Tag: Immigration issues

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Take Me to the Rio

The Rio Grande at Radium Springs (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

I crossed the Rio Grande river last week — several times, actually. It wasn’t that difficult. In fact, I could have walked across and not gotten my feet wet, much less my back.

In Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I was visiting family, the Rio Grande comes down from the northern part of the state and runs along the city’s western edge. Or at least it used to. Right now, the Rio Grande is as dry as a buzzard’s brunch — a 100-yard-wide strip of sandy dirt. The river has looked like this in Las Cruces from October to February for most years since the 1990s. The Rio Grande is “turned on” again early each spring by releasing water from the Elephant Butte Reservoir 70 miles upstream.

But things are changing, and not for the better. In 2020, water wasn’t released into the Rio Grande bed until late March, and the river was back to dirt by September. This year, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District says levels are so low that water won’t be released until June, and that the river will probably be dry again by the end of July. In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is no longer grande — or even a rio — for most of the year.

Historically, the Rio Grande used to flow year-round through the Mesilla Valley from Hatch (Chile Capital of the World), through Las Cruces, down to El Paso, at least at some level. Before the Spaniards arrived, Native Americans farmed the valley and fished the river’s waters. Then as agriculture began to increasingly tap into the river in the 20th century, the Rio Grande was dammed in several places to prevent seasonal flooding, capture snow-melt runoff from the mountains, and provide water as needed to irrigate many thousands of acres of pecans, alfalfa, lettuce, chiles, onions, and cotton. Now, there is enough water for agriculture — maybe — but that’s about it.

South of El Paso, where the river becomes the border between the United States and Mexico, the water level picks up again somewhat, as the river is fed by reservoirs in both countries. But drought (which doesn’t recognize lines on a map) is also affecting flow along the border.

It’s a good thing we have that beautiful 2,000-mile wall. Or, actually, I guess it’s the 452 miles of fencing that were already in place, plus the 80 miles that the Former Guy added. According to Google, there are 300 or so miles of barrier (fencing or wall) along the dry border between San Diego and El Paso. After that, we’ve traditionally counted on the Rio Grande to handle the job of stopping would-be immigrants: making them swim for it or die trying. We may have to rethink that strategy. Wading isn’t all that dangerous.

But I digress. Las Cruces is a lovely place. It has beautiful scenery, and it’s fun to drive around and take in the vast vistas of sky and mountains. (And also to drive into the desert with my brother and shoot at Amazon boxes using my late father’s old .22. We killed several.)

On a whim, I took my tack-sharp 95-year-old mother on a drive north of Las Cruces, through the farm fields of the Mesilla Valley to Radium Springs, where there is actual water flowing in the middle of the desert and where some of the world’s largest pecan orchards are located. We veered off toward the Rio Grande on a gravel road and found a couple of small, shallow pools in the riverbed — a lovely reminder of what used to be, and, sadly, probably not a harbinger of what’s to come.

In fact, if what I saw in Las Cruces is any indicator of where we’re headed with the Rio Grande, keeping the scary hordes of brown people from invading our pure Anglo-Saxon soil is just going to keep getting harder. It’s clear that Mother Nature — or climate change, if you’re an elitist — is conspiring against our puny idea of what makes a border.

It may come down to a choice between saving American pecans or keeping a few American wing-nuts happy. I stand with the pecans.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The See-Saw of Race and Power

CREDIT: CNN Video

On July 30th, images of a bright pink seesaw installed at the U.S.-Mexico border flooded my social media and news feeds. On the Mexico side of the wall, children lined up for a turn on the seesaw. On the U.S. side, a handful of people, mostly adults, got on the seats at the other end.

Though temporarily installed (for about half an hour), the seesaw will exist forever in digital memory through the photos and videos that documented it. Messages of love and unity accompanied them, and people celebrated the seesaw for allowing U.S. and Mexican kids to play together. As the co-architect Ronald Rael described, the “Teetertotter Wall” was meant to foster “joy, excitement, and togetherness.” But when I first came across these photos and videos, I didn’t see what most people saw or wanted to see.

Despite many reports suggesting kids on both sides playing together, coverage of the seesaw on the U.S. side showed mostly grown adults. Images that were widely circulated of actual children on the seesaw were of children on the southern side of the border. On the surface, images of smiling and laughing brown kids evoke positive messages. If that’s the level where we choose to stop, then we can agree that some of the goals that Rael and his partner, architect Virginia San Fratello, set out for this art installation — to bring joy and show that people on both sides can build positive relationships — have been accomplished.

CNN Video

Coverage of them should be, too.

But art is not that simple. Border narratives are not simple. The border, the wall, and the realities of immigration, colonialism, and militarization bound to it are multilayered.

When Rael and San Fratello said, “The wall became a literal fulcrum of U.S.-Mexico relations” and that the Teetertotter Wall reflects “how the actions on one side of the border have direct consequences on the other,” they presented a limited way to understand immigration. While it may not have been their intent, the consequence of this framing is that we neglect to consider the significant number of Central American asylum seekers who present themselves at the U.S. southern border. It also doesn’t recognize the role of the U.S. and Mexico in the oppression of Central Americans, especially black and indigenous Central Americans.

All that is lost in the coverage of the bright pink seesaws.

