Transcripts For CSPAN2 2011 Tucson Festival Of The Book 2011

CSPAN2 2011 Tucson Festival Of The Book March 12, 2011



i will also in a moment had the honor of introducing our wonderful authors who'll make up this panel. first though i would like to take a moment to acknowledge in thank the organizers of the tucson festival of books, all the sponsors and in particular university medical center center for sponsoring this venue. we have got an hour for a discussion and here's how it is going to work. i'm going to say a few words to welcome and introduce our panel is. i have prepared some questions for them to get our discussion going and hopefully you will have some questions also later on. i will invite you to make your way up to one of the two microphones, one here in when there. we will have a chance to ask about what is maybe on your mind. right after a discussion the others will go to the signing area and set up in the madden media signing area number one, it 10b and they will be happy to continue our discussion with you one-on-one and even more happy to sign a book that you buy either out here in the foyer or at the signing area. this session features three books and five authors. two of the authors or journalists, one is a dancer and the make or, one is a businessman in restauranteur and another is a position. they all share a deep commitment to telling true stories. they all came to their common subjects through different tasks that we are going to hear about. the forward to crossing would -- in the forward to crossing with the virgin one of the three books we are going to be talking about today it opens with a nine line poem i leslie marmon celko who is here, not with us right now but doing her own thing out in them all. if i can read it to you just to get us to see where all of these folks are coming from. i will tell you something about stories he said. they are just entertainment. don't be fooled. they are all we have, you see, and all we have to fight off illness and death. you don't have anything if you don't have the stories. now i am honored to introduce five authors who have found, digested, interpreted, written and shared powerful stories that matter. margaret regan rat "the death of josseline" immigration stories from the arizona mexico border lands. it was just released in paperback. barker writes for the tucson weekly and is one of dozens journalism awards for border reporting two of the national awards. she also writes about the arts and stories about the irish immigrant experience. she lives in tucson. sam quinones is the author of the nonfiction books, true tales from another mexico, the lynch mob, the popsicle -- and the bronx and also "antonio's gun" and "delfino's dream," true tales of mexican migration his most recent. he is now received -- reporting for "the los angeles times" where he covers drug trafficking and gangs. just a couple of kudos about him. the "san francisco chronicle" called him the most original american writer on the border and mexico out there. the "l.a. times" book review said over the last 15 years he has filed the best dispatches about mexican migration and its effect on the united states in mexico bar none. he lives in southern california. kathryn ferguson is the co-author of crossing with the virgin, stories from the migrant trail. she is also a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. she is produced and directed to feature-length award-winning documentaries the unholy connemara andrea of the sky. she is native to sony in and she has volunteered with samaritans since 2004. jed parks a co-author of crossing with the virgin spent most of his career in the restaurant business. he became involved with the samaritans movement in the fall of 2005 and norma price also a co-author of crossing with the virgin moved to tucson after a 25 year career in medicine in atlanta where she was an oncologist. she has lived here for just over 13 years. norm of volunteers at a local medical clinic and for the uninsured and also the samaritans. thank you you guys for being here and welcome to all of you. [applause] margaret let me start with you. you are mainly in arts editor and a writer. you covered art openings and you covered ballet. how did your interest in immigration issues start and get you into this whole world? >> okay yeah. i have been in the tucson weekly for a long time but i've also done general assignment reporting and i had done a number of stories, a lot about downtown development. i did a story about urban renewal which was very focused on the hispanic population, but around the year 2000, i first started and all of this first started hearing about the deaths of migrants in the arizona desert. probably some of you know that the federal government had more or less shut down the urban crossing in san diego and el paso and suddenly we were getting a lot of migrants coming to the place in between which was arizona. and because arizona is so treacherous, we were starting to see large numbers of deaths. so the summer of 2000 and editorial meeting in the tucson weekly i said, we have to cover this. we are the longform journalists and paper closest to the arizona border. it is our duty to cover this in being a small paper in being short-staffed, suddenly the assignment was mind. they said why don't you cover it? so i said i was happy to and they sent me down to douglas for several days. douglas is the border town in southeastern arizona which was then kind of the immigrant highway into the united states, and it was a very shocking experience for me to go down there and see the helicopters and see the border patrol everywhere up and down the the , arresting people. while i was there, i did a right along with the border patrol and had the opportunity to interview a man whose cousin had died in his arms a few hours earlier that day. they were from guatemala and that man told me the story of their long and ultimately tragic journey. that story that man told me really changed my life and moved me tremendously and ever since i have tried to cover immigration whenever i can while still upholding my other duties that the tucson weekly. so that is how it got started. >> thanks margaret. samia said your whole career as a reporter but that way you ever dare to books is kind of anything that it just a just the facts kind of approach. could you talk about why you chose to use real stories without real people to shed light on the immigration issue? >> mainly because they think the topic naturally lends itself to that. if you want to think about it you are talking about a mass movement of people probably the largest mass movement of people from one country to