What is so peculiar about these new wars of meaning in the American West is that the imagery is so rustic, full of appeals to the beauty of the mountains and the fields. But the dead young goatherds are on the other side, not of the border, but of the cult. We have reversed Virgil’s terms, or perhaps Virgil himself distinguished between the eclogues’ Arcadia and the georgic Paradise. After all, it was Cain who was the gardener. (Along these lines, one can trace the moral reversal of Jews becoming Israelis as that of nomads becoming gardeners; since goats walk and crops don’t, agriculture requires territoriality in ways that pastoral nomadism does not. Or note that country boy Timothy McVeigh used a truckload of fertilizer to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building.) Gardens are portrayed as serene spaces, but perhaps it is time for the guards to be incorporated into the iconography of gardens.
XVI
Borders don’t exist in nature, but they can be made. In San Diego and Tijuana shortly after the devastating 2003 October fires, friends pointed out to me how a single bioregion had sharply diverged because of distinct human practices. On the Baja side, the resources to put out fires never really existed, the fire cycle had never been seriously interrupted, and so the colossal fuel loads that would incinerate so much around San Diego had never accumulated. Besides, Mexicans are less interested in moving into locations remote from their fellows. The upshot is not only that they don’t have such devastating fires but that they tend not to have mansions in canyons and on mountaintops for which firefighters must risk their lives and the state squander its funds. Sometimes the ecology is better preserved south of the border than north of it. Consider the case of the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn on the Arizona-Sonora border. About ten times as many survive on the Mexican side, while on the U.S. side, they’re pretty much confined to the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range—not the healthiest habitat for the last couple dozen of their kind in the United States. I traveled there too, amid signs warning of live ordnance and the sound of distant bombing operations.
XVII
And back and forth across the Tijuana–San Diego border, where you can head south without fanfare but get stuck in endless traffic and searches and screenings on the route north. Part of the border there is made out of old slabs of metal from the first Gulf War, an ugly literal iron curtain, but the new border wall is elegant and visually perforated though equally impassible. When you cross into Mexico, nothing changes, because you’re still in the same territory, and everything changes, because you’re in a whole other cosmology and economy.
XVIII
The takeover of the Sierra Club would have succeeded only if the invaders had convinced people to believe again that the border marks a coherent environmental divide. The official idea is that immigrants are bad for the environment, but you can reframe that a couple of dozen ways. One is to point out that we don’t need help being bad for the environment. The United States consumes the world’s resources in huge disproportion to its percentage of the global population, and most of us work overtime to do our bit for global warming. (My mother got caught up in the same arguments the last time the immigration issue roiled the Sierra Club waters and exclaimed to me, “But what if they come here and live like us?” to which the only possible reply was, “What if we stay here and live like us?”) If you care about the environment, there are more relevant issues you might choose to take up before immigration. But if you care about stopping immigration, the environment is a touchstone of conventional goodness, or at least of liberalism, you can hide behind.
The poor nonwhite immigrants who are the real targets of this campaign are generally building and cleaning those big houses in remote places and mowing the lawns and fueling up the snowmobiles, but they tend not to own them, or to make the decision to delist an endangered species, or to defund the Superfund cleanup program, or to lower emissions standards. (We elect people to do that, actually.) In fact, if sprawl and resource consumption are the immediate threats posed by population growth, then the new immigrants, who live frugally, densely, and often rely on public transport, are a rebuke to the suburban majority in the United States.
XIX
The fantasy that the United States can be sealed off from the world like a walled garden in a slum overlooks dozens of other inconvenient facts, such as the role of our country, with tools such as agricultural dumping and the World Bank, in making those other nations slummier; or the fact that they too have their gardens and we too have our slums. (Sometimes it’s the destruction of their gardens that set them on the immigrants’ path in the first place—certainly that’s the case with the Mexican farmers bankrupted by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.) But it’s also dismaying because setting gardens apart is how the conservation movement began, back at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was far more closely affiliated with racist, nativist, and eugenicist movements. Behind the early national parks and wilderness areas was the idea of scenery segregation—that it was enough to save the most beautiful and biotically lush places, a few dozen or hundred square miles at a time.
XX
The implication of setting one piece apart is that the rest of the environment is put up for grabs, and into the 1960s the Sierra Club’s basic strategy was doing exactly that. They fought a nuclear power plant in California’s Nipomo Dunes, but agreed that it was okay to put one in Diablo Canyon instead. Club activists such as David Brower eventually came to regret that they had secured protection of Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument from damming by letting Glen Canyon Dam go forward. Now most environmentalists are against big dams and nuclear power, so that the debates are about policy, not just geography.
