hello folks as you're filtering on we're going to give people a few minutes to get logged on here before we officially begin all right we may have a few more filter in but hello and welcome i am renee nicholson and the director of wvu's humanity center we are really pleased to bring you tonight's event songs on the line and this is both a wvu diversity week event and a tie-in tour 2021-2022 campus read the line becomes a river we're so pleased that you can join us so i'm going to turn things ove
r here for introductions into our featured guests but just a few items of housekeeping tonight's event is being hosted uh through the the zoom webinar platform which most of you are probably already familiar with but just to make sure on this platform our chat function is disabled however you can and are encouraged to ask questions of our featured presenter using the q a function and we will answer questions as time allows after tonight's prepared material if you have questions about programming
for the humanities center i encourage you to check out our website humanitycenter.wvu.edu or to email us at humanitycenter at mail.wvu.edu and now it is my pleasure to turn things over to my colleague dr caitlin best who is assistant professor of musicology here at wvu who will uh introduce our guest for this evening thank you renee and thank you all for joining us tonight for this exciting event i have the pleasure of introducing dr robert neustadt robert is director of latin american studies
and professor of global languages and cultures at northern arizona university a scholar of spanish language and literature robert's work as a researcher musician and activist functions to increase awareness to the humanitarian crisis at the border of the united states and mexico engaging with this issue on many levels through his writing research teaching composition and service in 2012 robert produced an album titled border songs which brought together a wide range of artists both in poetry and
song this project which included contributions from pete seeker and michael franti garnered international attention but of even more significance its proceeds supported the humanitarian aid organization called no more deaths following this project bob wrote or robert wrote and produced a play titled border voices which served to heighten further awareness and insight into this crisis he recently is under contract with the university of liverpool to write a book titled songs on the line music an
d politics on the u.s mexico border his talk tonight titled songs on the line music politics and humanitarian crisis on the u.s mexico border offers an exciting opportunity to further consider and engage with the topic of this year's campus reid selection the line becomes a river dispatches from the border by francisco cantu please join me in warmingly welcoming dr robert neustadt well thank you very much everybody for uh joining us tonight uh and in particular thank you to the west virginia uni
versity humanities center and in particular renee nicholson for organizing this event and to mackenzie harris for being so patient with me and all the administrative things and i also particularly want to thank caitlyn best professor caitlin best for reaching out to me and giving me this invitation to join you tonight um you know what i'm going to talk about tonight is really really really important to me and and i have to come clean and admit to you that you know i've been a professor for about
25 years and i've been studying border issues that entire time in fact even before one of the chapters of my dissertation was about a mexican performance artist who worked on the border but i realized uh recently that until i started taking students to the border and that started in 2010 it was more of an intellectual inquiry for me and border studies is a fascinating intellectual area it's it's it's important stuff it's interesting it's good to do but it was that first trip when i took student
s in 2010 and we saw with our own eyes that there is a humanitarian catastrophe that was and is taking place in the borderlands that it blew me away and it did the students at the same time and it changed my life forever and it gave my life a certain direction and and made me the the person i am today which i guess we could say is also an activist an immigrants rights activist and a songwriter who uses music to try to give voice to this crisis there have been thousands of deaths in the borderlan
ds and the suffering and injustices that people experience daily in the borderlands takes place behind a curtain we don't really see it and we don't really hear it it is something that um you know in the in the media and politicians and we talk about the border all the time we talk about the economic impact of undocumented immigration we talk about border security we talk about technology for securing the border we talk about what the policy should be but this humanitarian disaster is something
that is very rarely discussed and if it is it disappears into the realm of statistics so what i started to do was to use music essentially folk music and write songs to try to give voice for the voiceless for these invisibleized people whose experiences are completely hidden and to amplify their stories and to try to educate people and spread awareness so um in this photograph you can see my students at the border wall and looking through the border wall a border patrol truck the trips that i ta
ke each one is different but they're usually five day field trips and um we try to get as wide a perspective on the border as possible and this includes speaking with federal agents and detention centers we go to immigration court in the courthouse we talk to border patrol agents to try to get all of their perspectives and then we also follow the trace of deceased border crossers and see where they're buried and see in the morgue their remains and how the medical examiner tries to identify these
people and figure out where they're from and who there are and we go into mexico and speak with deported people and we walk the trails of migrants in the desert so it's a really it's like a journey to the bottom of one's soul to go on one of these trips it starts off a lot of times each trip is a little different but often the first stop is the eloy detention center which is operated by a for-profit corporation called core civic in florence arizona you can kind of tell by this photograph that i
