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TheBorderChronicle

@theborderchronicle

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An independent media outlet reporting on the U.S.-Mexico border region from a border perspective, bringing you analysis and reporting with context.

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Come celebrate five years of The Border Chronicle!🦂
Join us for a joyful night celebrating the beauty, creativity, and community of the borderlands, and five years of independent journalism.
We’ll have delicious food from La Indita, live music and poetry, and a tropical desert dance party with the fabulous DJ Humblelianess spinning into the night.
Come raise a glass, dance, eat, celebrate, and toast to five years of borderlands storytelling and independent journalism. We can’t wait to celebrate with you!🥳🫂

💌Details:

Location📍: La Indita
Hours⌚️:6 pm to 9 pm
Day🗓️: Thursday, October 22nd

Ticket🎟️: $30
🗣️Get your ticket at https://www.theborderchronicle.com/event-ticket/ linked in bio!

Entertainment lineup🪩💃🕺🏻:
Music: Ted Warmbrand
Poetry: Russ McSpadden
Inspiration: Isabel Garcia
Dance: DJ Humblelianess by @theborderchronicle

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25 days ago

📱💻Here’s how to use Wall Watch.🦂

We built this app so border residents can document what’s happening in their own communities, wall construction, buoy barriers, surveillance towers, in just a few taps. Drop a pin, add a photo, tell us what you saw. We review and verify every report before it goes on the map.

This only works if you use it. Want the full breakdown? Scroll to the bottom of the page for a detailed how to guide.

🗺️ wallwatch.theborderchronicle.com linked in bio. 🔗 by @theborderchronicle

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2 months ago

🚨 Introducing Wall Watch, the first of its kind interactive map tracking border wall construction across the entire U.S. Mexico border.

Wall construction has accelerated dramatically along nearly 2,000 miles of the border. Walls, buoy barriers, surveillance towers, enforcement roads. Yet there’s no single public resource tracking it, and little reliable information from the government. So, we built one.
Wall Watch combines geospatial mapping with community reporting. Border residents can upload photos, location data, and firsthand reports of construction and infrastructure changes in their own communities, creating a continuously updated, verified public record for journalists, researchers, policymakers, and environmental advocates.

“Wall Watch will provide transparency and accountability by giving communities a trusted platform to report and verify what’s happening on the ground,” says Melissa del Bosque, Border Chronicle co-founder and executive director.

🗺️ Explore the map, submit a report, or download the data.

Visit Wall Watch at wallwatch.theborderchronicle.com linked in bio 🦂🔗

This project only works with your help. Share it with your community. by @theborderchronicle

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2 months ago

What’s really happening at the U.S.-Mexico border? We’ll tell you what we’re seeing, and we want to hear what’s on your mind.

This Saturday at Tucson Meet Yourself, our co-founder and executive director Melissa del Bosque joins Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel for a conversation about the people, policies and stories shaping life in the borderlands. We’ll talk about what’s happening on the ground, how accountability journalism cuts through political rhetoric and misinformation, and why independent local news matters more than ever.

📍 Folklife Here Stage, Of the People Village  🗓️Saturday, October 17th at 2 p.m.

See you there! 🦂 by @theborderchronicle

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4 days ago

At 3 p.m. on May 3, 1887, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck Bavispe, Sonora. Every house in the town fell. Some fifty people died. And the shaking reached far beyond Sonora, all the way into Southern Arizona.
More than a century later, author Mary Reynolds learned about the catastrophe and went looking for the full story. She interviewed the descendants of people who lived through it, dug into the archives, and studied the geology behind it. Along the way she found a trail that led to a Tucson high school, a team from Tombstone, and the region’s springs and watercourses, which the quake changed forever.
In this week’s podcast, Caroline Tracey talks with Reynolds, author of The Quake that Drained the Desert (University of Nebraska Press), about the research, the colorful characters, and what the quake means for life in the borderlands today.
Watch & listen to the full podcast episode at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio🔗🦂 by @theborderchronicle

