When Elida Perez was a student at the University of Texas at El Paso in search of a school that would continue challenging her desire to write, she enrolled in a new multimedia, bilingual communications class called Borderzine.
Soon, Perez found the class was giving real-time meaning to core courses in history, math, science, justice and language.
As an aspiring multimedia journalist, Perez was thrust from the classroom and into the larger El Paso community covering the sometimes violent, always exciting life of people on both sides of the United States-Mexico border.
“I really liked the fact that it (Borderzine) gave students the opportunity to go out there and write about what they had been learning,” says Perez, 33, now a staff reporter for the Statesman-Journal, the daily newspaper in Salem, Ore.
With an initial $15,000 seed grant from the Ford Foundation and soon afterward a four-year $400,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Borderzine is approaching its fifth anniversary with much to celebrate about its efforts to train aspiring Hispanic journalists using the populations on both sides of the nation’s 2,000-mile border with Mexico as its practical classroom.
The brainchild of veteran journalist Zita Arocha, the web-based multimedia, bilingual news reporting program has been woven into the communications education fabric of UT El Paso. It has spread across the country to include a dozen other colleges serving students along the U.S.-Mexico border, from UT El Paso to Imperial Valley College in Southern California. It has trained nearly 150 students, including Perez, with reporting assignments that expand their learning capacity in other classes and understanding of border issues.
At the same time, Borderzine alums like Perez say it has improved the skills students need to move to the front of crowded employment lines at news organizations as they boast far more technical skills and practical reporting experience than many counterparts who are not in a Borderzine class. That has allowed the school to place more than 100 students in internships locally and with national news organizations ranging from Scripps Howard newspapers to The Associated Press. The Borderzine website, www. borderzine.com, draws about 10,000 viewers a month with viewers clicking in from 93 countries around the globe. In addition to students along the border, Borderzine has run contributions from students in schools as far away as Illinois and Florida, according to webmaster Lourdes Cueva Chacon.
