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What the Indocumentados Leave Behind Lost and Found in the Arizona Desert By JOHN ROSS El Paso. Texas
The Buenos Aires Wilderness Sanctuary is a popular crossing for the indocumentados as well as for bioregional critters. Following an old creek bed, Molly found ample evidence of recent two-footed travel discarded water bottles, a new backpack, a green fleece jacket. When she picked up the jacket which was small, a child's size really but the petit Las Cruces librarian's too, she found a partially melted lipstick Lady Revlon, Candy-Apple Red in one of the pockets, along with a cheap metal mascara case containing 12 soft earth tones and a tiny mirror inside. When she peered into the mirror, she half expected to see the person whose things these were staring back at her. Molly could not shake her curiosity. The jacket had been recently discarded, perhaps just a few hours earlier when the sun rose full over the desert. Where was the girl/woman who had worn it now? Had the Migra caught up with her? Had she been handed from one pollero to the next and left to die out here where there was nowhere to hide and everywhere to hide? She must have wanted to look pretty when she arrived Molly thought about the lipstick: "she must have wanted to look pretty when she arrived." If she arrived As the spring desert heats up again for another deadly season of would-be crossings, what the indocumentados leave behind in their excruciatingly dangerous trek into El Norte is mute testimony to the "desgraciada pobreza" ("disgraceful poverty" a popular corrido) that motors their migration. It is also an object of fascination for Maeve Hickey, an Irish artist who curated the small but intriguing exhibit "Lost & Found" for the Paso del Norte Museum on the University of Texas-El Paso campus last autumn, a show heavily freighted with the deadliness of the geography in which her findings were made, the notorious "Coridor de la Muerte" ("Corridor of Death") on the other end of Molly's Arizona out in the unpardoning desert west of Yuma where hundreds have perished from dehydration under the brutal sun in this waterless tract abutting the O'dum Indian reservation. Corridor of Death The spectacular beauty of this killing field over 400 have died out here in the past ten years (the record one-day kill is 14 dead at Cabeza Prieta in 2001) — is darkened by the shadows of those who do not survive. Indeed, whether the objects collected by Hickey belong to the living or the dead or the desert itself is the tension upon which this small display of ordinary objects turns. Prowling around such picturesque locales as Growler Valley where the rattlers and the scorpions slither and roam, she uncovers a single white high top baby shoe, two emptied cans of Clemente Jacques Chilies Vinagres, a flattened pack of Boots with three filter tips graciously extended. Each is now encased in a plastic museum cube or case, instant Duchampesque artifacts in the anthropology of desperation. Both have large empty plastic water bottles attached. A baseball cap and tee-shirt distributed by the DIF the Mexican Integral Family Development Directorate are folded into each other to suggest a dissecated cadaver. In one case, a homemade bicycle with kind of square wheels. In another, a store-bought bike and a baby stroller are crammed together in an airless space both have large empty plastic water bottles attached. The viewer tracks the young mother defiantly pushing her baby into this deadly terrain. Pile of wrinkled birth certificates On the walls are photographs of lizard tracks and migrant trails, of the "Circle of Eight", a plot divided in half by carefully placed stones inside the semi-circle other stones are arranged in a figure eight with all the precision of a Smithson earthwork. The site is said to mark the tomb of eight who perished there. At the other end of the life cycle, Hickey has laid out a pile of wrinkled birth certificates in a museum case. Placed atop this wedding cake of crushed, discarded documents is the "certificado de nacimiento" for one Gildardo Diaz Gonzalez, born July 11th 1984 in Bella Vista Chiapas, Mexico's southern-most state and now the leading source of out-migration in the region. Indocumentados often discard their identifying documents before setting out in the desert so as not to be cited by the Migra for repeat offenses. But it is the centerpiece of "Lost & Found", a roll of undeveloped film the Irish artist found in the San Pedro river wash that finally puts a face to the bearers of these objects. 'Quincenera', the coming-out party that marks the passage of teen-age Mexican girls into womanhood As the viewer moves from one anonymous piece to the next — a twisted tube of Colgate, a small stuffed doll — frames from the developed role flash in loop upon the museum walls: a "quincenera", the coming-out party that marks the passage of teen-age Mexican girls into womanhood, set incongruously against the lush backdrop of tropical Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz. The scenes are poignantly "tipico": young girls in store-bought evening gowns waltzing on the town plaza, the aunts chowing down at the festive board, a stern grandmother posing with each of her grandchildren. Who is the actual traveler? Although Hickey found identity cards along with the film, she has received no response to her letters to Veracruz. In her remarks at the inauguration of the exhibit, Maeve Hickey insisted that human beings do not migrate: "birds migrate humans begin journeys." She compares the indocumentados' heroic odysseys to those which Homer celebrated. She draws similarities