The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement

by Jose Orduna

  For many years it was barbed wire, and then I read somewhere that what went up during Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 were welded metal landing mats from old aircraft carriers used in the Vietnam and Gulf wars. The year of Gatekeeper was also the year of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), so in Mexico, as the local was exposed to the pressures of the global, and as so-called structural adjustment displaced people, restrictions on movement increased. After 9/11 the manufactured threat of terrorism coming across the southern border brought “immigration” under the rhetorical dominion of national security rather than just criminality and economics. And today the erecting of this infrastructure is investable. Private firms compete for public contracts because carving out a place in the border security industry is increasingly lucrative. The 2013 “immigration reform” bills proposed by the House of Representatives (H.R. 1417) and the Senate (S. 744) are different in many ways, but they share the same border security paradigm: to achieve “situational awareness” of the entire Southwest border, which means 100 percent surveillance, and to maintain “operational control,” meaning that at the very least 90 percent of unauthorized entries must be deterred. These are unprecedented goals in our North American context.

  The major difference in the proposals is the Senate bill uses some of the enforcement benchmarks as “triggers” for initiating immigration relief for many of the undocumented individuals already in country. This ties the benefits of in-country migrant groups to the detriment—in many cases fatal—of individuals in earlier stages of very similar migrations. This macabre knot was regarded as the more liberal of the two bills because the House proposal is an enforcement-only bill, meaning it contains no immigration relief whatsoever. The Senate bill, if signed into law, would have allocated $46.3 billion for Southwest border enforcement whether or not it was necessary, in addition to the $100 billion the United States has already burned through in border security. In his article “The Green Monster,” for Politico Magazine, journalist Garrett M. Graff points out the United States already “spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals—plus the entire NYPD annual budget.” If signed into law, S. 744 would have nearly doubled the number of deployed full-time Border Patrol agents, bringing the total to 38,405. It would have added 3,500 Customs and Border Protection officers, funded the erecting of seven hundred additional miles of fencing, and purchased and deployed enough surveillance watch towers, camera systems, seismic sensors, drones, mobile surveillance systems, and the like to attempt to reach 100 percent surveillance.

  The bill was passed in June 2013 by the Senate in a vote of 68–32, but as of fall 2015 the House had refused to consider it.

  A kid I remember named James might have been my first white friend. He lived two buildings down and was one of the only white kids in the neighborhood. We got along great because he always wanted to play Twenty-one, and so did I. I don’t remember much about our friendship, because I was only seven when I knew him, but I know things were uncomplicated because we were too young for them to be, and because he lived two doors down in a building like ours with his Polish grandmother. Kids in the neighborhood called him James, sometimes “White Boy,” but nobody cared that he was white because he sank everything from the three-point line. One of the only clear memories I have about him was the time his grandmother gave us sandwiches made with orange cheese. I also remember when it was just the two of us playing Twenty-one he always wanted to be Michael Jordan and wanted me to be Larry Bird.

  School friends were different. Everything between us was obstructed by the rules and structures of the school. We were a version of ourselves in a kind of performance for the teacher and for one another. I didn’t really start having friendships that extended beyond school with any classmates until I was older, so my second white friend was also a kid I met from the neighborhood. His name was Andre, and his family lived in Key West most of the year, where he went to school with his younger brother Renny. We met on his first day of day camp at Holstein Park, where I’d been going every summer. I walked into a gymnasium and a bigger Puerto Rican kid was squeezing his neck with both hands. I ran over and told the kid to stop, which he did.

  Andre and I became good friends that summer. His family bought a yellow brick house and an adjacent lot, across the park from our building, to rent out during the year and live in during hurricane season. He had a sandbox, which was the first I’d ever seen, and a ring of green and white hostas in the center of his yard, with a few mantises living in it. His mom was a painter whose work looked a lot like Keith Haring’s. His dad, a barrel-chested man, always walked around with his shirt off, and when I first met him I was surprised that he smelled like armpits, because he chose not to use deodorant. I don’t think I ever learned what he did.

  I spent a lot of time with Andre in his yard and with his family, and for several summers I was his only real friend in the neighborhood. He was the first kid who asked me to stay for dinner, and dinner at their house was the first time I had salad with a meal, and the first time I had dinner by candlelight. There were paintings on the walls, and objects and furniture seemed to be selected and placed with careful attention to how the room would look, and how that look would make you feel. Our house wasn’t a pit, but there was a conspicuous difference in how this family lived, and I remember consciously noticing these differences and enjoying being able to observe them because they were evidence of a world outside of the one I already knew.