Back then, Rachel Carson had only recently brought the bad news about pesticides—that they didn’t stay put but moved through the environment into both wild places and our own bodies—and with that, it began to become clear that you couldn’t just defend places. You had to address practices; you had to recognize systems; you had to understand that, in John Muir’s famous aphorism, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” When he said that, of course, he wasn’t imagining plastic detritus being ingested by seabirds in the center of the Pacific Ocean or polar bears beyond the industrialized world becoming hermaphroditic from chemical contamination. But we can.
More and more things come under the purview of environmentalism these days, from what we eat to where our chemicals end up. Immigration, unless it’s part of a larger conversation about consumption, birth rates, reproductive rights, trade, international economic policy, sprawl, and dozens of other issues, isn’t really one of them. It seems instead that environmentalism is a cloak of virtue in which anti-immigration activists are attempting to wrap themselves. But they’re better looked at naked.
XXI
And those portrayed as invaders are in fact maintaining the garden. Throughout this century, various bracero programs have brought in Mexicans to do the work citizens don’t want—namely, to toil in the garden, not only the gardens of the wealthy, but the agricultural fields. Despite all the rhetoric depicting immigrants as assailants of the economy, the vast agricultural economy of California and much of the rest of the country is propped up by farmworkers from south of the border, documented or not (including many fleeing the post-NAFTA economic collapse of small farms, brought about by the sale of cheap U.S. corn in Mexico; NAFTA opened the borders to goods but not people). Think Virgil, think wetback georgics.
And the desire to secure cheap labor has created an alternative boundary around some of these agricultural gardens, ones that the workers cannot get out of. In 1990, a Southern California flower grower was given a small jail sentence and fined for enslaving undocumented Zapotec Indian immigrants from Mexico (and fear of the Border Patrol keeps many undocumented inhabitants of the Southwest not as outsiders but as insiders, afraid to leave the house or the private property boundaries of the farm they work on, garden captives). It is part of the murderous poetry of these garden w
ars: slaves on a flower farm. Who thought, picking up a dozen roses for love’s sake, that one person’s bed of roses was another’s wall of thorns?
XXII
“A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand!” exclaimed Thoreau. America was founded on a vision of abundance, enough to go around for all. The relatively open immigration policies of past eras are based on this assumption, as was the Homestead Act, which gave away western land to anyone willing to work it—a vision of privatized land but universal ownership that would’ve put everyone inside some garden or other. On a smaller scale, city parks were founded on the interlocking beliefs that nature was uplifting, that open space was democratic, that it was possible and even important for all members of society to find literal common ground.
The great irony of Central Park in its early years was that public money and democratic rhetoric were used to make a place most notable for its concessions to the rich, who promenaded there in carriages, while the poor took to private pleasure gardens where less aristocratic pleasures such as drinking beer and dancing the polka were acceptable. As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig write in their magisterial history of the place: “The issue of democratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people—from the ‘squatters’ of the 1850s to the ‘tramps’ of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s—have always turned to the park land for shelter. . . . The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park posed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans’ commitment to democratic public space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.”
XXIII
This is the same park from which Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York, banned activists in August 2004 during the Republican National Convention, saying that they would be bad for the grass if they gathered on the Great Meadow, as a million antinuclear activists had done some twenty-two years before. New York, in this scenario, became pristine nature to be protected. Despite the overwhelmingly Democratic majority in New York, the media reassured viewers that the anti-Bush contingent was made up of “outsiders.” One of them carried a photograph of his son, Jésus A. Suarez, who had died in Iraq, on a pink sign labeled Bush lied, my son died (and 1000s more), and his face was filled with an unabashed infinite sorrow. One of the peculiarities of the current war is that the economic draft brought in thousands of young people who were not citizens; those who died fighting the “war on terror” were given retroactive citizenship. In death, but only in death, did these young Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans become Americans. One could rearrange the old Western saying about Indians to go something like, “The only naturalized immigrant is a dead immigrant.”
XXIV
But when I flew east for the New York event, the airline screened the film The Day After Tomorrow, a movie in which global warming convulses the Northern Hemisphere with a boomerang cold snap that buries and freezes most of the United States and Europe so fast that millions freeze like popsicles. In the most interesting scene in the movie, groups of gringos wade across the Rio Grande carrying luggage, trying to flee the ecological destruction of El Norte, while the Mexican border patrol tries to keep them out. Finally, in return for a blanket forgiveness of Latin American debt, the Yankees are welcomed in, and the Dick-Cheney-look-alike president admits that the United States has been wrong in its environmental and social policy and vows to try to do better. The Yankee refugees waded across like the U.S. Army deserters of 1846–1848 whom no one on the north side of the border remembers.
