Leslie Olson—Brownsville by Bus, reflection

“Step across this line. (He draws a line in the dirt. The sheriff steps over.) Ay! Que milagro ! You’re not the sheriff of nothing anymore… The bird who is flying south, do you think he sees this line? Rattlesnake? Javelina? Whatever you got? You think halfway across that line they start thinking differently? Why should a man?”

“Your government’s always been pretty happy to have that line. The question’s just been where to draw it.”

“My government can go fuck itself. And so can yours. I’m talking about people here. Men.” --Lonestar, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996

*

I travel, in part, to participate in a different sort of learning that helps to round out the theory taught in my international studies curriculum. Travel helps to give intellectual theory context, and that context often complicates what theory once simplified. Before my departure, I had anticipated that my two weeks spent on La Frontera would provide a greater depth to my rather incomplete understanding of push and pull factors of international migration; I figured the time would elucidate various factions’ opinions about the border; it would help reveal how business is conducted, attitudes about remittances and work, solutions to crime and poverty and education. In short, I prepared myself to return to Colorado with a more complex understanding of relations between Mexico and El Norte.

And, indeed, having returned home and having had conversations with many people who are prone to spouting political catchphrases and ideological one-liners, I can say that the border issues are more complex than “America will be overrun by Mexicans, they’ll take all our jobs, we’ll all have to speak Spanish, and it won’t be our country anymore!”

But it is not the complexity of what I saw on the borderlands that made this reflection so difficult to write, it is, instead, the lack of sophistication of my initial conclusions that paralyzes me. Having sat with the pictures of almost two thousand miles of La Frontera flashing through my mind, I must admit that I have returned to the States carrying an embarrassingly simplistic opinion that makes me seem ironically inexperienced and naïve. I have returned thinking: This “international border” is only an artificial line drawn in the ever-shifting sand.

In a course about migrants and refugees, one professor, Peter Van Arsdale, suggested that migration has always been an adaptation for survival; that those populations who were allowed movement were the most likely to be able to adapt to change. It is true in the animal world: A valley meadow floods, and only the rabbits able to move to higher ground will survive; in the Midwest, upon hearing that a tornado is approaching, a farmer will release all of his livestock from their stalls and pens so they might scatter. While I recognize that human societies are infinitely more complex than animal communities, I have returned from the border with a sense that in our reading of the international papers, the scholarly journals and the cutting-edge academic texts, we have worked out intricate hypotheses about intricate societies, but we have also overlooked something very, very simple and fundamental: Freedom of movement is a natural tool of survival, and borders are often in direct opposition to this.

I am self-conscious as I write. I did not anticipate my composing a diatribe against international boundaries or state societies as we know them. I went through my Emma Goldman phase my freshman year, I did not—and do not—plan on its return. But I have been in the desert on El Camino Del Diablo while the sun is high, and after only a few minutes I have felt the beginnings of the thirst that has taken many traveling toward something better. I have seen the pictures of men sewn into bus seats, of hundreds of women crammed into semi-trailers and of children stuffed into the dashboards of cars. I have heard Border Patrol agents talk about catching the same men over and over, of taking those men back home, of catching them again a week later. And when I sleep, I keep picturing the scattering along the road of migrants’ plastic gallon jugs, half full of brown urine, kept because in the desert, the unnatural gesture of lifting that jug to the lips might be the only means to meet what may be man’s most natural desire: to continue to survive.

If I am forced to make one statement about our travels to La Frontera then, it will not be one that comes from an international studies major or an intern with a refugee agency. The statement that I must make is one that comes from the heart of just another human being. The drive to survive is natural, and ostensibly, the motivating force behind creating state societies was that such a creation would make survival more likely. When we have reached a point where the existence of unnatural boundaries compromise natural urges, where neither desire to survive nor boundary is being honored, we have reached a point where we must sit down—not as presidents and diplomats, but as fellow human beings—and we must modify our methods. It is embarrassingly simple, but also seems to be the only natural thing to do.