As the news of Donald Trump’s victory has begun to sink in, his focus on immigration has raised fears of deportation and renewed construction of the border wall. Sadly, radio talk shows, podcasts and coffee shop banter will continue to barrage us with simplistic truisms about “the border crisis” and “unbridled immigration” that might widen the divides in our country.
But after years of working in Arizona and New Mexico on bridging races, classes and faiths by walking together into what we call “the radical center.” I’d like to offer an alternative to all that tired rhetoric. I have learned that the “truth” about the border and immigration is always more complex and nuanced than I once naively assumed. The real stories of our daily interactions with immigrants are “hidden” from the view of most Americans who live beyond the border states.
I come to this other way of looking at our borderlands through the personal history of my family and that of my wife. Like a former editorial employee of this paper, Camille Flores, I am a Lebanese American. Many of our ancestors came into Texas and New Mexico from “Old” Mexico. My great-grandfather did not make it all the way; he died of malaria around Merida, Yucatan.
My wife’s family — the Kelly-Gross clan that has been around Santa Fe and Las Vegas, N.M., for decades, has not only played key roles in the City Different but in many of the “border towns” of reservations on what we now call Indigenous nations. I have worked on both sides of the U.S./Mexico line and on a half-dozen “Indian reservations,” where I was fortunate enough to be inspired by both elders and youth activists.
Whatever side of the political spectrum you are on, I invite you to consider a more quixotic perspective of immigration across our southern border. I do so in the hope we can find middle ground, cutting through the most facile presumptions about the impacts — positive and negative — of the flow of people across borders in this desert region.
The take-home message is this: Indigenous cultures and immigrants here in the border states have indeed played an extraordinarily disruptive influence on the status quo in American society at large and its institutions. But most of these “disruptions” have been positive. They have provided profoundly creative but nevertheless disruptive innovations in every facet of human existence — not through armed conflict, economic dependency or overpopulation.
In fact, there have been numerous positive “spill-over” effects from these change-makers in the borderlands that have reformed America at large.
Let me first sing the litany of positive changes that Indigenous, and Spanish-speaking Latino/a immigrants have catalyzed, and then briefly touch on a few. They have challenged our notions of land sovereignty, acceptable conditions for farmworkers, the efficacy of spiritual healing, the practice of sanctuary for refugees, the need to protect springs, forests and wetlands for livelihoods, and the lasting value of equitable cross-cultural collaborations. In fact, Rio Arriba County has been the proving grounds of both the LandBack and SeedBack movements over the last four decades.
As early as the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, San Juan Pueblo leader Po’Pay initiated a ”land-back movement that reshaped New Mexico and Arizona history. Later, Reies López Tijerina rekindled a land rights and resistance movement that included both Hispanic and Native American communities.
Where I now live near Nogales, Arizona, Teresita of Cábora and Lauro Aguirre united with the Yaqui for similar actions in the late 19th century. Teresita, a faith healer, had been accused of inciting the Mexican Revolution, so she fled first to El Paso and then to Nogales. Later, she worked to establish the first union of Mexican-born railroad workers in Los Angeles. Much later, Dolores Huerta of Dawson, N.M., joined with Yuma, Ariz.-born César Chávez to catalyze the work of the United Farm Workers (UFW) on farm and food justice.
These charismatic individuals fought for both Indigenous and Chicano rights to land and water. They worked cross-culturally and were not afraid to recruit Anglo allies as advisers, fundraisers or strategists. They jump-started social innovations that continue to make our workforce safer, more economically secure and healthier.
These are but a few of the stories from our own backyards that speak to positive cross-cultural collaborations that disrupted “business-as-usual” in America. They changed our society for the better, making America a healthier place to live. We need them today perhaps more than ever.
What humbles me is that the more time I live in the border states, I see each wave of its Indigenous and immigrant youth offering previously unforeseen ways to make America work equitably so everyone may prosper and enjoy an enriched life. After a half-century of being a “border bridger,” I welcome them to “the radical center” rather than fearing their contributions.
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Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese American essayist, cultural geographer and desert ecologist; part of his Arab clan traveled to the U.S. through Mexico. This essay is adapted from Against the American Grain, his new book from University of New Mexico Press’ High Road imprint, from which he will read at Collected Works bookstore in Santa Fe on Dec. 5.
