The UTSA Institute for Law and Public Affairs, Honors College and Camborne Productions are sponsoring a special screening of the documentary film Beyond Borders: The Debate Over Human Migration on Wednesday, April 23 at 5:30pm in the MB 0.106.

Dave Szamet, the film’s producer and UTSA Immigration Law professor Daniel Serna will be in attendance to introduce the film and talk about their views on immigration. The UTSA will join Yale Law School, Emory, the University of Southern California, and Georgetown in the screening of this film.

Beyond Borders moves past the headlines and takes an in-depth look at the hot-button issues of legal and illegal immigration. Beyond Borders explores the psychological forces driving the immigration controversy from both sides of the debate. Anti-immigration activists demand we stop this “illegal alien invasion,” while some pro-immigration forces speak of a Reconquista, a reclaiming of the American Southwest by Mexico.

In search of a middle ground, Beyond Borders travels across the U.S. and beyond to give voices to those on the front-line of this issue. (Beyond Borders Official Website) For more information concerning the documentary please click on the attached flyer below or visit: www.beyondbordersfilm.com.

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(UTSA press release)

As I hit pause on Muro for now, I want to share just a few images from the road: Some rust, some light, some real and recreated “history.” Let me know if you recognize any of these sites.

If you are a blog reader and haven’t found the Muro features, take the time to. I have been happy to see that some other papers, including the Fort Worth Weekly and Rocky Mountain Chronicle, are starting to pick them up.

If you are vigilantly searching for the latest breaking news on The Wall, stay informed with some of the other fine blogs such as No Border Wall, reporting on the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife’s challenge to the Real ID Act today. And keep a finger on the Rio Grande Guardian, as well, for daily developments.

In the future, I’ll be cross-posting Wall items here and at the Current’s Curblog.

Paz…

It was about ten years ago and my first trip to Marfa. I wasn’t there for Judd’s concrete boxes, likely hadn’t been tipped to Judd’s genius at the time. I was down for some Border Patrol meeting, the substance of which has long escaped me, distanced as I am by thousands of news items and feature assignments.

Fences were going up in a nearby border state at the time and I couldn’t help but ask: Were there any plans to build a fence here in Big Bend? The room erupted in laughter.

Considering the terrain, it seemed unthinkable — ridiculous.

Today, we find ourselves with 40 miles of wall proposed to run southeast of El Paso, another 6 around the port at Presidio, and spot after spot along the Rio Grande into the Border Wall maelstrom that is the Lower Rio Grande Valley. As much as the Wall will destroy decades of federal and non-profit conservation work restoring some of the most awe-inspiring wilderness in the nation, I have found that it is likely the people — and the river — that will suffer the most from this artificial barricade.

It is a rare bird that believes the Homeland’s pursuit will impact in any tangible way the triumvirate scapegoats of immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorism.

It will, however, destroy many lives through eminent domain condemnations and bring new tensions with the increased distancing river communities that have been coexisting for centuries.

As I finish my third installment on the Border Wall for the San Antonio Current, I find myself mourning — just a little — for my reinstated distance from the river and its people, though I know the riches found there are woven deeply into my being, to be rediscovered and cherished for a long time to come.

I’ve tried my best to speak to my fellow San Antonians in these stories, but my deeper hope is that the tri-part portrait of la frontera life will reach Middle America, too, where the press for the Wall was supposedly born.

I still can’t help feeling that such a concept couldn’t have come from Heartland Americans, that it must have been suggested, assembled, and sold, secretly, by a government in fear and shadow. That our unsettled state in Iraq and the open-ended war on “terror” must have been repackaged, with Mexicans cast this time as that deep security threat. Of course, I understand that sales job proved an all-too-easy task. So, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, you are complicit. While a collection of white North Texas Congressmen signed on with this turn of terror tremors, it doesn’t wash in South Texas.

How many times I heard in my travels, “If they could just come here and meet us, they would understand.”