t's in the middle of nowhere it's just invisible nobody knows where this place is these people are just kept in this warehouse in the middle of the desert and no one goes there and in fact you can't go there even immigration attorneys and family members if and when they can visit they only barely get in the front door and they get into the visitation area but for some reason they've allowed my students and i to tour the entire installation and we walk in there we're not allowed to speak with the
people but you walk through and you look at it and it's not meant to be a prison it's an immigration detention center none of these people have been charged or convicted with a criminal infraction immigration is a civil issue but just looking at it i think you can tell that it looks like it smells like it feels like and for all intensive purposes it is a prison for the people that are incarcerated in there now i asked the question is there music in this place because i've had uh on a number of
occasions a very powerful experience where we toured the place and then they take us outside and this area that you can see here this is actually the wreck yard and they'll give the detainees i don't know if it's an hour an hour and a half per day when they can go outside and they can shoot baskets and be outside in the blistering heat to get outside a little bit and uh i walked by on one trip and there was this huddle of women now it's completely racialized in there as well all of the detained
people are very dark people most of them uh latino latina some of them african people from all over the world but everybody's dark and there was this huge huddle of women i'm gonna guess 150 maybe 200 maybe 250 i don't know how many but a huge huddle of women they're all in the tight circle with their arms on the shoulder of the woman next to them and they're circled around and they were singing and they were singing in spanish religious songs and hymns and it gave me goosebumps and i just reali
zed the importance of music to the human spirit in order to cling to it as a mechanism to give faith to hold on in this dismal lonely lost enclosed environment where they're afraid they don't know when they're going to get out they don't know where they're going to be sent they're separated from their families and they're clinging to music and singing as a means of lifting their spirits and i thought about this and i thought about how important music is to everybody and you know the the guards a
re showing us where they can do a little bit of arts and crafts in there and stuff and i said can they have guitars in here and he laughed at me and he said no of course not they can't have guitars there's no musical instruments in here and i just thought you know these people are invisibleized and they're silenced even to the point where they can't even have a musical instrument with them we camp in the desert uh and this exposes us to an entirely new sonic landscape we hear the the sounds of n
ature out there but they're all sort of permeated by the politics and the situation so we might hear the wind blowing through the wall we hear the coyotes yipping and howling at night which to me sounds beautiful but i've read many times that migrants are actually terrified of the coyotes they don't know what these animals are they don't have these animals where they're from you hear the insects you're in your tent and you get this idea a tiny fraction of the vulnerability that border crossers m
ust feel when they're crossing this area afraid of snakes and scorpions you lie in your tent at night and you hear footprints and you think is that a border crosser who just walked past or is that a border patrol agent or a vigilante or one of my students and all of this your senses are just so heightened in this environment as you're thinking about where you are and listening to the environment around you we talk with the border patrol we actually tour the border patrol station in nogales arizo
na they'll show us the holding cells they'll show us how they bring people in they'll give us their whole perspective tell us what they're doing show us their weapons and everything sometimes we run into them in the field and they'll come up and start asking us questions about what we're doing there and we try to turn it around and ask them questions what are you doing what's your job all about tell us about your job and sometimes they just say oh i can't tell you i'm not authorized to talk and
others are really loquacious and they'll start telling you all their opinions and everything but all in the in the quest of getting as wide of a perspective and understanding as possible from the ice agents in the detention center to the border patrol in the in the desert were there to listen and to become informed and to understand and then we go into mexico we walk into mexico across the border into nogales and to walk in we just walk the return style in fact nobody even asks us to see identif
ication or documents walking into mexico and that's the first very striking lesson when you think how different it is for people trying to come north and we go to these shelters where recently deported people are congregating or this is a soup kitchen and the students served a meal to these people who have been deported who have lost everything and they're trying to figure out what their next move is they have no money they're deported without money they may be thousands of miles from their home
and they have to figure out are they going to try to cross the border again are they going to try to get home what are they going to do how are they going to rejoin their loved ones and we sit and we talk with them and you look into their eyes and there is nothing more soul shaking than to look into a woman's eyes or a man's eyes and have them explain to you the fear and the desperation that led them to leave their home country perhaps uh hunger-like situations in guatemala where they can't fee
d their children or perhaps fleeing the violence of the gangs in honduras where they were fearing for their life and you're sitting here and in the back of your mind you're thinking about what you heard in the media about these people are criminals they're criminal aliens what part of illegal don't you understand they broke the law and it is true it is against the law to cross the border without inspection but why have they done this they've done this to protect and save their families and provi
