Confronting La Frontera

Vehicle license plates issued to residents of Mexico who live near the nation's northern border are stamped with the abbreviation front., for frontera, the border, followed by an abbreviation for the state in which the vehicle is registered. It's a designation appropriate to this side of the border as well, for La Frontera is a "nation" that often ignores the artificial boundaries so important to lawmakers and diplomats. It is also one of the most dynamic regions in North America, a region that deserves much more sustained attention from the press than it has traditionally received.

La Frontera is a swath of mostly arid land stretching east and west for 2,000 miles, from the twin metropolises of San Diego-Tijuana on the Pacific to the old cities at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Border residents, whether they live in Nogales, Arizona, or Nogales, Sonora, breathe the same air and often drink the same water. In Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras, and other twin cities, they struggle or prosper as part of an intricate shared economy.

For reporters with an eye on American social issues, La Frontera is another kind of frontier. It is the front line where many of the issues that occupy this nation are being engaged. Along with the hardy perennials of immigration, drug trafficking, and poverty, important border issues include health care, environmental cleanup, population pressures, and the challenges of public education. At the eastern end of the border, the population from the two Laredos to the Gulf of Mexico nearly 200 miles downriver has increased from about 1.5 million in 1985 to nearly 3 million in 1993. That rate of growth makes it one of the fastest-growing regions in North America. With the Hispanic population of the United States expected to reach more than 20 percent of the total in the next forty years, La Frontera is an intriguing laboratory of social, cultural, political, and demographic experimentation.

Similar explosive growth is occurring on the Pacific end of the border. In the Tijuana area, some 600 foreign-owned maquiladoras -- the foreignowned assembly plants that have sprung up since the mid-1980s on the Mexican side of the border i have transformed a dusty tourist destination into a huge border boomtown. Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, predicts that freer trade in Mexico under NAFTA will cause overcrowded Mexico City to shrink as a manufacturing center as factories start moving toward Mexico's coasts and northern border.

With such a wealth of significant stories in the making on the border, it's surprising that news coverage of La Frontera is so spotty. For American newspapers that attempt to cover the the quality of coverage is often limited by of manpower. The Los Angeles Times, for example, supplements the often superb coverage out of its Mexico City bureau with reporting from Times reporter Sebastian Rotella, who has Tijuana, a dynamic city of some 2 million people, all to himself. His border beat includes the rest of Mexico's Baja California Norte, a state that includes not only Tijuana but Mexicali, the only U.S.-Mexican border city that is a state capital, and the Pacific port of Ensenada. In Mexicali, a desert metropolis of half a million people, Rotella covers Governor Ernesto Ruffo, Mexico's only opposition party governor. The Times's coverage of the recent Chiapas rebellion and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio has been suberb, but news about the border just doesn't get into theaper very often, says Richard Sinkin, a former professor of Mexican history, now a San Diego business consultant.

Murray Fromson, who monitors border coverage from his position as director of the Center for International Journalism at the University of Southern California, notes that it's not unusual for one-person foreign bureaus to cover courts, cops, trade, finance, immigration, politics, and the environment. The region, he argues, deserves more coverage than one reporter can provide.

Robert Rivard is a "border hand" who got his start covering border issues as a rookie reporter for the Brownsville Herald, in the Rio Grande Valley, and is now the assistant managing editor of the San Antonio Express-News. He regularly sends reporters into Mexico, but complains that many Frontera papers do not. "Reporters don't cross the border enough," he says. "They stay on our side of the river."

The newspapers that would seem to be most familiar with the arcane rules and customs of La Frontera, those in towns along the border, are for the most part small-town papers in towns that are no longer small. Although regular readers of the El Paso Times have noted some improvement under editor/publisher Dionicio "Don" Flores, most border papers are mediocre at best.

The evolving exception may be the three medium-sized dailies in the Rio Grande Valley owned by Freedom Newspapers, the California-based company whose flagship paper is The Orange County Register. "In the Rio Grande Valley, the dynamics of the market have changed," says Scott Fischer, senior vice-president for community newspapers at Freedom. "We were operating in a traditional way, and we had become badly dated."

