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BethelCollege.edu/Magazine2
ANEWPERSPECTIVE
on the border
It all started with a group text.
Yonathan Moya ’10 and his six siblings, who all attended
Bethel, were discussing their feelings about Mexican culture and
immigrants in January.
“We’re a first-generation Mexican family,” said Moya, a liberal
arts major, who was born in Mexico, but migrated with his family
to south Texas in the early 1990s. “All of us felt really weighed
down, and I threw an idea out there and said: I wonder what
it would be like if people that have never been to the border …
actually had a conversation with someone there.”
Within a month, Moya, along with his brother, Jordan, set off for
a nine-day photographic journey along the U.S.-Mexican border
to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. They titled their trip
“Border Perspective.”
“I think as storytellers, we have the ability to connect people to
others, and that’s what I wanted to do with Border Perspective,”
said Moya about sharing the story through photography.
Moya felt that if they could humanize the people they met on
the border, connections could be made with the people in their
Midwestern states of Indiana and Minnesota.
The two met all sorts of people – from an elderly gentleman
who works in cornfields every summer in Elkhart, to a little
league team in El Paso that plays in fields right along the border,
to a retired nurse who washes the feet of the immigrants weekly.
Through the trip, Moya perceived that people choose to live
a normal life in these violent, heavily surveilled areas. He also
gathered from his experience that amidst an increase in crime,
a change he noted from his days growing up along the border,
BY YONIKA WILLIS
YONATHAN MOYA (RIGHT) AND JORDAN MOYA (LEFT) STAND ON EITHER SIDE OF THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER.