Article first published in Vol. 37, 2020.
By Rachel Murphree Editor’s note: Rachel Murphree interviewed Alfredo Corchado on May 9, 2019, when he spoke to a college group of students, faculty and staff and then made a presentation to the larger El Paso Community that evening at the History Museum. This article is a composite of both events.
Image caption: Alfredo Corchado relaxes at Tequilas Restaurant in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Image courtesy of David E. Suros)
Rachel: A high school dropout who became an awardwinning journalist, author and teacher. That's one way to describe Alfredo Corchado. Leading figures in the field describe him as an expert storyteller, a giant, a voice for truth on both sides of the Border, a courageous reporter in the face of death threats and other intimidations. His latest book Homelands has been called essential reading, and I can attest to its power. I've read it twice and marked up my favorite passages.
Alfredo Corchado began his studies at EPCC,continued at UTEP and is now Mexico Border Bureau Chief for the Dallas Morning News. He is the author of Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness, and Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration. Homelands will be out in Mexico in Spanish under the title Patrias: Cuatro amigos, dos países y la gran migración Mexicana. He has received way too many awards for journalism to list them all because you are here to hear him, not me! He has been a fellow or a scholar at prestigious universities such as Harvard and the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. He's the former director of the Borderlands program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. We are so fortunate to be able to welcome him home to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of El Paso Community College and to speak to us on his journey, work and issues of identity and immigration. Please join me in welcoming Alfredo Corchado.
Alfredo: Thank you very much. Muchas gracias y buenas noches. She just listed a lot of awards, but to me, the biggest award is my mother and father who are here tonight. Mamá, Papá. Feliz Día de las Madres, Mamá
Rachel: So let's start at the beginning. How did you get to EPCC? You mentioned thinking that you thought you might be a hairdresser. Tell us more about that.
Alfredo: I was and still am a big fan of Warren Beatty and the movie Shampoo. I even told my mother that when we left Durango when I was six. Her biggest thing was that we all needed to get an education. My parents made the sacrifice to come to the United States and work in the fields of California so that their kids could have a better life. My father came first as a bracero. The word "education" was always there, but yet I betrayed them by dropping out of school. I noticed that after my friends graduated, they were coming back to the fields, and I thought there was no real value in that. I thought I was in love with the rancher's daughter, and we'd get married someday. I'd be the mayordomo of the fields, and all my friends would be working for me. But my mother never gave up.
I told her my dream was to someday own a '78 Camaro with the T-top. When I said that, she got a little twinkle in her eyes like she finally figured it out. She said, "Your dad and I will help you with the down payment, sign for the car, but you must do three things. First, you must leave California" (because all we knew there were fields and farm work). When we visited El Paso, my mother would always notice that Hispanics here wore ties, and that was where she wanted me to grow up. She heard about El Paso Community College where you could be a high school dropout and start all over again. "Second, you have to get an education. Third, you can't get married until you have a degree." So after one long miserable week, I picked the car and moved to El Paso, missing fall registration, and started school in the spring with absolutely no idea what I wanted to do.
I met with my counselor Danny Franco who asked me what my degree was or what I wanted to study. I told him I was there to get the basics and then figure things out. He gave me an aptitude test and he said, "You're very curious about the world; perhaps you may think about getting into government, maybe become a foreign diplomat or a reporter, a foreign correspondent." Something that had to do with foreign countries sounded good because I was so obsessed with Mexico and reconnecting with my roots and my language. Danny talked to one of my English teachers, Penny Byrne, who said to me, "Your English is terrible, and I think I can help you with that. You can work at the school newspaper, El Conquistador. I'll give you extra credit and you can volunteer: bring us pizza, bring us drinks, water and just kind of hang out in the newsroom."
After doing this for a couple of days, there was a little explosion in the biology classroom. Penny said,"Run, ask when did it happen, what happened, why did it happen, how did it happen (you know, the W's and the H), and then come back and I'll help you write the story." It was my first front page story, and there was something about seeing my name on the front page. A few weeks later I became the features editor, not because I was good, but because there was no one else who wanted the job!
