2. While the 1976 Supreme Court case U.S. vs. Martinez-Fuerte grants Border Patrol agents the right to ask such questions as you’re traveling through their checkpoints, you’re not legally required to answer (though an agent will surely request you pull over for secondary inspection if given the silent treatment). Unless the agent finds probable cause to detain you, you’ll likely be waved on afterward, without ever revealing a thing. For some spirited displays of civil disobedience, search for “Top DHS checkpoint refusals” on YouTube.
3. The Border Patrol’s inaugural stations were evenly split between borders north and south, with one in El Paso and the other in Detroit.
4. Known as “Tent City” for its Kevlar tent dormitories, Willacy County Correctional Center got destroyed in a major riot in February 2015. Frustrated by its wretched conditions—including rodent infestations, tent leaks, clogged toilets, and lack of access to lawyers and medical care—prisoners used pipes and knives to seize control of the facility and held it for nearly two days as they torched the tents and damaged the plumbing and electricity. The federal Bureau of Prisons has since declared the $60 million site “uninhabitable,” though county officials hope to someday resurrect their major employer.
7
The Wall
THE FIRST OBJECT REVEALS ITSELF ALMOST IMMEDIATELY: A MAN’S black Reebok, size nine. Something about its positioning inches from the steel bars suggests urgency. The fact there is only one implies struggle. And its absence of dust—which coats everything in this swath of Texas—means it hasn’t been here long.
“It wasn’t when I took my walk this morning, anyway,” Mark Clark, a painter who lives half a mile away, confirms as he squats down for a better look.
As I lower beside him, I notice a second object lying in the dirt: a water bottle. Like the sneaker, it is also stranded in the no-man’s-land between the eighteen-foot bars and the Rio Grande. Our friend the artist Susan Harbage Page sees the bottle too. After making a photo with her Canon 5D, she slips her fingers through the three-inch gap between the bars and unscrews its cap. Carbonated water fizzes out, drenching her sleeves. She drains and then tugs the bottle through the wall so that it’s unquestionably on U.S. soil. Mark threatens to report her to the Border Patrol for smuggling, and we all laugh.
Because it’s either that, or scream.
When I moved to China in the late nineties, the Great Wall was the first site I wished to see and the one I visited most frequently: nine times in one year. Ditto with the Berlin Wall when I later traveled to Germany: three visits in one week. I was fascinated that a government could so disregard human motivation that it fathomed hunks of stone or concrete could halt a determined citizen. When my own government started raising bars of steel en masse—after gleefully imploring others to “Tear down this wall!”1—I felt so disgusted, I couldn’t bear to see it.2 I’m here now only because of Susan, who is visiting from North Carolina. She has inspired me to try to view this obstruction through an aesthetic lens rather than through a political one, to explore its influence on art rather than on homeland security, to see how the wall has affected the cultural life of those sealed inside its bars rather than the social and economic life of those left outside of it.
Despite constituting 63 percent of the border, Texas was the last state to install its portion of the 670-mile wall mandated by the 2006 Secure Border Fence3 Act. Here in Brownsville—our southernmost city—local residents and public officials launched an all-out offensive against the plan to erect thirty-four miles of concrete and steel across their county. Students marched; lawmakers lobbied; activists picketed the courthouse. Landowners dug up titles granted by the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century and started suing. Environmentalists brandished studies showing how the wall would disrupt migratory patterns of endangered species like the ocelot. Tejanos decried the disturbance to their own migratory patterns between their porches and their favorite taco stands, beauty parlors, and great-aunts’ houses in Matamoros. Yet when they aired these concerns at a public hearing at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) in 2008, then-Republican representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado quipped, “Why don’t we just build the fence north of Brownsville then?”
Whether the wall has made this city or state or nation “safer” in the years since its inception is debatable. The following ramifications, however, are not. The wall has sliced through UTB’s campus, partially destroyed a wildlife refuge, shrunk private property, and obstructed downtown’s riverfront view. It has barricaded some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods while steering clear of its golf courses. It has incited dozens of landowners to file hundreds of lawsuits. It has inspired an offshore drilling rig designer to donate $3,000 worth of jasmine vines so that UTB students could make their campus portion a little less bleak. And it has become a muse to artists like Celeste, Susan, and Mark, who engage with the wall through their work.
