Week 5: Reflections from Penina

My name is Penina Eilberg-Schwartz, and I'm a senior at Oberlin College. I study history and have been interested in border regions for a long time, but this is my first real experience at the Mexico-U.S. border itself.

I have been working with the Pima County Interfaith Council, a child of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. With them I've been doing a lot of voter registration stuff and organizing in churches with large Spanish-speaking and immigrant populations.

When we get to Nogales, I will start working with En Común, a microfinance organization there. I cannot wait.

Today I was wandering around in Tucson's downtown with some friends, doing interviews for a mapping project we were assigned in our Globalization, Migration, and Human Rights course. We were asking whether people thought of Tucson as a border town, and we got a pretty wide variety of answers, but I knew what I thought by the end of the first week here.

This is what I wrote then:
"Tucson is most definitely a border city. I have evidence!
There is El Tiradito, a little shrine on a small corner to those who have died in the desert. There is a vigil that meets there every week.
There is, of course, all the Spanish you hear walking around, and the bright colors and the Sonoran hotdog stands.
There is the story that my friend told me about when she first went to find her field study site. She walked into the office and there was a man there, tired-looking with a huge gash on his leg. It was from a cactus. He had been abandoned by his coyote in the desert.
There is the story of Reverend John Fife and the Sanctuary movement that was located here and hid Central American refugees from the Dirty Wars who the U.S. was deporting (in violation of its own refugee law.)
And there is the drive down to Nogales and the way the wall appears, cutting through a hill. And the art you see on the wall when you get to the Nogales side.
Finally, there is the conclusion that many people, of diverse voices, have presented to us: the U.S. fence-building policy has funneled migrant traffic into the Sonoran desert, a dangerous place that is known to kill. In fact, in the document starting this policy, deterrence was acknowledged as part of the "hold the line" strategy. They will die, and then they will stop coming. The thing is, they have not stopped coming."

Last night Michael (my host father who is a photographer and involved member of several local humanitarian aid organizations) took me to a dinner with a filmmaker who is working on a documentary about deaths in the desert. When we asked him how he got started with this, his answer was long, but eventually he said, "America is asleep." Parts of Tucson are asleep too, but people are dying very near here, at least in part because of U.S. policy. And people are living here too, and it is hard. The militarization of the border and the U.S. owned companies in Mexico create seriously contaminated air and water, making the border area the highest incidence of cancer in the country, of floods that have broken through parts of the wall that are built like dams in the desert. But of course, there is also vibrancy here and someone who we talked to today on the first day of classes who studies border culture and folklife reminded us that there is beauty here too. There are Santos and Milagros and prayers.

It is strange to see beauty here, though. When we were in Nogales, everyone who lived there talked about how ugly it was. We thought it was kind of beautiful. I think maybe because we find it honest—this is the place (one of the places) that makes the lives we lead possible. This is a true place, a behind-the-scenes place.

So coming to the end of my time in Tucson, I'm looking forward to a place where the border will make itself even more clearly seen, and I will continue to struggle to find my place in all of it.