i will also in a moment had the honor of introducing our wonderful authors who'll make up this panel. first though i would like to take a moment to acknowledge in thank the organizers of the tucson festival of books, all the sponsors and in particular university medical center center for sponsoring this venue. we have got an hour for a discussion and here's how it is going to work. i'm going to say a few words to welcome and introduce our panel is. i have prepared some questions for them to get our discussion going and hopefully you will have some questions also later on. i will invite you to make your way up to one of the two microphones, one here in when there. we will have a chance to ask about what is maybe on your mind. right after a discussion the others will go to the signing area and set up in the madden media signing area number one,

it 10b and they will be happy to continue our discussion with you one-on-one and even more happy to sign a book that you buy either out here in the foyer or at the signing area. this session features three books and five authors. two of the authors or journalists, one is a dancer and the make or, one is a businessman in restauranteur and another is a position. they all share a deep commitment to telling true stories. they all came to their common subjects through different tasks that we are going to hear about. the forward to crossing would -- in the forward to crossing with the virgin one of the three books we are going to be talking about today it opens with a nine line poem i leslie marmon celko who is here, not with us right now but doing her own thing out in them all. if i can read it to you just to get us to see where all of these folks are coming from. i will tell you something about stories he said.

they are just entertainment. don't be fooled. they are all we have, you see, and all we have to fight off illness and death. you don't have anything if you don't have the stories. now i am honored to introduce five authors who have found, digested, interpreted, written and shared powerful stories that matter. margaret regan rat "the death of josseline" immigration stories from the arizona mexico border lands. it was just released in paperback. barker writes for the tucson weekly and is one of dozens journalism awards for border reporting two of the national awards. she also writes about the arts and stories about the irish immigrant experience. she lives in tucson. sam quinones is the author of the nonfiction books, true tales from another mexico, the lynch mob, the popsicle -- and the

bronx and also "antonio's gun" and "delfino's dream," true tales of mexican migration his most recent. he is now received -- reporting for "the los angeles times" where he covers drug trafficking and gangs. just a couple of kudos about him. the "san francisco chronicle" called him the most original american writer on the border and mexico out there. the "l.a. times" book review said over the last 15 years he has filed the best dispatches about mexican migration and its effect on the united states in mexico bar none. he lives in southern california. kathryn ferguson is the co-author of crossing with the virgin, stories from the migrant trail. she is also a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. she is produced and directed to feature-length award-winning documentaries the unholy connemara andrea of the sky. she is native to sony in and she has volunteered with samaritans since 2004.

jed parks a co-author of crossing with the virgin spent most of his career in the restaurant business. he became involved with the samaritans movement in the fall of 2005 and norma price also a co-author of crossing with the virgin moved to tucson after a 25 year career in medicine in atlanta where she was an oncologist. she has lived here for just over 13 years. norm of volunteers at a local medical clinic and for the uninsured and also the samaritans. thank you you guys for being here and welcome to all of you. [applause] margaret let me start with you. you are mainly in arts editor and a writer. you covered art openings and you covered ballet. how did your interest in immigration issues start and get you into this whole world? >> okay yeah. i have been in the tucson weekly

for a long time but i've also done general assignment reporting and i had done a number of stories, a lot about downtown development. i did a story about urban renewal which was very focused on the hispanic population, but around the year 2000, i first started and all of this first started hearing about the deaths of migrants in the arizona desert. probably some of you know that the federal government had more or less shut down the urban crossing in san diego and el paso and suddenly we were getting a lot of migrants coming to the place in between which was arizona. and because arizona is so treacherous, we were starting to see large numbers of deaths. so the summer of 2000 and editorial meeting in the tucson weekly i said, we have to cover this. we are the longform journalists and paper closest to the arizona border. it is our duty to cover this in being a small paper in being short-staffed, suddenly the assignment was mind. they said why don't you cover it?

so i said i was happy to and they sent me down to douglas for several days. douglas is the border town in southeastern arizona which was then kind of the immigrant highway into the united states, and it was a very shocking experience for me to go down there and see the helicopters and see the border patrol everywhere up and down the the , arresting people. while i was there, i did a right along with the border patrol and had the opportunity to interview a man whose cousin had died in his arms a few hours earlier that day. they were from guatemala and that man told me the story of their long and ultimately tragic journey. that story that man told me really changed my life and moved me tremendously and ever since i have tried to cover immigration whenever i can while still upholding my other duties that the tucson weekly. so that is how it got started.

>> thanks margaret. samia said your whole career as a reporter but that way you ever dare to books is kind of anything that it just a just the facts kind of approach. could you talk about why you chose to use real stories without real people to shed light on the immigration issue? >> mainly because they think the topic naturally lends itself to that. if you want to think about it you are talking about a mass movement of people probably the largest mass movement of people from one country to another in the last century, coming from a geography, a culture, traditions radically different than our own, coming to a place that they have really no knowledge of. it is like you know, i mean these are kind of distant story sometimes. so i see that every immigrant has these -- i began to see that every immigrant has these

magnificat stories within him or her. i also however believe that as a reporter and really as a storyteller you have to not link when the story reflects say poorly on someone who people might want to view as a noble figure and that is why a lot of my stories i've really try hard to not avoid the blemishes. i did a story about zeus garcia who was kind of like the michael jordan of the oaxacan indian basketball in the mountains and he is now a bus boycott been l.a.. he had made the trip and he came with this deep desire to teach americans about the true purity of basketball which he knew, which we did not because we corrupted it with the nba. this was really his point of view basically, and along the way he had this great kind of mission, this grade of session to teach us about the real way basketball should be played and

to make sure the oaxacan indians did not the way basketball should be played once they got here. but along the way you know he ignored his life -- wife. his kid who he named urban or urban magic johnson, he kind of did quite attend to him as well as he could. still the man was a remarkable figure. it is this kind of deep complexity and humanity that i loved about the immigrant stories that also lend themselves to asking about which is the longform tradition of stories. you want to tell a full story that also requires endless amounts of energy. i mean really really lots and lots and lots of energy because a three-hour interview is not enough. you are talking about day sometimes and repeating. what i would often do with a lot of immigrants that i interviewed

is do an interview two or three hours maybe, come back to another couple of hours and another two days and then come back a week later or two weeks later after i had time to think about it after i had time to knock around in my brain new ideas and had written some about it and had new questions comes out of the writing. from that i had a whole other set of questions and i began to think of how i might tell such detail. i really believe that storytelling, you have to start thinking of how would you tell this orally sometimes? how would you begin it? what way would you bring the people in? and some stories have naturally told themselves and others you really need to dig down into people because a lot of people will tell you certain things but won't tell you the full truth. i think for example lots and lots of people, i have met numerous immigrants now. i really think this is the second-leading cause of people coming to the united states is murder and i'm not talking about

the latest stuff. i am talking about murder as one of the main reasons why people in the northwest of mexico are escaping murder, not wanting to be killed and family feuds. you need to dig down and the only way to truly tell deeply those stories is that level. >> thanks sam. you came out of fine arts, dancer, teacher and filmmaker. you began volunteering and what i'm curious about is how you came to choose a book, written words with hardly any pictures really to tell the story you found as opposed to one of the numerous other avenues of expression you have been exposed to your whole life. >> because there is not so much equipment. [laughter] really. i am from tucson, and so i would go to and from mexico my entire life. we would cross the border. it was a wire. that means maybe somewhere there is still a wire out there but he

would just step over and i would go visit my friends in the ballot in the area or we would go to the port of entry. and so i have a lot of friends there and they are fabulous people. maybe a little bit less so but some very fabulous. when i joined the samaritans with my friends here, i was just appalled at the deaths that we would see out there like for the last decade. it has been called a decade of death. there are so many people who don't make it through the desert so i decided to start writing the stories with my friends here, and what i wanted to do was in words, i just wanted to make a connection to the interior life of somebody who was crossing. and we would meet people, we too may people on the trails are in the hospitals and as sam said you really need to talk to somebody for about five years before you really know them.

so we would have maybe just an hour or 15 minutes on a desert trail or some people with meat in the hospital and we would talk for several days. in that situation i would write down stories and as we are talking i would ask them pretty intimate questions and after a wild -- it is very immediate. i haven't been in a war but i have met people who are quite ill out in the desert and there is nothing extraneous. so you talk very intensely and very quickly. i would spend as many days as i could with them to find out what happened. for example one man was on a train and he got his foot crushed. i asked if i could write his story and then i went to the place where it happens so it is in the desert near the railroad tracks near nogales. i sat up there because the man sat there for five days. he couldn't walk and he didn't know how to get anywhere. so i just sat out there for a

day, and i took a picnic lunch and started writing down how terrified i would need. so i decided to use --. >> i saw some of you cringe when she talked about the crushed foot. the photograph, thank heavens is black as black and white in the book. it made me cringe also. norma you spent your whole life as a physician, most of it as an oncologist and i can imagine you have been part of -- through the years but have also had too many experiences where you felt helpless and when the patient died. even though the cancer ward in atlanta and the desert couldn't be more different, i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how being a medical person either did or didn't prepare you for volunteering as a samaritan? >> one of the things that was fortuitous was win for a short time before i moved to arizona when i got out of oncology.

