After a particularly busy period, a reflection about this website, and the direction of my work in general.
There are moments each year when all my intentions to maintain an up-to-date, compelling, thoughtful personal website just fall apart, sunk by an armada of 70-hour weeks.
I’m emerging (I hope) from one of those moments. In the last seven days, I’ve:
- Taught a class at the Foreign Service Institute
- Recorded a quick WOLA video ahead of Kamala Harris’s September 27 visit to the U.S.-Mexico border
- Prepared testimony and testified in a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing
- Driven from Washington to eastern Long Island (6 1/2 hours) and spent time with my father-in-law
- Presented on a virtual panel hosted by the Latin American Studies Association
- Given a virtual presentation to a group of experts in Colombia
- Driven to Brooklyn (2 1/2 hours), while covering the Harris border visit, for a weekend of family festivities around my sister’s wedding, which was terrific (especially my speech, lol)
- Driven back to Washington (4 1/2 hours), while covering the Biden administration’s tightening of asylum access regulations (see today’s “Border Links”)
Today, other than an interview this morning, I’ve got a clear calendar, finally. I’m washing clothes, taking a breath, answering messages (sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you, not that you’re likely to be reading this), planing out the next few weeks, and maybe getting rid of the stubborn cough I’ve had for two weeks (it’s not COVID).
One thing I miss during these “high season” moments is having the chance to share more here. This site is a good space for me to get my thoughts together, sharing information and insights that are deeper than a tweet, but not requiring full editorial review or an institutional voice.
I’d like to share more of that, and to have more time to do the reading on which a lot of it is based. But most of my recent posts to this site have been brief, sporadic links, graphics, or border updates, which are not quite the same. It’s not my goal to run a news-brief service.
I may remain in this rut, though, at least through the U.S. elections: such are the demands of “rapid response,” and I’ll also be spending part of next week at a conference in Guatemala, so there will be a bit of travel.
However, I expect some gradual but steady evolution in the coming weeks as I return to this space and use it more to develop ideas and future work.
That future work will be more on the “security and U.S. policy” side of my advocacy and research, where I’ve allowed a lot of weeds to grow during the past few years as my “borders and migration” focus intensified.
This year, though, WOLA has seen a decline in funding for borders-and-migration work. By no means will I abandon that work, which is very important to me even as it’s hard to promise short-term positive change. Still, as the election-period “rapid response” phase draws to a close, I do expect to turn the dial back toward the “defense oversight” work denoted by my job title.
That means more attention to security policy (what’s up with the “Bukele model?”), U.S. assistance (what’s Southcom up to?), state presence and governance (what’s happening with the Colombian peace accord’s “rural reform” promises? or in the Darién Gap?), organized crime and corruption (Ecuador’s crisis, drug policy challenges), and, yes, borders and migration (all of the above topics as they relate to migrants, plus accountability for abuse and corruption).
I look forward to this site reflecting that shift. It will be happening just as we get a new administration and Congress here in Washington. The election’s two possible outcomes point to two starkly different futures.
Neither promises a golden age for a rights-based U.S. policy toward Latin America. But one outcome promises gradual progress, while the other calls for defending what and whom we can, whenever we can, through a long, dark night.
It’s going to be endlessly interesting, and I’ll aim to document as much of it as I can here, even as these “busy seasons” come and go.