I recently asked friends and colleagues on my personal Facebook page to recommend recent journalism on Mexico in English; the goal was to revise and update the last two weeks of my "Modern Mexico" syllabus for the coming semester (the course has a significant journalism component). I thought I'd share the list as the inaugural post in this new blog.
Here are the recommendations I have collected so far, in no particular order. Thanks to all who contributed to this list (Michael Lettieri, Patrick Timmons, Alaina Harkness, Elizabeth O'Brien, Kate McGurn Centellas, Theresa Braine, Ulysses de la Torre, Brian Palmer-Rubin).
- Valeria Luiselli: Tell me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
- Ginger Thompson: "How the US Triggered a Massacre in Mexico" (ProPublica, June 12, 2017)
- Patricia Mayorga: "The Tarahumara Mountains: Migrant Death Camps" (Proceso, December 14, 2015) (in English via the Mexican Journalism Translation Project)
- Javier Valdez: "The Two Bodies" (Ríodoce, May 19, 2015) (in English via the Trans-Border Freedom of Expression Project)
- Javier Valdez: The Taken: True Stories of the Sinaloa Drug War
- Rachel Monroe: "How Rich Hippies and Developers Went to War Over Instagram's Favourite Beach" (The Guardian, April 26, 2017)
- Max Fisher, Amanda Taub and Dalia Martínez: "Losing Faith in the Mexican State, Some Mexican Towns Quietly Break Away" (The New York Times, January 7, 2018)
- John Gibler: "The Disappeared" (The California Sunday Magazine, January 4, 2015)
- Patrick Timmons: "Dispatch from Nueva Italia, Michoacán" (NACLA Report on the Americas, September 18, 2017)
- Jan-Albert Hootsen: "Church in Chiapas Asks for Help as Violence Displaces Thousands of Indigenous Farmers" ( America, December 29, 2017)
- Richard Marosi: "Product of Mexico" (series), The Los Angeles Times, December, 2014
- Joe Tone: Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels and the Borderland Dream (2017)
- Paul Imison: "Unleashing the Military on Mexico's Drug War" (Dissent, January 11, 2018)
In a different class this semester, I am teaching Alfredo Corchado's stunning memoir, Midnight in Mexico (2014). See also his reporting for the Dallas Morning News.
See also the ongoing work to bring Mexican journalism to English-speaking audiences:
I will update this list if/when I receive further recommendations.