Meet our Guests: John Kurc

John Kurc

Freelance Photographer and Filmmaker

Tucson, AZ

11/9/2021

In the YouTube video player, a mountainside covered in creosote bush erupts in plumes of dust and debris as if it has just been struck by an artillery shell. This is footage shot by John Kurc, a professional photographer and filmmaker, of dynamiting in Arizona’s Guadalupe Canyon to make way for the new wall on the US/Mexico border. Up until 2020, John photographed weddings and concerts, but as these two sectors virtually disappeared during the COVID-19 pandemic, he had time to focus his lens elsewhere.

John began to document the border and the issues surrounding it, inspired by a trip to Nogales, Mexico a year earlier. This documentation has been far from easy. John tells stories of the many negative interactions he has had with Border Patrol officials and the contractors building the wall, which is why he now wears a body cam whenever he is in the field collecting footage. He spent countless hours carefully observing the movements of crews building the wall so that he could time his drone flights to film the blasting. John is in the midst of creating a documentary that depicts the human suffering and decline of plant and animal populations caused by the border wall. The film will be released in the next couple of years although John wishes that it could reach viewers even sooner to highlight the pressing crises on the border.

By Morgan Sharp

Meet our Guests: Adriana Lopez

Adriana Lopez

Musician and Educator

El Paso, TX

11/3/21

     Adri Lopez’s powerful voice resounds throughout the city of El Paso. A musician and educator, Adri uses her vocal talent to fight for what she believes in: protecting culture and history in El Paso while spreading el cariño—a word with no direct English translation that refers to a special kind of love with tenderness, something that Adri feels is unique to El Paso and Juárez, its sister city directly across the Mexico border.

     Adri was born and raised in El Paso and has made her way back home after a decade away. In her time away from her home city she heard many narratives about El Paso that weren’t true to her experience. Wanting to correct these false conceptions, she gained an understanding and appreciation for the rich stories and history of El Paso. This experience brought her home—to the place where she feels el cariño.

     Led by her passion for writing, poetry, and especially music, Adri uses her talents to fight. Duranguito, El Paso’s oldest neighborhood is under threat by developers and the city council to be demolished to make space for a new stadium. Adri sees the importance of this place, for its historical value as the oldest part of the city, but also for the diversity of culture that it holds as a place of border and a first stop for many different groups entering the U.S. In the fight to protect Duranguito, Adri, along with historian David Romo, produces music with messages of revolution. Adri and David’s pieces vary in style, but all fall into the musical traditions of past residents of Duranguito, a nod to the diversity of culture that this place holds and that Adri hopes to preserve.

By Katie Wallace

Video credit: Haley Post

Meet our Educators: Victoria Blanco

Victoria Blanco

Writer

El Paso, TX

11/1/21 – 11/5/21

Standing at a lookout point above a sprawling cityscape, writer Victoria Blanco points out the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. Born and raised in El Paso, Victoria is deeply familiar with the richness and complexity that emerges from the U.S. - Mexico border. The border severs what Victoria calls a “cultural corridor” that runs south from El Paso to Juarez. She explains that this corridor is not only responsible for the flow of goods across the border but “also the flow of stories, of food, of families.”

  During a five-day writing workshop, Victoria emphasized the importance of seeing beyond the dominant narratives that mainstream news sources push about the border. She applies this lens to her writing, too: Victoria spoke to how writing genres are both a helpful framework for writing but can also act as a tool of restriction. She encouraged Semester in the West students to “bend the lines of genre” in their writing to tell stories that hold more nuance. In her own writing, Victoria often combines memoir style storytelling with her anthropological research with indigenous communities in Northern Mexico. 

With family on both sides of the border, Victoria is accustomed to hours-long lines that stand between her and loved ones. Victoria is no stranger to the way the border separates but does not let it confine her movement between the two countries.  “They can build their walls as high as they want,” she tells us, “But I’m going to come here with my kids, I’m going to cross the border, I’m going to go visit my in-laws four blocks away. And I’m never going to stop doing it.”

By Alli Shinn