Last Thursday President Bush signed a bill to fund the building
of a 700 mile fence on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. I
have been following the development of this story with great
interest because of my friend Lucia who risked her life to cross
the border after starvation drove her from her small village in
Mexico.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast … Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out.”
– Robert Frost (from the poem “Mending Wall”)
Last Thursday President Bush signed a bill to fund the building of a 700 mile fence on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. I have been following the development of this story with great interest because of my friend Lucia who risked her life to cross the border after starvation drove her from her small village in Mexico.
“The Mexican government did nothing to help us,” she said through an interpreter. “I had to leave Mexico to find a way to survive.”
She is a Mixteca woman, one of the indigenous tribes of people in Mexico who have retained their own language and culture for countless centuries. As a result, Lucia speaks neither English nor Spanish, making her part of the most easily exploited group of field workers immigrating to our area.
Not only is she in demand for how hard she works, but she is part of the fastest growing group of immigrants to Gilroy and the Central Valley of California. Lucia works many hours for the lowest pay that migrant camp owners pay any of their laborers.
Gilroy is home not only to camps that are more well-known and are held to certain standards of living, such as the Arturo Ochoa Migrant Camp, but it is also home to more hidden camps where living conditions are truly appalling. The Mixteca people are prized by these camp owners for their strong work ethic, great physical endurance, and the ability to do hard manual labor well into their 60s. Their longevity is legendary. Lucia’s compact yet sturdy 45-year-old body carries the strength of men twice her size and half her age.
Bush has said that the fence he wants to build would eventually cover as much as 6,000 miles along the Mexican and Canadian borders in efforts to make them secure. Our government has not placed a price tag on the project, although Homeland Security funding provides an initial $1.2 billion down payment for border security spending.
I am reminded of a certain other fence once known as the Berlin Wall which was built to stop East Berliners from immigrating to West Berlin in Germany. That Wall was a mere 96 miles long and had 302 watchtowers and 65 miles of anti-vehicle trenches. A parallel fence was built 100 yards further in, so that a no man’s land could be created between the two barriers. It was paved with raked gravel, making it easy to spot footprints left by escapees; it offered no cover; it was mined and booby-trapped with tripwires; and, most importantly, it offered a clear field of fire to the watching guards armed with machine guns.
Yet despite all this, there were over 5,000 successful escapes between 1962 and 1989. An unknown number of people were killed or injured trying to cross the wall.
Some people jumped the barbed wire or leapt out of apartment windows along the line. Other successful escape attempts included building long tunnels, sliding along aerial wires, and flying ultralight aircraft across, such as Thomas Kruger, who landed a Zlin Z-42M light aircraft on the other side. One man even drove a very low sports car underneath a barricade at a border checkpoint.
No matter what the risk, people never stopped trying. The final person to be shot dead while trying to cross the border was Chris Gueffroy on Feb. 6, 1989. The wall finally fell on Nov. 9, 1989.
Is spending our tax dollars on a big fence really going to solve anything? No wall will stop people like my friend Lucia from getting to Gilroy, or the many who will immigrate after her. No wall will secure our borders. What fence can ever contain the human spirit?
