Perhaps because of the taxi ride, perhaps because of the roads and paths incised into the hills since 1940, perhaps because we had no fears other than the ferocious heat of midday, we found the route remarkably easy, so easy that we could have done their nine-hour route in three, until I made a navigational mistake. Thinking we were looking down at Cerberes, the southernmost French town, and had another ridgeline to ascend, I took us straight up a steep slope, where a couple of guys with chainsaws were cutting brush, a nasty hike through sharp stubs of bushes and piles of debris, until we hit the trail for the two-thousand-foot peak called Querroig on which stands a ruined tower. From there, I could see Cerberes and Port Bou, lying together like mirror images of each other, each with its small bay and huge train yard, and realized we had gone too far. Since we were most of the way there, we decided to go ahead and reach the summit. Thus it was that we were indeed tired when we walked down into Port Bou six and a half hours after we started.
For refugees in 1940, there was a labyrinth of international paperwork to wade through as well. Fittko, in her memoir Escape over the Pyrenees, recounts the nightmares of scrambling for money to buy exit visas and destination visas, fake papers and real ones, the appeals to consuls and smugglers and forgers, amid a constantly shifting set of opportunities, risks, and rules. Having survived the walk, Benjamin fell into one of those traps: though he had a U.S. visa issued in Marseilles and a Spanish visa, he did not have a French exit visa, and in Port Bou the Spanish authorities told him he would be sent back. It was a tragedy of timing. When he left Marseilles, the regulation had not existed; a few weeks later, the regulation would have lapsed. That day, however, Benjamin saw no way out, though it’s still unclear whether he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, took an accidental overdose of his heart medicine, or committed suicide. Though the nature of his death is unresolved, it is certain that Benjamin died in Port Bou, in a hotel that no longer exists, on September 26, 1940, at age forty-eight. Moved by the tragedy, the authorities allowed his companions to continue their journey to Portugal.
They paid the first five years of rent on a grave for Benjamin and fled. Benjamin’s remains were put into a common grave after the rent on his resting place expired. The death certificate, says Fittko, recorded the briefcase with “unos papeles mas de contenido desconicido”—“with papers of unknown content”—but case and manuscript vanished. In recent years, the town has begun to remember him, with the brochure I found, with a new grave (which is unlikely to contain his body), with a museum that is just a large room of photographs and photocopies (closed when we were there), and with a brilliant monument by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. On the same steep slope as the cemetery, it consists of a long walled flight of stairs down toward the sea, a portion of it passing under the surface of the hillside. When you enter, the view through the slot of solid rusted steel the same color as the local stone frames a view of the blue ocean; when you look up, it shows pure sky.
It’s acutely attuned to the tragedy of Benjamin and the tides of refugees pushed by violence and intolerance across borders then and now. For neither the sea nor the sky is an attainable place—both are only beautiful beyonds. And when you descend, you find that a thick slab of clear plexiglass bars your way before you fall into the ocean. Etched on it, in several languages, are words of Benjamin’s: “It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.” Benjamin doesn’t need a memorial in Port Bou, for his real memorial is his influence on writers ranging from Susan Sontag to Mike Davis, his presence on college reading lists across the North American and European continents, and his books, still being read. If he deserves one, it’s for his commitment to what Karavan singled out in his monument, “the memory of the nameless.”
For me, there’s always been a question mark inscribed across Europe, one that asks what that culture would have looked like without the persecutions and exterminations of the Second World War, a Europe with six million more Jews and their descendants, along with dissidents, Gypsies, and the other exterminated. For the Europe Benjamin came from is as vanished as he is; many of his friends—Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, many other poets, scientists, philosophers, painters—were more successful and got to the United States, never to return. Many more went to Israel in the years and decades since, a country whose intolerances are all too clear a mirror of the intolerances of the left-behind lands. In Europe, towns from Salonika, Greece, to Krakow, Poland, lack the Jews who were central to their cultural life. In France, Jewish emigration to Israel has nearly doubled of late, perhaps in response to a new wave of anti-Semitism. I remember hearing a decade earlier that the four thousand Jews who lived in Ireland in 1904, the Ireland memorialized in James Joyce’s Ulysses, with its Benjaminian wanderer Leopold Bloom, had become two thousand.
Meanwhile, the debates on allowing Turkey into the European Union have made apparent what was implicit: that the EU can also be conceived of as a Christian union, despite its Jews and Muslims; and Italy, Poland, and some other member nations argued in May that it should be so. The week we walked, the World Court ruled that much of the fence across the Palestinian West Bank was illegal. In Arizona, vigilantes patrol the U.S.-Mexican border. In Tijuana, a new border fence and station are going up. And the United Nations counts seventeen million refugees and displaced people in the world, a considerable portion hoping for sanctuary in Europe, Christian or otherwise. At the beginning of our hike, our taxi driver told us that he got calls sometimes from refugees seeking rides across the border. He always refused, he added.
