JE #5: How Borderlands History Repeats Itself

When watching “Bodies on the Border” I was shocked and disgusted at the violent and dismal realities for undocumented immigrants trying to cross the U.S. - Mexico border because I had never heard of this phenomenon before.  Though when I reflect on it, when have brown individuals ever warranted much attention in the media outside of liberal or conservative appeals to certain constituencies or stereotypical constructions of our culture?  I imagine that these movements across the border are similar to Concha and the Opata in that they struggle to find ways to survive to a changing, hostile, anti-brown, and anti-indigenous environment which was once theirs.  Numerous times throughout the novel, Concha struggled to establish a stable niche for herself after she was forced out of her home via anti-indigenous expulsion and decimation by Mexican military forces.  Additionally, when Shelly found the Opata at the end of the story, she found that integration and assimilation were the survival strategies upon which Concha and the Opata depended on to navigate their new worlds.  Likewise, these immigrants also risk death in their flight, likely in order to escape economic or political to a land which was once there’s but is now hostile to their skin, bodies, and existence.  Moreover, for the ones that did happen to escape death, they face cultural and ideological annihilation through racism, cultural schizophrenia, assimilation and more.     

The deaths of these people also bear much similarity to the interpersonal and institutional hostility demonstrated in Arnoldo de Leon’s Greasers.  While America no longer lynches Mexicans and other Latinos, these deaths can either be seen as incidental collateral consequences of the militarization of the border or as an intended but invisible result of the escalation of border security, after all the result is the same: there are not “illegals” crossing into the U.S. because they die trying.