In the 1980s, Kathryn Ferguson, a Tucson High School graduate, began to explore with her camera the indigenous people who lived in the depths and on the precipices of the famed Barranca del Cobre in northern Mexico.
Her forays continued over the years and morphed into activism on border and immigration issues, as she all the while continued to delve into Mexico’s communities, getting to know and appreciate the people, landscape and culture.
From her journeys, Ferguson produced two documentary films related to the Tarahumaras who live in the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua, Mexico, and co-authored a book, “Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail” published by the University of Arizona Press.
Ferguson has now put her life’s experiences into a new book, “The Haunting of the Mexican Border: A Woman’s Journey,” released last week by the University of New Mexico Press.
The book is about the deep changes Ferguson witnessed on both sides of the border, and about the changes she underwent as a participant.
“I never thought of my life as a book,” said Ferguson at her midtown home, which doubles as a studio where she teaches Middle Eastern dance.
Ferguson is reluctant to call her book a memoir. She prefers to see it as a woman’s examination of the violence and generosity of the border region and Mexico, her adopted country.
Her book, like her life, is divided into two parts. The first part is about her years traveling to the land of the Tarahumara and learning their history and challenges.
Her first film, “The Unholy Tarahumara,” was first screened in 1998 at the Arizona International Film Festival in Tucson, and subsequently in 11 festivals in the U.S. and Europe. Her second film, “Rita of the Sky,” released in 2009, is about a non-English-speaking woman who was placed in a Kansas mental institution because no one could understand her indigenous language. She was declared mentally ill and she spent 10 years locked up.
As Ferguson’s life progressed, change came to the border region. The militarization increased as did the number of migrant deaths. The detention and deportation of immigrants and the separation of families rocketed up. And xenophobia became accepted and louder in the American public discourse.
The times got darker, and so does the second portion of Ferguson’s “Haunting.” The book’s title, she added, refers to the consequences of the United States’ ham-fisted approach to resolving economic and social problems along the border.
“We’re living it as it goes now,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson, who has been active with the Samaritans, a Tucson group that offers first aid, food and water to migrants walking across the desert, said, “We’re haunted by what we do at the border.”
But Ferguson diffuses the darkness by shining light on people on both sides of the border. From fellow Samaritans to families in Mexico, Ferguson wants readers to know that the border region is “a lovely place of relationships.”
While pandering politicians want Americans to believe that the border and Mexico are out of control, Ferguson counters that the border region is full of families, many of which are multigenerational and connected to both sides of the line.
“It’s full of laughter,” she said. “I don’t look at the border as an evil place.”
Ferguson, as a woman and writer about the border, is not alone. Two other Tucson women have recently published books about the border region.
Peg Bowden, a retired nurse who has volunteered at a Nogales, Mexico, shelter for migrants deported from the U.S., wrote “A Land of Hard Edges: Serving the Front Lines of the Border,” her account of the effects of our immigration policy through the stories of people in the Kino Border Initiative comedor.
And Margaret Regan, a longtime writer for the Tucson Weekly, wrote “Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire,” a journalistic examination of the impact of detention and deportation of Mexican families north of the line.
Ferguson hopes readers who are unfamiliar with the border come away with a deeper understanding. She wants readers to learn about the global forces that push people out of their homes and into the desert in search of better lives.
“I want people moved enough to do something,” Ferguson said.
