Will the deportations be live-streamed?
After seeing a stranger on the internet ask, “Will the deporations be live-streamed?”
On the plane to Mexico I saw both banks
of the Rio Grande from high above.
My friends pick me up at the airport and we drive to the pyramids at Teotihuacan. On the road we pass through three tollbooths, each one catching us by surprise and unprepared, forcing us to scrounge the floorboards for pesos. The toll workers all laugh at me in particular, the American in the backseat desperately looking for change.
I saw both banks of the Rio Grande,
the water flowed freely between them.
Between the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon I haggle over souvenirs in my haphazard Spanish. I buy a miniature skull for my eldest son, a reminder of severed heads of sacrificed children tumbling down pyramid stairs. Sun and moon earrings for my daughter. A cougar made of bull bone for my middle son. I know that what I offer my American children is a confused mess of sacrifice and barter.
Water moves freely, yes, but not with agency:
It only knows how to flow to the ocean.
The souvenir sellers are packing up for the day and they follow us toward the gate. A woman walks alongside us, smiling, offering her final deals of the day for her necklaces and bracelets. She invites us later tonight to a cave she knows, a sacred place where a shaman can cleanse us of our troubles.
But to say water does not have agency
risks denying that water is relational.
Riverbanks as militarized borders. Appeasing modern gods by casting children into cages. Tossing fathers into live-streams for the crime of their skin, parading them onto planes. My fellow citizens jeering in the comments section. I cannot be cleansed of these troubles when I cannot untangle I am my government but this is not me. I refuse the invitation to be cleansed of my troubles, opting to let them sink in for now.
I saw both banks of the Rio Grande
and the river relating the space between us.
This is not the first time that our country has intitated a mass deportation. Mexicans in particular have been the scapegoats for what’s troubling the United States time and time again. But we repeat our history because we barely learn it.
I said above that people are being deported for the “crime of their skin.” Some might disagree and insist that the immigration crackdown and deportations are focused solely on convicted criminals or those who are in the United States illegally. But in practice, ICE and Border agents are deporting individuals because they appear to be “Mexican.” In some instances this includes U.S. citizens. This also includes people with legal documentation to be here. This racialized approach to deportation has a long history in the U.S. and echoes the mass deportations of Mexicans in the previous century including Herbert Hoover’s American Jobs for Real Americans campaign and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback.
Resources: American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigrant Justice Center
What I’m reading: “The Deportation Machine” by William Finnegan, Inventing Latinos by Laura E. Gomez