One Shot
Photo by Nick Oza – USA Today Network
A single image by the late Nick Oza reunited a family separated by deportation. It now speaks volumes about the photojournalist’s legacy
Nitin “Nick” Oza was one of us. I don’t mean just literally – though this past August he texted excitedly to let me know he had become a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He sent me that message shortly after we published the piece, Citizen Dreamer by the talented journalist Eileen Truax, about how young Dreamers, regardless of their immigration status, embody the whole idea of citizenship and belonging. I could not think of anyone whose photography documented the humanity of Dreamers better than Nick’s. We often talked about future collaborations, but those plans dissolved with the tragic news of his accident and later his death on Sept. 27.
When I say that Nick was one of us, I mean that he was a journalist who was close to his community. Even though he didn’t speak Spanish, he spoke the language of love, as he liked to say with a charming and somewhat mischievous smile. He was never afraid to give everything of himself, to be vulnerable. That made people feel comfortable with him. It helped him build lasting relationships with his photographic subjects.
I always believed that the mark of a great journalist is how they stay in touch with the people whose lives they’ve documented, well after a project’s publication. But Nick wasn’t only a great photojournalist, he was a one-of-a-kind friend to many. That’s what made him so unforgettable, so uniquely magnetic.
In palabra.’s final story of 2021, we honor Nick Oza with the beautiful writing of another one of us, Jude Joffe-Block. This portrait, with Jude’s words and Nick’s photography, is, as he would say, a gift for future generations.
This story is a gift for us as well; an illustration of his greatness as a human being, the long trail of friends he’s left behind, and the many friendships he kindled even after he left us.
–Valeria Fernández, palabra. managing editor
As the deportations of Mexican immigrants from Arizona swelled in the summer of 2009, photojournalist Nick Oza walked the streets of Nogales, Mexico, with his camera hanging, as usual, from around his neck. For The Arizona Republic newspaper, he routinely documented the shell-shocked and distraught people who authorities would abruptly drop into the border town, permanently separating them from their families and the lives they had been living in the United States.
During one walk, just feet from the border fence and near one of the cameras U.S. authorities used to monitor the Mexican side, Nick saw a middle-aged man deep in prayer.
The man stood alone on a small dirt mound with his back toward Nick. He wore a simple white t-shirt and dark slacks. His arms were completely outstretched, reaching up to a stormy sky.
Nick, who was slim and moved quickly, managed not to disturb the man as he set up the shot. He framed it in such a way that the sky was sliced by the seemingly infinite line of the border fence looming overhead.
The image communicated the rage, anguish and loneliness of being trapped on the wrong side of the border, away from loved ones. And yet somehow and at the same time, the shot conveyed awe and pious devotion.
Nick might have sensed he was about to take one of the best photographs of his career. What he could not have known is how it would change the life of the man in front of him.
An early transformation
At the time he took the photo in Nogales, Nick was 44, though his thick black hair, wide smile and boyish energy made him seem much younger. He grew up in India, and had first learned about photography by transcribing a friend’s instructional books by hand since he could not afford to buy his own. He had been painfully shy as a child, but behind a camera he became outgoing and charismatic. He eventually made his way to the U.S. where he studied photography at Columbia College Chicago. He later was hired to work at a newspaper in Macon, Georgia, and met Jacquelyn Griffin, who would become his wife and adopt his last name. She would later describe how Nick’s gift for photography made up for his difficulty with words. His images were how he expressed himself, and he could see things others could not. “He saw like a mathematician with angles and an artist with light,” Jacquelyn told me.
When Nick started at The Arizona Republic in 2006, Arizona lawmakers and voters had begun passing a flurry of laws and voter initiatives that made life harder for unauthorized immigrants in the state and made it easier for them to be arrested, jailed, and turned over to federal authorities for deportation. Joe Arpaio, then sheriff of the state’s largest county, was embarking on an unprecedented crusade against illegal immigration that would also make him the target of a landmark racial profiling lawsuit.
