INTRODUCTION
My decision to accept a position at the University of Arizona opened up new perspectives on U.S. politics. I had been vaguely aware of something called “The Sanctuary Movement.” But in New York the focus had been on East-West relations. I was now faced with “border issues,” and how local events actually reflected international contests. The Cuban Revolution had inspired revolts south of the border, we countered by organizing counter-insurgencies, and the pressures on our border with Mexico were the result. I immersed myself in the reading of local and other authors on these issues.
Lives on the Line:
Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border
by Miriam Davidson
The University of Arizona Press, 186 pp.
There are lines in the sand we call borders. Some of them are drawn on maps and refer to geopolitical entities. Others, though they sometimes coincide, refer to boundaries of the mind. At times of rapid change, borders bristle with high-pressure tension: this is not what I expected to find upon moving from New York to Arizona some twelve years ago. I expected saguaro cactuses, sunny skies, and reasonable cost of living. And I got that, in spades. In fact, living in Tucson only some forty miles north of the Mexican border, I could leave it at that: most people do. On the other hand, others make it their business to tune into the border and its doings. It is some of their voices I would like to consider in this review.
Miriam Davidson’s Lives on the Line describes how the once sleepy border town of Nogales, which straddles the U.S.- Mexico border, changed from a traditional way station for surreptitious traffic of people and controlled substances, initially bootleg, into a place of escalating conflict and misery. In a guarded, even-handed manner, she documents the impact of recent developments on a number of individual lives.
What are those developments? Here in Arizona as well as elsewhere on the border, people are caught in a kind of pincer effect: the movement of foreign capital, mostly American, to set up maquiladoras on the Mexican side and the move, on the U.S. side, to seal off the border. Maquiladoras are factories thriving oncheep labor, cheep currency, minimal taxes, and lax environmental regulation. The rationale for tightening the border, presumably, is to stem the flow of people and drugs from South to North.
What are the results? The author focuses on several unsentimentally observed “lives.” First, we meet Yolanda Sanchez, a single mother, who fled rural poverty and a tequila-soaked husband in the hope of promised opportunity in the maquilas. She was thrilled to get a job in 1984 in Nogales, Sonora, assembling inductors for four dollars a day. After several years depending on one friend or another, she was assigned a plot of land to build one of those dwellings made of wood pallets, cardboard boxes, plastic sheets and discarded bits of corrugated tin. Tourists may see them up on the hill as they make their way to the “curios” shops. Such dwellings have no water, electricity or sewage. Yolanda Sanchez had to move and start over several times, but kept struggling for herself and her children, who are now in turn working for the maquilas.
Next, we meet Jimmy Teyechea, a resident of Nogales, Arizona. Downhill and downwind from its larger Mexican counterpart, the American town also came to suffer from severe air, water and soil pollution coming from factories, trucks, unpaved roads and squatter camps. Diagnosed with a rare bone marrow cancer at age forty, Teyechea rallied some neighbors similarly affected, and attempted a campaign to draw attention to the environmental crisis on the border. He succeeded in getting national media attention, and during the NAFTA negotiations of 1994 some effort was made to clean up existing pollution. All in all, the bulk of the effort was relegated to “scientific studies” of the problem while enforcement remained minimal. When Jimmy Teyechea died, the battle died with him.
Then there is the story of Dario Miranda Valenzuelo of Nogales, Sonora. Like so many before him, he undertook to cross the border into Arizona. He had done it before, and what he told his mother on the way out was that he had a job opportunity in Tucson. On that day the U.S. Border Patrol was tipped off about possible smugglers and sent out a detachment. One of the agents, Michael Elmer, saw Miranda in the distance and assumed him to be a scout for the presumed smugglers. Disregarding regulations he started shooting and killed Miranda; realizing the latter had been unarmed, Elmer buried him in a canyon west of town. The evidence collected during the subsequent investigation proved so damaging, that the incident became known as the Rodney King of the Border. Nevertheless, Michael Elmer was acquitted on all counts in the ensuing trial in Phoenix. Miriam Davidson does a good job of characterizing the key players in the proceedings. Miranda may well have worked as a scout for drug traffickers. That he had been unarmed, that he had been well known in the Mexican community as a dutiful son, a father of two toddlers, and a star soccer player was beside the point. Michael Elmer was “one of us,” never mind his dubious character and the damning evidence. He had done his job; he had held the line against “one of them.”
