Border Stories - Julia Munson

So much of the border is contradiction. A few weeks ago now, we left Tucson for a short excursion to Nogales and Altar, Mexico. Nogales – really Ambos Nogales – is a town that the border cuts awkwardly through: the fence and Customs station sit in the middle of the plaza where people from both sides used to get together.

Our first stop: the largest Border Patrol station on the Arizona border. If border policy as militarization had yet to sink fully in, this visit helped solidify that reality from the parking lot on. First impression: a sea of white and green vans emblazoned with Border Patrol, some with cages in the back. The night before, two such vans surrounded a truck and two men a block from my house. It was the first time I’d seen a Border Patrol stop. I felt totally overwhelmed, unsure how to respond. Confused as to why two Border Patrol vans were necessary to stop two men in one truck – intimidation? Reminded that many people in my new neighborhood must live in fear – fear of routine traffic stops that turn into deportations, fear of opening their doors lest the knock not be that of a friend but of an unwarranted Border Patrol raid. The next morning, then, standing in the parking lot at Border Patrol, my head was still reeling.

We heard a report about what was happening on the border and why we need the fence, the ever-increasing number of agents, and the use of military technology – infrared cameras, floodlights, “less-than-lethal” weapons… The number one reason? Terrorism. Yet the Border Patrol has yet to apprehend one terrorist on the U.S./Mexico border. The agents giving our tour admitted it, though claimed they wouldn’t know it if they had. After the talk, the two agents showed off their less-than-lethal weapons at their shooting range (which contains a human target): two different pepper spray guns, most often used to scare people away from the fence, especially those who might be throwing rocks at the agents. The new fence has slats in it that allow agents to see through to the Mexican side – and shoot through if “necessary.” While neither are “fatal” (to healthy adults), the Border Patrol will not allow its agents to be hit with one of them, as it can cause fairly severe damage. Next to the shooting range was a garage with overflow detention space – caged off areas on the concrete floor with razor wire at the top. What is this station if not a military complex?

Our next stop: Grupos Beta in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Grupos Beta is a Mexican governmental organization that provides discounted bus tickets home, phone calls and other services to recently deported migrants. It also works to advise migrants about the dangers of heading north. Outside, we talked with some migrants who, affected by the culture of fear perpetuated by SB1070, had left their children (U.S. citizens) behind. They wanted to return, but a failed attempt at crossing through the mountains had forced them to return and reevaluate. They asked if their children’s citizenship might help them through the visa process. Unlikely, so they’ll try crossing through the mountains once again.

Later that night, we stayed at CCAMYN, a migrant shelter that provides free housing, clothes, food, showers and other necessities to migrants in Altar – formerly a small town that serves as a staging area for the last stretch of the trip north. In this town, many migrants meet up with their coyotes and prepare for the trip north. Many stay in crowded casas de huespedes and are charged exorbitant prices for food. CCAMYN attempts to provide migrants with a dignified alternative. At CCAMYN, we talked with a man from Honduras who had lived in Hartford, Connecticut – less than one hour from my home – for five years before he was deported while visiting family in Florida. He was heading back, full of questions about crossing and concerns about the heat. The journey would take weeks. He’d already been traveling on trains across Mexico for a month just to get to Altar. And all I had to do to get home? Hand over some money and spend the day on planes. Over dinner, a Guatemalan man expanded on what the trains are like – how long it takes (he remembered the name of every town he’d taken the train through), how you have to avoid the Mexican migra and the gangs that rob migrants, how dangerous the trip was. His foot had gotten caught as he was getting on the train and he had lost a toenail. Some people lose limbs or fall off the trains to their deaths. The next day, we talked with three deported teenage boys at DIF (Desarrollo Integral Familiar). One of them, a seventeen year-old from Oaxaca, had headed north to make money so he could build himself a house in his village and find a wife.

These are the people who the Border Patrol stops with their military complex: separated families, people with lives in the United States, people who want to make money so they can return to their homes. They don’t stop terrorists, and they don’t stop the vast majority of drugs that come across the border.

The Right to Rootedness - Julia Munson

Blessed rain on a tin roof in a dark room. Some voices almost faceless, yet light shines over a mountain in the distance. The visit begins like many of our visits, with an explanation of Centeotl and its mission to make villages like this one more economically viable places to live.

The conversation turns to migration, and a woman who shares my name stands up, walks to the middle of the room and speaks forcefully through tears: her husband gone to the fields of New York state where the winters are long, cold and workless; how he and his fellow workers turn to alcohol and drugs to face them. Another women with an angry voice, the husband of her daughter gone to the U.S. never to return, angry at his forgetting of home and family. So much violence – for the men forced far away from their families, forced to cross borders that employ violence as strategy, violence for the women who stay behind on land that won’t produce, raising children alone because their husbands won’t or can’t return. The soil is worn down by goats, fertilizers, deforestation. The water: not enough. It’s as if the world has no place for them – and it doesn’t really. Neoliberalism sought to rid the world of “excess” farmers, to turn them into cheap labor. They survive by diversifying, by going north, growing amaranth, tending to their milpas.