Objects are cropping up every fifteen to twenty feet now. A belt. A shoelace. A toothbrush snapped in two. Susan photographs each one, then slips them inside the oversize shopping bag she brought along for this very purpose: one emblazoned with La Virgen de Guadalupe.
“I always buy one with the Virgin on it. That is my little offering,” she explains.
Susan has been making annual trips to the Rio Grande Valley for a decade. One of her many projects entails walking along the river in search of the objects people leave behind during their crossing. After photographing them in situ, she brings the items back to her studio to re-photograph, tag, and number them, then adds them to her “anti-archive,” which will eventually become an online searchable database. The last time she counted, there were nearly 800 objects inside, ranging from Bibles to pill bottles, combs, wallets, passports, clothing, and slips of paper bearing scribbled telephone numbers.
“The first one I found was a toothbrush. When I saw it, I just felt it in my whole body. I didn’t even know whether I should pick it up,” Susan remembers. “It was a powerful remnant of that person’s life, and I felt it needed to be seen. That’s what the anti-archive is: the unofficial history of immigration. The one nobody wants to look at or deal with.”
Many of the archive’s contents were found right here in Hope Park, a leafy strip of green that slopes down to the Rio Grande. Standing on its bank, you are either a seven-minute walk to downtown Brownsville or a seven-minute wade to Matamoros. The city founded Hope Park to commemorate its close ties with Mexico long ago. Tree-lined and bike-trailed, it would be gorgeous—were it not for the eighteen-foot steel wall cleaving through it.
“They have painted it black to make it look better, because it’s rusting like a motherfucker. It has two or three coats of paint on it, and it’s only three years old,” Mark says, gripping a stake in his fist. In his early sixties, he has a beard straight out of Don Quixote.
He shows me an imprint of a hand about halfway up a steel bar—perhaps the owner of the lost Reebok. As Susan focuses her camera lens, I gaze around at the adjacent bars. When reflected off a certain angle, the sun reveals dozens of other handprints—shoeprints too. Mark says that after a good rain, immigrants leave a trail of mud all the way up one side of the wall and halfway down the other.
“I once saw some guy get thrown out of a four-door sedan, run across the street, scale the fence, and hop over the other side in fifteen seconds flat,” he says.
I don’t know if I could do that, but—grasping a bar in each hand and standing on my tiptoes—I could probably haul myself up and over if I really needed to.
Farther down the path, we come upon a storage facility surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. A man’s gray jacket is trapped high inside the coils. Susan rises upon her toes and starts pulling. In her mid-fifties, she has a blonde pixie haircut and is wearing turquoise glasses and a bright red vest. After a cringe-inducing struggle, she frees the shirt from the razor blades and stuffs it inside La Virgen. Mark, meanwhile, has started unearthing a shirt half-buried beneath the trail. �
��Sometimes you come out here and it’s like a ropa usada,” he says, using the Spanish term for a used-clothing store.
The border wall ends a few feet farther at the offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where a chain-link fence begins. Mark shows me the section where some chain links have been snipped, creating a gaping hole. Half of it has been mended with plastic links, but the breach is still big enough to slide a package through. Mark picks up one of the broken links lying in the dirt and drops it into my palm.
“Take it,” he says. “It’ll be your souvenir of Mexican ingenuity.”