That's really how my career in journalism began, quite by accident. So to this day, I'm like The Accidental Reporter. Angela, my fiancée who's here, says that I'm like a Mexican American Forrest Gump: I happen to be at he right place at the right time for a lot of big events, including the< biology explosion.
Many of the students were from Juárez, and through them I started going to marches and protests. This was the early 1980s when you had the Francisco Barrio Terrazas / PAN movement. Imagine being in your late teens, early '20s, and suddenly you're a reporter at a college newspaper – a foreign correspondent. You're walking across into Ciudad Juárez, crisscrossing the border, and you realize what a beautiful, dynamic laboratory this whole region is. You're telling community college readers how what's happening in Juárez is impacting our community. That was the beginning, and I say jokingly it was like the beginning of the end. Once you get journalism into your genes, it becomes an incurable disease you can't get away from.
To her credit, Penny loved our enthusiasm, and she talked to a group in Colorado who helped fund a big vision of a Borderlands project to bring together the communities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Today I got to see the first Borderlands issue we wrote. I haven't seen it in 30 or more years, and I see we're covering the same issues now that we were in 1983.
Image caption: Rachel Murphree (holding the 1983 Borderlands issue edited by former student Corchado), Alfredo Corchado, and Northwest Head Librarian Lorely Ambriz gather before his presentation. (Photo by Fernie Garcia)
I interviewed Dr. Mauricio de la Garza for that issue. Mauricio had just written a book called La Ultima Llamada (Last Call), saying basically this was our last chance for Mexico. With this book he led part of the anxiety across Northern Mexico about the PRI who had been in office at the time for 50 to 60 years. They asked me to pick him up at the airport in Ciudad Juárez, and I kept hoping there was a long line to get back to El Paso because this guy was fascinating. We ended up talking for hours, about how Mexico needed good, critical journalists. I was peppering one of the leading intellectuals in Mexico with questions, and that encounter was transformative.
Twenty years later, I was covering the Zetas and drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, and this guy comes up to me and says in Spanish that I reminded him of Mauricio de la Garza. This was the editor of the newspaper El Mañana who said Mauricio was a family friend. It was a Wow moment. El Paso Community College came back to me, and let me tell you, this place will never leave you. It happened to me that day.
Rachel: So how did you get into writing books? I imagine that's quite different from being a journalist.
Alfredo: It's completely different. Again it was accidental. At that point, the Dallas Morning News had the biggest Mexican bureau of any U.S. publication. We had a reporter who just covered drug trafficking, and my goal was to show the other Mexico, the one that in many ways we as immigrants become nostalgic about. My passions were the culture, the music, the immigration story, U.S.-Mexico relations. But I started questioning why Mexico wasn't doing more. Why wasn't it becoming a stronger, more powerful nation that we as Mexicans in the United States believed it could be? I realized the depths of corruption in Mexico, the blood that was being shed all over the country. I began looking at the killings of the women of Juárez, and it opened up a different world. It's the dark part of Mexico that I think many of us tried to overlook; we tried to not pay attention. But once I started paying attention, writing about it became like a second career. One thing led to another.
There was a death threat issued, apparently against me. It was like the earthquakes we lived through in Mexico City. Everything was about to tumble. Angela and I were in our apartment there getting ready to go out and celebrate an award I had just received, and I thought we should cancel. My colleague, to his credit, said, "No, if they're going to go after you, they're going to go after us. As American journalists, we have to stick together." The importance of forming solidarity is so important, and my colleague made me understand it that evening. I didn't tell my parents about what happened because I had promised them not to write on drug traffickers. I spent weeks, if not months, investigating to find out who put the hit out on me. I tried to send them the message that it wasn't personal, it was just journalism. The paper changed my windows and sent me bodyguards, but it was never the same. I needed to get out of Mexico.
Luckily I got a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University, a fellowship that's given to about 25 journalists from all over the world. It's a year when you do a lot of soul-searching and you try to figure out things, and that's how the book idea came about for Midnight in Mexico. Here's the accidental part.
