The Why and How of the Border

A group of veteran journalists cover “the backdrop for national politics and rhetoric.” 

Food is a topic which is like that little string on the sweater,” Pablo De La Rosa, a journalist in South Texas, told me. “You pull it, and the whole thing starts coming undone. In terms of understanding the culture, the history of the region, it’s that kind of thread.” The Rio Grande Valley, where he lives, stretches five thousand square miles. Sugarcane, grapefruit, sorghum, cotton, and maize grow there, tended by thousands of agricultural workers. Recently, when the federal government shutdown ripped away SNAP benefits, De La Rosa had in mind the more than three hundred thousand local people reliant on the program. His resulting article, “They Grow the Food. So Why Are So Many Going Hungry?,” appeared in the Border Chronicle, which aims to cover the land spanning from San Diego and Tijuana to Brownsville and Matamoros.

The Border Chronicle was started in 2021 by a pair of journalists—Melissa del Bosque, who has won an Emmy, a National Magazine Award, an RFK Human Rights Journalism Award, and the Hillman Prize for border-related reporting, and Todd Miller, who has also long written about the border, with a particular interest in climate change, border patrol, and corporate power. The idea was to counter perceptions from the outside: “The way of thinking in the national debate is that there’s nobody at the border,” as del Bosque told me. “It’s this sort of barren place, or it’s this place that’s under some sort of threat or ‘invasion.’” The Chronicle works, she said, “from the perspective of people actually living in these communities.” In practice, “we don’t do much breaking news,” she said. “What we like to do is explain not just the what’s happening, but the why and how.” The publication’s main mission is to push against what she calls “border theater”—the use of the United States–Mexico border as, in del Bosque’s words, “the backdrop for national politics and rhetoric.”