de for their loved ones and help people in their community and to seek medical care and you think this is criminal this is criminality um it's very very thought-provoking and it's it's just sh it just shakes you up in a big way we have an enormous deportation machine in this country and so far some of you might have been thinking okay this guy is a liberal democrat i see where he's coming from but i want to make clear that this is not a clear partisan issue during barack obama's presidency barac
k obama democrat we deported nearly 3 million people obama deported more people than any other president in the history of the united states obama was deporting over a thousand people a day for a while and if you read articles about this deportations are just numbers we deported this many people they were moved from the country their statistics but these are not numbers to people these are mothers that are separated from their children these are fathers that are separated from their spouses and
their children these are people that have lost their livelihood that can no longer feed their families that don't know how they're going to survive this has enormous economic repercussions political repercussions social repercussions and psychological repercussions there are children in this country thousands and thousands of children that are afraid that when they come home from school their parents aren't going to be there or some of these children do come home from school and their parents ar
e not there and this is stuff that's going to come back to haunt us in the years forward uh multi-fold in nogales one trip we met this fellow here who told us that he had been living in stockton california for 25 years and one day he was driving to work and a bag flew out of his truck and he got pulled over by the police and they asked to see his driver's license which he didn't have because he's undocumented and he can't get a driver's license so he was detained he tried to fight his case and h
e spent two years in a detention center during this time of course his family lost his income and his wife lost their house and they had to move and he could not even afford to call his wife because they charge incredibly expensive charges to call out of the detention center and when we met him in nogales he had lost track of where his wife and children were he had no idea where they were and he told us i'm going to cross the desert and i'm going to go back to stockton and look for them i have t
o nothing can stop me from doing this we went to this bus station where people deported people were congregating hoping to get half-price bus tickets to get back to their homes in southern mexico and central america and i interpreted between these people and my students and one man said to my students if any of you are thinking about becoming border patrol agents please don't abuse migrants we don't deserve that we're human beings we're not criminals we don't deserve to be treated this way and t
hen a woman raised her hand and asked to speak her name was ruth and she was from oaxaca she had five children that she had left with a neighbor in oaxaca and she was crossing the desert to go to california to cut lettuce so that she could send money back to feed her children and she said she ran in the desert for four nights terrified the entire time by the time she was arrested by border patrol she could no longer walk and she said they put her in a cell and there was a sign in this cell that
said if you are hungry or thirsty or you need medical attention tell an agent and you will be provided for so she said uh that's not true all they gave her were two packages of crackers and a cup of juice and when she asked for medical attention for her legs they told her you can just get that when you get back to mexico later my students were furious and we were talking to a border patrol agent my students sort of challenged this guy and they said how can you guys do this why are you not feedin
g people that you have in your custody and he said of course we feed them it would be a felony if we didn't feed them we give every detained migrant two packages of crackers and a cup of juice every eight hours the same story but a very different perspective on that story so i wrote this song called voluntary return it's the song tells the story of three different people that we met on this trip and their story of deportation and it also plays with this vocabulary word voluntary return which is
a process whereby ice will get people to sign a document saying that they voluntarily return to their country of origin it's not an official deportation because they don't appear before an immigration judge it goes much faster but there's nothing voluntary about it so this song that i'm going to play you if you listen to the lyrics it tells this story bunch [Music] pancho lived for nine of his years turn in the gears of las vegas casinos he worked construction he made himself a woman and he move
d right in they had a daughter a family in las vegas [Music] it was the american dream till he was driving to work and a bag flew out the police pulled him over and they threw him out of the country [Music] he got deported they called it voluntary return now he's stuck in nogales without a dime convict this is a meter of a heinous crime illegal entry and even worse working not a good thing to do [Music] he committed a crime he drove his bleeding wife to the hospital alive without a license [Musi
c] not a good thing to do he stood before the judge's hands shackled to his feet she asked for his plea in a streamlined beat he said she gave him 90 days [Music] 90 days in a for-profit jail then he'll go out to a land of no opportunity [Music] he'll get deported they'll call it voluntary return [Music] ruth they dumped her no golly say a woman named ruth five kids in oaxaca barely a roof there with a neighbor they missed their mom four days in the desert she walked and she ran till her feet we
re so blistered black and tan she couldn't walk more [Music] she didn't feel like talking they threw her in a cell they locked her up tight they gave her some crackers and juice at night at three in the morning pushed her over the line they called it voluntary return [Music] so we got to talk about the wall everybody talks about the wall a lot of people think that the wall is trump's thing but actually we had nearly 700 miles of wall and vehicle barrier uh before trump was even elected in fact w
