Bullets Over the Borderlands: Where Do We Memorialize the Dead? Part II: Assaulted Landscapes, Porous Borders
This essay is the second of a two-part series. Follow the link to read part one.
President Trump and his white nationalist followers continue to subject the borderlands to repeated acts of humiliation. He nicks with words shot from bully pulpits while his followers brandish insults with Texas Ranger kill-the-spic flair. Since April 2018, when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero-tolerance immigration policy, bullets began to fly again over the borderlands. The policy was formulated shortly after Trump visited Southern California in March 2018 to inspect wall prototypes. Shamefully, this was his first visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as president. In a year-and-a-half, the border would become an all-consuming issue for him and his campaign. Nine months later, in January 2019, he and Vice President Mike Pence visited McAllen, Texas. A month later came his first visit to El Paso for a political rally that fueled more animosity toward brown people. Six months later, in August 2019, he returned to address the mass shooting he inspired previously.
Figure 1: Protests in June 2018 against the separation of children at Tornillo, Texas. Photographer: Peter Svarzbein.
Concurrent with his wall obsession was a deadlier reality he orchestrated, what journalist Robert Moore describes as “a hundred years’ worth of horrible shit that happened in nine months, since December 7, 2018, when the kids started dying.” The first child victim, Jakelin Caal Maquin, had died by the time Trump visited McAllen. The tragedy thickened when El Paso was chosen as a laboratory, a testing ground, for a pilot program secretly unfurled to separate children from their asylum-seeking parents in order to deter future crossings. As a port of entry El Paso has historically had low rates of crossing. This, combined with the city’s robust federal court system, which allows for swift processing, made testing of this Holocaustian experiment easy to control. These were the two conditions not present in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of far south Texas, where the highest number of immigrant crossings have historically occurred. Moore observed that it was El Paso-based U.S. Magistrate Judge Miguel A. Torres who began to raise questions in November 2017, when he saw more and more immigrants concerned about their missing children. This had never occurred in the past. What do you mean your child was taken from you when you were told to go to the next room to get your luggage? It is now estimated that around 3,000 children were separated during the full-blown April-to-June 2018 migration surge—many of those children residing in cages today—with countless irreparable inflictions to their mental health. Numerous outright deaths followed. The tally of children split at the border rose to more than 5,400 (as of October 2019), according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Figure 2: Protests in June 2018 against the separation of children at Tornillo, Texas. Photographer: Peter Svarzbein.
To date, 300,000 migrants have crossed at El Paso since October 2018, one percent of the entire population of Honduras and Guatemala, a fact that early on allowed many Mexican-Americans to distance themselves from the presidential cross-fire. Similarly, his vile rhetoric painting Mexicans as “rapists and murderers” led many to assume that the target was still the “other”—certainly not U.S. citizens. But now that a direct line can be drawn from the president’s words to the El Paso mass shooter’s death wish manifesto, the tides have changed. The local rejection of Trump’s visit to El Paso to console the victims—a case of the man who inspires the murder attending the victim’s funeral—is proof that many in El Paso finally realized that it isn’t only Central Americans or Mexican nationals who have become the target, nor is it only about U.S. Hispanics. Presidential claims of a “Hispanic invasion,” combined with white supremacist views against the intermixing of races, suggest that the borderland reality of a bi-national populace has itself become a target.
Alexander Hoffman Roth, a German citizen married to a Mexican national from Ciudad Juárez, was one of the El Paso victims. His wife says Hoffman considered himself Mexican. This is a narrative commonly found on the border, and it speaks to how border communities are continuously being formed. It is my story. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Matthias Jarvis, a New York native, married Inocencia Flores of Nuevo León, Mexico, and shortly after the Civil War, they settled in Laredo where he served as mayor. My grand-uncle Heinrich Portscheller, a German architect and builder, married a Mexican woman, Leonarda Campos, and in 1894, they also moved to Laredo. The borderland is home to century-old African-American, Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese, and Syrian mixed families. This further complicates the method of remembrance because it’s not about a single group, but about a rich border culture, one that might just be too complex for small eugenics-leaning minds to grasp. It cannot be forgotten, though, that we are witnessing a full-blown revival of La Matanza, a targeted assault on brown people, and now, anyone connected with them. Recently, El Paso city council members, led by Jewish Latino city representative Peter Svarzbein, unanimously passed resolutions to “condemn the weaponization of political rhetoric,” and another addressing the “federal government’s treatment of white nationalist domestic terrorism.” Under Ronald Reagan, presidential silence equaled death for those afflicted with HIV-AIDS. Today it is presidential words that sanction murder, apparently of anyone residing in the borderlands.