>> can you move the mic up a tiny bit closer? >> when i retired from oncology i practiced urgent care medicine which is like family medicine, so that rots red -- broad spectrum help prepare me a great deal. i always had a place in my heart for the underdog, the disenfranchised and when i saw the reports of all the people dying in the desert i felt like something had to be done. i came to learn that these people were noble, strong, people who had accomplished a lot and because of circumstances in their homes state, they had to come up here to support their families and to be able to eat and send their children to school. but we kept seeing more and more medical problems in addition to the deaths. there were a lot of people that were sent to the hospital. as catherine mentioned, the man

who had his foot crushed, there are a lot of people who come from southern mexico and central america and they ride the trains, and they are not in the club car. they are riding on top of the train or on the side of the train. we have stories about this in our book and catherine tells a story about people writing on the side of the train. one of margaret stories in margaret's book tells about a pregnant woman who rode on the side of the train. so there a lot of injuries there but then there are a lot of medical problems as well because dehydration is the number one medical issue that we see in the desert. we see people with severe blisters and when you talk about blisters, it is not like you hike 5 miles and get a bad blister on the back of your heel. these are like earns. all these medical problems kept unfolding and as i have been with the samaritans now since 2002, i feel like i have been able to continue my medical

expertise and continue my medical practice in a new way. >> thank you. ted lets hear from you. >> i'm making some assumptions here but anyway coming out of the restaurant business i would imagine you probably had a whole lot of one-on-one contact with undocumented people before you began to volunteer, burning about their families, their lives working in the food line together, hearing their crossing stories. if that is the case out of that motivate you to begin your volunteer service and to write your parts of crossing with the version seeing the real folks who worked with? first of all is my perception accurate? >> yes. i started the business in 85 and most anybody who works in a restaurant has met somebody that is undocumented or it is a migrant.

i owned a restaurant here in tucson for eight years and hirey undocumented migrants. the business community really does not want the flow of migrants to discontinue, because it is such a big part of business. but these people work really hard and they work really cheap. i take advantage of that and so does a good portion of business in america. they can get somebody to work for minimum wage and work an eight hour shift and take a half an hour break and work really hard. you use that person, so i don't know that i would say i am guilty of the big yeah i am guilty of it. i always felt that when i came to this work, after i sold my restaurant and came to this

work, suddenly what i had heard my employees or fellow workers say came to the forefront and i really saw that they had many times to risk their lives to come to the united united stateo work. and in most cases, they just want to work. they don't want to live here. they want to earn money and send it home and go home but what has happened down on the border now makes it very difficult for these people to return. >> that is getting into my next question for sam. sam in addition to the gripping stories of individuals in your books, you make a point that not a whole lot of authors on this side of the border get into and that is one thing migration in america isn't just about undocumented people and u.s. cities. it has profound effects south of the border also and in

"antonio's gun" and "delfino's dream" that came out loud and clear. how did you become aware of that and why did you decide to broaden the context of your stories to include what is going on south of the border also? >> the first trip, i went down to mexico to study spanish for three months and i ended up staying for 10 years. i went down there and my spanish was okay but not good enough to be a reporter. along the way a friend of mine from, thomas dodson where i've been a crime reporter for several years invited me to go to his town's annual fiesta and as it turned out everybody in that town was either living in stockton or chicago or indianapolis or dallas i believe, one of those cities or l.a.. so that first week i wandered around and it was there that i just understood, began to understand i should say, it began a tenure track through the

immigrant villages of mexico. first of all focusing on the houses. immigration to the united states because of the nature of mexican immigration to proximity and dollar has created a massive massive urban renewal essentially and lots and lots of villages where people build houses for years, decades because there are no mortgages for people or folks, mortgages that they could afford so they would get into these -- build their houses all but the idea at some .40, 30 or 40 years down the road at some point they are going to retire and go back home and retire to that house. that is the central part of their lives here really i think oftentimes in and it never happens. one of the great poignant ironies, kind of like a checkoff novel or short story, he works all his life and at the time that the house is finished and ready to be lived and he realizes he is not going home. he has kids and grandkids.