Nick did not speak much Spanish, but he quickly gained the trust of Arizona’s Latino immigrant communities as the state became ground zero in the nation’s bitter immigration wars. At a time when Arizona’s immigrants were being hunted and dehumanized, Nick’s photographs captured their fear and pain, and their fierce determination to change the status quo. He restored their humanity on the pages of the state’s largest newspaper.
“We as a journalist, we want to be a voice of people,” Nick told undergraduate students a few years ago at a lecture in Tijuana about his work documenting immigration and border issues. “It’s not about ‘I’m a great photographer’ or anything. I never want to be. I just want to be a people person and a beautiful soul,” Nick said.
A poster for Nick Oza’s 2015 exhibit, “Border of Dreams,” at Treeo, an art gallery in Phoenix
I first saw Nick’s photo of the man praying at the border six years after he took it, in 2015. We had become friends by then, after meeting through mutual friends in the local journalism community and running into each other at Phoenix press conferences. His black hair had turned silver and he often topped it with a fedora. I was early in my career, and Nick’s generosity toward less-experienced journalists like me stood out. I worked at the local NPR station then, and on mornings when I had a story air on the radio, my phone would often chime with a silly text from Nick letting me know he was enjoying his coffee with my voice.
That year, Nick’s photos were featured in a solo exhibition, Border of Dreams, at an art gallery in downtown Phoenix. The display showcased his immigration-themed work. The photo of the praying man at the border fence served as a poster for the event. After I mentioned that I admired the portrait, Nick surprised me one day with a leftover black and white copy on paper. I hung it over my desk at home. There, it served as a constant reminder of the human lives at the heart of every immigration story I reported.
The terrible news
In September, Nick sustained grave injuries in a car accident and was placed on life support. In the days after the accident, his family, friends, journalism colleagues, and community members he had photographed were stunned and heartbroken. We posted notes of healing to his Facebook wall. I spent hours at my desk, looking up at the photo he had given me. The praying man at the border fence, in limbo between two worlds, seemed to take on a new symbolism for my friend, now trapped between life and death. I regretted not asking Nick more about the man in the photo when I had the opportunity, and I vowed to research it.
Before I had a chance to do so, and ten days after Nick’s accident, I received a message on Facebook that answered some of my questions.
“Hi, I'm so sad for what happened to Nick please I would really appreciate if you let me know of any changes on his condition,” the note read. The sender was Pancho Olachea Martin in Nogales, Mexico.
Curiously, the message also included a photo of the front page of The Arizona Republic from July 22, 2009.
As I clicked on the image to enlarge it, I did a double take. The lead photo in the newspaper that day was the same one hanging on the wall above my desk. But this time I could see its caption: “Pancho Olachea Martin, 50, prays on the Mexican side of the border. Olachea Martin, a deported migrant, now cleans buses for a living and buys first-aid supplies from his meager salary to care for deported migrants.”
Nick had helped me find the praying man in the photo after all.
Pancho’s story
A photo Pancho Olachea Martin sent the author of the front page of the July 22, 2009, Arizona Republic, featuring Nick Oza’s photo of him. Photo courtesy of Pancho Olachea Martin
Pancho and I exchanged messages, and traded the scraps of information that we had about Nick’s condition. Pancho also sometimes mentioned the photo that I was so curious about, and told me that he credited it with reuniting him with his family.
On Sept. 27, just days after Nick’s 57th birthday, I shared with Pancho the news that everyone had been dreading: Nick was gone. He was survived by his wife Jacquelyn, 19-year-old daughter, Shanti, as well as his father, siblings, and many other relatives in India.
Pancho and I met over Zoom a few days later. His graying beard and smile came into view on my computer screen, and together we processed our friend’s death. Pancho then agreed to tell me the full story behind the photo Nick had taken of him.
Pancho was born in Baja California and had migrated to the U.S. as a 16-year-old without papers. He ended up in Phoenix, where he raised a family and became a caregiver to elderly people. He lived with and tended to a frail diabetic with a long white beard, David Hickox, who he promised to take care of until one of them died.