In their statement “Borderwall as (Settler Colonial) Architecture, or Why We Prefer Bulldozers to Seesaws” Dubravka Sekulić, Elise Misao Hunchuck, and Léopold Lambert write, “The immediate public acceptance and celebration of this project flattened it into a palatable image of hope, concealing if not erasing real and pressing concerns.” They emphasize that “this is less about the installation itself than its publicization” because the coverage of the seesaw suggests that this art intervention can make the wall a part of a playful landscape. In that brief but well-documented and later publicized moment, all we see is the smiling and laughing faces of brown children. It doesn’t challenge us. And because we are not challenged to think of the border and what it represents and supports in a different way, we consume images of brown smiles and then those images, like anything “viral,” enter and leave our social media feeds.

This leads to another point that unsettled me. These images of children that are meant to make you feel — something. Images of children, especially black and brown children, are often used for this purpose. Smiling faces to make you feel one way, faces full of tears to feel another. A recent example is the series of raids that happened in Mississippi where images of grieving families and children were spread across the internet.

The 2018 worksite ICE raid in Bean Station, Tennessee, that took 97 people was about 440 miles away from Memphis, and while there have been raids in Memphis before, this one had been the largest in a decade at the time.

For perspective, Canton, Mississippi, one of the six cities that experienced worksite raids, is less than half the distance from Memphis that Bean Station is. Around 680 people were taken from worksites last week. For some cities, it was the first day of school for children. Their faces of grief and trauma were shared and retweeted over and over. Some may say that this was done to raise awareness, but a recurring problem is that images of black and brown people experiencing violence at the hand of the state are not made for awareness; they are exploited for white consumption. The images of the smiling brown kids on the pink seesaw similarly serve to aid a comfort that obscures a call to challenge and act. Journalists and photographers need to think about their role in documenting these events. Are you amplifying the voices and stories of people with dignity and respect?

Bringing awareness does not require photographing children without their or their parents’ and caretakers’ consent. What these children and communities need is resources and support, now more than ever.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian exploring race and ethnicity in the changing U.S. South.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

No Crisis! You’re the Crisis!

CREDIT: REUTERS | Earnie Grafton

When the orange terror — I mean President Donald Trump — said he was going to build a wall at the southern border, I thought it was a joke. It’s expensive, it’s anti-immigrant, and seems regressively un-American. Not only was it not a joke, but, as of press time, the orange terror is seemingly willing to allow the federal government to be partially shut down indefinitely, halting federal services, hurting people’s pocketbooks, and causing a slew of other disruptions, in order to force the issue of the border wall.

People’s livelihoods are being played with, like this is one big game of Monopoly, all for what the president calls the “crisis” at the southern border.

Merriam-Webster defines a crisis as a “situation that has reached a critical phase” or an “unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending, especially one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.”

REUTERS | Earnie Grafton

The southern border

There is no real crisis at the border. There are crises, however, in our schools, in the health-care system, in the criminal justice system, and elsewhere in this country. And the billions of dollars Trump wants to spend on border security could make a huge dent in those areas. But, that’s a discussion for another day.

The most current crisis is the 800,000 federal employees who are not getting paid. Why should they be punished? Let’s talk about the rent they won’t be able to pay, or the car note, or the groceries they won’t be able to afford for their families. What about the mothers and babies who could stop getting WIC benefits and therefore not have the things they need to survive, the kids whose school lunches will stop being provided, or the immigrants whose court dates have been rescheduled for a time in the unforeseeable future?

The FDA isn’t regulating or inspecting food and drugs, FBI agents are working without pay, food stamps will stop being dispersed at the end of February, national parks are turning into waste zones, and airports are closing entire terminals due to a limited number of TSA agents. And this isn’t even an exhaustive list of all the other chaos the shutdown has caused.

This is the real crisis, which could have, and should have been, avoided.

Trump’s behavior mirrors that of a prepubescent child who throws tantrums when they don’t get their way. That’s all this government shutdown is: one big temper tantrum. When you are a 12-year-old girl, it’s fine and even expected. But, when you’re the leader of the free world and are responsible for the well-being of an entire nation, you need to do better.

Trump seems to have no regard for the millions of people his hissy fit is affecting. That’s a slap in the face to the people who chose jobs, in some cases for an unglamourous amount of pay, who serve the country — and those of us who depend on their service. You can’t just shut down the government of the world’s most prominent country because you didn’t get what you wanted.

The United States looks like such a joke to other countries around the world right now. I mean, I lost some faith in our country the day it elected the orange terror. But now? Trump’s warranted a whole new level of disrespect.

Though it’s unlikely Trump will ever be able to redeem himself from the absolute joke of a president he’s become, he still has the time and opportunity to offset some of the havoc he’s wreaked. If he does, maybe some day the history books can at least say one nice thing about him.

If he backs down now, it would show the world that he has at least an ounce of sense and reasonableness — not much, but some. But, I doubt that’s coming. He’s still talking about declaring an emergency to build the wall. He’s going to have a real emergency on his hands if this continues. What happens when TSA agents can’t survive working like unpaid worker bees anymore? Or when FBI agents decide to stop working for free?

And would a wall even solve the immigration “crisis?” Not unless it’s coupled with updated, strong, fair legislation. A wall won’t fix this country’s problematic immigration system. Good leadership will.

At the end of the day, the United States is a country of immigrants built by immigrants. Those who came here 200 years ago to seek a better life have little room to criticize those who are coming in 2019 for the same reason.

The government shutdown is just another reminder that we are all living in a wonky Twilight Zone, a nightmare episode that, hopefully, we’ll soon wake up from.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.