Day 11

I can't believe I only have a week left here in Arizona! It's kind of unreal all of the things we've done here in such little time. We had another early morning today, but that was fine because that meant we had an early finish! We started off with talking to Raquel Rubio Goldsmith. She specializes in research and teaching on Mexican-American women's history, human rights, and immigration issues. She has also won numerous awards for teaching excellence. She has presented papers on Mexican women on the U.S./Mexico border, before national and international conferences, and published the results of her research in several scholarly articles. In fact, the article we had to read last night was written by her! She spoke about human rights and the Border Patrol and one thing that she said really stuck out to me. "Where do human rights start and where do they end?" It's true though. Who decides what human rights should be? Who decides who these rights should be exempt to? It was humans who made the border after all. It was not created by nature. These people were not meant to be divided. She told us things about who is crossing the border, and actually it seems that more women are crossing recently. The women also have a higher rate of death than men. Something else that stuck out to me was the fact that the children that are apprehended are being deported unaccompanied. They are sending children, without their parents, back over the border into dangerous places at dangerous times. She was a great speaker and I'm really glad we got to hear from her!

After lunch we heard from another speaker, Chelsea Halstead from the Colibri Centre for Human Rights.

 The Colibri Centre for Human Rights owns the most comprehensive dataset of missing persons last seen crossing the U.S./Mexico border. Along with access to information about unidentified remains found along border, this data allows them to successfully match families searching for loved ones with unidentified remains and informs the public of a continuing human rights crisis on the border. She told us how there are only a few things that lets them positively identify a body and those are tattoos, fingerprints, skeletal radiographs, and dental radiographs. This organization actually deals with more migrant deaths than anyone else! 

After this presentation, we got to go to this really cool artsy place that sold a bunch of different Native American art and jewellery. The outside was really pretty too!

 Actually the weather today was perfect and I could have stayed outside all day. When we got back we got to have PIZZA for dinner! With pepperoni! Oh I was so happy. The reason was because it was our other guide, Tito's birthday! So we were celebrating! It was nice having pizza. I've missed it. And it was Little Caesar's so that made it all the more better. Then after dinner a bunch of us went to the movies again! We saw devil's Due and it was pretty bad. But it was nice to get out of the house! Tomorrow is going to be awesome because we are going to the 10th Annual Border Issues Fair! I can't wait to go!