Dear readers,

I've decided to stop working on this blog. Its been months since I've updated it, largely because the subject matter was weighing me down. I'm writing about the border in my fiction and it's too much to write about such a heavy topic all the time.

I've started a new blog, myrunnershigh.blogspot.com, about running, tri's, training and all variety of alternative medicine and healing in the Bay Area. It's pure joy and fun to write about which is what I want my blogging to be--I'll take on weighty topics with fiction and poetry and keep the blogging light.

I hope to see you over there!

be well
Michelle

Healing the Rift in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera

I just picked up Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera again and realized how much of what I am doing now is directly related to the first time that I read her book. The rift of the border though the book, geography, peoples and her psyche and the resulting ambiguous identity that she believes define Chicana/os resonated with me, as did her call for healing. The reading series that I curate and the collection of shorts that I am writing I wouldn’t have begun if not for reading Borderlands/La Frontera.

 The U.S.-Mexican border winds its way through Borderlands/La Frontera, a sort of auto-history, in which she “puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies,” (104). In winnowing out the lies, Anzalúa, establishes Aztlán as ancestoral homeland, reclaims powerful females in history, reinstates the creative power of female gods, pushes the mestiza towards a new consciousness and sets out the potential for  a new culture. This new culture comes by way of balancing cultural dualities (male/female, Spanish/English, Mexican/white/Indian, rational/intuitive) through—not the uneasy juxtaposition of two parts—but a powerful synthesis of cultures into something whole and new. To Anzaldúa’s thinking, the conflicting dualities of Mexican-U.S. border culture creates an unhealed wound across the land, an open wound replicated in the psyche of the people who live on or are affected by the geo-political border: Chicanos.

Anzaldúa makes the case that being constantly tugged at by opposing cultures and principles, by living straddling the border, understanding both sides, but never knowing which one to choose, is the psychic equivalent of the rift that is the border, the un-natural divide forged through war, sustained by violence and subterfuge, continued through the “constant state of mental nepantilism” (100), the divide that occurs when people are caught between ways of being.

At the heart of Borderlands/ La Frontera, Anzaldúa looks to mend these rifts, “the agony of inadequacy” (67) that plagues the Chicano community and the individuals that make it up. She isolates and then deals with each aspect of Chicano culture that affects the feelings of inadequacy in each chapter in the prose section of Borderlands.. In drawing out the many contradictions within Chicano culture, and then resituating them, Anzaldúa sets up the potential for the new mestiza consciousness that she is after.

Ambiguity and duality are central characteristics of borderland culture, as conflicting cultural expectations, norms and languages pull at people in opposing directions, causing physic rifts.  Anzaldúa proposes synthesis for healing these rifts, a melding of two wholes into something entirely new and integral. Within Borderlands/ La Frontera, Anzaldúa employs many of the characteristics of borderland rifts—ambiguity, duality, and contradictions of language—in her writing, to create the essence of the borderlands and prove the possibility of her argument: that opposing sides of a border can seamlessly synthesize into something else entirely.

Sueños quebrados:…y no se lo trago la tierra

Con el Tratado de Guadalupe-Hildalgo en 1848 la gente vivía en Texas se convertiaron de mexicanos hasta mexican-americanos, pero no tuvieron el bienvenido en los Estados Unidos. Aún asi que ellos ambos vivían en las tierras de Texas, California y New Mexico antes del tratado y que, con el tratado, se convirtieron en ciudadanos de los Estados Unidos, los gringos (uso gringo en esta esayo por los estadounidenses quienes son blancos y quienes tienen el poder en el libro) los trataron como ellos fueran imigrantes ilegales. Después del tratado, hay muchas leyes en Texas que hizaron facil que los gringos pudieron arrebetar las tierras de los Mexican-americanos. De repente, los campesinos Mexican-americanos se convertieron de nuevo, hasta migrantes que tuvieran mudarse con las cosechas, sigiendo trabajo. Sus vidas eran sin riquesas, vivido debajo de los gringos. Contra esta fondación, Tomás Rivera pone su coleción de cuentas, dicho de la perspective de un niño. Rivera pone sus cuentas en la frontera, donde las relaciónes entre gringos, mexican-americans y los migrantes mexicanas eran más complicadas y conflictadas, especialmente con las vidas migrantes de las mexican-americanos.
Las vidas en la colección son llena solamente con esperanza y sueños de una vida mejor. Con …y no se lo tragó le tierra, Tomás Rivera hace el mundo de la frontera uno en que la realidad brutal quebra todos los sueños que traen la gente. Con “Los quemaditos,” Rivera realiza el tema de los quebrados por medio del maltratamiento de los gringos.

