JE #5

                Marc Silver, the author of the article and director of the short documentary Bodies on the Border, makes it very clear that the immigrant struggles along the United States-Mexican border are not unique to our neighboring nations.  I deeply respect the seriousness and frankness with which he approaches the topic.  The worldwide immigrant struggle does not, of course, lessen the importance of the individual’s battle.  All along the Arizona-Mexico border, immigrants are perishing because of the dangerous borderland conditions.  Upping the degree of militarization along the border may be called well-intentioned, but it cannot be called a guarantee.  The danger is still very real and very prominent so long as there is a market for cheap labor. 

The troubles of the Opata people in Kathleen Alcalá’s The Flower in the Skull were not driven by the call for cheap workers, but were driven by the desires of greedy nations.  The Opata of Concha’s time were a peaceful people, keeping their distance from the Apache in order to reduce the amount of strife between peoples.  Through the story of Concha’s lineage, we learn that the Opata were overtaken by the Spanish and then by the Mexican.  Concha is forced from her home, from her safety net, into a world she doesn’t know or understand.  It violates her and then binds her and her descendants up with social mores in order to keep them from violating it back.  Concha makes her place in the Mexican world, but that, too, is eventually overrun by the American.  The continual conquest of land and people made the tale of Concha’s lineage one of constant immigration.  They were immigrants because the borders crossed them.  Concha saw horrors in her trek from her homeland to that of the new life her conqueror handed her – dead bodies strewn about in a storm, the greenery her only shelter.  She does not sound unlike the young Dayani Cristal being found under a cicada tree in Silver’s feature-length documentary.