f--- that fence

Erin Gould
Nogales, AZ
October 16, 2018

Though I have been living in New Mexico, a border state, since 2013, it was my first time seeing a border fence, a physical, metal, regular, orderly, imposing manifestation of our made up line between "us" and "them". It was oddly normal. 

The normalcy is oppressive.

I should have hated this object, this symbol, but I kind of liked it. 

I was also highly aware of my body in that space, one protected by white privilege, and the feeling of state surveillance on my skin. That strip of cleared land felt dangerous.

I don't know if I have ever consciously felt that level of cognitive dissonance.

Paco asked us to take in this place in silence, an instruction for which I was grateful. Otherwise, we may have just been chatting.

I found myself drawn to the plants that were reaching through those even, bright, framing negative spaces in the fence. Do you think those mesquite know how transgressive their branches are?

I'm probably not supposed to swear here but fuck that fence.



I was listening to NPR yesterday morning and heard this story:

   "Newly elected Democratic mayor Arturo Garino was busy with Election Day when the Army arrived in Nogales and started erecting coils of glistening razor wire along the tops of the border wall that separates his small U.S. town from its sister in Mexico.

    "Razor wire, concertina wire is not what you want to see on a fence with two countries that have been friends and traded forever," he said.

     President Donald Trump announced a little more than a week ago that he was sending troops to the border to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

     "And now here we have a wire, you know, downtown, el puro downtown," Garino said."

What does the fence look like how? How much different would I feel in that space? How much different is the experience of the people who see and interact with that fence everyday? What does it feel like to have razor wire bisecting your town? 

Fuck that razor wire.


(ALSO--- check out Borderlands Restoration Network and all of the amazing work that they are doing to combat the ecological and community harm wrought by the physical and conceptual border at:
http://www.borderlandsrestoration.org/ )

(ALSO--- thank you to everyone at BRN that met with us, Perin in particular for her late night map workings, and Francisco Cantú and Karima Walker. It was so lovely working with you all.)