JE #5 How the borderlands history repeats itself

First and foremost, the documentary brought me to tears. I didn’t know that Pima County in Arizona is one of the deadliest places along the U.S. and Mexico border. In reading the article and watching the “Bodies on the Border” documentary, I was able to connect what is happening now along the border to the experiences of las mujeres from the Opata tribe in Kathleen Alcala’s The Flower in the Skull. Many of the people in the Opata tribe were forced to relocate away from their homes in Arizona. While they were forced to relocated, they had to travel by foot often times without food or water. Many of the folks who migrate by foot from Mexico to the U.S. are often times left without food or water. As we were able to see in the documentary, those are the main causes of the deaths of our peoples. The womyn who started the project to find these missing bodies, mentioned that “the deaths are teaching us about what human rights means in a globalized economy.” (Robin Reineke). Most of the people who cross the border do so because of the extreme economic hardships in their country. Some have no idea of the risks involved in doing so. The U.S. did nothing to help the indigenous folks then, and they are not helping those who migrate today, either. I believe that these borderlands histories are repeating themselves and I hear these stories from some of my clients, about their near-death experiences while crossing the border and walking along the dessert. They are very real and the U.S. is not doing a thing about it.