Student-Produced Videos

Maymester in Marfa/Junction: Borders, Borderlands and Border Crossings 2024 Funded by the Morris Endowed Professorship, College of Media and Communication Texas Tech University.

The biggest American story of 2023 and 2024 was the mass migration of millions of undocumented immigrants from around the world into the United States through the southern border with Mexico. This crisis affected local communities–school districts, religious organizations, social and medical services, and individuals directly or indirectly. The story took a national dimension when the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, started sending busloads of migrants to self-declared sanctuary cities in Colorado, California, Illinois, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts,and and so on. Nevertheless, the story was under-reported in the local media of West Texas.

This was one of the reasons why the College of Media and Communications launched a maymester course, Borders, Borderlands and Border Crossings: Maymester in Marfa. The aim of this multimedia course was to introduce students to the complex spaces of the American/Mexican borderlands, enable them to experience the situation first hand, and give them opportunities tell stories about its various dimensions, from different perspectives. The course was based at the Texas Tech campus in Junction, TX. From there, students and faculty travelled by van to Marfa for a workshop on border journalism. It was led by a panel of journalists from both sides of the border. Students subsequently visited border posts in Presidio, Del Rio, Quemado, and Eagle Pass.

The class went to exotic locations at the center of the crisis, met interesting personalities, saw United States Customs and Border Protection agents at work, and interacted with the local police, firefighters and ordinary citizens in the communities affected by the crisis. The students subsequently wrote stories and produced videos that presented slices of the reality of the borderlands. The videos below present multiple facets of the borderlands as told by the students in the course.