In 2008, Pancho had begun speaking out, raising awareness in Phoenix about scams targeting senior citizens. One day, Nick showed up at the door of the house Pancho was sharing with David and introduced himself as an Arizona Republic photographer. How Nick found the house is unclear to Pancho, even today. What Pancho does remember is that Nick was interested photographing how Pancho, an undocumented immigrant, was the caregiver for David, an elderly U.S. citizen, at a time when the state was cracking down on unauthorized immigrants. They made a loose plan that Nick would come back one day to take photos.
But before that could happen, Pancho was apprehended and then deported to Nogales, Mexico, on October 14, 2008. He was 49, and had spent his entire adult life in the United States. Once in Nogales. Pancho slept in a graveyard with other migrants who had no place to go. Pancho had no money, and he had been deported without his cell phone and its list of his contacts. He wanted to call David to say he was OK, but he had recently changed his landline number to avoid junk calls. Pancho had not yet memorized the new number. Eventually an American volunteer he met in Nogales and who lived in Phoenix agreed to bring David a letter from Pancho. David sent Pancho back a debit card with a little money on it and his phone number. But Pancho often had trouble reaching David and it was a struggle to correspond.
Pancho wanted to alert his 28-year-old daughter, Christina Young, that he had been deported, but she was living in Germany and he had lost a way to communicate with her months earlier.
Now unmoored from his past life, Pancho dedicated himself to helping others who had also been deported and separated from their lives. He met some who had attempted to cross back into the U.S., only to be apprehended by Border Patrol agents. Pancho noticed that recent migrants who were returned to Nogales after long journeys in the desert were arriving dehydrated, with severe blisters and injured feet. After Pancho found a job cleaning buses, he set out to buy bandages, gauze, iodine, peroxide, painkillers and electrolyte packets to treat migrants who needed help. He was driven, he said, to “change the moment” for people in dire circumstances, in the hopes that it would orient them onto a better path.
He started a ritual of praying and preaching alone at the border fence in front of U.S. cameras. It was, in a way, an act of protest. He hoped he could force U.S. border authorities to contemplate the humanity of the people on the Mexican side of the fence. Sometimes he would shout out against Border Patrol abuses against migrants. He would also use the spot to think about “the power of faith,” and pray for David and the other elderly people in Phoenix who he could no longer take care of. “In some way it released my anger,” Pancho told me. Other days, while praying, he said he experienced “joy of starting to find a different purpose in my life.”
On that summer day in 2009, he had finished his prayers and turned to leave, instead finding in his path a photographer waiting for him. At first, Pancho didn’t realize that it was the same Arizona Republic photographer he had met before he was deported.
Nick asked Pancho if he minded that he had taken his photo. When Pancho said no, Nick began asking him more questions. Then the two men began to recognize each other. “Oh I met you before,” Pancho remembered Nick saying. “What happened?”
It was an unexpected reunion, a moment that Pancho calls “amazing.”
Pancho would later conclude that God had sent Nick to him twice, first to his house in Phoenix, and then to the border fence in Nogales.
Nick learned that Pancho had been deported and was helping others who had been, too. So Nick asked if he and the reporter he was working with that day, Dennis Wagner, could follow him for a while.
“Just carry on, just do what you do, we won’t bother you,’” Pancho remembered Nick saying. Pancho led them to the graveyard where he set up an improvised first-aid stand and tended to migrants’ blisters and cuts.
He liked that Nick kept his word and didn’t interrupt. He marveled that Nick seemed to become one with the camera. It was easy for Pancho to forget he was there, even though he said Nick took what seemed like “a thousand pictures in one minute.”
As Pancho applied antiseptic ointment to a man’s foot, Nick snapped photos. “When I see these feet,” Pancho told the newspaper at the time, “I see the feet of Jesus Christ.”
A week or so later, Nick went back to Nogales on another assignment. He brought along a copy of the July 22, 2009, Arizona Republic for Pancho.
“You made the front page,” Pancho remembered Nick saying.
Pancho’s photo praying at the border fence appeared under a headline that read: “At Mexico’s edge, deported migrants are left in limbo.”
Before Nick left, Pancho asked him to deliver a note to David in Phoenix.
Divided and reunited
Later in the summer of 2009, Pancho’s daughter Christina Young returned from Germany and went looking for her father at David’s house. Instead she found David, alone and unkempt, in what she called “unlivable conditions.” Unable to shop or cook for himself, the 81-year-old had been surviving for months on just Raisin Bran.
David broke the news to Christina that her dad had been deported. She remembered he told her, “A man from the Republic came to see me and he bought me this newspaper and a letter from your dad.”
Pancho’s letter to David had not offered any contact information. Then Christina looked at the July 22 newspaper David had received. “And I'm like, Oh my God, that's my dad's picture. And you can only see the back of his head. But I knew that was my dad.”
She saw the photo was credited to Nick Oza so she called The Arizona Republic and left a message for him.
Christina remembered Nick sounded excited when he called back. He told her he didn’t have a way to reach Pancho, but offered to meet her in Nogales to see if, together, they could find him.
“I was amazed that he would be willing to do that for me to find my dad,” Christina told me. She was not sure what to expect, but Nick’s smile when they met in Nogales put her at ease and made her feel hopeful.
They spent the morning driving around the border city’s narrow streets without luck. The streets seemed to be full of recently deported immigrants, and Christina and Nick scanned every face they saw looking for Pancho. Around noon, Nick suggested they head toward the Kino Border Initiative’s soup kitchen for migrants in case Pancho might be there for lunch.
(Top) Christina Young and her father, Pancho Olachea Martin, hug in Nogales, Mexico, in 2009. Photo by Nick Oza, courtesy of Christina Young
(Below) A few moments after their reunion, Christina Young and Pancho Olachea Martin laugh together on a bench. Photo by Nick Oza, courtesy of Christina Young
“Look, there he is!” Christina remembered hearing Nick cry out as they drew closer to the crowded shelter. “I pulled over and there was my dad.”
Pancho noticed the car pulling up and heard Nick yell out the window, “I got a surprise for you!”
Christina jumped out of the car. Pancho was stunned for a moment. He and his daughter then hugged and cried in the street.
“I know Nick wanted to capture that on camera,” Christina said. “And he really only got one photo because he was so caught in that moment with us and even Nick was crying.” They found a bench and sat and caught up. Nick took one of Christina’s favorite photos: she and Pancho, sitting on the bench and laughing together.
A few years later, once David was strong enough, Christina brought David down to Nogales for his own reunion with Pancho.
“I don't think that I would have found my dad without Nick,” Christina told me.
A new life
After Christina reunited with her father, she gave him an old Dodge Caravan. He named it “Cristina” in honor of her and turned it into a “mobile Wal-Mart” – his delivery van stuffed with donated clothing, food and toiletries for the needy that he continued serving in Nogales. Pancho also began taking first-aid classes at the Red Cross. He later worked with the organization and secretly slept in the building.
Pancho had not finished high school before he had left Mexico decades earlier as a teenager. He made a goal for himself to get his diploma and then go to college. At first he strove to become a minister, later he decided to pursue nursing.
Nick promised to keep returning to Nogales every three months. He was now determined to track Pancho’s progress for a long-term photo documentary project.
“That encouraged me a lot,” Pancho said. “It was a blessing because it allowed me to look at myself more deeply, because now I was going to do something big, become an example to the migrants.” Pancho wanted to show others who had been deported that it was possible to start over, even at age 50.
Christina noticed that Nick’s decision to keep documenting her father, “helped give him that boost of motivation to keep going.”
It all proved to be a long journey. Even before Pancho could get his high school degree, he had to pass an initial exam because there was no record of him having attended elementary school in Mexico.
Pancho remembered Nick seemed impressed when Pancho finally earned his high school credential. “Wow, you really did it. You know, I'm keeping track of your success as you go along,” Nick told Pancho at the time.
College was next for Pancho. He was almost 55 by the time he earned the degrees he needed to work as a nurse and a paramedic.
David Hickox, Christina Young and Pancho Olachea Martin, reunited in Nogales, Mexico. Photo courtesy of Christina Young
He dedicated himself to working on the streets of Nogales and continued providing first aid to migrants and the indigent – people no one else was helping. He checked his patients’ blood pressure, listened to their lungs, screened them for various viruses or illnesses like diabetes, and referred them for more medical treatment if they needed it. He was even able to convert Cristina, the Dodge Caravan, into a functioning ambulance.
Pancho started his own aid organization, which he called Panchito y Su Cristina.
Nick took photos at every major step in Pancho’s path. He was there for each graduation, each milestone. Pancho understood Nick’s goal was to one day publish a photography book about his life. When Nick arrived in Nogales for visits, he would often bring bags of his daughter’s old clothes and packs of new toothbrushes to add to the pile of donations Pancho would distribute.
Christina enjoyed watching Nick following her father with his camera, and noticed the two men seemed to inspire each other.
Back in Phoenix, Christina felt like Nick had become a new member of her own family. He photographed her and her kids at family events that Pancho could not attend, and was there when she received her diploma from Arizona State University.
Whenever Nick would take her photo in public, Christina would joke that he made her feel like a movie star. “You are a star,” he would respond.
Nick also documented how Christina took over as David’s caregiver, thereby fulfilling her father’s promise to always be there for David. Christina moved David into her home so he could spend his final years living with her and her kids.
(Top) Nick Oza prepares to photograph Christina Young at her graduation from Arizona State University. Photo courtesy of Christina Young
(Below) In January of 2017, Nick Oza visited David Hickox and took this photo of David’s hand next to a photo of him and Pancho Olachea Martin. David died the next day. Photo by Nick Oza, courtesy of Christina Young
And when David passed away in 2017, Nick was there to photograph the funeral.
Before David died, Nick created a video about Pancho, David and Christina that aired on Channel 12, the Phoenix NBC affiliate. The story left out the central role Nick had played in reuniting the family after Pancho’s deportation. It was a detail few people knew.
Pancho understood Nick was bound by the ethics of journalism to maintain certain boundaries. (For the first decade that Nick documented Pancho’s life, Nick reminded Pancho they could not be friends.) But in the last two years that they knew each other, Pancho felt that Nick had accepted the inevitability of their deep connection. During Nick’s visits to Nogales, the two men stayed up late, discussing their lives and their different takes on religion and spirituality. Nick would admire how Pancho could heal people. Pancho would admire how Nick, with his camera and his attention to details unseen by others, could heal in a completely different way; he made people feel seen and important.
“He was my best friend and he changed my whole life,” Pancho told me.
He knew time was precious
When I called Nick’s wife Jacquelyn to ask what she remembered about the photo Nick took of Pancho all those years ago, she knew exactly which one I was talking about. It was the only photograph Nick had taken that he allowed her to put up in their home. A black and white copy hung right over the desk Nick used in his home office to edit photos.
She believed the photo reminded him “why he does what he does.”
Nick Oza's photo hangs on the wall of his home office. Photo by Jaquelyn Oza
Just a few years before Nick took Pancho’s photo at the border fence, Nick’s mother had died in India. Nick had rarely been able to afford plane tickets to go back to visit in the years before she passed away. Jacquelyn sensed that for Nick, losing his mother and living so far from his family had left a void that never healed.
“He knew that time was precious,” Jaquelyn said. “He had a bleeding heart for anybody that was separated – even more so if they were ripped apart.”
Nick came home from reporting trips in Nogales and would describe Pancho to Jacquelyn as a “miracle worker” for the way he put others’ needs above his own.
“I think in a lot of ways, Nick identified with this because he would do the same,” Jacquelyn said.