he is used to the services in the united states. he doesn't want his brother -- his brother was kidnapped last time he went down about kinds of things like that. people stop going so it was in this town i began to understand these huge changes on the mexican side. i also began to understand one very important thing about immigration i think is really true and certainly in mexico and that is that immigration from mexico does almost nothing to change the reasons why people leave for that region. changes the circumstances for the family for the individual immigrant and his family what have you but you can go to all these immigrant immigrant areas and you will see over and over and over no jobs, dirty, 4050 years into it, millions of dollars that come down in remittances to these areas and there is no work and there is good reason for that, because people are used to raises up in the united states. people are going to be working. people are gone. the best people are gone.

the real-life blood is up here not down in those villages. all of this kind of became very clear to me as i wandered from village to village talking to people over the 10 years i lived down there and talking to people up here as well back then and since, that the effect is we see it up here and it has got all kinds of controversial effects positive and negative as ted was saying. there is a whole other change down in mexico and one is to continue, want to village darts immigrating there is almost nothing else to do except emigrate because the cost of living rises due to the dollar. who wants to be -- these are the stories i love. who wants to be the lone 16-year-old than a town where everybody has gone to the united states and worked in dallas and phoenix and l.a. and come home with amazing stories about all

the women and the cars and the jobs in all this stuff. who wants to be the lone 16-year-old who doesn't do that? that is a real big draws too. i remember a lot of times talking with guys. why did you go? so that no one tells me about it any more. so i have my own stories. talk about stories, that's why. >> i would like to turn our discussion to the writing process just a little bit. margaret margaret reading the title chapter of "the death of josseline" you make us feel we are in the desert with the young girl feeling the sharing winter. you are detailing that in so many of your other stories and it is so incredibly powerful. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you find your details and why you decided to include and for that matter why he decided to leave it out? >> okay. i guess i will focus on the story about josseline, the title story of my look, the tale, the true tale of a 14-year-old girl

from el salvador who passed through into arizona just about three years ago now and fell ill and was left behind by her -- and everyone else in her group. she was traveling with her little brother to get to her mother in los angeles and a brother cried and wanted to stay with her and josseline told him to continue. so she was left behind and nobody found out about this. the boys arrived safely in l.a. three days later and had to tell his mother that joselyn was back in the desert. her body was found three weeks later by a young no more death volunteer from tucson. so i first found out about her when i went down to camp out at the no more death camp in most of you in tucson have probably known that they have a camp where they go every summer to be there in the desert to help people in trouble. so when i went down there to

camp out with them to find out what they were doing i was researching my book and they took me out to the trail where she had died. i ended up hiking the trail that joselyn had hiked. i sat by the rock that joselyn had found that i thought i really wanted to write about her. most of the stories in my book are people i have been able to talk to myself and this was one that was particularly challenging. her mother did not want to talk to the press so i had to use other means to get those kinds of details you are talking about so as i said i hiked the canyon and i was able to describe the place where she was. interviewed the young man who found her and his emotional response and his view of her body. her body had been out there for three weeks and he did tell me, he said i'm not going to tell you what it looked like. i don't want that ever to be written about.

but i was able to describe his situation. one of the big places i got information about her was here at our pima medical examiner's office. i went to visit dr. bruce parks who does the autopsies and i was able to obtain through a public records requests all the information in her autopsy file, and to read those autopsy files is heartbreaking. it details every garment that little girl had on. she had on a little bracelet. she had on a black jacket with a silky pink lining. she had on a pair of sweatpants that said hollywood. they are called but pants and that was one of the way she was identified, because the people who knew that she was out there who were looking for her new that. so, gathering together and i have to tell you that was very heartwrenching for me just

emotionally, reading about her effects. this is a child that died right here in our state. so to put that story together, i try to imagine and really it is the only story my book in which i kind of had to imagine and didn't just rely on people telling me. i found the weather data for the days that she was out there, and i knew that she had gotten sick and so i knew it was cold. it was a january day so it was when she was abandoned, that whole week in january had been chilly and had been wet. so i imagined her walking down that trail shivering and i knew that she had gotten sick. i imagined what it was like for her knowing she has got to keep going. she is trying to get to her mother in l.a. but she is too sick to go and she finally has to tell them, i can go any further. so how do i choose those things? it are the -- edward the things that move me as a mother, as a human being.

