Update from the Border: Unresolved stories, VOL II

To Those Good Folks With Whom I Like To Exchange Stories, share ideas, and mutually engage in real work, visit and generally keep up to date:

Well. This past week, the four of us semester students went on a travel seminar, which means that we traveled and visited different folks, places, and institutions on both sides of the border. I'm not given to synopses, but I'll give you this outline. Actually, don't read it. Skip the next paragraph because all the names and folks mean nothing to you. I saw the schedule last Sunday night, and I thought about it less than I do about dinner (which, actually is NO comparison, which you'll know if you know me much at all).

Monday morning, we met with Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation (which borders Mexico) who sets up water stations for the passing migrants because of the increasing number of deaths on tribal lands. Last year: 68, due to dehydration and exposure. In the afternoon, we met with a Public Information Officer of the Border Patrol, who gave a power point, answered questions, and gave us a tour of the Nogales, AZ Border Patrol compound. In the evening, we stayed at the Mexican BorderLinks headquarters in Nogales, Sonora. Tuesday morning in Nogales, Sonora, we paid visits to No Mas Muertas (No more deaths: a humanitarian aid organization that works on both sides of the border), Grupo Beta (a governmental agency set up to assist and inform and dissuade Mexican immigrants headed for the US), and the Center for Repatriated Minors (where unaccompanied, deported minors are sent to). That night, we spent with two families high on the shanty hills of Nogales, Sonora. Wednesday morning, we met with the Mexican director of BorderLinks. Wednesday, we made our way through a monsoon on our way to Altar, Sonora which is the "waiting room for the American Dream." It's the place where all the Latino Migrants meet up to hire their coyote before hiking for between 3-8 days through the Mexican/S. Arizonan desert. We spent the night in a migrant shelter. Thursday afternoon, after speaking with migrants at the plaza in Altar, we visited with Alberto Morakis. We met him at the wall in Nogales, where he's constructed a metal and paint mural on the wall. Friday, we spent the morning in immigration court. The afternoon, we attended a presentation with Derechos Humanos (Human Rights) who document abuses (assaults, robberies, a labor) against migrants. They also work on policy reform. Last, today, Saturday, we took a trip out to Arivaca, AZ to visit an artist that has created pieces and an exhibit from all the items left by migrants in the desert: back packs, pedialyte, kids shoes, note books, bibles, embroidered love handkerchiefs, canned meat, love poems, kids back packs, jackets, blankets, shoes, letters, a pair of eye-lash curlers, birth control packets-- taken by most women two months before their journey because of almost certain rape--, the list goes on. And, last, we visited another No Mas Muertas Tent, out in the dessert that has water and food for lost, dehydrated, abandoned migrants.



Saul Alinsky, the Chicago based organizer with the Back of Our Yards organization, said, "You don't have to radicalize people," or convince them to organize. "The status quo will do that just fine on its own."



On Monday night, I told my fellow students, "You know? The hardest part about seeing all this, about passing through the border to Mexico without stopping while there's a two and one half hour line on the other side, the hardest part about talking with the well intending border patrol agent who says, "I try not to let it [the fact that our country isn't doing anything to address why people are coming, just 'prevention by deterrence" once they're on our threshold] get to me." The hardest part about being solicited by every business on the streets of Nogales because of the money that our gringo skin represents... The hardest part about all of it, is that I don't know how to tell it, to make it a story. To put it into words that I can share with my folks [in the broadest sense of the word]. I don't know how to tell the story."

I kept going. You see, I told them, a story has a certain balance. There are opposing forces. There is a flip and flop between powers. For example, fluctuating between sad and happy, serious and humor. And right now, I see only the heavy. To say things like, "Oh, but the people of Nogales are smiling" is cliche and an excuse to try to resolve one's story. It's a load of crap, when you come right down to it. Smiles and jokes are no balance to a story marked by detention centers; Berlin style iron walls with digital, heat-sensing camera towers; rampant inequality determined by 3/8 of an inch of steel landing strip left over from the Gulf and Vietnam Wars; squatter settlements made from cardboard, adobe, and scrap metal salvaged from the dump; rocks vs AK47's; and where the difference between wages is easily the difference between a day and two weeks, meanwhile the food cost more for the lower paid. Nobody likes that story. It's not balanced. And it doesn't coincide with most of our own experience, so we write it off as "third world", "oppressed people of the world" or with words like, "God, it's so awful. I don't know how people can live like that, but they're so happy. They really are."

This is going to take more than one email.

At the Border Patrol Station in Nogales, Az, we met with Agent Marcus Van Der Lee. He's a Public Information Officer, which means he's a PR expert. He knows to only offer statistical facts, and when questions are asked that perhaps request generalities, he pauses and says, "Well. Let me look," as he glances through his stat sheet, "No. I don't know the specific number on that." Even if he knows, for example, that more than 150 people have died this year crossing the Tucson sector, through the desert, if he doesn't have the exact number, that is what he'll report. I'd do the same thing in his shoes. It's his job after all.

