Sixteen years ago, Morgan Smith ’60, a retired lawyer and government official turned photographer and writer, made an impromptu visit to a Mexican border town amid intense cartel violence. What he saw there prompted him to begin documenting the living conditions, and the project quickly became a consuming mission. Until this year, when health concerns forced him to stop, Smith made the five-hour drive at least once a month from his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, across the border to visit with locals, humanitarian workers, and migrants passing through.
Smith has made more than 200 trips. His most frequent destination has been Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the notoriously dangerous city just south of El Paso, Texas. The stories he has captured in photographs and essays—of suffering, hope, and heartbreak—are often stark. He writes of a Colombian-born U.S. citizen who places handmade crosses in the desert where migrants’ bodies have been found (more than 1,400 so far), and of schoolchildren recruited by the cartels.
Often, he writes about people trying to help: the priest who runs a migrant shelter, the cooks and caregivers at mental health facilities, the patients in those facilities who look after one another. This is what Smith calls the “other face” of the border. “The violence makes the news,” he says, “but there are extraordinary people helping the needy, often at substantial personal risk.”
Many of those people have become his friends, and before every trip, Smith loads up his car with clothing, shoes, toys, medical equipment, and cash, as well as printed photos to give to people whose pictures he’d taken. Now 87, he says he must finally give up the grueling journey but adds: “This has become a part of me.”
