Update from the Border: An Open Letter, VOL VII

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

From the messages I've been receiving, I seems as though, perhaps, folks think that I'm struggling. Well, I've be wressling, yeah, but hardly struggling. I've been synthesizing. I've been strategizing, planning, imagining, instigating, trying like hell to learn spanish, reading, remembering, writing, chatting, walking, seeing, reflecting.

Pending the department's approval, I'll be compiling a senior thesis next spring of personal writings and research on social movements. In that light, you could say, I'm in my element here on the border. I suppose the best way to illustrate this is to cut short the description and share with you an open letter I just composed addressed to "organizers and activists of the Borderlands Movement."



An open letter to the Organizers and Activists of the Borderlands Movement:

Several things have occurred to me regarding the potential Borderlands Movement.

But first, to root myself in experience, I must share with you about a young man I met last week at the Quaker meeting. I'll call him Dwight. Having recently completed his commitment to the Navy in Afghanistan, accepted a job with Homeland Security here in the Boderlands, and began his civilian life in Tucson; he was not the man I expected to meet at the Quaker meeting. It was his second time attending.

"I took care of getting a job," he told me. "So then I knew—my wife and I knew—we had to attend to our spiritual lives." He took a spiritual/religious survey online, he told me, and it told him that he was just about one-hundred percent Quaker. Or one-hundred percent Buddhist. "I don't mean them any disrespect, but I'm not Buddhist," he explained. He made a point to meet me because during visitor self-introductions, —a Quaker tradition—I said I went to school just outside of Asheville, NC.

He asked me if I'd "ever heard of a little place named Swannanoa?" His interest was rooted in his roots: he grew up there. (Warren Wilson College, my school is in the heart of the Swannanoa Valley.) Dwight's father and grandfather worked at the Beacon plant, the textile mill that was the primary employer, life-blood and exploiter of the valley for around 100 years until it closed shop in 2004 to move to Central America for cheaper wage-labor.

He asked what I was doing in Tucson, so I gave him my worn out summary: "BorderLinks semester on the Border… a few months in Tucson… Nogales… travel on both sides of the border… Magdalena… Altar, the place where migrants meet up with their guides to travel through the desert—"

He interrupted me. "Now that's," he began, looking around at the other Quakers, "Something I just don't understand around here," referencing the meetinghouse. "My job is to stop those people sneaking in."

He mentioned something about Muslim terrorists posing as Mexicans seeking to harm us because of the freedoms we enjoy.

"Huh," I said. "Is that right? How about that?" I suppose it was my mother who taught me to listen and wait, listening through initial disagreement in order to hear what otherwise would be missed, trusting the conversation and the relationship to push beyond sound bites and rehearsed phrases; to listen and wait enabling people the chance to offer each other something not previously considered, the chance to share from beyond one another's places of comfort. I waited. He continued.

He said a few things that I now forget, and I replied, "Yeah, huh, well, yeah, I hadn't thought of that before. I'm just down here trying to learn more about the Border, so I don't have to rely on the TV to tell me what's going on. You just can't trust it a lot of the time." I told him about a few of our stops along our travel seminar: Border Patrol, Grupo Beta, and a few other stops in the Borderlands.

"I just don't get it," he said. "If they'd just come in legal like the Europeans and Asians…"

"Huh. Yeah. I wonder what that process is," I said.

"It's just all this sneaking…. Besides. They're poor. So why don't they just plant themselves some food? Take care of themselves? I still don't see why—The Europeans, the Asians. They come in legal. It's just all this sneaking."

"Hm," I responded. "That's a good question."

Off hand, I mentioned land speculators pushing people off their land, bad economies, the lack of options and the coyote organizations that include recruiters "all the way down in South Mexico—and even Central America." And then I mentioned quotas, long waits.

"Then, why don't they just wait?" he asked. Frustration looking for an answer. But a question. They weren't fighting words. It was a question.

"That's a good question. I, I don't really know. I think maybe it was something to do with being hungry. But the truth is, I, I don't really know."

"Yeah, well," he responded. "Coming in illegal makes you question a person's core values. You've gotta wonder whether they're honest or not."


Like I mentioned, several things occurred to me this past week concerning the potential Borderlands Movement. First, inspired by Freire, I realized that Americans cannot give the migrants their liberation. It is something Americans can support and aid, but they cannot lead the way. Migrants must lead their own liberation. Perhaps Americans have a role in dramatically illustrating their support, rolling out a red carpet of sorts. In the end, Americans can walk along side, but the explicit movement—like the great migration, the continental momentum—must be initiated from beyond the United States' borders, which leads me to another point.