e started building wall in 1994 during the democratic administration of president bill clinton we started between juarez mexico and el paso called that operation blockade then they put wall between tijuana and san diego we call that operation gatekeeper and then we put wall between novalee sonora and nogales arizona we call that operation safeguard the idea was to wall off the easy to cross urban areas and funnel people force people out into the more remote hostile terrain of the sonoran desert
and the idea was that there would be it would be so unpleasant and so dangerous the government wrote you know lives will be lost people will die but we think it's going to stop things now obviously the wall didn't stop undocumented people from coming into the country because we've got 11 million of them in the country now we used to have 14 million there's a guy sitting on top of the wall here his name is dan millis he used to be the campaign borderlands campaign director of the sierra club he c
ould climb the wall in something like 32 seconds or something like that or a patrol to call it a speed bump and uh i know i met this uh man named glenn wyant who calls himself a sound sculptor he plays the wall as a musical instrument uh the idea originally for him was pure sonic experimentation he would uh put contact microphones on the steel wall and then he would bow the wall with the cello bow and record the vibrations of the wall and then upload them into his laptop and then he sort of beca
me aware of the political dimensions of all of this that he was taking this piece of infrastructure that was designed to separate people separate countries and separate people and keep people apart and he was turning it into a musical instrument and sometimes he'll play the wall with somebody on the opposite side and they're playing the wall together his wall music has been downloaded by people in over 200 countries and we go down and we'll watch him play the wall and then he'll invite us to pla
y some of the largest group ensemble performances of the world's largest most expensive and most deadly musical instrument and we'll play this wall and i'm not going to show you this youtube now but you can look it up if you want later it's called nogales wall blues it's pretty dissonant crude rough stuff this is not concert music by any stretch at one point i'm blowing harmonica into the thing and but it's interesting that towards the end of it the group with no leadership no conductor no leade
r anything sort of congealed into playing a rhythm together uh as if we were playing a type of a samba rhythm or something and it was just interesting to see how the group congealed over the sound the other thing to keep in mind was the time we were playing the wall here we had already met with border patrol we had already spoken with uh deported migrants and heard about their situation we were sad we were hurting we were angry and we started to sort of channel our all of these emotions into bea
ting this wall it was just a very powerful experience to to play the wall um now i want to talk about border patrol strategies i mentioned this briefly with the wall in 1994 the border patrol released a position paper called prevention through deterrence where they said that they were going to push people out into more hostile terrain and it wasn't just the wall it was also a massive um addition of additional border patrol agents its ground sensors its drones its towers and observation cameras a
ll over the place but the idea was that people could no longer run from one city to another and they're going to go out into the desert and they're going to find it so unpleasant and scary and some are going to die the government admitted that that they would stop doing it and doris meisner who was the commissioner for the immigration and naturalization service she said i quote we did believe that geography would be an ally to us it was our sense that the number of people crossing the border thr
ough arizona which go down to a trickle once people realized what it's like so maybe they thought this but unfortunately they were tragically wrong each one of these red dots represents at least one recovered human remain in the tucson sector this goes from douglas arizona to yuma arizona here each dot is one dead body it's one cadaver and i want to tell you why they die out there this is nogales here and this is tucson here and each one of these arks represents what would be one day walking so
this is one day walking two days walking three days walking to walk from nogales to tucson would take about seven or eight days if you don't get lost keep in mind these people don't know where they're going they're running on really rough rocky uh difficult trails at night they are scared border patrol is all over the place and they're trying to avoid border patrol they are compromised they are malnourished they are dehydrated and most of them are not athletes so a lot of people do get lost but
if you don't get lost you've still got seven days walking now in the summer time it gets to be about 117 degrees fahrenheit out there in the winter it freezes so in the summer people die of hyperthermia and then the winter people die of hypothermia biologists say that in the heat of the summer for your organism to continue functioning normally in these conditions you need to drink about three gallons of water per day now the most prepared migrants carry two gallons of water with them because the
y've got two hands and they can carry two jugs that's about it and that means that before the first day is over they're out of water and there's no naturally occurring water out there if it's not the rainy season so what they do is they drink from cow stockpots that are full of fecal matter and e coli and all kinds of dirty stuff and you can imagine what's going to happen to your body when you drink that you're going to start getting diarrhea you're going to start vomiting you're going to get fe
ver you're going to get dizzy you may pass out and you're with a group and you're terrified and there are guides who are bringing you for money and there's border patrol agents out there and the guys are saying we got to go we got to go we got to go we got to go and you don't want to get caught and lose it so the group will leave behind people that can't keep up and if you can't keep up you either get found by border patrol you get found by a humanitarian volunteer if you're lucky or you die and
that's what's happened to these people since the year 2000 they have encountered over 8 000 human remains in the borderlands and those are only the remains that have been found because the area is huge most are never found they say the number of deceased border crossers could be anywhere from two to ten times that number now who are these people that are dying are they criminals well they didn't feel like criminals when we were talking with them in the comedor and on one trip we went to three d