As the more popular points of entry in California and Texas have been choked off, the pressure has shifted to Arizona. The laughable chain link fence of the past has been replaced by a two-mile long, fourteen-foot-tall steel wall. Millions are poured into the purchase of helicopters and surveillance equipment. The Border Patrol is reinforced by the National Guard. Does the militarization of the border stem the traffic of drugs? Hardly, for the traffickers too can afford to arm to the teeth, or to buy their way through on BOTH sides of the border. In the meantime, tens of thousands get arrested trying to cross, and thousands die, some by bullets, some from exposure in the desert. And an incalculable number get through anyway. Davidson reports the comments of two men standing by the wall:” They can bring all the army of the United States if they want, but they will not stop us from working to feed our families” said one of them; “they cannot kill us all,” said the other.
Imagine raising kids under such conditions. Families from traditional rural communities come to Nogales chasing “the American Dream,” and implode in the overcrowded, chaotic and supercharged conditions of the border. But there is a safe haven for homeless children: it is an underground maze of tunnels crisscrossing below the border. Originally built as a system of storm channels, it is now youth gang territory. Kids band together and exact transit payment from drug smugglers and illegals. They come out on the American side to burglarize stores and restaurants. They get arrested, and then returned to the streets and the tunnels. Rehabilitation resources are meager on the Mexican side. U.S. based funding agencies are forbidden to do cross-border work. The author befriended a young gang member called Cristina. Her story is only too predictable: estrangement from family, drugs, fights, stints in jail, efforts to “make it” at a maquila night job that netted $3.50 a day. Finally, alone at eighteen with two children from different fathers, Cristina dreams of finishing primary school, may be getting an allotment to build a shack and somehow – somehow – give her two girls a life better than her own.
Unexpectedly, Miriam Davidson entitles her next chapter “Faith, Hope, and Charity.” She tells of individuals who struggle against the tide and make a difference. Like Jose Torres who prevailed on his Native-American wife Hope to “move back” (at least in his case) from Phoenix to Nogales, and open La Casa de la Misericordia, a place that serves a free lunch to about a hundred children every day. Or like Tom Higgins, a longtime maquiladora manager, who helped pioneer a unique collaboration between his industry and the Mexican government to build homes for low-income maquiladora workers.
Surely such efforts, laudable as they are, must be a drop in the bottomless well of trouble for “lives on the line.” Miriam Davidson does, in her last chapter, broach the subject of broader political implications: the need for union solidarity across the border where NAFTA is primarily organized for the interests of business and industry; the need for a bi-national approach to environmental issues; the cruel contradiction of opening the border for goods but not for people; the futility of drug interdiction. I would have liked to read more on this and related subjects, but this would probably require another book. This book does something else: for the accidental tourist from the North, it individualizes some faces in the faceless crowd and it humanizes the appalling squalor one confronts in crossing the line between the two Nogales.
The information conveyed in Lives on the Line can be gained as a hands-on experience through the organization “BorderLinks.” Its mission is to mediate the experience of the border, particularly for the “Gringos.” One can break a leg stepping down from the First World into the Third, so BorderLinks is right there to catch you. As one who has “walked the walk” with “BorderLinks” in Mexico and elsewhere, I can attest to the efficacy of their method. Quite simply, they see to it that you stay with and talk to folks you would never meet on any other “guided tour:” in fact, the very people Miriam Davidson describes in her book. Forgetting all about pyramids and mariachis and tacos and tequila, you discover with great relief your common humanity, and with humbling gratitude, the fact that humanity still endures under conditions of severe dehumanization. You find that culture shock is greatest upon re-entry: you look at the familiar glut, glitter and glitz and you don’t know where you belong anymore. If that happens, the “BorderLinks” experience was a success.