another in the last century, coming from a geography, a culture, traditions radically different than our own, coming to a place that they have really no knowledge of. it is like you know, i mean these are kind of distant story sometimes. so i see that every immigrant has these -- i began to see that every immigrant has these magnificat stories within him or her. i also however believe that as a reporter and really as a storyteller you have to not link when the story reflects say poorly on someone who people might want to view as a noble figure and that is why a lot of my stories i've really try hard to not avoid the blemishes. i did a story about zeus garcia who was kind of like the michael jordan of the oaxacan indian basketball in the mountains and he is now a bus boycott been l.a.. he had made the trip and he came with this deep desire to teach americans about the true purity of basketball which he knew, which we did not because we corrupted it with the nba. this was really his point of view basically, and along the way he had this great kind of mission, this grade of session to teach us about the real way basketball should be played and to make sure the oaxacan indians did not the way basketball should be played once they got here. but along the way you know he ignored his life -- wife. his kid who he named urban or urban magic johnson, he kind of did quite attend to him as well as he could. still the man was a remarkable figure. it is this kind of deep complexity and humanity that i loved about the immigrant stories that also lend themselves to asking about which is the longform tradition of stories. you want to tell a full story that also requires endless amounts of energy. i mean really really lots and lots and lots of energy because a three-hour interview is not enough. you are talking about day sometimes and repeating. what i would often do with a lot of immigrants that i interviewed is do an interview two or three hours maybe, come back to another couple of hours and another two days and then come back a week later or two weeks later after i had time to think about it after i had time to knock around in my brain new ideas and had written some about it and had new questions comes out of the writing. from that i had a whole other set of questions and i began to think of how i might tell such detail. i really believe that storytelling, you have to start thinking of how would you tell this orally sometimes? how would you begin it? what way would you bring the people in? and some stories have naturally told themselves and others you really need to dig down into people because a lot of people will tell you certain things but won't tell you the full truth. i think for example lots and lots of people, i have met numerous immigrants now. i really think this is the second-leading cause of people coming to the united states is murder and i'm not talking about the latest stuff. i am talking about murder as one of the main reasons why people in the northwest of mexico are escaping murder, not wanting to be killed and family feuds. you need to dig down and the only way to truly tell deeply those stories is that level. >> thanks sam. you came out of fine arts, dancer, teacher and filmmaker. you began volunteering and what i'm curious about is how you came to choose a book, written words with hardly any pictures really to tell the story you found as opposed to one of the numerous other avenues of expression you have been exposed to your whole life. >> because there is not so much equipment. [laughter] really. i am from tucson, and so i would go to and from mexico my entire life. we would cross the border. it was a wire. that means maybe somewhere there is still a wire out there but he would just step over and i would go visit my friends in the ballot in the area or we would go to the port of entry. and so i have a lot of friends there and they are fabulous people. maybe a little bit less so but some very fabulous. when i joined the samaritans with my friends here, i was just appalled at the deaths that we would see out there like for the last decade. it has been called a decade of death. there are so many people who don't make it through the desert so i decided to start writing the stories with my friends here, and what i wanted to do was in words, i just wanted to make a connection to the interior life of somebody who was crossing. and we would meet people, we too may people on the trails are in the hospitals and as sam said you really need to talk to somebody for about five years before you really know them. so we would have maybe just an hour or 15 minutes on a desert trail or some people with meat in the hospital and we would talk for several days. in that situation i would write down stories and as we are talking i would ask them pretty intimate questions and after a wild -- it is very immediate. i haven't been in a war but i have met people who are quite ill out in the desert and there is nothing extraneous. so you talk very intensely and very quickly. i would spend as many days as i could with them to find out what happened. for example one man was on a train and he got his foot crushed. i asked if i could write his story and then i went to the place where it happens so it is in the desert near the railroad tracks near nogales. i sat up there because the man sat there for five days. he couldn't walk and he didn't know how to get anywhere. so i just sat out there for a day, and i took a picnic lunch and started writing down how terrified i would need. so i decided to use --. >> i saw some of you cringe when she talked about the crushed foot. the photograph, thank heavens is black as black and white in the book. it made me cringe also. norma you spent your whole life as a physician, most of it as an oncologist and i can imagine you have been part of -- through the years but have also had too many experiences where you felt helpless and when the patient died. even though the cancer ward in atlanta and the desert couldn't be more different, i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how being a medical person either did or didn't prepare you for volunteering as a samaritan? >> one of the things that was fortuitous was win for a short time before i moved to arizona when i got out of oncology. >> can you move the mic up a tiny bit closer? >> when i retired from oncology i practiced urgent care medicine which is like family medicine, so that rots red -- broad spectrum help prepare me a great deal. i always had a place in my heart for the underdog, the disenfranchised and when i saw the reports of all the people dying in the desert i felt like something had to be done. i came to learn that these people were noble, strong, people who had accomplished a lot and because of circumstances in their homes state, they had to come up here to support their families and to be able to eat and send their children to school. but we kept seeing more and more medical problems in addition to the deaths. there were a lot of people that were sent to the hospital. as catherine mentioned, the man who had his foot crushed, there are a lot of people who come from southern mexico and central america and they ride the trains, and they are not in the club car. they are riding on top of the train or on the side of the train. we have stories about this in our book and catherine tells a story about people writing on the side of the train. one of margaret stories in margaret's book tells about a pregnant woman who rode on the side of the train. so there a lot of injuries there but then there are a lot of medical problems as well because dehydration is the number one medical issue that we see in the desert. we see people with severe blisters and when you talk about blisters, it is not like you hike 5 miles and get a bad blister on the back of your heel. these are like earns. all these medical problems kept unfolding and as i have been with the samaritans now since 2002, i feel like i have been able to continue my medical expertise and continue my medical practice in a new way. >> thank you. ted lets hear from you. >> i'm making some assumptions here but anyway coming out of the restaurant business i would imagine you probably had a whole lot of one-on-one contact with undocumented people before you began to volunteer, burning about their families, their lives working in the food line together, hearing their crossing stories. if that is the case out of that motivate you to begin your volunteer service and to write your parts of crossing with the version seeing the real folks who worked with? first of all is my perception accurate? >> yes. i started the business in 85 and most anybody who works in a restaurant has met somebody that is undocumented or it is a migrant. i owned a restaurant here in tucson for eight years and hirey undocumented migrants. the business community really does not want the flow of migrants to discontinue, because it is such a big part of business. but these people work really hard and they work really cheap. i take advantage of that and so does a good portion of business in america. they can get somebody to work for minimum wage and work an eight hour shift and take a half an hour break and work really hard. you use that person, so i don't know that i would say i am guilty of the big yeah i am guilty of it. i always felt that when i came to this work, after i sold my restaurant and came to this work, suddenly what i had heard my employees or fellow workers say came to the forefront and i really saw that they had many times to risk their lives to come to the united united stateo work. and in most cases, they just want to work. they don't want to live here. they want to earn money and send it home and go home but what has happened down on the border now makes it very difficult for these people to return. >> that is getting into my next question for sam. sam in addition to the gripping stories of individuals in your books, you make a point that not a whole lot of authors on this side of the border get into and that is one thing migration in america isn't just about undocumented people and u.s. cities. it has profound effects south of the border also and in "antonio's gun" and "delfino's dream" that came out loud and clear. how did you become aware of that and why did you decide to broaden the context of your stories to include what is going on south of the border also? >> the first trip, i went down to mexico to study spanish for three months and i ended up staying for 10 years. i went down there and my spanish was okay but not good enough to be a reporter. along the way a friend of mine from, thomas dodson where i've been a crime reporter for several years invited me to go to his town's annual fiesta and as it turned out everybody in that town was either living in stockton or chicago or indianapolis or dallas i believe, one of those cities or l.a.. so that first week i wandered around and it was there that i just understood, began to understand i should say, it began a tenure track through the immigrant villages of mexico. first of all focusing on the houses. immigration to the united states because of the nature of mexican immigration to proximity and dollar has created a massive massive urban renewal essentially and lots and lots of villages where people build houses for years, decades because there are no mortgages for people or folks, mortgages that they could afford so they would get into these -- build their houses all but the idea at some .40, 30 or 40 years down the road at some point they are going to retire and go back home and retire to that house. that is the central part of their lives here really i think oftentimes in and it never happens. one of the great poignant ironies, kind of like a checkoff novel or short story, he works all his life and at the time that the house is finished and ready to be lived and he realizes he is not going home. he has kids and grandkids. he is used to the services in the united states. he doesn't want his brother -- his brother was kidnapped last time he went down about kinds of things like that. people stop going so it was in this town i began to understand these huge changes on the mexican side. i also began to understand one very important thing about immigration i think is really true and certainly in mexico and that is that immigration from mexico does almost nothing to change the reasons why people leave for that region. changes the circumstances for the family for the individual immigrant and his family what have you but you can go to all these immigrant immigrant areas and you will see over and over and over no jobs, dirty, 4050 years into it, millions of dollars that come down in remittances to these areas and there is no work and there is good reason for that, because people are used to raises up in the united states. people are going to be working. people are gone. the best people are gone. the real-life blood is up here not down in those villages. all of this kind of became very clear to me as i wandered from village to village talking to people over the 10 years i lived down there and talking to people up here as well back then and since, that the effect is we see it up here and it has got all kinds of controversial effects positive and negative as ted was saying. there is a whole other change

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