We just talked live with journalist and author Jazmine Ulloa, whose new book, El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, tells the story of her hometown as experienced by the people who helped build it. Ulloa, who has been a national political reporter for The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe and currently covers immigration for The New York Times, looks to tell a broader story about the American immigrant experience. Her history looks to the Southwest as well as Ellis Island, centers on how the Mexican and Chinese immigrants and fronterizas — the people who grew up on the border — shaped the United States, and posits El Paso as a capital city of the way we understand and misunderstand the border today. We talked about:
The revolutionary histories of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez
How the border went from being “just a line in the sand” to a militarized frontier
Why conflicts over immigration have always been about the control of labor
What’s new and what’s familiar in Donald Trump’s mass deportation project
How Border Patrol and ICE have taken advantage of the “twilight zone” between domestic and foreign policy to turn immigration enforcement inward
What she’s learned reporting on the federal occupation of Minneapolis and from the people there who have come together to defend their neighbors
And how the bigger story of immigration challenges and expands our understanding of who Americans are and what American culture really is
If you’re looking to know more about the history of North American immigration and how we’ve gotten to our current crisis, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Just click on the video player above to watch now.
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