A few days ago I was in Tijuana at a conference, and colleagues of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte [College of the Northern Frontier] took us to visit points of interest in the city, including a couple of sections of the famous border fence.
Before I begin, let me clarify that I felt some attraction for the savvy people of Tijuana. I was surprised to feel an air of freedom, or at least of existentialism, in the midst of that city-bottleneck, which recharges itself from the border fence with the ease of a scoundrel smoking a cigarette.
Even the famous fence brought me unexpected images.The border fence in this area is actually a double fence with a road running between them, where there are soaring towers with sensors to detect migrants, and Border Patrol vans roam. The fence that could be called "interior" (that is, what is entirely on the U.S. side, not adjacent to Mexico, designed to be a second obstacle for whomever might be encouraged to scale the first fence) is high, of mesh, with barbed wire along the top and flatly unassailable.
The "outer" fence, that is, the one adjoining Mexico, can be touched by any pedestrian; it changes its appearance and materials depending on the section. In the area of the beach and into the sea, this 'outside' fence is made of iron stilts with spaces between that allows the gaze to wander without problem from one side to the other of the border. This is an architecture a little less violent than the solid fence that covers the view and the crossing not only of the undocumented, but also of the squirrels, rabbits and lizards that are in the less touristy parts.
The fence of Tijuana beach is full of graffiti of all kinds--Christian, anti-imperialist, philosophical, love, etc. Many of the graffiti are in English and were written by Americans who live in Mexico or go to Tijuana for an outing and are outraged by the politics of their own country. One of those graffiti, which was the one I liked, says:
"Please don't feed the gringos."
The image, absolutely terrific, reverses the sense of the wall--the animals caged and observed, as in a zoo, would now be the US-ians and not the alleged barbarians of the south.
But it seemed to me that the graffiti seeped deeper than the simple statement of the lack of inhumanity of U.S. immigration policy. Placed where it was, on a border fence overlooking the immaculate fields on the U.S. side (and the port of San Diego in the distance), the graffiti made me think of the Americans (and of those who, like me, live in the U.S.) as domesticated animals. It is Nietzsche's image of modern man himself as a pet, well-fed, well-groomed, well-trained and house-broken. "Do not feed the gringos", who now have their food on a plastic plate in the kitchen. The U.S. order and Tijuana disorder appear here as a boundary between the domesticated human and the (a little bit) more wild human.
This same image assaulted me again a few miles later at the section of the fence that borders Colonia Libertad [Liberty County]. Before the border fences were built--in the eighties--it was a nightly crossing point for dozens of migrants. It turned out that twenty-five years ago, the driver who was our guide had crossed at this point twice. He told us his experiences with the enjoyment of someone narrating an adventure: the dance, now no one pulls it off.
At that time, there was an afternoon tianguis [open-air market] on the Mexican side, so that each night the cross-ers bought juice or some quesadillas [tortillas wrapped around beans, cheese] as they negotiated with the polleros [smugglers], who walked around posing as street vendors:
"I have fifty pesos [$4.00 USD), will you take me across?"
"Va [You're going]."Then the polleros sent ahead a small group of local boys--drug addicts or alcoholics, for example--as "bait" so the migra [migración, Border Patrol] would arrest them. In those days, the Border Patrol had only two or three patrols for all those people. So as the patrol was moving toward the bait, a group of ten or fifteen migrants with their smuggler would set out running to the canyons to go into the hills behind San Diego.
Our guide told us all this with visible joy, and it was then that a second image came to me: the border as a Tom and Jerry episode. And I realized that the image is related to the "Don't feed the gringos". In this case the US-ian is exposed as a domestic pet (Tom the cat), and Mexico as a tiny animal who is still in a free state and does not have to respond to its owner.
It occurred to me that the origin of the fence is in the sullen pride of Tom the Cat before the cunning of Jerry Mouse, faced with the invisible repression of the law of his master. The poor frustrated kitty went out to buy a double fence of the ACME brand, complete with towers and sensors in order that the mice may not mock him. An impossible mission. Spanish original
*Claudio Lomnitz was born in Chile and earned his undergraduate degree at the Autonomous Metropolitan University at Iztapalapa (Mexico City) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (1987). Dr. Lomnitz focuses on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, particularly Mexico. Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. His conceptualization of the nation-state as a kind of cultural region culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992). He has also concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, developed in works on the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001). Recent works include Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the 16th to the 21st centuries. He is currently finishing a book on anarchism, socialism and revolution in Mexico (c. 1910) that inspects the cultural and political history of trans-nationalism.