BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 5

Into the Beautiful North: Nayeli’s Magnificent Border Story

The Jaguar’s Children, the brilliantly written novel by John Vaillant, tells of the harrowing journey of two young men who, for every different reasons, put their lives in the hands (and sealed up water tanker truck) of ruthless coyotes to make their way from Oaxaca and Mexico DF to “the North.”  Hector’s mother wants him to stay, but his father urges him to go –for reasons hidden in the father’s past and hoped for in the son’s future. César is on the run for a more urgent reason.  Their suspenseful saga calls forth the powers of the ancient symbol of the jaguar, sees strange new claims on their people’s life source: corn, and holds out the promise of a bright new future for smart young men who made it to university.   

Theirs is a tale of men, strong and able and intelligent and educated young men, leaving for El Norte.  Into the Beautiful North shows what remains of life – of family life and community life --in the villages where all the men – all but the very oldest – have left to cross the border in the collapse of their local economy.  Into the Beautiful North, by the poet, novelist and journalist Luis Alberto Urrea, is a laugh-out-loud picaresque novel about one such village, the absence of men, and a young woman who decides to do something about it. 

Nayeli, a 19-year-old former high school soccer star and server at La Mano Caída, “The Fallen Hand” taco stand.  She despairs that her father has gone north to “Los Yunaites,” as have all the eligible young men of her generation. Her village, Tres Camarones (Three Shrimp), is dying and she is dying of boredom from watching the town’s only movie, The Magnificent Seven.

The movie inspires her quixotic quest:  she will go to the North to round up her own “magnificent seven” men to move back to re-build, and re-populate, her village.  And she’ll find and bring home her father, who years ago quit coming back. 

The novel could be paired with Huckleberry Finn in their journey motif (his escape on a river, hers a river crossing), their picaresque and episodic structure, and the merging of social commentary into the adventures and mishaps and unforgettable people they meet at each new place.  Just as Huck Finn sees right through the piety of the “respectable” people, Nayeli and her side-kicks (yes, some colorful friends come along) learn that the most generous people are the family they encounter living on the Tijuana garbage dumps.   The book is full of contemporary cultural references high school students will recognize (Kanye West, Sabado Gigante, internet).  And, yes, political realities:  the Border Patrol and, by inference, NAFTA:  “Twenty pesos! You couldn’t even afford corn tortillas anymore on twenty pesos.  The Americans were buying up all the maize for fuel and none of the rancheros could afford to use it for food.”

Into the Beautiful North gives voice and unforgettable personality to the ones “left behind” in Mexico and, even more important, in delightfully painful and funny and startling clarity, the story holds a mirror up to taken-for-granted luxuries (electricity, elevators, “small cartons with mushrooms piled inside like snowballs and vegetable bins [that] periodically sang ‘Singin’ in the Rain’” when the sprinklers sprayed the produce”).  And it holds a mirror up to the absurdities that a single line of political geography can make in who has and who needs, who leaves and who stays.  The book provides great fun (and no small amount of poignancy) when Nayeli declares, “We didn’t come here to get boyfriends! We’re on a mission! …. We came to save Tres Camarones!”

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 4

THE POWER OF STORY:  The Jaguar’s Children

We hear too much about “building walls” and “improving border security” and not enough about the walls of privilege and power that make the risks of leaving home the lesser of dangers.   Behind the stats on “illegal aliens” are the alienating conditions of poverty, violence, and powerlessness that seem more the stuff of movies or social science data than of real lives.  That’s where we need stories.

Those of us who live in states that border Mexico hear the stories from our immigrant friends and neighbors who have crossed borders from El Salvador and Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico, to build their lives here in Houston, the most diverse city in the US.   We know the mom who hovered in the bathtub with her babies while insurgents and government goon squads left the street in front of her home in El Salvador strewn with the bodies of her neighbors. We know the auto mechanic who had to flee his country when warring factions began raiding central garages to commandeer trucks, his workplace likely their next target.   A friend now with a leading hotel chain who as a middle schooler served as his family’s translator at his little sister’s parent-teacher conferences and at their negotiations to buy their first house.    In Houston, when we hear “border,” we hear our neighbors and their stories.

But even if you don’t have the advantage of living near the US-Mexico border, you can bring your students into this dynamic space thanks to wonderful authors I’ve been discovering and sharing with everyone I meet for the way their unforgettable characters and the power of their prose to pull us into new understandings of “border.”

One of my latest finds is John Vaillant’s The Jaguar’s Children, a book I’ll probably re-read this summer just for the writing. The first time through I was holding my breath wanting the mystery to be solved, our narrator to be rescued – wanting everything to turn out all right.  A happy ending for Hector was far from assured: he and friend César are sealed up in a water tank truck that is to take them to a warehouse across the border where a metal worker will free them and a dozen others who have paid extra for this vehicle guaranteed to fool la migra.

The perils of heat, cruel and untrustworthy coyotes, and fear of discovery by la migra set the tone for a predictable story of the dangers of border crossing.   But nothing in this story is predictable:  why do Hector and César want so desperately to cross to el norte?  why is the ancient symbol of the jaguar a recurring motif linking Hector to his abuelos, his home lands, his destiny?  and how did GMO’s get into a story about ruthless coyotes and the Arizona dessert?

And what about that cell phone?  How many “bars” does Hector need to be heard?  Your students will immediately relate to the frustration of dropped calls and messages that don’t get through.    “Structure” and “voice” as literary devices become familiar – and credible transports into this suspenseful tale.

Linda  Christensen, teacher and author of the “border” curricula in Rethinking Schools’ The Line Between Us, explains building lessons “that teach literary skills embedded in larger world issues.”    The Jaguar’s Children could be a study in the use of water, and water imagery, as the motif linking expectations for the journey: each person’s litre of water for what is planned as a brief trip,  a capful of water as temptation – a choice between survival or betrayal, the irony of being trapped in a water tanker truck fearing thirst as your death, Hector’s dreams of water and watermelons and water spirits and his abuelo and the corn.

