The border wall isn't just a dividing line – it's a monument against racial progress | Michelle García
Alongside a one-room church, surrounded by farmland and a tangle of south Texas chaparral, a former slave master and a freed slave lay buried. Husband and wife. Nathaniel Jackson was a white man born into privilege on his father’s plantation. Matilda Hicks once labored on a Georgia plantation. In 1857, Matilda and Nathaniel, along with their children, six other mixed-race families and 12 freed slaves, set off from Alabama and settled near the Rio Grande, a few miles from San Juan, Texas.
On a cool Sunday afternoon, on the cemetery grounds, Ramiro Ramirez, still wearing a suit from church services, lifted his grandson, Liam, in the air. The redheaded boy rang the bell mounted atop the church, a replica of the one built by Nathaniel, his ancestor. Seven generations of Liam’s kin rest in the graveyard.
“Nathaniel and Matilda escaped racism and prejudice and came here,” said Ramirez, 70, a fifth-generation Jackson. If lawmen or bounty hunters showed up, out to capture black people, the families were just a sprint away from Mexico, where slavery was illegal. The newly formed border amounted to safety and a peaceful start.
In the popular imagination and political debates, the border is a fixed perimeter that defines a stark binary. It is a place of violence and insecurity, one that cleaves apart “us” from “them”. But the borderland of south Texas was historically and continues to be a site of racial pluralism and resistance to white supremacy. This land is not rooted in an English colonial history; it eludes the neat categories that both conservatives and liberals exploit. Its identity is shaped by a multitude of cultures and races. And the fluidity of border life has long represented an affront to the administrators of a nation that from its inception have drawn a bright, brutal line around racial groups.
The latest expression of this line-drawing is Trump’s border wall; the US government plans to construct 104 miles of it in the Rio Grande valley beginning this year. Many in the region consider the wall a monument to a national identity that not only excludes but marginalizes them. And their opposition to the project, their insistence on racial progress, is part of an age-old movement of resistance by border residents to institutional aggression. “They are going to take all of this,” Ramirez told me, stretching his arms wide across the gravesites belonging to his father and Jackson ancestors. He pointed to the stakes where surveyors had marked off the path of one of the first sections of the wall. It’s unclear if the wall will run over the bodies or if they will be exhumed.
This land is not rooted in an English colonial history; it eludes the neat categories that both conservatives and liberals exploit
“The nation’s boundaries of belonging are projected on the US-Mexico border,” said the historian Monica Muñoz Martinez, author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. “This is a line of demarcation that is literally saying: ‘This is what America is,’” she said. It is saying: America is white.
Meanwhile, according to cultural geographer Daniel D Arreola, deep south Texas may possibly represent the nation’s “largest ethnic subregion”. The first people to make the valley, which is really a delta, their home were Native tribes. Africans reportedly arrived in the 1500s as fugitives from a wrecked slave ship. Conquest resulted in the mixing of Spanish and Native people: mestizos. Freed and escaped slaves came to live in the valley, as did white and black civil war soldiers deployed to the area and European immigrants. Black men and women who lived with the Jacksons married into Mexican and Tejano families.
Others have preferred to see the border as a limit that divides, and a wasteland. In the same year that the Jacksons found opportunity and openness here, 1857, New York writer Frank Law Olmsted described the region as “valueless”. The riverbank where the Jacksons fostered a multiracial community Olmsted determined was nothing more than a barrier, “separating nationalities and protecting from encroachment, at least temporarily, the retreating race”. In the decades that followed, a new racial order was imposed: based on white supremacy, backed by the strong arm of the law, and used to justify violence against and swindle land from what the state saw as members of a “mongrel race”.
The clash is ongoing. America’s racist legacy is manifest in the government’s latest effort to seize family-owned land to construct a wall that has yet to be proven effective. Its opponents are facing off against what they see as a assault on their very way of life. Members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, whose ancestors lived along the Rio Grande for hundreds of years, have built a campground at the Jackson church and cemetery in protest. Native people, said the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe’s chairman, Juan Mancias, have largely been erased by a nation that perceives the border in the context of rigid dualities: citizens and non-citizens, whites and Latinos.
In March, the tribe joined Ramirez in a lawsuit against the federal government to stop the construction of the wall in the valley and protect what they argue is sacred land. “We are all part of the oppressive colonization that has occurred,” Mancias told me as we toured the campsite.
Last month, Mancias led a prayer vigil on a levee in the path of the proposed wall. During the ceremony, a group of “winter Texans”, mostly white northerners who winter in the valley, drove up in their golf carts and tried to get through the crowd. When Marianna Treviño-Wright, director of the National Butterfly Center, asked them to wait, they sped away, chanting: “Build the wall!” Treviño-Wright, who is white, told me that some winter Texans treat the border like a colonial playground and cross to Mexico when they need vanilla or Viagra.
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Treviño-Wright is among the transplants who have embraced the border’s unique landscape, its variability. She was four years old when she arrived from South Carolina to the region with her mother, who had married a Mexican-born doctor. In the 1960s, her family could walk into a restaurant together in the valley and be seated. Not so further north. “My father would remind us that we lived behind the tamale curtain and the rest of the world would never understand,” she said.
To be clear, the borderland is not a utopia. Class and wealth inequality is endemic. Not everyone in Ramirez’s family has embraced the news, delivered by a local historian, that their ancestor was a freed black slave. Locals, fed up with border policing and national scrutiny, have begun to unleash their frustration with anti-immigrant sentiment. But despite frictions and border wall efforts, a broader notion of national identity reigns in the valley; the mantle of “American” belongs to all.
At a recent community meeting in Starr county, 16-year-old Aleyda Rodriguez said that the border wall, which will consume some of her family’s land, makes her feel like a minority. The feeling is not completely unfamiliar: a few years ago, she traveled two hours north to San Antonio for a band competition and was called “dirty” by wealthy, white spectators. Back home, she said, she is not “the other”. But in different Texan towns, in the conversations taking place all over the country about border security and immigration, she has found a divisive perspective on the border and her home that she can’t relate to, one conjured in the far away.
Michelle García is a journalist and essayist. She is a Soros Equality fellow and the current Dobie Paisano writer-in-residence. She is working on a book about the border