The Populist, the Labor, and Civil Rights Movement I have previously claimed as strictly American movements. But now I see, they neither were nor are American movements. They were and are the movements of people. And this Borderlands Movement, if there is to be one, will also be a movement of people.

In addition, this movement must be international. It must transcend the border. It must bridge and defy the border that is only as historical as 1848 and only real on paper and temporarily real in wire, fences, and search towers. Ultimately, the movement must be more than bi-national, though it will start here.

It also occurred to me that Dwight is not an enemy of the migrants. He spoke many of the questions and concerns that we should daily ask ourselves. "Why don't they just plant something, take care of themselves?" Indeed. Why do they not? Why can they not? If we coordinate and influence the Borderlands Movement well, we will return to Dwight's question and its cousin: Why are migrants leaving their homes? With the power of movement, we will be able to address these questions that currently haunt our efforts as ghosts, questions seemingly too big, too distant, too political, too global. These questions will become the sustaining provocateur of the Borderlands Movement.

At first Dwight's questions are seen as a threat. They should not be. Why? Because his last statement, his true worry—"You've got to worry whether they're honest or not"—is a worry shared by many in the United States. And it is so easily confronted. Migrants need only be honest. Absolutely honest. Bravely honest. Determinedly honest. Provocatively honest. Forcibly honest.

Gandhi spoke and lived that the point must never be to defeat the adversary but to recruit the adversary to the side of justice, goodwill, right-livelihood, and peace. The point, as Freire puts it, is not to reverse the structure of oppression, making the oppressed the oppressor, but to eliminate this dynamic, thus creating a better world for all. The point is for the oppressed to rise with subsistence to dignity and to redeem the oppressor from the state of mere having to the point of being. In the end, the adversary, whether active or passive, becomes the greatest alley to the cause of justice because the energy of worry and calculation is liberated through understanding to the energy, the great power of love.

I have myself been so converted.

So many that Dwight represents worry that the migrants come to the USA to steal jobs, to rob their homes, to prey on American children. They fear concealment of weapons, drug smuggling, and sneaking. They fear the lack of papers and the use of false papers. They fear migrants may not be honest.

What it comes down to is that they fear dishonesty.

I suggest we confront their fears with honesty. Absolute honesty. Brave honesty. Determined honesty. Provocative honesty. Forceful honesty.

I have an idea. It is full of flaws, I am sure, but I'd like to share it with you.

Let us, migrant and resident, march to the United States' ports of entry with simple hand-written papers which display our name, place of origin, intent and probable destination in the USA, signed by clergy or family members for legitimacy. Let us march—Brown, Black, and White; Indian, Mestizo, and Anglo—together with papers written in honest handwriting, sealed with the sweat of good work and the intent of justice. Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, El Salvadoran, Honduran, Mexican and American together. Let us walk through the ports of entry as honest travelers. Let us walk to cause a response. And let our numbers be such that we will continue marching through the ports of entry until we cause a response or until the laws restricting the free flow of migrants are repealed, nil and void, and the walls that divide us, like Jericho, like Berlin, "come a tumbling down."

The social momentum that, like a wave, like a freight train, is soon to rise and pass us by began decades ago. It picked up steam in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA, its great counter force. It encountered an ocean shelf and so rose a bit higher in 2004 with a tide of migrants. The momentum extends through Mexico, throughout Central America. It is a wave growing larger, a train that cannot be derailed. It is quickly transforming from social momentum into the Social Movement Express, the Borderlands Wave of Change.

Our job is not to create the wave or push the train. Our job is to foreworn and organize for its coming. Yet unlike the prophets of old who were ignored and rejected, we will share the story to be heard. We will ask the questions that cause deep breaths. We will create, transform, and support the organizations that will provide collective strength, coordinate non-violent action, and organize to create a better world.

We will not, should not, shall not let this movement—this moment—pass us by.

May grace blossom in the desert as love shines from the heavens. May people walk with the non-violent determination and joy carried by those who hold the possible in their hearts.


My friends, we,
We have a story.
Unlike a tale,
Our story has an unclear beginning,
And it will never end.

Ours is the story of things not as they should be.
Ours is the story of a people,
of a world,
hungry and thirsty for Shalom.
And ours is the story of the weary glance
we cast at the unimaginable mountain of Shalom

And yet,

Ours is the story of how we rose to the challenge.

Yes, my friends.
We.
We have a story.

We will do our great work.
We will grow weary,
But, ah: We will rise.



Nathan