I always tell people if you want to write a book (and I think a lot of people want to write books), you need three things: you need two Argentinians and a Swedish author! These were colleagues of mine at the Neiman. They wanted to go to New York City for a week to talk to editors, publishers, agents, and they kept telling me, "You've got to come. You have to come with us." And I kept thinking, "Man, they really love me. These guys really missed me. It's only been a year, but I'm like family. I later found out that what they really wanted me for was the Marriott points. So I went there for 48 hours. I was the only one in the group who didn't have a book idea. I just wanted to see what that world was about.
During the conversation, the others were pitching stories, and the agent turned and asked me what I was pitching. I looked at that agent without a thing to say; I just kind of stared. Then the Swedish journalist said,"He's got stories that are the real thing. He's been covering the women of Juárez, he's been covering drug traffickers." The Argentinian author said, "He's like Roberto Bolaño, but he's the real thing." With that kind of introduction I didn't have to say a thing.
The agent told me he wanted to stay in touch and that same evening he wrote, "You have a book to write, and I'd like for you to give it a shot" Long story short, I ended up writing Midnight in Mexico, but when I wrote my manuscript, he threw it back all marked up in red saying, "Maybe this isn't for you. Maybe we should meet again in New York City. " I got there and he told me to look for a liquor store and pick my favorite tequila and bring it up. I thought,"Wow, this guy's got style. He wants to have a shot of tequila and then say it was nice knowing you, but it's not going to work out." I got there and unbeknownst to me, he took out his iPhone and was recording. He aid "Tell me what's it like being a son of Mexico who eaves and then comes back and witnesses the massacre of a Homeland."
I began just pouring my heart out and drinking tequila with him. An hour and a half later he said, "This is your book. It's not the stuff you're sending me. What you're sending me is stuff you're writing as a journalist, but I need you to pull yourself away from the sidelines, and pour your heart out.Tell me really what that means. How does it feel?"
So when you ask me what's it like to write a book, it's a whole different dimension. As a journalist, I'm always very shy about giving opinions because I respect the profession, but as an author you have to put yourself out there. Midnight in México was about the kid who comes back home, and starts questioning the motherland. Why is this or that happening? You see your parents' sacrifice, but you also see what that's doing to you as a Mexican immigrant. Midnight in México is el México de allá. Homelands is el México de acá.
Homelands to me was about this side. In a nation of immigrants, how and where do we as Mexicans, as Latino immigrants, fit in? It's really a conversation that we began to have at my mother's restaurant, Freddy's Café, many years before.
So many of our young people graduate and there are there are no opportunities in El Paso; it's a low wage community and so many have to leave. Freddy's Breakfast Forum came about from students (mostly from EPCC and some from UTEP) getting together asking: How do you stop the brain drain? How do you become a better community, a better city? It wasn't structured, we were just eating menudo, huevos rancheros, and debating when suddenly politicians found out what we were doing. Congressman Ron Coleman came by. Then Governor Ann Richards,Hillary Clinton, Francisco Barrio Terrazas from Juárez dropped in, and it became more of a community forum. But there was still the question: How do we fit in? Where do we fit in?
Image caption: Corchado's article on Mauricio de la Garza was featured in the 1983 premier issue of Borderlands.
I began Homelands with that question and the story of four friends and the last 30 years of U.S.-Mexico relations. But the heart of that book is paying tribute to the Mexican immigrants who came to this country in mass numbers during the Bracero era and before, who contributed to building this country into what it is today. It was me paying tribute to my father, paying tribute to my mother and trying to help Americans understand that that great Mexican migration is over. 2007 was the last time the numbers were up; since then it's just dwindled. I thought it was the right time to try to write a book to pay tribute to a generation.
Rachel: So in the book you tell us how you met those friends in Philadelphia. How did you get there?
Alfredo: Frank Allen, who was the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, began to recruit me in May1986 because he saw a diverse America growing, and he wanted the newsroom to reflect that. He wanted reporters to be a mirror of this country, and he thought what better place than El Paso where you have bicultural reporters who can penetrate communities and tell different stories? That was the beauty of being from this area, being able to connect on both sides. This was the heyday of the PAN movement in Mexico and Chihuahua. There was nothing or no one that was going to pull me away because I was so hooked on that story. I kept putting him off, month after month. He thought this is a Mexican American kid who does not want to leave Mom and Pop. He's not listening.