The Border Fence, Tijuana, MX

Avenida Internaciónal become Calle Al Aereopuerto west of el centro de Tijuana in its run along the south side of the border. It passes the airport and continues east towards Tecate.

I wanted to return to a particular section of the border fence, just behind the airport. I’d seen it yesterday while Oscar Ortega was driving me over to the site of his newest sculpture.

The border fence stands more prominent in the lives of people who live south of it. In the U.S., cities stop well north of the border, far enough away that the border fence remains out of sight unless you go looking for it. I stand on a hill in Colonia Reynosa, and look west, the fence continuing out into the Pacific, rising and falling with the desert hills. On the U.S. side, all I see are hills spotted with low desert shrubs; on the Mexican side, urban landscape continues right up to the wall. On the southern side, cities roll right up and crash into the border. In Colonia Federale, I have seen garden plots cultivated in the shadow of the fence, vines growing up the fence itself.

People have draped and decorated the fence with their prayers and fears and criticisms, with wood and paint and cloth, with sculpture and words and image, turning it into a veritable alter.

At this particular point, a series of artworks cascade into each other. An anonymous photographer has captured images relative to the border, to Tijuana, and transferred them to cloth, which s/he then draped over the fence for nearly a half mile.

The images are all black and white, and repeated several times before the next print begins its run. The images reveal many perspectives of the fence in haunting simplicity. The back of a woman and her children, sitting on a hill that overlooks the border fence accompanied by the sunburst aura of Guadalupe, empty space where the saint herself would normally be. A collection of silver jewelry against black velvet. A man climbing over the fence. Shadows of people waiting. Men in cowboy boots and hats in an airport, looking overwhelmed and confused.

One after another the images line the fence itself, giving depth to what the fence is, what it means in people’s lives. The printed cloth blows in the wind, and will hang there until the weather tatters it and it falls off.
Further west, but beginning just where the prints end (or begin), simple wooden crosses hang. They have been painted white, and assembled with the crosspiece not always at right angles. In black paint, names of people who have died crossing the border have been painted on the crosses, and desconoscido for those who died anonymously and were discovered anonymously.

These desconoscidos make me think, more than the named crosses, of who it was that found the body and who waits, at some point south, for contact, reassurance, a note, a postcard, something, anything, from this person? It is those crosses desconosidos that make me painfully aware of the webbed links of each person’s life, of how many people, however far away they are, the fence has affected.

In seeing the border itself, it is difficult to understand what it stands for, but these two installations make the human implications of the fence painfully clear.

McCarthy's Blood Meridian or, The Evening Redness in the West

In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy tells tales of the U.S.-Mexican border that today, is long forgotten. He picks up the story of the forming of the Glanton gang, a group of felons hired by the Mexican government to annihilate the Apaches, for that matter, any remaining American Indian, just after the treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago, 1848 that cemented the U.S.-Mexican border where it is today.

Blood Meridian is a historical novel, bringing to light not just the tumultuous history of U.S.-Mexican relations, but the nebulousness of the border, the ease of crossing back and forth, and the American Indians that lived on and near the border.

The Glanton gang was formed in 1849 and did, as the story tells, traverse the Chihuahua-Texas area, scalp hunting. As brutal an act as scalping is, in the world of the novel, it becomes an almost serene act of violence against the unimaginable violence, brutality and cruelty that occur on nearly every page of the book. Their work was possible only in the complete lawlessness that existed at the time. The violence, horrific in both its high frequency and in its ruthlessness, characterizes the novel, and the border.