BorderLinks: The Road is made by Walking
By Jerry H. Gill
BorderLinks, 142 pp. B
Jerry H. Gill’s Borderlinks: The Road is Made by Walking is a history of the enterprise from its Sanctuary days to the present. I have some recollection of the word “Sanctuary” from my New York days back in the 1980s. It had something to do with refugees from South or Central America, but I would have had a hard time putting El Salvador or Guatemala on any kind of a map of personal political awareness. In those days the nuclear arms race between the two Big Ones was the only game in town, the way the Middle East monopolizes our attention today. In Arizona, however, North-South relations are a daily fact of life. Back in the 1980s during the civil war in El Salvador, and the death squad activities in Guatemala, desperate people fled northward. Some cattle ranchers formed vigilante posses (and still do). But sending those “aliens” back was tantamount to a death sentence. Other cattle ranchers, like Jim and Pat Corbett, opened their doors to them. As the stories of atrocities from which the refugees fled got around, the circle of support widened. Father Ricardo Elford, a Tucson priest, Reverend John Fife of the Southside Presbyterian Church of Tucson, and eventually the Tucson Ecumenical Council Task Force on Central America helped raise bond money for refugees and looked for ways to house them: the Sanctuary Movement, which was to spread throughout the country, was born.
BorderLinks may be understood as an effort to institutionalize the initial project of Sanctuary. As Jerry H. Gill tells it, Rick Ufford-Chase, the director of BorderLinks, had much to do with the course and direction of events. Rick grew up in Pennsylvania as the son of a Presbyterian minister. In 1968 he participated in a two-week seminar hosted by the organization “Witness for Peace” in Nicaragua, while that country was at war with the U.S. funded Contras. His “calling” was the result of that trip. Fired up by what he saw around him, he vowed to return to “help” the Nicaraguans. An old campesino set him straight: he charged him to help where help is really needed, i.e., back home in the United States. Was it not the case, after all, that the atrocities committed in El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua and since then in Colombia and Chiapas had something to do with the U.S. and its policies? Hence BorderLinks’ focus on mediating North-South relations primarily for the Northerners.
Although there continues to be an influx of political refugees from the South, the distinction between political and economic refugees becomes increasingly moot in our global economy. As a result, the educational trips across the border become object lessons in economic disparity and political exploitation both. This updated perspective required additional resources. BorderLinks was able to secure increased funding sources for a paid staff. Nowadays, its seminars and trips earn credit for students from an increasing number of colleges. BorderLinks has also bought La Casa de la Misericordia in Nogales, Sonora, from the widow of Jose Torres. It continues its mission to feed hungry children, and it strives to make it a seedbed of bi-national grassroots cooperation: Mexican staff members are now on board with BorderLinks. Both sides of the border have much to learn from each other, for here at the border is where Yankee ingenuity meets “liberation theology,” the improbable or not-so-improbable marriage of religion and Marxism. The mix seems to work.
Whether one takes one’s inspiration to call for the forgiveness of debts to poor nations from the Bible rather than from latter-day Manifestoes, the political implications are not lost on interested parties. Already the originators of the Sanctuary Movement in Tucson had had to stand trial for their actions. Another Tucsonan and early participant of the Sanctuary Movement, Reverend Ken Kennon, of the Disciples of Christ, has since served six months in a Federal penitentiary in Texas for protesting the School of the Americas, recently renamed Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC). I now know three Tucsonans who have spent similar stints in jail for crossing the symbolical white line drawn across the road that leads to the Army compound of Ft. Benning, GA., which houses the School or Institute. Ken Kennon’s cohort numbered 25 people from all over the country, and there were others before and many more since. As to Father Roy Bourgeois, the originator of the protest some 12 years ago, his prison time adds up to years.