the tiny details that bring you to the humanity of this little girl. the hollywood pants were especially heartbreaking to me because she knew her mom lived in l.a. and here she is the 14-year-old kid and i could imagine she thought oh how cool, i'm going to wear my hollywood pants when i arrived in the land of the movie stars. to think of that light snuffed out is hard so i try to put those details and just so that people can think of her as an individual and is somebody's child and a personality. we try to get as many details as we can as a writer. you can't always get as many as that, so that was kind of an unusual thing to put all those things together. oh and the other thing i had for that story was the local activists and a very wonderful local priest made -- named father bob kearny hiked out to have a funeral mass for her in the location where she died.

her parents couldn't come because they were illegal and they were afraid to come. he told me the story of how her aunt and uncle were there and they were the first ones up the canyon. when they walked up the canyon and they got to the place where josseline had died and they knew that was the spot because there was already a shrine, he said a quail came down the canyon. the aunt in the uncle started wailing to see the place where josseline had died in to see her photo they are and this sort of combination of guilt and sorrow that they felt. i put all that in there, all that detail. >> thanks margaret. catherine let me ask you a question to speak for all three of you. all three of you are volunteers and you have demonstrated her commitment to the immigrants for nearly a decade. you are not professional journalists like sam and margaret get at the same time your book does not read like a

call to arms. you don't prescribe or demand solutions or reform. you simply tell real stories about real people that you have encountered on a migrant trail so i'm wondering if this on your part was a conscious decision and if so how did you come to that decision as opposed to writing a straight manifesto or something? >> well, we came about it a little bit differently each one of us writes differently. but we wanted to keep ourselves out of it. and i especially wanted to keep us out of it and have the story talk about the people we encountered. in the process of making the book, you know, the university press felt that the book should have certain things so we did add references and a little bit of history and everything but for the most part i think it was a matter of trying to talk about people we encountered in sort of an unadulterated way but that

was pretty hard to do because you are so emotionally involved with it. when you are out on the trails, the story that margaret was just saying, i actually went to that service. out on the desert. her aunt was, josseline's and was writing in the back of a pickup truck and to get to this location where her body was found we had to go in for will drive vehicles and people were just packed into the back of these trucks. the mother comedy and i mean was in front of me and i watched her over the 40 minutes or however long it took to get out there. we were all ready at that camp, and i saw her face just cave and crumbled and come apart because she had no idea and the family had no idea what the terrain was

that people were going through. and so i mean if you are there, it is a stunning gorgeous country, but the truth is there is nothing there. there is nothing there and there was the little girl's body there. suddenly the aunt got out of the truck and the man said this is where her shoe was. she just threw her body -- you know. it was kind of an under monster family and she really, she threw her body into the dirt and started hitting the ground and wailing and it was one of the most horrible things i have ever seen. so i mean they have to speak for themselves but as a group we just decided as close as we could to keep ourselves out of it and try to tell the stories because these are horrific stories. >> salmon margaret both of you briefly --. >> we wanted to give a voice to the migrants and they can't tell their stories.

where they are headed, the direction they are going, the places they end up, they can't describe what they have been through. we wanted to give them a voice, and tell their stories for them. >> sam and margaret i want to ask you the opposite question. you both talked about especially sam earlier or both of you how much time you need to spend with somebody to tell their stories to get it out of them. you can't help but to connect with people. people tell you things that maybe they have never shared with anybody ever. how is professional reporters can you stay dispassionate and just report or for that matter to you end up in the matter? >> i don't think you need to stay dispassionate. i've never felt that way about reporting and i have found actually when i meet these people in crisis, i can actually do something to help them which

is listening to them. j. and i together were on a storied where we went out with the border patrol agency, the swat team for search-and-rescue and we went out to sort of do a story on them and no sooner we were in the truck with the guy for half an hour and he got a call that this dangerously injured woman was near arra baca. we ended up spending the day with these rescue people. this woman had broken her femur, a 27-year-old woman from honduras and she had been left behind by someone who threatened to shoot her to put her out of her ministry -- misery. she persuaded him not to shoot her but he left her behind in the desert overnight and her lucky story was that a mexican family came along and found her and they were kind to people and they gave up their trip and they hiked out to the road and hail down the border patrol. so that is what we were doing

