La Frontera

"The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.  And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country-- a borer culture."
Gloria Anzaldua

Photograph by Bruce Berman.
The Rio Grande at El Paso/Juarez, 1985
Thanks to the Borderlands Encyclopedia, University of Texas at El Paso.

 

I was born and raised on the Texas-Chihuahua border, a place that is both beautiful and sad.

I loved growing up there.  La frontera is a place where people eat turkey mole on Thanksgiving, where mueblerías, furniture stores,  illustrate their annual sales with images of soldaderas, where every morning people cross the river with tortillas and aguacates to sell in middle-class neighbors on the U.S. side.

La frontera is a place where my elementary school mandated compulsory Spanish lessons beginning in first grade while my primos on the southside were spanked for speaking in that very language on their school grounds.

La frontera is a place where several years ago I was detained by Customs for trying to smuggle a mango, a reddish-golden, sweet-smelling mango, across the border in my purse.  I wanted to bring it home with me to remind me of México, that long-lost sweet homeland of my immigrant parents and grandparents.

La frontera  is where my identical twin sister, Elisa, and I  were born in the mid-fifties in a small medical clinic near downtown Juárez.  She stayed with our mother in Juárez and died of an intestinal virus, still the biggest killer of Mexican children on the border.  I was taken to the U.S. side where I grew up.  Elisa is buried in an unmarked grave in the municipal cemetery in Juárez.  Because of her, I know a part of me will always be on the other side, el otro lado.

In downtown El Paso there is a plaza.  Poor children from Juárez cross each day and hide in the underground bathrooms there, selling sex for survival. No one sees them unless they know to look.  They are invisible, like so much of what happens in the place where two nations and many different groups of people meet.  We have to look below the surface to see what is really happening.

The border is a beautiful and sad place.  Because of this, I have spent a decade studying it and a lifetime learning the stories of its people.