If climate change is the existential crisis of our time, then it ought to provoke a reckoning for the news media. For The Nation I analyzed media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on race and inequality, as a preview of the challenge of covering our emerging world of “climate apartheid.” Before statistics […]
Author Archives: Director
For Bon Appétit I returned to Matamoros and the camp where some 2000 asylum seekers wait for their cases to be heard in the U.S. This camp is unprecedented. It used to be that asylum seekers lived and often worked in the U.S. while their cases were pending in immigration court. Under a relatively new […]
Earlier this year I drove to San Antonio from Austin to have my pick-up truck repaired and I decided to wait it out by visiting Artpace museum. A selection of monographs featuring the work of each artist in the exhibition had been neatly laid out in the reading room. I flipped open one and the […]
Interview on Longform podcast
My latest piece for CNN analzyes the El Paso massacre as the violent culmination of the ongoing political warfare against Latinos in Texas and the implications for the 2020 election. Find the piece here.
In early 2019, I launched the Rewriting the West series in partnership with Guernica magazine. After the 2016, the need to understand the west, the symbolism of the border and its mythology became especially urgent. I assembled a team of award-winning team of contributors for a series that explores the origins of the American West […]
My three-part series about the border appeared in The Baffler. Part I | The Border and the American Imagination Listen to me discuss the piece The Brian Lehrer Show/WNYC, the NPR station in NYC here. Border and the American Imagination was later cited in The Nation and featured in Longreads. With roots in the Native […]
This was, undoubtedly, my most controversial piece. Writing for CNN.com about the recent “border wall deal,” I argued that Democrats had caved to a dangerous and violent ideology and, in doing so, betrayed a core constituency. Some three months later, Pew Research Center estimated that Latinos were expected to become the largest non-white voting group […]
In April I contributed a piece to the Antiracism and America series, a collaboration between the Guardian and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center. In the piece, I explore the U.S.-Mexico border as a solution, not a problematic site, and challenge to the nation’s long history of white supremacy. In the popular imagination and political […]