He told us a couple of stories that I noted. He mentioned the wall separating Nogales from Nogales. "We put it up, they tear it down." He continued: "It's not supposed to be intentionally harmful, only preventative" he said. He also told us, however, that "It cut me. I was helping to build the wall, and a piece of the [climb-prevention] guard cut me. It sent me to the hospital. I went in, trying to keep myself in high spirits because I didn't want to go into shock, to pass out. I was loosing a fair amount of blood. The nurse, she asked how. She put a wet towel on my arm, and asked me how I cut my arm. I told her I'd cut it on the fence. She said, 'Oh. So, now you know how they feel.'"

He said, "I think I passed out at that point" and smiled.

Do you know? It's times like these when you can align yourself as an ally, a peer. It's time like the end of stories, when you can mark yourself as an aggressor, a person of similar understanding, or a person who just doesn't understand. Well. I didn't know the appropriate response, but I bet on the slight up-and-down nodding, with a part smile and a little nasal sigh-laugh. I had a few questions, we wanted to get a tour of the whole facility (something few people were allowed), and besides I'm a sucker for trying to break through profession-based facades.

This past year, the Border Patrol in the Tucson sector (most of S. Arizona) caught, detained, processed, and deported 350,000 migrants. Of those, 4000 of those were "criminals." Around 2000 of those 4000 people are considered criminals because they have a previous record of "illegal entry" which means entering the USA without crossing through a port of entry. 350,000. The Border Patrol is busy.

Yet, they are herding compliant sheep. Drug Lords, first of all, do not cross the border. They send their cargo on the backs of migrants who can't afford the mandatory bribe prices the desert gangs require. Drug lords do not gather in straight lines of 35 people and march through the desert. They do no sit still under the pathetic shade of 4ft mesquite trees when apprehended by Border Patrol They have automatic, long-range assault rifles. They do not go willingly with the Border Patrol. Willingly doesn't have much to do with it. They don't go. They stay home, safe, riding on the backs of migrants hungry after the American dream of hard work and success.

"Most people come to look for work," Marcus told us, "which, in most cases, is probably true. There's a certain element that tell us that because they think it's the right answer, but, in most cases..."

He took us on the tour: Through the monitor room where agents sit in front of display screens from the mounted cameras all along the border fence. They're remote controlled. From their chairs, the agents can pan, zoom-in, out. If they detect an "illegal entry" they inform the nearest ground agent in vehicle patrol along the wall. We peered inside the "arms room" where the agents check out any and all assault rifles, AK47's, hand guns, long range-scope rifles, night-vision goggles, etc that they might need on their shift. On the threshold of the "evidence room" I held 58 pounds of marijuana tightly packaged in burlap sacks, outfitted with rope back-pack straps. The smell emanating from the room was so strong it burned my nose like Vick's vapor rub. Never, in all my life, will I be in such close proximity to so much dope. 5000lbs, they told us, brought in, mostly by migrants forced to carry the loads.

And then, we went to the detention center. From my journal: "16ft chain-link fences. Razor wire. Bull pens. Six one-hundred foot benches. Bright lights. All day. All night. Port-a-potties at one end, many-times-used gallon water jugs at the other. They're "separated from their belongings" our guide told us. The folks sat on the inside, with blank stares. Their shoes had no laces. They'd been taken from them to "prevent violence" and self-hangings. Although they might get their backpack and belongings back, we learned later, their laces are not returned to them. Just outside the detention center, I saw diapers and bottles, and pads on a shelf. 'Do you have these diapers because there are children in here?' I asked. 'Yes,' he told me, 'And the feminine products, they're for... well. Females. The name kind of gives it away.'" One size fits all.

One of my favorite things about being a Warren Wilson student is that everyday, per the Warren Wilson Work Program, I have to work (15hrs/wk). I work on Landscaping, so everyday, I work three hours outside. Yes, sometimes it's hot. And I sweat. My dad, as it turns out, sweats profusely whenever he does anything physical. And my mother, well, she just sweats, a lot, all the time. She's pretty much been in menapause since she was born, or so she tells me. "Nathan. I've always been hot," she told me countless times, which is almost the same thing. Almost. So, you can imagine the propensity of my sweat glands.

But if I miss work for some reason, if I don't move and have physical activity, I get grumpy. I feel all agitated. My reading will blur into misunderstanding or worse: not-understanding. I'll pittle around, homework hounding me like a dark shadow even thought it's completely manageable. I'll drag through the day, tired, but when I try to sleep at night, I won't. I'll lay there trying to figure out what I ate, or what caffeine slipped into my body unawares, and growl at myself when finally I'll realize that I didn't do anything, that my body is still eager to move.

In attempt to draw out possible emotions, possible depth, possible stories from our Public Information Officer tour guide, I asked him, "What's the hardest part of your job?"

He said, "The most hardest part of my job- well- it's also the most exciting and physically demanding part of our job." He really likes "interrupting the delivery of their product" which in most cases is used to indicated the human "product" of Coyote smugglers. That is, migrants. He went on to say that his favorite part of the job-- "also the hardest"-- was catching people out in the desert, chasing illegal entries up mountains at a run. He loves it. I think, perhaps, he mentioned adrenaline.

And in the strangest way, I understood him. Completely.

And, at the same time, or perhaps a moment later, I remembered the detention center.

And so,
some stories are not easily resolved,

and perhaps,
just perhaps,
they are not meant to be.

Nathan