ifferent places where people had been found deceased in the borderlands and i want to talk about one in specific this is a shrine that was built to a girl named josely who was 14 years old and she was from el salvador and both of her parents were living in the united states and working for years and they saved up enough money to send that money back to el salvador to pay a guide to bring her across central america across mexico across arizona to california and she drank cow stock pond water and
became ill and she couldn't keep up with the group and they left her behind and she died the medical examiner says it probably took her about two weeks to die in the desert and she was found by the guy who was sitting on the fence in that early photo dan millis who only happened to encounter her body because he was taking a shortcut he was out putting out water in the desert to try to keep people from dying and he went through a place that he'd never been before and just coincidentally he happen
ed to come across her body it's a beautiful place where she died if you were just there on a hike and you stopped there for lunch to hang out you would say wow isn't this the greatest place i love this place and then you think that a 14 year old girl died there because she wanted to be with her mother and then it penetrates you how deeply wrong everything is about our system and what's going on so this is jocelyn here and i wrote a song to try to give voice and to also to get my head around the
idea how is it possible that these people would leave a little girl alone in the desert and i think i figured it out and i have to admit in their situation i don't know if i would have done anything any different and furthermore i think that we are about as complicit as they are so i'm going to play you this song called on our way for jose [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey the girl's sick again been sick like this all day hey little girl fell again been falling down all day the guy said
we have to leave her here we best be on our way the guy said we got to get out of here before the meagre finds us today my wife says we can't leave her here we can't leave a little girl this way we can't leave a girl alone in the desert we got to find help today the guide says we need to leave her here or if you want you can stay but if you stay you lose everything you paid to get here today we can't just leave her here we can't leave a little girl this way we got to find help let's stay with he
r let's kneel down and pray the guide said we ought to leave her here we best be on our way the guide said the meagre will find her here say the meagre will find her today i sold my house to get us here i sold off all my land i even borrowed money from a mean and vicious man i paid it for your day to leave me here to help us find our way we paid everything we owned to get us here to help us find our world what happens to me if i stay with them they lock me up and throw me away what happens to my
little girl to my son to my wife to my mother who grows sicker by the day the men say we have to leave her here we best be on our way the guide said we ought to leave her here said the negro will find her today off we walked we left her there we left a little food in some water the guide said to me to find her there said the meagre would find her that day like i'd say i'm eager to find her there said the meter would find her that day said they'd find her and send her back send her back salvador
would but no savior ever founded it for two weeks there she late she got so cold she felt burning hot she shivered and trembled all day she took off some clothes and her sneakers she soaked her feet in a puddle when she died that's how they founded it when she died they found her that way hey the girl's sick again and sick like this all day hey little girl fell again been falling down all day and what about the rest of us we leave em all there every day thousands die we wonder why but we we're
on our way what about the we rest of all there every day we stare at our smartphones we rush off to work we're off we're all we're always we're on our way [Music] so i mentioned there's this organization's actually a number of organizations to put water out in the desert the one that i've taken my students to interact with is called no more des no mas muertes and uh they do a lot of things but their mission is to end death and suffering in the arizona border lands arizona mexico borderlands and
primarily they do this by leaving water in the desert to try to keep people from dying the federal government does not like it many times they have been charged uh and gone to court and they have never lost a case they know what they're doing they've got good lawyers they know what's legal and what's not legal and they stay within the confines of the law their motto is humanitarian aid is never a crime when you're out in this desert and to imagine somebody dying of thirst or somebody finding wat
er the choice is pretty clear what you want to do now some people will say they're making it easy for people to break the law they're helping people break the law and to invade the country but the area is so vast you have to understand the scope and the size of the sonoran desert there's no guarantee that a border crosser is going to find water that's been left there by no more deaths we hope that they'll find as much as they can but you know the area is absolutely immense so the project that ca
itlyn mentioned that i'm most proud of in my life is the production of this cd called border songs now what happened is after my first trip i came back and and i wrote that song voluntary return that i played for you all and i played that song for my friend chuck cheeseman who's a fine guitarist and he was moved by it and he said you know i have a song about an undocumented guy living in chicago who's sending money back home to his family why don't we make an album we'll put out a call for songs
we'll make an album we'll fundraise to make it and then we'll donate all the money to no more deaths and i said it's the greatest idea i've ever heard let's do it you know and we went forward with this idea turned out to be a double cd originally we were thinking it was going to be locals and friends of ours and then a colleague of mine named bill carter who happens to know a number of really famous musicians like amos lee and michael franti and tom russell and calexico he contacted me and said
