Students at the Walter Cronkite School traveled to Mexico and Nicaragua as part of a depth reporting class and shared their experiences at a panel discussion Monday night.
Southwest Borderlands Initiative Professor Rick Rodriguez, a professor for the depth reporting class, moderated the Must See Mondays event. The panel featured students Steven Totten, Jessie Wardarski, Theresa Poulson, Dominic Valente and Molly Bilker. Totten and Wardarski were on last year’s trip to Chiapas, Mexico.
Rodriguez chose to go to Chiapas because of the 20-year anniversary of the Zapatista Revolution, Totten said. Poulson, Valente and Bilker traveled to Nicaragua because a canal is to be built in the southern part of the country. Most of the stories the students worked on revolved around the canal.
The Cronkite School offers a Latino specialization which, Rodriguez said, begins in the fall of every school year with the Latino and Transnational Issues seminar. Students from that class are selected for the depth reporting class the following semester, which prepares students for a foreign reporting trip during spring break.
“It’s really a working trip,” Rodriguez said. “People learn to … work hard together and produce really top-quality journalism on multimedia platforms.”
For the trip to Mexico, Totten produced a piece about basketball courts.
“That story was about how throughout Chiapas specifically, and most of southern Mexico, there’s this uncanny abundance of basketball courts, especially in the indigenous villages,” Totten said.
Totten said he found the courts were used not only for sports, but also as a space to meet, for festivals and any kind of community gathering. He said the government was trying to use the courts as a way to build better relations with indigenous tribes, though there were claims of people getting tied up to the courts by the paramilitaries, who would threaten to set them on fire.
Wardarski said reporting abroad was not easy because she was not fluent in Spanish, but a connection she had with a little girl showed that body language is just as important.
“You have to rely a lot on other people in the class that are fluent, which I felt bad about, but everyone is so willing to help,” Wardarski said. “We were such a team.”
On the trip to Nicaragua, Poulson shot a video that she said focuses on farm workers that live along the proposed canal site.
“The reason I (focused) on the farmers (is because) agriculture is big in Nicaragua, especially in this region where the canal is going to run, but they’ve also been a huge force in the protest movement against the canal,” Poulson said.
The farmers were not scared of those involved with the canal, such as the military and police, Poulson said, but of losing their land. The farmers were too attached to their land to consider the possibility of an economic boom as a result of the canal, Poulson said.
Just a few hours before going to Nicaragua, Valente was planning on reporting about a kidney disease that is only in Nicaragua and Sri Lanka. But after death threats were made to the organization Valente and his partner were going to work with, the story had to be dropped.
Instead, Valente ended up shooting a photo story that focused on two families that will be displaced by the construction of the canal.
“We talked to them, we made them feel comfortable and then once they got used to us, and that took a couple of hours, we just started documenting their way of life,” Valente said.
Bilker’s reporting strayed from the focus of the canal, and instead focused on renewable energy. Once she was in Nicaragua, Bilker said she learned energy bills are really high. She said a resident told her their energy bill is four times their rent.
Bilker said between the rolling blackouts the country faced a few years ago and high energy bills, Nicaragua has no choice but to turn to renewable energy, which they have a lot of potential for. They have hardly any opportunity to cultivate oil and fossil fuels, she said, so they have to turn to the wind, sun and sugar canes, among other natural sources.
Grupo Fenix, an organization Bilker met with, provides solar panels for those in rural areas whose homes do not connect to Nicaragua’s energy grid.
The canal, which still might not be built, is expected to be 173 miles long and run from Brito, through Lake Nicaragua and exit at Punta Gorda, Rodriguez said.
Poulson said the canal is estimated to affect 7,000 to 20,000 households.
“(The students) become pretty much semi-experts at what they’re doing and they know a lot more than most people in this country about the subjects that they cover,” Rodriguez said. “And that’s what we’re intending to do with this program.”
Contact the reporter at haley.bosselman@asu.edu
Editor’s note: Molly Bilker is a Downtown Devil editor. She did not contribute to the reporting or editing of this story.
