I’m trying to think of how
to do this. I’m supposed to be writing a reflection on this thing, this trip,
these seventy-five-ish hours that twelve of us just experienced together.
(together? yes, and also no). Before we left, people from home were asking me
if I was excited. I had no idea how to explain my confusion with that word. I
had no other words to give either. Now, afterward, it seems if anything harder
and weirder to try to name all the feelings I am having about all the things I
saw / heard / experienced / felt / received.
We got back to Tucson
yesterday. This reflection would be different if I wrote it tomorrow, or in a
week, or in two. But it is this right now.
I am in my house. Well, my
host family’s house. Martha, my fellow student and housemate, is making cookies
for us. There is still a little bit of a cactus buried in my right pinkie from
our first night in Tucson but I can hit the delete key now without even feeling
it so that’s cool. I got my first flat tire on my bike rolling out of the
driveway this morning. I have been in the borderlands for almost three weeks. I
can’t even say how much longer it feels. Two of the things they said would
inevitably happen to us in our fifteen weeks here—poked by a cactus (well
actually I fell on it), flat tire—have already happened to me. I wonder what
else will happen to me that has been predicted. I wonder what else will happen
to me that hasn’t been predicted. It feels like I(we?) am(are) at a point right
now. I don’t know what else to say about that, but I think a transition is
happening / is about to happen.
So on thursday we started
the day at the Nogales border patrol station in Nogales-Arizona at the
US-Mexico border. In a windowless conference room, two agents delivered us a
powerpoint presentation. Laying on the table at which we sat was a rope ladder
that people had used to climb the border fence, booties that leave no tracks in
the desert, rocks that had been thrown across the fence at agents, and a
PLS—pepperball launching system—that they told us was “kind of like a paintball
gun.” After the presentation they took us on a tour of the station—we got to
pass around their huge guns and try on their gear, we got to watch their
monitor feeds from cameras along the border wall, and we got to look through a
wall of windows into the station’s detention center, where an agent was tossing
foil blankets at a bunch of men in one of the holding cells. Things they said to
us during the presentation, tour, and conversations afterward:
-“illegal aliens”
-“good for the country” “I
get to meet the community”
-“terrorists”
-“make it more difficult for
them”
-“you can tell if they’re
females or males, or if they have big packs that are probably full of
marijuana”
-“there’s all kinds of
different terrorism….with the smugglers, them trying to cause harm to us, you
get marijuana bundles and flip them over and there are spikes. now that’s a
kind of terrorism.”
-“I basically saved his
life, he would have died crossing through the mountains”
-“if he’s throwing a
pebble—well, probably not worth shooting”
-“exotics—middle easterners,
chinese…”
-“we have a feeding
schedule; they get fed, the juveniles get fed…”
-“the smugglers have an
agenda when they talk to you, they want you to think we kill people and beat
them up all the time…” “my agenda is to go home to my family at the end of the
day.”
We ended the day at CCAMYN
(Centro Comunitario de Atencion al Migrante y Necesitado) a migrant shelter in
Altar, Sonora. We ate dinner and talked with migrants, some of whom had just
been deported, some of whom were about to try to cross, some of whom were about
to turn around and go home because they couldn’t afford to go the rest of the
way or because they refused to carry drugs for the mafia, who controls the
entire area and is impossible to evade. In the courtyard after dinner, two
fellow students and I started talking to one of the migrants, someone who has
interfaced with the US so-called “criminal justice system,” the prison system,
the immigration system, never mind countless other systems in the US and in Mexico
that have impeded his, his family’s, and his neighbors’ abilities to live and
work and move and not move. Things that he started telling us:
-that he loves America
-that people who are
deported are criminals and have to pay the price
-that he has been deported
-that every country has laws
and you have to follow them
-that he loves us
-that he does not see the
border
-that to be American means
that you can walk around the world and everyone will roll out a carpet for you
-that the American
government makes its laws and plays its games to protect its own citizens
-that he can’t trust Mexico,
or Guatemala or El Salvador or Russia or China or anyone else, so he has to
trust the US, because who else will he trust?
Already in these three weeks
we have had so many conversations about reciprocity, about giving, about
taking, about power, about our varying positions as students from private
liberal arts colleges in the US, eleven of our twelve as US citizens, many of
us as white, many of us coming from super privileged class backgrounds; the
lists of our privileges vary from person to person in our group, but certainly
go on. We have had conversations about taking pictures, about hearing stories,
about what it means for us to enter and exit spaces and how we take and is it
possible to give and is there any way to do what we are doing without harm and
if there is how do we achieve that and if there isn’t should we keep doing it
anyway
I am an American citizen, I
am white, I am from an upper middle class background, I go to Oberlin College. My
family has paid a lot of money for me to come live in this region for a few
months, cross the border in a white van with my US passport, and visit this
shelter to hear from people who use it for its real purpose. Standing across
from this person who was telling us his story, I had all these questions of
power, of what my silence meant and what my words might mean too, of the space
I take up, of the space I was taking up just standing there in that courtyard
in that moment. Questions of how to receive and hold these words he was giving
us, of how maybe it was best for me to just listen, because with the power
dynamics of my very presence it felt too complicated and too questionable to do
anything but be quiet and listen. But
also, standing there listening, my silence started to feel wrong. I felt
automated and disrespectful just standing and smiling and nodding, knowing that
as soon as the three of us walked away we would burst into a huge break-down of
what we had just heard and all that we felt about it. It felt wrong to be
silent, like I wasn’t respecting him as a person enough to engage with him, to
communicate some of the things happening in my head as he was communicating
some of the things in his head. So I started asking him questions, arguing with
him about foreign policy and the US government’s motives. Some of the things he
said felt like really really important reminders to me about the many many
privileges of having my US passport. Some of the things he said made my stomach
squirm with how closely they echoed the american dream rhetoric that the border
patrol agents had fed us that morning. Mostly the conversation was a reminder
to me that really, this stuff is complicated. Something that we have been
hearing, not just from our leaders but also from various community members and
workers that we’ve been meeting with since we got here, is that the borderlands
are full of contradictions, of things which may seem incongruous but which actually
exist alongside one another in the same space. Maybe the american dream is all a
myth, maybe this man and his family and his neighbors have experienced first
hand the violence of the border wall, of NAFTA, of the drug war. And maybe he
also loves America, maybe he needs it to exist. I’m not a person who can say
that’s right or wrong. I am not a person who can say that it is incongruous
with everything he told us about his life. It’s his experience. It’s
complicated, multilayered. So is mine, so is yours probably. That’s how we are.
It’s a cool thing about being a person, to not fit easily into a box, to not
have one neat little packaged meaning.
A last thought—well that’s a
stupid thing to say, so really just a final thought for now. One of these
questions which I am sure will be ongoing throughout the semester (and after)
is about this reciprocity, about the giving and taking, about when it’s appropriate
to speak or take up space and how to go about doing that. It is something I
struggled with in our visit with border patrol, and, in an entirely different
way, something I struggled with at CCAMYN with the different migrants I spoke
to. Something Jeff and Katie told us early on is that much of this semester,
much about being in the borderlands, is about unlearning. Constantly
questioning the ways I take up space, and trying to unlearn the ways that that
causes harm to the people and spaces around me, is a really really important
part of the learning and living that I want to be doing here in the coming
months (and, again, on and on after I leave this specific space). It is
something I want to balance, though, with not using silence as a way to avoid engaging
with the world around me.
-jaye harden
No comments:
Post a Comment