The Personal Toll of America’s Border Crisis: A Tale of Family, Sacrifice, and Agency
This week’s feature for Ars Poetica’s Writing Series for BIPOC Voices is written by Fernanda Gonzalez-Blanco. All pieces within the series have been curated by Shakilya Lawrence.
Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, has a small-town feel upon arrival.
You make your way through the single-terminal airport to get to baggage claim which is partitioned off from the general public by a glass wall. Friends and family watch with intent as you grab your bags and exit through the doors into the waiting arms of your Abuelitos 1 . On your way out, you sidestep hands clasping flowers, balloons, letters, and even the occasional pañuelo 2 that dabs at eyes and foreheads in anticipation. You might run into your tia de cariño 3 who hasn’t seen you desde que eras chiquita 4 ! Or your mom’s high school ex-boyfriend. And before you know it, the five-second walk to the door turns into twenty minutes of hi’s and bye’s and promises for coffee, dinner, or drinks.
Eventually, you make it outside.
The open gray lot is speckled red from fallen flamboyan leaves, and the trees offer slivers of shade on the way to the car. You might think that raising a hand to block out the sun will help only to be surprised by the effort it takes to pull your arm up. It’s as if the air itself, hot and heavy, needs to be cleared chunk by chunk, wiped away to make a path — unencumbered — for everyone behind you.
1 Grandparents
2 Handkerchief
3 An “aunt” in everything but genetics
4 Since you were little
“The steps to making a life in the United States are not set in stone and those who immigrate are not a monolith, though they’re often spoken of as such.”
People have always moved, either by want or by need — a subject which has been written about time and again. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki writes that “often, the concern with boundaries and their transgression reflects not so much corporeal movements of specific groups of people, but rather, a broad concern with the "cultural displacement" of people, things, and cultural products”. In May 2018, during a roundtable in California, Trump said, “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”
Donald Trump’s tweet via Twitter on June 19, 2018
People arrive every day in the United States hoping to stay. They come by plane, car, and some even travel miles and cross countries by foot to get here. Some arrive with papers permitting them to stay under various stipulations such as through work, studies, or teaching. Others come without documentation at all. The steps to making a life in the United States are not set in stone and those who immigrate are not a monolith, though they’re often spoken of as such. The president is wont to do so, as it stokes the fires of his base. In a tweet, he likened the arrival of undocumented immigrants in the United States to an infestation — to vermin. Implied in this sentiment is the need for an exterminator to collect and dispose of that which infests your otherwise “clean” home. In the way he speaks about immigration along the US-Mexico border, Trump has consistently shown us what motivates his border policies. Beyond enforcement of law or bipartisan disagreements, it has and always will be about cultural and racially motivated malice.
Stories told from detention centers by those coming into the US via the southern border often highlight how border policies in action (from the inception of the DHS under Bush, through Obama’s tenure, and now to Trump) dehumanize those who have often made incredibly taxing journeys to get there. To commit to emigrating means not only making the sacrifice to leave your home, but committing yourself to the possibility of existing in liminality. Neither arrived nor turned away, but held — detained. It means acknowledging the possibility of being separated from your children or being sent back to the place you tried to leave. From border patrol agents joking about sobbing children who were recently separated from their parents to the current mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis, these spaces are a locus of strategic inhumanity.
This past March, the U.S, Canada, and Mexico reached an agreement to “limit all non-essential travel across borders”. Additionally, per the Department of Homeland Security, border patrol would “no longer detain illegal immigrants” and would “immediately return these aliens to the country they entered from”. These detention centers, in which COVID-19 infections have spread rampant, have begun to knowingly expel infected immigrants at a high rate exporting the virus to countries often ill-equipped to respond to the crisis. Detained immigrants at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) went on a hunger strike for the gross mismanagement of COVID — ICDC turned off the water in response. A nurse reports that a detainee resorted to drinking out of the toilet, “It’s what he had left”. In contrast, immigration from European countries continues to be an open pathway.
Mi Abuelito Miguel was raised on the concept of autonomy and space, and often tells us as much is true about the world in which we live. Born the third of fifteen children to a large ranch family, these concepts are coded into the core of his being.
When he was a child, his grandfather purchased a horse and a hunting dog from a nearby ranch and needed someone to transport them back to his property. No adults were available to do the task at that time, and so my grandfather, at twelve years old, offered to do it. Off he went by himself, an eighty miles three-day long trip. He calls it his Odyssey, telling us about sleeping with the horses overnight and waking up to coffee with milk straight from the udder of the cows in the next stall over. He talks about starting his last leg of the trip en la madrugada5 to a star-speckled sky. I can feel the heat as he describes the sun languidly climbing up his back as he got closer to home. With a crinkle in his eye, he recounts being so sore he couldn’t walk for days afterward, but how he bragged about the journey to all of his friends anyway.
5The very early morning
Shortly after this adventure, his father, my great-grandfather, lost his land due to a combined result of gambling and government expropriation policies. My Abuelito was then sent to live with his aunts where he could be of more help. Eventually, they felt he outgrew his usefulness in their home, and at age 15 he left, began selling popsicles, and has worked every day of his life since.
My grandparents, who eventually settled in Tuxtla, had four children. My mother is the second-born of the group, but the first and only one to move permanently to the US. Through concerted efforts — summer camp in Michigan, a year away in Saskatchewan, Canada — my grandparents strove to provide pathways of opportunity for all of their children. The hope was that their mastery of the English language would open doors for them in life. And it did. My mom got her undergraduate degree in the United States, a crucial step to our family settling down stateside, eventually with citizenship, for good.
John Moore via Washington Post
By now, many have seen the widely circulated photograph of a two-year-old Honduran girl screaming as border patrol search her mother. A lesser-known picture captured by the same photographer, John Moore, shows what looks like an agent tying the little girl’s shoes. In reality, she is removing the laces, the last step in confiscating the toddler’s personal effects before turning to do the same to her mother. The agent gathers everything they’ve carried with them for 1,500 miles in a plastic bag and drops it on top of a pile of other bags containing the effects of others who have been stopped, stripped, and taken to a detention center. It is here they await a verdict on their future either together with their families or forced apart.
Parent-child separation in detention centers has lately been the subject of public discourse. These stories garner outrage, then fade, as headlines fall down timelines. In June 2019, RAICES and Badger & Winters installed cages with child-sized mannequins inside them all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. The purpose was to highlight the reprehensible conditions detainees — particularly children — are being kept in. This #NoKidsInCages campaign also sought to highlight a specific problem about this human rights issue: desensitization. The general public has become so removed from the realities taking place in detention centers, and these installations attempt to ground people in the reality of kids in cages — of children being forcibly removed from their parents.
Photo credit Matthew Earle Scott
A whistleblower complaint by a nurse allegedly states forced hysterectomies were performed on women at the ICDC center in Georgia. The women who had the procedures performed reported feeling confused and angry — one lady was given a total hysterectomy though “she still wanted children.” The nurse describes how she then had “to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids”. To know children and parents are being separated and that their trauma is being compounded by removing their ability to have more children is a deep evil, though not an isolated incident in the history of the United States. It is saying that not only are those attempting to come here are not welcome, but their potential progeny are inherently unwelcome and unassimilable in this nation.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
These words are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They directly applied to Frederik Trump, who landed at Ellis Island from Germany with hopes of making a better life, and whose great-grandchild, Donald Trump, now actively perpetuates malice towards those attempting to make their lives here.
I’m not sure what the future holds, especially for people who look like me. But I do know that I have the privilege to move freely to and from the southernmost border — an invisible line and not a wall for me. I can come home and unpack my bags after spending a summer in Mexico, look outside my window, and know that my family is safe while others cannot. As these news stories surface and disappear, I ask that we acknowledge the journeys that people we love have taken, either with us or for us. And to then turn to and show that same care, love, and action to everyone whose journey is being impeded. It is our responsibility to do so not in spite of, but because of the place we call home.
Where to donate:
Raices : promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees.
Al Otro Lado : serves indigent deportees, migrants, and refugees in Tijuana & Los Angeles
The Florence Project : provides legal & social services to detained immigrants in Arizona
Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) : protects unaccompanied children who enter the US immigration system alone to ensure that no child appears in court without an attorney
La Union del Pueblo Entero : founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, a community union that works in the Rio Grande Valley from the grassroots up
Fernanda was born in Mexico City, Mexico, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Some of her passions include setting off the fire alarm when cooking, actively supporting the NYC Parks Department, and horseback riding (inspired by her Abuelito Miguel and Abuela Pat). She is interested in examining systems of creative production through a critical lens. Fernanda is reachable at fernandagbs112@gmail.com.
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