Focused on the border at Ciudad Júarez and El Paso, McCarthy foretells the ongoing violence at these border towns. In the novel, just before the Glanton gang begins their scalp hunting foray into Mexico, a Mennonite tells the boy, the only name the main character ever has, that if they cross over the border they will wake “the wrath of god…hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it” (40). After the ambiguous ending (was the boy murdered? What was there to see so terrible in the jakes that couldn’t be spoken on these pages that have described in gruesome detail horrors I didn’t even know man could wreck?), the epilogue describes what seems to be a man making post holes for a fence, and fire comes with each post hole. With him are wanderers searching for bones. These two scenes seem to indicate Ciudad Júarez now, haunted by the brutal and epidemic femicides. It seems to me that the Mennonite’s warning of what the Glanton gang will set into motion the violence that we still know of today. I read the hole-augurer as setting out the border fence, cause for more violence and the unending hell. The wanderers looking for bones brings two images to mind: one of the myriad migrants that don’t make it across and end up dead in the desert, only to be found later and the bodies and bones in the desert around Júarez.

The border has been rife with violence since its inception and will be defined by violence until it is no longer. For me, the importance of the border story that McCarthy tells is important in how it points to the continuation of the story in today’s border violence.

Canadian's experience hints at border ethics

Last week a young Canadian, Nina Vroeman, was stopped at the U.S.-Canadian border on her way to California. (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2010/05/12/gatineau-vroemen-border-windsor.html) She was planning on volunteering on a farm in California, a common work-travel exchange that happens around the world.
Vroeman was allegedly detained, strip-searched and sent back to Canada. I find it horrific that the border patrol thought it necessary to strip-search a young woman and this incident makes me wonder what goes on at the southern border? Why do we treat all people crossing borders first as criminals? The recent passing of Arizona's new immigration bill which essentially legalizes racial profiling in an attempt to deport illegals (disregarding the fact that many U.S. citizens born on the border speak Spanish as their first language, aren't white and so are at risk for deportation if they aren't carrying identification on them), speaks volumes about the current state of fear at the border. If a young Canadian is getting strip-searched, what happens to Mexicans detained at the border in this time of heightened paranoia due largely to the drug wars and border violence? I imagine that Vroeman's experience hit the news because it's and unheard of experience at the northern border and because she is young, educated and white. But any Mexican so mistreated would never gain the same attention because the personal violence of an unwarranted strip search would be lost amid the large everyday violences happening in border cities. It would also take longer to come to light because of language barriers and, I believe, wouldn't be seen as something so shocking because of the largely public view of Mexicans as poor, uneducated and not quite equal.

Ortega's border sculptures

         Oscar Ortega is currently working on a series of sculptures that will stretch along the length of the border, each one documenting the time and place of its site. The energetic and affable artist began this series with La esquina de un mundo (The Corner of a World) in Las Playas, the most northwestern corner of Tijuana and “the last, or first, depending on your view, corner of Latin America.”

The next sculpture in the series, Entre ventana y puerto (Between a window and a door), sits on a meridian in the center of the main thorough fare out of Tijuana and into San Ysidro, about 100 feet from the border crossing. Here, there is always traffic, and men and women walk among the cars, peddling food and drink, puppies and piñatas, magazines, jewelry, entertainment by way of juggling and acrobatics, anything that could turn a dollar.

With Entre ventana y puerto, Ortega combined many elements of the border: the industrial aspects, the motion, the traffic, the cultures coming together, so the sculpture has elements of Aztec and U.S. culture, suns and stars and stripes; cement tire wheels jutting out from the edges.

Ortega took me to view the site of his newest work, in Otay Mesa, the industrial center of Tijuana. When we went, all there was was a deep hole, with a rebar structure that would help to stabilize the cement base once it was poured. The area seemed desolate, with abandoned big rigs and windowless industrial buildings set on massive plots of land, though we were just a few minutes away from the chaos of Tijuana.

The model of Ortega's newest work

The base of this sculpture will mimic a large cog and wheel, but Ortega will mosaic symbols – letters, numbers but also the ubiquitous symbols of today; the circle with a line through it that is now always on the “on-off” button on electronics – and will boast a cityscape at the top, with a mosaic of people in buildings, office buildings and maquiladoras, showing the variety of positions that people hold.

As Ortega works his way across the border, each of his sculptures will represent the specific area that it resides in. In the end, Ortega will have captured the characteristics of a specific time for each place through his work.