Who are these people and why are they doing this? Let me first address the why. They are protesting the School of the Americas because it has, over time, earned the name of “School of Assassins.” It was founded in Panama back in the Sixties to stop the likes of Castro and Che Guevara. Counterinsurgency means training Latin American military cadres in the art of opposing armed rebellion, and by extension, any form of political opposition. Methods have included assassination, torture, rape, narcotraffic, decimating whole communities, toppling democratically elected governments. In short, the School of the Americas is the sore thumb of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. In “crossing the line” and risking arrest, people are trying to draw attention to the problematic nature of that policy. Renaming the “School” does in no way “WHISC” away its well documented activities. Nor does it affect ongoing U.S. policy.
Prisoner of Conscience: A Memoir
By Kenneth Kennon
Xlibris Corporation, 286 pp.
A portly gentleman in his sixties, Ken Kennon is neither your wild-eyed missionary type, nor a glutton for martyrdom. Ken’s mother had taught him “to love God and your neighbor as yourself.” It was as simple as that: the rest would follow. Ken became part of Sanctuary because he recognized the “aliens” fleeing for their lives across the border as “neighbors.” In time, the link between their plight and U.S. policy became so obvious, that he was compelled to try on their shoes and limp along the extra mile. And that’s how, being a prisoner of his conscience, Ken became a “Prisoner of Conscience.”
Like any simple mortal, he felt disoriented and vulnerable upon leaving his family and entering the prison. The shoes they gave him were too small: all he can think of is the pain in his toes. The mattress of his bunk bed sags, the broken springs poke out, the single blanket keeps him cold. His bad back takes a beating from this and the assignment as kitchen help, and his diabetes takes a beating from the food. He is bothered by the mindless rules, periodic “shake-downs,” and other petty harassment. In time he comes to fear the inmates less and to resent the hostility and highhandedness of the guards more. Some pithy, “un-pastoral” language either triggered by the environment or picked up in a sort of solidarity with it, attests to the earthiness of Ken Kennon’s character. Like the “Bird Man from Alcatraz,” he becomes absorbed by the doings of birds, those emblems of winged, soaring freedom, outside his window.
Still, he gets depressed, he suffers from claustrophobia, he hates the perpetual racket, he doesn’t get much time to read or write. The Sunday services are a mixed blessing: the chaplains don’t seem to have their heart in their job. This Protestant Minister finds he comes to prefer the Catholic services. There are compensations: he develops guarded relationships with some inmates. But when his original cell mate leaves, he is replaced by a man who makes him uncomfortable: his insinuating ways, his attempts to pump him for information suggest a stool pigeon. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, he looks for solace in small joys: he comes upon some precious stamps no one seems to claim; he is able to pass on a partial tube of toothpaste to another man (“no small thing on the inside”).
Visits are everything: he waits for them like a kid on Christmas Eve. The arcane prison system subverts his visitation rights, crosses off an elderly nun from the list of permissible correspondents and “looses” chunks of his mail. Ah, the mail! Hoarding stamps and keeping the postman busy is where it’s at. Letters keep coming in from family and friends and fellow activists. They send him books (about Mandela, Dan Berrigan, Sr. Dorothy Kazel; also books by Kathleen Norris, Tina Rosenberg, and others). They are good company. He jots down some poems; he keeps up with his diary. He writes many letters, keeping in touch, looking for words to justify his existence to the outside world. One of the inmates, upon reading one of Ken’s letters in the Tucson Citizen, approaches him. It turns out he used to be a U.S. Army special forces trainer for the trainers of SOA. He confides in Ken, giving details of the brutal torture methods it had been his business to teach. He says instruction was passed on orally, no written records were kept, and the personnel were sworn to secrecy. So, there’s the justification.
The Blindfold’s Eyes:
My Journey from Torture to Truth
by Sister Dianna Ortiz
with Patricia Davis
Orbis Books, 484 pp.
Sister Dianna Ortiz’ The Blindfold’s Eyes (co-written with Patricia Davis) also recounts a personal line-crossing story. First she crosses the North-South border in the opposite direction from whence her Mexican parents came, in her case all the way to Guatemala. Then she is kidnapped and tortured. Although she survives and escapes, she is then compelled to recross that life and death line over and over as she takes the reader on a wrenching and salutary trip across mental borders.