The Centeotl representative tells us “first visit: applause, second visit: *alegrias. ” Some significance there, a sharing of sustenance in return for a return, in return for a promise delivered. As we file out, we shake hands with every person, a custom so full of grace and reverence for others I wonder why we rarely stop for it in my communities. Many of the women repeat the same sentiment, “Come back, come back.” And while it’s a request, it feels like a necessity. To ask for these stories, to listen, and not seek to change the way the world makes it unfeasible to live well in one’s home seems to me a failure.

For my own well-being, I need to believe that I can plant roots in the land of my home. I need to believe that I can work with the land I live on to sustain myself. These are the things that ground me: soil, water, food. My life would be less whole were I not to have the right to grow my own food, to feel its direct connection to the place I call home. I feel compelled to fight for this right, for this community in rural Oaxaca, for communities across the world, for my family. I may never physically return to El Carmen, yet I hope I return often in my thoughts and actions, that I return by promoting the rights of individuals to live dignified, rich, and connected (to land, history and community) lives in their homelands.

I left El Carmen utterly overwhelmed. We talk of solidarity often on this program. In many ways, the visit to El Carmen began to turn my understanding of the necessity of solidarity from an intellectual one to a personal, emotional one. Still, the visit created many more questions than it answered. What does my solidarity with communities like El Carmen look like? What does it mean? How can I be in solidarity? These are questions I hope I will struggle with for the rest of my life.


*Alegrias are bars of popped and sweetened amaranth.

The Treacherous Whirlpool: Nogales, Sonora and the Quest for Cheap Labor - Ian Patrick Flanagan

A century ago, the binational town of Nogales, spanning the Arizona-Sonora border, was a tiny hamlet far from American and Mexican centers of populations, only recently a beneficiary of the new rail network’s steel tentacles that knitted the two nations together in an ever-expanding labor market. Fifty years after that, on the Sonoran side of what was then a simple barbed-wire fence, the Flores Magon neighborhood—which I have twice had the pleasure of visiting while on the Border Studies Program—was vacant land with no recorded residents.

In contrast, the Nogales, Sonora of 2011 is a teeming city, its vacant outskirts filled with workers from the foreign-owned maquilas, or export-only factories, that have sprung up since the mid-1960s. Flores Magon’s story is a microcosm of the recent history of northern Mexico, from Tijuana in the west to Matamoros in the east, a story of the treacherous whirlpool of foreign-controlled development, slowly sinking communities deeper into an economic abyss; just as importantly, however, Flores Magon illustrates the never-ending struggle of people against economic aggression, a struggle manifest throughout Mexico.

In sharp contrast to the industrial history of the West, maquila towns were non-union corporate utopias founded after 1964 along the border by foreign capitalists (typically American, but also European and Japanese), and individual factories exist only to export finished goods back to the companies’ countries of origin. Flores Magon residents spoke of the lure of (relatively) high wages in the early decades of maquila development—and the importance of Nogales as a way station for U.S.-bound migrants. Some of the town’s migrants decided to stay in Mexico, however, and their settlement spilled into colonias on absentee landlords’ land.

The colonias are legal gray areas—residents are without title, but the Mexican Constitution mandates access to unused land—and the landlords mostly want to keep it that way, so that they’re not required to provide services to residents. Community organizing in the colonias picked up in the 80s, said longtime Flores Magon residents. Wages then were high enough to sustain one-income families, leaving some residents the time to organize, slowly winning concessions from the government in access to roads, electricity, sewage, and useable water. At several points, residents nearly gained legal title to their land.

The emergence of even cheaper labor sources in East Asia, however, has depressed wages in Nogales in recent years, and some maquilas have even departed from Mexico, rendering single-income families a relic of the past, and cutting deeply into time for organizing—the town found itself plunged deeper down the whirlpool.

Local resistance to the system continues: one long-time Flores Magon resident has steadfastly refused to work in maquilas for decades; a new community center serves the neighborhood; and local organizing ploughs forward, albeit with less support from the overworked maquila laborers. People we encountered in Nogales, Sonora carried on with life, generally hopeful and glad for what they could provide with the jobs they had.

Unspoken, however, the nadir of the whirlpool looms ever closer—a large-scale movement of maquilas to East Asia, at which point Mexican border residents would have little choice but mass emigration to the United States for low-wage work here or return to mostly abandoned farming communities further south in Mexico. It’s not hard to think of which option American capital—ever concerned with cheap labor, in the U.S. and abroad—would prefer.