanity. This mode of reporting uses the narratives of individuals as a means of entering their positions within a larger narrative whether it be detention centers, border enforcement, etc. What makes this project so textual rich, however, is the emphasis on the mode of pedagogy that the project hopes to produce. Because these modes of reporting take place within an academic framework, methodology is key. The focus of the project is just as much about the student’s experience as it is about what they report. “Beyond the Border” not only collects the stories created by journalism students, but also hopes to produce an educational video that speaks to the methodological approach of reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. The projects directors, Professors Latty and González de Bustamante documented students during their reporting experience, which will result in a first-of-its-kind video for journalism educators who teach reporting in areas of conflict and trauma. Looking at the process of these journalists, their positions enter into a complex relationship between representation and “bearing witness.” Because many of the stories varied in terms of subjects and story angles, there were no elemental approaches that ran across every text. What the project more clearly relied on was the collaboration between students unfamiliar with border politics and University of Arizona journalism students who are more knowledgeable. While the potential difficulties of reporting “as an outsider” are present, the networked collaboration and production among the students of different academic institutions is something that is new and helps us to rethink modes of reporting. The desire for a new approach or “angle” that the NYU students arguably gathered as they reported on the situation, is in dialogue with the mode of persistence and endurance that journalism students at UA can been seen as being engaged in. The multivalent issues that were reported on as well as the collaborative approach between the two schools seem to produce a mode of reporting as a networked production.
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