No, the Texas border, for all its “misbehaviors” and unpredictability is not, as the Border Patrol is selling to new recruits, the new “front line on the war on terror.” The border is a river. It is thousands of years of family life. It is, I’m convinced now more than ever, one of the most precious regions left in this twisted country.

If only you could come here and see.

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[Read the Border Wall series (third installment out in the a.m.) at Murodelodio. This entry cross-posted at Curblog.]

I guess I should have titled this entry “Security II.” During my travels I met more than a few river residents who expressed concern about the Wall not for the unpalatable signal it sends to our neighbors in Mexico, or for the eco impacts, or simply the waste of taxpayer dough. The concern of these few was over which way the fence was really leaning. Is it to keep Mexicans out or the rest of us in?

Several I met with, including growers in Presidio, the brave folks at Fronteras Unlimited, and Mayor Chad Foster in Eagle Pass, talked about the impact increased security effort had already had in their communities: Farms left fallow for want of labor, Mexican communities without resources locked out, and guest and undocumented workers fenced in.

Foster told me:

The fence will fence those 12 million in. That is what happened. Those 12 million, the vast majority of them have historically been migratory. They would come to the United States, they would work for several months, and then they would go back to Mexico. They were very proud Mexicans. They do not want to be gringos. They never intended to stay here. But when pressure was put on the border, it interrupted their migratory flow and they were hung in the U.S., and so now here comes the family.

The NAFTA punchline — Mexican farmers who find the removal of protective tariffs on beans and corn impossible to navigate — is guaranteed to increase migration efforts to enter the U.S. workforce. It seems to be an engineered humanitarian disaster.

But what about those camera towers, chipped passports, and security pledges?

It’s not a stretch for those who already have to check in or out of their home communities each day at U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints to feel that the Wall is intended for us. A wall is a wall, whichever side you stand on. A wall controls movement and doesn’t differentiate between Mexicans and Americans, that role goes to the Gatekeepers.

I thought the video I was forwarded a few weeks ago was hopelessly conspiratorial in the eternally-speculative-never-proven way of things, but one element, the micro-chipping of U.S. passports, seemed plausible. So, maybe, I thought. There would be GPS capabilities and more, certainly.

Then while I visited with folks in the Valley, a was handed an interesting article from the Del Rio News Herald. Seems the port of entry there will be the first outfitted with a passport reader that allows those at the gate to read your vital signs before you even pull up to the window. Hey, it’s expected to ease the stop-and-start of cross-border traffic, but at what cost to privacy?

Somewhere out there is a new U.S. passport waiting to telegraph your personal data to Data Control. Are we safe now? How about free?

I’ve entered the last remaining hundred acres of sabal palm forest ecosystem in the nation. Soon we will be cut off from it by Homeland’s Wall.

I walk a wooden boardwalk and marvel at the trees’ stature, the volume of their massive fronds clashing in the winds I’m sheltered from.

The river here, approaching freedom and the Gulf at Boca Chica, used to be a mile wide and up to 40-feet deep, a local conservationist tells me.

I can’t use any proper names here. You see, the clampdown is on. Both employees at the Audubon Sanctuary said they could not speak about the wall, could not tell me anything, in fact. Instead, one hands me a printout from the non-prof’s website. I can use this, I’m told.

I fumble with the pages as I hurry to snap pictures of this magnificent place.

They read in part:

Plans to build a physical border wall along the Rio Grande would essentially fence off Audubon’s Sabal Palm Center and other spans of critical wildlife habitat. This barrier will have disastrous unintended consequences for wildlife, nature-based tourism, and community education efforts in the lower Rio Grande Valley and could force the closure of the Center.

So, it is silence into obsolescence for Audubon South, apparently.

Next door, at The Nature Conservancy’s southernmost holding I speak with Texas’ southernmost householder (we are lateral to Miami here). Lips here have likewise been pinned shut.

Meanwhile, the many organizations that have come together to resist the construction of The Wall are pushing ahead with calls for a moratorium on construction. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a provision of the Real ID Act can’t be far behind.