XXV
After the Southwest was seized from Mexico, when the gringos from the East began settling the American West, they came to terms with deserts—or didn’t, for a fair number of them died in the terrible crossings of the salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake, the great Nevada sinks into which the rivers vanish, and, most famously, Death Valley. What does it mean that once again the deserts are for dying in, under similar circumstances, despite the existence of railroads and highways and refrigeration and air conditioning and airplanes and interstate waterworks? What do these twenty-first-century reenactments say about the first time these gringos waded, these wanderers died?
XXVI
In August of 2004, a life-size statue of Jesus Christ was found in the Rio Grande, near Eagle Pass, Texas. Border Patrol agents spotted it from the air and thought it was a body, Jesus as an unsuccessful border crosser, a dead alien. They launched a rescue attempt and retrieved the statue, which no one subsequently claimed as lost property. It was regarded by Catholics in the area as a message from God. On the south side of the border, in Piedras Negro, the statue was regarded as the Christ for the undocumented. “He’s telling us he’s alive and he is here with us,” Veronica de la Pena told a newspaper. “He’s trying to tell us that there is hope.”
XXVII
Thirty-nine steps across the border; where do we go from here?
Nonconforming Uses
Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border
[2006]
Somewhere, somehow, decisions were made for us in the United States about how we would live, work, travel, and socialize, the decisions institutionalized as the very architecture and geography of our everyday lives. What were they thinking, those mid-century designers who divided up the world on so many scales as if fearful of mingling, whether it’s the mingling of public and private, work and home, rich and poor, or old and young? Who insisted we should keep building houses for a middle-class nuclear family that is less and less common, rather than flexible spaces to accommodate solo dwellers, single parents, extended families, and communities whose ties soften the bounds between public and private? Who privileged the car so much that the parking lot, driveway, and garage have almost replaced human-scale architectural façades; who let cars eat up public space and public life? Who forgot to build anything for the service sector, even though those workers more than anyone keep a city running?
In recent years, radical architects have begun to question and jettison those decisions. This route hasn’t always resulted in high-profile projects, but it has opened up broad possibilities, a more significant if less visible achievement. At its most provocative, this opening up is a series of challenges to borders and categories, and its most inspired practitioner might be architect Teddy Cruz. That he is based in San Diego is no coincidence, for that city’s southern edge is divided from Tijuana, Mexico, only by the most trafficked border crossing in the world, an ever more militarized line between the first world and the third, between chaotic exuberance and beige reticence; and for him Latin America supplies a lexicon of alternative practices from which the United States could learn.
He says of his fellow architects, “We are just working to insert our refined high aesthetic into an invisible city that has been shaped by developers, economists, and politicians. This invisible city is made of height limitations, setbacks [the rules about how far back from the property line you can build], zoning regulation that is very discriminatory. So what came to be my interest is what I call urbanism beyond the property line.” Cruz would like to knit back together the fragmented places that result from a lack of collaboration between urban planners and architects and to spur a level of social engagement that he thinks is absent in most American cities. To do this, architects have to cross the property line and venture into public space, and then cross still another divide. This latter divide he calls the “the gap between social responsibility and artistic experimentation.”
One cloudy Sunday, he drives me in a friend’s scruffy Miata, the one whose trunkful of blueprints looks like contraband, to his newest work in San Diego. We wind through the city’s central green space, Balboa Park, to the museum complex at its heart. A supreme expression of the enthusiastic mix of Mission Revival and Alhambra fantasia that characterized much prewar California architecture, its buildings form a hollow square with, of course, parking at its center. But much of t
he parking lot is now occupied by Cruz’s pavilion for InSite, the transborder biennale also taking place in Tijuana. The work of installing two tractor-trailer beds and building a tented structure and AstroTurf lounge area was relatively easy; getting permission to do so was not. But breaking rules and opening borders are what Cruz’s work is about. “We closed a parking lot—one of the most sacred parking lots in the city,” he says with satisfaction and amusement. “That was the achievement.”
Cruz is no fan of the way parking lots dominate the American built environment. The reconquest of space for unfettered human interaction might be what he’s after. Or the reinvention of the whole urban fabric. He’s modest but hardly unambitious. A professor at Woodbury College in downtown San Diego, he was recently hired away by the University of California, San Diego. His longtime collaborators in his architecture firm, estudio Teddy Cruz, moved on to other opportunities at the same time, so his own life is a project under construction these days. At forty-three, Cruz is dapper, sturdily built but somehow slight, perhaps from nervous energy, elliptical in his rapid speech, passionate in his enthusiasms, and usually running late. Somehow, as we traverse both sides of the border this Sunday, I begin to feel like Alice being rushed along by the White Rabbit, though the rabbit in this case is not so white. Born and raised in Guatemala City and brought to San Diego at age twenty by his stepfather, Cruz has been here contending ever since with suburbia, sprawl, real estate booms, the border, and other contingencies of contemporary California.
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 11
