Exclusive Interview with Journalist Terry Greene Sterling

Terry Greene Sterling, a Writer-in-Residence at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, is currently writing a non-fiction book about people living in the shadows of America’s immigration battlefield—Phoenix, Arizona. It’s called “ILLEGAL: Life and Death in the Undocumented Underground,” and it will be published by Lyons Press, a division of Globe Pequot Press, in 2010.

Sterling is a three-time winner of Arizona’s highest journalism honor, the Virg Hill Journalist of the Year Award and the recipient of 48 other national and regional journalism awards. She was a staff investigative reporter at Phoenix New Times for 13 years and her stories have also appeared in The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, salon.com, Newsweek, Newsweek.com, The Nieman Narrative Digest, Arizona Highways, High Country News, The Arizona Republic, and PHOENIX Magazine, among others.

For more info, please check out her website (http://www.terrygreenesterling.com) and/or find her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/TGSterling).

The following is our exclusive interview with Ms. Sterling:

S&B: What is the crux of the book?

Sterling: The book takes readers into the hidden worlds of undocumented Latino immigrants living in Phoenix.

S&B: What drew you to the subject of immigration?

The publisher approached me with the idea of writing a nonfiction book on immigration, and I didn’t want to write yet another “crossing the dangerous border on the immigrant trail” book. Ted Conover did this very thing in Coyotes, and in my opinion no one has ever written a better book about the topic, although many have tried. I wanted to write a book no one else had written. So I chose to report the untold stories about everyday people in the shadows of America’s kidnapping capital.

S&B: How long have you been a journalist and what other topics have you written about?

Sterling: I have been a journalist for over 25 years, and all of this time I’ve written Phoenix-based stories. I was a staff investigative reporter for Phoenix New Times for 13 years. At the newspaper, I broke several stories that caused national heartburn. One story, on a childhood cancer cluster in a polluted area called Maryvale, sparked a CDC investigation. Another, on pedophile priests in the Diocese of Phoenix, made me sick to my stomach. I broke a story about the financial weirdness (flipping, multiple shell corporations, and, yea, derivatives) of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, which turned out to be the largest religious financial fraud in American history and ended up bringing down Arthur Andersen. The Baptist perps went to prison. I’ve written stories about serial killers, gang members, a doctor who operated on the wrong side of a guy’s brain, animal hoarders, corrupt politicians, the Virgin of Guadalupe, groundwater, and saguaro cacti. I’ve written about all sorts of people, places and things.

S&B: Is immigration more difficult or less difficult to cover than other subjects you’ve written about? Are there unique problems covering immigration?

Sterling: All I can say is that reporting about Immigration is just the same as all reporting. That is to say, it’s all hard if you do it right.

I have pulled out my hair trying to understand the intersection of federal and state laws—don’t forget Arizona has really harsh anti-immigrant laws that often head-butt federal immigration laws. So you have to understand the big picture. Sometimes, I might spend a day researching a law that may only surface as one paragraph in the book.

Probably the biggest challenge for me is to not react emotionally as I cover the lives of undocumented men, women and children living on the edge of a black hole.

S&B: What it’s like to cover immigration in such a political hotbed like Arizona?

Sterling: Phoenix, the setting for my book, is Ground Zero for America’s immigration brawl. It’s also the nation’s kidnapping capital, and sometimes I interviewed some pretty sketch characters. Since I got out alive, it was a lot of fun in retrospect.

Long story short, it’s often adrenaline-pumping fun to cover immigration in Arizona.

It’s humbling. The writer Charles Bowden likes to say we reporters are witnesses for those who cannot tell their tales, and for those who would not know those tales without us. That is the humbling role of a journalist. As I report and write this book, I often feel as if I’m a war correspondent, witnessing epic battles not only in the political arena, but in the souls of human beings. Undocumented people see me as a conduit; they want English speakers to understand them as human beings, with hopes, sins, strengths, flaws, yearnings. For me, it’s more interesting to profile an undocumented person who lives in a secret world than to profile a public official willing to yammer on and on about immigration.

It’s sobering. Phoenix is making immigration history, and I’m tasked with writing untold stories about people living through it. Phoenix is galvanized. It’s a hot, mean, angry city on one hand, but on the other hand it’s a city with a heart. You never know, from one week to the next, what’s going to happen. One week I might cover a Nazi anti-Mexican march, the next week I’ll interview the sheriff’s cat lady picketing Al Sharpton at a prayer breakfast, and another week I might cover a raid by Sheriff Arpaio. These are predictable political events. The unpredictable and fascinating stories come from the people in the shadows whose lives are affected by these debates.

Terry interviewing Sheriff Arpaio

And it’s frustrating. Phoenix politicians tend to be scripted, media-savvy and accessible. As a journalist, I get frustrated when Phoenix immigration-minded (pro and con) politicos spin their stuff, and some journalists swallow the spin without checking the data.
Of course, that gives me plenty of blog fodder.

S&B: Could you tell us more about your blog, White Woman in the Barrio?

Sterling: Right now, the blog is about general immigration topics that have to do with Phoenix. Like, I fact check Sheriff Joe Arpaio a lot on my Web site. After the book is published, the site will showcase videos of me reporting the book, videos of some characters, slideshows, and audio of other characters.

S&B: What do you think will happen with immigration reform in 2010?

Sterling: If the sound and fury over healthcare is any guidepost, immigration reform will be debated and debated in 2010. After that, I can’t predict.

After all, I live in Phoenix, a city with a divided heart.

Headshot Photo Credit: Arizona Highways Magazine