out there, but we hiked in with the border patrol with some difficulty. they got lost. ran out of water and got lost. it was really a rest day. this woman was really suffering and i talked to her. i think i even held her hand as we beholder out of their. a fellow human being in pain and i try to comfort her. i gave her water. i was just a human presence at her side. the other people were medical depot and doing a wonderful job saving her life but i was the one talking to her. then i went to see her a few days after that in st. mary's hospital and she thought i was some kind of an angell. i had to say i am really a reporter and i try to explain and i hope she understood what i was doing. she said i'm going to remember you my whole life. that was something for me to hear. i don't think reporters have to abandon their humanity.

i ended up buying crutches for that woman because st. mary's hospital did a surgery on her and treated her for three or four days but when it came down to giving her crutches and clothes, that was against the rules for some reason. so i went out to -- there was a very nice thrift store across the street. i told them the situation. the they gave me half price on the crutches and half-price on the clothes. i don't think that is accomplished for a reporter, i really don't. i told her story and i feel i told a compassionate but when i wrote about it of course i also talked, wrote about the border patrol people and i talked to the hospital people too. i guess i don't really believe in that kind of really extreme objectivity. >> what is your take, sam? >> yeah, let me say this. one of the things that donned on me as time went by in my career writing about immigration to mexico was that it is one of the

most compassionate things you can do for or with an immigrant from mexico as margaret said is to listen to that person because think about where that person came from and by that person has to make that trip. at do you know why that person has to make that trip? bachan at hometown, his father is not the mayor. his father's not an attorney. his fathers nobody powerful. there is no families all his life this man probably his father and his grandfather had been relegated, sent -- they are not worth talking to or their story has never been told. i had wonderful luck. i don't think it was lots basically but i had wonderful luck going to small villages in mexico and sitting down and talking to people and saying tell me your story. they look at me like this strange person. what the heck is this guy doing

here? after a while you prove your interest, your compassion or your passion rather for their story and that is something that is almost a revelation i think in a lot of peoples lives. the story of delfino in my second book, "delfino's dream," delfino was the poorest kid in his town. his dad was a raging alcoholic. no one gave a darn about that kid. but he changed his town twice. he went to mexico city. came as a 12-year-old alone, a construction worker. became a punk rocker and came back home to his village in the mountains with a big old mohawk haircut, a dog collar and pretty soon all the boys his age wanted to go to mexico city just like him and that is what they did. finally mexico city after 10 years of working hard, got him oh, got them nowhere come he decided to come to the united

states outside l.a.. he built this enormous house back home in the village and all of a sudden boom, all the kids are going to the united states. the kid was an enormously influential gaia. nobody cared about his story. i spent years almost talking with him and visiting him. i had been to his town five times and talked with him appearing down there. i could feel particularly from him that what he -- what made him feel terrific is that some strange american wanted to know and not only want to know his story but for an hour but over and over and over again wanted to talk to him finding out all he felt about different things in life, his own place in it and his own place in the town and how his dad was an alcoholic and all that. i wanted to know it all and he picked up on that. i think frankly and i don't

think it is luck if you go with that attitude or if you went with that attitude because nowadays i don't think it is safe to do the kinds of things i was doing down there, if you buy with that attitude people responded. it is that kind of passion. i'm not sure about the disinterested part of it all. i'm definitely passionate about these stories and i think people who have never been told their stories are worth anything picked up on that and feed on that. >> thanks a lot of. >> can i say one thing? i just want to say one thing. it is not just a bunch of poor people that live in mexico. we also have encountered one person across the desert -- i met him at a theater and one of the favorite playwrights of all of mexico was writing this wonderful play and this man was a ceo in a company there. he was in attendance that night and we got to know each other and lo and behold his life falls

apart and he asked across the desert too. we have met all kinds of people and there are all kinds of people from mexico. >> you right. we have about 20 minutes left. i would like to invite you to come up to the microphones to ask some questions if you would like. we have heard some pretty compelling things already that have generated follow-up questions for other questions on your part if you would like. please come up to one of the two microphones and maybe a few direct your question to one or two people to talk that would be great. >> three rear for a few these perks in my mind. the arizona border on the southern tip of mexico is a long way and you were talking about salvador and guatemala and stuff. what does the mexican government was a railroad do with these people riding the trains through mexico? that is a long ride so what happens to these people if they are discovered?

