http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i32/32a05601.htm
From the issue dated April 13, 2007
Students Explore a Complex Landscape of Fear
By PETER MONAGHAN
Near Douglas, Ariz.
National security demands we keep "illegals" out of the country. Terrorists may be entering alongside Mexicans jumping immigration queues.
So explain members of the self-appointed Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as they and 25 Vassar College students trudge a migrant trail across this parched, cactus-punctuated desert. I have joined the students, visiting points just north and south of the United States-Mexico boundary, for part of their 12-day study trip about border and migration history and politics.
Here, it is hell for humans, but heaven for buzzards. At least no rattler is liable to strike; it's too hot for any sane reptile to venture out. In any case, the Minutemen have their pistols at the ready, in a state where carrying them, loaded, is a right. The guns are not for protection from immigrants. Drug runners may attack, the Minutemen say, the ones who carry AK-47s and who just the other night skinned and ate a rancher's wife's cat, in front of her.
"Ranchers are telling us, 'We're in constant fear out here,'" says Lance Altherr, a Tucson landscaper who heads the Corps's local chapter. Countless migrants enter the country across this land, and many, he says, arrive starving after days on brutal terrain. Often, he adds, the "coyotes" who guide the migrants for considerable fees have abandoned, robbed, abused, or raped their weakened charges.
He and his colleagues are taking the students to what one Minuteman calls "the greatest ecological disaster in America today," and one that makes their hunting of javelina and mule deer less enjoyable: shaded groves and dusty arroyos that are vast middens of migrant passage, littered with belongings piled feet high.
"Don't touch anything," Mr. Altherr cautions. Mexican migrants are introducing untreatable new strains of tuberculosis, and even leprosy, he says. Backpacks, of which there are scores, may conceal hypodermic syringes.
The students ignore the Minutemen's warnings, and later, during their evening "reflection," they talk about poring over piles of water bottles, food packaging, and baby supplies, and finding letters, diaries, and other personal effects.
Several students cry.
"They took us out to look at trash," Margaret Adams tells me. "We saw possessions and stories of all the people we've been meeting this week."
The next day, she and her fellow students walk another trail with Steve Johnston, a volunteer with No More Deaths, a Tucson group dedicated to curbing the sharp increase in deaths in the desert. As the group takes shelter in the begrudging shade of Arizona sycamores and desert ironwoods, Mr. Johnston explains that migrants leave their possessions at rest areas because their coyotes say they must, in preparation for the final rush to pickup spots on roads through the region.
Talk of polluting the desert is laughable, he says, coming from ranchers who run cattle that drink the land dry and stomp it to ruin.
Drug running? Yes, he says, there is plenty, but violence is between rival smugglers. "Drug runners vanish off the trail at the slightest hint of anyone approaching," he says. He has never encountered hostility while carrying food and water to migrants on the trail.
He has, however, found bodies desiccating in the sun. He leads the way to a small memorial to one migrant who perished only a quarter of a mile from a road, and safety. The students stand in silence before a flower that bravely blossoms there, among plastic ones set in stones on scrub.
Why, Mr. Johnston asks, is the United States forcing migrants into harsher funnels of scalding basins and boulder-strewn passes? Studies show that more than 90 percent of illegal Mexican migrants eventually succeed in entering undetected. So, he asks, why not establish an American confederation similar to the European Community and permit entry to any screened applicant?
The students are reading texts from across ideological lines for "The United States-Mexico Border: Nation, God, and Human Rights in Arizona-Sonora," a course that marries geography, history, and theology. One of the course's two instructors is Joseph Nevins, an assistant professor of geography and author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2001). Border patrols originated, the book explains, to combat Chinese who were sidestepping exclusion laws that were not lifted until 1965.
Guided by the staff of Borderlinks, a nonprofit group that conducts tours in and seminars about the border country, the Vassar students cross over to Agua Prieta and Nogales, in Mexico, to meet religiously inspired immigrant-rights activists and staff members of a drug-rehabilitation clinic who replenish desert water stations set up for migrants.
The students also spend two nights with host families, who welcome them warmly to their concrete-block homes that sometimes have no running water but do have cable television. Such are the vagaries of maquiladora (free trade) that has exported American jobs to Mexican border towns.
"We've seen a lot of pain and a lot that none of us had ever seen before," says Hannah Ewert-Krocker, a sophomore from farmland near Cleveland.
"It's very emotional for the students," says Samuel H. Speers, a Presbyterian minister who directs the college's Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and is the course's second instructor. "What we're trying to push on them is that emotion is not enough. If they find something repulsive or upsetting, they need to find a way to articulate that."
A coyote, says Ms. Adams, a senior from rural Maine, said much the same thing: "He told the travelers with him that I was a messenger, and that anything they had to say to the U.S., they should say to me. I told him that many people in the U.S. don't understand how things are, here.
"He told me: 'Yes, but a lot of them do.'"
On the way to and from study sites, I drive for two hours with Joshua Tartakoff, a reedy student with intense eyes and a gentle manner who, I noticed, stood apart at the desert memorial.
Perhaps he has become inured to such sites, he says. For four years, he tended graves in the cemetery his father managed in rural Massachusetts.
Growing up, he hunted for food, with men not unlike the Minutemen here, except that the Northeastern variety had no reason to voice uncharitable thoughts about "aliens." It is too easy to exonerate the Mexican government for failing to do more for its own citizens at home, he says. What's more, he believes the patriotism of the Minutemen is real, however questionable their actions. Many are veterans. He says he can imagine serving in the military alongside them — as a medical officer, because he believes that all Americans share responsibility for American wars.
But that would be after graduation, and a two-year mission. He is Mormon.
After a long silence, he says he has been thinking about what it means to bear witness to the plight of immigrants. "When the Minutemen were talking about the dangers of the desert, all the things that will stick you, the cactuses, I couldn't help thinking about Jesus and the crown of thorns."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