El Paso’s past hasn’t always been about walls, caged children, and assault rifles. Historically, our southern border has linked people more than it has divided them. The sites where past heads of state visited are venerated. An architectural gem on El Paso’s main plaza, the Henry Trost-designed Hotel Cortez, is noted for being a key Texas stop for President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, before his assassination in Dallas five months later. The Chamizal National Memorial Park, only ten minutes from the site of the mass shooting, is remembered for a historic meeting the following year between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos. Indeed, it is a city in which bi-national roots run deep. On both sides of the border, one finds sites that commemorate the historic 1909 meeting of U.S. President William Howard Taft and Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, the first occasion on which a U.S. and a Mexican president traveled abroad to meet a foreign head of state, a meeting that set the tone for El Paso and Ciudad Juárez’s culture of communion. While presidents Nixon and George H. W. Bush never visited El Paso, presidents Kennedy, Ford, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush each visited once. Johnson visited numerous times, and Obama twice in eight years, speaking along the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence (built by George W. Bush between 2006 and 2011). Though Obama’s effort to move immigration policy forward was fruitless, he deported more immigrants than Trump. But Obama’s work was not about memorializing himself with a wall, and it certainly didn’t lead to the grim number of deaths we have seen since.
Figure 3. This photo is described in the Getty archives as “A motley group of illegal Mexican wetbacks sprawled on floor of border patrol jail cell…as they sadly await deportation back to their homeland.” Photo by Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
As a city in mourning prepares to exhale collectively, it takes a cue from the popular Mexican song, “Cielito lindo,” a favorite of the borderlands that encourages us to sing and not to cry. Ay ay ay ay, canta y no llores. Yet crying is a form of exhaling. Mourning occurs as El Paso ponders its new sites of remembrance, erasing the instigator’s presence with songs of rallying and fortitude. But again, how and where does one memorialize and venerate the dead? Today, El Paso’s makeshift mass shooting memorials are by the Walmart, on the parking lot of the neighboring Hooters. And it would be harrowing if all the dead children were forgotten. As artists and architects consider this, it is ironic to note that what caused these escalating tragedies was Trump’s very own desire to memorialize himself. His repeated rejection of alternative security systems and decentralized methods of surveillance exposes a man who just wants a wall erected in his name. Something everyone can see. Architectural history is filled with stories of those who built walls, towers, and citadels on the backs of others. In the borderlands, there is complete disregard for what a wall would do to a deeply rooted border culture, a fated U.S.-Mexico union. Border city officials have firmly pushed back, two border sheriffs recently stating that “there is no crisis, and we don’t want Trump’s wall.” Trump even accused El Paso’s mayor, Dee Margo, of being a RINO (Republican in Name Only) after he told the president that El Paso has ranked as the safest U.S. city with only the (Bush) fence in place. Trump criticized him because Margo wouldn’t buy into the hatred of brown people Trump needs to perpetuate to rile his base during a pre-election season. In the end, sites of remembrance will grow from within. What seems certain is that no site in El Paso will ever be remembered for a president associated with this era of bloodshed and caged children.
“In the context of one memorial—an unnecessary wall—being hastily erected to satisfy one man’s ego, how and where do we memorialize the caged children, the dead, the sweeping trauma of decentralized hate speech, the gunned-down victims of a mass shooting?”
During the bloody dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the world saw a similar attempt to build a legacy to one man’s ego. This Dominican dictator, who loved to see his name in neon lights, was energized by expressions of reverence to him in the public sphere. He even demanded that his portrait be hung in every living room for 24/7 veneration. This reminds one of civil rights lawyer and professor Burt Neuborne’s comparison of Trump’s twitter account to Hitler’s free plastic radios. Future scholars will most likely find similar Trujillo-Trump comparisons as they study the problematic effects that oppressive heads of state often have on the public realm. In the end, the world was relieved to see that after his assassination in 1961, Trujillo’s urban-scaled swag was completely erased. The capital city, Santo Domingo, cast off its forced designation as Ciudad Trujillo and reverted to its historic name, eradicating Trujillo’s name so completely that one is hard-pressed to find any mention of the dictator there today.
Figure 4: Eight wall prototypes built near San Diego in 2017 for Trump’s 2,000-mile continuous wall, seen here from Tijuana, Mexico. Credit: Guillermo Arias /AFP/Getty Images
Architecture is never apolitical. Architectural forms embody political acts, and when pursued with hate or aggression, they can negatively affect a populace. Of course, the opposite is true as well, and that is what we strive for. El Paso and the borderlands will survive the recent attacks, but more questions can be raised given the complexity of competing motivations currently at play. In the context of one memorial—an unnecessary wall—being hastily erected to satisfy one man’s ego, how and where do we memorialize the caged children, the dead, the sweeping trauma of decentralized hate speech, the gunned-down victims of a mass shooting? Where across the borderlands do we pay our respect, or are multiple sites of resistance in order? Finally, to consider when we should do this, should we dominate the public sphere right now, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, until all wrongs are righted? The mothers marched for nearly thirty years, and there are still so many “disappeared” children that traversed the borderlands never to be seen again. Perhaps an open-ended site of veneration is in order. And with time, a memorial that only the blue sky above us knows about, will emerge and present the most appropriate site of remembrance for the border and for all of its people to finally heal.