to her Irish expatriate compatriot Samuel Beckett, self-exiled in an interior landscape that seems to be part of the greater desert. I write you this so that you can be happy to know that I love you so much and already I miss you And she marvels at what she has found out there: a pile of business cards meticulously stacked upon a flat rock in the middle of the wilderness as if they were left behind for the four winds to hand out; a black bra flapping from the upturned arms of a giant Saguaro cactus; a woman's comb with course hair still knotted in its teeth; a love letter from a young woman to her "novio" that begins like the most heart-aching corrido ever written: "I write you this so that you can be happy to know that I love you so much and already I miss you" What has been retrieved from the wilderness cuts to the quick but does it constitute criminal evidence or cultural anthropology or found art or art at all? A friend returned from election watchdogging in Tucson last fall reported Dia de los Muertos altars at "El Tiradito" ("The Throwaway"), a border art space, also featured the discarded clothing of the indocumentados. Sothby's could be next. 'Desgraciada pobreza' The Paseo Al Norte Museum, a peripatetic entity that sponsored "Lost & Found" is dedicated to recording the passage north of the border in much the same way as Ellis Island documents the Jewish diaspora to New York, explains UTEP professor Jon Amastae. In a curious way, the project sits at the other end of the seesaw from the nearby Border Patrol museum set atop a lonely mountain road overlooking the "frontera" about ten miles out of El Paso and crammed with badges and portraits of famous desperados and heroic agents, their saddles and six shooters and scrapbooks, samples of contraband and stuffed horses. Together, these two museums tell the true story of what my friend, the west San Antonio corrido writer Salome Gutierrez calls that "desgraciada pobreza" which pushes the migrantes ever-northwards. U.S. immigration policy to chase them in a strategy to "up the risks" of migration Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed by the first Bush and the now reviled Carlos Salinas in 1992, over 4000 Mexican workers, many of them campesinos displaced from the land by NAFTA agricultural imports, have died trying to cross that line to find a job no North American citizen will work. They have drowned in the All-American Canal and the river that Mexico calls the Rio Bravo and the U.S. the Rio Grande. They have been bitten by vipers running through south Texas, suffocated to death in boxcars, died in car crashes after high speed chases or simply been shot down by the Migra and their volunteer vigilantes. They have fallen into ravines or froze to death in the winter snow up in the Rumarosa, the most dangerous part of the border to which it is U.S. immigration policy to chase them in a strategy to "up the risks" of migration. And mostly they have dropped out there in the cruel desert never to rise again as the vultures circle slowly in the spotless heavens above. It is a daunting task to make sense out of all this let alone art. At least Hickey succeeded in achieving the art part. John Ross is at home on the Aztec island of
Tenochtitlan nursing a bum back. Pray for him — and buy his latest instant cult classic "Murdered By Capitalism — A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left".
It is in Aeschylus's Oresteia that we find the fulcrum on which law pivots from custom and religion to become a social contract, to which, in theory, at least, we all are parties. Human beings, not the gods, rationally have created a system of dispute resolution, to which we subordinate our irrational, piratical proclivities. From law as custom, symbolized by the titan Themis, whose blindfolded statue we place atop our court houses, come the impulses we seek through law to institutionalize: and no custom is more universally observed among primitive cultures than the obligation of hospitality to strangers. When the scope of expected rights was extended to protect the alien as well as the familiar, concrete custom became abstract justice. Our attitude toward foreigners thus measures the amplitude or meanness of our political vision, and probably predicts our prospects for survival. The Athenians loved jealously their democracy Aeschylus, who died in 456 BC, wrote at the pinnacle of Greek power and optimism, a time when the aliens in Athens, called "metics," were honored, and invited to participate in the major religious festivals of the city. The Athenians enjoyed a prosperous mercantile economy, powered by the genius of artisans from all over the "known" world. Like the Americans after World War II, the Athenians believed that their recent victory over the mighty Persians was more than a military victory; they felt it was also a moral triumph of civilization over barbarism. It was the time when the arts, literature, philosophy, architecture, which we now consider the glory of ancient Greece, were flowering. The Athenians, like the founding fathers of the United States (in spite of slave owning and patriarchy) loved jealously their democracy, and therefore prized debate and persuasion over raw force. