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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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
Shannon McGauley
July 19, 2008
First of all, it's not a wall. IT'S A FENCE!!!
Second, if Latin America treated their people better with the monies we give them every year, people would be fruitful in their own countries instead taking from ours!
www.txminuteman.org
Donald Rozansky
July 20, 2008
Good subject. Continuous quoting of others tiresome. Did not feel the article was constructive enough.
Ken G
July 20, 2008
Any unmanned barrier can be defeated.
william
July 21, 2008
You know the article was right in one respect we don t need a wall between us and Canada, We don t have whats the count now 12 million illegal Canadians living here if Mexico doesn t want to help their own people why should that fall on the U.S. As for taking land from Mexico don t feel bad about it it belonged to the INDIANS long before it belonged to Mexico and the U.S. People want to condemn a wall or a fence look around El Paso don t think i see anyone without a wall or fence around whats theirs. We do that why?? I have heard to keep out snakes and other unwanted critters or maybe we just want to keep people out of what is ours??
Thomas
July 21, 2008
Good grief, this was the never ending story...he must have run out of people to quote. Perhaps he should head back south and help his family build a "great nation" of their own.
One thing he should have mentioned in his article, for all their "superpower" status, I would note that Mexico's second largest component of their GDP is repatriated money from the US sent back into Mexico by those working here. This is the true reason Mexico opposes the fence and any increased supervision and supports amnesty...a neverending supply of money from the north.
Thomas
David K
July 21, 2008
Oh I see - now you guys are all "spanish" folks. J
ust yesterday you were mestizos and hated the evil spanish invaders.
I'm confused.
either way "WE" didn't do anything to Mexico. "WE" weren't alive back then. "WE" will just have to deal with the reality we were handed.
Todd
July 22, 2008
Wow, what a fair tale. Could this story possible have more of an angle to it????
1. Who the heck cares what Robert Frost thinks about immigration - he is a writer, not a police officer, immigration official, or border patrol member.
2. "Yes, there's corruption in Mexico. But there's corruption in the United States..." - I agree, there is corruption in the U.S., but to try to equate the level of corruption in Mexico (w/ its drug war) with the small pockets of corruption in the US is just plain idiotic. Whole states in Mexico are bought an paid for by the drug cartles. The last time a place in America was that corrupt was during Capone's years in Chicago. American citizens are dieing at the hands of these groups and Mexican citizens are being exploited by the coyotes. Nothing about illegal immigration is good - and in fact, its illegal!
3. The US allows more 'legal' immigrants to cross its borders than any other nation in the world (in fact about 1 million). At what point would the system be considered "fixed?" I keep hearing that the system is broken - yet even if we double the amount to 2 million people a year - there will still be a significant number of people who are told no because 5x's that try to come here. We can't sutain it as a nation. Yet until we gain control of our borders (our sovereign right as a nation) people who are told no will continue to come illegally, regardless of how many we let in legally.
4. What about the people who come here legally - they waited and did it properly - should they now have to pay taxes to help support those who chose to cut in line and come illegally??
5. Mexico's government is using the U.S. as a public welfare system. Mexico's second largest source of income is money sent home from Mexican workers living in America. That kind of cash is not leaping accross our nothern border to Canada or to Cuba. Also, there aren't well over 12 million illegal canadians in our country. Not to mention the incredibly violent drug war going on just accross the border in Mexico. Moreover, if it were really racism - we would have the same policy with Cuba (they are latin as well).
5. Does this author not realize that Mexico was founded by the Spanish - after brutally killing almost all of its native inhabitants? So the history of oppression goes both ways.....in any case - we can't change what happened 150 years ago. Nor is any current American responsible for it. We fought a war with Mexico (they were shooting too) and we won - so we took some land for repayment - it happens after every war.
6. This authors proves he is more concerned with ideological bumper sticker slogans than he is with the truth or reality. Even when he mentions Iraq and states that democracy takes time and thats why we couldn't just hand things over he felt compelled by some liberal anti-war ideology to include in parenthesis "This is not an argument for an indeterminate American presence in Iraq; nor approval of the Iraq War."
7. "While Mexican apple trees will never get across the border to eat the cones under American pines," - but they are getting accross and eating the cones under American pines.
8. The United States is not responsible for the economic prosperity of every other nation in the world. Our country is not responisble for fixing Mexico's economy for Mexico.....yet all you hear is that we can't build a fence, we can't deport illegal immigrants, we can't punish those who have already snuck accross - that instead we must help Mexico rebuild its economy....well, thats great, but maybe Mexico should rebuild its own economy by acting to prevent people from fleeing north, instead of promoting it as its economic policy. Maybe, If Mexico's best and brightest stayed in Mexico, helped break the cycle of corruption and violence, and worked to create new ventures, better manage their vast oil resources, and stimulate the economy (creating jobs) - then they wouldn't need to flee.
This article sounds like it was written by Mexican Public Relations.....Double standards abound - if you are Mexican, you have the right to illegally invade another country - if you are American (or white) you are evil for invading Mexico 150 years ago. Well I cant do anything about 150 years ago, but Mexico can do something about right now.