I find one aspect of the No Border Wall release particularly tantalizing.

The groups say that the moratorium was prompted in part by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s admission that no potential terrorists had ever been apprehended on the southern border. He told the New York Daily News last month, “I don’t see any imminent threat” of terrorists infiltrating from Mexico. (“Michael Chertoff’s Deepest Fears: Terrorists Entering U.S. from Canada,” February 10, 2008)

The groups note, however, that DHS has frequently referred to the imminent threat of “terrorists and terrorist weapons” crossing the southern border in order to justify the breakneck speed of border wall construction …

The groups are also calling for an immediate suspension and repeal of section 102 of the Real ID Act of 2005, which gives Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff the power to waive all laws in order to build the border wall without regard to the negative consequences it will have in the border region. The groups say that such power concentrated in the hands of an unelected official makes a mockery of Democratic processes and places border residents under an undue burden, denying them the same legal protections afforded the rest of America.

Father Roy showed up at the end of this week’s No Wall walk to splash us with some sanctified Rio Grande water outside the historic La Lomita Chapel. A fine and welcome gesture — even if all the local convenience stores were out of Lone Star and we were reduced to mere Miller quaffers.

The 1849 chapel is being restored, though Homeland fence plans would put it in the nether region between the Wall and the river.

Said our strong-footed leader Jay Johnson-Castro post-march: “I don’t want to leave that [wall] for my kids or grandkids or great-grandkids — 700 miles of impenetrable wall? We have to stop the wall now. That’s why we say, ‘Let’s tear it down now, before it’s built.”

After some strong talks, the pleasure of the afternoon overtook we hangers-on. Un tarde bohemia.

Here’s my new friend Candelaria Palacios belting one out with her husband Antonio showing me up on the Harman plinker.

Today wraps up a week of marching for Valley residents and the Border Ambassadors joining organizer Jay Johnson-Castro for portions of the week-long 63-mile March 4 March 4 contra El Muro. The effort was an (successful) attempt to push the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border into the political debates.

Reporters from Germany and Brazil (as well as local scribes) stopped by to snap photos during my intermittent hours on the blacktop with local residents (as well as a few radicals out of Houston, Corpus Christi, and beyond) over these last few days.

Marching along Military Highway beneath the belly of McAllen, we received honks and waves from the many semi’s pulling through the industrial area. Along the route, a kindly popsicle deliveryman stopped to drop off a box of the good stuff. Ah, solidarity.
Pharr resident Veda Ojeda walked the first few days, but closed the march driving a rear support vehicle.

“I felt I was even more effective in the back of the truck waving that sign,” she said.

Virginia Velazquez (left), a supporter of the local immigrant-assistance non-profit ARISE, walked with a heavy cane in hand despite a body weakened by cancer and chemotherapy, a woman toward the back of the line told me. “This was that important to her.”

The mayor of Brownsville also came out for a segment, Johnson said.

Community members from El Calaboz, Las Milpas, and Granjeno were in strong attendance, tolerating my miserable Spanish beautifully.

But don’t feel bad if you missed it, the Big march is still ahead. This Spring Break, join the 9-day, 15-mile-per-day march from Roma to Brownsville being organized now. The push is for a moratorium on any construction until sanity returns to el planeta.

Here’s the schedule.

The desk I have been given to work at is said to be my host’s great-grandfather’s. Another honor. Catarino Garza was a “journalist, revolutionary, and folk hero,” according to Handbook of Texas Online.

Finally settled in the Rio Grande Valley, I am beginning to enter the heart of Homeland Security’s war on private property in its attempt to raise the Wall on the Texas-Mexico border.

Granjedo is the first Spanish Land Grant community I enter. Once up to 16,000 acres in size, this community that predates the creation of the United States is now under 100 acres. The town incorporated only a decade ago, in part to protect itself from rich, influential developers (aka Ray Hunt of Halliburton fame) crowding in on them.

Today, Granjedo gets the wall. Hunt’s upscale subdivisions unobstructed views.

Meet Reynaldo Anzaldua: