Why Tucson? Stories from the Border (Leif Johnson)

Tucson probably doesn't seem like the most interesting place for someone to "study abroad," especially anyone who has lived here (or, for that matter, anywhere in the southwest.) After all, it's the US. It has Safeways, Albertsons, and Wal-Mart. Signs are in English. There are ticky-tacky housing developments, although they are often in the style of southwestern architecture, rather than the more traditionally "european" stylings that yankee northerners like myself are used to. I had some conversations with my parents before coming that were decidedly ambiguous about where I was going. After all, if I have a semester to travel wherever I want, why wouldn't I go somewhere really different? Bolivia? China?

The thing that I'm really starting to appreciate, however, is the extent to which the Tucson we are living in is not like the Tucson that is advertised in the airport, or the Tucson some of you might have experience with. The Tucson I'm in is a lot of different things - it's the destination point for thousands of migrants walking across the desert, a racially divided city with a significant Border Patrol presence, and the site of some of the most serious resistance to bad border policy in the US. These different versions of Tucson are revealed because, as part of this program, we have been dropped into the thick of things, so to speak. My central point here is not a comfortable house filled with people who are the same color as me. It's a comfortable house filled with people who, because of their color and background, are living a different kind of life than me. My universe in Tucson includes the US-Mexico border, something that I think a lot of people here don't think about that much. Finally, I've been dropped into work at No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, one of the main organizations working on humanitarian aid and human rights at the border.

With No More Deaths, for example, I have been exposed to a concentration of caring people at meetings, and have gone out with them to several of the most heavily travelled migrant trails in the desert on water runs, dropping gallon jugs of water in the desert. For people who haven't been here, this might seem somewhat incongruous. Here, though, it's perfectly serious and sensible. Walking from Sasabe, on the border, to Tucson, the closest real US city, people have to walk more than 4 days through the desert. It is more or less physically impossible to carry enough water for this journey. Lots of people die on the way - there have been more than 400 deaths along the border per year, which only counts the bodies that are discovered. The desert is pretty vast, and nobody is at all willing to calculate how many deaths there might have been in total.

When I go home to my family, Marta (my mom here) usually asks me what I've been learning, with the tacit understanding that its been heavy stuff. She has her own stories, and while I'm not going to relay them here out of respect for her, they are also heavy. There is one anecdote that I want to share, though. It comes from Jorge, my host father, who works at a door factory that is closing at the end of this month. He believes that our current economic crisis is caused, at least in part, by the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants of the past few years. As Marta says, it's like a snowball effect - as you chip away at the bottom of the workforce, the rest of the system comes crashing down on it. Both of my parents have a distinct sense of the racism inherent in border enforcement policy, which extends way beyond the border itself. These are stories like the time that Jorge's workmate severed his finger on a saw, and when they were driving him to the hospital right next to our house, they saw two border patrol "dog-catcher" vans in the entrance, and had to drive all the way to Phoenix to get to a hospital that wouldn't offer a swift deportation along with medical care. Or the stories of how Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff in Phoenix, has made it the duty of local police officers to check for papers, in an all-out campaign that targets more or less all Hispanics. For example, officers will wait two blocks from elementary schools, wait for parents to drop their kids off at school, and then ask the parents for papers. There have been more than one account of kids waiting at school into the night when their parents didn't come to pick them up. Where were they? On a bus to the Mexico side of the border. Then there are the stories of people who don't have papers but marry US citizens. Upon consulting a lawyer, the best advice they are offered is to "wait for an immigration reform bill, because if you try to regularize your status now, you'll spend four to five years in Mexico, separated from your husband."

All of these are things that my family has witnessed first hand, or heard about through the network of family communications. Marta says that people are so afraid of Joe Arpaio that they'll listen for him on the radio, hear that he's at such and such grocery store, and call all their friends, telling them to stay away. She says that even though she is a citizen, she's very afraid. And why wouldn't she be? After all, she tells me stories about the Hispanic Republican state senator jailed for a day when a cop asked him for his papers and he couldn't produce them, or the mayor of Pomona, California, who was deported to Mexico before he managed to get his situation figured out. If that can happen to politicians, the people most likely to know their legal rights and eloquently defend them, imagine what could happen to people who don't have the same strings to pull on.