This ASU professor takes students on an annual trip to the Arizona borderlands

There’s a difference between learning about something in the classroom and experiencing it firsthand.

And that’s what Arizona State University Barrett Honors College professor Abby Wheatley tries to do every year when she brings her class on transnational migration to the Arizona borderlands.

Wheatley has been taking students on this transformational trip for more than a decade. But this time, she followed it up with a conference afterward, where students presented their original research.

This year, Wheatley took her students on a desert walk near Ajo, Arizona, and to the border wall in Nogales.

Wheatley and sophomore Maria Blandon spoke more about it to The Show.

Full conversation

ABBY WHEATLEY: So students experience the topography, they experience the heat, they experience what walking in the desert means. Some students carry water. And then when we go to the border wall, we ask them to kind of really just look around and observe, and see for themselves what the border wall looks like, what it feels like, who’s there, what are they doing.

And it takes a long time to get out there, right? Because we were based in Tucson. So the other thing I always tell students is like the driving component is not like separate from this experience, like thinking about how far out in the desert we’re going and how far out in the desert people are walking when they’re crossing.

LAUREN GILGER: Had you ever been there, Maria?

MARIA BLANDON: No, that was my first time being there.

LAUREN GILGER: It certainly is different, that border wall, when you see it up close, right?

MARIA BLANDON: For sure. Yeah, definitely different from what I was used to seeing in the news.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, you see that picture sometimes from an overhead shot, right? But it’s very different being under it. What were your reactions?

MARIA BLANDON: It was definitely an eye-opening experience, definitely a very lively city, interconnected. You can definitely tell that those two cities, in both sides of the border are interconnected, something that I wouldn’t have thought.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, there’s a Nogales, Sonora, and then there’s a Nogales, Arizona. Right, yeah.

MARIA BLANDON: Yeah, yeah, and for a lot of people there, it’s just Nogales. It’s not Arizona or Mexico, it’s just Nogales. And that was very beautiful to see, just that connection. People like crossing. The traffic was very heavy, and that was also surprising. Very nice people, too. So, that was something that really touched my heart, like hearing the testimonies of people who were living for so long on the other side and then were just separated by this wall all of a sudden and, now found themselves on the other side was definitely impactful.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder as well, when you were in Ajo, that’s like one of these places where like lots of people are going and kind of walking through the desert. What were your impressions of that, and like what those trails are like, what the desert’s like there?

MARIA BLANDON: It was definitely moving, to experience something very deep and very that goes back to generations. I have family and friends that their immigration journey included aspects of what we experienced in the desert. And that was very moving, definitely.

I had all of them in mind whenever I was walking through that path, and not only them, but also just other experiences of people who didn’t make it, and that was also very impactful as well. I did get emotional during a talk that our professors who were guiding us, commenting of like other people’s path and journeys through that same path that we were walking on at that same time.

LAUREN GILGER: How have you seen it change students, Abby, this — I mean, it’s a day, right? Like one trip, one day. What does it do?

ABBY WHEATLEY: There’s really like a very palpable, tangible shift in the class of students once we get out of the classroom and go to the border. Like the minute they’re engaging with community folks and they’re kind of in the field, it becomes more important, more pressing, more personal. I also think students become really empowered.

So one of the things I hear from my students a lot is, "This is overwhelming. It’s sad. It’s a huge problem. Like how could we possibly address any of this?" And when they go to the border or they go into the field and they connect with people already working on these issues, I think they see where they can get involved, and they see themselves as people who can make those changes.

And I think that’s the other goal, is that many of our students are from the borderlands. They have the key skills to be involved in these issues, they have the knowledge, they have the experience. Many of them are bilingual.

Connecting them in this way, I think, really empowers them to commit to addressing these issues, right? And so it’s sort of like a practice of I think connecting students to places where they’re already capable and competent to act.

LAUREN GILGER: Did you feel that way, Maria, that all of a sudden you felt, "This is not such an overwhelming problem, I can actually affect change here"?

MARIA BLANDON: Oh, for sure, especially in the conference aspect. It was very empowering to see that it was not only me who was frustrated about this problem, but also a lot of other students.

LAUREN GILGER: Tell us about the research that you conducted. I mean, you presented it at this conference in the end, but this was a big part of it, it sounds like, going down to the border and talking to folks.

MARIA BLANDON: Oh, for sure. Being an immigrant myself, I had my own immigration journey, but it was very different from what I experienced in this trip.

So the research project that I’m working on is titled "Measuring Know Your Rights Literacy Among Latino Immigrants," and it felt as the next phase of this immigration journey after crossing the wall, after going through the desert. Now it’s the constant process of survival, in the search of education, in the search of information, resources to fight these many illegal deportations that we’re seeing nowadays.

LAUREN GILGER: You mentioned you’re an immigrant yourself, but your journey looked very different from these folks you met on the border. What did your immigration journey look like?

MARIA BLANDON: Yeah, I am originally from Nicaragua. I grew up there till I was 16. However, I was born in Miami because my grandma was working there at the time.

But I was just born there, so I grew up my whole life in Nicaragua. And then political persecution emerged in the country. It was very unstable, so my family had the obligation to flee out of the country, and we came here to Arizona, the great state of Arizona.

So it wasn’t through the border, it wasn’t through the desert, so that aspect was missing from my experience, from my perspective. So it was definitely complementary, this trip, to everything that I’ve lived and to everything that I’ve researched myself.

ABBY WHEATLEY: The reason we take students out to the desert to walk is not to mimic the journey of a migrant. We would never do that, because people lose their lives doing that, right?

But to have a small amount of awareness what it means to walk in a vast desert, by yourself, without water, without knowing where you’re going, with your family or your children alongside you. So just to have a small amount of awareness, but I think also the embodied component of like physically engaging in this complements the intellectual part, right?

And maybe that’s the other really important part of the experiential learning, is we connect it to rigorous research and scholarship and literature, and everything has to be evidence-based, right? We spend a lot of time learning and researching and reading articles and collating all that information, but we also can’t forget about the communities and the people who are impacted by the policies, right?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Maria, what do you want to do when you grow up? When you graduate?

MARIA BLANDON: When I graduate, I want to go to law school. I want to specialize in education and special education law. That’s my goal for now.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s a big goal, yeah. I mean, so I wonder, experiences like this being able to sort of learn how to bring research into your real life, into the real world, right? And connect it with real people. Do you think that’ll affect the way you go about your career in the future?

MARIA BLANDON: Oh, for sure. I think the most important thing that this trip taught me is not to keep only the first impression that I have or only secondhand impressions that I have about any subject — not only immigration, not only the border, but about any subject. And as professor Wheatley was mentioning, experiencing for myself and having others — I can serve as a tool for them if they can experience a specific topic through me as well.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, all right. That is Maria Blandon and Abby Wheatley joining us to talk about this experience. Thank you both so much for being here, I really appreciate it.

ABBY WHEATLEY: Thank you.

MARIA BLANDON: Thank you.