By More than 75 students and faculty filled the Karl Anatol Center yesterday to watch a documentary about seven illegal immigrants who were entangled in the 2007 San Diego wildfires when trying to cross the border into the U.S.
San Diego City College’s Communications Department Chair Laura Castaneda screened the 45-minute documentary, titled “The Devil’s Breath,” which told the stories of some who survived and others who perished in the fires.
Castaneda — an Emmy-award winning professional writer, producer and journalist — said that putting together the documentary was one of the most challenging projects she has tackled in her career.
“The more I started digging and hearing about these people, the more drive I had to tell their stories,” Castaneda said.
She said the idea for the documentary, the first she produced, came from a story in the Union Tribune about one of the fire survivors, which compelled her to investigate more.
“Seeing that article made me realize no one else is going to do anything about it,” Castaneda said. “This is the first and last article we’ll see about this, and that inspired me to cover it.”
At the event, hosted by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Castaneda talked about her documentary and her career in journalism and encouraged students to ask her questions.
Chris Burnett, chair of the journalism and mass communication department, said he invited Castaneda to speak because of her experience in covering the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We wanted to get somebody to talk about something that’d be interesting to students,” Burnett said. “One of the issues we wanted to address thoroughly is the whole illegal issue. I think she did an effective job humanizing the whole illegal immigration issue. There’s a lot of demonizing that goes around the term of ‘illegal aliens,’ but they’re people too, and their stories need to be told.”
Castaneda started covering the border when she began working for an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz., and was one of the only Spanish speakers in the newsroom.
“I loved covering the border, but not a lot of people wanted to cover the border,” Castaneda said.
Castaneda said she wanted to shed light on border issues and show people that border stories are not always negative.
“The border is misunderstood,” she said. “There is a lot of negative stories from the border, when it should be balanced. People need to be educated about the positives of the border too.”
Burnett said he believed the event went well and is planning on having another guest speaker sometime in the near future.
“It was great, particularly when she was answering questions,” he said. “She told it from an individual standpoint and a lot of the students know of people in this situation, so they were really involved. I think it was successful.”