BORDER WALLS HAVE A HISTORY of serving as public art spaces—sometimes even before their political functions have ceased. The west side of the Berlin Wall was long a canvas for artists like Keith Haring, who deemed it “an attempt to psychologically destroy the wall by painting it.” After toppling in 1989, the east side became a gallery too when some of the biggest names in the art world descended upon it to paint vibrant murals about freedom and democracy, a few of which remain to this day (albeit, crumbling). Over in the West Bank, Palestinians and Israelis have both adorned their respective sides of the twenty-six-foot concrete slabs that split their territories. Palestinian artists tend to draw flags or giant house keys, signifying their desire to return home, while international graffiti artists like Banksy 4 paint utopic murals of solidarity. Security guards at the border gate between Pakistan and India at Wagah have elevated their daily “lowering of the flags” ceremony to a dance performance, complete with jubilant goose-stepping, rifle-whirling, and moustache-twirling as bleachers full of spectators cheer. And while the rulers of the Great Wall would probably have imprisoned anyone who tried to tag it for much of its 2,300-year history, in recent years they have permitted a portion near Beijing to host an annual music festival that draws in top techno acts like Parisian DJ David Guetta and German live act Paul Kalkbrenner as well as thousands of revelers.
Certain sections of the U.S. wall have also become binational art spaces, most notably Friendship Park, which straddles the Tijuana/San Diego borderline. The park was founded in 1971 by First Lady Pat Nixon, who declared, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too much longer” after ordering her security team to snip the barbed wire that marked the line then. Families have traveled to the park from across Mexico and the United States to kiss, clasp hands, and picnic through the ever-evolving barricade ever since. But in 2007, the government began a series of renovations that resulted in the current double wall that swallows the park and is open for just a few hours on weekends. It is also covered with a steel mesh that allows only families’ fingertips to touch. Local artists and activists have worked hard to preserve the park’s humanity by turning the eighteen-foot obstruction into a stage for poetry readings, symphonies, dance performances, yoga classes, volleyball games, and ecumenical communions enjoyed by visitors on either side of it. They have also planted a Binational Friendship Garden that flourishes in each nation.
But for the most part, if you want to see art on the U.S. border wall, you must walk along its southern side, where Mexicans have been embellishing it as fast as the U.S. government has been constructing it. Politicians plaster campaign posters; border crossers inscribe their names, home villages, and the date. Muralists and graffiti artists layer image upon image. For years, a group called the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo nailed full-size coffins upon the Tijuana wall in honor of Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) that displayed the number of immigrants who had died that year while trying to cross the borderline. The one from 1995 read 61. The one from 2000 said 499.
In 2004, Arizona artist Alfred Quiroz started making giant metal milagros—or religious amulets—to hang along the wall at Nogales and Agua Prieto. Some were shaped in the traditional forms of hearts, eyes, and legs, but others specifically addressed the border-crossing experience, such as the one of a coyote with a serpentine tongue. In 2011, Tijuana artist Ana Teresa Fernández tried to erase the wall altogether by painting a stretch of it pale powder blue so that it blended into the sky.5 And since 2012, Arizona artists who call themselves the “Border Bedazzlers” have been driving to Naco, Mexico, recruiting neighborhood children, and painting landscapes decked with hearts and rainbows along their community’s backdrop of corrugated metal.
The U.S. side of the wall, meanwhile, mostly remains blank. Granted, much of it consists of mesh or pylons instead of a continuous surface and is therefore tough to paint, but then—the Mexican side is too. Artists’ chief deterrent here seems to be the Department of Homeland Security, which has fortified the U.S. portion with infrared cameras, heat sensors, stadium lighting, Predator drones, and the bulk of its Border Patrol force.6 Anyone wishing to jazz up the northern side must do so covertly, as street artist Ron English once did. Renowned for “culture jamming,” or slapping subversive messages atop corporate advertisements, English is a veteran of border adornment, having painted both the Berlin Wall and the West Bank Wall. When his buddies started hassling him about his own nation’s wall, he bought a plane ticket to Texas. On April Fool’s Day in 2011, English drove along the border wall with a few mates, found a lonely patch between La Joya and Penitas, leaped out of the car, and wheat-pasted a two-headed donkey across it. One donkey was painted like the U.S. flag; the other, the Mexican flag. Both pulled in opposite directions. They snapped a fast photo before bailing, and good thing: they passed a Border Patrol vehicle minutes later. Then English crossed the bridge into Reynosa, where—at the port of entry—he propped up a sign of Uncle Sam pointing to a peach-toned bar on a color chart that read: YOU MUST BE THIS COLOR TO ENTER THIS COUNTRY.
