Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Emily Fisher
Professor Dowdy
SCHC 450
2 March 2017
Border Wall Midterm
1. Drawing on our readings and other class materials, examine the president’s purposed
border wall, taking into account the myriad literary, historical, and/or geographical contexts
for its construction, including its logic, its obstacles, and its disruptive potential.
3. Drawing on our readings and the materials of contemporary culture, discuss the complex
place of Mexico in the U.S. imagination.
Scapegoats are created to ignore the faults of one group and to unite a group of people
together. We have made scapegoats of Mexicans, and many of us have become unified under
Trump’s purposed border wall. When examining the meaning of a wall, many words come to
mind – permanent, monumental, otherness, solid, final, isolation, and separation. Therefore,
Trump’s purposed border wall intends to isolate and separate Mexico permanently. Throughout
history there have been attempts to isolate and separate groups of people through walls: The
Berlin Wall separated people from their families. Trump’s wall is attempting to seal what Gloria
Anzaldúa calls the “herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds”
with hot glue; the wall appears to be an immediate fix like hot glue, yet this immediacy burns
Fisher 2
both parts – America and Mexico – and it is a false and temporary perceived solution to the
problems that have been connected to the lack of a wall (25). The supporters of the wall believe
that the wall will solve many of our problems. However, the wall supporters seem to have
overlooked a flaw in Trump’s purposed border wall: the complex problems that proponents of
the wall attribute to Mexicans and use to justify the wall’s construction will not disappear, but
our scapegoats, those who cross over, will hypothetically disappear with the wall. Therefore, the
wall will remove the perceived cause of the problems, but the problems themselves will remain
(this could be a hint to wall proponents that Mexicans are not the source of our problems).
According to Leo Chavez, this embodies the “Latino Threat Narrative” which is “part of grand
tradition of alarmist discourse about immigrants and their perceived negative impacts on society”
(3). This useless wall will cost anywhere from 1021 billion dollars. Do not fear though, for
Mexico is supposedly going to pay for the construction. Obviously a country is not going to
finance a wall set out to separate and isolate them, and we cannot afford to alienate and burn the
second biggest consumer of our exports who inadvertently support our families in our effort to
ruin families in Mexico. As Mexico is one of our allies and trading partners, we cannot escape
the burn from the hot glue required for the border wall.
In addition to history and economics demonstrating the senselessness of a border wall,
geographically speaking, the border is entirely unfeasible. In Josh Begley’s video, “Best of Luck
with the Wall,” he compiles 200,000 satellite images from Google Maps that enables one to
grasp the enormity of the U.S.Mexico border. The image of a barren wasteland traversing from
Fisher 3
one side to the other is replaced with the true border – a 1,954milelong border that includes
cities, rivers, plains, towns, deserts, and backyards. The border is not a flat line that we have
drawn in sand. The border is not the political weapon we have consigned it to be. Couples live on
the border. Children play on the border. Puppies fetch sticks on the border. Guillermo
Verdecchia urges us to stop referring to Mexico as “North America’s backyard,” because Mexico
is “made flesh” as Mexicans are our “neighbors” who live beside us and with us (54). Our
president seemed to have missed this video and this essential deconstruction of the backyard
metaphor. As well as the millions of Americans who support his proposal to completely seal
America off from Mexico.
In Oscar Martínez’s novel The Beast, he shadows a border patrol agent, Esmeralda
Marroquín, who asserts that that sealing the border is “a pipe dream that politicians sell from
their offices” (220). Many Trump supporters have devoured this dream while grounding their
belief in their supposedly righteous hatred of immigrants for stealing jobs and saturating our
country with drugs. What Trump and his followers fail to understand is that those crossing the
border will not let a wall prevent them from crossing over in order to find jobs to support their
families – jobs that proponents of the wall would never take. So they ignore the fact that a ten
foothigh wall will only provoke immigrants to build an “elevenfoot ladder” according to
Esmeralda (216). Instead, they lament the loss of jobs that could transport them from their
circumstances; however, they are not willing to be a part of those whom Alicia Schmidt
Camacho describes as “somos los que venimos a dejar nuestro sudor” (2). And herein lies the
Fisher 4
ultimate paradox of Americans’ interact actions with immigrants: we have refused to grant them
citizenship, yet we have “accepted their labor” (Camacho, 2). We are looking for a scapegoat to
place our unemployment woes onto, and immigrants are easy targets.
Additionally, proponents of the wall focus solely on the immigrant crossing over to take
jobs or smuggle drugs. Makina in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World disrupts
the narrative we have written for all who immigrate to the United States. Makina crosses the
border with the intention and strong desire “to come right back” – she is merely delivering a
message to her brother (52). She resembles the seasonal workers who cross the border only
because they have a duty to their families; these individuals do not want to be away from Mexico
much less remain in the United States permanently. However, there is a popular belief that
Mexicans cannot wait to illegally cross the border so they can take advantage of America.
Makina also demonstrates the complexity of the terms migrant and immigrant. She is
hard to classify as one or the other because the terms are fluid and tricky. While terms can
empower and liberate people, they can also oppress the groups who have these terms cast onto
them. We consistently label all Mexicans as immigrants, but Alicia Schmidt Camacho states that
“Mexicans cannot be “immigrants” because the immigrant is on a path to citizenship” whereas
migrants are classified as either “failed citizens or belated arrivals to national community” (11
12). By this definition, the popular classification of many Mexicans as immigrants or migrants is
incorrect. These terms also ignore MexicanAmericans by lumping many people undeservingly
together into two changing and complex terms. Regardless of being a migrant or an immigrant,
Fisher 5
people from Mexico who cross over or people who are American with families from Mexico are
individuals with their own qualities, goals, and experiences.
Despite this individuality, we have constructed an image that we immediately apply to
each Mexicans we encounter. We ignore the individual’s characteristics, past, and idiosyncrasies
– all of which can protect against generalizations – and solely focus on the individual’s country
of origin. Of course, our beliefs are shaped by our environment, so the stereotypes we attribute to
Mexicans stem from our culture and film. American movies do not reveal that Pablo Escobar
“was a big philanthropist” or that drug lords are “respected or tolerated” in Mexico because they
“provide schools, hospitals, churches, homes, and jobs” (Verdecchia, 41). Instead, movies
villainize and dehumanize Mexicans until they can only be narcotraffickers or lazy drunks. In
turn, we villainize and dehumanize Mexicans; this makes it “easier to lack empathy” for the
plight of immigrants and to see the immigrants who are fighting for their rights as a “chaotic
mass rather than as people struggling to be recognized as contributing members of U.S. society”
(Chavez, 6). They are simply painted with the broad brush of “the dark, the short, the greasy, the
shifty, the fat, the anemic” and categorized as those “who take your jobs, who dream of wiping
your shit, who long to work all hours” (Herrera, 99). Makina writes this in response to a police
officer’s attempt at mocking her, yet she turns the tables on the officer through her eloquent
rejection of the stereotypes we have ascribed to Mexicans. Herrera demonstrates that these
stereotypes come from Americans by having the police officer read her poem: the thoughts seem
to come from his own mind when he reads it aloud which reveals that it is our thoughts which
Fisher 6
have caused Makina to be characterized in this negative way. This scene also unsettles the
stereotype of Mexicans as lazy drunks because the police officer originally intended to mock the
immigrant with a book of poetry by taunting “You a romantic? A poet? A writer? Looks like
we’re going to find out” and then proceeds to command the immigrant to “write” (98). Makina
saves the man and creates this poem which derails the officer’s mini lesson in what he deems to
be civilization. In our attempt to paint Mexicans as uncivilized through our stereotyping of them,
we ourselves are becoming uncivilized.