  A few summers into our friendship I introduced Andre to another friend I’d made during the year, another white kid who had moved into a newly finished condo building down the block. They hit it off, and a few weeks later I saw them hanging out together without me. The three of us continued to be friends, but things weren’t the same after that. Andre and I stopped hanging out every day like we once did, and things felt chilly. A summer or two later Andre stopped coming to Chicago because his parents sold their house and adjacent lot. I watched the yellow building get gutted and rehabbed, and now there are ugly generic condos where the yard used to be. A lot of structures went up and came down in that stretch of years as the neighborhood was “revitalized.” One by one, new people, mostly white, replaced neighbors until everyone I passed walking down the block was a stranger.

  By the time we were priced out of the neighborhood where we’d lived since coming to the United States—the place where all my first memories were made—I was old enough to understand the nature of some of the changes that had taken place. I’d already very viscerally experienced, by witnessing gang violence, how someone’s benefit could be tied directly to someone else’s detriment. Anyone could learn this lesson if one walked around Bucktown long enough, but then I understood that this rule could also apply beyond observable chains of cause and effect. Andre had been my friend, and his family had been good to me, but they were a pioneering family in an already inhabited space, and despite their benevolence they were part of what would eventually drive out the people who were living there, my family included. It was the first time I really understood how some of the strong imperatives that animate social life have little to do with individual will. There were arrangements of power that relied less upon malice and more upon disregard, obliviousness, adherence to what one was accustomed, and a generally uncritical disposition toward one’s own place in the world. It would have been easy to revise my view of my friendship with Andre and others like him, to believe we had never really been friends, but that simply wasn’t the case. We had been friends and what occurred still occurred.

  Caitlin walks past me toward the opening in the first iron gate. I turn toward the hills where a car snakes its way toward us, kicking up dust. She passes the first threshold and enters the zone between the double barriers. A narrow path made of sand-colored tiles cordoned off by thick steel wire leads to a corral up against the main gate—a wall of rust. At the edge of the path, the tiles disappear beneath a
few scraggly weeds that grow in clusters and look like they’re clutching the sand. Just beyond the narrow path there’s a single dwarf tree, and leaning up against its base is a lone white cross. It makes me think about Octavio and the man who’d stopped moving as they attempted to cross, and I wonder whether word ever reached that man’s family, or if now, years later, someone still waits for him to call or walk through a door.

  A light-skinned lanky man walks past us to the fence. He paces back and forth, looking at his watch for a few moments. A woman on the other side approaches, pulling a toddler by the hand: a little girl in a pink cardigan, with white bows in her hair. Upon seeing them, the man crouches and presses his hand against the metal. Her fingers are small enough to poke through the spaces, so they can touch at least a little, in violation of the various posted signs that forbid any attempt at physical contact. Caitlin and I aren’t close enough to understand what they’re saying, but we’re both immobilized watching how their bodies bend toward each other, listening to the subtle intonations of their voices. They talk for a while, their bodies curling in closer until their heads are pressed to the metal, and then, abruptly, he stands to talk with the woman. The green-and-white SUV is still there. The sunlight on the windshield prevents us from seeing inside. From where we’re standing I watch the man retrieve something from his pocket. It looks like paper folded into a long thin strip, about the length of money. The woman quickly plucks it out of his hand from the other side, and then they both turn and walk away. I catch a glimpse of his eyes, which look thick and wet. He looks sallow and older than I’d originally thought, and as he marches toward his car he doesn’t look back. Clouds of dust kick up in his wake as he pulls away.

  Out here on this final sliver of land before the ocean, no one sees these small moments between a father, a mother, and their daughter, a girl just old enough to understand there’s a real, physical barrier between her and her dad. It’s often said that shedding light on events like these, making them visible, has some impact on those who learn about them. I’m sure it does, but what I’m less sure of is if the impact is great enough to radiate beyond someone’s individual psychology and result in any action. The distance between being emotionally moved and actually moving is a chasm few seem to cross. I’m suspicious of those who preach awareness, or hold empathy at the center of problematics of injustice, because awareness itself has never seemed to be enough, and empathy always has, and always will have, a limited scope because of the impossibility of what it requires.

  Some of the most widely held and enduring definitions of friendship rest on the idea of mutual concern. One friend cares about the welfare of the other and vice versa, but whether or not the quality of the caring ever goes beyond the realm of the emotional or psychological is much more ambiguous. There are fewer definitions that include action on the behalf of friends, perhaps because it’s assumed that action follows concern, or maybe it’s believed that spending time in friendship is itself nourishing for the parties involved, and that this spending time is by itself a kind of action on behalf of someone we consider a friend. But what about when action required on a friend’s behalf goes beyond the everyday? There are situations when it’s precisely the concern we have for others that dissolves friendships and renders us unable to act in ways our friends might really need. Serious illness, for example, a terminal diagnosis, or mental illness, can have the effect of repelling close friends. The feelings of helplessness and proximity to the anguish of someone we care deeply about can be too much to endure. In those moments it’s simply easier, although not easy, to disappear.

