⁂ Migrant as Chimera: Clandestine Time. Proscribed Space (Pt. 2)

How does one identify an open wound without having the body?

Borders (international): Politically defined boundaries separating territory or maritime zones between political entities and the areas where political entities exercise Border governance measures on their territory or extraterritorially. Such areas include Border crossing points (airports, land Border crossing points, ports), immigration and transit zones, the “no-man’s land” between crossing points of neighbouring countries, as well as embassies and consulates (insofar as visa issuance is concerned).

Anzaldúa was wrong. Intuitively, I had known as much the first time I read Borderlands, though I could not then articulate myself as I lacked any exposure to any sort of theory or self-reflection.

In Gloria’s conception, the Border is an open wound, a gash, a cut. Bloodied and gushing, it is still somatic, a site on living flesh. This is impossible. The Border could not be a wound.

I hold a secret resentment for this perduring romanticization of the Border which sprouts like crocuses from a bed of snow and brocading the thick nest of knotted threads underneath. Anzaldúa could not have known the extent to which TLCAN/NAFTA would radically upend the geopolitical relationship between Mexico and the United States, she could not have known though she could have seen in its uterine stage the development of a middle class of Mexicans who knew nothing and wanted nothing to do with Aztlán and who had no use for nepantla or any stance or state when they had a national mythos of their own with the full weight of one of the world’s largest nation building apparatus behind it and enough credit worthiness to drive a Nissan with faux leather seats that cushioned the pressure of a subprime loan. But in her dream of the Border as friction burn, as oozing graft of a fruiting tree that rejects becoming a Chimera, she should have known that the Border is not a wound, a site, but that rather it is a series of interlocking systems and phenomena that even in her time was spreading beyond the sand dunes and dry river creeks of Southern California and the cane along the banks of Southern Texas to consume the US and then the entire world as a parasitic fungus does to a tree enfeebled by improper grafting. 

Gloria’s conception betrays a surprisingly, dishearteningly facile and superficial thinking about the Border itself which contrasts vividly with the vibrant and deep knowledge of the society she lived with and her social positioning which makes Borderlands so compelling to so many. The Border as a site, the Border as a thing, these are childish notions. The Border as a site of chimeric miscegenation, the Border as a site of fission, this is foolishness. No. The Border is a kaleidoscopic and panoptic array of power and all its disciplinary, surveilling, and eliminating apparatuses. It’s the dispositif of necropolitics par excellence–greater than the sum of its terrifying and shockingly violent constituent elements.

A multitude of biomes and mountain ranges separate the San Isidro point of entry with its throngs of drivers and their sun-lacquered faces from Tacoma, Washington. But in Tacoma, the Border is present and imposing in the form of the region’s detention center that takes the longitudinal series of barriers, walls, and offices and closes them into itself in the form of a building which could be any building were it not for its turrets to surveil the outside as much as the recluses the guards inside putatively watch over. The Border too is Children and Family Services in inland California whose agents push the Border from its own limits into the heart of the family in mandatory visits by mandatory reporters who too-often play the role of Border agent and immigration judge. In the DUI checkpoint, in the bank manager that won’t accept a passport or a consular ID despite its own policies, in the school district with a sheriff onsite—in all of them are the essential elements of the Border and together they constitute it and are themselves fortified by it. It is ever evolving.

Reports about the collaboration of Amazon and other Chimeras of Silicon Valley with the Department of Homeland Security were not surprises or disappointments. While the most experienced activists see emerging technologies with cautious suspicion, the Border incarnates them and makes them useful. The Border is the mobile phone whose location data is shared constantly and in the alternative to detention that uses the satellites, Global Positioning System and antennae to cast an invisible and electronic net that immobilizes while others use those to plan trips and travel . It is mundane —the database, the online application portal, the QR code. We err when we think of the Border as a primitive series of barriers; it has often been smarter than we are and continues to vex use who want its destruction. 

The obsession with fences, with walls, with the space of the Border, fits the poet and fits the theorist whose concern is not the Border as noumenon but instead the border as signifier for her own floating existence. Gloria longs for a soothing anchor tied to something, anything of the physical world. Gloria and I share this narcissistic defect in our character and this same sine qua non of identity; the Border is the steel double-helix of our DNA. We could not have been born in this world without our beloved metal chromosome. 

This Border of flesh and blood, of iron and drone is a convenient symbol for the state. As a symbol, it has the quality of a reliquary in a cathedral; ostentatious and sacred, a knucklebone that comes to stand for all the power of divinity to intervene in the lives of living persons. It is not surprising that the world’s strongmen and its eugenicist technocrats have seized on the fence as a powerful symbol of anti-Migrant politics; we invoke it as a synecdoche for the toolkit of genocide. Activists cut barbed wire and sabotage electricity generation that turns the fences electric and polyphonic at night. And yet, the invisible trip wires, the perversion of the law into a tool for the deployment of PDF-barbarism, all of this happens largely without the same brave action and the same breathless denunciation.

And this still is only the crude form of the Border, its basic purpose so stated. The other effect of the Border, the one which terrifies and awes me, is the way it shapes the world in its own two-dimensional image. As a prism shatters the spectrum of light into individual wavelengths and makes resplendent the mundane white light in which we are submerged, the Border rends time and tears apart space. But, while a prism imposes a taxonomy on the white light of the Sun through its physical structure by ushering the light into narrow passageways of crystalline labyrinths, the Border does this not only through its physical qualities, but through the psychological and metaphysical realities it creates, ones it upends and ones it makes impossible. The jail, the school, the financial system, the global system of passports, visas and immigration controls, all these have their own genealogies and their own wavelengths with their own qualities and energies. The Border draws from these and obliges them to harmonize; the Border as conductor, the Border as brain structure that makes the state coherent to itself. This is why some activists say that to save the Migrant or to abolish the Borders, we must return to our old red pennants and abolish the State. Revolution seems both nearer and most distant to me now in our present moment. This activist truisms seems more obvious than ever and for that reason, less powerful and less true. In my mind’s eye I see the world without the Border in the aftermath of the collapse of all states and the free movement of people. Even then I see its Geist floating through the world in the forms of men who remain swine even after the death of Circe.

On the evening I crossed, I remember the emptiness of the desert before me. I remember how everyone seemed mute and all the words which had been intelligible at a moment lost to me were now beyond the realm of meaning. The sky and the earth were both one grey monolith in its monochrome engulfing the horizon. The cardinal points of the compass were shuffled. It’s my most vivid memory; I can recall or I have invented and can now summon with perfect timing every whip of cold sea air pregnant with grains of sand and the smell of putrid water which made my face red and tender. I was three and I assume now that my sense of time, only recently acquired, may have been faulty. But, in the rare moments I feel I will not break into the pieces of a terrified child recalling the day, and I meekly ask for my mother’s recollection of the only day I have ever lived or will ever live, she does not know how much time we spent under the two eagles which hover over my head waiting for me to lie supine and breathless. From that moment, I have been without time. I feel I am not alone, The Border as a phenomenon intervenes so intimately and so totally into our lives that crossing them (they are all, in fact one same Border and those who do so clandestinely are the only ones who cross it in truth) cleaves experience into post-antes that are irreconcilable with one another.

The life abandoned becomes mythical and holy and births lives that could have been which beckon always and are always more mirthful and more warm. They first crowd the present and make the air thick and humid with emotions and memories that are inescapable. They so thoroughly colonize experience that at some point—I have not given adequate thought to whether there is a shared point or if this is personal and arbitrary—they implode the present until it collapses into the past. An impossible timeline emerges where the present and the past meld and the future looms over like a Sword of Damocles for the Jodidos until it too is indistinguishable. Time becomes a pink grosgrain bow crushed in a suitcase; the loops and tails retain a shattered semblance of itself, but the beauty is lost and thus so is the function.

The Migrant’s Time is a flattened ribbon, crushed for aspiring to something beyond its once inherent flatness and degraded into an all more two-dimensional state than the original flat dimensions from in which it contorted itself in order to escape.

To live without time means the Migrant is a Pidgin person entirely without conjugation, experience is colonized gradually by the preterite until it replaces even the infinitive. It retains most of the phonetics and the rhythm of the language from which it is derived. He cannot understand why others cannot relate to him or why he is unintelligible to the men and women whose gaze he avoids. They see a child of sorts, pitiful and abandoned, one having no education or socialization that has become utterly feral and lays prostrate beyond the bounds of empathy. Experiences, objects, all the milestones and achievements of a normal life’s course are diaphanous and fragile. Homes made of powder, automobiles made of paper, degrees and certificates made of little more than smoke. Relationships are tenuous. Blood ties and love become sclerotic and the exposed lesions become sources of anguish and fear.

I felt suffocated as a child not by my mother’s overprotectiveness, but by the immense fear and pain she could barely attempt to conceal and which she only very rarely was able to cloak with the thick wool tapestries of her totalizing opprobrium. I do not know what it is like for a mother’s love for her children to stand in the place of fear and to do so always simultaneously; I am gracious in the interpretation of my childhood for this reason and I do not blame my mother. Chiefly, because, as a child, I had already experience being left behind by my parents. But, after crossing the Border this fear was entirely gone. It seemed inevitable that we would one day wake up in different countries and time zones and I was incapable of mustering the attachment other children must surely have for their parents. My mother describes me as precocious and independent as a child, but the truth is I was still living in the final months in Guadalajara before crossing when I had no parents except the infrequent disembodied voices that made me cry. I was incapable of attachment because I was dislodged from my place in time and was still mentally and emotionally with my grandparents just months, then years, then decades before when I did not know what it is like to fear for your life in the face of men in uniform and their white trucks that take you into cold buildings and then wherever they please. My mother and I, having crossed the same border, lived asynchronous lives and our relationship has always had a sense of syncopation.

