It was May 11th, 2023, and I had just launched a book trailer for my newly published literary debut, The River Runs: Stories. The book trailer depicts the La Lomita Chapel, a historic landmark and religious site situated just a short walk from the Rio Grande River in Mission, Texas. After reading about its cultural significance, I was moved by my first visit to La Lomita Chapel in 2015, which led to my writing the award-winning flash fiction story, “La Lomita,” now published in The River Runs.
While editing the book trailer, I remembered the years when the chapel site was under threat of border wall construction. I recalled how I had fought to preserve the site. I had raised awareness and organized my peers to contact our South Texas Congressmen, and I had prioritized the issue when meeting with political candidates running in the 2018 midterms. I was energized not by religious nor political affiliation; I had fought to preserve this important relic, and many other important sites like the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, because they are invaluable elements of our border community in the Rio Grande Valley.
It was in this frame of mind I listened to a Fox News interview with Congressman Steve Scalise. As Fox News showed live footage of immigrants crossing the Rio Grande River in Brownsville, Texas, Congressman Scalise proclaimed, “Every town in America today is a border town because of President Biden’s open border.”
Those words shocked me, and I imagined how they would resonate with the tens of thousands of Americans tuning in. With Congressman Scalise’s words rippling across airwaves and crisscrossing the country with tremendous speed, even unwitting listeners sitting in waiting rooms or flicking through radio stations would be met with his narrative about the border: Scary things are happening in these border towns, and the scary things are coming to your town, now.
In that moment, I came up the idea for my next book of short stories about the U.S.-Mexico border: The power of the butterfly effect to reshape our communities and our collective future.
In these stories, I will critique the “chaos at the border” political narrative by leaning on chaos theory to demonstrate how these reductive narratives about our region cause real damage to people and prevent real solutions to border issues. By allowing political fantasies to become our reality along the border, we are providing a permission structure — and arguably a blueprint — for powerful forces to inflict similar damage on other communities, too.
If the borderlands can be reduced to a narrative that is politically expedient to the powerful but systemically detrimental to its residents, it can indeed happen to Appalachia, the Industrial Midwest, and any other region in America. “Every town is a border town,” indeed, Congressman.
Although Congressman Scalise is not the first U.S. politician to utter this talking point, I had not reflected on the significance of his words until after publishing a book that sought to reimagine the Texas-Mexico border in our collective imagination. I had published a book, and he had gone on national television. Clearly, our reach, our audiences, and our impact would differ dramatically.
“They’re gonna end up at schools… where are they keeping these people?” Congressman Scalise, the 2nd-highest ranking Republican of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the most powerful country in the world, asked us all, helplessly, on national television.
The scary things, of course, are immigrants arriving at our border after escaping violence, poverty, or corruption in their home countries. A small percentage, certainly, are not good people and should not be here — but that is beside the point to the politicians shipping these people across the country to liberal cities to score points with voters who simply want fewer immigrants, of any kind, in our country. Thereby, beware. “Every town is a border town.”
Clearly, politicians like Congressman Scalise are not serious about fixing our country’s broken immigration system. Primarily, they remain fixated on unserious solutions to border security, like building border walls and implementing mass deportation regimes, that yield them political benefits during election season in the hopes that “the dog doesn’t catch the car,” as the Republican Party has learned the hard way with abortion.
(To be fair, shameless Democrats who also propagate reductive border narratives and who also use the border for political theater are not entirely blameless. But I will write on this later.)
This is why I am motivated to write new stories that will, I hope, provide us all with new ways of thinking about regional narratives and equip us with the words to fight against these reductive narratives about our region.
Throughout my books and in my public events, I have already begun to advocate against reducing the borderlands to the narrative politicians like Congressman Scalise love to tell about us: We are a chaos zone rife with towns overrun by immigrants, drugs, and crime. In so many words, I echo Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s argument in her famous TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.”
As I conclude writing this blog to turn back to working on the book, I will leave you with a timely quote from Adichie’s talk:
“But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
So that is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
Comments