The border swallows our existence

You can't see the absolute absurdity of this steel fence until you stand in front of it. It genuinely threatens anyone who stands in front of it, daring them to narrate their lives differently.

I arrived in Tijuana in a cold late afternoon. The wind blew harshly through the neatly aligned rusted steel pillars—thousands of them - as tall as 6m. The US-Mexican border wall is not a concrete wall. It is formed by a line of iron pillars from the sea's edge through many mountains, hills, deserts, small towns, and swamps. They shape like wing fans with a wide shape queuing one after another, leaving the gaps between two pillars as if they invite one side to peek at the other. We can see each other on the face, not the whole face. We can see each other in the eye, but not our straightforward eyes. Our eyes are distorted and hidden half by the steel fences. Our faces are defaced by the wide body of each pillar.

The barrier runs 3,145 km, clearly shows up the absurd ambition to divide mountains and sea, and demonstrates the hostile attitude of one side of humans to the other side of humans. In Tijuana, a stretch of the border wall continues to the water, taking it to the sea. I walked close to it and observed the gray, murky water stirred by waves and sand, wondering if the San Diego ocean tasted differently from Tijuana's water—a loud jetski sound cut through the wind. A border patrol rode his high-speed boat and circled the steel wall, implying that no one could outswim the mechanical power of the American Imperial on his throttle.

Some years ago, I watched a documentary named "Maquilapolis: City of Factories," about Mexican female workers on the Mexican side of the Mexico-US border. Hitachi, Sanyo, and other famous corporations were there to exploit the tax break that Mexico offered and cultivate extremely cheap labor from Mexican workers. Through the chaotic walk, thousands of Mexicans lined up and entered a Hitachi medical machine factory. Hitachi didn't want to hire Mexican men because they thought Mexican women worked better with small and accurate machine details.

The border town was built on cardboard boxes, plastic tarps, and metal scraps. Sonora Desert caters getto homes piling up on each other. Each has some aluminum walls and a door. Communities were formed by an army of starving women working till exhausted in the bright and clean factories, serving expensive medical equipment for the first world of Japan and the US. These women would die before any of them could afford a healthcare trip to try the equipment they sacrificed to assemble in the supply chain.

The border workers didn't have water to wash themselves. In the documentary, they could afford one shower every week. They slept three or four hours before the bus to the factory the next day. They were in the desert; it was no surprise if water was rare. Imagine one day you were treated with high-technology surgery equipment made by the misery of thousands of women.

I stayed near Tijuana and Rosarito for some weeks. I could feel how those women lived decades ago. Gust wind and dust storms came by often. Our car was covered in white dust. My skin broke out bleed because the air was too dry. There was no lack of violence there, just like the old time. I saw three leaflets about missing women in the central market, on a random electric pole, and at a tacos counter. All three women were in their 20s, with long hair, dark and beautiful eyeliners, and plumping lips. They "disappeared" after one night at the club, after work at the factory, or after visiting her boyfriend. The contact numbers on the leaflets were mothers and fathers.

There was a time that disappearance was no big deal among Mexican woman workers. They were killed and thrown away somewhere along the highway, in the desert, or in mass graves with many unknown unlucky other body fragments. In the documentary, a woman went on a pilgrim to search for her daughter, who was missing after a night out with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was nowhere to be found. I gradually learned that many groups of relatives are still searching for their loved ones along the border until this day. The man-made division magically consumes the flesh and bones of those who dare to search for a life beyond its limit.

I have been traveling across many borders, and a part of my curiosity is to understand the scale of unimaginative things that humans can make up. I once walked to the mountaintop of Preah Vihear Temple along the Thai -Cambodia border. The magnificent temple was built in the 11th-12th Century before the modern border. Nowadays, the temple gate stands on the Thai side, while the body of the temple sits on top of the Dangrek Mountains on the Cambodian side. Thai border patrol and the Cambodian border army have been firing and killing each other for decades over the temple of their common gods.

I talked to a soldier who showed me his son's picture and was excited to have a weekend home playing football with him. Some days later, many of his colleagues were injured by the shells from the Thai side. I wondered if he had ever got to play football that week.

I also wondered if the disappeared women got to enjoy their nights after an exhausting working day before anything disrupted their existence. The border wall consumed my questions, swallowed the women's lives, and spit out a hollow present in many empty arroyos along the highways through the Sonora Desert.