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4 days ago

Laredo, Texas, relies solely on the shrinking Rio Grande for its water. As climate change takes its toll, the city is increasingly vulnerable.
So a group of Laredo city officials and NADBank experts packed up and headed to El Paso and Tucson, two desert cities that have spent decades figuring out how to stretch every drop. The trip was led by Martin Castro, watershed science director at the Rio Grande International Study Center, a Laredo nonprofit working to protect the river.
In a Q&A, Castro shares what surprised him, what stuck with him, and what he thinks Laredo needs to do now, because water resilience takes decades to build.
Read full Q&A at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio🔗🦂
Photos: @niclewisfilms by @theborderchronicle

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6 days ago

On October 7, in Lochiel, Arizona, heavily armed Border Patrol agents fired tear gas and pepper balls at protesters trying to stop a double border wall from cutting through the San Rafael Valley.
Some had chained themselves to heavy machinery. Organizer Kate Scott, who witnessed one protester’s ordeal, said she called 911 for help and was told by the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s office to ask Border Patrol instead. Erick Meza, borderlands coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon chapter, has spent days at the site. “These are not regular Border Patrol agents,” he told us.
Meanwhile, Rally for the Valley, one of the protesters’ Instagram accounts, reports that five people were released today with no charges after being held incommunicado for 24 hours. Protesters have been at the site since July, and they remain there now.

Read the full story at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio🔗🦂

🎥Video: Sonoran Desert Press by @theborderchronicle

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11 days ago

Two years ago, the evening program at Prepa 2 in Tapachula, Chiapas, had just 60 students. Then two siblings from Nigeria walked in and asked if they could enroll.

Today, about 150 students attend, and roughly 80 percent are immigrants. Many arrived in Mexico hoping to keep moving north, but with the right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border virtually eliminated, thousands of families are now stuck in Tapachula. For their kids, a seat in a classroom has become a lifeline.
Reporter Liliana Frankel spent time at the school and met the principal, teachers, and students. One staffer helps kids enroll with nothing but the burned scraps of their birth certificates. The principal has an ambitious goal for the school’s future.

Read full story at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio🔗🦂 by @theborderchronicle

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13 days ago

Bulldozers carved through Big Bend National Park in August. CBP called it survey and design work. Satellite images told a different story.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, and it never stops at surveying. In Arizona’s San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, temporary vehicle barriers became 30-foot bollard walls, drained artesian springs feeding endangered-fish habitat, and turned flash floods into dam-breaking events. Now CBP is adding a second wall layer there, while five new contracts push vehicle barriers through Big Bend and across Seminole Canyon, threatening pictograph panels painted onto canyon walls thousands of years ago.
Scott Nicol has documented border wall construction for over two decades. In this piece, he lays out exactly how just a vehicle barrier becomes a 30-foot wall, and what that means for two of the last untouched stretches of the borderlands.
Read the full investigation, and support the reporting tracking this $46 billion project at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio 🔗🦂.
📸: @ntlnwmn by @theborderchronicle

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18 days ago

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20 days ago

Over 600,000 people deported to Honduras in a decade. Most of them young men, most of them caught between gangs who control their own neighborhoods and governments determined to keep them from leaving.
In a new review, Joseph Nevins digs into anthropologist Amelia Frank-Vitale’s “Leave If You Can”, a book built from years inside migrant caravans and Honduran neighborhoods, arguing that deportation isn’t a deterrent, it’s just another form of the same forced movement people are already trying to survive.
Her conclusion, the problem was never migration. It’s everything we’ve built to stop it.
Read the full review at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio🔗🦂 by @theborderchronicle

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25 days ago

He’s almost unknown north of the border. A leftist, a prisoner, a novelist who spent his career writing about failed dams and flooded irrigation districts in Mexico’s arid north. And this year, he’s suddenly everywhere.
Caroline Tracey noticed something strange, three of the year’s most essential borderlands books, by Cristina Rivera Garza, Álvaro Enrigue, and Natalia Mendoza, all open with an epigraph from the same Mexican writer, José Revueltas. So she went looking for why.
The answer runs through prison cells, cotton fields, a 1943 road trip through Sonora, and a piece of literary news that makes the timing bittersweet.
Read the full story at the borderchronicle.com linked in bio. 🔗🦂 by @theborderchronicle

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a month ago