//podcastplus.net/feed/podcast~6062c52aee8c7971261e8773f3f38a050591f40adc0d8999327603f643ea140e The Border Chronicle podcast is hosted by Melissa del Bosque and Todd Miller. Based in Tucson, Arizona, longtime journalists Melissa and Todd speak with fascinating fronterizos, community leaders, activists, artists and more at the U.S.-Mexico border. www.theborderchronicle.com Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:39:23 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138921349/8476403e6994368c66312e1e1d1bab0a.mp3 All signs indicate that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, yet again. If this sounds like something you’ve heard before, it is. Every year it seems like records are set, broken, and then broken again in cities, states, countries, and regions across the world. The heat, droughts, floods, and storms are putting pressure on people and their livelihoods, primarily in the Global South. As founder and executive director of the organization Climate Refugees , Amali Tower explains in this podcast, these climate disruptions are causing more and more displacement in the world, and each year the number of displaced people increases by the millions. Border Chronicle readers should recognize Amali’s name: this is not only her second podcast (please check out the first one here ), she also wrote a piece for us one year ago titled “Finding a Solution to Climate Displacement: Time to Divert Border Enforcement Billions into Loss and Damage Finance” . In this conversation, as we approach the ann... Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:30:50 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138921349/8476403e6994368c66312e1e1d1bab0a.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138427612/7c50cdf50993d6aef5a6d6971ed28b05.mp3 Muzzafar Chishti, a lawyer, is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and director of MPI’s office at New York University School of Law. He specializes in immigration policy and has spent years researching and writing about the United States’ outdated asylum system, which he says is “built on a 1952 architecture.” Chishti discusses how the system could be meaningfully changed, including how Congress could make it both more humane and responsive to the country’s needs. The United States, he says, is facing two fundamental crises when it comes to migration. The first is that the workforce is aging, which means we need to bring in younger workers, which will have the added benefit of keeping social security alive. The second crisis is that, globally, many people see the asylum system as the only way to enter the United States. “It’s become this default mechanism,” he says. “Not only for people to enter the United States but also for our labor market.” ... Tue, 31 Oct 2023 17:50:00 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138427612/7c50cdf50993d6aef5a6d6971ed28b05.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138105727/f99a04002cfbca90ca3344d69beb54b2.mp3 “The borderlands are beautiful.” That’s how Petey Mesquitey always ends his weekly show Growing Native on the Tucson community radio station KXCI . And that was my first question to Petey in this interview: Why are the borderlands beautiful? What follows is the legendary storyteller’s observations from more than 30 years of living in the rural borderlands, what it’s like to walk every morning through diverse biomes, what it’s like to see a bear, a coatimundi, or a box turtle; what it’s like to experience a forest of saguaros or a forest of oak trees. In other words, a description of the borderlands that is much different from what we usually get, with sparse adjectives like dusty and desolate . Petey is an expert storyteller who lets the words tumble out of his mouth in all directions—a chaotic, coherent, sweet, and joyful poetry—and this interview is no different. It was a joy, as it has been for decades, to hear his descriptions and see with fresh eyes what a unique a... Thu, 19 Oct 2023 16:45:01 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/138105727/f99a04002cfbca90ca3344d69beb54b2.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137665692/aea93f0ad8322111375565e0d2334b1b.mp3 David Taylor is a visual artist who works with drone footage, photography, and other art forms to question our sense of place, territory, history, and politics. His artwork challenges how we see the increasingly militarized zone that divides the United States and Mexico. His work is provocative, playful, and harrowing all at once. Taylor, who is also a professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, joined Melissa and Todd from The Border Chronicle for a fascinating conversation and Q&A with the audience in August at Patagonia’s Tin Shed Theater . Among many things, Taylor talked about his work Complex , which looks at massive immigrant detention facilities from a drone’s eye view. He also discussed DeLIMITations, a work in which he embarked on a cross-country journey with Mexican artist Marcos Ramirez ERRE placing steel obelisks along the U.S.-Mexico boundary as it existed in the early 19th century, ranging from Brookings, Oregon, to the mouth of t... Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:00:00 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137665692/aea93f0ad8322111375565e0d2334b1b.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137387572/70a5a088ceada4cf66a93707948fbb32.mp3 Roberto Lopez, born and raised in South Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, leads the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Beyond Borders Program, which works to defend the civil and human rights of border communities and of the people migrating through the borderlands. Inspired by the United Farm Workers movement, the nonprofit Texas Civil Rights Project was founded in 1990. It has taken a strong stand against the illegality of Texas’s Operation Lone Star. Beginning in March 2021, Operation Lone Star sanctioned the deployment of National Guard and state police—from Texas and other states—to the Texas-Mexico border. Under the initiative, asylum seekers and migrants are charged with criminal trespassing when they enter Texas. They are then held in state-run prisons. Recently, at least 14 Republican-led states have sent police and National Guard to Texas border communities under Operation Lone Star. Lopez says residents have no idea what policies these out-of-state police are operating under, including... Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:57:46 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137387572/70a5a088ceada4cf66a93707948fbb32.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137039124/9ed6d38084cd4e799f1094b89700fc96.mp3 In July the Board of Immigration Appeals ordered that prominent federal immigration lawyer and longtime community organizer Margo Cowan be barred for two years from practicing law in immigration court for “violating the rules of professional conduct.” For this week’s podcast interview, The Border Chronicle caught up with Cowan in her Tucson office to hear her side of the story. This story includes Cowan’s long history of advocacy and organizing in the community—including know-your-rights campaigns in Tucson in the 1970s, work with the Sanctuary Movement and HIV/AIDS awareness in the 1980s, and working for the Tohono O’odham Nation in the 1990s, where she witnessed the onset of border militarization on the native reservation that, she asserts, has now become an “occupied” territory. (By the way, here is the link to Cowan’s book about the Tohono O’odham, cowritten with historian Guadalupe Castillo. We mention the book in the podcast). Throughout the conversation, Cowan talks abou... Thu, 14 Sep 2023 17:21:25 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/137039124/9ed6d38084cd4e799f1094b89700fc96.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/136498729/7a7d39164a726e66108c00cb78d82e90.mp3 Last week, Panama’s government announced a new campaign to prevent people from taking the deadly journey through the Darién Gap, one of the world’s most dangerous migrant routes. In 2023, more than 300,000 people have already crossed through the jungle isthmus. Panamanian officials estimate the number will reach 400,000 by the end of the year, which is twice the number of people who made the trek in 2022. An untold number of people on their journey north will never make it out of the Darién alive. Why do people keep risking their lives in the Darién? Caitlyn Yates , a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, has spent years researching this question. Yates has been traveling to the Darién Gap since 2018 to document changes in the region and interview hundreds of people who have chosen to take the risky journey. Her work has especially focused on Black migrants who face some of the worst prejiduce and treatment on their journeys north. “They risk b... Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:53:51 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/136498729/7a7d39164a726e66108c00cb78d82e90.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/135899468/06075eff4a619b7edb9cfb23b3bece37.mp3 On August 3, 2019, a mass shooting took place in El Paso, Texas. After hearing reports of the shooting, anthropologist Gilberto Rosas tried to call his parents, who live in El Paso, his hometown. At first, they did not answer the phone. At a Walmart about a mile away from the U.S.-Mexico divide, the shooter was on a white-supremacist rampage that would kill 23 people and wound many others. As Rosas describes in the following interview, these harrowing moments intensified until his parents finally answered. That moment would turn into a book: Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the U.S.-Mexico Border . This was the associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s second book. (His first was Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier .) In the interview, Rosas told me, “As someone who grew up on the border, who knows the literature on the intensified militarized policing of the border, as someon... Thu, 10 Aug 2023 17:27:55 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/135899468/06075eff4a619b7edb9cfb23b3bece37.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/131335788/441e7bf829140a64dc0c16f1cac95c7c.mp3 Alejandra Spector is a practicing psychotherapist and licensed master social worker , from El Paso, Texas. Spector, who now lives in Austin, grew up in a bilingual family of border activists. Her father, Carlos Spector , is a well-known asylum and human rights lawyer, and her mother, Sandra Spector, is a longtime community organizer who runs the family’s law practice. Social justice work can be incredibly rewarding. But it can also lead to burn out and take a physical and mental toll. Spector stresses the importance of self-care. “Are you eating enough, drinking enough water, and getting enough sleep? Are you finding things you enjoy outside of social justice work?” she says. “Having people who really know and care about you is important. Who is in your life, and who is helping you?” Her therapy practice reflects her border upbringing by focusing on the mental health impacts of systemic oppression, racism, and forced displacement, which leads to migration. Most of her clients are peo... Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:01:04 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/131335788/441e7bf829140a64dc0c16f1cac95c7c.mp3 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/128326628/57ab9bfe847295be62c190fae7bc5b14.mp3 We’d like to give a special welcome to our new audio editor Steev Hise and give a huge thanks to Hannah Gaber for her work with us over the last several months. As always in this volatile arena of journalism, it is hard for us to do anything coherent without our team behind the scenes! The Longer Story of the Border Patrol Killing of a Tohono O’odham Man: A Podcast with Amy Juan The Tohono O’odham leader and thinker describes the May 18 killing of Raymond Mattia and the long context of border militarization that led to it. On May 18, Raymond Mattia stepped out of his house after he saw the U.S. Border Patrol arrive. He lived in the small community of Ali Chuk (also known as Menagers Dam), located about one mile from the U.S.-Mexico international boundary on the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona. Mattia had called the Border Patrol a few hours earlier to report people moving through his land. He was about two feet from his front door, witnesses said, when agents fired , hitt... Thu, 15 Jun 2023 16:43:35 +0000 https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/128326628/57ab9bfe847295be62c190fae7bc5b14.mp3