  And then there’s the body of violent crime statistics that show Americans are about as likely to be murdered by friends, relatives, and acquaintances as by strangers.

  Just beyond the border, in Tijuana, there’s a white lighthouse and a hotel called the Hotel Martín. A kid, maybe sixteen years old, walks his golden retriever who trots around sniffing at everything it passes. Caitlin touches my arm as we stand motionless, peering through the metal crosshatching at a quiet street.

  When I moved to Iowa I lost touch with the friends I’d had in Chicago, and I was thrown into an environment I didn’t immediately notice was more racially segregated than any I’d ever lived in. It took several months for me to begin to feel the almost complete absence of meaningful interaction with people of color. There were several other graduate students in my cohort who weren’t white, but when we were set into the broader university community we were overwhelmed by a sea of whiteness. The graduate program I attended was supposed to be full of serious writers, people who were striving to be artists, which I mistakenly assumed meant they would be interested in engaging critically with the ways mass culture grinds people into dust, but one of the first things I noticed was that many embraced the romantic notion of the writer as a solitary being and were interested in little other than writing cleverly about their own middle-class realities. Others had adopted a shallow, non-rigorous nihilism that allowed them to be comfortably and fashionably hopeless about the course of any action. And others still, whose work verged on something meaningful, managed to file down their voices, producing “interesting” and “brave” pieces for smooth consumption, digestion, and excretion. On more than one occasion, one white friend expressed, without a trace of sarcasm, how lucky I was to be so clearly socio-economically maligned because it put me in a great position for my writing.

  The lighthouse just beyond the boundary seems like a cruel joke, a cliché symbol of finding your way home from open sea behind tons of metal that have destroyed countless homes. There’s nothing ambiguous about my place here anymore, at least not officially. Officially I’m an American standing in front of a wall that’s here to “protect” me from people who are not a threat to my safety or well-being. This new position is disorienting because it injures as it brings me into the fold. I’m no longer subject to the cruel and unusual punishment of being uprooted, expelled, and barred from returning for menial crimes. But it’s also impossible for me not to be overwhelmed by the situation of approximately 11.5 million people, among whom friends like Octavio count themselves. Any contact with law enforcement could lead to indefinite detention and eventual expulsion, perhaps for life. Days become a walk along a dire edge, particularly for people who face added levels of structural vulnerability, like undocumented women who are often not able to report domestic abuse, sexual assault, and rape out of fear of making contact with law enforcement. Like undocumented LGBTQ populations that have been excluded from heteronormative, family-based immigration relief. Like people who have been convicted of crimes for whom almost no one advocates and who are frequently offered up as sacrificial populations for liberal reform. Since I’ve become a citizen, these realities that have always been very present for me have become acute. Being a brown graduate student and instructor at a primarily white institution of higher education means that in addition to the aggressive forms of racism I experience, there’s a layer of mundane, casual, almost ambient racism that hangs in the halls and offices I move through. It’s as though there’s a piercingly high frequency going at all times that only some can hear, and when it finally knocks you off kilter, people then call you crazy. Even though my situation isn’t as dire as it could be, isn’t as dire as it once was, and isn’t anywhere near feeling the full weight empire can bring to bear, it feels as though I’m in a kind of indefinite, never-ending battle, and the territory being ruined is me, us.

  Across the political spectrum one would easily find many who know that friendship is an inane metaphor to use for the relationship between states, and I agree, but maybe the terms of this cynicism betray a deeper naïveté, one that implies an idealized form of friendship that can produce a genuine or authentic connection with another. When it happens, maybe it feels as Aristotle characterized it, one soul occupying two bodies. Two people share not only a deep and abiding concern for the other, but as the unification would suggest, a harmony of interests. We often feel this apparent union t
o be inherently virtuous if it’s genuinely enacted, and we assume that the psychological goodness we feel radiates over the horizon of self to interpersonal relationships, and beyond into the public and political spheres. But sometimes friendship goes bad or gets stale, and sometimes it was rotten to begin with—rotten for the friends, rotten for one of them, or good for the friends and rotten for those around them. Whatever its associated feelings, it’s a bounded ethical relationship. These feelings of union drive exclusion and the privileging of some over others.

  In the realm of the personal, encountering strangers is still possible. I encounter people I don’t properly know, and in whom I don’t immediately recognize myself, people whose experience is inaccessible to understanding through my own subjectivity. I even sometimes feel as though I’ve encountered aspects of the foreign within the boundaries of myself. States, on the other hand, have no strangers. The existence and operations of organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are evidence that the nations of the world are bound in inextricable ways. The idea that countries have control over their territory and domestic affairs to the exclusion of external powers is a fiction, a particularly brutal one for so-called developing countries who have been continually “known” by affluent states from colonialism to globalism.