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus proudly celebrated his country's supremacy — its civil society, in which all free men participated; its cosmopolitan economy; and the wisdom of its supreme court. By the end of the century, believing themselves invincible, having just defeated the evil empire of the Spartans with its oligarchic tyranny, the Athenians had sent their armed forces throughout their world. They traded their democracy for imperialism. Their over extended armies were destroyed in Sicily and a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis enforced the rule of a puppet oligarchy on the city of Athena. The cost of military adventure had bankrupted the Athenians. The democracy was thriving when Aeschylus wrote, but, even then, growing militarism augured the usurpation of justice by meretricious arrogance. Their cruelty grew with their military successes Despite submitting themselves to the rule of law within Athens, the patriots remained, collectively, pirates in their relationship to the rest of the world, launching preemptive attacks on their neighbors on various pretexts, invariably with the true objectives of controlling resources and trade routes, and consolidating military dominance. Their cruelty grew with their military successes. It might be argued that the love of law made Athens great and the abandonment of law brought her down. With the loss of empire, wealth, democracy, and freedom, the city was reduced to a Balkan mediocrity, where a government preoccupied with national security regarded strangers with the same suspicion with which timid people all over the world view foreigners. That an evolution of law makes possible in the nation an increasingly complex and prosperous economy and a democratic society, is evident in ancient as much as in modern history, and the destruction of the nation coincides with the end of that evolution. Greek legends referred to a murky time before there was writing, a time when gods copulated with mortals, and human beings sacrificed their children to appease the appetites of the gods. The Odyssey is such a legend, and Homer describes how, after the sack of Troy, the great hero Odysseus, before heading home, makes a brief detour to attack the inoffensive coastal city of Ismaros, where he murders the men and enslaves the women. Piracy was an honorable vocation, and Homer describes the raid with the nonchalance we would expect to find in a Wall Street Journal report of how a modern tycoon made billions by speculating on international currency fluctuations. Piracy exclusive prerogative of the state By the time of Aeschylus, though, piracy had become, as it is today, the exclusive prerogative of the state. Obviously, international trade could not flourish on seas patrolled by freebooters. There is no reason to suppose that genetic human nature had changed, but mankind in the Greek world had made the conscious election to suppress individualistic privateering for the sake of the mercantile economy. The next logical step in creating a world of peace and prosperity would have been to elect to subordinate the larcenous proclivities of the state to a system of justice, but that step the Athenians were unwilling to take. The question of justice arises only between parties of equal strength. The strong do what they can, and the weak submit Thucydides, himself a general in the Peloponnesian war, reports how the irrational rapine of the ancient order reasserted itself when the Athenians refused to submit themselves as a nation to be ruled by law. An Athenian delegation to the island of Melos demanded the surrender of the city. The neutral Melians replied that they wished only to be left alone, and, being a democratic state like Athens, they claimed the right to be treated justly. The Athenians stated their case bluntly: "You know and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parties of equal strength, and that the strong do what they can, and the weak submit." Preferred force to legal argument The Melians replied with the argument that it was in the interest of the Athenians to submit to the rule of law: "As you ignore justice and have made self-interest the basis of discussion, we must take the same ground, and we say that in our opinion it is in your interest to maintain a principle which is for the good of all — that anyone in danger should have just and equitable treatment and any advantage, even if not strictly his due, which he can secure by persuasion.The Athenians preferred force to legal argument, and besieged Melos, which fell a year later. They killed all the men and sold the women and children as slaves. Eventually, however, the fall of the Athenian empire resulted in a crushing punishment that might have been a lesson to the world. Thousands of Greek prisoners of war perished in Sicily in quarries used as concentration camps. It was, obviously, a lesson that subsequent military adventurers — Romans, Franks, Turks, Japanese, Germans — like the Athenians, confident in their invincibility, refused to learn. Unlike writers of modern television dramas, Greeks understood psychological and material antecedents of murder may be complicated In Aeschylus's Oresteia, the custom of blood vendetta yields to the deliberate choice to subordinate the irrational, personal appetite for vengeance to institutional rationality. Orestes arrives in Athens pursued by the Furies, who are crying out for revenge, because Orestes has murdered his mother. Unlike writers of modern television dramas, however, the Greeks understood that the psychological and material antecedents of murder may be complicated. The killing of Orestes's mother Clytemnestra is the result of the curse that has haunted the house of Atreus for generations. To Aeschylus, the Trojan war was ancient history, "embroideries out of old mythologies," as Yeats said. In the long ago era of human sacrifice, Tantalus of Lydia served morsels of his roasted son Pelops to his guests, the gods, who had dropped in for a visit. The outraged gods sent Tantalus to the underworld, where he is tantalized in eternal