Pulitzer Center Update

Photographs from Mexico/US Border on @PulitzerCenter Instagram

July 20, 2017 | General news, Project news
By
Jordan Roth
Young boys from the Arias family peer over the first, older US-built border wall at dusk into the flood-lit no-man's land created between the two walls/fences where US Border Patrol is present 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Mexico. The Arias family is led by Estel, these boys’ grandmother and matriarch of the clan. Their house actually rests up against the border wall and yet the family expressed no fear from human or drug traffickers. Still their home, despite being millimeters from the world’s superpower, lacks running water, necessitates an outhouse and they’ve had to illegally tap into the power grid because they cannot afford to pay for electricity. Image by James Whitlow Delano. Mexico, 2017.

Young boys from the Arias family peer over the first, older US-built border wall at dusk into the flood-lit no-man's land created between the two walls/fences where US Border Patrol is present 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Mexico.  The Arias family is led by Estel, these boys’ grandmother and matriarch of the clan.  Their house actually rests up against the border wall and yet the family expressed no fear from human or drug traffickers.  Still their home, despite being millimeters from the world’s superpower, lacks running water, necessitates an outhouse and they’ve had to illegally tap into the power grid because they cannot afford to pay for electricity. Image by James Whitlow Delano. Mexico,  2017.

James Whitlow Delano's photographs from the Mexico/US Border wall in Tijuana, Mexico are featured on the Pulitzer Center Instagram this week. 

Earlier in 2017 Delano visited the wall to document families living along it. 

"I’ll never forget the shock at seeing, for the first time, the corrugated-tin US/Mexico border wall in 1982.  I could not believe that two countries, not at war, could be separated by such a formidable barrier, resembling the Berlin Wall.  It felt militarized on the beach.  Helicopters circled overhead.  Border Patrol, sitting in 4WD trucks, were watching my every move.  Not much has changed there except now there is more wall, extending into the sea and sometimes there is even a double wall," says Delano.

Check out the Pulitzer Center Instagram this week to see more.