The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers.
Category Archives: Violence/Conflicts
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 […]
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 […]
I am delighted to share that Carolina Miranda, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed my piece, Mexico’s City of dogs, which appeared in Al Jazeera America for Nieman Storyboard. In her critique, “How Michelle Garcia told the story of Juárez, a city lost to violence, through its dogs,” Miranda writes: It is a […]
The NYTimes’ Room for Debate recently posed this question: Is Criticism of Identity Politics Racist or Long Overdue? Some complain of being unfairly accused of bigotry. Others say discrimination needs to be directly addressed. I was invited to participate on the panel of debaters. Below is my contribution which you can also access here. The attack on political […]
In Fall 2015, I returned to UT-Austin, my alma mater, as a visiting lecturer in the Radio-Television-Film department. I designed the audio documentary course to explore the overt and subtle role of the ‘I’ in media storytelling. In an era of the selfie, crafted visual images on Instagram and the Serial podcast, the Self is peddled […]
In looking back at 2015 I can’t help but think of three important tenets of journalism: bearing witness, telling the story and holding institutions and public officials accountable. Last year, Cosmo for Latinas commissioned me to write a piece about police brutality and Latinos. We were, after all, living in the time of #BlackLivesMatters in the wake […]
On May 1, Guernica magazine published my piece, The War of Forgetting, in honor of Eduardo Galeano who passed away a few weeks earlier. Vela Magazine later selected the piece for as part of its Women We Read This Week review. I began writing the piece on a sweaty afternoon in an apartment in the historic center of Mexico City […]
In the early part of last year I read Alfredo Corchado’s new memoir “Midnight in Mexico” and it soon became a topic of conversation while I traveled through Tijuana, in Texas and in New York City. The book’s storyline is built on Corchado’s investigation into a very possible hit on his life. In a review and q/a […]
In early 2014, the Mexican government–state and federal– launched an operation to search for human remains in the northern state of Coahuila. The search was meant to investigate a massacre, perhaps the largest in recent years, that involved some 300 victims. The operation quickly became a big media story in Mexico. But the operation, as it turns […]
Michelle García 