People lose their identities when approaching the border. No border patrol looks at you as some individual. They scan through your paper. They check your skin color, eye color, and face shape, match them with a piece of ID and let you go without reaching for meaningful human contact. You are just another number of labor capital, of gender figure, of exploitation capacity they can count and multiply into another number. Crossing the border means handing over your identity for the sake of the unknown promise behind that erect steel wall.

Although they would get sick from exhaustion in the Hitachi factory, Mexican women still lined up for the job at the border. They get paid starving salaries. They get sick from factory chemicals. They accumulated diseases from suppressing their toilet rush and no shower. They turned into prostitutes to earn double after factory hours. They were killed in the bars after midnight or raped and shot while walking home.

You can't see the absolute absurdity of this steel fence until you stand in front of it. It genuinely aims at you, threatening anyone who stands in front of it, daring them to climb over and get over it, daring them to ignore its swaggering existence amid the immense nature of the desert and the low-land swamp. It stands to prove how American capitalism thinks of itself as a force louder than nature's power and alienates itself from the existence of anyone beyond its permission.

A group of authors describes the new dynamic created between the two sides in the essay Why No Borders?, "They [borders] place people in new types of power relations with others and they impart particular kinds of subjectivities. Borders, then, are the mark of a particular kind of relationship based on deep divisions and inequalities between people who are given varying national statuses." (1)

I could see the power at play right the moment I crossed the fence gate into Mexico. Americans who drive to Tijuana praise Mexican people for being kind, happy, generous, talented cooks and dedicated construction workers. Many Americans come to Mexico to fix their teeth, buy diabetes medicine, do surgery, and get medical attention because they can't afford that in their home city.

Dental clinics, orthopedics centers, and cosmetic surgery labs spring up on the Mexican side, a symbolic appearance of how Mexican accommodate the American best life while charging affordable living prices. Mexican grants American to be decent human beings without pain and struggles from the brighter side of wealth. Yet America doesn't want anything to do with the others from that side of the border, so they must construct 3,145 km of 6-8m steel fence to prove their territory. While praising Mexican food, Mexican abundance, and Mexican kindness, Americans may contemplate how their society had become a cruel cut-throat society with no affordable healthcare and healthy food.

The steel border cut the line and answered that question. It is more interested in building the wall than accommodating its citizen best lives.

Thousands of steel poles have been erected through mountains. The spikes divide from the mountain tops to the deep drops. Rusted pillars run through dirt slopes like a giant snake. They cut through the water, imagining cutting the sea in half.

On the Tijuana side, I walked and saw ten tiny rooms made of concrete and twisted-looking metal structures. Some rooms were broken on the windows or roofs with hammers. Each has a door facing a dark and narrow alley. The apartment getto reminds me of some interviews with workers at the border, a grandmother working as a prostitute to feed some kids abandoned by other women. She couldn't find a factory job again because she was too old. Her room walks through the same alley deep into the darkness, too ugly for us to look at. Yet she and millions of other Mexicans used to assemble the chips and breathe the toxic air to generate flashy high-tech products in the shopping malls elsewhere.

The sun set in the fuming wind. A group of Mexican workers stood in a group and listened to a young man discussing education for children. The audience was tired and ragged. They sat by the staircase near the border wall; their eyes looked grim, just like the weather that day, foggy and with dark clouds. Two brothers played football nearby, and the little one hit the ball on the wall. The ball bounced back and rolled downhill toward the fenced beach. How many balls would it take to take down the imagined border wall?

Since the documentary was shot, those famous brands have moved across the ocean. They left Mexico for Indonesia for cheaper labor, leaving behind millions of workers getting sick from lead and toxins, getting killed by the destructive economic patterns negotiated and agreed upon between the corrupted Mexican government and powerful conglomerates. Tijuana is the early model narrative of globalization that developing countries like Vietnam has bought into it sincerely, hoping to bleed in harsh working condition would pay off in wealth.

Mexican artists painted each border steel fence with beautiful art to celebrate their voices over the voice of steel and wall. So that the kids do not play football with the erased horizon. So that the lovers do not see the beach imprisoned by their feet. I walked for some hours at the border park until it got dark.

This is the new norm in this part of the world, a steel barrier can fracture the sky. May a wave sweep the border away.

==== Reference:

(1) ‘Why No Borders?’ (2009) - Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright: https://refuge.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/refuge/article/view/32074

(2) About Maquilapolis: City of Factories https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/maquilapolis-city-of-factories/