Pandemic Border Stories
The view from Mexico heading into downtown El Paso. Photo by Alma Rodriguez, Borderzine.com
Transforming Borders and Newsrooms through Borderzine
In the toughest of times for the City of El Paso, Texas, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kate Gannon saw that she’d have to adapt quickly to changes and tragedies around her.
Gannon, director of Borderzine at the University of Texas, El Paso, orchestrated a pivot; a grant-funded project she was leading, aimed at transforming border narratives, suddenly had to take on a pandemic. The border was all but closed. People grounded in the service economy were at home and isolated.
Borderzine is an award-winning publication that features the work of UTEP student journalists. Gannon and the staff knew the COVID-19 impact would be huge on a region where a borderline separates families, friends, and even business partners.
“When you live in a border city, like 10% of our students cross the border to come to school, it is the only story. It is the big story, right? When people were cut off from family, cut off from connections… And so, it was important to be able to try to tell this to people who may not be of our community to understand what that was like and what was going on,” said Gannon.
And there was much to chronicle: For a time, El Paso was recording some of the highest death and positive testing rates from COVID-19 in the country. By the fall of 2020, the state of Texas had sent in a fourth mobile morgue as COVID-19 continued to rise.
Downtown El Paso stores that have long relied on shoppers coming from Mexico for a majority of their sales took a big hit from cross-border travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo by Brianna Perez, Borderzine.com
In El Paso, COVID-19 snapped the connections between families who lived on both sides of the border. Through the grant, Gannon was able to prepare her students and build Borderzine’s capacity to show how the pandemic was changing the stories they’d planned to tell from the community’s point of view.
“We were feeling that impact by not having our neighbors being able to come and visit. And again, that's something that a lot of people don't understand, right?” Gannon said. “They think that ‘oh, there's a border, and everybody's separate. And here in our area,’ uh, you know, like literally is across the street, you walk across a bridge, and you're in the other country … I take people to the edge of campus, and there's the I-10 (freeway). And on the other side of I-10 is Mexico. Our downtowns are shoulder to shoulder.”
One of the biggest challenges was dealing with the pandemic’s effect on the staff itself: Many UTEP students commute to campus from Mexico. The border closures prevented them from participating, in person, in the newsroom. Students were unable to renew their visas for extended periods of time.
Traffic flows over the Rio Grande across the Bridge of the Americas between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. Residents routinely commute between the sister cities for school, work and shopping. Photo by Jorge Salgado, Borderzine.com
All this played out in Borderzine’s pandemic stories, which included pieces about love and romance between people who had cross-border relationships. Gone were the times when people would come from Mexico for dinner in El Paso and then return home the same evening.
The publication also explored the pandemic economy. “Everybody who used to come across with tourist visas or a shopping visa would come across for the day shop, have dinner, visit with family and friends, come for the weekend, do cookouts, and then they would go back home,” Gannon said. “All of a sudden, that just didn't happen anymore. So our downtown, which relies heavily on shoppers, was shutting down.”
Borderzine pieces went on to examine equity issues. One story showed how affluent Mexicans flew into Dallas to get the Covid vaccine, while average Mexicans could not drive or walk across the international border.
‘It's great to be able to kick into journalism mode and figure out how we can inform, how we can get these stories out.’
Borderzine’s student staff witnessed and reported on these issues while dealing with their own pandemic problems. Through the grant, Gannon purchased safety equipment to ensure the safety of reporters. Boom microphones and poles became part of the staff’s reporting equipment, facilitating audio interviews from safe distances. “The big challenges were government offices that were often closed, or they were on these skeleton staffs,” Gannon said.
Students developed skills to stay safe and document what was happening in the border cities. Through the project, the newsroom needed to adapt and use new tools. But that also exposed equity issues within the student community. While the university had much equipment on site, the order to study and work from home presented barriers for students who did not have their own hard drives or resources for strong broadband connections. Additionally, students had to juggle their studies and their pursuit of journalism against the need to work. “Our students were frontline workers. They were working in retail, they were working in restaurants. They were getting sick… I'm thinking, why are you even here? But they were there because this was important,” Gannon said.
Gannon and the Borderzine student journalists published 15 articles about the pandemic shutdown and produced audio pieces and stories through a partnership that provided mentors and professional guidance from the Puente News Collaborative, which included El Paso Matters, a digital media publication that does in-depth reporting and investigative pieces, as well as La Verdad, a news outlet in Juarez, Mexico.
Kate Gannon. Courtesy of Gannon
“There is something that during strange times, traumatic times, times of news, it's great to be able to kick into journalism mode and figure out how we can inform, how we can get these stories out, how we can find out what's going on and tell these stories,” Gannon said. “As educators, it gave us opportunities to connect some of our students with really great editors. That ranged from students who were mentored by Ricardo Sandoval from NAHJ’s palabra… (to) a student working with Dallas Morning News and (reporter) Alfredo Corchado. For the students, I think it also gave them a great sense of purpose as opposed to feeling like, you know, events were just happening to them.”
For Gannon, the crisis was an opportunity to transform not just the narratives Borderzine and others would present to audiences but also the way student journalists could be shown more opportunities.
The result, she added, was a new portrait of El Paso and the binational border region as a home to resilient communities that have survived so much tragedy.
—
Cora Cervantes-Orta was born in México and raised in Los Angeles. Growing up within a diverse community taught her to understand issues from different perspectives. She completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and her Master's degree in Multimedia Journalism at New York University. Her work has been published by NBC News Digital, Al-Jazeera, NPR's Latino USA, Salon, NAHJ: palabra and Narratively. She has produced stories for MSNBC and NBC News NOW. During her time at NBC Universal she has worked as Diversity Coordinator for NBC News and MSNBC, and as an Associate Producer for MSNBC’s Politics Nation with Al Sharpton. Currently, she is an Associate Coverage Producer for NBC News. Cora is passionate about equity in representation, in the media. She currently serves as Vice President of NAHJ’s Los Angeles Chapter. She resides in East Los Angeles, California.