My grandfather, mi abuelo, was born in Los Indios, Texas (or Mexico, depending on who you ask). Named Wenceslao Longoria, his name did not fit comfortably in the mouths of his fellow soldiers when he joined the United States Army with a potentially forged birth certificate in hand. He remodeled himself — becoming Vince, then Vinny, and finally, David.
Decades later, after serving two terms in the Vietnam War so his younger brother, Fernando, would not have to go, he was left with the failing hearing common to a generation of veterans, and the emotional scars to match. He is now a dual citizen (by location, not legally). Living primarily in Heroica Matamoros, Mexico, he travels across the Gateway Bridge into Brownsville, Texas once a month to pick up a disability check from Veteran Affairs and a paycheck for any side gigs he has worked in town. In the process, he endures questions of belonging and birthplace from border patrol agents tasked with defending the country from foreign invaders.
They say, “Los Indios didn’t have a hospital in 1941. Where were you really born?”
To which he replies, “To be honest, I was there, but I don’t remember much of the experience.”
Because sometimes we mask our pain and our fear with humor. And because he can speak both Spanish and English and is funny as all hell in both. They let him through, but not without warning him that border patrol agents stop cars of folks who “look like him” miles into the United States — the country that stole his hearing and now wants to pretend he does not deserve recognition nor compensation for it. I cannot help but notice the irony in his move to a town literally named “heroic” in order to escape this constant harassment, while the same Americans asking him if he really belongs set off fireworks on federal holidays designed to commemorate veterans.
Feminist Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa speaks about the border as an open wound, una herida abierta. One “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again.” The toll taken on by migrants, Mexican natives, Mexican Americans, and legal residents is often a fatal one, because there is seemingly no way to stop the bleeding. Or because they bear a socio-political mark reading “Do Not Resuscitate” on their holy tan skin.
Sometimes the toll taken looks like crumbling beneath the weight of going unrecognized as a whole person who can and does belong/become in the fractured borderlands and has the birth certificate or residential papers to prove it. Other times, it parades as “routine and procedural” rather than dehumanizing and traumatizing.
It shows up as traffic stops planned in collaboration with local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement where families are detained on their way home from church, soccer practice and medical appointments. While this action is prohibited by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution which “protects Americans from random and arbitrary stops and searches,” Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. Sometimes it is more overtly gruesome. Sometimes it looks like the U.S. border enforcement policy of “Prevention through Deterrence,” where Americans turn away as throngs of refugees and migrants die trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. They are watched by surveillance, but never rescued, and they perish in the sun beneath the altars constructed to the infant Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Their prayers are swallowed by the desert’s vast expanses just as their rosaries were lost in bags upon bags of detainee “contraband.” With last breaths they cry,
“O Virgin of Guadalupe,
Mother of the Americas,
grant to our homes the grace of loving
and respecting life….”
Dear Mother of the Americas. Dear God of the Universe. Whose life is sacred? Whose wounds are to be healed? Who has the right to call this place home?
These Latinx children of God, mi familia, deserve to be recognized, not for what they allegedly detract from this stolen land, but for who they are in the face of all this place’s broken promises and theo-political weapons. The work of resistance when it comes to this ever-present threat to our neighbors is situated in the wounding spaces — in solidarity with those whose lives have become politicized, policed and perishable. By bearing witness with our bodies, voices and actions, we aim to highlight and center the hopes, dreams, and lives of those who belong and become here.
These martyred border crossers, these “law breakers,” these parents and siblings and children, were already in and far too often taken from the Bible Belt of the “Promised Land.” Even those who do perform the Herculean task of crossing far enough into the U.S. to be detained by border patrol or ICE agents are thrust once again into the mouth of the beast — for their very survival is deemed “illegal.” They are thrown back to the otherworldly terrain that is the Sonoran Desert because apparently that is where “aliens” belong.
In these border places — every mile of them — and in the face of these deadly border enforcement policies, in every threat to our neighbors, in every illegitimate stop and search, my family has learned to not only survive, but to build a whole life. It is this thriving which inspires my own continued acts of love and resistance. And it is my fear, anger and hope that I share with you. May those of you who can stand up for and with your neighbors. And for our neighbors being targeted by these unjust actions and policies, may this be a salve for the wounds caused by anyone who dares to question your personhood, your wantedness or your belonging. We see you. We love you. Estamos aquí para ti.