“There are people who are innocent who have just been written out of existence, essentially. My brain bottoms out thinking about it.”
Jonathan Blitzer describes a humanizing approach to immigration journalism.
Near the end of our conversation, Jonathan Blitzer walked through the process of calling lawyer after lawyer, slowly piecing together contacts in order to share his powerful reporting about Andry José Hernández Romero, a make-up artist that was one of more than 230 Venezuelans deported to an El Salvador prison earlier this year. The tedious work of collecting the story and describing nuanced immigration policy is occluded by Blitzer’s humanizing portraits of Andry and several of the other deported individuals. In this final part of our conversation, Blitzer shares his process of building relationships and how to effectively share immigration stories in this moment.
ANTERO GARCIA: Building relationships that are crucial to your reporting must take substantial amounts of time. Given the speed at which immigration policy is changing right now, is that a limitation in this moment?
JONATHAN BLITZER: In a perfect world, you have so much time with everyone. The thing that really spoils you working on a book is you have an opportunity to talk to people for years. In a certain sense, for me, that is a dream because you get to really live with people in different senses and visit them repeatedly and talk to them regularly. Obviously you can't do that in day-to-day work. At The New Yorker, for instance, there are different sizes of stories that we do. We have longer narratives that are the kind of classic New Yorker stories. There are also things that are still probably long by general interest standards, but shorter for us. Essentially you scale the same ethos to each of these situations, if that makes sense to say.
For example, let’s take Andry [José Hernández Romero]’s case: Obviously what was happening with the stealth summary deportation of 238 people to El Salvador, is monstrous, it's shocking. Just as a journalist, you immediately want to try to do something of some value about what's happening, to explain to people what is going on, to explain to people the horror of it, to make clear to people the randomness and arbitrariness of it.
I think the thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that there are people who are innocent who have just been written out of existence, essentially. My brain bottoms out thinking about it.
AG: Of course.
JB: Additionally, there's a whole political rhetoric around the fact that El Salvador was the destination and that there was a whole politics and history around branding people as gangsters without any evidence. That's a historical pattern that tragically repeats. Journalistically I've spent a lot of time just looking at that pattern play out between the US and Central America. And here you had a new version of that pattern being applied to the latest country of interest, which is now Venezuela, because that's where the lion's share of most recent arrivals have come from. It's almost axiomatic looking at American politics that an administration like this one would identify a Venezuelan gang and start to brand people as members without any evidence. All these circumstances of this were just ringing all of the bells in my ears.
And so, what you do is you start to get in touch with lawyers who are involved in this advocacy. You can get in touch with different lawyers by looking at some of the court filings. In some of the court filings, there are references to sworn statements and affidavits by attorneys, because at this point, all of the people in question are already unreachable in El Salvador. You just slowly start this process. Well … you're going as fast as you can because the news is breaking and a million things are happening.
The way I think about it is, in a purely process way, you're trying to land as close as you can to the people affected. And generally the closest way to land on a tight turnaround like this, are the lawyers involved in advocating for these people. And so, one lawyer points you to another, points you to another, and there are different cases that come streaming your way. In this case, I connected with Andry’s lawyers, who are incredibly passionate, effective advocates, because they had the trust of members of his family. Because members of his family were out of their heads with grief and anxiety, they were willing to talk. You start there.
AG: I think the first name in that story is his mother, right? Before you meet Andry you meet his mother. Part of why that story hits so effectively is that it starts with a family and a place.
JB: Absolutely. The reason I think it's so important to have human beings at the front and center is just because I think that's what is at stake here, actual lives. I think readers intuitively get that, but as a writer in this situation, there is a special narrative burden which you have to take very seriously, which is how to set the story up in such a way that people can actually see every dimension of the situation for what it is and for these different dimensions to kind of build in synchrony. This stuff is complicated. It's like, imagine writing a story about this for readers who don't know anything about Venezuela, don't know anything about the US immigration system, don't know anything about El Salvador, can't follow along on back and forth between Justice Department lawyers and a federal judge in Washington.
You have to think very, very concertedly about how to structure these stories so that you can move through them in a way that's digestible and intelligible and immediate to people. There’s a narrative gradient that you're up against, which is even well-intentioned people often don't click on these stories or don't open the magazine to read these stories because they think, “This is so depressing, this is just so upsetting.” I agree, it's horrible.
“You have to think very, very concertedly about how to structure these stories so that you can move through them in a way that's digestible and intelligible and immediate to people.”
AG: “Do I want to ruin my day reading this article?”
JB: Yeah. I'm sympathetic to that because honestly, there are days when I do that. There are days when I'm deep in reporting on stuff where I see a story that I both personally and professionally need to read and I'm like, “I just can't do it right now.” It'll just upset me too much.
Not to trivialize the stakes of it, but that's where being a narrative journalist can get interesting. Because then the exercise becomes, okay, how do I set this thing up in such a way that I can guide someone through and have moments be episodic and intensely personal and very specific and then cut away to something that's happening simultaneously? A lot of this work--after the reporting and after the interacting with the families and so on--is thinking structurally about how to line up these different pieces so that someone can see every aspect of the plot developing. Finding the right place to start is very important. Not just because it's what immediately hits the reader, but also you have to start in a place that then allows you to unfurl the whole story.
AG: I think you’re naming the exact tensions that Alix and I faced when writing The Cost of Being Undocumented: how do you convey the nuances of the costs of undocumented survival and do people even have the stomach to read that kind of material right now?
JB: I do think that there's a pretty important divide between journalism and advocacy. But I think that in order to parse the complex political particulars and the human dimensions you have to kind of obsess yourself with all these details at every level. No detail is too small.
When I’m talking to people while reporting, I’ll often sort of pitch myself to people and have something like a meta-conversation with them. I'll say, “Interview me.” If I'm asking you to talk about stuff that is probably some of the most complex stuff in your life, you have to feel like the person who you're telling that to is attentive in the right ways. But one of the things I will say to them too is, “Look, I'm going to ask you some questions too in these conversations, they're going to strike you as totally weird and random. And it's just because I want to understand as specifically as possible just what your perspective is at every moment. And so, tell me, stop me as we're talking if something seems odd or if you are curious about why I am asking you about that? What does that have to do with anything? I'll tell you.”
I don't think journalism is intuitive to people. Unless you're interviewing someone in Washington or someone who's really read into the whole thing, it's not obvious to people what the hell you're up to. It's on you to relate to someone as a human being before you relate to them as a journalist because you need to bring them along. Someone asking 1,000 nosy questions is not a normal way to interact with someone. It's scary and it's off-putting. And so I think it's very important as a journalist to not forget how alien and jarring journalism is.
“It's on you to relate to someone as a human being before you relate to them as a journalist because you need to bring them along.”
Propina
A huge thank you to Jonathan Blitzer for sharing his time with La Cuenta during an incredibly busy time covering US immigration policy. If you missed the first two parts of our conversation, you can find them here:
Don’t forget to pre-order The Cost of Being Undocumented and get your free stickers!
We’ll see you next week.