He came to El Paso in November that year, and my mom said, "Invite him over. We'll make enchiladas for him and we'll talk." So I was translating their conversation and I was telling her, "Mom, don't feel like I have to go, because I don't want to go." My mom listened to Frank saying, "Your son has a lot of potential but he needs a mentor; he needs someone who can really help him. I can do that." By the end of the conversation, my mom said, "Take him." I felt so betrayed! But she said, "Can you wait until the holidays are over?" They agreed on the first week of January. Bam!
I remember being at the airport when I realized I didn't have the right clothes and I bought a sweatshirt ... if El Paso Community College had had a sweatshirt there, I would have bought theirs ... but I bought a UTEP one. Frank, thinking ahead, showed up with a warm jacket for me. We walked outside, and it was the coldest I've ever felt.
I had asked El Paso friends if they knew of any Mexicans in Philadelphia and they said there was one: Primitivo Rodriguez. I kept his number in my wallet and called and called, until one day he answered "Bueno" and I thought – sounds like a Mexican. We decided to try out a new restaurant called Tequilas. I was covering Campbell Soup and consumer issues for the Wall Street Journal at the time. Being very cynical, I said it was probably part of a franchise, a Chi Chis. But we tried it out: Mecano was playing, there was an altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe, pictures of Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, and I was thinking ... these American marketers, they think of everything. There was a guy with a mustache who we joked was probably Italian and he came up to us and said, "David Suro, a sus ordenes." Mexican!
We came together, the three of us, and Ken Trujillo, a New Mexican, and those are the four friends I write about. We lived the last 30 years: IRCA (the Immigration Reform and Control Act), NAFTA, the integration of two countries, the drug trafficking war and, obviously, Trump. And that is really the makeup of Homelands, weaving together all this history and how these two countries really became one in many ways. And now how there's an attempt to break it up.
Rachel:I think you mean the election of 2016. Can you speak to the questions of "How do we fit in?" and "How should we respond in the age of Trump?"
Alfredo: At least in my lifetime, this is the hardest time to really answer those questions. I'm so lucky that I live between La Condesa in Mexico City and the Border. When I travel in Mexico, I still feel the reach of the cartels and corruption, but it's so interesting to feel so much hope there, as opposed to how I feel these days in the United States. I find that troubling for us as a country and as immigrants. Would it be sweet justice for people from the border to really take back their narrative and set the agenda? To be the ones that really speak up, participate, vote, whether Republican or Democrat, and really have our say? I think this is our moment. We have to get on stage like the Irish, Germans, Italians and Hungarians from the past, and make sure our voices are heard. It was interesting in November to see the impact of El Paso. I think it was the first time I saw so many El Pasoans turning out to vote. It is a very hopeful sign.
I write in Homelands that Angela and I tried to give up journalism at one point, teaching at Arizona State University. We were trying to teach students from ASU in Nogales what a presidential election meant for both countries – for the United States and Mexico – and the importance of the Hispanic community and the importance of them becoming political players. We had been grappling from the beginning whether or not this was what we wanted to do, but when the election results came in, we looked at each other and we said, "We''ve got to get back!" We knew that the Border was going to become the place of attacks. It would be demonized. This was why we became journalists. This was the moment, the reason, the place. By the next morning we decided that we were going to come back.
Rachel: So ... what is next for you? Are there plans for a third book?
Alfredo: Patrias (the Spanish edition) comes out in Mexico in two weeks. The English and Spanish paperback editions come out this fall, and I've been writing a new epilogue that's based entirely here in El Paso. It will be Bloomsbury, an American publisher, teaming up with Vintage, and it will be a bilingual/bicultural launch for the very first time. I hope to launch it in El Paso because this is home. There's not a third book in my mind yet, but I'm sure there will be something to work on. And there's so much to cover as we head into the elections of 2020 that I hope to focus much, much more on journalism, and then see what's next.
Rachel: Well, we'll be certainly be watching for your articles. And now let's open it up for questions.
Audience Questions for Corchado:
Questioner: What is your personal theory about who was responsible for the murder of the women maquiladoras workers?
