By: Roxane Ramos This year’s first place winner of the UA Poetry Center’s Bilingual Corrido Contest recounts a moving migration story of aspiration, struggle, and love. Daniela Ibarra first heard the story in 2009 when she was living in Sonora, Mexico for a year. An abuela (grandmother) in a dentist’s waiting room shared the trials of her grandson, left behind in Mexico, and his mother, seeking better fortunes in the United States with the expectation of reuniting soon. This is so often … [Read more...]

By: Roxane Ramos The Kino Teens, a social justice group associated with the Kino Border Initiative, take what they learn about border issues on the road, locally and nationally. For the teenagers who attend Lourdes Catholic School in Nogales, Arizona, the border is not some distant abstraction—it is their home. And the debate that surrounds immigration reform is not simply political rhetoric—it is part of their everyday lives. So the students at Lourdes took on the issue, and organized the … [Read more...]

By: Roxane Ramos Immersion experiences are precisely what they sound like—on-site visits that place participants right where they can observe the realities of a situation firsthand. For the Kino Border Initiative, immersions are a way to convey the reality of the border through direct engagement. Visitors get to speak with migrants and hear their stories; they serve meals and sort clothes; they tour the streets of Nogales, Sonora, and hike the harsh desert outskirts, harmless enough with … [Read more...]

By: Roxane Ramos The humanitarian crisis of thousands of undocumented and unaccompanied children at the border has prompted numerous responses from organizations throughout the country. Here, we print two letters—one from the Jesuit Conference and the other from the Sisters of Mercy. The letters outline the decades-long history of violence in Central America that has led to the atmosphere of danger and threat that exists today. And they provide disturbing facts about the reality of what … [Read more...]

By: Roxane Ramos More than 57,000 unaccompanied migrant children have crossed the U.S.–Mexico border since October. The initial crisis for the U.S. government and border authorities was one of sheltering them and providing for their basic needs. Now that most of the children have been placed with relatives and await immigration hearings, the more ongoing challenge is addressing the reasons they have migrated, and determining who may have a right to stay in the U.S. based on refugee status or … [Read more...]