American Tune- Tornillo Part 1.
American Tune Tornillo
Part 1
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As the vast Chihuahuan desert rolled out in front of me last week I passed the hours behind the wheel listening to music.
Somewhere around Van Horn, near Big Bend National Park the Paul Simon song "American Tune" suddenly began weeping out of my radio like a prayer.
That song became the musical backdrop for a terribly sad and frightening trip to the U.S./Mexico border.
The lyrics continue to haunt me and are a pretty good reflection of the mental and emotional space in which I seem to have been stuck since last Wednesday.
It's a tough thing to see and experience what I now fear may be our collective future. I'm normally a pretty fearless person but I've gotta admit, I'm scared.
I've lost count of the number of times this week that I've been asked why I chose to drive 500 miles to Tornillo, Texas.
There are two reasons I did so and two important things I learned. I'd like to tell you about them all.
Today I'm writing about the first thing I noticed and my impression of it's implications. I'll follow-up with the second and most important tomorrow and then finish the following day with additional conclusions and resources. There's a lot here, but I feel compelled to write it all down.
Oh, and on Wednesday I'll also tell you about the truck driver and the bottle of pee.
Nothing there but the dirt, some drones, patrol cars and a lot of helicopters.
Last Monday I returned home after spending almost three weeks in the U.K.
As we traveled from green, glorious Ireland to our home-away-from-home in London and on to the gorgeous sea cliffs in Cornwall I saw a few bits and headlines about the current situation in American.
It was easier to ignore them than I'd imagined, mostly because they were all so very, very bleak and ugly. Ignoring those headlines seemed, at the time, an appropriate act of self-preservation.
When boarding the return flight from Heathrow to DFW they handed us a copy of the New York Times. Everything I had been trying to ignore let out a Times New Roman roar for the next 10 hours. Not a single thing I read made me glad to be flying toward Dallas.
In the pages of that newspaper I read that the United States of America is actively imprisoning asylum seekers and their children, whose only goal was to cross our border and ask for protection. Because we are the United States of America and that used to be what we did.
You are now acutely aware of this crisis and we're all trying desperately to reconcile what it means. About us.
These are criminal acts, they are cruel and the crisis is far, far from being over. That is if over is even possible anymore.
Our media is covering those sickening stories pretty thoroughly so
I'd like to tell you about my personal observations about things the media is not covering.
It's not an intentional exclusion on the part of the media. These observations are comprised of something that is more than words.
To see them, to feel them, requires the lens of time and experience.
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When I was a little girl my family could drive or walk across the border from El Paso to Juarez to spend the day shopping for straw baskets, cheap marionettes with strings that impossibly tangled within minutes and"authentic" serapes- all while eating elotes, covered with cotija cheese, guajillo chili and salty mantequilla.
I remember my brother once throwing himself to the ground wailing and begging my parents to buy him a "real" Mexican bullwhip. They did, and my sister and I got the bad end of the flick of that leather tail a few times.
Once we were finished it was a simple thing to pass back across the border and head home.
In college the rite of passage that was heading to Mexico to get drunk on tequila and maybe get a tattoo of a burnt orange longhorn was a just part of being a student in Austin. It was a day trip and we made it often.
Later, my friends and I would drive to Eagle Pass, Texas to cross the border into Piedras Negras, Mexico. We'd sit in a dark bar, slumped in red leather booths all day long, listening to La Onda Chicana on the jukebox and paying eager young boys a few pesos to run to the panaderia to bring back some crusty pan to help soak up whatever we were drinking.
A friend and I once drove from Kerrville Texas to the beach at the Pacific Ocean in Mazatlan, in the state of Sinaloa. We wound through the switchback roads of the Sierra Madre mountains in the state of Durango with a few bucks in our pockets and not much else other than a general idea of where we were headed.
It was just my friend and me, on a spur-of-the-moment trip, driving a pickup truck and listening to country music cassettes, waving at the kids we passed in the small towns along the way.
When we headed back home we drove across the border through a small and minimally barricaded auto lane while waving out the window at the Border Patrol.
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For almost 400 years the U.S./Mexican border has been an epicenter of bi-cultural relations between two countries that share over 2000 miles of a special mix of deserts, ocean shores, mountains and densely populated cities. The shared goal was to grow crops, trade manufactured goods and services, learn from each other and try to extend a hand to anyone looking for something more.
Last Wednesday I crossed that border and had more than 10 guns aimed directly at my car. The car was x-ray scanned. Then, every bag, door pocket and the entire motor compartment was searched while an agent of the United States Border Patrol grilled us about where we had been and where we were headed.
I'm still pretty much the same me, but that border is not the same border.
Not by a long shot.
This is apparently necessary to drive around trying to catch thirsty people traveling on foot with small children.
A few years ago I traveled to Israel. We drove from the port of Ashdod through the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem, crossing an eerie, militarized desert with high fences on all sides, meant to keep some people out and others in.
Driving from Van Horn to El Paso reminded me of that trip, over and over again.
The entire region has morphed from the beautiful desert and lazy Rio Grande into what feels like a well-policed military installation.
The ubiquitous Border Patrol trucks were stacked along the roadway along with roving helicopters, county sheriff patrol cars, Texas Department of Public Safety SUV's, and Homeland Security (ICE) vehicles of every size. And drones. Lots of camera drones.
The semis speeding along I-10 were more likely to be loaded with strange looking mechanical parts, hauling Halliburton trailers loaded with brand new Border Patrol speedboats, HumVees and military jeeps than they were with fruit and livestock.
In one single four mile stretch of I-10 I saw five TX Dept of Public Safety SUV's. Three of them had stopped vehicles, lined up the passengers on the highway shoulder and every person I saw standing in that dirt was brown. Every one.
Our border highway, the main artery between California and all points eastward has been militarized and the aim seems to be to make sure that no brown person is left unchecked. Even those with valid Texas license plates.
The line for the routine, interior borderland checkpoint near Sierra Blanca used to be a formality for passenger cars where the aim was to slow down enough to keep from getting a ticket. Now it is a scorching hot line of overheating cars that can stretch for miles and take an hour to pass through.
Our carefree days of see the USA in a Chevrolet are no more. Especially if your skin happens to be anything other than white.
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FIRST OBSERVATION AND A QUESTION-
This was the entry to the border bridge at 8 am on Wednesday. Clear.
Same entry at 9am after the U.S. Conference of Mayors press conference began. Tx Dept of Public Safety SUV and a local police car.