Image caption: Corchado spoke to students, faculty and the public in May 2019 as part of EPCC's Spring Arts Festival (Photo by Fernie Garcia)
Alfredo: I have personal theories that I won't say because I don't have evidence to back it up, so I would just be smearing someone's reputation. This was one of the stories that the Morning News was incredibly committed to looking into. We worked on this for at least two or three years, and with the help of a colleague, we pointed the finger at a group called La Linea which is part of the Juárez cartel. My colleagues in Juárez told me there's just no evidence of La Linea. But that's what we came up with after talking to many, many people.
Looking back, I was so naïve. I had accepted an invitation to speak at a journalist forum in Juárez days after, and I remember as I left the forum I got a call saying they knew exactly where I was (including the street corner). I ran to Dante's office, a lawyer, and he said, "Well, you hit a nerve!" Dante put me in the back of his SUV and drove me to the bridge where we went through customs, and I got back to El Paso. Weeks, months later, the headlines suddenly became about La Linea. I thought that was a big, significant breakthrough.
Some of the people who helped us at the time worked at El Norte de Ciudad Juárez, another paper. They were told, "Tell Corchado the evidence was right, but he missed a name." We later reported that too. So we felt like we were getting closer. But in retrospect, there were so many women and men being killed that after a while we had to leave Juárez because of the killings in Monterey and other places. I just wrote a story this week looking at how the drug war today is even worse than it was at the height of the coverage, but we're not really covering it anymore. As journalists I think there's a sense of fatigue. I've said to my editors that we have to get back to that story because whatever happens in Mexico is going to have a huge impact on Texas and on the rest of United States.
[Alfredo, summarizing a question in Spanish]: She's talking about living with the ambiguities I mentioned earlier, the ambiguous world of belonging to two countries. She spoke specifically about Walmart and the introduction of McDonald's to Mexico City, and how you may reject one but you want to grab the burger and the fries. It's a constant battle of these two worlds going on.
I think one of the things that Mexico did right was creating an office that was specifically targeted to build bridges with Mexican immigrants. There was a big campaign to identify certain Mexican leaders throughout the United States, bring them back and turn them into ambassadors for both countries. The goal was to create a soft policy landing so that policies aren't as harsh against Mexico. That was something that I started covering under [President] Zedillo that I thought that was fascinating to see, and then Vicente Fox took it to a new level. The United States started catching on under Presidents Bush and Obama. We began to see a creation of a similar program to try to identify Mexican Americans who could go to Mexico and again create these bridges of understanding. It led to a softer landing for both sides.
I think in many ways it is Mexican Americans who are now being torn because of today's climate between both countries. I live in Mexico City and you can't get away from Starbucks, from all these U.S. franchises. They're everywhere.
And now you have the "fifis" as [President] Lopez Obrador calls them who sprinkle their Spanish with English words and so forth. It's a different attitude. Has it totally changed? No. You'll find a lot of pockets throughout Mexico where there's still that pushback. I never thought I'd see a day in America where journalists would have to seek protection, but that's where we are today. You have leaders in both countries who unfortunately see the press as an enemy of the people. I think it's dangerous for both countries, but especially dangerous for Mexico because it is such a young fledgling democracy. To refer to the press as "fifis" or to not understand the value of an open critical press, is something that's very troubling, and it doesn't help Mexico.
Questioner: What made you overcome your fears coming from an isolated place as you mentioned, and what motivates you to overcome the fear of being a Mexican inside of the U.S.?
Alfredo: It's a great question; I've never been asked that. It's not because I'm doing a 50th anniversary event for El Paso Community College, but I think in many ways EPCC helped me find a sense of not just purpose, but a sense of confidence. As a Mexican immigrant, I have an inherent inferiority complex that I never feel like I'm good enough for this side, especially as a high school dropout. Coming to El Paso Community College gave me the beginning of the foundation, a sense of knowing what I was doing. More than anything, it accepted me. It accepted my bilingualism. It accepted my biculturalism. When that happens, it can transform you. Someone believing in you and giving you that opportunity can totally change especially a Mexican American kid, coming from that world.