Another artist who has braved the northern wall is the musician Glenn Weyant. He was shocked by its existence when he first moved to Tucson from New Jersey, viewing it as “a symbol of fear and loathing. I wanted to transform it into something else … an instrument so that people on both sides can have open dialogue and communication,” he told me during a phone interview.
He started by rapping on its iron bars with chopsticks and recording the rhythmic beats, but as the wall grew longer and taller, he swapped them out for drumsticks. Over the years, he has stroked the wall with cello bows, pummeled it with broomsticks, and made it hum with milk frothers and vibrators. “Every time I do it, it keeps the wall from being a militarized zone,” he said. “Sometimes I play it with the people I meet out there, be it a Border Patrol agent or a rancher or a guy picking lemons in his backyard. It is like pressing a restart button. It’s an opportunity for a narrative for something other than capitalism gone amok.”
And then there are the Texans. Soon after moving to Brownsville from Washington, D.C., ten years ago, Mark opened Galeria 409, which showcases artists from the Rio Grande Valley. When the government announced it would install a wall less than a hundred feet from his business (which doubles as his home and studio), he joined the local protests. Twice he has staged flash-mob exhibits called “Art against the Wall,” where artists gather in Hope Park and hang their work directly on the wall, sans permit. Among the pieces: piñatas shaped like Border Patrol agents, complete with sunglasses, walkie-talkies, and binoculars. Thirty-foot ladders made of bamboo and twine. Deflated black inner tubes fished out of the Rio Grande. A colossal funeral wreath, fastened to the steel bars.
In 2011, the exhibit was up for four hours, Mark says. “Then the viewers thinned out and it was just three artists and a Boston terrier until four Border Patrol agents surrounded us with bulletproof vests and Glocks. They said, ‘We know you don’t have a permit,’ and I said okay and they were shocked. They had expected a confrontation, but we had made our point and so we took it down.”
We are back inside his gallery now, in the heart of downtown. It is a massive space with exposed brick walls, a high wood-beam ceiling, and plenty of sunlight. I start flipping through a stack of his canvases. In a series called Moonlit Mojada (Moonlit Wetback), bikini-clad Latinas distract Border Patrol agents by inner-tubing down the Rio Grande while
immigrants scale the wall behind them. Another project entails Aztec codices reinterpreted through the latest headlines out of Matamoros: cockfights, gunfights, kidnappings, beheadings. Mark used to walk to Brownsville’s sister city to eat or stock up on art supplies a couple times a week, but he’s grown wary lately.
“I try to be back on the bridge by noon on the notion that the sicarios [hired assassins] sleep in. I was on the bridge once when a gun battle broke out. My framer lives a block and a half away and was pinned down in his bathroom with his family for four and a half hours,” he says. “Once they get going, it’s totally deafening. It’s worse than the Fourth of July.”
Without skipping a beat, he then invites Susan and me to join him there for dinner tonight.
My hesitation is hypocritical. In the past, I’ve thought nothing of trekking into Burma at the height of its military rule or visiting Tajikistan or Venezuela when the State Department explicitly advised otherwise. I barely flinched hitchhiking across Moscow after the Metro closed at midnight. But even though—or, more likely, because—I grew up two hours away, the thought of walking three blocks into Matamoros for a platter of enchiladas and a round of micheladas unnerves me. Though I am fully cognizant that my paranoia is overblown and media-fed, it paralyzes me just the same. And I am not alone in this fear: tourism to border towns has plummeted in recent years, shuttering many of the region’s beloved bars,7 restaurants, and shops. While I refuse to consider whether the border wall has kept any noncitizens out, it is certainly reinforcing my decision to stay in.
So rather than replenish my veins with salsa and tequila, I walk with Susan to the plaza on the northern side of the international bridge and sulk atop a table. A steady stream of Mexicans flow past, some lugging shopping bags, others wheeling carts as they make their way home to Matamoros. A father carries a giant star-shaped piñata festooned with multicolored streamers. His young daughter trails behind him, bearing the stick she’ll later use to whack it open and eat its candies.
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