In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost was not advocating that “Good fences make good neighbors.” The reference is to a statement by his neighbor who believes in keeping the fence between his property and the persona in the poem in good repair. We assume the persona in the poem is Robert Frost whose opinion is: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

In the current flap over building a wall between Mexico and the United States, it would be well to keep in mind Robert Frost’s injunction “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That “something” is that a wall is a barrier. Frost says:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines . . . .

In the case of a “wall” between the United States and Mexico, a wall is a manifestation of conflict, just as the Berlin Wall was a manifestation of conflict. Essentially, conflict is an interactive process or behavior. That’s why the Berlin Wall escalated the Cold War. And why a wall be-tween the United States and Mexico will only escalate the enmity between the two countries.

Ronald Reagan’s plea to Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”—referring to the Berlin Wall—is not what brought down the wall. On the contrary, it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s response that brought down the wall. Instead of escalating the cycle of conflict, the Soviet leader chose to ignore the rhetoric of conflict and for whatever reasons take the first step in repairing U.S.—Soviet relations. There is no doubt that the U.S.—Soviet conflict had developed mutually destructive patterns of interactive behavior, the consequences of which heralded Armageddon.

When asked about the U.S.—Mexico wall in a 2006 visit to the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev responded that the United States seemed to be building the Great Wall of China between itself and Mexico (Midland Reporter-Telegram, 10/18/2006).

In the current American rhetoric about controlling the nation’s borders the question looms large: Why on the one hand did the U.S. want the Berlin Wall torn down and on the other hand does it want to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico? There is no evading the possibility of racism and selective amnesia about the history of walls.

The history and philosophy of walls takes us back to antiquity. Between the 8th and 5th centuries BC, the northern states of China began to build a wall along their northern border with Mongolia in an effort to stave off Mongol penetration. Over centuries and dynasties, “the great wall of China” came into being as a 4,000 mile fortification in defense of Chinese borders. In places, the wall was 25 feet high and 30 feet wide.

Today, “the Great Wall is one of the surviving megastructures of antiquity and the world’s long-est human-made structure, stretching from Shanhai Pass in the east to Lop Nur in the west along an arc that roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia” (Wikipedia). In their time, the Mongolians easily penetrated the Great Wall of China.

In 122 AD the Roman emperor Hadrian built a wall across Britain to keep Romans safe from the hostile Picts. The wall stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, 80 Roman miles long, 10 feet wide and 15 feet high. The wall is still there (N.S. Gill, "Your Guide to Ancient/Classical History").

In like fashion, in the 20th century the French built the “Maginot Line” as a walled fortification against German incursions. With the use of aeroplanes, the Germans simply flew over the Maginot Line. General George Patton called the Maginot Line a monument to man’s stupidity. Even the Berlin Wall was not impenetrable.

While the Berlin Wall did function as the perimeter of a "prison" state, its principal objective was to keep out extra-territorial influences that were anathema to the state dictum of the Soviet Union. A U.S. wall on its border with Mexico has the same objectives -- to keep out extra-territorial influences (the uninvited, the unwelcome, and the unwanted) that are deemed anathema to the apodictic values of the United States.

In the 50's I worked as a Threat Analyst in Soviet Studies with SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers) in Europe and well understood the nature of the Berlin Wall. But a wall between the United States and Mexico is not about penetrability. It’s about “good neighbors.” Why not a wall between the United States and Canada? Or a wall along the Florida coast to keep out Cubans? The inference is that Canadians and fleeing Cubans are good neighbors; Mexicans are not.

While Mexican apple trees will never get across the border to eat the cones under American pines, a wall between the United States and Mexico is intended to keep Mongol hordes of Mexicans at bay, a consummation devoutly to be wished by Xenophobic Americans as Hamlet would have put it.

Will a wall between the United States and Mexico help the United States in controlling its border with Mexico? The Harvard philosopher George Santayana put it well when he opined that those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it. What is that lesson here? That walls are no substitute for diplomacy.

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Twenty miles wide and two-thousand miles long: that’s how the border between Mexico and the United States is described geographically in various contemporary texts about the U.S-Mexico border.

According to the International Boundary and Water Commission, the U.S.—Mexico border is 1,951 miles long, from San Diego to Brownsville. It is the most frequently crossed international border in the world, with some 350 million people crossing legally every year (Wikipedia). A wall along that border would be about half as long as the Great Wall of China; and, perhaps, about half as effective.

Robert Kaplan describes the U.S.-Mexico border as a “wild, unstable swath of desert” (Truet). The most powerful koinos topos about the border today is that of armed ranchers and Minutemen patrolling the border to thwart illegal entry into the United States and INS raids to ferret out undocumented workers.

This vast region of borderland was first formally conceptualized by the American historian Herbert Eugene Bolton, who perceived the borderlands as an area with a lively interactive system of commerce, macroeconomics, and isotopic relationships covering the length and breadth of the Americas and stretching back to the times of indigenous peoples long before the arrival of Europeans in the region. According to Velez-Ibanez, “the area was an arena of constant tumoil and dynamic change” (56). This attests to the historical permeability of the region since ancient times (Ruiz, 2).

