At the Venezuelan border, Shandra Back centered her reporting around one question: are you coming, or are you going?
The answers she received varied, but she said she quickly realized what had to come next.
“I started to understand that the next question I needed to be asking was whether this was the first, second, third, fourth, fifth time that people were leaving or coming back,” Back said.
While some took summer vacations, Back traveled to report on the displacement crisis from the migrant route along the Venezuela-Colombia border. After receiving a travel grant from Boston University’s Center for Forced Displacement, Back spent five weeks documenting the waves of fleeing and returning refugees during the Venezuelan elections in July.
Back, a senior majoring in journalism and minoring in political science, initially approached the CFD with the idea of covering the Venezuelan displacement crisis through a photojournalistic piece and said she wanted to capture the lives of migrants through the objects they were carrying.
“This is the first time that I’m working with really vulnerable populations, and I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable,” Back said. “So that’s essentially, originally, where the idea [of] objects came up, because I [could] tell these stories of people’s journeys without actually needing to ask for their identity [or] needing to take their own picture.”
But Back quickly learned she’d made a false assumption— most refugees wanted their photos taken.
“The people that I was meeting, at least along the route, wanted to have their picture taken. They wanted this time to be documented, and they wanted their experience to be documented,” Back said. “So it shifted the story, because I wasn’t just taking pictures of the objects, now I was taking pictures of the people with their objects.”
Back’s photographs and interviews produced the article, “What We Carry: The Packing List of Venezuelan Displacement,” which was the subject of her presentation at the Pardee School of Global Affairs Feb. 18.
Although the article still focuses on what refugees chose to bring with them, it added a human element of pairing faces to the objects — something attendees appreciated.
“I’m really intrigued by human-to-human storytelling and hearing about actual, real people’s stories, and so the photo journalistic aspect and the humanization of this entire crisis really piqued my interest,” said Sophia Blair, a recent BU graduate who attended the presentation.
Blair said Back’s deep understanding of the people she discussed made the presentation more personal.
“She was just talking to us, she lived it and she felt it, and the way that she conveyed the two people she spoke about was so real,” Blair said. “It was clear she really took the time to understand them and also explain the context of the crisis and the situation, and then the case studies.”
Elizabeth Amrien, the Assistant Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Pardee, also commended Back’s presentation and article, admires her work.
“She’s not only a talented journalist in terms of just being very able to connect at a human level, as well as knowing the subject about which she writes, she’s really able to connect at a human level,” Amrien said.
Amrien explained the Center for Latin American Studies approached Back after reading her work and invited her to present her article at Pardee. While they have not had many student presenters, Amrien said they would “love to do more of [these events].”
Although this was the first project Back worked on as a bilingual journalist, it’s far from her first venture to Latin America. From an immersion program in Costa Rica to study abroad in Chile, Back is familiar with spending time away.
Back recalls wanting to be a travel journalist as early as high school. After finding her reporting niche in migration through a forensic anthropology class her freshman year, Back said it “became much more of a real, tangible dream.”
However, in the fall of her sophomore year, Back was hired as the podcast director for CFD. Although her position enabled her to engage with her interest in migration, Back said it “moved [her] away from journalism in a very big way.” Reporting on the Venezuelan migrant crisis last summer put her “back in the game” in ways she never expected.
“It really made me realize why I love storytelling, why I love journalism,” Back said.
Post-graduation, Back said she intends to apply for fellowships to kickstart her freelance journalism career. Although she said she doesn’t have any concrete plans for the future, she knows she will return to Latin America, where she will continue to focus on narrative-driven stories concerning migration.
“When we’re able to bring faces, even just a couple faces reflective of such a large event … [we’re] able to humanize the story,” Back said. “I think that is such an essential piece of journalism.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated Back was in Venezuela. Back traveled to the Colombia side of the Venezuela-Colombia border. The updated article reflects this change.
