I'm writing from the Lower Rio Grande Valley - the name for the string of communities along the last 200 miles or so of the Rio Grande before it dumps out into the Gulf of Mexico. This includes Brownsville, and McAllen, and smaller cities like Harlingen and Roma and Weslaco, and it's my third morning here.
I flew out here because it is current ground zero in the struggle against the border wall. I've been hired by the Sierra Club to make a short video about the environmental impact of the wall, and so I'm here trying to get interviews with local enviros and beautiful nature footage of the stretches of habitat along the river where DHS is planning to come in with bulldozers and piledrivers and whatever else and put in their big steel boondoggle, ruining this habitat and cutting off access to big parcels of public and private land that are extremely important to the wildlife and culture and economy down here.
And speaking of culture and economy, wow. Texas sure is different. In a way it's really America in a nutshell, an America I sometimes forget is out there... but I've said that about LA too. However, LA is just the bleach-blonde, boob-job America in a nutshell, whereas Texas is like, another level of America, the trailer park, cowboy, monster truck, baptist church America in a nutshell.
And yet this borderlands ribbon of South Texas is fascinating, as all the borderlands are. There's a unique culture as well as a unique ecological treasure (tons of amazing birds, ocelots, rare sabal palm trees, etc). There's an amazing mix of "Winter Texans" - mostly elderly folks who come down here to escape the winter, mostly in RVs - good 'ol boys, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, vacationing college kids (south padre island is right off the coast here)... it's pretty interesting.
And into this mix wades the fascist police-state right wing, come to put up their little toy fence. This devastation is all so that Chertoff and Bush and all their political buddies can say they did something to stop the HUGE wave of terrorists sneaking in from Mexico (hah!), and so the racists and anti-immigrationists can feel a moment of satisfaction, at least until, sitting in their armchairs in Dallas and Denver and Boise and Sioux City and Boondocks, Ohio and wherever the hell else, they realize, finally looking closely at the map of the new construction, that we're talking about little 2 or 4 or 10 mile chunks of wall with huge 2 or 5 or 20 or 500 mile spaces in between, and that even the sections that have wall will only slow down migrants for about 3-10 seconds as they climb over, dig under, cut through, go around, or even just buy a fake visa instead.
Like I keep saying, Nothing will sway these people from coming except fixing the economic catastrophe that is destroying their countries and ruining their livelihoods - NAFTA and CAFTA and other trade policy foisted on them by the U.S. - because they're starving, and they don't care if you arrest them or hold them in a detention cell, because the alternative is to stay home and starve to death with their kids.
Ok, sorry, I went into rant mode. It's first thing in the morning and I just had my morning coffee and the caffeine is coursing through my veins. hah.
Posted by steev at Febrero 10, 2008 06:10 AM