Yes, the corn!  Sacred to the ancient peoples of Oaxaca, tempting to corporate profiteers.  César is not a day laborer hoping for work in the fields al norte.  We learn he is a scientist, a scientist on the run from the federales – there must be a new Willie Nelson song here somewhere.  Your students can compose the corrida!

Get to your nearest library or independent bookstore and grab a copy of The Jaguar’s Children, then email your school’s librarian to order the copies that will take your students into the convergence of “border” forces ancient and new, personal and political, communal and corporate.

See upcoming posts for more titles you and your students will want to read together.

BORDERS:  WALLS OR BRIDGES?

TEACHING THE US-MEXICO BORDER, Part 1

I am a shameless promoter of Rethinking Schools, the organization itself, its publications, and especially its advocacy for social justice as a central component of what we teach, not as an add-on or special project.

That’s what makes The Line Between Us such a valuable resource for making the US border with Mexico not a political slogan of fear and exclusion, but a dynamic feature of our country’s history and a signifier of opportunities for asymmetrical conflicts or cross-national peace.

For teachers spending part of their summer preparing lessons in history, literature, world studies and cultures for their fall courses during this volatile and (in some cases) anti-immigrant election cycle, I urge you to grab a copy of this book.

The Line Between Us does not shy away from controversy.   The volume, authored by social studies educator Bill Bigelow, brings together historical sources, personal narratives, poetry, photographs and policy documents  for “teaching about the Border and Mexican Immigration.”  Unlike textbooks that sanitize the effects of colonization or simplify “history” through a single lens, The Line Between Us gives students ways to listen to, to think about, and to ask smart questions about this contested, emotionally and politically charged area.

All of Rethinking Schools publications – its journals and especially its curriculum publications, are respectful of teachers’ knowledge and of teachers’ role in engaging students in meaningful thought based on multiple credible and intellectually rich sources of information. 

Today’s headlines carry stories of “illegal aliens” crossing the Rio Grande River by night, or hidden in freight trucks coming through border check points, the “invasion” coming up from south of “the border.”  The Line Between Us shows that current  “border” to be  historically constructed, specifically constructed in the 19^th century by “invaders” coming not from the south, but from the north and east – Americans under US President Polk using military force, as well as economic pressure, to add a huge section of Mexico (yes, a section of the nation of Mexico) to US territory.   (Imagine if Canada decided it wanted Microsoft and Seattle, so it sent the Mounties to take Washington state!)

I can only imagine how shocked many of our students will be to see the book's maps that show the Mexico of 1830 and the much smaller Mexico of today after the original “border” was violated and moved to its present configuration along the Rio Grande. The accompanying historical analysis explains how thousands of miles of border was shifted, dramatically altering two nations and their futures.  Rethinking our mental borders of territory, of “the other,” of histories as constructed and chosen and resisted, makes The Line Between Us  uniquely valuable for studying the US border with Mexico and for giving us a framework for examining the choices and forces behind other “facts” in our history books and in our politicians’ claims.

My next posts will highlight several of the activities the authors have developed to engage students in seeing the border through the eyes of those who have enacted the policies that govern it and those who live with the consequences of those policies.

If you are one of the hundreds of teachers whose teaching of the US-Mexico border has been informed by The Line Between Us, I hope you’ll share your experiences – and your those of your students – in the Comments section here.

INSPIRATION:  COURAGE, COMMUNITY, PERSISTENCE

GRACE LEE BOGGS

One of my graduate students brought in his field notes from observing five sophomore English teachers at a large urban high school.  All had been teaching a lesson on action verbs, a lesson that varied only slightly from teacher to teacher.   My student and I mused on the possible efficacy of teaching action verbs de-contextualized from text – texts the students would read or themselves compose, giving action to those verbs.

Then I thought of Jean Anyon.  In Ghetto Schooling, she taught us the importance of action verbs.   People living in poverty in Newark didn’t just happen to be poor. They, and their neighborhoods, had been pauperized. They had been made poor.  City leaders, corporate executives, and elected officials had taken actions that over many years had created structures of inequality, had moved jobs away from the central city and lowered wages for those jobs that had remained, and had shifted the investment of tax dollars into whiter, richer areas of the city.   They exercised their power through action verbs:  they pauperized those areas of the city they chose to abandon.

The life and legacy of Grace Lee Boggs remind us that action verbs – real actions – can also challenge injustice.    Grace Lee Boggs, who died this year at the age of 100, took action and inspired action. And she did so everywhere she lived and in every circumstance in which she found injustice.  Those actions included investigating and naming and making public (“public-izing”) not only injustices but the people and organizations and laws that created and benefited from them.  Her actions included writing with courage, organizing in places where the poor and oppressed had more typically been acted upon, and building new structures of possibility that would persist beyond her lifetime.

Image source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/grace-lee-boggs-detroit-activist-dies-at-100.html?_r=0

McFadden's tribute to Boggs is full of the specifics of Grace Lee Bogg’s actions:  injustices encountered, creative solutions imagined, obstacles surmounted, and new alliances ever being forged to fight civic and economic injustices with unconventional voice and action.  A Chinese-American woman organizing for African American civil rights, and in the process expanding our understanding of democracy in action.

Image source:  Tumblr "The People's Record" http://thepeoplesrec.com/post/67411631578/today-i-wanted-to-share-some-quotes-by

For more inspiration from Grace Lee Boggs, and for the humor and, yes, grace, she brought to all her endeavors, I hope you’ll take time to savor her interview with Bill Moyers.