Here in the ridiculous city of quartz, immigration is always at the center of our modern histories. This is THE City of Immigrants. How do I know this? I once talked to someone who lived in a neighborhood that had Brazilians living side by side with Indians and Pakistanis. There’s no historical hoo-ha between Brazilians and desis, which makes their geographic juxtaposition that much more interesting and cementing (in my notion that LA is THE City of Immigrants).
My initial impression is that the LA Weekly is LA’s equivalent of the Houston Press (Here I am stoking my Texas nostalgia by leveling pieces of my LA life with segments of my humid, I mean Houston, memory). In the latest Weekly that I picked up, there’s a story called ‘Girls Gone Border Patrol!‘ by Karl-Erik Stromsta. It describes teenagers living at the Naco, Arizona - Naco, Mexico Border and how U.S. teenagers are interns in the ‘Border Patrol Explorer Scout’ program. And yes, it was started by the Boy Scouts of America.
Border Patrol Explorers learn to raid buildings, pull cars off the road, shoot guns, and track ‘illegal immigrants’ with night-vision goggles on ‘moonless’ nights. In other words, these teens are learning how to be part of the nation’s largest domestic army, the Border Patrol. Stromsta refers to it as the “internship of the 21st century,” and I think he’s right because these kids are learning what it takes to be American these days. They are learning to invade other peoples’ spaces, to profile on the basis of skin color and/or national origin, and are enforcing a partition that exists between one nation and another — a verified line of power.
Naco, Arizona is an economically-depressed town, with few opportunities for jobs and advancement. As one of the teens mention in the article, there’s not a whole lot to do in Naco - which makes this internship a precocious catapult into, as Stromsta mentions, one of the two largest regional employers in Naco (the other one is…the Military!). When I spent bits of time in El Paso, TX doing work for the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR), I sensed a similar dynamic - Border Patrol vans are everywhere, and a military base (Fort Bliss) is located mere miles away from BNHR’s office. The hotel I stayed at was filled with vans and trucks sporting military and U.S. government license plates. I’m not sure ’safe’ is the right way to describe what I felt when I stayed there, especially when my bill was paid by an immigrants’ rights organization.
Stromsta interviews teens on the other side of the border, who do not like the corrugated metal slicer that separates them from the city of the same name. The teens interviewed in Naco, Mexico decry the Border and its negative effects - it brings drug and people smugglers into the city and has created a climate of fear, particularly at night. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez, where hundreds of women have died. When I was there, I was part of a human rights tour around the city, where the situation was discussed at length by local human rights advocates and city officials. They described the deaths as a result of the existence of drug and people smugglers, gangs, and most perversely, the increasing idea that women are disposable, objects capable only of providing nuisance. This disgusting morality has pervaded the area over time, and with every woman that dies, the patriarchy is further entrenched, as though each death justifies the ideas that women are, indeed, disposable.
Juarez is not the only place where this is happening - women are dying all across Mexico, in Latin America, and in South America. This is aggravated by maquiladoras, where mostly women work and who travel at odd hours of the night to/from work. As sustainable economic opportunities dry up in parts south of the border, they are replaced by those that generate fast cash - drug and people smuggling, mafias, and the black market increases its demand for blood.
I wonder if any of the teens in the Border Patrol Explorer program realize that they are not learning to catch ‘illegal immigrants’ but rather, economic refugees - people who need someplace safe and sustainable to work. People who are just trying to survive.
hey vivek, you need to change yr profile. it says u r still in htown. and i read that article too in the latimes when i was at yr place. sta loco. jp
Left by jp on August 16th, 2006