hey i know these guys would you be interested in having them on the cd if they'd like to be and i was like yeah absolutely and they all said absolutely they want to be a part of it and then ted warmbrand who's a banjo player in tucson who was uh submitting a song to be on the album he said i have a contact with pete seeger would you like to have him and i said absolutely now i suspect that a lot of students at western virginia university haven't heard of pete cedar because he's a different um g
eneration he died at 95 years of age a couple of years ago so i'm not going to go into him right now but i'm begging you to google pete seeger and read about the life that this folk musician led because he's somebody that you should know about and he was on border songs and then when we had this core of famous people then i got brave and i started like writing emails to different groups and like i wrote the manager of sweet honey in the rock which is this african-american women's acapella group
that had been very active in the civil rights movement and they jumped on board and before we knew it we had this incredibly eclectic double cd of music that includes cumbia and americana and hip-hop and blues and rock and poetry and spoken word and things in spanish and things in english and the wall and it's just an amazing thing and we made 5 000 of them and we sold them we gave all the money to no more deaths now this is a photograph a page from the booklet that came with the cd that i desig
ned and it's got a couple of stanzas of a poem by an important poet by the name of margaret randle she had gone and visited the wall with glenn wyatt and she was impressed by what he was doing playing the wall and she wrote a poem called offended turf and she dedicated it to him and we chuck and i drove to albuquerque and we recorded her reading her poem and then we overlaid the sound of glenn wyant and the soundscape of the desert that he had over the poem and it's a really neat production but
i want to just read you these stanzas from margaret randle's poem real quickly she writes we are making music here you with your cello bow percussion implements and contact mike me with the words i coax from walls and fences everywhere we are taking a chance our vibrations will change these molecules of hate and i foreground this because in addition to raising money for humanitarian aid for me those stanzas sort of sum up in a nutshell what we were trying to do with this project which is to brin
g people together and instead of separating ourselves into tribes and immigrant haters and immigrant lovers to bring people together to end the hate and to try to move forward and be more compassionate and loving with one another we played a series of release concerts and of course we donated all of the entries to no more deaths as well this is i think the first time i ever played in public i'm not a professional musician but this is sort of through these journeys to the border i went on another
journey of becoming sort of a singer-songwriter and i figured out that no more deaths was paying 69 cents a gallon for their water so if people would buy a 20 uh cd that would put 29 gallons of water in the desert and the importance of this project just rang made made such an impact on me when they first arrived at my house the first shipment we had two thousand of them and i saw them in my house and i totally freaked out and i thought these might be here for the rest of my life and i just wast
ed all this time and energy and money and materials and i threw a switch and i decided that for this cause i would become a nut so i started selling these everywhere i went i would go to my daughter's gymnastics tournament and try to sell cds to the other parents my daughter has never forgiven me for this i would get on an airplane and once i sold five of them to the woman sitting next to me on the airplane i would sell them everywhere i had this group of incredibly motivated students who had be
en to the desert with me and they would come to the farmers market with me and we would sell them and we would talk to people about it and you know one time i had a guy come up to me and he said you know i don't agree with you politically i'm a conservative and i don't believe in this but i didn't know people were dying out in the desert and i don't think they should be so i'm gonna buy your cd and this is where i realized how powerful this project of using music to spread awareness about the bo
rder was um i used to hawk them at the latin american studies association meeting down in the academic book exposition and people would walk by and i'd say hey have you heard about the border songs project and they'd say uh what and i tell them and i'd have people come up to me trembling saying i have to buy this my parents crossed that border i've got to have this you know and it just really struck deeply once i was in a church trying to talk to people about him and this guy raised his hand he
said i crossed that border and i would have died if i hadn't found that water and i just feel like this project was so meaningful we raised a hundred thousand dollars almost for no more desks we basically sold out you can still get a few copies on amazon you can get used copies if you want you get to use copy it's not going to do anything for the cause but you can make a donation to no more deaths so um i want to tell you one more story and play you one more song we released the album on october
12 2012. so today is coincidentally border songs anniversary two days before we released the album jose antonio elena rodriguez a 16 year old mexican boy was shot and killed in mexico in novalee sonora while walking along this wall next to the wall um they said the border patrol agent that shot him said that he was throwing rocks and he shot him in self-defense now i stood with my back to this wall where he was shot and i'm going to show you a photograph of where those bullets came from where h
e shot him through that wall atop this embankment and behind that steel fence and this border patrol agent originally the government wouldn't release his name eventually they did his name is lonnie schwartz and he claimed that he shot him in self-defense i've taken hundreds of people to this place including my students and colleagues and i've never had a single person be able to stand there and say yeah i can see how that could be self-defense it just makes no sense not only that but he shot him
