Guest Post: Colleen Bradford Krantz on her book “Train to Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation”
The letter was inside the folder the sheriff was sorting.
“Guess you can see this,” he said.
I was in Denison, Iowa, going through Crawford County Sheriff’s Office records as I researched my book, “Train to Nowhere; Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation.” The book and companion documentary examine the 2002 deaths of eleven undocumented immigrants, whose bodies were found in Denison when a grain worker opened a locked railcar.
I read the note as then-Sheriff Tom Hogan waited for my reaction. It was a hand-written letter from a woman in another state. Hogan said it had arrived within days of the national news reporting on the discovery of the bodies in Denison. The letter said:
“This is [a] wonderful way to solve the illegal alien problem. Let’s hope we find hundreds more, no, make that thousands more, freight cars full of dead spics. Maybe then these worthless criminals will stay in Mexico where they belong.”
I knew that emotions could run high on either side of the immigration issue, but this was hard for me to believe. Here was someone who had heard a summary of how these eleven had died inside a sweltering railcar that had been locked from the outside, and presumably felt nothing – not even pity – for the group and what they endured.
I drove away from Denison that day feeling like my instincts had been right: if I was going to tell a story that related even distantly to immigration, it had to be as neutral as I could manage. I was going to set aside the advice I had heard from some I encountered in the book and film world (no one I ended up working with) that I had to have a political agenda if I was going to tell this story. I was new to this setting, having left behind the world of newspaper reporting, and I had listened, wondering if I could really be so far off with my plans to tell this story journalistically.
I really don’t have a political agenda, I would tell them. After all, if I had the answers to the immigration issue, I’d run for Congress. Wasn’t it acceptable anymore to simply tell a compelling story in as even-handed a manner as possible and let the readers walk away to draw their own conclusions?
The letter affirmed that this issue is emotional enough (though I don’t think such views are at all representative of most people who worry about illegal immigration). I was convinced it was better to avoid the animosity that can come from both sides of the debate. Perhaps that was my “agenda” – to get Americans to recognize our blind spots in the debate. I wanted those who automatically judged anyone in a Border Patrol uniform as being unfeeling and cruel to get to know Alonzo, the retired immigration agent who led the death investigation team. And I wanted those who viewed all undocumented immigrants as lawbreakers with a sense of entitlement to get to know Byron, a Guatemalan teen who only wanted the pride of earning his own money instead of taking money from his older siblings.
Monte Reel, an author and former South American correspondent for the Washington Post, shared the following comments about the “Train to Nowhere” story, which gave me hope that I had succeeded in my attempt to honestly share viewpoints from both “sides.”
“The issue of illegal immigration is so complex that anyone who declares himself to be unequivocally on one side or another probably isn’t that informed. …If someone [approaches] this with pre-formed opinions about the issue, this [story] probably won’t change their minds. But I don’t think that’s the point,” Reel wrote. “I think it will get them to acknowledge the complexities and to recognize immigration as a human – and not theoretical – issue. That, to me, seems to be the point, and I think it succeeds incredibly well.”
Colleen Bradford Krantz’s book, “Train to Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation,” is being released this month. This is Day 3 of her week-long “blog tour.” Join her next at http://booksbooksthemagicalfruit.blogspot.com/ The book can be purchased at www.IceCubePress.com or on Amazon. Learn more at www.ColleenBradfordKrantz.com or follow Colleen on Twitter @bradfordkrantz