Division and Limitation

One night on the Tohono O’odham reservation, there was a knock on
Morgana Wallace’s door.

An artist from back East, Wallace had only recently moved West to
join her boyfriend, a teacher at Tohono O’odham High School. She didn’t
yet know that nighttime knocks are common on the rez, where numerous
migrants trek by on their way north from the border.

She and her boyfriend opened the door to find a young Mexican
man.

He was alone. He’d gotten hurt somewhere on the giant O’odham
Nation, a prickly outback of almost 4,500 square miles. He could only
limp, not walk, and his friends had gone on without him. Now all he
wanted was to go home, back to Mexico.

He asked the couple to call the Border Patrol.

The encounter, described in The Border Project exhibition at
the Arizona State Museum, puzzled Wallace. Why would a migrant give up
after traveling so many miles?

The artist later got a chance to immerse herself in the
contradictions on the Arizona-Mexico border. The Smithsonian was
staging Borders, Fences and Gates, a traveling exhibition, and
Wallace was picked to come up with a local component. She put together
The Border Project, an installation of photographs, art and
spoken word, created in conjunction with art students from three high
schools where kids experience the border crisis every day.

Hailing from Ajo High School, Tohono O’odham High School and Cobach
High School in Sonoyta, Sonora, just south of Lukeville, the students
live within a nexus of borders. The Ajo kids live in a small town just
west of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and 43 miles north of Mexico. More
than 200 Border Patrol agents are stationed in Ajo, along with all
their attendant paraphernalia, including buzzing helicopters and racing
SUVs.

Kids on the rez have plenty to deal with, too. At one point, the
Nation calculated 15,000 migrants were crossing every month, and its
hothouse corridors have claimed more migrant lives than any other
immigration trails in Arizona. The Border Patrol races up and down the
roads, and the United States has used vehicle barriers to seal up the
O’odham’s 75-mile border with Mexico. Tribal members can no longer pass
freely to their lands—and their families—on the other
side.

The Mexican kids in Sonoyta see American tourists routinely coming
into their territory on their way to Puerto Peñasco, and
migrants turning up to try to cross the line. They also witness the
elderly O’odham in their communities having trouble getting over the
border to the U.S. Indian Health Service hospital at Sells.

When Wallace asked these border kids what the la frontera means to them, they were blunt. Their recorded voices, in O’odham,
Spanish and English, are broadcast into the museum gallery.

“It’s a division, a limitation,” said one Mexican girl.
“Dinero,” said another.

“Death and rights,” an American kid said.

An O’odham had an insight particular to a people whose traditional
lands have been sliced apart by the vehicle barriers.

“When the border was first built, it caused some families to be
separated from each other,” the student wrote. When the kid wrote it
out, he illustrated the sentence with a stick drawing of a large
family, parents and kids, lined up as though trapped by an invisible
barrier.

Wallace also got the kids to do visual art, and their clay works and
crayon drawings depict the mayhem that surrounds them. (The Arizona
State Museum show only includes The Border Project, not the rest
of the Smithsonian exhibition.) One boy drew a pile of skulls,
representing the migrant dead yielded up in the furnace-like
deserts.

Somebody made a fine little line drawing of the ubiquitous Border
Patrol SUV, and somebody else (all the artists remain anonymous) made a
fired-clay plaque: It pictures a stick figure crawling on hands and
knees through the ocher sands, a brown mountain in the distance, a
blazing sun overhead.

A girl drew a coil of black barbed wire over a wall, and an O’odham
boy drew an array of floating blue ceramic pots, in traditional style.
One slice of unfired clay sums up the tragedy of the border in a few
simple strokes. Crosses surround the words “No Trespassing.”

Jewel Fraser Clearwater, an artist from the Curley School artists’
community in Ajo, where Wallace also now lives, made evocative color
portraits of each of the kids. In her photos, the students’ young faces
are framed by their artwork.

At the center of the room, Wallace has arranged fence-like
panels—as ugly as Homeland Security’s border walls—and
covered them with chain link and black screen. Reflecting the violence
and chaos of the border, she’s cut up the students’ written texts and
paper artworks and collaged their fragments to the wall, in between the
diamond shapes of the chain link.

The clay works survive intact on little shelves, and the photos of
the students’ fresh faces glisten along the tops of the walls. Wallace
has made one fence for each high school, and she’s joined the three
barriers together in a pivot at a central point, making a visual plea
for unity in the divided borderlands.

Many of the students are critical of the wall and the Border Patrol.
(“I think of the border as a waste of money,” said one girl. “The
Border Patrol, they’re useless.”) They’re also unhappy with Americans’
attitudes toward migrants. (“Who’s the illegal alien, Pilgrim?” another
student asked.) But not everybody blames the Americans for the problems
of the border.

“I think of Mexicans overpopulating our country,” one Ajo boy said
on the recordings. “I think of how drugs are getting through the
border. The Border Patrol tries to stop it. I just don’t think they
have enough support.”

Another student targeted the environmental devastation caused by the
massive migration—and massive enforcement—in a fragile
desert. The artist crafted a clay coyote vehicle, crowded with
migrants, smashing down every saguaro in its way.

But all of the students are conscious of the agonies that surround
them daily. A Mexican spoke of the families split apart, and an
American girl noted out that “Mexicans cross the border and suffer, and
some don’t even make it.”

Her point is well taken. The total of known migrant deaths for the
fiscal year that just ended is 203, a full 20 bodies more than last
year.

Death creates a new border for families to cross, one perceptive boy
said. Migrants’ stories often end in death, he said, “leaving their
families to cross another border, an emotional border.”

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.