Archive

"Mexico in flames"?

Dear friends, Many have reached out after seeing the international news from Mexico — the army deployment, the cars and shops on fire, the blockaded streets. I understand and appreciate why — the scenes are made to order for panic, and were heavily amplified by US and Canadian tourists caught off guard

Mexico's radical rural normales, ft. interview with Tanalís Padilla

Dear friends, Over June and July this year, I reported this story for Al-Jazeera English about the death of Jesús Alaín Vásquez, a 22 year old student of the Mactumactzá 'rural normal' teacher training college in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital city of the state of Chiapas. With Mexico'

Morena fetishism and left mourning*

Dear friends, In their recent article 'Solidarity or Coloniality in the Feminist Foreign Policy Knowledge Market? Lessons from Mexico', Mexican feminist scholars Daniela Philipson Garcia and Ana Velasco Ugalde recount the passage through Anglo and European international networks of the feminist foreign policy (FFP) announced by Mexico in

The squirrel men

Dear friends, Perhaps, some say, it was the murder of his young son that sent Don Celso's bloodlust stratospheric. Himself the son of 'La Ardilla' - 'The Squirrel', Celso was already born and raised in war. His ex-policeman father founded the armed criminal organisation

Running for Alejandro

(español abajo) Dear friends, Alejandro Arcos Catalán had been the mayor of Chilpancingo, capital of the state of Guerrero, for just six days when he was murdered. The 43-year-old was elected to office in 2024 following a second campaign as the candidate for a coalition of three parties - the

Feminism in Mexico: Proof of life

CW: armed violence, sexual violence Dear friends, Of the many conversations I’ve had about feminism in Mexico over the last 9 years, a particularly memorable one occurred early one evening in 2023. Let's call him Saúl. We met at a bar around the corner from the Zócalo

Errata - The Troubled Region April 2 2025

Hi all, I needed to make two corrections to the latest newsletter ('"A mass grave with a national anthem": Mourning a killing field in Mexico'). They're now reflected in the website-published version. Regarding the email version sent out on April 2, please note: * For

"A mass grave with a national anthem": Mourning a killing field in Mexico

(corrected and re-issued 04/04/2025)* Dear friends, "Each visitor invented their own narrative", writes Mexican journalist Marcela Turati, describing a chaotic press tour of the Izaguirre ranch in the western Mexican state of Jalisco on March 20. The tour, attended by Mexican social media influencers and international

Stopping traffic, and the state

Dear friends, Early this morning (Saturday 22 February), thousands from the Zapatista communities of the Lacandon jungle took to the highways that link the towns of Palenque, Comitán, San Cristóbal de Las Casas y Ocosingo. For several hours they blocked traffic as part of a global protest marking

The Troubled Region in 2025

Dear friends, I meant for this post to have different words, but it was a long January and I am rather lost for them to be honest. So for now, some important information about this newsletter, and me, in 2025. 1. The Troubled Region is going (mostly) paid-subscriber-only. It has

Staying with the trouble

Dear friends, I like to talk about 'staying with the trouble' after the title of a book by Donna Haraway, a trailblazing feminist theorist who, since I read her Manifesto for cyborgs in the early 2000s, has helped me think through so many things over the years. '

Cruel emblem: Mexico, the 43, and the 116,000

Dear friends, September 26 marked a decade since the forced disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa teacher's college in Mexico in 2014. This is a case that became emblematic of the crisis of forced disappearance and paramilitary/criminal governance in the country and was covered by media

No landmark: Australia's inquiry into Missing and Murdered First Nations Women and Children

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following post contains the names of people who have died. Dear friends, In episode 3 of the 2022 podcast Dying Rose by Douglas Smith, Indigenous Affairs Reporter with The Advertiser, it is fellow Advertiser journalists Emily Olle and Katherine Bermingham’

The genocide in Palestine: Students, space and silence

Dear friends, As university goes back in the United States, the country’s colleges are prepared. New York University has fenced gathering space and hired guards to keep people out. Similar deal at Columbia. Students demonstrating at the University of Michigan were arrested. Encampments at University of California are now

Black women journalists expose Trump's threat to the world

Dear friends, When Kamala Harris announced that she would replace Biden as candidate for US president on the Democratic ticket, Ghanaian-American international journalist Erica Ayisi says her first thoughts were for “the lives of Black women and girls in the States.” As a Black woman in the national media spotlight,

The butcher's apron and the Bund

Dear friends, I've been writing an essay about British Christian settler colonialism for months now. I'm not sure how the essay starts but I think do know how it ends - that is, with some provocations on home, and the bargains that are made for it;

Tourism of duty

Dear friends, While you’re waiting for your baggage in Mexico’s shiny new Felipe Ángeles international airport, the walls promise the train is coming. Shapes and colours catch the eye, anticipating the ride of your life through the rainforests, fauna, Mayan ruins, and blue lagoons of the nation’s

Pedro Pascal as foreign policy*

Dear friends,** In The Last Of Us, Pedro Pascal's Joel Miller must shepherd Ellie, played by Bella Ramsey, across terrain marked by the mass expiry of most of the world's humans. There is danger around every corner. Trust between the remaining mortals is as thin as

Burning out brightly

Stay tuned for 2023

Iran erupts in feminist protest

Why are Iranians in the streets, how is it being framed in international media, and how are people outside the country boosting the signal?

Might in the 'right' hands

Mexico, assault weapons, and the international re-order

How we might have cared for each other

A pandemical plea

Bottleneck and sieve

Mexico as a destination

The Galleon and the Good Hardworking People

Dear friends, As three-year-old Evelina* has grown, a friend of her dad’s, thinking that she looks Asian, has come to jokingly call her ‘la coreana’, the Korean girl. Evelina is a daughter of the state of Guerrero in southwestern Mexico, far from Seoul and Pyongyang. But poor racial approximations

The Social Dilemma

Dear friends, Happy new year! It’s kinda funny that one of the cultural products of 2020 was called The Social Dilemma, because the same name might easily be put to the ongoing deliberations (/straight-up actual fist-fights) around how we all live with the covid19 pandemic, wherever we are in

On living

+ the uses of Power

Hiatus

~~~it’s a pandemic~~~

Stigma as a pre-existing condition

Love in the time of COVID-19*

Dear friends, How’s your coronavirus anxiety. Your coronanxiety. Your crowning anxiety? This bad attempt at rapid-fire punning should tell you enough about where mine’s at. From my apartment on the roof of a some 80-year-old building in a working-class neighbourhood in a central borough of Mexico City, I’

Mexico: Local militias are training children

+ Arab women reporting the Arab world

Trapped on the beach: Australia burns

A special edition.

Jungle Princes and other white whales

Also, what happened in Bolivia?

From, to, of

The locations of international reporting

Reporting the catastrophe

As the Amazon burns, who are our correspondents?

Who is foreign correspondence for?

Dear friends, At a shelter for migrants in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, right near the border with Guatemala, my conversation with Alejandro, a man from Honduras, is interrupted by Elsa, a fellow national of Alejandro’s. “Mira” (“Look”), she says, pointing at her phone. We look. It’s

How does someone consent...

... to be part of an international news story?

Samba and sensibility

"... makes me wonder if the Western gaze is really something people can get rid of."

Parsing risk and making deadline

A freelance foreign correspondent field note

'You have to tell people what's happening here'

Introducing The Troubled Region