The second thing was understanding my parents' sacrifice. Understanding that they came to this country, not for themselves; they came because of us. They wanted to give us the opportunity. They wanted to give us a better life. Once that gets into your head, you realize this is much bigger than yourself. You realize you have no excuse whatsoever.
My first few months in Philadelphia, I was miserable, I was crying, calling home. And then I’d think, “How did my parents feel in this country without speaking the language, without knowing anything?” Yet they navigated it. I have no excuse. It’s that inner motivation that keeps you going. And I know many of you are shy and don’t want to ask questions. You may think I’m successful now, but I have to tell you there have been some failures, and I think failures are also really important. They can define you and bring out your character.
One of my biggest failures was in El Paso Community College when Henry Irigoyen gave me the Ruben Salazar scholarship to work as an intern at a local TV station, KDBC Channel 4. I was writing stories for anchors Carole Barasch and Al Hinojos to read. One day Carole came to me and said she understood my parents had a restaurant, Freddy’s Café. And I thought, they want to go eat or maybe they want me to order something. Then she said, “You should really think about your career choice because I don’t think you’re a very good writer. You don’t have confidence; you seem very timid when you go out there.” I just sat there but inside I was crying. So I left. I left in that Camaro with the T-top down, listening to Juan Gabriel, thinking, “I’m gonna be the best damn waiter ever. I’m going to work in my parents’ restaurant, and maybe I can open up a chain of them along the border.”
And again, it’s the importance of a mentor. My UTEP professor said to me, “You need to stop dwelling on this. You should be a journalist. That’s what makes you happy. Go do it and prove Carole Barasch wrong.” I started at the UTEP newspaper and then got an internship at the Ogden Standard Examiner in Utah. Sweet justice, a year later Carole Barasch had to read on television, “Tonight we are proud to announce that our former intern, Alfredo Corchado, has received the top award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.” I look back on that now and think, you can’t allow people to kill your dream. If you have the motivation, if you have the inner drive, do what you’re going to do. And to her credit, Carole, many years later, came up to me and apologized. It was something that always stayed in her mind, and she was sorry for it.
Questioner: You speak of the last Mexican migration, and the dwindling numbers. As we see the older generation getting older, how do we refresh that immigrant blood if there are no more Mexicans moving over here? How do we keep that connection to Mexico alive and not lose our language or costumbres, especially with this anti-immigrant sentiment? People my generation or younger are saying, “That’s them, the others, we’re not one of them anymore,” because we might be two or three generations removed from that immigrant experience.
Alfredo: It’s a question that I wrestle with a lot when I see the younger generation and how removed we are becoming, especially with the environment today. I think a lot more people hesitate to identify with Mexico because in many places there is a strong anti-Mexico feeling, and yet at the same time you have other movements like Latinx. I do a lot of talks at colleges, and I’m always gratified by younger people who are saying, “This anti-immigrant rhetoric is doing the contrary. It’s making me embrace my culture more.” I try to speak to my nephews and nieces in Spanish as much as I can; I try to take them to Mexico often. But I think what Mexicans and Mexican Americans have (that maybe the Irish, Germans, Hungarians, and Italians didn’t have) is that Mexico will always be here. It will always be a 2,000-mile border right here, even though since the drug war, the crossing back and forth has dwindled. We don’t see as many El Pasoans today connecting with their grandmothers or their aunts or their cousins in Juárez. The drug war and now the long lines and the hassles of crossing the border have had a big impact, but I think it’s an individual thing that people like you are going to question.
I tell people if you live in El Paso, there's no excuse not to go to Mexico City. There's no excuse not to go to León Guanajuato. I bought plane tickets recently to Mexico City for around $120 round trip. In Mexico there's so much more than violence, but I don't see Americans being the target of that violence. That's a story that obviously is important, but there's so much culture, beauty, world-class museums and cinema. We have to just keep promoting that. I tell the Morning News that I will do that story about violence as long as I can also do this story or that story to try to balance the view.
It's a beautiful day in El Paso. I think the Chihuahuas are playing today, and you guys decided to come here. So I appreciate it. Thank you very much
Rachel: And we, of course, want to thank you so much, Alfredo. You have been so gracious for spending essentially the whole day with us even though you had a deadline this afternoon! We really appreciate that!
