Bøger af Belen Fernandez

Much has been written In English about the experiences and treatment of immigrants from south of the Rio Grande once they have entered the United States. But this account, by the itinerant, effervescent and highly original journalist Beln Fernndez, offers a different and wholly original take.Beln Fernndezshows us what life is like for would-be migrants, not just from the Mexican side of the border but inside Siglo XXI, the notorious migrant detention center in the south of the country.Journalists are prohibited from entering Siglo XXI; Fernndezonly gained access because she herself was detained as a result of faulty paperwork when she attempted to return to the US to renew her passport. Once inside the facility, Fernndezwas able to speak with detained women from Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Bangladesh, and beyond. Their stories, detailing the hardships that prompted them to leave their homes, and the dangers they have experienced on an often-tortuous journey north, form the core of this unique book. The companionship and support they offer to Fernndez, whose antipathy to returning to the United States, the country they are desperate to enter, is a source of bemusement and perplexity, demonstrates a spirited generosity that is deeply moving.In the end, the Siglo XXI center emerges as a strikingly precise metaphor for a 21st century in which poor people, effectively imprisoned by American political and economic policies, nevertheless display astonishing resilience.

"e;When I first committed to three full months in El Salvador, the feeling that I was signing up for the equivalent of marriage and reproduction was assuaged only by the awareness that, come March 2020, I'd be dashing around Mexico before flying to Istanbul and resuming freneticism in that hemisphere. Little did I know that the scribbled itinerary would never come to fruition, and that I'd only get as far as the coastal village of Zipolite in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where March 13-25 would turn into March 13 until further notice."e;Since leaving her American homeland in 2003 Beln Fernndez had been an inveterate traveler. Ceaselessly wandering the world, the only constant in her itinerary was a conviction never to return to the country of her childhood. Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened and Fernandez found herself stranded in a small village on the Pacific coast of Mexico.This charming, wryly humorous account of nine months stuck in one place nevertheless roams freely: over reflections on previous excursions to the wilder regions of North Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe; over her new-found friendship with Javier, the mezcal-drinking, chain-smoking near-septuagenarian she encounters in his plastic chair on Mexico's only clothing-optional beach; over her protracted struggle to obtain a life-saving supply of yerba mate; and over, literally, the rope of a COVID-19 checkpoint, set up directly outside her front door and manned by armed guards who require her to don a mask every time she returns home.

At 21, Belen left the U.S. and didn't look back. Alone, far off the beaten path in places like Syria and Tajikistan, she confronts violence, lechery, and places where it's hard to find a good glass of wine, and reflects on what it means to be an American in a largely American-made mess of a world. After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Beln Fernndez ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking-through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America-to packing avocados in southern Spain, to marrying a Palestinian-Lebanese man, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernndez survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling-as of the present moment-continued survival.In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Beln Fernndez has earned a place alongside Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag as one of the most trenchant observers of American actions abroad.

Factual errors, ham-fisted analysis, and contradictory assertionscompounded by a penchant for mixed metaphors and name-droppingdistinguish the work of Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Beln Fernndez dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity.The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writinginaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the wordsof one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was ';running up like parchment in the fire.'From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that hiscollection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. such polemics reappeared bothbefore and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century.In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideologicalhirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition.Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.