Up Against the Wall. Peter Laufer
to shining sea, the starkly differentiated Mexican-American borderline drops into the Pacific between San Diego and Tijuana.
8.1Portugal’s Guimarães Castle, built over a thousand years ago, needed no panic room. It is a panic room: windowless. All walls.
8.2The cover sheet for the author’s Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi) file.
8.3The abandoned Green Zone in Nicosia, keeping the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots apart in the last walled city of Europe.
8.4The Cyprus Green Line is a ghost-town swath across the island, a scar leaving echoes of emptiness since 1974.
8.5A police dummy at work on the highway outside Addis Ababa, alongside a makeshift wall of corrugated metal.
9.1The wall of one of the “slave castles” on the Ghana coast. Through holes in the walls like this one captive Africans bound for slavery were loaded on ships headed for the Americas.
12.1Along even the most fraught borderlines in the world—such as Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall—barriers eventually become routine stops for tourists’ smiles at the camera.
12.2The Virgin of Guadalupe provides comfort—faded, peeling and sharing a sun-bleached wall with graffiti tags in El Centro, California.
14.1Sound walls keep much of the roar of traffic confined to the Autostrada without blocking the view at Arno in Tuscany.
14.2The pragmatic use of a Portland, Oregon, wall: advertising.
19.1A retaining wall north of the border in California on Highway 101 holding back a hillside threatening to slide a blockade of mud across the crucial coastal corridor.
19.2The border as business. Modest lodgings like this Calexico motel greet travelers coming across the border from cosmopolitan Mexicali.
21.1A smoke break up against a wall in Varadero, Cuba.
22.1The severe and serpentine borderline wall separating Fortress America from the Global South at Tijuana.
22.2With prototypes for Trump’s wall as a backdrop, a family walks along the borderline on the Tijuana side. Note the little girl riding on the bike: Her angelic face illustrates the front cover of Up Against the Wall.
I am prejudiced to favor immigrants. How can I not be? My father came through Ellis Island. I have the page from the logbook where his arrival was recorded by the immigration officer on duty. He answered all the questions to the satisfaction of the inspector.
“Whether a polygamist?”
“No.”
“Whether an anarchist?”
“No.”
And Question 24:
Whether a person believes in or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law, or who disbelieves in or is opposed to organized government, or who advocates the assassination of public officials, or who advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching disbelief in or opposition to organized government or which teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or who advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers in general, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government because of his or their official character?
“No,” my father answered. It was 1923 and America was still more worried about immigrating anarchists from Middle Europe than Mexicans coming north.
“You’re an American by birth,” my father repeatedly reminded me. “I’m an American by choice.”
Years ago, my wife Sheila and I spent days searching the bowels of the La Porte County courthouse in Indiana, finally finding her grandfather’s naturalization papers.
“It is my bona fide intention,” he swore to the clerk of the La Porte County Court in 1913, “to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.”
We secured the address of the house in what used to be called the Poletown section of La Porte where her mother lived before immigrating to California. Poletown was still on the wrong side of the tracks. The railroad bisects La Porte. South of the ornate courthouse, gracious Victorian mansions line Michigan Avenue under a canopy of well-established trees. But east of downtown and north across the tracks the boxy houses are humble, packed into the rusting factory and warehouse district. The wrong side of the tracks is the usual entry point in an American city for immigrants. And in La Porte, Poletown was filling up with Mexicans (along with other immigrants from south of the Rio Grande), Mexican restaurants and Mexican grocery stores.
Radical Change
In the summer of 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks, I wrote the following essay for the San Francisco Chronicle, a strident call to open the southern U.S. border to Mexicans who wish to come north:
We Americans work hard to keep Mexicans out of the United States, Mexicans who want to wash our dishes and pick our crops. Those crops need picking and those dishes need washing, so workers come north despite our best efforts. America ought to open and demilitarize our southern border immediately, welcome our Mexican neighbors to come and go with the ease of Canadian travelers to this country, and finally put an end to a sordid and shameful chapter in our national history. Not only is such a change in policy the proper moral and logical course of action for us to take, there will be no negative effects to the lives of most Americans.
The current border, from its Berlin Wall-like ghastliness against cities such as Tijuana, to the equally harsh deserts to the east, doesn’t keep Mexicans from coming north and working here illegally. The heavily armed Border Patrol, equipped with the latest hi-tech magic, can’t stop this surge of money-motivated migration. We all know that. Just look in the kitchen of your favorite restaurant, or along the roadside at one of the ad hoc hiring stations where desperate manual laborers congregate around all over the United States. Mexican workers are everywhere north of the border, especially in California. The only Mexicans who choose to come north illegally and don’t are the unlucky who get caught. And many of them just try again moments after they are deported.
Since the passage of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the U.S. Border Patrol has grown into the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with nearly ten thousand officers. Nonetheless, our southern border remains porous.
A friend of mine who works in gardens and construction in Marin County commutes—illegally—from his home in Sinaloa. He’s practiced at the journey, telling me jumping the border at Nogales, hitchhiking up to Tucson, and grabbing a Southwest flight to Oakland is just a necessary part of his work routine. Another friend simply walked into the United States past overworked border guards at a bridge between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. Once on the U.S. side, she piled her hair up high on her head, made up her face, and with her short shorts and entitled attitude, she sashayed to the airport for a flight further north, sure no one would mistake her for a desperate Mexican peasant. She was right, and she’s lived in rural California ever since, raising a family of U.S.-born children.
I have traveled the artificial line between our two countries with Border Patrol officers, and many have acknowledged that they cannot keep determined Mexicans from crossing north.
It’s