We were sitting on a bench at Grupo Beta — the Mexican government’s border patrol and migrant relief agency — in Nogales, Mexico when we got the call.

After two weeks of nothing, a mortuary on the other side had a body.

We hitched a ride with one of the recent deportees to the downtown border crossing, walked into the United States, jumped in our car and drove ten minutes down Grand Ave. to Adair’s Carroon Mortuary.

John Doe from Lisa Ruhl on Vimeo.

Jorge and Reuben have been picking up bodies in the desert for years. This time, they took us along for the ride.

Out of Nogales, through Patagonia and Harshaw, we drove down bumpy, winding, dusty dirt roads up into the mountains near Locheil, Arizona. Border Patrol and the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office were waiting for us at the scene. So was John Doe.

What the rancher found was mostly bones, Reuben guessed the remains weighed about 50 pounds. No identification was found with the body, which had already been sealed into a white plastic bag.

We watched as the two Nogales natives loaded the body onto a gurney and into the SUV; we sat next to the body on the ride back to the mortuary and watched as the gurney was unloaded and taken through the back door. The body spent the night in a freezer in Nogales.

The next day, the body was driven to Tucson and added to the other bodies that the Pima County Medical Examiner will attempt to identify in the coming weeks. Deduction, forensics and missing persons reports may mean the man’s family gets a call.

If not, his remains will be buried in one of the grave sites for unidentified people in scattered around Arizona — “John Doe cemeteries.”

Stay with us and we’ll let you know which path our John Doe takes.

We hired him to translate for us and to show us around Nogales. He works with migrants and deportees there and was once deported himself. Frank lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years before being deported to Nogales. Needless to say, he had a point of view.

—

We did not exactly feel welcome when we walked into the Nogales bus depot. A woman at the front desk stared at us with a blank expression. A man in a dress shirt and black pants glared from a stuffed chair. But Frank led us in without hesitation and we followed.

He walked straight into a back room of the bus depot, pushing aside a bed sheet that served as its door.

The smells hit us first — those of lots of displaced people living in close quarters.

It was a makeshift home, right there in the back of the bus depot — microwave, TV, couches, a cross on the wall and a few mattresses on the floor.

We found out later that many of the people staying there were working to save enough money to pay the bus fare back to their hometowns. One woman had been working for a month to save the 70 pesos it would cost her to get back to Mexico City. That’s less than $6.

In the middle of that room full of men, two women agreed to be interviewed. They had both been deported in the last few weeks.

They told us why they came to America, how they crossed the desert, how they were caught and what happened to them after they were detained — courts, judges, sentences, papers, buses and then a bus depot in Nogales, so far from where they began.

But they didn’t tell us everything. They seemed hesitant, in that situation and environment, to be completely open.

Example One

During my pre-reporting and attempts at setting up interviews for a trip to South Carolina, I was turned down by a business that had received a violation for not following state law.

“With everything going on in Arizona and this request coming from an ASU student, I’m going to respectfully decline,” the potential interviewee stated in an e-mail.

In this situation I was dealing with a PR person as the intermediary between me and the person I was trying to interview. This did not allow for direct communication. I called her back asking her to let the business owner know that I was trying to learn about South Carolina’s law, not Arizona’s. However, the effort was futile and failed. No interview took place.

Example Two

A group of migrant workers lived in the hotel where I was staying. I approached them to explain my project and my desire to share their stories. At first, they said that they couldn’t speak English well or that they were fearful of their boss seeing the final product, which could mean losing their jobs.

'Johnny' -- a migrant worker we met in South Carolina.

After speaking to my News21 editors, we came up with another approach. The goal was to gain their confidence by stressing the importance of sharing their stories so that the public could obtain a better understanding of the situation of migrant workers in the United States.

After many casual conversations with the workers at the hotel over a two-day period they gained enough confidence to speak to me. One of the men, Mr. Flores, who is from Mexico City and received his citizenship a year ago, agreed to a video interview. Thereafter, many of his colleagues approached me to just talk about their situation and answer my questions. They realized I was sincerely interested in their stories.

Eventually, I found myself speaking with “Johnny” who freely shared his opinions. He did ask for my views on occasion, but I learned to just turn the question back around, asking him “What do you think of that?” At the end of our interview, I had gotten to know Johnny so well that I was allowed to take a few pictures of him.

It is important to note that the two men mentioned above are documented workers who are in the country legally. Speaking with undocumented workers can be even more challenging.

In the end, during my time out in the Palmetto State I realized that, as a journalist dealing with a very touchy subject, I must be willing to approach sources in sincere and open way — and be patient while building relationships. By taking the time to get to know these people, I was eventually able to do the reporting I wanted to do.

Amid southern Arizona’s vast landscape of dry foothills, valleys and mountains it’s easy to feel very small.

The people that I’m writing about move through this land, sometimes on a daily basis — they include hikers and hunters, law enforcement and humanitarian volunteers, and the people illegally crossing Arizona’s section of the U.S.-Mexico border.

With the land playing so much of a role in the stories I’m reporting, I decided early on that I needed to see it and experience it for myself. On my first trip I was confident that I’d kept track of where we’d parked the jeep — only to be completely wrong. During the second trip I witnessed dramatic shifts in weather and vowed to be better prepared next time. Most recently, exhausted from the heat, I felt my head swimming despite all my efforts to stay fit, rested and hydrated.

There are rewards — glimpses of elusive wildlife, the fiery wildflowers, unforgettable sunsets. But people who underestimate the harshness of this area are taking a huge risk.

In recent years, an influx of white 20- and 30-somethings, attracted by the neighborhood’s affordable housing and proximity to downtown, shifted the Mission District’s demographics. The change –- I suppose “gentrification” is the technical term, but “hipsterfication” seems more appropriate — is readily apparent to anyone walking around the intersection of Mission and 24^th Streets, the neighborhood’s two primary thoroughfares.

