It’s early on a Friday evening and presses at The McAllen Monitor churn out folded pages awash in warm-toned ink, readying a section front that will honor soon-to-graduate high school seniors in this Texas border city of about 143,000.
Men in dark blue polo shirts tend to computers showing page layouts and corral stacks of newspapers as they flow off the multistory machine. Deputy Editor Michael Rodriguez, who was born and raised here in the Rio Grande Valley, walks through the production, shaking hands and greeting the polo-shirted workers by name. Rodriguez assumed the editorial helm of this 110-year-old publication in January 2018, one year before President Trump’s highly publicized visit to McAllen in support of a border wall. It might seem an auspicious time to work in local news at the border — after all, national, capital-M Media flocks to your home, your turf, wants your story — but Rodriguez is wary. He expresses doubt outsiders, even other journalists, understand his job — or the Valley. “It feels condescending for national media to come in here and cover this area like it’s a fringe location,” Rodriguez says. “It almost feels like we’re a puppy you need to pet on the head, like, ‘Good job, you’re doing the best with what you have.’” Rodriguez noticed when Trump turned the megaphone on the border and big-city journalists flocked there. He was, in part, grateful they came and could help fact-check Trump’s “invasion” narrative that projects suspicion and scorn. But he, and other local border journalists, wonder if this “parachute journalism” only reinforces that the border is a fringe location, violent and “other.” Rodriguez has been asked why he has just one reporter, Lorenzo Zazueta-Castro, assigned to the immigration beat. People often think it’s a resources problem, that a local paper simply can’t afford to devote more attention to immigration stories which have captured national attention. This isn’t entirely wrong: Like many local papers, The Monitor has grown leaner, more economical with its staff. As Rodriguez says, “We are all a general assignment reporter.” But this seemingly minimized attention to immigration is also a deliberate editorial decision. “We do have to be positioning ourselves as elders in some way,” he says. “We also don’t want to be a part of alarm. We don’t want to be alarmists. It just feels like we’d be playing into a certain narrative. We would feel used in ... what they’re trying to create on the national level, namely fear.” Zazueta-Castro, who has covered immigration and federal courts for The Monitor for the past three-and-a-half years, was skeptical of immigration reporting long before Trump came to town. “I didn’t necessarily want to cover immigration because I’m too closely tied to that,” he said. “I walk in to those facilities and I think about my mom when she came to this country and we were in a [expletive] prison cell. I remember being in a prison cell in Nogales.”
Zazueta-Castro’s mother brought him and his brother across the border illegally into Nogales, Arizona, in 1989, when he was 3 years old. The memories sometimes overwhelm him when he reports from Border Patrol facilities or interviews people who were recently detained. “In that sense, I still think that it’s a bad call that I made to do this beat, because I’ll break down in front of somebody,” he said. “But I think I leave those interviews with even more resolve to keep telling stories.” Rodriguez doesn’t see border security as his community’s biggest threat. He cites diabetes as the area’s most pressing issue and is instead looking to increase the paper’s public health coverage. However, he also knows they can’t ignore federal government action, and rhetoric, at the border. People talk about it. Hidalgo county, where McAllen is located, is 92 percent Latino or Hispanic, according to 2018 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Rodriguez is proud The Monitor’s editorial page has taken stances against proposed border wall additions. “Of course we would because it would change us,” Rodriguez said. “It would cut us off from what made us who we are.” |