LA FRONTERA

(In the light of recent immigrant roundups and forced deportations by the Trump administration, I thought it would be fitting to re-post this reflection from a year ago…)

The Aeromexico vaulted over the dry northern states, then veered westward towards the darkening horizon line of the Pacific. The flight was filled with Mexicans returning to work in the States or to visit relatives for the holidays. Somewhere below us stretched the vast, porous frontera, with its yawning expanses of desert, prairie, and mountains. Geography is fate, I thought. Imagine England and all of North Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt - sharing a common, unguardable border.

Across this mythical demarcation running from Tijuana/San Diego all the way to Matamoros/Brownsville, two deeply different societies gaze at each other, imagine each other, imitate each other, visit each other, resent each other, violate each other, and penetrate each other in every way imaginable. Labor and drugs and food flow north; money and arms and retirees flow south.

Vecinos distantes, distant neighbors for sure, my fellow passengers and I - yet in other unacknowledged ways as intimate as lovers, tangled in fitful clandestine embrace. Identities tug at each other across this trackless boundary we just crossed. Words in Spanish drop their English italics: tacos became just tacos, as once in cowboy days la riata became lariat. Mexicans say “adiós, bye,” and “sí, okay” and “website.” U.S. political candidates parade their Latino credentials, angle for photo-ops wearing sombreros and munching burritos and in their next breath rail against immigration, while in Mexican cities Costcos and Walmarts establish beachheads.

This great intercambio, involving countless millions of people and billions of dollars, often illicit, also showers hard-won blessings: a man who gets paid twelve dollars a day back home can make fifteen an hour en el otro lado and wire a good portion of it home - and in one of Mexico’s countless poor, stacked colonias of unsurfaced brick and cement, electricity blooms, food appears on family tables, new school or football uniforms are purchased, and a student enters the university on the hill.

The lights of San Diego slid past below. I sat with a volume of Herman Melville’s short stories that I’d come upon in a Guanajuato bookstall, probably left behind by some gringo. American writers, I thought, had always been beset by a kind of collective dissociative fugue - “sudden, unexpected wanderings from home.” Melville, Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles - full- or part-time wanderers or expatriates all. For these writers, being outside provided the best seat in the house, neither quite here nor there, yet in both places at once. “The act of comparison,” wrote the American writer Donald Richie, a longtime resident of Japan, “is the act of creation.”

Now America was instinctively drawing up its moats again, the world beyond our borders viewed with greater suspicion and fear. More than ever, we’ll need these voices at a distance, calling back to us from across la frontera, reminding us to widen our gaze.