But I still heard more Spanish than English as I walked these streets with my camera, and was grateful to see that taquerias still outnumbered vintage fixed-gear bicycles. While the tattooed, skinny-jeans-wearing set is now an undeniable presence in the neighborhood, the Mission District remains a bastion of Hispanic culture and pride. From the murals that decorate its alleyways, to the colorful storefronts along tree-lined 24^th Street, to the sounds of a band performing on Mission Street, the neighborhood stands to retain its unique identity well into the 21^st century. Here are some of its sights and sounds.

And I was there, as a backpack-journalism team of one.

During a tour of the neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village in Chicago, a large mural addressing immigration caught my eye.

Having worked for the past semester as a student news producer, never asked to leave the newsroom or conduct an interview, it was time for me to pick up a camera and refocus.

Juggling expensive camera equipment, navigating with my limited sense of direction (turns out, without mountains, I am completely lost), and attempting (in vain) to not look a fright arriving to interviews as my hair frizzed in the humidity of The Windy City, this trip put my journalism skills to the test on a whole new level.

“Well, Anderson Cooper changed the game for everyone when he picked up a camera and pointed it at himself,” a crewmember from Chicago’s ABC7 said to me. He must have picked up on my anxiety as I checked and double-checked my tripod height and audio levels. One of my sources scheduled back-to-back interviews, and I was set to follow a professional production by Chicago’s ABC station. I wanted to ask them if they would let me borrow their lighting… and crew.

But once I had my shot set up and my notes at hand, I didn’t have time for nerves.

I knew there was a story here. I was thrilled to be the one bringing it back to the newsroom.

And although my Sony Handycam HD was dwarfed by their JVC GY-HD250 CHU Pro HD HDV — HD is HD. And thankfully, my first solo flight as an MMJ will surely not be my last.

—

One question I developed during my encounters in Chicago was, how much do you share with sources or people you meet in the field about what the thesis of your story is?

After all, I am continually reconsidering, redrafting, and revisiting different parts of this depth-reporting project as I continue to collect information and interviews… But how much do I share before the final product is done?

Since people are quick to share with me their opinion on the matter, I have fallen back on keeping my story explanation to a short snippet and let them do the talking.

A woman holds a sign at a rally held in downtown Phoenix in opposition to Arizona's new immigration law.

Last year, when we chose Latino and Borderlands issues as our focus for ASU News21, we knew we were setting out to tackle a timely and important topic.  We also felt we were uniquely positioned to provide quality coverage. These issues have long been a focus and interest of the university and the Cronkite School of Journalism.

We did not know that in 2010 we would find ourselves at ground zero of an explosive national debate over immigration.  The Arizona State Capitol, scene of dramatic protests and rallies surrounding the controversial immigration law known as SB 1070, is just blocks from our newsroom.  In recent weeks we’ve been able to look out our windows onto Phoenix’s Downtown Civic Space to watch yet more protests and parades in reaction to the law. The chief proponents and opponents of the law are figures well-known to our reporting team.  They’ve followed them, interviewed them, and closely studied their principles and motivations.

Now, as the rhetoric remains heated and the legal and political landscape continues to shift, we’ve decided to delve into these issues anew — in the News21 way.  We’re going in-depth to find interesting, original stories and vital but often overlooked information that will help to truly inform the debate. We will present those stories in new ways and invite our audience to join civil discussions about these topics.

* We’ll delve into the plight of citizen children of undocumented immigrants and look at why they are the next target of hardline policy-makers. We will consider what it is like for children to be left alone — sometimes for years — when their parents are deported.

* As undocumented children grow up in the United States, attend school, and try to find work, they face major challenges. Many of them consider themselves American in every sense of the word. Some are accomplished enough to enter college. Throughout the country these college students face a patchwork of state laws — some accommodating and some hostile — that affect their status and ability to pay for school.

* Crime is often cited as one of the top concerns of those who support a crackdown on illegal immigration. Do undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than others and are crime rates changed by waves of immigration? We will explore various communities’ experience illegal immigration in an attempt to understand this complex issue.

* We’ll investigate programs aimed at deterring border crossers through swift but arbitrary — and sometimes confusing — court proceedings and/or deportation to remote areas. Lawmakers are calling for the expansion of these programs but saying little about the cost or commitment involved.  We’ll investigate what expansion of the programs might mean for taxpayers, government agencies, and the communities along the border.

* We’ll consider what happens to families left behind when immigrants die or disappear — and how authorities on both sides of the border work to identify the dead and inform relatives of their fate.

* We’ll explore the experience of immigrant women and investigate why they are more likely to die while crossing the border, more likely to face discrimination on the job, and more likely to face abuse when detained.  We’ll ask hard questions about who is responsible for the harrowing experiences these women confront.

* Nearly all immigrants come to the United States looking for work and most of them find it. The demand for cheap labor on the part of businesses and the desire for wages by immigrants drives the flow of people. Experts have said if immigration is to be curtailed, American employers will have to stop hiring undocumented workers. We will look at states that have serious penalties for those who knowingly employ undocumented immigrants and those that don’t.  Readers might be surprised at what we find.

* As some states and communities have moved to make undocumented immigrants unwelcome, others have openly embraced them.  We will explore these so-called “sanctuary” communities to learn why they are moving in the opposite direction of so many other locations in the country.

* As the debate rages on this side of the border what is going on in Mexico? How are people living their lives and how are local, state, and federal officials dealing with the violence related to the drug trade? What do they think of the crackdown on illegal immigration in the United States?

Stay tuned.