1. A Risky Place? Media and the Health Landscape in the (In)secure U.S.‐Mexico Borderlands
- Author
-
Kathryn Jill Fleuriet and Heide Castañeda
- Subjects
060101 anthropology ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,Immigration ,Media studies ,050801 communication & media studies ,06 humanities and the arts ,Politics ,0508 media and communications ,State (polity) ,Content analysis ,Political science ,General Earth and Planetary Sciences ,Mainstream ,0601 history and archaeology ,Prosperity ,Citizenship ,News media ,General Environmental Science ,media_common - Abstract
In this paper, we consider how news stories about one area of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, further propagate notions of a region filled with people characterized as dangerously noncompliant with American ideals of citizenship, prosperity, and security. Using Ethnographic Content Analysis, we conducted a systematic analysis of Valley, state and national mainstream news media stories from 2010–2016 about health or health care in the Rio Grande Valley. Ethnographic research with Valley leaders, residents, and journalists completed the media analysis. We argue that the Rio Grande Valley is framed as both an unruly internal colony as well as a racialized periphery, due to its proximity to Mexico. We detail how these news stories are received and acted upon by seasoned local journalists who use their trade to offer different scripts, rooted in actual lives and experiences of residents. We conclude with alternative versions of the U.S.-Mexico border region from borderlands scholars to reflect on how dominant media representations of places and people can be weathervanes for political discourse that shape state and national action about “the border.”
- Published
- 2017