For many Americans “the U.S.-Mexico border is a land that time forgot” (Truett) peopled by renegades and bandits such as Geronimo and Pancho Villa. In “Border Studies,” Paul Jay ex-plains that a “border zone” is a liminal place of intercultural contact and hybridization where people from very different cultures and historical backgrounds imprise everything from identities to art forms, foods, and political alliances” It is, in other words, “a contestatory space for emerging cultures,” as Santiago Vaquera-Basquez explains.

And it is in this “contestatory space” that external (global) forces impact local circumstances producing formative changes. Adding to this concept of “contestatory space,” Samuel Truett posits that “before the United States annexed northern Mexico in 1848 (and in 1854 the Gadsen area) this was a contested terrain of empires, nations, and native communities.

Mary Louse Pratt, the languge and linguistics scholar, calls this contested terrain “contact zones,” social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, a relatively accurate term though it does not reveal the syncretic realities of such hybrid zones.

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In a piece on “Fences and Neighbors,” Rick Toone characterized the U.S.—Mexico wall as “a shining symbol of American economic and environmental arrogance.” And in a washington-post.com article (Sunday, May 27, 2007; B01), Luis Alberto Urrea quotes the Mexican consul in Tucson calling the U.S.—Mexico wall “the politics of stupidity.” In the National Geographic (May 2007), Charles Bowden concludes that “Fences may make good neighbors, but the barriers dividing U.S. and Mexico are proving much more complicated.”

Those barriers are indeed complicated despite the facile rhetoric of Lou Dobbs and Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project. Those barriers have their genesis in the historical conflict between Spain and England giving rise to the Black Legend, venomous defamation of the Spaniards by the English, perpetuated by the venomous defamation of Mexicans by Anglo Americans.

American manifest destiny was fueled in part by the Black Legend. The vision of a United States from sea to shining sea was at the expense of Spain and its Hispanic progeny in the Hispanic Southwest. Manifestations of the Black Legend abound.

A little known manifestation of the Black Legend occurred in the 1920s in El Paso, Texas, where Zyklon-B (hydrocyanic acid used later in Hitler’s gas chambers) was used regularly as a vermin-control delousing agent on hundreds of thousands of “dirty, lousy people coming into this coun-try from Mexico” (David Dorado Romo, "Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cul-tural History of El Paso and Juarez: 1893-1923," pp 240-243,Cinco Puntos Press, 2005). Eight decades later, the toll of that episode is still immeasurable.

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The law of territorial integrity was trampled by the United States when it dismembered Mexico in 1848 and annexed more than half of its dominion and three-fourths of its natural resources as a booty of its war against Mexico. Laws are social constructs subject to change depending on historical contingencies. In 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that African Americans could be segregated; just as it upheld during World War II that President Roosevelt could intern Japanese Americans on suspicions of subversiveness. Laws are not sacrosanct. Bad law is bad law! Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that.

My roots are Mexican, part of them still in Guanajuato, Mexico, where vast numbers of my kin live and have lived for centuries forging a nation; my other roots are in Texas (when it was part of New Spain) where a branch of my mother's family settled in 1731, a few years before 1776. That part of my family is huge today. History and its consequences have made my family binational.

Yes, there are many Mexicans coming north from Mexico into the United States. Like me, many of them have families on this side of the border. Struggling to shake off its repressive colonial past, Mexico is like most developing nations charting a course for its people across rocks and shoals difficult to navigate. Democracy is a process, not a product. That's why we can't just hand off "democracy" to the Iraqis and say: "Make it work"! Democracy takes time. [This is not an argument for an indeterminate American presence in Iraq; nor approval of the Iraq War.] After 231 years, in the United States we are still struggling with the democratic process.

Unlike Par Lagerqvists’s hordes, not all Mexicans are on the road to al norte. My Mexican family despairs that I prefer to live and work in the United States. For years they've encouraged me to live with them in helping to build a nation. If one paid stock to the exaggerated reports about the depopulation of Mexico, the country would be barren.

Mexico is a modern nation--airports, bridges, super-highways, skyscrapers, businesses, schools, universities, subways. And poverty, of course. But there's poverty in the United States. Has been. Poverty is everywhere with us on the planet. It's a condition humans are still working at solving. Yes, there's corruption in Mexico. But there's corruption in the United States. Corruption is everywhere with us on the planet. It's a condition humans are still working at solving.

Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans leave the United States to live elsewhere. It's sometimes hard to define the nature and patterns of human migration. In our efforts to get a handle on human migration as it impacts the United States, I would encourage a humane perspec-tive, one that brings us all to the parley, especially those of us most affected by the consequences.

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A shorter version of this piece previously has been published in various publications. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca is Scholar in Residence at Western New Mexico University and Professor Emeritus, Texas State University System—Sul Ross. E-mail him at ortegop@wnmu.edu