The image of the blindfold is crucial throughout. One moment Dianna sees with the eyes of ordinary, habitual vision: she is a nun in the field, doing what nuns do, in her case running a school in some small mountain village, and just then spending some rest time in a convent on the outskirts of Guatemala City. Next, as she is walking in the convent’s garden, a man grabs her, someone tightens a blindfold over her eyes. From now on touch, smell, sound, taste become the agents of a new vision. A body’s vision penetrated by alien flesh, filled with screams, her own and others’, slaked by urine, seared by burning cigarettes, inscribed in blood. Improbably, she survives. Some man referred to as “Alejandro,” and speaking Spanish with a pronounced American accent, calls a halt to the proceedings. He walks her to a jeep and promises to take her to the American embassy. As they stop at a red light, Dianna jumps out, and runs for her life. Some woman opens her door to her and gives her time to compose herself. She manages to get out of the country.
But the blindfold stays on: she is taken “home,” but the strangers who claim to be the members of her religious community, or the strangers who claim to be her parents and brothers and sisters, she has never “seen” them before. What she sees and smells and hears all around her, is the dark corridors, the men who tortured her, the screams of the victims. Patient support, well-meaning advice, professional intervention can’t get through. They belong to the old orderly vision of the world that goes on living side by side with the abysmal vision of hell that is now hers.
The long struggle that ensues is about breaking down the barriers between the obvious, the sensible, the expected – and the unspeakable. It’s coming to terms with who is responsible. Where is the God of love and justice who sent her on her mission? Did she somehow deserve what happened? It’s either Him or her. If this isn’t tough enough for a nun, there is the matter, which she blocks out until the very end, that she had herself aborted of the issue of the rape. “Big deal,” as some of us feminists might say, but it is a very big deal to her: it is the faith glue that links her to everything she has ever known, loved and trusted. There are more dark secrets: the torturers forced her, by holding her hand, to stab another woman, making her thus complicit in their crimes. She also mentioned, under torture, the name of the people with whom she stayed in Guatemala City, likely causing the subsequent death of one of them.
Slowly, step by step, and with excruciatingly harrowing relapses, Dianna extricates herself from the conspiracy of guilt-making to turn on the guilty. She steps away from her traditional support systems, and forges alliances, first with other victims of torture, then, increasingly, with the politically active. This proves an eye-opener. Yet the scales don’t fall from her eyes in any sudden revelation, for she clings to her faith that the justice of her cause will surely be championed by the official representatives of law and order. She is, after all, an American, and possibly owes her survival to that fact. Yet her rescuer, the man referred to as “Alejandro,” was the one patently in charge of the torture. All this is crazy making. The temptation to end all is ever present. Still, Dianna holds fast to her pledge to speak out for those who have been silenced forever, thousands and thousands of them. She fasts, she holds vigils in front of the White House, she gives press conferences. She even meets with Hillary Clinton, who promises to move things along. As she cooperates with the various investigations, which includes having to fly back to Guatemala to identify the secret prison, she continues to suffer from recurring flash-backs of the torture experience with all its intensely physical symptoms. They warn her, as it turns out reliably, that the investigators work not on her behalf at all, but to whitewash the damaging links between the torturers and the U.S. embassy in Guatemala. The investigators stall endlessly, they lead her on, then question her veracity. They insinuate allegations of collusion and sexual impropriety, they interpret the burn traces on her back to be tattoo marks, they probe her vulnerabilities, they blackmail her about the abortion. In short, the torture goes on.
The Blindfold’s Eyes is a merciless book. It is because Sister Dianna so relentlessly believes in mercy and insists on justice that her ordeal is exemplary. She expected mercy from her torturers, and she expects justice from those who were in collusion with them. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope comes to mind. In the same way, Sister Dianna expects the reader to stay with her through her body’s revisited, re-lived desecration, her shaken faith, her haunted mind, the torturous investigation. And miraculously, because the writing measures up fully to such a daunting task, the reader exults with Dianna, fired with renewed commitment to mercy and justice.
Rise and Shine: Galina DeRoeck's Website 