The Furious Spinner

Today Mario and I attended the Borders Issues Fair put on by the Santa Cruz Valley Border Issues Coalition. This was the third year of this fair, and it was held in Green Valley, which is about an hour from where we're living. People were there from Borderlinks, No More Deaths, Las Madras Project, Just Coffee, Humane Borders, Samaritans, and other organizations, most of them faith-based. The large meeting room was filled with hundreds people, most of them over sixty, most of them middle-class Anglos. Mario and I spent the day in their company being amazed, inspired—and sometimes in tears.

We had a moment of silence, and then the speakers began. They were all good. Those who lived in la frontera, in the region near the border, said they felt as though they were in a "low-intensity war." Black hawk helicopters and the Border Patrols were a daily part of their lives. They could be stopped at any time, and they were, on the pretext of national security, and they had to show ID. The Border Patrol, and now the local police who were helping them, were often belligerent with the members of this community when they asked for ID. (These are American citizens, by the way, living right here in Arizona.)

The speakers talked about the root causes of illegal immigration. They talked about global economics and "savage capitalism" which devastates communities. (Multi-global corporations, dumping of products, etc.) The Reverend Delle McCormick gave statistics about the poverty in Mexico. The Reverend Mark Adams talked about the coffee cooperative he and others started on the borderlands. Joseph Nevins gave a historical prospective on immigration and immigration laws in the United States over time.

Joseph Nevins talked about mobility being a basic human right. He said, "Security in the United is a 'god' word, something universally embraced and insufficiently questioned." Despite all the billions of dollars that have been spent on border "security," just as many people get into this country illegally as before they spent billions of dollars. (Mark Adams said they lent the coffee cooperative $20,000, and now that cooperative is supporting 37 families. Imagine what could have been done with all those billions of dollars. If people can feed their families, they don't want to leave their own lands.)

Nevins said, "Despite a massive buils up in resources, drugs and migrants still cross. About 1/3 get caught. 92/97% eventually succeed. There's no difference between before and after the build up at the border....Political actors have exaggerated the security threat. They say there hasn't been any attacks since 9/11, but there weren't any attacks the 5 years befor 9/11 when they had spent much less." (Did you know 25% of the prisoners in the world are in our jails, even though we have 5% of the world's population?)

Nevins said we need to change the language of the debate on this issue. He pointed out that the Minutemen are using the deaths in the borderlands as a reason to have increased border security. Nevins said we need to say that we don't want any more deaths, and we are interested in basic human rights, which include the right to mobility and the reunification of families.

Later when I went to the Samaritans table and saw all the items they had picked up from the desert, dropped by passing migrants, I started to cry. The woman standing next to me said, "Seeing this kind of gets to you, doesn't it?" I thought of Myla walking the wash and picking up what she found there and taking it to the Church of the Old Mermaids. I thought of her walking the desert near la frontera and finding Lily, left there as though she was trash. Myla said, "Lily held out her arms to me, and I embraced her. From that second on, I knew I would lay down my life for her; it was as though I had given birth to her—or she to me." I wish everyone of those people who walked the desert had had someone like Myla. I wish they didn't have to walk the desert. I wish they could walk into this country with dignity and return to their own countries when they wished with dignity—or make this country their own.



The stories about the people who have crossed were very powerful. Mark Adams talked about the man who said how painful it was to leave his land. Joseph Nevins talked about the 13 year old boy who dragged his mother's body across the desert for days after she died from heat exhaustion. He talked about Olivia Luna who was only 11 years old when she was found on Tohono O'odham land. A trip to the hospital did not save her life. They found Olivia Luna in the desert dying, he said, wearing pink sneakers. I gasped (yes, really, outloud) when he said this and looked at Mario; he looked stunned, too.

I started my new Old Mermaids book this week. In the first scene, Lily and Myla are walking the wash together looking for things to take to the Church of the Old Mermaids. They aren't finding anything until:

A desert cottontail scurried across the wash in front of them, slipping on the loose dirt and looking completely panicked before it jumped up out of the arroyo. Lily clapped. Myla noticed something in the sand near where the rabbit had made its getaway. She and Lily walked over to it.

A tiny bit of pink stuck up out of the sand. Myla bent down. The rabbit’s scrambling must have exposed it. Lily crouched next to her. Myla began pushing away the dirt with her cotton-gloved fingers. It was the heel end of a pink shoe.

All week I've been saying to Mario, "I know I'm going to find a pink shoe somewhere."

And there it was, on the foot of Olivia Luna Noguera.

That's the way writing these books and stories has worked. There was some reason Myla found that pink shoe in the wash. I don't know what it means. Recently I had started to lose faith in what I was doing. How could me telling stories, particularly stories of the Old Mermaids, be accomplishing anything, even though they meant so much to me? As I thought about Olivia and all her companion walkers, I realized again that the Old Mermaids had walked up onto these shores, this New Desert, without shoes, without anything, because their home had dried up (literally). They were migrants; we are all migrants, every day, trying to find our way in this land and in our lives. Church of the Old Mermaids was always about migrants coming together to create community.

I want to tell the stories of people like precious Olivia Luna. I want to tell the story of every item I see on that table, just as Myla told stories of what she found in the wash. I want to find the truth in those stories. And I'm hoping telling these tales will in some way contribute, in some way document what is happening—maybe even transform it on some level. Who knows?

I wish I had been out in that desert to hold my arms out to Olivia Luna. I would have wiped her tears and tied the shoelaces of her pink tennis shoes. I would have protected her, no matter what.

At least I'd like to think so.

Labels: Arizona, migrant issues, Old Mermaids

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.