hunger and thirst, and put Pelops back together, except for a shoulder, which they replaced with ivory, because Aphrodite, more credulous than the others, had taken a bite of the feast. Blood must be paid with blood Pelops's son Atreus shared his grandfather's penchant for practical jokes, and regaled his brother Thyestes on the flesh of two of Thyestes's sons, which led Thyestes to curse Atreus and his descendants. Atreus also fathered Agamemnon and Menelaus, the generals of the Greek army in the siege of Troy. Before the Greek ships could leave for Troy, however, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to still the headwinds that prevented their sailing. Iphigenia's mother Clytemnestra took offense and, with the assistance of Thyestes's surviving son, killed Agamemnon when he returned from Troy ten years later. Thus it fell to Agamemnon's son Orestes to avenge the death of his father. The curse of the house of Atreus in essence was the inviolable custom that blood must be paid with blood. That custom was embodied in the Furies, who came into being long before the gods were born. Resolved when humanism replaces custom as the source of law Orestes is trapped in the curse when he arrives in Athens. Clytemnestra warns him against murdering her, "Watch out — the hounds of a mother's curse will hunt you down." But, says Orestes, "How to escape a father's if I fail?" The dilemma is resolved when humanism replaces custom as the source of law. The furies complain, Such is your triumph, you young gods,The Athenians do not deny the irrational, the vengeful and angry part of the human psyche, but they seek to conform it to law, to what modern Americans would call "due process." Athena reminds them: But they [the Furies] have their destiny too,Athena reconciles the claims of the curse, irrational man's lust for revenge, with the social order without which man's irrationality will destroy him: She appeals to the Areopagus, a human court, the institutionalization of rationality — a jury — for the management of irrationality. She says: My contestants,Subordination of fury to law After a trial, Orestes is acquitted, because he already has been punished enough. The importance of the process, however, is not so much the triumph of compassion over anger as the subordination of fury to law. Even an alien may claim justice in the jurisdiction of Athens. The visceral custom of family based blood feud is replaced with an abstract entitlement of all men to due process. The Furies, fittingly, are transformed and renamed "Eumenides," as the thirst for justice, channeled through institutional rationality, is acclaimed guardian of the happiness of Athens. Aeschylus's city, then, is the model for the world, and its fortune is bound with its treatment of its guests. The play ends with a triumphant procession, and foremost among the metics, the resident aliens, are the Furies, themselves. Athena reminds the Athenians: Exalt them always, you exalt your land,Athenians could not appreciate the argument of the Melians Though it was the genius of the Athenians voluntarily to institutionalize the submission of individual appetites to rationality, of the infantile self interest of individual pirates to the order that made national peace and prosperity possible for a time, it was the failure to take the next step and subordinate national piracy to the rule of law that doomed the empire to the crushing punishment that should have been a lesson to all the world. What is appalling is that the Athenians could not appreciate the argument of the Melians. Like the Persians before them, the Athenians were blinded by their own magnificence, convinced that they never could be defeated, and so refused to subject themselves to the rule of justice, which it had been their genius to create. Yet only the powerful, like the Athenians, could establish the rule of law over the piratical ambitions of nations, precisely by making the same rational choice they had made to control individual crimes — to submit to it themselves. Conscious choice to rationalize international dispute resolution There is no reason that human beings could not make the conscious choice to rationalize international dispute resolution by voluntary submission to a criminal tribunal, quite as logically as they consciously have chosen instead to perpetuate the law of tooth and claw. We may elect to persist in our choice to torment our guests and exhaust our resources in endless brutality. But why should we? In an era when the pirate among us, United States Department of Homeland Security, keeps hundreds of innocuous foreigners in jails for months and years, when the rule of law domestically is in doubt, it may appear naïve to hope that the mightiest of nations will submit to the jurisdiction of higher courts. But if rational self interest guides us, we will do so. We have a choice Aeschylus reminds us in the story of a refugee whose search for asylum leads to the foundation of our modern concepts of law that we have a choice. The very last lines of the Oresteia resound with optimism that justice and necessity may be united by the deliberate labors of human beings: This peace between Athena's people and their guestsIt is not yet too late. John Wheat Gibson practices immigration law in Dallas, Texas. He can be reached at: jwg [at] jwgpc.com Sources: Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Anchor Books, 1963. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin Classics, 1977. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated and edited by Richard Livingstone, Oxford University Press, 1960.
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