Benjamin was extraordinary in his life. But in his death, he was ordinary, another refugee denied refuge. On his empty grave, another line of his is written, from his last work: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Thirty-Nine Steps Across
the Border and Back
[2005]
I
In the United States, or at least in my part of it, the Border means the U.S. Mexican border, not the other one we share with Canada. That’s one semantic oddity located somewhere in the nebulous borderlands, like monotheism, mono-marginality, perhaps. God, not the gods; the Border, not the borders.
II
In the 1984 indy punk-rock movie Repo Man, set in Southern California, there’s a character driving around in a Chevy Malibu with a trunkful of lethally radioactive aliens, nonhumans from outer space. I failed to understand much of the movie because I thought the trunk contained undocumented immigrants—Mexicans or Central Americans who maybe picked up some radiation at a border military base, like Yuma Proving Grounds, where depleted uranium armaments were tested. After all, trunks of cars are one of the places coyotes—smugglers—hide people attempting to cross the border illegally. It’s a telling linguistic overlap, this migration of meaning back and forth from outer space and outside national boundaries, an other-ization of neighbors and people who aren’t even always from there but from here, when here was there. The border, the aliens, the makings of a theology.
Still, my friend Guillermo, who is from Mexico City but has been in the United States most of his adult life, has a penchant for collecting glow-in-the-dark outer-space trinkets, of which there is a copious supply. A few of them conflate the two kinds of aliens: bug-eyed monsters in sombreros. Was there ever a fifties horror movie in which the flying saucer disgorged mariachi bands? You’d think so.
III
That is the unspeakable background to this premise that the border is some kind of great natural division and brown people are some kind of outer-space creatures who belong on the other side of it. That and the war Mexico never forgot and the United States can never quite remember, the 1846–1848 war Thoreau went to jail to oppose but U.S. history books hardly mention, the one whereby Mexico was cut in half and the United States was increased by a third, to become its current sea-to-shining-sea self, the war some Latinos reference when they
say, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” The border is also a migrant. Texas had already been taken, but New Mexico, southern Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California were added to the spoils pile of Yankee expansion. Its arbitrariness is everywhere; in the existence of two Californias, Alta and Baja; in tribes such as the Tohono O’odham, whose homeland (like that of the Mohawks on the other, lowercase border) is on both sides. The border is a strictly western phenomenon, going from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, from Texas to California, from Brownsville-Matamoros to Tijuana–San Diego. Everywhere north of it, the influence of Mexico is evident, down to the outfits cowboys wear and the food everyone eats and the Spanish place names for the cities, rivers, and land forms, the mesas, arroyos, and canyons. The influence of the people who are not supposed to be here is so everywhere that they are perhaps in some way the dominant culture already, before they become a majority, as they will in a few decades.
IV
In California, the Mexican-American War began as the Bear Flag Revolt on June 16, 1846, when some trigger-happy Yankees in California illegally started a little shooting in the beautiful Spanish-style plaza in Sonoma, where General Mariano Vallejo was in charge of the northern half of Alta California. The U.S. anxiety to grab Mexican territory was so powerful that these Americans wouldn’t know for months that President James Polk had declared war on Mexico much farther southeast, though the two wars would become two fronts of one war. The actions of the Americans in Sonoma carried all the moral authority of a convenience store holdup, and the bear on the flag they raised was so poorly drawn that Californios—the non-Native Spanish-speaking citizens—thought they were flying an image of a pig. (It became the California state flag, but the California grizzly it represented was hunted into extinction over the next several decades.) Lieutenant John C. Fremont of the U.S. Army came to the aid of the Americans, various North Bay Californios were killed or taken hostage, and the squabble joined the war being fought in other scattered locales across the West.
The war that began in Texas in 1846 was a more serious business, and a third front opened up when the U.S. Army landed in Veracruz and invaded Mexico City. More soldiers died of disease than of combat in this war, and, like the Gulf War, it was largely won by the superior technology of the U.S. forces. Mexicans still annually commemorate los ninos heroes, the teenage military cadets who fought bravely, and mostly died, defending the capital. But the U.S. military record in this war is made up more of squabbles, insubordination, and desertions. The people wading and swimming across the Rio Grande then were U.S. soldiers seeking more civilized conditions than the U.S. Army camp. The first aggressive border patrol was instituted to stop this leak of U.S. troops to Mexico; Major General Zachary Taylor gave orders to shoot all deserters. Keep those deserters in mind; they will return in the twenty-first century.