The change is particularly evident at The Monitor, in McAllen, Texas, which serves a metropolitan area that is now the sixth largest in the state, and where eight out of ten readers are Hispanic. According to Daniel Cavazos, the paper's thirty-four-year-old editor, Freedom Newspapers has made a commitment to build "a good mid-sized daily serving a growing population area." Cavazos became editor in 1992, just after the company converted the Monitor to a daily and began to increase the size of the staff. Cavazos, the paper's first Hispanic editor, says the staff now "reflects the diversity of the community, the border culture that we have here." It is worth noting that Monitor circulation is up from 36,000 daily in 1991 to 40,000 in 1993.

Stories in the Monitor are beginning to reflect that diversity as well. Last summer, the paper ran an unusual, thorough, and informative five-part series on Rio Grande Valley migrant families and the lives they lead in Michigan, where many of them go every year to work in the asparagus fields. "The valley has the largest migrant base in the country," Cavazos points out, "but nobody except the migrants themselves knew what it was actually like for them to live up north."

Earlier, the Monitor ran a well-researched series on the people who work in the maquiladoras. "We were trying to get beyond the typical chamber of commerce assessment of the maquilas, about how good they are," Cavazos says. "We wanted to see what it's like for the people who work there, most of them women, mostly in Reynosa. What does it mean, for example, when these women, most of them from interior Mexico, become head of households? We wanted to offer another side of the story."

Similar changes have taken place at the Valley Morning Star, the Freedom Newspaper daily in Harlingen. At the Brownsville Herald, the oldest of the Freedom papers in the valley -- it was founded in 1892 -- the company is trying to bridge the border literally, by pushing into Mexico. Despite the "nightmare" of getting through customs, 15 to 20 percent of the Herald's circulation is now in Matamoros, the city of nearly a million across the river.

The Herald also prints four to six pages in Spanish every day. And in February the Monitor introduced its own Spanish-language weekly.

Big-city Texas newspapers with a presence on the border include The Houston Chronicle, with bureaus in Harlingen and Mexico City, and the San Antonio Express-News, with bureaus in Laredo and a new bureau in Mexico City.

The most comprehensive border coverage among big-city papers comes not from an American newspaper, but from the impressive Monterrey daily El Notre. Now available on this side of the border, El Notre is probably the Mexican paper most accessible to American readers in terms of style and format. It offers frequent well-researched investigative pieces on northern Mexico's environmental problems, and its daily Negocios section offers comprehensive coverage of the economy, finance, and high technology.

Among American papers, The Dallas Morning News provides the most comprehensive coverage, even though Dallas is 300 miles from the border. In contrast to the one-person border bureau of the Los Angeles Times, the Morning News has bureaus in El Paso and Monterrey, as well as a business writer in its Austin bureau who focuses on international business, primarily Mexican business.

NAFTA prompted the Morning News to beef up its border and Mexico coverage, and to add an extra person in Washington to cover international trade, but its long-term commitment to being a statewide paper for Texas is another reason the border gets a significant amount of attention. More than any other American paper, the Morning News has managed to integrate its Mexican and border news, particularly economic news, into its daily mix of stories.

In addition to a comprehensive twelve-page section on NAFTA at the end of the year, recent Morning News stories about Mexico and the border include an informative report by Monterrey correspondent Enrique Rangel on La Bolsa, the $ 171 billion Mexican stock market; a report by San Antonio correspondent David McLemore on immigrant children and the strain they are putting on Brownsville schools; and a story by El Paso correspondent Maggie Rivas on a Mexican power plant near Piedras Negras that's polluting the skies above Big Bend National Park, about 125 miles away.

"We have a weekly news budget devoted to Mexico issues -- government, trade, whatever they happen to be," Morning News managing editor Bob Mong says. "We've also made space adjustments in the paper."

Mong insists that his paper will continue to focus on Mexico and border issues "mainly because the more you know about something, the more you need to know about it. Open one door, and five more doors appear."

If American newspapers do their job, opening doors will become routine as two nations continue the long process of cultural and economic integration, a process well on its way in La Frontera.

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