As we head into April, the actual border remains quiet, although the administration continues to militarize, and is sending tanks to Fort Bliss which straddles New Mexico near El Paso. There are also immediate plans to build a camp at Fort Bliss to hold 10, 000 people awaiting deportation.
Locally, everywhere, people are focusing on ICE activity and how its insidious presence is infiltrating communities and snatching citizens and terrorizing families. PAY ATTENTION wherever you live, and do what you can. I know we all feel rather helpless and hopeless.
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Suzanne Dulle, who many of you know, recently compiled a reading list of books with border insights. If you are tired or overwhelmed by the daily trauma of the news, these may give you a more in-depth historical context to what we are experiencing. A deeper dive but more researched and personal.
THE LAND OF OPEN GRAVES, Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015) by Jason de León
“In his gripping and provocative debut, Jason de León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time – the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.”
THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER, Dispatches from the Border (2018) by Francisco Cantú
“His mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners are posted to remote and smuggling corridors, where they learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think about where the stories go from there…. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River makes urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.”
AGAINST THE WALL, My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist (2022) by Jenn Budd “Jenn Budd, the only former U.S. Border Patrol agent to continually blow the whistle on this federal agency’s rampant corruption, challenges us — as individuals and as a nation — to face the consequences of our actions. Her journey offers a vital perspective on the unfolding moral crisis of our time. She also gives harrowing testimony about rape culture, white privilege, women in law enforcement, LGBTQ issues, mental illness, survival and forgiveness.”
UNSETTLING, The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border, (2023) by Gilberto Rosas
“On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, TX. … Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administrations’s brutal crackdown on migration — and the massacre in El Paso.”
CROSSING THE LINE, Finding America in the Borderlands (2024) by Sarah Towle
“It was family separation and “kids in cages” that drove Towle to the US southern border. On discovering the many-headed hydra that is the US immigration system — and the heroic determination of those caught under its knee — she could never look away again. Crossing the Line charts Sarah’s journey from outrage to activism to abolition as she exposes, layer by “broken” layer, the global deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation complex that is failing everyone — save the profiteers and demagogues who benefit from it.”
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~Barbara