Recently I went with a group of Divinity students, a professor, and a teaching fellow to the AZ/Mexico border. With the passing of SP 1070 and Obama's issue of 1200 military forces to this section of the border, it was a hotspot to learn about the borderlands and partly experience the stories from both sides. We essentially wandered through the Sonoran Desert for eight days asking various questions. The question I was interested in answering was: what does God's justice look like in each perspective and how do the pieces fit together? It is a dangerous question to ask when media voices engage in a kind of domestic terrorism--persuading Americans there is something to fear from the Hispanic immigrant. The term 'illegal' helps most categorize the Hispanic immigrant as a criminal who should be grateful we simply deport them or offer a legal justice. How kind of an originally immigrant population who illegally invaded North America and displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans; how kind of a culture which honors the man on a twenty dollar bill who openly disregarded the Supreme Court to engage in genocide and displacement of Native Americans. I too share this history and unfortunate fragment of my identity with other Anglo-Americans.
Despite racism in our history and present, the border wall itself mocks our heritage. The United States has never been a country concerned with keeping people out until very recently. Why? One speculation is after the Berlin Wall fell and the shredding of the Iron Curtain, the United States needed a new archenemy. Why not those Hispanic drug lords coming from the South? Oh, wait, only 17% of individuals crossing outside of entry points have a criminal record....and a smaller part of that percentage have criminal records other than previous illegal entry. So fear must be built around this issue. I spent a week in Nogales, AZ, which eerily reminds one of the days of a divided Berlin with the wall in the middle of the town, and there was no fear of violence. Undocumented individuals are usually the best behaved citizens because they want to lay low. A murder has not been committed in Nogales in several years.
A radio show yesterday sparked this rant in a negative direction which I hope to move beyond. The hosts were so sure more military presence on the border will solve our problems and were obviously clueless of border policy designed by the US government to funnel more people through the AZ border because of the high peril of crossing the Sonora Desert. The government wishes to use death as a deterrent to people who have nothing left to lose, to parents who have no other way to feed their children unless they can find a job further north. The excuse is our economy cannot sustain undocumented persons or allow a large influx of the US population. I would like to see the predicted data and ask what crystal ball is certain of the US crumbling.
We walked a once popular immigrant trail in the desert. Personal belonging lay strewn along the way as people were forced to drop what few possessions they had to survive. And when you have heard the stories of people who attempted to cross, but lost loved ones in the journey, it is impossible for the human being in the United States supposedly upholding the pursuit of happiness and justice to say death was a proper sentence in an attempt to break a US law. Laws, like human judgment, are not absolute and are flawed. Wandering in the desert searching for justice is never a pleasant trip so I will not pretend it was. The poverty of Mexico was not new to me, but confronting the flaws in my identity as a white, American, financial privileged, educated, woman was brutal when Mexican households were so generously hospitable to citizens of a land who would prefer a higher body count of 'illegal' persons at the border rather than justly give such persons a chance at living.
The last day of the trip I learned a dear professor from my undergraduate career died mysteriously and suddenly at the age of 43. It was impossible at this point to bury my grief and tears in order to engage in group reflections. I stood in the bathroom staring out the window through my tears and glimpsed really for the first time the unacknowledged depth of my feelings... ... primarily grief and sadness... ... surrounding the death and sins of our world. Grief has normally been treated by me as an annoyance, a hindrance to moving on from a factual reality. But, I am thinking differently these days and understand deep grief that brings tears gives clarity other emotions cannot quite reach.
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