Novelists Laura Esquivel, Paul Auster and Don DeLillo will be reading next Tuesday at Cooper Union as part of an evening in support of Mexican journalists whose work on the border has become increasingly life-threatening.

“It’s important to take part in it, because it is our duty as human beings, at this historic moment, to analyze, comment, question,” said the Mexico City-based Esquivel, author of “Like Water for Chocolate.”

At least eight journalists have been murdered in Mexico this year alone. The escalating violence led the daily newspaper El Juarez, in Ciudad Juarez, to say last month that it would cut drug war coverage after a reporter for the publication was killed, the second slain in less than two years.

Tuesday’s 7 p.m. East Village event, titled “State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico,” is organized by the PEN American Center, the PEN Club de México and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mexican poets Víctor Manuel Mendiola and Luis Miguel Aguilar and journalist Jon Lee Anderson will also be reading. A discussion about what can be done, featuring CNN en Español’s anchor Carmen Aristegui and Adela Navarro Bello, of the Tijuana-based news magazine Zeta, will follow.

“I’m sure these prominent writers and journalists’ reunion will result in a new vision of the problem,” said Esquivel, “and will open doors to find solutions.”