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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
Five days before the 2016 election I proposed to Eliza Borné, my editor at the Oxford American, that in 2016 we, as a nation, had experienced a long-delayed realization of the 1967 Summer of Love, a spiritual awakening made possible through the struggle for racial justice. Whereas in the post 2016 election analysis, some insisted racial politics needed to […]
In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]
Michelle García 