The cultural propagation of the attitude that the police officer has toward immigrants has
enabled Trump’s purposed wall to garner support. While Trump has perpetuated this idea of
secluding immigrants and keeping America American, this perpetuation is enabled by the beliefs
of those who voted him into office. As Chavez explains in The Latino Threat, there are
“assumptions and takenforgranted “truths” inherent” to Latinos who are apparently “bent on
reconquering land that was formerly theirs…and destroying the American way of life” (3). We
are so fixated on this “American way of life” that we often fail to remember that this manner of
life was developed through the combination of many cultures. Trump is merely a manifestation
of the xenophobia that plagues many Americans. So what does the wall say about our country? It
shows the selfcenteredness that refuses a second glance at anyone else who could be suffering
alongside of us. It overlooks the enactment of NAFTA in 1994, and our large hand in forcing
thirty percent of Mexico’s population into what Guillermo Verdecchia describes as “shining
shoes, squeegeeing windows, or selling pencils on the street” in order to barely scrape by;
Fisher 7
NAFTA ruined Mexico’s economy and forced many people to migrate to find a job (41). It
shows the apathy to those who need an abundance of compassion. It ignores the parents
struggling to create a better future for their children. It snubs the young adults seeking
opportunities to improve their lives. And above all, the wall blatantly dehumanizes an entire
country.
Furthering this dehumanization is the game Esmeralda and other border patrol agents
make out of catching drugs and those trying to cross the border by claiming that “sometimes we
win, sometimes we lose” (208). This ‘game’ that the agents have made out of their jobs rests on
actual people. However, this game has loosened its rules as border patrol agents like Esmeralda
have switched to focusing on possessing only “operational control” of the border because that is
“all that’s possible” due to the border’s magnitude (220). Her lack of concern within immigrants
crossing is revealed when she remarks that two teenagers who were detained would have
successfully crossed “if only they hadn’t come out to the highway” where border patrol agents
saw them and therefore had to detain them (222). Esmeralda is apathetic to the whole situation,
and there is the impression that she would rather those attempting to cross the border to be
successful so she could avoid having to detain them. Despite the trivial attitude the border agents
have toward immigrants, their attitude also calls to attention the innocuousness they perceive
immigrants to have. Immigrants like those two men “have been denoted to second priority” in
favor of detaining terrorists: in Esmeralda’s eyes, terrorists are narcotraffickers who “live off
breeding terror” (Martínez, 216). However, despite her firm conviction that narcotraffickers are
Fisher 8
terrorists whom we should fear, she only wishes to “hinder,” not stop drugs (215). Completely
stopping the flow of drugs across the border is not possible, and a wall would only be an
expensive failure at stopping drugs – the only possibility is hindering the flow of drugs.
In the examination of various literary texts written in regard to immigrants and the
border, the prevalent arguments against immigrants are disproved. When taking a historical,
economical, geographical, and literary approach to Trump’s purposed border wall, one can see
the violence and severance surrounding the idea of the wall. The literary texts that have been
examined were written before Trump’s purposed wall; therefore, the problems surrounding
immigrants and the stereotypes we have given them have not suddenly appeared with Trump’s
purposed wall. Rather, Trump has made scapegoats out of Mexicans in order to capitalize on the
discontent of many Americans. Despite Trump’s frenetic rhetoric encompassing the wall, the
issues that are manifested in the idea of the wall cannot be solved by hot glue, and if we attempt
to drench the border in hot glue, we will damage our neighbors and ourselves.
2094 words.
Fisher 9
Works Citied
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed., Aunt Lute Books, 2012.
Print.
Begley, Josh. “Best of Luck with the Wall.” Field of Vision, Oct 2016.
https://fieldofvision.org/bestofluckwiththewall
Camacho, Alicia Schmidt. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.Mexico
Borderlands. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Print.
Chavez, Leo R. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. 2nd ed.,
Stanford University Press, 2008. Web.
Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Translated by Lisa Dillman, London: &
Other Stories, 2015. Print.
Martínez, Oscar. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. London:
Verso, 2014. Print.
Verdecchia, Guillermo. Fronteras Americanas. 2nd ed., Talon, 2012. Print.
Fisher10