Todd
July 22, 2008
"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."
This may be true, but the vision of a "New Spain" that spans the entire new world and later a Mexico that spans the entire South West and all of Central America was at the expense of all of the native inhabitants of these places. So the Mexicans were oppressors in what is now considered Mexico and the Southwest United States. Don't forget, Both Spain and Mexico wanted control of all of the new resources in America as well. The only difference is America won. So now we are deemed evil or 'zenophobic' and Mexico is seen as the victim.
Either way, the past does not matter.....the present and future do. Right now 'illegal' immigration is hurting America and open borders threaten our safety. Furthermore, this mass movement of people through illegal means leads to massive exploitation of the illegal immigrants coming accross our borders by both organized crime and coyotes on the Mexican side and shady employers on the US side. They are the real criminals in this as well.
Also, a major difference between the Berlin Wall and the US/Mexcian border is that the Berlin wall was put up in the middle of another country's city (Berlin) immediately following the war that destroyed that city. There would be a parallel if this was the 1850's, but its not. The United States is building a fence along it sovereign border. To argue otherwise, again completely discounts the claim the US has to the Southwestern United States. Something that seems to be a pattern to this author.
But I tell you what, we will give Mexico back its pre 1850's border, if they then in turn give all of their land back to native peoples they stole Mexico from and return to Spain. Yeah...didn't think so....
The author claims that "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." - so the spanish didnt defame the Brittish and the Mexicans don't harbor any ill will toward the "Anglo-Americans"?
As a final point, the "system is broken" argument, whether true or false, does not excuse people who immigrate here illegally and should not justify amnesty. Just because a foreign individual wants to immigrate now and thinks it takes too long or is too complicated to get in legally - that doesn't give them the right to break our laws and go anyway. That kind of an argument could only be given by someone with no respect for the sovereignty of other nations. Yet it is given all the time by our own leaders. Who is running this country? The American people or Fox and Calderon? Its not racist or xenophobic to want border control.....in fact, with the threats facing America today, its probably smart.
Nando
July 29, 2008
Put a wall around El Paso to eliminate the influx of racist honkies.
rick m
July 30, 2008
Interesting point of view, however there are several factual errors.
MIkhail Gorbachev did not bring down the wall either... rather the soldiers of East germany were powerless to respond when their leadership was out of touch, and the Premiers speech was MIS interpreted as condoning a reunion. It was a fait accompli by the time the leadership was made aware, not an intentional act by Mikail.
Everything based on this misunderstanding (ie the rest of the article) is therefore incorrect in its assumptions. The wall became a symbol of the division WITHIN A SINGLE COUNTRY, and pf the philosophies of East and West. It was built to prevent ESCAPE, not to prevent entry, the West germans were happy to have their fellow country men come to west germany. And to be honest the berlin wall stabilized the situation in the DDR.
This would benefit BOTH countries in our case if you judge by that same history with an open mind.
A fence is merely a physical representation of a legal separation.
As any property lawyer will tell you, If you want to prevent trespassing, you must put up a fence to indicate the borders of your property. Merely posting signs is not enough to prosecute someone, nor to prevent their entry. Though they can simply walk over a fence, it is a moral choice that is harder to make and much harder to defend against when being prosecuted. there is no rationalization that the landowner doesn;t care if they put up a fence.
What we have right now is a problem with formerly honest mexican citizens committing a crime for their personal benefit. They cross our borders illegally. It is no different than an American stealing to feed his family, I have sympathy but they have harmed others and committed a crime. Either they become a drain on the taxpayer, or they depress wages and employment conditions, or both.
As jay leno astutely observed, if they are taking Jobs Americans won't do, what will happen when they become Americans?
The other problem we have is that some believe that being sympathetic to the desires f mexicans to achieve a better life, means we should forgive them for breaking our laws, and anyone who disagrees is a bigot. That just isn't so. I think that most ALL americans are sympathetic to our Fellow "united statesians (of mexico)" but until they choose to Join our country as a territory, agree that they should fix their own country. They have certainly had enough chances to do so, and enough help from the US, but continue to vote bread and circuses while relying on money from the US to sustain themselves. I only ask that if they come to my country they do so legally, otherwise they are just as much a criminal as a murderer or a car thief or a bank robber or a purse snatcher. A crime is a crime.
A fence, like the one around my yard, and the yard of every person in El paso (mandated by the same council that protests the federal border fence!) is just common sense.
LisaT
July 31, 2008
They need to complete the fence. Those against the fence are supporting the trade in children for sex,slavery and any number of crimes. They support the trafficking in people.
I say bring the military in as the Border Patrol is unable to protect our borders.
Raquel Welch
August 2, 2008
Your point is?
LChuco
August 16, 2008
Wow. I'm shocked that El Paso could put together so many knee-jerk racist responses to one simple article. I'm shocked half these nitwits could even read the article in the first place! Please keep on writing, Profe!