V
I went to the sesquicentennial celebration of the Bear Flag Revolt on June 16, 1996. It was during the heyday of Governor Pete Wilson’s demonization of Latino immigrants and, by extension, Latinos generally, not long after Proposition 187 attempted to deny basic services—education and health care, including emergency medical care—to undocumented immigrants. Few remember now, when terrorists so neatly occupy the bogeyman niche vacated by communists, the many other groups who were cast in that role, most particularly immigrants (and, in fact, terrorists—if you ignore Timothy McVeigh and all the abortion-clinic shooters—and immigrants share the basic status of Outsider or, if you prefer, Alien, so that anti-terrorism rhetoric has continued to focus on the border—particularly on the Border, even though some of the September 11 terrorists came over the Canadian border and none over the other one). Proposition 187 explained away California’s sagging economy by blaming it on illegal immigrants, who allegedly were siphoning off social services without paying taxes, though in fact it was more the other way round: they were failing to collect major social services—unemployment, disability, social security—while working hard, sometimes under the table, sometimes with taxes, which they would never file to recoup, taken out of wages. Then, too, those who pushed the notion that they were stealing jobs never looked very carefully at how many gringos were hoping to break into dishwashing and strawberry-picking careers.
Anyway, the sesquicentennial celebration in Sonoma Plaza was beautifully staged. The parade celebrating it seemed to consist almost entirely of white people, including adult men in the Davy Crockett outfits of their youth, toting rifles. A group of young Latinos protesting the celebration—which was by no means merely a commemoration—arrived in the plaza first, before the parade, so that the Yankees had to take the plaza all over again, with a certain amount of conflict, or at least anxiety. Governor Wilson, whom the great émigré artist Enrique Chagoya once depicted as a cannibal in an Aztec codex, spoke, and the Latino kids shouted and drummed while he did so. “I don’t know what they’re so angry about,” an elderly lady clucked to her husband, so I told them. He said to me, at this celebration of the seizure of Mexico’s northern half, “Young lady, California was never part of Mexico. You should go to college and study some history.”
VI
Thus the border, which is not so much a line drawn in the sand of the desert but in the imagination, a line across which memory may not travel, empathy may be confiscated, truth held up indefinitely, meaning lost in translation. The West is cast as nature, not culture, which is part of why we do not believe we have to remember anything that happened here. If the border is natural, it must not have a history, since despite the realm called natural history, we consider those two terms to describe exclusionary territories. It is its naturalness that is its justification, in a nation that has long cast itself as nature against European culture, which required forgetting the displacement and devastation of Native Americans, an easy omission for all the nativist groups opposed to immigrants, at least since the Irish began to arrive in quantity after the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s. It may have been their homeland, but it was our Eden; we were Adam and Eve, they were just a trailer for another movie. And the defense of nature has become another semiautomatic weapon in the arsenal of exclusion.
VII
Some might consider the fact that fences are unnatural a slight problem here, a little blight on the landscape or at least on the ideology of nature wielded on the border’s northern side. To put up a fence is to suggest difference when there is none (though there will be), and to draw a border is much the same thing. Paradise means a walled garden, and when Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, its walls first appear in the narrative, because they matter only from outside. Adam and Eve are the first refugees, the fig leaves the first canceled passports, Paradise the first immigration-restricted country. And of course the Angel with the Flaming Sword is a Border Patrol agent, like the ones with their flaming guns and night-vision goggles who kill people in California, in the stepped-up Border Patrol program called Operation Gatekeeper. In recent years, the wall, the guard, and the gate have become increasingly popular devices for maintaining difference, the difference between the garden and the world. They show up on every scale, from the domestic to the national front, and though usually seen separately, it makes sense to look at them together. Whatever is inside the wall, past the gate, protected by the guard is imagined as some version of Paradise, but Paradise only so long as its separateness is protected. Which means that Paradise is a violent place.
On the smallest scale, these dividers are nothing more than incongruous little garden ornaments I noticed on a recent visit to the highlands of West Hollywood and then started to notice in affluent zones everywhere. In the more plush parts of Southern California, every house has a garden in front of it, a garden that seems to be a sort of no-man’s-land, since nobody but the gardener ever diverges from the driveway to tread upon it. It provides a certain buffer of private property between the house and the street, and it proclaims, in lawn and bougainvillea, a certain pastoral attainment and affluence. In the midst of
each one is a little medallion on a steel stick promising some security company’s “armed response.” A flaming sword for every Paradise, and an armed response for every garden (or perhaps the medallions are more like fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as long as we’re going to allegoricize).
Visually, these medallions are akin to the fire extinguishers, bathroom signs, and so forth one is not supposed to notice as part of the wall furnishings of museums. Symbolically, they proclaim the same message as the garden, albeit to a different audience: that the goods herein are both coveted and secured. Politically, these gardens seem to be constructed for two distinct audiences: those who are meant to admire the plants and ignore the medallion and those to whom the medallion speaks; the former being a majority audience of friends, neighbors, and those who belong, the latter being those who do not belong (and seldom show up, making them something of an imaginary audience). To a third audience—to me, anyway—the medallion and the garden cancel each other out: what kind of serenity can a garden promising armed guards provide?
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 9