eight times through the back and twice in the head the original autopsy said seven and i wrote a song called seven bullets it was later upgraded to eight but he was shot through the back as well so um i wrote a song called seven bullets um and of course i brought glenn wyant in on this song and added recordings of him chiming the wall you'll hear it at the end when i'm counting um uh glenn has this performance where he strikes the wall chimes it once for each migrant who died in a given year cr
ossing the border and then later the song ends with the vibration of the wall the very same wall that jose antonia was shot through so i'll play you this song now it's called seven bullets [Music] seven bullets seven bullets to the back 16 years old seven bullets [Music] they said he was throwing rocks calling it a international rocket [Music] now the border patrol say they shot him in self-defense atop a 15-foot embankment through a 25-foot steel fence so if he was throwing rocks he was lobbing
him up over his head and over the wall he could have been a professional ball player but now he's dead witnesses say wasn't throwing rocks was walking along the wall mind his own business government won't release the name of the agent that shot him or the videos they say it's under investigation they say it's not in the best interest of the nation [Music] seven bullets seven bullets to the back [Music] 16 years old we put seven bullets to his back [Music] two in his head now he's there he's not
coming by [Music] they say good fences make good neighbors that's not a good offense me sure hell earn a good name good neighbors don't shoot their neighbors children to the back [Music] imagine if a mexican law enforcement authority were to shoot a blonde american child on american soil through the back old donald trump will call for a full blown military attack we could drop seven missiles and seven drones and blow the whole country of mexico smitheree [Music] one two three four five six seve
n [Music] seven bullets seven bullets [Music] that's the sound of the wall you're here jose antonio elena rodriguez presented so i did uh release another cd that's my own music um obviously border songs is a compilation i have one song on it uh and then i got to the point where i made i just kept writing songs more and more and more songs about different aspects of this crisis in the borderlands and i released this album called voluntary return and i uh give all of the money from it not just pro
fits but all of the sales go to no more deaths and to the quali brie center for human rights which is an organization that works to identify recovered human remains of border crossers so that they can tell loved ones and family members what happened to people and hopefully repatriate the remains and this album you can get it on amazon if you want or you could get it straight for me if you don't have a cd player i also have these digital download stickers where you can put in a code and get mp3s
to the songs and download them uh if you're interested and then i know i've dumped a lot of really heavy stuff on you i'm sorry this is sort of what i do in the world i go around and i depress people and the question is what can we do and the final message is not to be depressed but to become informed because if we can understand a problem we can solve a problem and we need to learn the facts because in the media what we hear and from politicians we just get these little bits and pieces but we n
eed to learn the facts the economic political environmental and humanitarian consequences and aspects of these and then hopefully if you'll agree with me we could find a compassionate uh humanitarian way of treating people on this earth so um that's all i've got i want to thank you for uh sticking with me if you're still here um it's an honor to share this with you and um i would be delighted to answer any questions or entertain any comments and obviously if um you disagree with me that's fine i
'm not at all thin skinned about this feel free to say whatever you want don't feel like you have to support anything that i've said here but again thank you so much and let me know if there's anything you want to talk about so it looks like we're getting a couple of questions here so uh one that i just want to share with you is a great question and we're going to have to work on this one but one of the uh people in our audience said is it possible for wvu to organize a trip similar to the one d
escribed by dr neustadt i'm very interested in this trip so um that's a very heartening one for sure uh to hear and and i wanted to share that uh with you but what what does it take to put a trip like this together i mean i'd be happy to advise you but he needs a big chore and of course i did it for uh 10 years so i got sort of used to it but it's enormous because for example uh well to get permission to go into the detention center you have to contact ice they ask you to provide a name a list o
f everybody with their driver's licenses and documents and then they have to vet you before you can go same story with the border patrol if you're going to go to the migrant shelters you have to make those arrangements with people if you're going to go out with no more deaths you need to make those arrangements with people you need to buy the food in order to cook the meals you need to make recipes for what you're going to cook you need to get vans and do the transportation part you need to get
the institutional excuses for the students you need to have some other faculty members come with you to drive the other van if you have two vans worth of people you need to make sure people have camping gear and know what they're getting into you have to convince people that's one of the hardest things actually is i had so many students that say well i don't want to go get dirty camping with a bunch of people i don't know or even more so they're afraid to go because they've heard so many terribl
e things about the border that they think we're going to get shot down there ironically i once had a student who was afraid to go and you know she said you know if i die my daughter's gonna not have a mother i said well i love my kids too um but she ironically didn't want to wear a seat belt when we were driving on the interstate through phoenix so it also takes a lot of educating people and explaining to them what's risky what's not risky and obviously you want to do it in the safest most contr