>> do any of you want to answer? >> one of the biggest problems they face is bandits. there are groups of bandits that will attack them. there is a medical facility, like a hospital clinic that is called casa day -- for the ones who have been amputated when they have fallen off the trains come, either arms or legs. the bandits will rob them and throw them off the train. the authorities, if they catch them they will send them back. they are not -- they did not treat them favorably at all. >> the last they heard being an illegal immigrant in mexico is a felony. i think mostly they are sent back. what is happened recently at will say is the cartels have seen these guys as revenue streams and so kidnapping immigrants and extorting more money -- they will pay to go to

guatemala or honduras or belize or ecuador lately. folks from ecuador. but these guys will -- they are very adept on the texas side over there at kidnapping these guys. they see them as another revenue stream. the immigration phenomenon was once a very kind of like mom and pop business. there were a lot of families in tijuana. they had houses in l.a.. they would take people all over. it was like a family business. every village pretty much had its own. now it is a corporate kind of thing and it has become in the last five or 10 years where you've got guys, the division of labor. some people their job is to take them from this point to that point but one of the new phenomena that is cropped up

lately is seeing them as a revenue stream and charging more for them once they kidnap them. kidnapping them and charging more for them. >> the man on on the last. >> my question actually was similar. i work in the field of interpretation, and we are seeing requests for a number of indigenous languages of central america. and also of southern mexico. and these are individual keisha watt speakers, people coming from fairly remote areas and don't speak spanish and the speak english. when we have an uptick in request for languages like that we know, and i've not privy to clients that i am assuming that it is coming from immigration. what happens to those people when they are turned back to mexico because the speakers from

guatemala and ecuador, guatemala in particular is a remote valley in the middle of the bunch of nonsense. their country is trying to take over that part, take over their lands for ecotourism to control it to the government. many of them have been evicted from their lands. when they go back to mexico, they can't speak the language in mexico and they are deported from here. what happens to those people? do you run across indigenous people in the stories that you have been witness to? >> the story i mentioned, the first story i ever heard about those two men work guatemalan speakers. what happens, when they get arrested on this side, they don't get deported back to mexico. they get sent back to their home countries. if you are a mexican you can sign this document, voluntary return and you can be sent back the next day, two days or three

days at this guatemalan man that i met for example he was being taken up to florence where we had a detention center and to be held there for an indefinite period of time until perhaps they could get together enough guatemalans and he would be flown back to guatemala. if you drop it quarter-mile and in no golos he is not going to guatemala. he is coming right back here. yeah a lot of people you see coming across our indigenous. you can go down to the courthouse in tucson every -- any day of the week under operation streamline. that is a pilot program where 60 immigrants today are actually charged in a criminal fashion and brought into the criminal court. most people are let go under the voluntary return but if you go down there it is astonishing to see they are all indians. they are indigenous. they are very small, very dark people and they are in chains, leg chains and hand chains. they all plead guilty and then they get sent back with a criminal record.

yeah, i think a large portion of the migration is indigenous and primarily for economic reasons because those are the poor people down there. >> also can i say that they are also treated horribly by the mexican, northern mexican smugglers. there is a big issue of racism in mexico that no one talks about too much but i -- sinaloa looks upon i think most of the oaxacan as martians. not even the same country and my understanding is in talking with law enforcement in arizona that the greatest amount of torture is perpetrated by northern mexicans who are the smugglers. they are the guys holding the safe houses in phoenix and whatnot.

folks from oaxacan and guatemala in places like there. >> this gentleman has been waiting for a wild, standing up. >> first, i have a comment. for margaret. he has done this multiple times, where he has intervened in the life to better the recipients on the other side. >> he wrote a wonderful column one time. he was in africa and he said i am taking 50 of my best sources out to dinner and it was a village in africa and he provided some kind of a feast.