Space is not spared the distortion of the Border. Its crude function as a barrier to human mobility is amplified by the sophisticated if inelegant systems of surveillance, internal checkpoints and the breathless efforts of those who wield the law to open infinite portals that all lead to tragedy. Even for those who had never before ventured beyond their province or even their village, the world becomes impossibly small and constricted. It is not just the presence of immigration officials or those deputized legally or extra-legally to perform their functions who form the mile markers which smother life until it is unlivable.  It is not the immense physical distance from home or the sudden presence of logistical barriers to maintaining kinship and social ties that conjure a loneliness that is the theoretical limit and the nadir of human misery. Those are simply crude functions and the unescapable reality. It is the risk of detention and deportation and the racism and violence which  constrict the world to the  home and too-frequently to the waxy membrane of the skin which covers the body. To be always at risk of being taken in the night or to have the flowers of your blood and your love snatched from you, that constant fear vacates life of all but the most fleeing and bittersweet joys. 

It is ironic in a Euripidean sense that for those who have travelled thousands of miles and have visited sometimes dozens of countries that life in their destination is largely defined by their inability to move and the sudden immobilization of their bodies in a web of laws and social norms. When I say Migrants lose a sense of space I am not referring to nostalgia or the sense of loss of a homeland or a specific place on the planet. I mean that they literally lose space. Made targets to the arsenal of state violence and shielded only by the onionskin of lawcraft by its most generous magistrates or by a civil society which is always mending what is always fraying, their physical presence is an immense risk because it is this primarily that is the target of the State’s fury and the society’s disdain.

In the United States, unlawful presence is perhaps the most insidious euphemism in the law. It is not the presence which is unlawful, but existence. This is why laws which criminalize crossing and perduring without the correct dispensations are complemented always with a suite of laws that restrict the right to work, to housing, to education, to children and spouses– that is, to life. With the exception of the crudest and most insecure subsistences for the benefits of others, the Border creates Chimeras who do not live but can only work and can only serve and only as long as the Border countenances. The Border replaces the epithelial layer of the skin. The Border replaces the terminals of nerves that flower beneath vellus hair on the face and on the arms. Space as we intuitively understand it is gone; space is a looming threat and a no-man’s land we cannot cross into. To be out of time and to lose the right to a body is the way in which the Border becomes the master craft of the State at humanity’s twilight. I cannot think of another phenomenon which has as complete and effective a metaphysical function of the border: to nullify the basic elements which underpin existence until what remains is a base biological survival and the most reptilian of emotions and psychological responses. Taxonomies of migration create the language and the categories which identify migration as a medical researcher creates a nosology for the diagnoses of sickness, that is, plans for extinction of the pathogen or disciplining of errant, excisable vestigial organs. The border voids the underpinnings of experience and turn the body into an abstraction until it arrives at an impossible phenomenology inflected and declined that is unintelligible and thus justifies the elimination of its para-subjects. Denied the right to experience reality and diagnosed as an illness with the requisite detail and empiricism to justify the violence of the state delivered always in full and at whim, the Chimera is forewarned of its aberrant existence and told there is no remedy. The Chimera exists as an affront to God. The Migrant exists as an affront to the globalized, open state whose membranes must paradoxically be ever-thinning and more porous while hardening to contain immune systems that are ever more reactive.

Anzaldúa was wrong. The border is not an open wound, the Borderlands are not a liminal space. The Chimera is not in between worlds, he floats disembodied and whistling with pain in the empty distance between the worlds of men.

To think of the Migrant as Chimera is to reveal the alchemy, to provide a proof against the cruel arithmetic which births him. Couched in the argument of the natural and inevitable nature of infinite human mobility is the truth that the migrants of today are aberrant beings who have been relegated to a gradual social death so slow-moving it renders him vestigial. There is no possibility for drawing circles of salt with sacred patterns or recitations of Sanskrit hymns to ply out the goat’s head and the snake’s tail from the lions body and make them all natural beings. It is enough that he is a null-being cast just outside spacetime; it is enough that his rupture from the rest of human experience makes life insipid and inert until it turns to stone and drags him down with its weight.

It is enough that the Chimera fears elimination–in fact, it is preferable (more economical). A crusade needs a crime against God and the Nation can build a mythos, a political movement and a corpus of laws on a Chimera that remains crouched and cowering in the shadows.

To see the Migrant as Chimera is to conclude that it is necessary to either build a world that does not birth monsters or to slay them. It is necessary to see the Migrant as unnatural. It means to insist that the era of human mobility has long been over and the dichotomized world of the Border is one of chained Chimeras and of Tourists.

To be the Migrant as Chimera is to know that it is preferable not to be at all than to be a beastly composite.

To suffer the Migrant as Chimera is to long to extinguish the Migrant as Chimera.