olled responsible way possible so i'd be happy to consult if you want to put together a trip there we go and and all my free and spare time uh but i love that there would be that uh question slash comment because uh it means that your work has really touched our students and so a couple of other questions coming in one is do you think there is anything to do to help migrants come to the u.s legally um okay is there anything or could there be anything those are two separate questions and the answ
er to both is yes i uh volunteer with an immigration legal services clinic here in flagstaff and what we do is we try to provide pro bono free legal assistance to immigrants so that they can um get permission to be here or uh get out of detention or whatever their case is there's millions of different things but an immigration attorney can provide help they can be of great help it's complicated because a lot of people don't have the money to pay for an immigration attorney and a lot of immigrati
on attorneys need to pay their mortgage so they don't want to provide pro bono aid necessarily and there's these problems but of course um people need and deserve legal aid and there is that the other question that i suspect they might have been wondering is you know couldn't we do this a different way because you know it's a very important question some people say why don't they come legally and it's important to point out that there is no legal avenue for an indigently poor latin american immi
grant to come to the united states legally there's no visa they can apply for but theoretically we could make that possible we could have a work visa program and in fact we had one uh before in this country it was called the brassero program it wasn't ideal in that it was kind of like slavery so i'd like to see it changed a little bit if we were to change it but uh we instead of having people hey uh illegal uh guides to gather them bring them across the border we could let them pay for visas and
i guarantee you a lot more people would want to do that and we certainly have a lot of work available in this country especially now so yeah congress could come together and say let's create an immigrant work program worker visa program and that would fix a lot right there great question yeah uh we have one more here if you have a moment and it's a two-part question um but this audience member wanted to say thank you for your presentation and the two questions are where do you get energy or ins
piration to continue this work and secondly how has the immigration problem changed your creative process composing music writing and stories the inspiration comes i think from the people like i said it was you know before the trip i i just you know i mean i've always sided with the underdog but it just sort of wasn't at the forefront of my mind all the time the way it is now but when you look into somebody's eyes and you realize wow this is a wonderful human being and they're being dragged thro
ugh hell and this is wrong then you just feel like i can't turn my back on these people anymore because now i know before i was ignorant and i didn't know what was going on and now i know and i couldn't look myself in the mirror if i didn't try to do what i can now you know i don't want to overblown myself it's not like i've fixed this problem you know people continue to die and be detained and this is an enormous problem but uh my you know what i think is we just have to do what we can do somet
hing do something that matters and the creative process question is linked to that where it just sort of arose organically you know i didn't come home and think oh i should write songs and use these songs to educate people and spread awareness that first song it just came to me and i wrote that song and then the second song and the third song and the songs just come to me but then i realized well i guess i'm going to perform this and i'm going to see if i can move some people or i guess i'm goin
g to use this song and see if i can raise some money for these organizations that can uh use a hand uh and and the same with you know i wrote a play because i just am constantly looking for ways to uh express what i've seen and felt about these issues so it's just sort of shaped me uh the the the trips to the border have shaped my journey as a human being and for better or for worse have pushed me in these different directions yeah i i think there's something to be said about organically being m
oved to this work um and that it speaks to the way that we are all intimately connected and our ways of showing that can be as diverse as our experience and our talents dr neustadt it's been such a pleasure to have you with us this evening what a beautiful presentation i want to thank my colleague dr caitlin best would you like to say anything here before we wrap up yeah no i just i wanted to thank you for sharing your insights and talking about the different facets in which music comes into pla
y you know as a form of raising awareness as a form of understanding the soundscapes of the environment but i really appreciated your last statement of do work that matters you know because it is so true that in everything we do we do something that matters and that will shape the directions of our lives but yes thank you so much and and renee um for being a part of this and um really being able to speak to a lot of this you know the campus read book as well as to the larger issues well thank yo
u all again for having me and stay in touch and feel free to share my contacts with people if people are interested in dialoguing about this or if i can help in any way i am always open to do that so um it was my pleasure and honor to be able to share these stories that people shared with me with you and i appreciate all of you so thank you well thanks again and and to all the folks who joined us today for this presentation and also our friends at the division for diversity equity and inclusion
uh who included us in their diversity week celebrations and programming um just a few uh reminders about upcoming events um we have our neh grant workshop on november 29th our campus read author francisco cantu on november 16th and appalachian writer of color series continues with nima avashia on december 6th and for more information go to humanitycenter.wvu and thanks again for joining us tonight be safe and see you soon stay healthy
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