and journalism it is perfectly fine to take a congressman out to dinner but it is not supposed to be okay to give a desperate migrant $20 which i think does not make sense. >> in numerous places all around the world. and in the then the other thing is, i go eased in the summertime and michael is to get together at -- my goal is to get to gather some kind of venue where i can gather people to talk about what the situation is here, because so many misinformation and disinformation exists in regard to migrant. and i thought i had it all set up last summer, and thanks to both you and the trio for having written, because those were books that i intended to have in

this discourse. >> let me interrupt you and see if this gentleman has a question question. i appreciate your comments though. did you have a question for the folks? >> yes. my question is, what could i do to increase the chances of these people having that opportunity? i had called. >> invite us. >> there is no place to go. this is martha's vineyard i'm talking about. [laughter] speak you know that. let me interrupt you. they are going to be at the signings of that would be the appropriate time to talk about specifics. they do travel. they do talk to groups and love doing it and sharing their stories obviously. >> that has been my -- last

year. >> hopefully it will work out. sir, do you have the question? >> where do you think we are headed if you are back were back here five years from now but would you be talking about? >> i would hope that at least crossing with the virgin would be a book that would be used as a reference material so that people would know what had happened over the last 15 years. i fear that it is only going to become more merit -- militarized and there is going to be more violence and more suffering by migrants that are crossing for gus. >> can i say also that a lot of the response to your question depends on a government in the country of mexico.

there are major changes that mexico needs to make to provide opportunities for people down there the lack of which are forcing people to come here. and that is a major issue. it is not brought up enough. but, if mexico for example continues to have the kind of public education system that it has today which is really dismal or if it continues to have the local governance system that has today which is almost guaranteed there is no economic development in many areas, then you will see probably a lot of what you are already seeing. >> kathryn. >> i would slightly differ about that. also really i think if you want to see these changes are we want to see changes that have been with you and with us, i have

never seen so much hatred in my lifetime. there is so much hatred. i go to the grocery store and everywhere i go there is hatred. and if you don't stop it and if i don't stop it and if they don't stop it is not going to stop. it doesn't matter what the governments do. it is up to us one person at a time. >> do you have a question for the panel? >> i was really surprised in the book and i don't have it with me so i have forgotten which one of you three wrote that particular chapter, about this town in mexico, this benjamin hill that they stop through. was that yours, norma? would you just in a few words -- were you as shocked as i was when you found out about it? >> actually i was there about three weeks ago. >> let me interrupt you. what you tell the audience which what she is talking about? >> benjamin hill is a town in

mexico. it is about 100 miles south of the border and this is a place where they train meets and they change trains coming from southern mexico going to either mexicali or nogales. the trains leave tuesday thursday and saturday need of migrants coming from southern mexico and central america. they camp in in the fields overnight and this little church has a reckless dan serves them anywhere from 40 to 120 depending on the season and how many people are coming through it. when we were driving down to mexico several weeks ago, before we got to benjamin hill the train had already laughed and there were people on top of the train that we saw before you get to magdalena and just south of magdalena. you can look over to your right parallel to the train tracks and we saw the train coming by and the people on top of it.

when they are in this little town the women in the church have this breakfast every morning, six days a week where they served them food, and when somebody is there they will have streetside medical clinics pass out socks because that is what they need most of all. did that answer your question about benjamin hill? >> the town itself, how did the town itself become desolate? >> the question was for the people listening on tv, following up about whether the town itself became part of the entire process? >> actually they are not able to capitalize on it because there is no really no commerce. there are a few small grocery type convenience stores and pharmacies and three churches. it is a very small town so the town itself doesn't benefit

financially at all from the people coming through. >> we are about out of time believe it or not that i want to ask one final question row briefly and that everybody spread out in a line from sam to kathryn and let us know what has got your attention now, what is in your future and what are you working on? can't sit still i don't imagine. >> i am working on writing stories about, well, drug culture in l.a., marijuana stories and humbled and doing something i would like to have you all check out my web site, sam quinones.com. does storytelling called true your -- tell your true tale. go to my web site sam quinones.com. i've got numerous stories up there now and i'm looking for many more. i don't pay anything but i do edit and sometimes that is more important. that is what i'm working on now and hoping to do a be a book as

well on the issues of kidnapping and home invasion and robberies in phoenix. >> i am continuing my journalism. i have a story coming out this week about kind of the historical look at the great copper mined strike of arizona in 1983 which would be very useful for us to review right now now that we have the new coppermine trying to come into arizona and what happened there and what happened to those people. as far as my reporting on immigration i am really interested in looking at the detention centers that i mentioned earlier and the federal detention centers in which migrants are held with essentially no rights. they don't have the right to -- they have no rights at all and they are held for ready much indefinitely without charges and without any expectations. they have no right to an attorney and they never know how long they are going to be there so i think that is something that would be really good to write about.