She recalled that when Nick covered Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2005, he worked barefoot because he had given his shoes away to hurricane victims he had met, “not ever thinking about himself.” (Nick was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage. He’d go on to win a second Pulitzer for his contributions to The Arizona Republic’s 2017 coverage of former President Donald Trump’s border wall.)
Pancho and Nick were dedicated to their communities above all else, Jacquelyn said. “I would say they were kindred spirits.”
New friends; new beginnings
Nick’s memorial service was held at dusk on Oct. 6, on a large swath of lawn on Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix. There, Christina met Jacqueline and Shanti in person for the first time. Christina was moved by it. “I could see Nick’s spirit all through Shanti,” she told me.
There were many introductions that day among the people who loved Nick. I also met Christina, Jacquelyn and Shanti for the first time. Jacquelyn later told me she felt an “outpouring of love” from Nick’s friends that she had just become acquainted with. “It's been a gift,” she said.
At the memorial, a clothesline displayed prints of some of Nick’s photos. Everyone who attended was invited to pin up their own photos of Nick.
Christina shared a collage she had made showing Nick’s impact on her family. It included The Arizona Republic cover with Nick’s photo of her father. A photo of Nick taking her photo at her ASU graduation. A shot of David, Pancho, Nick and her kids together in a Nogales taco shop. And one of Pancho wearing a stethoscope around his neck with David and Nick in the back of a car in Nogales.
(Top) A photo of Nick Oza next to a small copy of the poster for his 2015 Border of Dreams exhibit at his memorial service on Oct. 6, 2021. Photo by Jude Joffe-Block
(Below) The collage that Christina Young shared at Nick Oza's memorial on Oct. 6, 2021.
Before Nick’s death, Pancho had expected to see Nick in October, in Mexico.
Pancho had planned a party to celebrate his recent marriage to Kathi Noaker. The date held significance for the couple. It was the thirteen-year anniversary of Pancho’s deportation and his new bride’s birthday.
Pancho and Kathi had met in 2018 through the Patagonia, Arizona-based organization, Voices from the Border. Kathi, a founding member of the nonprofit, first saw Pancho near the Nogales port of entry with his stethoscope around his neck, doing health checks of migrants on the street. Voices from the Border later began working with Pancho to amplify his efforts to aid the growing number of Central American asylum seekers and migrants arriving at the border.
The new partnership had allowed Pancho to finally purchase enough medication, secure a better ambulance and recruit doctors to work alongside him. The need for these services only became more acute in recent years, when changes in immigration policy stranded asylum seekers at the Mexican border and COVID-19 hit.
Kathi Noaker and Pancho Olachea Martin pose while driving an ambulance in Nogales, Mexico, on Feb. 8, 2020. Photo by Nick Oza, courtesy of Kathi Noaker
Pancho expected the October wedding party to be the final chapter in the photo book that Nick had been working on for so many years. It was to be both an ending and a new beginning. Now 62, Pancho had decided to finally retire from years of border humanitarian work to start a new life with his wife in a small town on the shore of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez.
The party never happened.
After being deported alone and with nothing, Pancho had reunited with his family, gone back to school, helped countless people and had found love. Nick had been by his side, chronicling every moment of the journey, until the very end.
Most of the photos Nick took of Pancho’s life over the years, however, are currently missing. Jacquelyn is still searching for where Nick would have stored them, along with many of his other documentary projects. One photo she does have is the shot of Pancho at the border wall that hung over Nick’s desk at home. She wants to make copies for Christina and Pancho.
Pancho never actually had his own reprint of the iconic shot. Nick had offered him an oversized copy once years ago, but Pancho had refused because he was unhoused at the time and had nowhere to keep it.
Now, perhaps, the image can take him back to when Nick changed his life.
“He wanted to finish that book,” Pancho said. “Unfortunately, he left us before.”
Photo by Nick Oza
Jude Joffe-Block is an audio producer and journalist in Phoenix, Arizona. She frequently reports on immigration and her work has appeared in The Guardian, NPR, The World and The Associated Press.