A Decade of Listening to Voices of the Border

TCLP Staff
4 minutes ago
4 min read

By Robert Neustadt, Guest writer

I began thinking about borders intensively in 2010 when I first took a group of students from Northern Arizona University on a 5-day field trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Originally, I thought a field trip would be “interesting,” especially since many of my most successful and enjoyable pedagogical experiences, as a student and a professor, have been experiential. In retrospect, I had no idea what I was getting into. My students, my accompanying colleagues, and I were completely overwhelmed by the visceral understanding that we gained from what we saw and heard on this journey to and through borders. We went into the experience thinking in terms of an academic field trip and ended up having our worldviews shattered. One student wrote on his course evaluation that it made him realize he “had a soul.” The trip proved so impactful that I continued taking students and colleagues to the border for more than ten years, sometimes multiple times per year.

Each trip had a different itinerary, but often we started off by touring an immigration detention center. We then observed an immigration hearing, called Operation Streamline, in a federal courthouse in Tucson, Arizona. At Streamline hearings, 70 handcuffed, shackled, and chained detainees would plead guilty, over the course of a few hours, for having illegally entered the United States. After leaving court, we visited the “Potter’s Field” where the remains of deceased border crossers have been interred for many years in graves and/or columbaria. It was an intense start to an intense field trip.

The next morning, we visited with Border Patrol, toured their facility, and listened to the BP perspective. Border Patrol agents maintain that their mission is to protect the homeland. They emphasize the dangers they face while chasing drug traffickers and saving the lives of lost migrants. Afterwards, we sometimes joined musician Glenn Weyant to transform the border wall into a collective and collaborative musical instrument. We would then walk across the border into Mexico and spend the afternoon at shelters with recently deported migrants. We listened as they described their experiences, all the while thinking in the back of our minds that these could be the same people we saw in detention, or in chains in the courtroom. These are the people, we now understood, that the Border Patrol refers to as “illegal aliens.” These are the people, we now understood in our guts, whose bones may end up on a gurney in the morgue. Usually, these student field trips concluded with a couple of days camping in the desert with humanitarian volunteers. We walked migrant trails with humanitarians and cached water, food, and blankets for people in need. Some of the students had never camped before. Sleeping under a desert sky bursting with stars, listening to coyotes howl, and thinking about migration can be a scary and/or spiritual experience. Inevitably, students developed close friendships with their peers on this journey. Emotions bounced around like ping-pong balls—one moment students were laughing and goofing off, the next moment we might encounter a site where a border crosser perished. Students hugged, they got mad, they often cried.

The first field trip shook me to the core. I returned and had to tell everyone about the experience. Soon thereafter I wrote a song, entitled “Voluntary Return.” When I played my song to my friend Chuck Cheesman, he suggested that we produce an album as a fundraiser for a humanitarian NGO. And so began the Border Songs CD Project, a double album of music and spoken word, in Spanish and English. We fundraised to create the record, and everyone involved volunteered their time. Ultimately, we donated the proceeds from album sales, nearly $100,000, to the humanitarian group No More Deaths/No más muertes, whose mission aims “to end death and suffering in the AZ/Mexico borderlands.”

Border-themed songs kept forming in my mind, so I recorded my own album of mostly original tunes, Voluntary Return: Songs of Solidarity with Migrants and Refugees. Though I had never before performed, I started playing concerts to raise funds for migrant and immigrant rights organizations. Thus, my work as a professor, a humanitarian, an immigrant rights activist, and a musician began to overlap. Many songs from Border Songs and Voluntary Return constitute a kind of aural syllabus for my classes and field trips. During our trips I would play specific tracks in particular places for my students. As we would drive away from the border wall and make our way in the van towards a Border Patrol checkpoint, for example, I would play the track of Margaret Randall reading her poem “Offended Turf.” Traveling through darkness across the desert and listening to Randall’s poem, which is mixed with Glenn Weyant’s recordings of the borderlands soundscape and his drone-like soundings of the wall, after having visited the wall and witnessed its consequences, renders a powerful, thought-provoking, immersive experience.

More recently, I wrote a play, Border Voices/Voces fronterizas (NoPassport Press, 2021), with more than one scene inspired by events and situations we witnessed on the field trips. Some of the characters’ voices are based on real people, others are fictional, and the overall plot represents the absurd limbo endured by migrants and refugees. The play, as well as my music and the border tours, all strive to inform and to entertain, to interrogate, and ultimately, to make us reflect on the humanitarian crises taking place on the U.S.-Mexico border (and elsewhere).

Robert Neustadt, Professor of Spanish at Northern Arizona University, began taking students on field trips to the Arizona/Mexico border in 2010, and these experiences shaped the course of his creative output. In 2011, he co-produced the Border Songs CD, a double album of music and spoken word, in English and Spanish, about the border and immigration. Border Songs raised nearly $100,000 for humanitarian aid. During his journey to become an immigrant rights activist, he became a songwriter and recorded an album of (mostly) original songs, Voluntary Return: Songs of Solidarity with Migrants and Refugees. He has also published poetry and, in 2021, published a play, Border Voices (NoPassport Press). Bob is currently writing a book for Liverpool University Press entitled Music on the Line: Songs and Politics on the US/Mexico Border. This book-in-progress combines academic analysis, crisis reporting, and personal reflection.

Robert Neustadt is co-leading the November 2026 Borderlands Journey.

Questions about the Journey? Sign up for the Info session on Tuesday, May 19.